Thus only in a land where rulers, being evil themselves, feel all goodness to be their instinctive foe, and themselves therefore entertain an instinctive hostility to it, where they punish but never reward, where not to be noticed by them is the highest ambition of those under their yoke, in no other land could a proverb like the following, Do no good, and thou shalt find no evil, have ever come to the birth. How settled a conviction that wrong, and not right, was the lord paramount of the world must have grown up in men’s spirits, before such a word as this, (I know of no sadder one,) could have found utterance from their lips. [64]
Irish proverb.
I have taken a wide circuit of nations; with the proverb of a people nearer home I must bring this branch of the subject to an end. It is one, and a very characteristic one, which the poet Spenser, who long dwelt in Ireland, records as current in his time among the Irish; in which were contained their offer of service to their native chiefs, with a statement of what they expected in return: Spend me, and defend me. Their leaders in all times have taken them only too well at their word in respect of the first half of the proverb, and have not failed prodigally to spend them; although their undertakings to defend have issued exactly as must ever issue all promises on the part of others to defend men from those evils, from which none can really protect them but themselves.
Other families of proverbs would each of them tell its own tale, give up its own secret; but I must not seek from this point of view to question them further. I would rather bring now to your notice that even where they do not spring, as they cannot all, from the centre of a people’s heart, nor declare to us the secretest things which are there, but dwell more on the surface of things, in this case also they have often local or national features, which to study and trace out may prove both curious and instructive. Of how many, for example, we may note the manner in which they clothe themselves in an outward form and shape, borrowed from, or suggested by, the peculiar scenery or circumstances or history of their own land; so that they could scarcely have come into existence, not certainly in the shape which they now wear, anywhere besides. Thus our own, Make hay while the sun shines, is truly English, and could have had its birth only under such variable skies as ours,—not, at any rate, in those southern lands where, during the summer time at least, the sun always shines. In the same way there is a fine Cornish proverb in regard of obstinate wrongheads, who will take no counsel except from calamities, who dash themselves to pieces against obstacles, which with a little prudence and foresight they might easily have avoided. It is this: He who will not be ruled by the rudder, must be ruled by the rock. It sets us at once upon some rocky and wreck-strewn coast; we feel that it could never have been the proverb of an inland people. And this, Do not talk Arabic in the house of a Moor, [65]—that is, because there thy imperfect knowledge will be detected at once,—this we should confidently affirm to be Spanish, wherever we met it. So also a traveller with any experience in the composition of Spanish sermons and Spanish ollas could make no mistake in respect of the following: A sermon without Augustine is as a stew without bacon. [66] German proverbs. Thus Big and empty, like the Heidelberg tun, [67] could have its home only in Germany; that enormous vessel, known as the Heidelberg tun, constructed to contain nearly 300,000 flasks, having now stood empty for hundreds of years. As regards, too, the following, Not every parish-priest can wear Dr. Luther’s shoes, [68] we could be in no doubt to what people it appertains. And this, The world is a carcase, and they who gather round it are dogs, plainly proclaims itself as belonging to those Eastern lands, where the unowned dogs prowling about the streets of a city are the natural scavengers, that would assemble round a carcase thrown in the way. So too the form which our own proverb, Man’s extremity, God’s opportunity, or as we sometimes have it, When need is highest, help is nighest assumes among the Jews, namely this, When the tale of bricks is doubled, Moses comes, [69] plainly roots itself in the early history of that nation, being an allusion to Exod. v. 9–19, and without a knowledge of that history would be unintelligible altogether. The same may be said of this: We must creep into Ebal, and leap into Gerizim; in other words, we must be slow to curse, and swift to bless. (Deut. xxvii. 12, 13.)
But while it is thus with some, which are bound by the very conditions of their existence to a narrow and peculiar sphere, or at all events move more naturally and freely in it than elsewhere, there are others on the contrary which we meet all the world over. True cosmopolites, they seem to have travelled from land to land, and to have made themselves an home equally in all. The Greeks obtained them probably from the older East, and again imparted them to the Romans; and from these they have found their way into all the languages of the western world.
Much, I think, might be learned from knowing what those truths are, which are so felt to be true by all nations, that all have loved to possess them in these compendious forms, wherein they may pass readily from mouth to mouth: which, thus cast into some happy form, have commended themselves to almost all people, and have become a portion of the common stock of the world’s wisdom, in every land making for themselves a recognition and an home. Such a proverb, for instance, is Man proposes, God disposes; [70] one which I am inclined to believe that every nation in Europe possesses, so deeply upon all men is impressed the sense of Hamlet’s words, if not the words themselves:
“There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will.”
Proverbs compared.
Sometimes the proverb does not actually in so many words repeat itself in various tongues. We have indeed exactly the same thought; but it takes an outward shape and embodiment, varying according to the various countries and periods in which it has been current: we have proverbs totally diverse from one another in their form and appearance, but which yet, when we look a little deeper into them, prove to be at heart one and the same, all these their differences being thus only, so to speak, variations of the same air. These are almost always an amusing, often an instructive, study; and to trace this likeness in difference has an interest lively enough. Thus the forms of the proverb, which brings out the absurdity of those reproving others for a defect or a sin, to whom the same cleaves in an equal or in a greater degree, have sometimes no visible connexion at all, or the very slightest, with one another; yet for all this the proverb is at heart and essentially but one. We say in English: The kiln calls the oven, “Burnt house;”—the Italians: The pan says to the pot “Keep off, or you’ll smutch me;” [71]—the Spaniards: The raven cried to the crow, “Avaunt, blackamoor;” [72]— the Germans: One ass nicknames another, Long-ears; [73]— while it must be owned there is a certain originality in the Catalan version of the proverb: Death said to the man with his throat cut, “How ugly you look.” Under how rich a variety of forms does one and the same thought array itself here.