Dr Whitaker almost flung down his beloved violin in his shame and disgrace at this untimely interruption. ‘Father,’ he said, as kindly as he was able, ‘I am not well to-night—I am indisposed—I am suffering somewhat—you must excuse me, please; I’m afraid I shan’t be able to meet your friends at dinner this evening.’ And taking down his soft hat from the peg in the piazza, he crushed it despairingly upon his aching head, and stalked out, alone and sick at heart, into the dusty, dreary, cactus-bordered lanes of that transformed and desolate Trinidad.
(To be continued.)
FRENCH AND ENGLISH PROVERBS.
The object of the writer of this paper has been to collect and compare a few of the most familiar English and French proverbs or sayings; and to bring together a few of those sayings which exist as such in both languages, expressing the same idea, or nearly so, in each. To begin with a few similes.
We English seem to have selected the mouse as an emblem in our ‘As dumb as a mouse;’ the French have preferred a glass, for they say, ‘As dumb as a glass.’ We say, ‘As deaf as a post;’ the French, ‘As deaf as a pot.’ ‘As dull as ditch-water,’ Gallicised becomes, ‘As sad as a nightcap.’ ‘Don’t count your chickens before they are hatched,’ is changed into, ‘Don’t sell the skin of a bear before having killed it.’ Instead of, ‘Biting off one’s nose to spite one’s face,’ a similarly useless experiment is illustrated by ‘Spitting in the air that it may fall on one’s nose.’ The self-evident impossibility in the words, ‘You can’t get blood out of a stone,’ is represented by, ‘One could not comb a thing that has no hair.’ (This last also ‘goes without saying,’ which, as literally translated from the French, now forms a proverb in our own language.) In the proverb, ‘One man may lead a horse to the water, but a hundred can’t make him drink,’ our neighbours have not inappropriately selected an ‘ass’ as the illustrative animal. ‘When you’re in Rome, you must do as Rome does,’ every Englishman will tell you; though few perhaps could say why Rome was chosen as an example; and whether it is more necessary, when in Rome, to follow the general lead, than in anywhere else, is to us a matter of doubt. To the Frenchman, the idea is sufficiently well expressed, however, by impressing upon you the necessity of ‘howling with the wolves.’ ‘Easy come, easy go,’ though terse and to the point, is in itself scarcely so intelligible as the somewhat longer sentence, ‘That which comes with the flood, returns with the ebb.’ That ‘a burnt child dreads the fire’ is perfectly true, as every one will admit: our neighbours go farther than this, and, in choosing a ‘scalded cat’ as the object of consideration, speak of it as being in fear of ‘cold’ water even, thus expressing the natural distrust of the cat, after having once been scalded, as extending even to ‘cold’ water. ‘Money makes the mare to go;’ and ‘For money, dogs dance.’
The advisability of ‘letting sleeping dogs lie’ is very seldom questioned; in France the recommendation simply takes the form, ‘Do not wake a sleeping cat.’ In England at least, it is said that ‘Birds of a feather flock together;’ or, to put it less poetically, ‘Those who resemble, assemble.’ Naturally, ‘A thief is set to catch a thief;’ or, in other words, ‘A good cat to a good rat;’ ‘A thief and a half to a thief.’ Evidently one thief is not always sufficient; more are required at times. That ‘Practice makes perfect’ is equally true with ‘It is in forging that one becomes a blacksmith.’ And speaking of an ‘ill wind that blows nobody good,’ the fact that ‘to some one, misfortune is good,’ is equally applicable, if the phrase were not un-English. The cat seems to figure rather prominently in French proverbs. Instead of buying a ‘pig in a poke,’ ‘a cat in a bag’ is often spoken of.
That a man—or rather his clothes—should be ‘stitched with gold’ is about on a par with ‘rolling in money.’ It does not require a very powerful imagination to trace the likeness supposed to exist between a person placing his arms ‘akimbo’ and making or imitating a two-handled vase. The ability to utilise whatever comes to hand, aptly put, ‘All is fish that comes to his net,’ regarded from another point of view, resolves itself into ‘Making arrows out of any wood.’
We are not aware—although, perhaps, some of our readers may be—of the origin of the advice contained in ‘Tell that to the marines.’ It is just possible, in times gone by, ‘the marines’ were a more credulous body of men than the majority of people; but be that as it may, our friends content themselves by saying, shortly, ‘to some others.’ The idea in ‘Talk of a certain personage and he’s sure to appear,’ is similarly embodied in the words, ‘As one speaks of the wolf, one sees his tail.’ Perhaps to ‘shave an egg’ is almost as difficult a task as to ‘skin a flint;’ and ‘to make with one stone two coups,’ about as arduous as ‘to kill two birds with one stone.’ These illustrations might be multiplied to a much greater extent, if necessary; but the foregoing will suffice.
Of course, there are a number of English proverbs for which the French have no real equivalents, and vice versâ. By ‘equivalent’ is here meant the same idea expressed in a similarly pithy, terse form, so as to come under the head of proverbs in either language. As it is true of individuals, that every one looks at things from his or her point of view, so it is more or less true of all nations; and it follows that, from the two nations here spoken of having different ideas on many subjects, and different ways of looking at things, it is not always possible to ‘transplant’ one idea satisfactorily into another tongue. Translators are often puzzled by such obstacles. Again, as also cannot fail to happen, many proverbs are identical, or nearly so, in words in both languages. The best use of proverbs is to illustrate, sum up, or emphasise what has already been said, in a brief and concise manner; or as a convenient form in which to give advice. Advice is sometimes, like physic, very disagreeable to take, and being administered in the form of a proverb-pill, is occasionally rendered less unpalatable.