Primitive Manners and Customs

by James Anson Farrer

The liberal man is the friend of God.

Practise liberality, but lay no stress on the obligation.

As another illustration of the way in which a few proverbs may condense centuries of history, may be instanced the recorded experiences of mankind touching priests and priestcraft. With no other evidence than that of proverbs before him, a future historian of Europe might easily detect a marked difference of feeling on this matter between Protestant Germany and the Catholic countries of Europe. Not that the latter are wanting in sayings to the prejudice of the priestly class, but they are not so numerous as in Germany. The French have two proverbs, marked with all the wit and boldness of their genius, one charging anyone who values a clean house not to let into it either a priest or a pigeon; the other declaring that it is human ignorance alone which causes the pot to boil for priests. The Spanish experience also is, that it is best neither to have a good friar for a friend nor a bad one for an enemy, and that it is well to keep awake in a land thickly tenanted by monks. But the Germans go much farther than this. In German estimation the priest is a being who, in company with a woman, may be found at the bottom of all the mischief that goes on in the world, and is as little likely as a woman to forgive you an injury. Like the bites of wolves, those of priests are hard to heal, so that it is best, if you fight with them at all, to beat them to death. If they are ever hot, it is from eating, not from work; for they always take care to bless themselves first, nor do they ever pay any tithes to one another.

The above comparisons suffice to show how differences of national character, and even how the operation of different forms of faith, may reveal themselves in proverbs. Yet such estimates must be formed with caution, in consideration of the wide possibilities of error which are inseparable from so inexhaustible a subject. For not only may the proverb-collector easily attribute to one country alone a saying which belongs equally to, or may even have originated in, another, but his canon of selection is somewhat arbitrary and dependent on his preconceptions of what a proverb really is. ‘To take the ball on the hop,’ for instance, is as genuine an English proverb as ‘to make hay whilst the sun shines,’ which contains the same idea; yet whilst the one might be heard every day, the other might not be heard once a year, so that it might easily escape notice altogether, or if found be rejected as obsolete. We can consequently, as in other branches of human study, only make use, on trust, of such data as lie at hand, and, whilst fully acknowledging the imperfection of the evidence, strive after an approximation to truth, without hope for its actual attainment.

If now we extend the limits of our comparison, to take in some proverbs of the lower races as well as of the higher, we shall find therein a strong corroboration of the lesson already learnt in any comparison of the superstitions, myths, and manners of different societies; namely, that differences of race, colour, and even structure, sink into insignificance when compared with the intellectual affinities which unite the families of mankind, and that there is, perhaps, no phase of thought nor shade of feeling belonging to the higher culture of the world to which we may not find an antitype or even an equivalent in the lower. If we take some of the proverbs collected from tribes confessedly low in civilisation—those, for instance, of West Africa—and compare them with proverbs still prevalent in Europe, we cannot fail to be struck with the strong likeness between them, as well as impressed with the idea, that many actually existent common sayings may have had their birth in days of the most remote and savage antiquity. The immense number of modern proverbs, drawn from the observation of the natural, and especially of the animal, world (a number which must be nearly one out of five), coupled with the coincidence that the same fact is perhaps the most striking one in the proverbs collected from West Africa, seems to lend some support to such a theory.

As an introductory instance let us take savage and civilised sentiments about poverty, a belief in the misfortune of which is written clearly in every language of Europe. Italian experience says that poverty has no kin, and that poor men do penance for rich men’s sins; in Germany the poor have to dance as the rich pipe; whilst in Spain and Denmark the evil is expressed more graphically still, it being a matter of observation in the one country that the poor man’s crop is destroyed by hail every year; in the other, that the poor man’s corn always grows thin. And, in the Oji dialect, spoken by about two millions of people, including the Ashantees, Fantees, and others, it is also proverbial that the poor man has no friend, that poverty makes a man a slave, and that hard words are fit for the poor. And as the Dutch have learnt, that ‘poor folks’ wisdom goes for little,’ or the Italians, that ‘the words of the poor go many to the sackful,’ so in Oji exactly the same idea is conveyed in the saying, that ‘when a poor man makes a proverb it does not spread’; in Yoruba, in the saying, that ‘poverty destroys a man’s reputation;’ and in Accra in the still cleverer proverb, that ‘a poor man’s pipe does not sound.’[119]

The proverbs of savages are moral and immoral, elevated and base, precisely as are those of more civilised nations. The proverbs of the Yorubas, justly observes the missionary, Mr. Bowen,[120] ‘are among the most remarkable of the world;’ and indeed the intellectual powers and moral ideas displayed in West African proverbs generally ought largely to modify our conceptions of their originators, and make us sceptical of that extreme dearth of mental wealth which has so frequently been declared to attend a low standard of material advancement. Their wit, terseness, vividness of illustration, and insight into life, are all alike surprising; and acquaintance with them must suggest caution in any estimate of the mental capacities of savages whose languages may have been less investigated and consequently remain less known. ‘It has always been passing travellers who have drawn the most doleful pictures of so-called savages, and especially have asserted the poverty of their language.’[121] It may well prove that better acquaintance with the languages of tribes, classed at present for various reasons almost outside the human family, may show them to combine, as Humboldt found was the case with the once depreciated Carib language, ‘wealth, grace, strength, and gentleness.’ It was said of the Veddahs once that they were utterly destitute of either religion or language; and the Samojeds were reported to shriek and chatter like apes.

The Basutos of South Africa are savages, yet the following proverbs are current among them:—

A good name makes one sleep well.

Stolen goods do not make one grow.