Proverbs. All attempts to define a proverb, from the time of Aristotle downwards, have been unsuccessful. One of the difficulties is to find an essential difference that will not admit or exclude too much, and another is the diversity of opinion among paræmiographers as to where the line should be drawn. Some would include almost any form of popular phrase, while others, like Giusti, refuse to recognise anything that is not a sentence containing a precept or admonition of some sort. In default of an exact definition we must be content with descriptions, such as Earl Russell's—'The wisdom of many, and the wit of one,' or that of Cervantes—'Short sentences drawn from long experience,' or the more complete if less pithy one of Cipriano de Valera—'Short sayings, sententious and true, and long since accepted as such by common consent.' This last has the merit of recognising what is in truth the distinctive characteristic of the proverb, that it is a popular current saying adopted as a convenience by the community. All the qualities said to be essential to it, shortness, sense, salt, and the rest, are subsidiary to this. To be current it must be easily remembered, and therefore, within certain limits, short; without sense it would have no value, and without salt it would not take the popular fancy. But there is another quality no less essential than these which seems to be always ignored, and that is general applicability. Unless a saying is capable of being applied to a variety of cases it can never become a proverb. Lord Palmerston's famous dictum, 'Dirt is only matter in the wrong place,' has sense, salt, and shortness, but it will never be a proverb. It is of no use except in sanitary discussion and when dirt is in question. Lord Derby's answer, after trying a South African port specially recommended for gouty subjects, 'I prefer the gout,' has a much better chance, for it serves every purpose of 'The remedy is worse than the disease,' and is far richer in salt. A proverb is in fact a colloquial coin, not for exclusive dealing at any one particular stall in the market, but negotiable at the butcher's as well as at the baker's; and it is in this its numismatic character that the essence of the proverb lies. A wise man's saying may be ever so wise, pithy, and pointed, but it is only his saying, and nobody is bound to take it as a settlement of any question. The proverb, on the other hand, has been adopted time out of mind and stamped by common consent as the recognised expression of public opinion. It has thus become by prescription a legal tender in controversy, while the other is only the cheque of a presumably solvent capitalist. In this respect proverbs and ballads are on precisely the same footing. They derive their authority from popular suffrage, and take their stand not as the issue of this or that man's brain, but as the adopted utterances of the people at large. But there is this difference between them, that the ballad had a maker, whoever he may have been, but no man ever yet made a proverb. He may have made the original saying, but the forces that made it a proverb were entirely beyond his control. No man by taking thought can add one proverb to his language any more than one cubit to his stature.
It would be a mistake, however, to fancy that every proverb must have had its germ in some wise or shrewd remark. Some are fables in little, or the concentrated essence of fables; and, as might be expected, a large number of the proverbs of the East, the birthplace of the fable, are of this sort. Every oriental collection abounds in proverbs like 'The ant got wings to her destruction,' 'They came to shoe the Pasha's horses, and the beetle held out his foot,' 'They asked the mule, "Who is thy father?" "The horse," said he, "is my maternal uncle." By purists, perhaps, these and others of the same species, including the familiar 'Pot and Kettle,' may be denied a place among the proverbs proper; but they fulfil all the functions of the proverb, and they serve moreover to show how near akin are these two venerable vehicles of old-world wisdom, the fable and the proverb. Nor is the proverb of necessity the wit of one. Sometimes it is the simplicity or naïveté of one, and the wit lies in the application of it by the many. The Viennese have a good specimen of this kind. The late Emperor Ferdinand, driven for shelter one day into a peasant's house, took a fancy to some dumplings that had been just cooked for the family supper. The court-physician, being responsible for the imperial digestion, remonstrated, but his majesty's gracious answer was 'Kaiser bin i', knödel muss i' haben'—'Emperor I am, dumplings I'll have'—which became in course of time a recognised comment in cases of pertinacity. Here we have what is very rare, a proverb traced to a definite source; a few instances there are like 'A bridge of silver for a flying foe,' which was, it is said, a saying of the 'Great Captain,' Gonsalvo de Cordova; but as a rule the proverb is a scrap of unfathered wit or wisdom that came into the world nobody knows how. And here, too, we have a proof that though many regard the proverb as a mere fossil, there is still vitality in it. No doubt modern society has recourse to proverbs in conversation much more sparingly than was usual in the days of our forefathers, and the reasons are plain enough to see. To accept a proverb as an answer implies deference to authority and is in effect an acknowledgment of the wisdom of our ancestors. There is necessarily an antagonism between the proverb and individualism or self-assertion or self-conceit, or whatever other name we may choose to give it. The office of the proverb is to hit the nail on the head, to put the matter in a nut-shell, to bring back discussion to the point at issue, to check prolix argumentation. In all languages it condemns loquacity and commends silence.
