PROVERB, an old and common say ing; a short or pithy sentence often re peated, and containing or expressing some well-known truth or common fact ascertained by experience or observa tion; a sentence which briefly and forci bly expresses some practical truth. Un less a saying is capable of being applied to a variety of cases it can never be come a proverb. Every Oriental collec tion 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 ful fill 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 pro verb. We are apt to use proverbs auto matically. So completely have they en grafted themselves that we talk of gift horses, and half-loaves, and a bird in the hand, and sauce for the goose mechani cally and without any thought of speak ing proverbially. There is no family, perhaps, that has not proverbs or rudi mentary proverbs of its own, founded on some adventure or drollery or blunder of one of its members, and used proverbi ally 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 out sider, but full of meaning to all who are to the manner born.
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 is obvious that the greater number of these proverbs which seem to be com mon 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? 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." "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 pro verbs that are strictly national have an interest of another kind. Coming di
rectly from the people, the chosen vehi cles 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.
Of the national groups the Spanish is unquestionably the most remarkable. The number of Spanish proverbs is pro digious. In any other language 5,000 or 6,000 would be a large collection, but a Spanish MS. by Yriarte, the royal libra rian, which was in the Heber library, contained between 25,000 and 30,000. 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.
The Italian proverbs, only less numer ous than the Spanish, are more re markable for wit, often bitter, than for humor; in the French, on the other hand, there is little or none of that brilliant wit and epigrammatic neatness of expression which distinguish French literature. English, including the Low land Scotch, must be regarded as simply a subdivision of the great Teutonic group comprising the German, the Platt deutsch, 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 re gion richest in proverbs in Europe is the Anglo-Saxon country. 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 say ings in praise of Fingal, or expressive of the opinion which one clan has of an other, 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 —a remark certainly borne out by the specimens usually given, in which moral truisms of the copy book order, like "vir tue is everlasting wealth," "wisdom ex cels all riches," "falling is easier than rising," have a decided predominance. Among the Oriental proverbs the Arabic hold the first place in respect to quantity, and perhaps quality likewise, but the Persian and Hindustani are also excel lent, 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 praise, of the English proverb of the shorn lamb is not rivalled by its Turkish par allel, "God makes a nest for the blind bird."