And what are proverbs but the people’s voice?
Coined first, and current made by common choice?
Then sure they must have weight and truth withal;”
It will follow from what has just been said, that, true in the main, they yet cannot be taken without certain qualifications and exceptions. [9]
Popularity essential.
Herein in great part the force of a proverb lies, namely, that it has already received the stamp of popular allowance. A man might produce, (for what another has done, he might do again,) something as witty, as forcible, as much to the point, of his own; which should be hammered at the instant on his own anvil. Yet still it is not “the wisdom of many;” it has not stood the test of experience; it wants that which the other already has, but which it only after a long period can acquire—the consenting voice of many and at different times to its wisdom and truth. A man employing a “proverb of the ancients,” (1 Sam. xxiv. 13,) is not speaking of his own, but uttering a faith and conviction very far wider than that of himself or of any single man; and it is because he is so doing that they, in Lord Bacon’s words, “serve not only for ornament and delight, but also for active and civil use; as being the edge tools of speech which cut and penetrate the knots of business and affairs.” The proverb has in fact the same advantage over the word now produced for the first time, which for present currency and value has the recognised coin of the realm over the rude unstamped ore newly washed from the stream, or dug up from the mine. This last may possess an equal amount of fineness; but the other has been stamped long ago, has already passed often from man to man, and found free acceptance with all:[10] it inspires therefore a confidence which the ruder metal cannot at present challenge. And the same satisfaction which the educated man finds in referring the particular matter before him to the universal law which rules it, a plainer man finds in the appeal to a proverb. He is doing the same thing; taking refuge, that is, as each man so gladly does, from his mere self and single fallible judgment, in a larger experience and in a wider conviction.
And in all this which has been urged lies, as it seems to me, the explanation of a sentence of an ancient grammarian, which at first sight appears to contain a bald absurdity, namely, that a proverb is “a saying without an author.” For, however without a known author it may, and in the majority of cases it must be, still, as we no more believe in the spontaneous generation of proverbs than of anything else, an author every one of them must have had. It might, however, and it often will have been, that in its utterance the author did but precipitate the floating convictions of the society round him; he did but clothe in happier form what others had already felt, or even already uttered; for often a proverb has been in this aspect, “the wit of one, and the wisdom of many.” And further, its constitutive element, as we must all now perceive, is not the utterance on the part of the one, but the acceptance on the part of the many. It is their sanction which first makes it to be such; so that every one who took or gave it during the period when it was struggling into recognition may claim to have had a share in its production; and in this sense without any single author it may have been. From the very first the people will have vindicated it for their own. And thus though they do not always analyse the compliment paid to them in the use of their proverbs, they always feel it; they feel that a writer or speaker using these is putting himself on their ground, is entering on their region, and they welcome him the more cordially for this. [11]
Not all proverbs figurative.
Let us now consider if some other have not sometimes been proposed as essential notes of the proverb, which yet are in fact accidents, such as may be present or absent without affecting it vitally. Into an error of this kind they have fallen, who have claimed for the proverb, and made it one of its necessary conditions, that it should be a figurative expression. A moment’s consideration will be sufficient to disprove this. How many proverbs, such as Haste makes waste;—Honesty is the best policy, with ten thousand more, have nothing figurative about them. Here again the error has arisen from taking that which belongs certainly to very many proverbs, and those oftentimes the best and choicest, and transferring it, as a necessary condition, to all. This much of truth they who made the assertion certainly had; namely, that the employment of the concrete instead of the abstract is one of the most frequent means by which it obtains and keeps its popularity; for so the proverb makes its appeal to the whole man—not to the intellectual faculties alone, but to the feelings, to the fancy, or even to the imagination, as well, stirring the whole man to pleasurable activity.
By the help of an instance or two we can best realize to ourselves how great an advantage it thus obtains for itself. Suppose, for example, one were to content himself with saying, “He may wait till he is a beggar, who waits to be rich by other men’s deaths,” would this trite morality be likely to go half so far, or to be remembered half so long, as the vigorous comparison of this proverb: He who waits for dead men’s shoes may go barefoot? [12] Or again, what were “All men are mortal,” as compared with the proverb: Every door may be shut but death’s door? Or let one observe: “More perish by intemperance than are drowned in the sea,” is this anything better than a painful, yet at the same time a flat, truism? But let it be put in this shape: More are drowned in the beaker than in the ocean; [13] or again in this: More are drowned in wine and in beer than in water; [14] (and these both are German proverbs,) and the assertion assumes quite a different character. There is something that lays hold on us now. We are struck with the smallness of the cup as set against the vastness of the ocean, while yet so many more deaths are ascribed to that than to this; and further with the fact that literally none are, and none could be, drowned in the former, while multitudes perish in the latter. In the justifying of the paradox, in the extricating of the real truth from the apparent falsehood of the statement, in the answer to the appeal made here to the imagination,—an appeal and challenge which, unless it be responded to, the proverb must remain unintelligible to us,—in all this there is a process of mental activity, oftentimes so rapidly exercised as scarcely to be perceptible, yet not the less carried on with a pleasurable excitement. [15]