Primitive culture, vol. 1 (of 2)

To conclude, the phrase ‘cheating the devil’ seems to belong to that familiar series of legends where a man makes a compact with the fiend, but at the last moment gets off scot-free by the interposition of a saint, or by some absurd evasion—such as whistling the gospel he has bound himself not to say, or refusing to complete his bargain at the fall of the leaf, on the plea that the sculptured leaves in the church are still on their boughs. One form of the mediæval compact was for the demon, when he had taught his black art to a class of scholars, to seize one of them for his professional fee, by letting them all run for their lives and catching the last—a story obviously connected with another popular saying: ‘devil take the hindmost.’ But even at this game the stupid fiend may be cheated, as is told in the folk-lore of Spain and Scotland, in the legends of the Marqués de Villano and the Earl of Southesk, who attended the Devil’s magic schools at Salamanca and Padua. The apt scholar only leaves the master his shadow to clutch as following hindmost in the race, and with this unsubstantial payment the demon must needs be satisfied, while the new-made magician goes forth free, but ever after shadowless.[91]

It seems a fair inference to think folk-lore nearest to its source is where it has its highest place and meaning. Thus, if some old rhyme or saying has in one place a solemn import in philosophy or religion, while elsewhere it lies at the level of the nursery, there is some ground for treating the serious version as the more original, and the playful one as its mere lingering survival. The argument is not safe, but yet is not to be quite overlooked. For instance, there are two poems kept in remembrance among the modern Jews, and printed at the end of their book of Passover services in Hebrew and English. One is that known as חד גדיא (Chad gadyâ): it begins, ‘A kid, a kid, my father bought for two pieces of money;’ and it goes on to tell how a cat came and ate the kid, and a dog came and bit the cat, and so on to the end.—‘Then came the Holy One, blessed be He! and slew the angel of death, who slew the butcher, who killed the ox, that drank the water, that quenched the fire, that burnt the stick, that beat the dog, that bit the cat, that ate the kid, that my father bought for two pieces of money, a kid, a kid.’ This composition is in the ‘Sepher Haggadah,’ and is looked on by some Jews as a parable concerning the past and future of the Holy Land. According to one interpretation, Palestine, the kid, is devoured by Babylon the cat;

Babylon is overthrown by Persia, Persia by Greece, Greece by Rome, till at last the Turks prevail in the land; but the Edomites (i.e. the nations of Europe) shall drive out the Turks, the angel of death shall destroy the enemies of Israel, and his children shall be restored under the rule of Messiah. Irrespectively of any such particular interpretation, the solemnity of the ending may incline us to think that we really have the composition here in something like its first form, and that it was written to convey a mystic meaning. If so, then it follows that our familiar nursery tale of the old woman who couldn’t get her kid (or pig) over the stile, and wouldn’t get home till midnight, must be considered a broken-down adaptation of this old Jewish poem. The other composition is a counting-poem, and begins thus:

‘Who knoweth thirteen? I (saith Israel) know thirteen: Thirteen divine attributes, twelve tribes, eleven stars, ten commandments, nine months preceding childbirth, eight days preceding circumcision, seven days of the week, six books of the Mishnah, five books of the Law, four matrons, three patriarchs, two tables of the covenant; but One is our God who is over the heavens and the earth.’

This is one of a family of counting-poems, apparently held in much favour in mediæval Christian times, for they are not yet quite forgotten in country places. An old Latin version runs: ‘Unus est Deus,’ &c., and one of the still-surviving English forms begins, ‘One’s One all alone, and evermore shall be so,’ thence reckoning on as far as ‘Twelve the twelve apostles.’ Here both the Jewish and Christian forms are or have been serious, so it is possible that the Jew may have imitated the Christian, but the nobler form of the Hebrew poem here again gives it a claim to be thought the earlier.[92]

