Rhyme in proverbs.
Let me mention now a few other of the more frequent helps which the proverb employs for obtaining currency among men, for being listened to with pleasure by them, for not slipping again from their memories who have once heard it;—yet helps which are evidently so separable from it, that none can be in danger of affirming them essential parts or conditions of it. Of these rhyme is the most prominent. It would lead me altogether from my immediate argument, were I to enter into a disquisition on the causes of the charm which rhyme has for us all; but that it does possess a wondrous charm, that we like what is like, is attested by a thousand facts, and not least by the circumstance that into this rhyming form a very great multitude of proverbs, and those among the most widely current, have been thrown. Though such will probably at once be present to the minds of all, yet let me mention a few: Good mind, good find;—Wide will wear, but tight will tear;—Truth may be blamed, but cannot be shamed;—Little strokes fell great oaks;—Women’s jars breed men’s wars;—A king’s face should give grace;—East, west, home is best;—Store is no sore;—Slow help is no help;—Who goes a-borrowing, goes a-sorrowing;—with many more, uniting, as you will observe several of them do, this of rhyme with that which I have spoken of before, namely, extreme brevity and conciseness. [16]
Alliteration in proverbs.
Alliteration, which is nearly allied to rhyme, is another of the helps whereof the proverb largely avails itself. Alliteration was at one time an important element in our early English versification; it almost promised to contend with rhyme itself, which should be the most important; and perhaps, if some great master in the art had arisen, might have retained a far greater hold on English poetry than it now possesses. At present it is merely secondary and subsidiary. Yet it cannot be called altogether unimportant; no master of melody despises it; on the contrary, the greatest, as in our days Tennyson, make the most frequent, though not always the most obvious, use of it. In the proverb you will find it of continual recurrence, and where it falls, as, to be worth anything, it must, on the key-words of the sentence, of very high value. Thus: Frost and fraud both end in foul;—Like lips, like lettuce;—Meal and matins minish no way;—Who swims in sin, shall sink in sorrow;—No cross, no crown;—Out of debt, out of danger;—Do in hill as you would do in hall; [17] that is, Be in solitude the same that you would be in a crowd. I will not detain you with further examples of this in other languages; but such occur, and in such numbers that it seems idle to quote them, in all; I will only adduce, in concluding this branch of the subject, a single Italian proverb, which in a remarkable manner unites all three qualities of which we have been last treating, brevity, rhyme, and alliteration: Traduttori, traditori; one which we might perhaps reconstitute in English thus: Translators, traitors; so untrue, for the most part, are they to the genius of their original, to its spirit, if not to its letter, and frequently to both; so do they surrender, rather than render, its meaning; not turning, but only overturning, it from one language to another.[18]
A certain pleasant exaggeration, the use of the figure hyperbole, a figure of natural rhetoric which Scripture itself does not disdain to employ, is a not unfrequent engine with the proverb to procure attention, and to make a way for itself into the minds of men. Thus the Persians have a proverb: A needle’s eye is wide enough for two friends; the whole world is too narrow for two foes. Again, of a man whose good luck seems never to forsake him, so that from the very things which would be another man’s ruin he extricates himself not merely without harm, but with credit and with gain, the Arabs say: Fling him into the Nile, and he will come up with a fish in his mouth; while of such a Fortunatus as this the Germans have a proverb: If he flung a penny on the roof, a dollar would come down to him; [19] as, again, of the man in the opposite extreme of fortune, to whom the most unlikely calamities, and such as beforehand might seem to exclude one another, befall, they say: He would fall on his back, and break his nose.
Transplanting of proverbs.
In all this which I have just traced out, in the fact that the proverbs of a language are so frequently its highest bloom and flower, while yet so much of their beauty consists often in curious felicities of diction pertaining exclusively to some single language, either in a rapid conciseness to which nothing tantamount exists elsewhere, or in rhymes which it is hard to reproduce, or in alliterations which do not easily find their equivalents, or in other verbal happinesses such as these, lies the difficulty which is often felt, which I shall myself often feel in the course of these lectures, of transferring them without serious loss, nay, sometimes the impossibility of transferring them at all from one language to another. [20] Oftentimes, to use an image of Erasmus, [21] they are like those wines, (I believe the Spanish Valdepeñas is one,) of which the true excellence can only be known by those who drink them in the land which gave them birth. Transport them under other skies, or, which is still more fatal, empty them from vessel to vessel, and their strength and flavour will in great part have disappeared in the process.
Still this is rather the case, where we seek deliberately, and only in a literary interest, to translate some proverb which we admire from its native language into our own or another. Where, on the contrary, it has transferred itself, made for itself a second home, and taken root a second time in the heart and affections of a people, in such a case one is continually surprised at the instinctive skill with which it has found compensations for that which it has been compelled to let go; it is impossible not to admire the unconscious skill with which it has replaced one vigorous idiom by another, one happy rhyme or play on words by its equivalent; and all this even in those cases where the extremely narrow limits in which it must confine itself allow it the very smallest liberty of selection. And thus, presenting itself equally finished and complete in two or even more languages, the internal evidence will be quite insufficient to determine which of its forms we shall regard as the original, and which as a copy. For example, the proverb at once German and French, which I can present in no comelier English dress than this,
Mother’s truth