Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 099.djvu/171

Rh and unrefined, but often expressing a vigorous moral sense—business-like and practical, frugal and severe;—those of Spain, foremost in both quantity and quality—so rich in humour, so double-shotted with sense—gravely thoughtful, too, and breathing the very spirit of chivalry and honour and freedom;—those of Italy, too often glorifying artifice and cunning as the true guides and only safe leaders through the labyrinth of life, but sometimes not only delicately beautiful, and of a subtle wisdom not yet degenerated into cunning and deceit, but also noble and elevating;—those of modern Egypt, bespeaking the selfishness, the utter extinction of all public spirit, the poor, mean, sordid, and ignoble stump of the whole character of the people, with only a few faintest glimpses of that romance which one usually attaches to the East. And so on with other ethnological groups.

His comments on some of the proverbs he selects for elucidation are generally thoughtful and interesting. In the German saying, One foe is too many: an hundred friends are too few, he points out the sense of the sorry truth that hate is often a much more active principle than love—the hundred friends will wish you well, but the one foe will do you ill—their benevolence will be ordinarily passive, his malevolence will be constantly active, will be animosity, or spiritedness in evil. He quotes, Where the devil cannot come, he will send, as setting out to us the penetrative character of temptations, and the certainty that they will follow and find men out in their secretest retreats, and so rebuking the absurd supposition that by any outward arrangements, closet retirements, flights into the wilderness, sin can be kept at a distance—for temptations will inevitably overleap all these outward and merely artificial barriers. In the French proverb, It is easy to go afoot, when one leads one's horse by the bridle, we are taught how easy it is to stoop from state when that state may be resumed at will—how easy for one to part with luxuries and indulgences, which he only parts with exactly so long as may please himself. "No reason indeed is to be found in this comparative easiness for the not 'going afoot;' on the contrary, it may be a most profitable exercise; but every reason for not esteeming the doing so too highly, nor setting it in value beside the trudging upon foot of him, who has no horse to fall back on at whatever moment he may please." In another French proverb. Take the first advice of a woman, and not the second, we are certified, that in processes of reasoning, out of which the second counsels would spring, women may and will be, inferior to men; but in intuitions, moral ones above all, they surpass them far—having what Montaigne ascribes to them in a remarkable word, l'esprit primesautier, that which, if it is to take its prey, must take it at the first bound. Our own, A burnt child fears the fire, good as it is, is shown to be inferior to that proverb of many tongues, A scalded dog fears cold water;—for while the former expresses only that those who have once suffered will henceforward be timid in respect of that same thing from which they have suffered, the latter adds the tendency to exaggerate such fears, so that now they shall fear even where no fear is—a fact which clothes itself in a rich variety of forms: thus, one Italian proverb says, A dog which has been beaten with a stick, is afraid of its shadow; and another, which could only have had its birth in the sunny south, where the glancing but