The old proverbs brought down by long inheritance into our modern talk are far from being insignificant in themselves, for their wit is often as fresh, and their wisdom as pertinent, as it ever was. Beyond these practical qualities, proverbs are instructive for the place in ethnography which they occupy. Their range in civilization is limited; they seem scarcely to belong to the lowest tribes, but appear first in a settled form among some of the higher savages. The Fijians, who were found a few years since living in what archæologists might call the upper Stone Age, have some well-marked proverbs. They laugh at want of forethought by the saying that ‘The Nakondo people cut the mast first’ (i.e. before they had built the canoe); and when a poor man looks wistfully at what he cannot buy, they say, ‘Becalmed, and looking at the fish.’[93] Among the list of the New Zealanders’ ‘whakatauki,’ or proverbs, one describes a lazy glutton: ‘Deep throat, but shallow sinews;’ another says that the lazy often profit by the work of the industrious: ‘The large chips made by Hardwood fall to the share of Sit-still;’ a third moralizes that ‘A crooked part of a stem of toetoe can be seen; but a crooked part in the heart cannot be seen.’[94] Among the Basutos of South Africa, ‘Water never gets tired of running’ is a reproach to chatterers; ‘Lions growl while they are eating,’ means that there are people who never will enjoy anything; ‘The sowing-month is the headache-month,’ describes those lazy folks who make excuses when work is to be done; ‘The thief eats thunderbolts,’ means that he will

bring down vengeance from heaven on himself.[95] West African nations are especially strong in proverbial philosophy; so much so that Captain Burton amused himself through the rainy season at Fernando Po in compiling a volume of native proverbs,[96] among which there are hundreds at about as high an intellectual level as those of Europe. ‘He fled from the sword and hid in the scabbard,’ is as good as our ‘Out of the frying-pan into the fire;’ and ‘He who has only his eyebrow for a cross-bow can never kill an animal,’ is more picturesque, if less terse than our ‘Hard words break no bones.’ The old Buddhist aphorism, that ‘He who indulges in enmity is like one who throws ashes to windward, which come back to the same place and cover him all over,’ is put with less prose and as much point in the negro saying, ‘Ashes fly back in the face of him who throws them.’ When someone tries to settle an affair in the absence of the people concerned, the negroes will object that ‘You can’t shave a man’s head when he is not there,’ while, to explain that the master is not to be judged by the folly of his servant, they say, ‘The rider is not a fool because the horse is.’ Ingratitude is alluded to in ‘The sword knows not the head of the smith’ (who made it), and yet more forcibly elsewhere, ‘When the calabash had saved them (in the famine), they said, let us cut it for a drinking-cup.’

The popular contempt for poor men’s wisdom is put very neatly in the maxim, ‘When a poor man makes a proverb it does not spread,’ while the very mention of making a proverb as something likely to happen, shows a land where proverb-making is still a living art. Transplanted to the West Indies, the African keeps up this art, as witness these sayings: ‘Behind dog it is dog, but before dog it is Mr. Dog;’ and ‘Toute cabinette tini maringouin’—‘Every cabin has its mosquito.’

The proverb has not changed its character in the course of history; but has retained from first to last a precisely definite type. The proverbial sayings recorded among the higher nations of the world are to be reckoned by tens of thousands, and have a large and well-known literature of their own. But though the range of existence of proverbs extends into the highest levels of civilization, this is scarcely true of their development. At the level of European culture in the middle ages, they have indeed a vast importance in popular education, but their period of actual growth seems already at an end. Cervantes raised the proverb-monger’s craft to a pitch it never surpassed; but it must not be forgotten that the incomparable Sancho’s wares were mostly heirlooms; for proverbs were even then sinking to remnants of an earlier condition of society. As such, they survive among ourselves, who go on using much the same relics of ancestral wisdom as came out of the squire’s inexhaustible budget, old saws not to be lightly altered or made anew in our changed modern times. We can collect and use the old proverbs, but making new ones has become a feeble, spiritless imitation, like our attempts to invent new myths or new nursery rhymes.

Riddles start near proverbs in the history of civilization, and they travel on long together, though at last towards different ends. By riddles are here meant the old-fashioned problems with a real answer intended to be discovered, such as the typical enigma of the Sphinx, but not the modern verbal conundrums set in the traditional form of question and answer, as a way of bringing in a jest à propos of nothing. The original kind, which may be defined as ‘sense-riddles,’ are found at home among the upper savages, and range on into the lower and middle civilization; and while their growth stops at this level, many ancient specimens have lasted on in the modern nursery and by the cottage fireside. There is a plain reason why riddles should belong only to the higher grades of savagery; their making requires a fair power of ideal comparison, and knowledge must have made considerable advance before this process could become so familiar as to fall from earnest into sport. At last, in a far higher state of culture, riddles begin to be looked on as trifling, their growth ceases, and they only survive in remnants for children’s play. Some examples chosen among various races, from savagery upwards, will show more exactly the place in mental history which the riddle occupies.

