Chesterfield superbly declared that no man of fashion would have anything to do with proverbs? Aristotle collected them; Plautus rejoiced in them; and so did Rabelais and Montaigne, Shakspeare and Cervantes, Fuller and Butler. Whole nations love them. Indeed, however they may be defined, popularity, or popular recognition, is an essential condition to their being; for without it, no saying, as Mr. Trench rightly affirms, however brief, however wise, however seasoned with salt, however worthy on all these accounts[1] to have become a proverb, however fulfilling all its other conditions, can yet be esteemed as such. As an instance, he cites a mot of Goethe's (or Schiller's?): "A man need not be an architect to live in a house," which seems to have every essential of a proverb, except only that it has not passed over upon the lips of men, not received the stamp of popular acceptance; and however wise it may be, still it is not (at least in this form) the wisdom of many; it has not stood the test of experience; nor embodies the consenting voice of many and at different times to its wisdom and truth; it has not the value, because it has not the currency of the recognised coin of the realm.[2] Not however that proverbs are mostly to be traced to the populace as their author as well as authority. "They spring rather from the sound healthy kernel of the nation, whether in high place or in low; and it is surely worthy of note, how large a proportion of those with the generation of which we are acquainted, owe their existence to the foremost men of their time,[3] to its philosophers, its princes, and its kings; as it would not be difficult to show." Lord Bacon's saying, that the genius, wit, and spirit of a nation are discovered in its proverbs, is enforced and illustrated, briefly but satisfactorily, by Mr. Trench. He shows 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 and what of evil report in their eyes. He passes in review the proverbs of the Greeks, which testify of a people leavened through and through with the most intimate knowledge of its own mythology, history, and poetry—teeming with an infinite multitude of slight and fine allusions to legend and national chronicle, with delicate side glances at Hesiodic theogony and Homeric tale;—those of the Romans, comparatively few
- ↑ One definition of a proverb being, that it is a synthesis of shortness, sense, and salt—i. e. it must be (1) succinct, utterable in a breath; (2) shrewd, and not the mere small-talk of conversation; (3) pointed and pungent, having a sting in it, a barb which shall not suffer it to drop lightly from the memory. With this explanation of the proverb, Mr. Trench aptly compares Martial's admirable epigram upon epigrams:which he thus renders:
"Omne epigramma sit instar apis; sit aculeus illi,
Sint sua mella, sit et corporis exigui;""Three things must epigrams, like bees, have all—
A sting, and honey, and a body small." - ↑ Mr. Trench believes the explanation of the word "proverb" to lie in the confidence with which a man appeals to it, as it were from his mere self and single fallible judgment, to a larger experience and wider conviction. He uses it pro verbo; he employs for and instead of his own individual word, this more general word which is every man's.
- ↑ Lord John Russell is said to have defined a proverb thus: "The wit of one man, the wisdom of many."