It is in fact a primitive form of 'closure.' If an Arab or Persian orator waxes fervid on the theme of equality and bombards his hearers with pompous platitudes about Nature's law, some graybeard will ask, 'Hath God made the five fingers of thy hand all equal?' and solventur visu tabulae. In the nature of things, therefore, it is impossible that the proverb should be popular among the worshippers of excellent speech. The Celtic races, it may be observed, never greatly favoured proverbs. But for all that proverbs are very far from being the dry bones they are sometimes supposed to be. If any one took the trouble to register carefully all the proverbs or references to proverbs that came under his notice in the course of a day, making a note of allusions in his newspaper, whether in leaders, parliamentary, law or police reports, letters from correspondents, critiques, or puffing advertisements; jotting down those he overhears in the railway carriage or tramcar, those dropped in business conversation, in chat at the club, in table-talk at and after dinner; and in fact from breakfast to bedtime keeping his ears open for proverbs, he would find probably that they enter into our daily speech to a much greater extent than he had suspected. We are apt to use proverbs automatically. So completely have they engrafted themselves that we talk of gift horses, and half-loaves, and a bird in the hand, and sance for the goose mechanically and without any thought of speaking proverbially. There is no family perhaps that has not proverbs or rudimentary proverbs of its own, founded on some adventure or drollery or blunder of one of its members, and used proverbially by all, often to the perplexity of the uninitiated visitor; and what is true of the family is true of the community on a more extensive scale. It has its own current sayings, allusions, comparisons, similitudes, incomprehensible to the outsider, but full of meaning to all who are to the manner born. Of these there will be now and then one more generally applicable and negotiable than the rest, with more of the true proverb metal and ring in it, which in time will pass the bounds of the community and become the property of the nation. A man sees another bolting out of his house, and asks what he has been about there. 'You'll see when the eggs come to be fried,' says the other, making off; which is explained when it is time to fry the eggs and it is found out that the frying-pan has been stolen. It will be first a family joke; then a parish joke; then a stock saying in the market-place—'very good; time will tell; you'll see when the eggs come to be fried;' then a saying in many market-places; and so at last a proverb. This is the actual story of one enshrined in Don Quixote—Al freir de los huevos.
As they pass from the family and the community to the nation, so they pass from one nation to another. The purely national proverbs form only a portion of the proverbs in any language. It almost seems as though there had been from time immemorial a kind of proverb exchange through which any serviceable proverb in one language passed into any other that stood in need of it; and this makes it a matter of difficulty, or rather impossibility, to settle the nationality of many of the best and most familiar. We are not, however, to jump at once to the conclusion that proverbs which are identical or nearly so must be in every instance merely versions or variants of one common original. To take an extreme case, our old friend the swallow that makes no summer is current now in sixty or seventy versions, and was current more than 2000 years ago, a date which allows ample time for it to have penetrated into the remotest corners of Europe. But it does not by any means follow that none of these came into existence independently. The remark is one which must have been made at first hand in many a tongue on many a spring day. 'Summer!' cries the young man, 'Lo, a swallow!' 'Nay,' says the old one, with that repression of youthful optimism which is the privilege of age, 'One swallow,' &c. But undoubtedly in most cases of widely distributed proverbs the probability is on the side of a common ancestor. It is not easy, for instance, to see how that one about the gift-horse's mouth, which was, as we know, 'a vulgar proverb' in the time of St Jerome, could ever have been independently produced. That two minds should hit upon precisely the same illustration for the same thought may be within the bounds of possibility, but that in each case a proverb should be the fruit of it pushes the coincidence to the utmost limits of chance.
