Proverb Lore Part 18

"Many kinsfolke and few friends, some folke say: But I find many kinsfolke and friend not one.

Folke say it hath been sayd many yeares since gone Prove thy friend ere thou hast neede: but in deede A friend is never knone till a man have neede.

Before I had neede my most present foes Seemed my best friends, but thus the world goes."

The experience, we suppose, of all men, if ever this testing time really comes, is a twofold surprise--how entirely some they had trusted failed them, and how splendidly others came out of whom it was not expected.

Seneca declares that "Our happiness depends upon the choice of our company," and we may, we suppose, take it that we all of us get about such friends as we deserve. "Our friends are the mirror in which we see ourselves." Other excellent adages pertaining to friends.h.i.+p are these: "Be slow in choosing a friend, slower yet in changing";[219:B]

"Friends.h.i.+p multiplies joy and divides grief"; "Wherever you see your friend trust yourself"; "The way to have a friend is to be one"; "Hearts may agree though heads differ"; "Wise and good men are friends, others are but companions"; "Search thy friend for his virtues, thyself for thy faults"; "Love sought is good, but given unsought is better"; "G.o.d divideth man into men, that so they may help each other"; "A man is valued as he makes himself valuable." The Spaniards declare that "Eggs of an hour, bread of a day, wine of a year, a friend of thirty years, are best."

"The friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, Grapple them to thy soul with hooks of steel";

and in another pa.s.sage Shakespeare writes of kindly

"Words of so sweet breath compounded, As made the things more rich";

and it certainly appears to us that if we had reached the lowest depth of dest.i.tution we would yet rather have the gracious inability to help that some would express to us than the brusque brutality of some donors.

When one would seek fine thoughts admirably presented one naturally turns in the first place to Shakespeare, but Chaucer makes an excellent second. How charming this line from "The Clerke's Tale," "He is gentil that doeth gentil dedis," and this pa.s.sage again from the "Romant of the Rose":

"Loue of frends.h.i.+ppe also there is, Which maketh no man dou amis, Of wil knitte betwixt two, That wol not breke for wele ne wo."

Tusser, in his quaint directness, says in his "Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandrie":

"The quiet friend all one in worde and dede Great comfort is, like ready golde at nede With bralling fooles that wrall for euerie wrong Firme friends.h.i.+p neuer can continue long.

Oft times a friend is got with easie cost, Which vsed euill is oft as quickly lost.

Hast thou a friend, as heart may wish at will?

Then vse him so to haue his friends.h.i.+p still.

Wouldst haue a friend, wouldst knowe what friend is best?

Haue G.o.d thy friend, who pa.s.seth all the rest."

The following sayings of warning and experience have their valuable lessons:--"Trust not new friend nor old enemy"; "Though the sore may be healed yet the scar may remain";[221:A] "Small wounds, if many, may be mortal"; "Vexation is rather taken than given"; "At the gate which suspicion enters friends.h.i.+p departs"; "False friends are worse than open enemies"; "He that ceased to be a friend never was a good one"; "An unbidden guest knoweth not where to sit"; "All are not friends that speak us fair"; "Every one's friend, no one's"; "A friend that you buy will be bought from you."

An old saw bluntly says, "To make an enemy lend money, and ask for it again"; and it is certainly an excellent rule to have as little to do with money matters as one can help with one's friends and relatives. To appeal for help and to be refused, to lend and to see very little chance of repayal, to receive and to be under a heavy sense of obligation, are all destructive of frank and hearty friends.h.i.+p. Chaucer declares that

"His herte is hard that woll not weke When men of meeknesse him beseeke."

