This subject of the generation of proverbs, upon which I have thus touched so slightly, is yet one upon which whole volumes have been written. Those who have occupied themselves herein have sought to trace historically the circumstances out of which various proverbs have sprung, and to which they owe their existence; that so by the analogy of these we might realize to ourselves the rise of others whose origins lie out of our vision, obscure and unknown. No one will deny the interest of the subject: it cannot but be most interesting to preside thus at the birth of a saying which has lived on and held its ground in the world, and has not ceased, from the day it was first uttered, to be more or less of a spiritual or intellectual force among men. Still the cases where this is possible are exceedingly rare, as compared with the far greater number where the first birth is veiled, as is almost all birth, in mystery and obscurity. And indeed it could scarcely be otherwise. The great majority of proverbs are foundlings, the happier foundlings of a nation’s wit, which the collective nation has refused to let perish, has taken up and adopted for its own. But still, as must be expected to be the case with foundlings, they can for the most part give no distinct account of themselves. They make their way, relying on their own merits, not on those of their parents and authors; whom they have forgotten; and who seem equally to have forgotten them, or, at any rate, fail to claim them. Not seldom, too, when a story has been given to account for a proverb’s rise, it must remain a question open to much doubt, whether the story has not been subsequently imagined for the proverb, rather than that the proverb has indeed sprung out of history. [33]
The proverb having thus had its rise from life, however it may be often impossible to trace that rise, will continually turn back to life again; it will attest its own practical character by the frequency with which it will present itself for use, and will have been actually used upon earnest and Employment of proverbs. important occasions; throwing its weight into one scale or the other at some critical moment, and sometimes with decisive effect. I have little doubt that with knowledge sufficient one might bring together a large collection of instances wherein, at significant moments, the proverb has played its part, and, it may be, very often helped to bring about issues, of which all would acknowledge the importance.
In this aspect, as having been used at a great critical moment, and as part of the moral influence brought to bear on that occasion for effecting a great result, no proverb of man’s can be compared with that one which the Lord used when He met his future Apostle, but at this time his persecutor, in the way, and warned him, of the fruitlessness and folly of a longer resistance to a might which must overcome him, and with still greater harm to himself, at the last: It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks. [34] (Acts xxvi. 14.) It is not always observed, but yet it adds much to the fitness of this proverb’s use on this great occasion, that it was already, even in that heathen world to which originally it belonged, predominantly used to note the madness of a striving on man’s part against the superior power of the gods; for so we find it in the chief passages of heathen antiquity in which it occurs.[35]
I must take the second illustration of my assertion from a very different quarter, passing at a single stride from the kingdom of heaven to the kingdom of hell, and finding my example there. We are told then, that when Catherine de Medicis desired to overcome the hesitation of her son Charles the Ninth, and draw from him his consent to the massacre, afterwards known as that of St. Bartholomew, she urged on him with effect a proverb which she had brought with her from her own land, and assuredly one of the most convenient maxims for tyrants that was ever framed: Sometimes clemency is cruelty, and cruelty clemency.
Later French history supplies another and more agreeable illustration. At the siege of Douay, Louis the Fourteenth found himself with his suite unexpectedly under a heavy cannonade from the besieged city. I do not believe that Louis was deficient in personal courage, yet, in compliance with the entreaties of most of those around him, who urged that he should not expose so important a life, he was about, in somewhat unsoldierly and unkingly fashion, immediately to retire; when M. de Charost, drawing close to him, whispered the well-known French proverb in his ear: The wine is drawn; it must be drunk. [36] The king remained exposed to the fire of the enemy a suitable period, and it is said ever after held in higher honour than before the counsellor who had with this word saved him from an unseemly retreat. Let this on the generation of proverbs, with the actual employment which has been made of them, for the present suffice.
Footnotes
- [[22]] Thus is it, I believe, with, Bos lassus fortius figit pedem; a proverb with which he warns the younger Augustine not to provoke a contest with him, the weary, but therefore the more formidable, antagonist.
- [[23]] Oblitus veteris proverbii: mendaces memores esse oportere. Let me quote here Fuller’s excellent unfolding of this proverb: “Memory in a liar is no more than needs. For first lies are hard to be remembered, because many, whereas truth is but one: secondly, because a lie cursorily told takes little footing and settled fastness in the teller’s memory, but prints itself deeper in the hearers, who take the greater notice because of the improbability and deformity thereof; and one will remember the sight of a monster longer than the sight of an handsome body. Hence comes it to pass that when the liar hath forgotten himself, his auditors put him in mind of the lie and take him therein.”
- [[24]] Quintilian, Inst. l. 4.
- [[25]] Comes facundus in viâ pro vehiculo est.
- [[26]] Kemble, Salomon and Saturn, p. 56.
- [[27]] Kelly, in the preface to his very useful collection of Scotch proverbs, describes his own disappointment at making exactly such a discovery as this.
- [[28]] The pages of the excellent Notes and Queries would no doubt be open to receive such, and in them they might be safely garnered up. That there are such proverbs to reward him who should carefully watch for them, is abundantly proved by the immense addition, which, as I shall have occasion hereafter to mention, a Spanish scholar was able to make to the collected proverbs, so numerous before, of Spain. Nor do there want other indications of the like kind. Thus, the editor of very far the best modern collection of German proverbs, records this one, found, as he affirms, in no preceding collection, and by himself never heard but once, and then from the lips of an aged lay servitor of a monastery in the Black Forest: Offend one monk, and the lappets of all cowls will flutter as far as Rome; (Beleidigestu einen Münch, so knappen alle Kuttenzipfel bis nach Rom;) and yet who can doubt that we have a genuine proverb here, and one excellently expressive of the common cause which the whole of the monastic orders, despite their inner dissensions, made ever, when assailed from without, with one another? It is very easy to be deceived in such a matter, and one must be content often to be so; but the following, which is current in Ireland, I have never seen in print: “The man on the dyke always hurls well;” the looker-on at a game of hurling, seated indolently on the wall, always imagines that he could improve on the strokes of the actual players, and, if you will listen to him, would have played the game much better than they; a proverb of sufficiently wide application.
- [[29]] Φθείρουσιν ἤθη χρήσθ’ ὁμιλίαι κακαί.
- [[30]] Αἱ Ἰβύκου γέρανοι.
- [[31]] Aurum Tolosanum; see C. Merivale, Fall of the Roman Republic, p. 63.
- [[32]] Πολλὰ μεταξύ πέλει κύλικος καὶ χείλεος ἄκρου. The Latin form of the proverb, Inter os et offam, will not adapt itself to this story.
- [[33]] Livy’s account of “Cantherium in fossâ,” and of the manner in which it became a rustic proverb in Italy, (23, 47,) is a case in point, where it is very hard to give credit to the parentage which has been assigned to the saying. See Döderlein’s Lat. Synonyme, v. 4. p. 289.
- [[34]] Σκληρόν σοι πρὸς κέντρα λακτίζειν.
- [[35]] Æschylus, Prom. Vinct. 322; Euripides, Bacch. 795; Pindar, Pyth. 2. 94–96. The image is of course that of the stubborn ox, which when urged to go forward, recalcitrates against the sharp-pointed iron goad, and, already wounded, thus only wounds itself the more.
- [[36]] Le vin est versé; il faut le boire.