It is obvious that the greater number of these proverbs which seem to be common property must be of eastern birth. If we find a proverb in English, German, Italian, and Spanish, and also in Arabic, Persian, and Hindustani, which is the more likely—that it has passed from Europe to Asia, or from Asia to Europe? A wide distribution argues antiquity, for necessarily the proverb travels slowly; and, go back as far as we may, we find the proverb, the fable, and the parable working together in the East. When David appealed to Saul it was with 'a proverb of the ancients,' and it was with proverbs that the prophets drove home their words, proverbs that are, many of them, in use there to this day, like 'As is the mother, so is her daughter,' and 'The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the teeth of the children are set on edge.' The sayings of 'them of old time' cited in the Sermon on the Mount—'Judge not that ye be not judged,' 'The straw in another's eye thou seest, but not the beam in thine own,' and others, are still current in Syria. 'One sows and another reaps' and 'Who makes a trap for others falls into it himself' are Turkish, and 'Where the corpse is there the vultures will be' is a Bengali proverb. The proverbs that are strictly national have an interest of another kind. Coming directly from the people, the chosen vehicles of their sentiments and opinions, they naturally reflect the habits of thought, the turn of mind, the way of looking at things, that prevail among those who use them. Any one at all versed in comparative paremiology will be able for the most part to make a shrewd guess at the original language from a translated specimen. They reflect other things too—often the history of the nation they come from. The Spaniard, as he was before Ferdinand and Ximenez bridled Aragon and Castile, makes himself heard in 'The king goes as far as he may, not as far as he would;' there are Teutonic proverbs older than Luther, in which his very spirit seems to speak; there are Italian proverbs that, in their cynicism, distrust of mankind, and open advocacy of lying, are more eloquent on the state of society in mediæval Italy than any of her historians. And the differences they suggest are often curious. The devil figures prominently in the proverbs of Europe; but in those of the Latin races he is always treated with respect, or at any rate credited with astuteness, the only exception, perhaps, being the Italian one that accuses him of weaving a coarse web. In Teutonic proverbs, on the other hand, he is held up to ridicule on the score of his amazing simplicity. He tries to get wool off his pigs; he takes a donkey for a cow, and remarks how soft its horn is; he sits down on a swarm of bees, because where there is singing going on one may make one's self easy; and so on through a host of proverbs that give a very poor idea of his intellect.
Of the national groups the Spanish is unquestionably the most remarkable. The number of Spanish proverbs is prodigious. In any other language 5000 or 6000 would be a large collection, but a Spanish MS. by Yriarte, the Royal librarian, which was in the Heber library, contained between 25,000 and 30,000, a number which, however incredible to others, is not at all surprising to those who know the proverbial aptitudes of the people and the language. In Spain almost everything has its proverb; every village of the plain, every herb of the field, has its virtues or vices put in a compendious shape for general circulation. And they are as racy as they are numerous, full of shrewd sense and knowledge of human nature, and rich in that grave, dry Spanish humour which never compromises itself by a descent into facetiousness. The Spaniard is, no doubt, naturally sententious, but the facilities offered by his rich, sonorous Castilian should not be overlooked; and among them must be reckoned its wealth in rhymes, consonant and assonant, of which there is such striking proof in the number and excellence of the Spanish rhyming proverbs. Language, it may be observed, plays an important part in proverbs. Take, for example, the Scotch 'Better a toom house than an ill tenant.' Compared with the English 'empty,' how much more effective is the Scandinavian 'toom,' to say nothing of the alliteration or inverted rhyme. The Basque proverbs, from which several of the Spanish are obviously derived, are of much the same character; and in both, but especially in the