An excellent man, most kindly in all his dealings, told us that he never lent money. The borrower is ordinarily in such straits that he has little chance of ever repaying. If he never intends to pay he is a knave,[222:A] and if he has more honourable thought he is crushed by the burden of the debt. Anyone who came to our excellent friend with a true and touching story was sympathetically received, and his request for the temporary loan of twenty pounds promptly declined! As an alternative he was offered a somewhat smaller sum, the half or, mayhap, the quarter of this, as a free gift, which he never failed to accept joyfully. In one of the Harleian ma.n.u.scripts, dating from the reign of Edward IV., the writer's experience is a very common one, and his decision sound:

"I wold lend but I ne dare, I have lent and I will beware When I lant I had a frynd, When I hym asked he was unkynd.

Thus of my frynd I made my foo, Therefore darre I lend no moo."

The writer was evidently a kindly man, desiring to do the best he could, and he touchingly appeals to us not to judge him harshly:

"I pray yo of your gentilnesse Report for no unkyndnesse."

Some one has very wisely remarked that many of the disappointments of life arise from our mistaking acquaintances for friends, and then when some little testing incident arises they break under the strain.

"Prosperity makes friends, adversity proves them." One sarcastic adage hath it that "Friends are like fiddle-strings: they must not be screwed too tight"; but the Scotch say, and justly, that "He that's no my friend at a pinch is no my friend ava." Some centuries ago, human nature being then evidently very similar to what it is to-day, a wise man wrote: "If thou wouldst get a friend, prove him first, and be not hasty to credit him. For some man is a friend for his own occasion, and will not abide in the day of thy trouble; and there is a friend who, being turned to enmity and strife, will discover thy reproach; again, some friend is a companion at the table, and will not continue in the day of thy affliction."

In Chaucer's "Romaunt of the Rose," we find the poet using the expression, "Farewel fieldfare," a valediction on summer friends that, like the wild and migratory fieldfare, take to themselves wings and depart. An old rhyming adage declares that "In time of prosperity friends will be plenty, in time of adversity not one in twenty"; or, to quote Tusser:

"Where welthines floweth, no friends.h.i.+p can lack, Whom pouertie pincheth, hath friends.h.i.+p as slack";

while Goldsmith, it will be remembered, bitterly sums all up in,

"What is friends.h.i.+p but a name, A charm that lulls to sleep, A shade that follows wealth and fame, But leaves the wretch to weep."

Another adage declares that "Compliments cost nothing but may be dearly bought," while another candidly warns, "I cannot be your friend and your flatterer too." The flatterer has ordinarily "an axe to grind,"

"His fetch is to flatter, to get what he can, His purpose once gotten, a fig for thee then."

In the "Rambler" No. 155, Johnson sapiently remarks, "Flattery, if its operations be nearly examined, will be found to owe its acceptance, not to our ignorance, but to our knowledge of our failures, and to delight us rather as it consoles our wants than displays our possessions."

Swift a.s.serts that

"'Tis an old maxim in the schools, That flattery's the food of fools, Yet now and then your men of wit Will condescend to take a bit."

Bacon tells us, however, that "There is no such flatterer as is a man's selfe, and there is no such remedie against flatterie of a man's selfe as the libertie of a friend." It has been said that "A friend's frown is worth more than a fool's smile," but a cynical writer has affirmed, with some little truth, that "Most of our misfortunes are more supportable than the comments of our friends upon them," and it was long since discovered that "Whoso casteth a stone at the birds frayeth them away, and he that upbraideth his friend breaketh friends.h.i.+p." The duty of remonstrance is one of the most difficult that the friend can undertake, and "Save, save, O save me from the candid friend!" is the cry of Canning in "The New Morality," a cry that many have been inclined to echo.

Our ancestors, with blunt directness, a.s.serted that "Fish and guests stink in three days," while the Arabs have the picturesque proverb, "A thousand raps, but no welcome"--a pertinacious hammering at the closed door but no response from within; a fruitless endeavour to thrust an intimacy on those who do not desire it.

We have seen that the friend lost is never really recovered and may become very readily an implacable enemy. Shakespeare warns us to "Trust not him that hath once broken faith," and we most of us know by experience how true are the lines of Dryden:

"Forgiveness to the injured doth belong, But they ne'er pardon who have done the wrong."

