And in respect of their quality, it needs only to call to mind some of those, so rich in humour, so double-shotted with homely sense, wherewith the Squire in Don Quixote adorns his discourse; being oftentimes indeed not the fringe and border, but the main woof and texture of it: and then, if we assume that the remainder are not altogether unlike these, we shall, I think, feel that it would be difficult to rate them more highly than they deserve. And some are in a loftier vein; for taking, as we have a right to do, Cervantes himself as the truest exponent of the Spanish character, we should be prepared to trace in the proverbs of Spain a grave thoughtfulness, a stately humour, to find them breathing the very spirit of chivalry and honour, and indeed of freedom too;—for in Spain, as throughout so much of Europe, it is despotism, and not freedom, which is new. Nor are we disappointed in these our expectations. How eminently chivalresque, for instance, the following: White hands cannot hurt. [48] What a grave humour lurks in this: The ass knows well in whose face he brays. [49] What a stately apathy, how proud a looking of calamity in the face, speaks out in the admonition which this one contains: When thou seest thine house in flames, approach and warm thyself by it; [50] what a spirit of freedom, which refuses to be encroached on even by the highest, is embodied in another: The king goes as far as he may, not as far as he would; [51] what Castilian pride in the following: Every layman in Castile might make a king, every clerk a pope. The Spaniard’s contempt for his peninsular neighbours finds its emphatic utterance in another: Take from a Spaniard all his good qualities, and there remains a Portuguese.
We may too, I think, remark how a nation will occasionally in its proverbs indulge in a fine irony upon itself, and show that it is perfectly aware of its own weaknesses, follies, and faults. This the Spaniards must be allowed to do in their proverb, Succours of Spain, either late, or never. [52] However largely and confidently promised, these succours of Spain either do not arrive at all, or only arrive after the opportunity in which they could have served have passed away. Certainly any one who reads the despatches of England’s Great Captain during the Peninsular War will find in almost every page of them that which abundantly justifies this proverb, will own that those who made it read themselves aright, and could not have designated broken pledges, unfulfilled promises of aid, tardy and thus ineffectual assistance, by an happier title than Succours of Spain. And then again what a fearful glimpse of those blood feuds which, having once begun, seem as if they could never end, blood touching blood, and violence evermore provoking its like, have we in the following: Kill, and thou shalt be killed, and they shall kill him who kills thee. [53]
The Italians also are eminently rich in proverbs; and yet if ever I have been tempted to retract or seriously to modify what I shall have occasion by-and-bye to affirm in regard of a nobler life and spirit as predominating in proverbs, it has been after the study of some Italian collection. “The Italian proverbs,” it has been said not without too much reason, though perhaps also with overmuch severity, “have taken a tinge from their deep and politic genius, and their wisdom seems wholly concentrated in their personal interests. I think every tenth proverb in an Italian collection is some cynical or some selfish maxim, a book of the world for worldlings.” [54] Certainly many of them are shrewd enough, and only too shrewd; “ungracious,” inculcating an universal suspicion, teaching to look everywhere for a foe, to expect, as the Greeks said, a scorpion under every stone, glorifying artifice and cunning as the true guides and only safe leaders through the perplexed labyrinth of life, [55] and altogether seeming dictated as by the very spirit of Machiavel himself.
Proverbs on revenge.
And worse than this is the glorification of revenge which speaks out in too many of them. I know nothing of its kind calculated to give one a more shuddering sense of horror than the series which might be drawn together of Italian proverbs on this matter; especially when we take them with the commentary which Italian history supplies, and which shows them no empty words, but the deepest utterances of the nation’s heart. There is no misgiving in these about the right of entertaining so deadly a guest in the bosom; on the contrary, one of them, exalting the sweetness of revenge, declares, Revenge is a morsel for God. [56] There is nothing in them, (it would be far better if there were,) of blind and headlong passion, but rather a spirit of deliberate calculation, which makes the blood run cold. Thus one gives this advice: Wait time and place to act thy revenge, for it is never well done in a hurry; [57] while another proclaims an immortality of hatred, which no spaces of intervening time shall have availed to weaken: Revenge of an hundred years old hath still its sucking teeth. [58] We may well be thankful that we have in England, at least as far as I am aware, no sentiments parallel to these, embodied as the permanent convictions of the national mind.
How curious again is the confession which speaks out in another Italian proverb, that the maintenance of the Romish system and the study of Holy Scripture cannot go together. It is this: With the Gospel one becomes an heretic. [59] No doubt with the study of the Word of God one does become an heretic, in the Italian sense of the word; and therefore it is only prudently done to put all obstacles in the way of that study, to assign three years’ and four years’ imprisonment with hard labour to as many as shall dare to peruse it; yet certainly it is not a little remarkable that such a confession should have embodied itself in the popular utterances of the nation.
Italian proverbs.
But while it must be freely owned that the charges brought just now against the Italian proverbs are sufficiently borne out by too many, they are not all to be included in the common shame. Very many there are not merely of a delicate refinement of beauty, as this, expressive of the freedom in regard of thine and mine which will exist between true friends: Friends tie their purses with a spider’s thread; [60] of a subtle wisdom which has not degenerated into cunning and deceit; but also of a nobler stamp; honour and honesty, plain dealing and uprightness, have here their praises too, and are not seldom pronounced to be in the end more than a match for all cunning and deceit. How excellent in this sense is the following: For an honest man half his wits is enough, the whole are too little for a knave; [61] the ways, that is, of truth and uprightness are so simple and plain, that a little wit is abundantly sufficient for those that walk in them; the ways of falsehood and fraud are so perplexed and tangled, that sooner or later all the wit of the cleverest rogue will not preserve him from being entangled therein. How often and how wonderfully has this found its confirmation in the lives of evil men; so true it is, to employ another proverb and a very deep one from the same quarter, that The devil is subtle, yet weaves a coarse web. [62]
Again, what description of Egypt as it now is, or indeed generally of the East, could set us at the heart of its moral condition, could make us to understand all which long centuries of oppression and misrule have made of it and of its people, what could do this so effectually as the collection of Arabic proverbs now current in Egypt, which the traveller Burckhardt gathered, and which, after his death, were published with his name? [63] In other books, others describe the modern Egyptians, but here they unconsciously describe themselves. The selfishness, the utter extinction of all public spirit, the servility, which no longer as with an inward shame creeps into men’s acts, but utters itself boldly as the avowed law of their lives, the sense of the oppression of the strong, of the insecurity of the weak, and, generally, the whole character of life, alike outward and inward, as poor, mean, sordid, and ignoble, with only a few faintest glimpses of that romance which one usually attaches to the East; all this, as we study these documents, rises up before us in truest, though in painfullest, outline.