Basque, the resemblance to the proverbs of the East is very distinct. The Basque proverbs have not been as carefully collected as they deserve, and of course form only a small group; but, relatively to the Euskara-speaking population of a little over half a million, their numbers indicate a propensity to the use of the proverb as strong as the Spaniard's. The Italian proverbs, only less numerous than the Spanish, are more remarkable for wit, often bitter, than for humour; in the French, on the other hand, there is little or none of that brilliant wit and epigrammatic neatness of expression which distinguishes French literature. But this is only what might be expected. French wit is the product of French culture, and proverbs are natural productions. Our own, including the Lowland Scotch, must be regarded as simply a subdivision of the great Teutonic group comprising the German, the Plattdeutsch, the Dutch, the Danish, the Swedish, and the Norwegian. Each of these has, of course, its own peculiar proverbs, but in each case the main body, it will be seen on comparison, belongs to a common stock. Next to Spain, the region richest in proverbs in Europe is probably that watered by the lower Elbe, and including Oldenburg, Hanover, Holstein, and Mecklenburg—the Anglo-Saxon country, in fact. Compared with other groups, the Celtic proverbs must be rated as poor. The Gaelic proverbs, as Nicolson's admirable collection shows and he himself admits, have been largely recruited from Norse and Lowland Scotch sources; and the purely Celtic are to a great extent made up of sayings in praise of Fingal, or expressive of the opinion which one clan has of another, or of itself. The Welsh proverbs gathered by Howell are very flat; and of the Irish Dr Nicolson observes that the wonder is they are so few, and those few so remarkably deficient in the wit for which our Hibernian cousins are specially distinguished—a remark certainly borne out by the specimens usually given, in which moral truisms of the copy-book order, like 'Virtue is everlasting wealth,' 'Wisdom excels all riches,' 'Falling is easier than rising,' have a decided predominance. Among the oriental proverbs the Arabic hold the first place in respect of quantity, and perhaps quality likewise, but the Persian and
Hindustani are also excellent, and in the Turkish, together with abundant worldly shrewdness, there is sometimes a vein of poetry that is very striking. It is questionable whether the 'tender beauty,' to use Trench's phrase, of our own proverb of the shorn lamb is not rivalled by its Turkish parallel, 'God makes a nest for the blind bird.'
The bibliography of proverbs is, of course, a subject which cannot be compressed within the limits of an article. Even the admirable work of M. Duplessis, Bibliographie Parémiologique (Paris, 1847), full as it is, has been outgrown by the proverb literature that has sprung up since its appearance; and Nopitzsch's Literatur der Sprichwörter (Nuremberg, 1833) is still more out of date. The oldest collections of proverbs—true proverbs, that is to say, not aphorisms or maxims of sages—are probably the French Proverbes ruraux et vulgaires and Proverbes au Villain, a significant title as indicating the recognised source of proverbial wisdom. Both of these are of the 13th century, and there are one or two others of the same sort almost as old. The Marquis of Santillana, the Spanish poet, statesman, and soldier, is the oldest collector of proverbs of whom we know anything. His collection of 625 'Proverbs that the old women repeat over the fire' was made at the request of John II. of Castile about the middle of the 15th century, but was not printed till 1508. The earliest German collections were those of Johann Agricola in 1528, and Sebastian Franck in 1541, for Bebel's 'Proverbia Germanica' (1508), being in Latin, cannot be counted. Of Italian proverbs the first genuine collection was the Proverbi of Antonio Cornazzano (Venice, 1518). Comparatively little attention has been paid to our own. John Heywood, the dramatist, in 1546 composed in verse A dialogue conteyning in effect the number of all the proverbs in the English tunge, which has a certain interest and value as the first attempt towards a collection in the language. George Herbert's Jacula Prudentum is, as its original title of Outlandish Proverbs implies, merely a collection of foreign proverbs in an English dress. Howell in 1659 collected a few which he appended to his Lexicon Tetraglottum, to take away the reproach against England 'that she is but barren in this point, and those proverbs she hath are but flat and empty.' The first deserving the name of a collection was Ray's in 1670, which, though faulty in system and arrangement, brought together a considerable number of genuine, racy, popular proverbs, and has passed through seven or eight editions. The best, that in Bohn's Handbook of Proverbs (1855), is supplemented by a copious 'Alphabet of Proverbs,' to which the companion volume, the Polyglott of Foreign Proverbs (1857), forms a useful adjunct. A later collection is Mr W. C. Hazlitt's (2d ed. 1882). Scotch proverbs have fared better. A collection by David Fergusson appeared in 1641, and a much larger one by Kelly in 1721, followed by Allan Ramsay's in 1737. Henderson's was published in 1832, and Hislop's in 1862. A collection of Gaelic proverbs was made by Donald Macintosh in 1785, and a more complete one by Alexander Nicolson in 1882. Trench's Lessons in Proverbs (1853) somewhat relieves the poverty of English proverb literature. In strong contrast to English neglect is the zeal of German collectors. Goedeke enumerates seventy-five names, and Duplessis more than thrice that number of works. A few of the more notable, after Agricola and Franck, are Lehmann, Politische Baumgarten (1630); Siebenkees (1790); Wander, Scheidemünze (1832) and Sprichwörter Lexicon (1867); Korte (1837); Eiselein (1840); Simrock (1846); Sutermeister, Schweizerische Sprichwörter (1869); Binder, Sprichwörterschatz (1873); Schröder, Plattdutsche Sprichwörterschatz (1875); Rheinsberg-Düringfeld, Sprichwörter der Germanischen und Romanischen Sprachen (1872-75). The last is probably the most masterly work on proverbs ever written. It is not so much a collection as a concordance of proverbs, in which more than 1700 are traced through all the Teutonic and Latin languages and most of their dialects. The chief French collections are Proverbes Communs (15th century); Lebon, Adages et Proverbes de Solon de Voje (16th century); Meurier, Trésor des Sentences (1617); Oudin, Curiositez Françaises (1640); Pancoucke, Dictionnaire des Proverbes (1749); Tuet, Matinées Sémonaises (1789); Le Roux de Lincy, Livre des Proverbes Français (1859; the best; over-elaborate in arrangement, but valuable for its introduction and appendices); Oihenart, Proverbes Basques (1637; reprinted 1847); Sauvé, Proverbes de la Basse Bretagne (1878); Lespy, Proverbes du Pays de Bearn (1876); Toselli, Recueil de Proverbi (Nice, 1878).—Italian: Cynthio, Proverbi (1526); Pescetti, Proverbi Italiani (1598); Giusti, Proverbi Toscani (1853; new ed. by G. Capponi, 1884); Bonifacio, Proverbi Lombardi (1858); Tommaseo, Proverbi Corsi (1841); Pasqualigo, Proverbi Veneti (3d ed. 1882).—Spanish: Refranes Famosissimos Glossados (1509); Blasco de Garay, Cartas en Refranes (1545); Pedro Vallés, Libro de Refranes (1549); Hernan Nuñez de Guzman, Refranes o Proverbios (1555); Mallara, Philosofía Vulgar (1568); Palmireno, El Estudioso Cortesano (1587); Oudin, Refranes Castellanos (1605); Sorapan, Medecina en Proverbios (1616); Cejudo, Refranes (1675), Refranes de la Lengua Castellana (1815, from the Dictionary of the Academy); Collins, Dictionary of Spanish Proverbs (1822); U. R. Burke, Spanish Salt (1877; the proverbs in Don Quixote); Haller, Altsprache Sprichwörter (1883).—Portuguese: Adagios, Proverbios, etc. (1780-1841).—Dutch: Harrebomée, Spreekwoorden (1858-63).—Danish: Molbech, Danske Ordsprog (1850); Kok (1870); Grundtvig (1875).—Swedish: Reuterdahl, Gamla Ordspråk (1840); Svenska Ordspråkboken (1865).—Norwegian: Aasen, Norske Ordsprog (1856).—Icelandic: Dr H. Scheving (1847).—Flemish: Willems (1824).—Modern Greek: Negris, Dictionary of Modern Greek Proverbs (1834).—Russian: A selection in appendix to Duplessis (1847).—Arabic: Scaliger and Erpenius, Proverbium Arabum Centuriae Duæ (1623); Burkhardt, Arabic Proverbs (1830; 2d ed. 1875); Freytag, Proverbia (1838-43); Landberg, Proverbes et Dictons de la Province de Syrie (1883).—Persian and Hindustani: Roebuck, (1824).—Bengali and Sanskrit: Morton (1832).—Behar: Christian (1891).—Turkish: Decourdemanche, Mille et un Proverbes Turcs (1878); Osmanische Sprichwörter (1865); K.K. Orient. Akad., Wien).—Chinese: Hau Kiou Choouan, or the Pleasing History (1761), contains a small collection.—Japanese: Steenackers and Ueda Tokunosuké, Cent Proverbes Japonais (1884).