The following are specimens from a collection of Zulu riddles, recorded with quaintly simple native comments on the philosophy of the matter:—Q. ‘Guess ye some men who are many and form a row; they dance the wedding-dance, adorned in white hip-dresses?’ A. ‘The teeth; we call them men who form a row, for the teeth stand like men who are made ready for a wedding-dance, that they may dance well. When we say, they are “adorned with white hip-dresses,” we put that in, that people may not at once think of teeth, but be drawn away from them by thinking, “It is men who put on white hip-dresses,” and continually have their thoughts fixed on men,’ &c. Q. ‘Guess ye a man who does not lie down at night: he lies down in the morning until the sun sets; he then awakes, and works all night; he does not work by day; he is not seen when he works?’ A. ‘The closing-poles of the cattle-pen.’ Q. ‘Guess ye a man whom men do not like to laugh, for it is known that his laughter is a very great evil, and is followed by lamentation, and an end of rejoicing. Men weep, and trees, and grass; and everything is heard weeping in the tribe where he laughs; and they say the man has laughed who does not usually laugh?’ A. ‘Fire. It is called a man that what is said may not be at once evident, it being concealed by the word “man.” Men say many things, searching out the meaning in rivalry, and missing the mark. A riddle is good when it is not discernible at once,’ &c.[97] Among the Basutos, riddles are a recognized part of education, and are set like exercises to a whole company of puzzled children.

Q. ‘Do you know what throws itself from the mountain top without being broken?’ A. ‘A waterfall.’ Q. ‘There is a thing that travels fast without legs or wings, and no cliff, nor river, nor wall can stop it?’ A. ‘The voice.’ Q. ‘Name the ten trees with ten flat stones on the top of them.’ A. ‘The fingers.’ Q. ‘Who is the little immovable dumb boy who is dressed up warm in the day and left naked at night?’ A. ‘The bed-clothes’ peg.’[98] From East Africa, this Swahili riddle is an example: Q. ‘My hen has laid among thorns?’ A. ‘A pineapple.’[99] From West Africa, this Yoruba one: ‘A long slender trading woman who never gets to market?’ A. ‘A canoe (it stops at the landing-place).’[100] In Polynesia, the Samoan Islanders are given to riddles. Q. ‘There are four brothers, who are always bearing about their father?’ A. ‘The Samoan pillow,’ which is a yard of three-inch bamboo resting on four legs. Q. ‘A white-headed man stands above the fence, and reaches to the heavens?’ A. ‘The smoke of the oven.’ Q. ‘A man who stands between two ravenous fish?’ A. ‘The tongue.’[101] (There is a Zulu riddle like this, which compares the tongue to a man living in the midst of enemies fighting.) The following are old Mexican enigmas: Q. ‘What are the ten stones one has at his sides?’ A. ‘The finger-nails.’ Q. ‘What is it we get into by three parts and out of by one?’ A. ‘A shirt.’ Q. ‘What goes through a valley and drags its entrails after it?’ A. ‘A needle.’[102]

These riddles found among the lower races do not differ at all in nature from those that have come down, sometimes modernized in the setting, into the nursery lore of Europe. Thus Spanish children still ask, ‘What is the dish of nuts that is gathered by day, and scattered by night?’ (the stars.) Our English riddle of the pair of tongs: ‘Long legs, crooked thighs, little head, and no eyes,’ is primitive enough to have been made by a South Sea Islander. The following is on the same theme as one of the Zulu riddles: ‘A flock of white sheep, On a red hill; Here they go, there they go; Now they stand still?’ Another is the very analogue of one of the Aztec specimens: ‘Old Mother Twitchett had but one eye, And a long tail which she let fly; And every time she went over a gap, She left a bit of her tail in a trap?’

So thoroughly does riddle-making belong to the mythologic stage of thought, that any poet’s simile, if not too far-fetched, needs only inversion to be made at once into an enigma. The Hindu calls the Sun Saptâsva, i.e. ‘seven-horsed,’ while, with the same thought, the old German riddle asks, ‘What is the chariot drawn by the seven white and seven black horses?’ (the year, drawn by the seven days and nights of the week.[103]) Such, too, is the Greek riddle of the two sisters, Day and Night, who gave birth each to the other to be born of her again: