“The genius, wit, and spirit of a nation are discovered in its proverbs,”—this is Lord Bacon’s well-worn remark; although, indeed, only well-worn because of its truth. “In them,” it has been further said, “is to be found an inexhaustible source of precious documents in regard of the interior history, the manners, the opinions, the beliefs, [37] the customs of the people among whom they have had their course.” [38] Let us put these[47] assertions to the proof, and see how far in this people’s or in that people’s proverbs, their innermost Proverbs characteristic. heart speaks out to us; how far the comparison of the proverbs of one nation with those of others may be made instructive to us; what this comparison will tell us severally about each. This only I will ask, ere we enter upon the subject, that if I should fail here in drawing out anything strongly characteristic, if the proverbs regarded from this point of view should not seem to reveal to you any of the true secrets of national life, you will not therefore misdoubt those assertions with which my lecture opened; or assume that these documents would not yield up their secret, if questioned aright; but only believe that the test has been unskilfully applied; or, if you will, that my brief limits have not allowed me to make that clear, which with larger space I might not have wholly failed in doing.

I am very well aware that in following upon this track, one is ever liable to deceive oneself, to impose upon others, picking out and adducing such proverbs as conform to a preconceived theory, passing over those which would militate against it. Quite allowing that there is such a danger which needs to be guarded against, and also that there are a multitude of these sayings which cannot be made to illustrate difference, for they rest on the[48] broad foundation of the universal humanity, underlying and deeper than that which is peculiar and national, I am yet persuaded that enough remain, and such as may with perfect good faith be adduced, to confirm these assertions; I am convinced that we may learn from the proverbs current among a people, what is nearest and dearest to their hearts, the aspects under which they contemplate life, how honour and dishonour are distributed among them, what is of good, what of evil report in their eyes, with very much more which it can never be unprofitable to know.

To begin, then, with the proverbs of Greece. That which strikes one most in the study of these, and which the more they are studied, the more fills the thoughtful student with wonder, is the evidence they yield of a leavening through and through of the entire nation with the most intimate knowledge of its own mythology, history, and poetry. The infinite multitude of slight and fine allusions to the legends of their gods and heroes, to the earlier incidents of their own history, to the Homeric narrative, the delicate side glances at all these which the Greek proverbs constantly embody, [39] assume an acquaintance, indeed a familiarity, with all this on their parts among whom they passed current, which almost exceeds belief. In many and most important respects, the Greek proverbs considered as a whole are inferior to those of many nations of [49]modern Christendom. This is nothing wonderful; Christianity would have done little for the world, would have proved very ineffectual for the elevating, purifying, and deepening of man’s life, if it had been otherwise. But, with all this, as bearing testimony to the high intellectual training of the people who employed them, to a culture not restricted to certain classes, but which must have been diffused through the whole nation, no other collection can bear the remotest comparison with this.
Roman proverbs.

It is altogether different with the Roman proverbs. These, the genuine Roman, the growth of their own soil, are very far fewer in number than the Greek, as was indeed to be expected from the far less subtle and less fertile genius of the people. Hardly any of them are legendary or mythological; which again agrees with the fact that the Italian pantheon was very scantily peopled as compared with the Greek. Very few have much poetry about them, or any very rare delicacy or refinement of feeling. In respect of love indeed, not the Roman only, but Greek and Roman alike, are immeasurably inferior to those which many modern nations could supply. Thus a proverb of such religious depth and beauty as our own, Marriages are made in heaven, it would have been quite impossible for all heathen antiquity to have produced, or even remotely to have approached. [40]

[50]

In the setting out not of love, but of friendship, and of the claims which it makes, the blessings which it brings, is exhibited whatever depth and tenderness they may have. [41] This indeed, as has been truly observed, [42] was only to be expected, seeing how much higher an ideal of that existed than of this, the full realization of which was reserved for the modern Christian world. Yet the Roman proverbs are not without other substantial merits of their own. A vigorous moral sense speaks out in many; [43] and even when this is not so prominent, they wear often a thoroughly old Roman aspect; being business-like and practical, frugal and severe, wise saws such as the elder Cato must have loved, such as must have been often upon his lips; [44] while in the number that relate to farming, they bear singular witness to that strong and lively interest in agricultural pursuits,[51] which was so remarkable a feature in the old Italian life. [45]
Number of Spanish proverbs.

It will not be possible to pass under even this hastiest review more than two or three of the modern families of proverbs. Let us turn first to the proverbs of Spain. I put these in the foremost rank, because the Spanish literature, poor in many provinces wherein other literatures are rich, is probably richer in this province than any other in the world, certainly than any other in the western world; and this I should be inclined to believe, both as respects the quantity and the quality. [46] In respect of quantity, the mere number of Spanish proverbs is astonishing. A collection I have been using while preparing these lectures, contains between seven and eight thousand, and yet does not contain all; for I have searched it in vain for several with which from other sources I had become acquainted. Nay, it must be very far indeed[52] from exhausting the entire stock, seeing that there exists a manuscript collection brought together by a distinguished Spanish scholar, in which the proverbs have attained to the almost incredible amount of from five and twenty to thirty thousand. [47]
Spanish characteristics.