The ancient Romans had a proverb that the French have adopted in the words, "Jeter de l'huile sur le feu." We have no identical English proverb, but its meaning is clearly a reference to those evil spirits who foment a quarrel, add fuel to the fire, irritate rather than soothe, and who have no part or lot in the blessing promised to the peace-makers.

The following adages are here worthy of our consideration:--"He that does you an ill turn will not forgive you"; "Pardon others often, thyself seldom"; "We are bound to forgive an enemy, but we are not bound to trust him";[225:A] "Better ride alone than have a bad man's company"; "Haste is the beginning of wrath, and its end repentance"; "It is wiser to prevent a quarrel than to revenge it"; "If thou wouldst be borne with, bear with others." To these we may add the oft-used saw, "The absent are always wrong," without at all endorsing its truth. The absent are often quite as right as the other people, and are merely unable through absence to protect themselves from defamation.

Poverty and riches naturally find a place in proverb-lore. "Poverty,"

says an old author, "is no crime, and it is no credit"; but the truth is, it is impossible to generalise quite so dogmatically as this--for poverty may be a crime when a lazy ne'er-do-well allows his wife and children to come to rags, and, on the other hand, it may be a credit when a man has done his best and foresworn all the dirty little tricks that have enriched his trade rivals. It is sometimes too readily and sentimentally a.s.sumed that poverty is itself a benediction; hence such sayings as "The poor are G.o.d's receivers and the angels are His auditors," but the real state of the case is excellently well put in the proverb, "There are G.o.d's poor, and the devil's poor."

"Honour and shame from no condition rise; Act well your part, there all the honour lies."

Everywhere in life, some one has admirably said, the true question is not what we gain, but rather what we do. "Poverty need not be shame, but being ashamed of it is," poverty of spirit being a more distressing state of things than emptiness of pocket.

Let us turn to the wisdom of those who have gone before us, and see what teaching for our edification we may find. "Nothing is to be got without pains except poverty"; "Dependence is a poor trade to follow"; "Opportunities do not generally wait"; "Enough is a plenty, too much is pride"; "The groat is ill-saved which shames its master"; "Providence provides for the provident"; "To bear is to conquer"; "Poverty craves much, but avarice more"; "Gain ill-gotten is loss"; "Poverty is the mother of all arts"; "Content is the true philosopher's stone"; "If honesty cannot, knavery must not"; "Poor and content is rich"; "Flatterers haunt not cottages"; "Thrive honestly, or remain poor."

In a ma.n.u.script of the fifteenth century we found the following excellent precepts amongst many others, the whole being much too long to quote:

"If thou be visite with pouerte Take it not to hevyle For he that sende the adversite May turn the agen to wele.

Purpose thy selfe in charite Demene thy worschip in honeste Let not nygardschip haue the maystre For schame that may befalle Faver not meche thy ryeches, Set not lytel by worthynes Kepe thyn hert from dowblenes For any manner thyng."

Another budget of excellent precepts will commend itself to the thoughtful reader in the following:--"He who buys what he does not want will want what he cannot buy"; "Winter finds out what summer has laid up"; "Sleeping master makes servant lazy"; "Thrush paid for is better than turkey owed for"; "Better small fish than empty dish"; "He that borrows binds himself with his neighbour's rope"; "A man must plough with such oxen as he hath"; "He goes like a top, no longer than he is whipped"; "Better half a loaf than no bread"; "Better do it than wish it done"; "He that goes borrowing goes sorrowing"; "Better say here it is, than here it was"; "If you light the fire at both ends the middle will take care of itself."

Some three hundred years ago an old writer thought out what he called "the ladder to thrift," and these were some of his hints:

"To take thy calling thankfully And shun the path to beggary.

To grudge in youth no drudgery, To come by knowledge perfectly.

To plow profit earnestlie, But meddle not with pilferie.