The wit of proverbs spares few or none. They are, as may be supposed, especially intolerant of fools. We say: Fools grow without watering; no need therefore of adulation or flattery, to quicken them to a ranker growth; for indeed The more you stroke the cat’s tail, the more he raises his back; [97] and the Russians: Fools are not planted or sowed; they grow of themselves; while the Spaniards: If folly were a pain, there would be crying in every house; [98] having further an exquisitely witty one on learned folly as the most intolerable of all follies: A fool, unless he know Latin, is never a great fool. [99] And here is excellently unfolded to us the secret of the fool’s confidence: Who knows nothing, doubts nothing. [100]
The shafts of their pointed satire are directed with an admirable impartiality against men of every degree, so that none of us will be found to have wholly escaped. To pass over those, and they are exceedingly numerous, which are aimed at members of the monastic orders, [101] I must fain Bohemian proverb. hope that this Bohemian one, pointing at the clergy, is not true; for it certainly argues no very forgiving temper on our parts in cases where we have been, or fancy ourselves to have been, wronged. It is as follows: If you have offended a clerk, kill him; else you never will have peace with him. [102] And another proverb, worthy to take its place among the best even of the Spanish, charges the clergy with being the authors of the chiefest spiritual mischiefs which have risen up in the Church: By the vicar’s skirts the devil climbs up into the belfry. [103] Nor do physicians appear in the middle ages to have been in very high reputation for piety; for a Latin medieval proverb boldly proclaims: Where there are three physicians, there are two atheists. [104] And as for lawyers, this of the same period, Legista, nequista, [105] expresses itself not with such brevity only, but with such downright plainness of speech, that I shall excuse myself from attempting to render it into English. Nor do other sorts and conditions of men escape. “The miller tolling with his golden thumb,” has been often the object of malicious insinuations; and of him the Germans have a proverb: What is bolder than a miller’s neckcloth, which takes a thief by the throat every morning? [106] Evenhanded justice might perhaps require that I should find caps for other heads; and it is not that such are wanting, nor yet out of fear lest any should be offended, but only because I must needs hasten onward, that I leave this part of my subject without further development.
Proverbs about pride.
What a fine knowledge of the human heart will they often display. I know not whether this Persian saying on the subtleties of pride is a proverb in the very strictest sense of the word, but it is forcibly uttered: Thou shalt sooner detect an ant moving in the dark night on the black earth, than all the motions of pride in thine heart. And on the wide reach of this sin the Italians say: If pride were as art, how many graduates we should have; [107] and how excellent and searching is this word of theirs on the infinitely various shapes which this protean sin will assume: There are who despise pride with a greater pride, [108] one which might almost seem to have been founded on the story of Diogenes, who, treading under his feet a rich carpet of Plato’s, exclaimed, “Thus I trample on the ostentation of Plato;” ‘With an ostentation of thine own,’ was the other’s excellent retort;—even as on another occasion he observed, with admirable wit, that he saw the pride of the Cynic peeping through the rents of his mantle: for indeed pride can array itself quite as easily in rags as in purple; can affect squalors as earnestly as splendours; the lowest place and the last is of itself no security at all for humility; and out of a sense of this we very well have said: As proud go behind as before.
Sometimes in their subtle observation of life, they arrive at conclusions which we would very willingly question or reject, but to which it is impossible to refuse a certain amount of assent. Thus it is with the very striking German proverb: One foe is too many; and an hundred friends too few. [109] There speaks out in this a sense of how much more active a principle in this world will hate be sometimes than love. The hundred friends will wish you well; but the one foe will do you ill. Their benevolence will be ordinarily passive; his malevolence will be constantly active; it will be animosity, or spiritedness in evil. The proverb will have its use, if we are stirred up by it to prove its assertion false, to show that, in very many cases at least, there is no such blot as it would set on the scutcheon of true friendship. In the same rank of unwelcome proverbs I must range this Persian one: Of four things every man has more than he knows: of sins, of debts, of years, and of foes; and this Spanish: One father can support ten children; ten children cannot support one father; which, in so far as it rests upon a certain ground of truth, suggests a painful reflection in regard of the less strength which there must be in the filial than in the paternal affection, since to the one those acts of self-sacrificing love are easy, which to the other are hard, and often impossible. But yet, seeing that it is the order of God’s providence in the world that fathers should in all cases support children, while it is the exception when children are called to support parents, one can only admire that wisdom which has made the instincts of natural affection to run rather in the descending than in the ascending line; a wisdom to which this proverb, though with a certain exaggeration of the facts, bears witness.
French proverb.
How exquisitely delicate is the touch of this French proverb: It is easy to go afoot, when one leads one’s horse by the bridle. [110] How fine and subtle an insight into the inner workings of the human heart is here; how many cheap humilities are here set at their true worth. It is easy to stoop from state, when that state may be resumed at will; easy for one to part with luxuries and indulgences, which he only parts with exactly so long as it may please himself. No reason indeed is to be found in this comparative easiness for the not ‘going afoot;’ on the contrary, it may be to him a most profitable exercise; but every reason for not esteeming the doing so too highly, nor setting it on a level with the trudging upon foot of him, who has no horse to fall back on at whatever moment he may please.
There is, and always must be, some rough work to be done in the world; work which, though rough, is not therefore in the least ignoble; and the schemes, so daintily conceived, of a luxurious society, which repose on a tacit assumption that nobody shall have to do this work, are touched with a fine irony in this Arabic proverb: If I am master, and thou art master, who shall drive the asses? [111]
Again, how clever is the satire of the following Haytian proverb, which, however, I must introduce with a little preliminary explanation. It was one current among the slave population of St. Domingo, and with it they ridiculed the ambition and pretension of the mulatto race immediately above them. These, in imitation of the French planters, must have their duels too—duels, however, which had nothing earnest or serious about them, invariably ending in a reconciliation and a feast, the kids which furnished the latter being in fact the only sufferers, their blood that which alone was shed. All this the proverb uttered: Mulattoes fight, kids die. [112]