And in respect of their quality, it needs only to call to mind some of those, so rich in humour, so double-shotted with homely sense, wherewith the Squire in Don Quixote adorns his discourse; being oftentimes indeed not the fringe and border, but the main woof and texture of it: and then, if we assume that the remainder are not altogether unlike these, we shall, I think, feel that it would be difficult to rate them more highly than they deserve. And some are in a loftier vein; for taking, as we have a right to do, Cervantes himself as the truest exponent of the Spanish character, we should be prepared to trace in the proverbs of Spain a grave thoughtfulness, a stately humour, to find them breathing the very spirit of chivalry and honour, and indeed of freedom too;—for in[53] Spain, as throughout so much of Europe, it is despotism, and not freedom, which is new. Nor are we disappointed in these our expectations. How eminently chivalresque, for instance, the following: White hands cannot hurt. [48] What a grave humour lurks in this: The ass knows well in whose face he brays. [49] What a stately apathy, how proud a looking of calamity in the face, speaks out in the admonition which this one contains: When thou seest thine house in flames, approach and warm thyself by it; [50] what a spirit of freedom, which refuses to be encroached on even by the highest, is embodied in another: The king goes as far as he may, not as far as he would; [51] what Castilian pride in the following: Every layman in Castile might make a king, every clerk a pope. The Spaniard’s contempt for his peninsular neighbours finds its emphatic utterance in another: Take from a Spaniard all his good qualities, and there remains a Portuguese.

We may too, I think, remark how a nation will occasionally in its proverbs indulge in a fine irony upon itself, and show that it is perfectly aware of its own weaknesses, follies, and faults. This the Spaniards must be allowed to do in their proverb, Succours of Spain, either late, or never. [52] However [54]largely and confidently promised, these succours of Spain either do not arrive at all, or only arrive after the opportunity in which they could have served have passed away. Certainly any one who reads the despatches of England’s Great Captain during the Peninsular War will find in almost every page of them that which abundantly justifies this proverb, will own that those who made it read themselves aright, and could not have designated broken pledges, unfulfilled promises of aid, tardy and thus ineffectual assistance, by an happier title than Succours of Spain. And then again what a fearful glimpse of those blood feuds which, having once begun, seem as if they could never end, blood touching blood, and violence evermore provoking its like, have we in the following: Kill, and thou shalt be killed, and they shall kill him who kills thee. [53]

The Italians also are eminently rich in proverbs; and yet if ever I have been tempted to retract or seriously to modify what I shall have occasion by-and-bye to affirm in regard of a nobler life and spirit as predominating in proverbs, it has been after the study of some Italian collection. “The Italian proverbs,” it has been said not without too much reason, though perhaps also with overmuch severity, [55] “have taken a tinge from their deep and politic genius, and their wisdom seems wholly concentrated in their personal interests. I think every tenth proverb in an Italian collection is some cynical or some selfish maxim, a book of the world for worldlings.” [54] Certainly many of them are shrewd enough, and only too shrewd; “ungracious,” inculcating an universal suspicion, teaching to look everywhere for a foe, to expect, as the Greeks said, a scorpion under every stone, glorifying artifice and cunning as the true guides and only safe leaders through the perplexed labyrinth of life, [55] and altogether seeming dictated as by the very spirit of Machiavel himself.
Proverbs on revenge.

And worse than this is the glorification of revenge which speaks out in too many of them. I know nothing of its kind calculated to give one a more shuddering sense of horror than the series which might be drawn together of Italian proverbs on this matter; especially when we take them with the commentary which Italian history supplies, and which shows them no empty words, but the deepest utterances of the nation’s heart. There is no misgiving in these about the right of entertaining so deadly a guest in the bosom; on the contrary, one of them, exalting the sweetness of revenge, declares, Revenge is a morsel for God. [56] There is nothing in them, (it would be far better if there were,) of blind and headlong passion, but [56] rather a spirit of deliberate calculation, which makes the blood run cold. Thus one gives this advice: Wait time and place to act thy revenge, for it is never well done in a hurry; [57] while another proclaims an immortality of hatred, which no spaces of intervening time shall have availed to weaken: Revenge of an hundred years old hath still its sucking teeth. [58] We may well be thankful that we have in England, at least as far as I am aware, no sentiments parallel to these, embodied as the permanent convictions of the national mind.

How curious again is the confession which speaks out in another Italian proverb, that the maintenance of the Romish system and the study of Holy Scripture cannot go together. It is this: With the Gospel one becomes an heretic. [59] No doubt with the study of the Word of God one does become an heretic, in the Italian sense of the word; and therefore it is only prudently done to put all obstacles in the way of that study, to assign three years’ and four years’ imprisonment with hard labour to as many as shall dare to peruse it; yet certainly it is not a little remarkable that such a confession should have embodied itself in the popular utterances of the nation.
Italian proverbs.

But while it must be freely owned that the charges brought just now against the Italian proverbs[57] are sufficiently borne out by too many, they are not all to be included in the common shame. Very many there are not merely of a delicate refinement of beauty, as this, expressive of the freedom in regard of thine and mine which will exist between true friends: Friends tie their purses with a spider’s thread; [60] of a subtle wisdom which has not degenerated into cunning and deceit; but also of a nobler stamp; honour and honesty, plain dealing and uprightness, have here their praises too, and are not seldom pronounced to be in the end more than a match for all cunning and deceit. How excellent in this sense is the following: For an honest man half his wits is enough, the whole are too little for a knave; [61] the ways, that is, of truth and uprightness are so simple and plain, that a little wit is abundantly sufficient for those that walk in them; the ways of falsehood and fraud are so perplexed and tangled, that sooner or later all the wit of the cleverest rogue will not preserve him from being entangled therein. How often and how wonderfully has this found its confirmation in the lives of evil men; so true it is, to employ another proverb and a very deep one from the same quarter, that The devil is subtle, yet weaves a coarse web. [62]

[58]

Again, what description of Egypt as it now is, or indeed generally of the East, could set us at the heart of its moral condition, could make us to understand all which long centuries of oppression and misrule have made of it and of its people, what could do this so effectually as the collection of Arabic proverbs now current in Egypt, which the traveller Burckhardt gathered, and which, after his death, were published with his name? [63] In other books, others describe the modern Egyptians, but here they unconsciously describe themselves. The selfishness, the utter extinction of all public spirit, the servility, whi............