CHAPTER I.
Introductory Remarks on the Real Use and Importance of Jests and Anecdotes.
ONE of the Anglo-Saxon kings gave the manor of Walworth to his jester Nithardus; and we have all heard how the magnificent benefaction of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, subsequently repaired by Sir Richard Whittington, was founded by Rahere, the joculator and favourite of a later monarch of this isle. In former days, to be a fool within certain lines, or a buffoon of a special type, was a walk of life not to be despised either by a man or by his friends. The jokes which he made were negotiable securities of first-class value. Not a five-pound note, but broad lands and the smiles of a prince, awaited the fortunate utterer of the bon-mot and the fountain of merriment and good humour.
Even in the time of Charles II. the prosperity of the vocation had sensibly declined. Charles liked people who contributed to his amusement; but shabby constitutional restraints precluded him from endowing a pleasant fellow, who could play a conjurer’s tricks with the risible muscles and the purse-strings of his sovereign, with a large and valuable estate.
Nay, before the Stuart era, Henry VII., whose parsimony has been exaggerated, and who gave freely to many charitable objects, had to content himself with presenting the makers of jeux d’esprit with a few shillings—the shillings, of course, of that epoch.
The greater rarity of learning, and its status as a special mystery or cult, surrounded these ancient scholars with an atmosphere which we have not only a difficulty, but a sort of delicacy, perhaps, in thoroughly penetrating, so as to enable us to arrive at an absolutely accurate valuation of their gifts. Among their contemporaries and even immediate descendants they were regarded as something more than human; and this sentiment, while it, as a rule, limited itself to worshipful awe, not unfrequently degenerated into a superstitious dread fatal to the possessors of incomprehensible faculties.
The first impression of nine persons out of ten, on taking up a Book of Jests or Anecdotes, is that it is merely a volume prepared for their momentary diversion—to be bought at a stall for a trifle, cursorily studied, and thrown on one side.
But the moment that one approaches this description of literature in a critical spirit, it begins to wear a changed, and yet perhaps a more interesting, aspect. The application of a microscope of very inconsiderable power is found by a philosophical student of the subject to be adequate to the detection of much that is new and curious, lying either on the surface or not very far from it.
Anecdote-literature, in which I always desire to understand as included the Jest, seems to me fairly resonant with the life of other days—in larger measure than has been usually supposed, simply because on a superficial view we are very apt to content ourselves with the foregone conclusion, that a story, whether humorous or otherwise, is nothing but a story.
The notes to the series of Old English Jest-Books, edited by myself in 1864, and the frequent citations of such works in our philological literature, bring us to the consideration of another point of view, in which it is well, perhaps, that we should try to tolerate these facetious miscellanies, and regard with indulgence their sins alike against propriety and against wit. A dull story is frequently redeemed, it may be observed in studying such publications, by the light which it sheds on an otherwise unintelligible phrase or allusion—or, indeed, by the service which it renders in having rescued one from oblivion.
The accidental formation, more than twenty years ago, of this acquaintance with our own jocular literature, and the periodical renewal of it in an editorial capacity, have naturally led me to pay rather close attention to the Jest in its numerous varieties and stages of growth, and to cast from time to time a scrutinising eye over the contents of the extensive series of works in this class which has come under my notice.
The result, almost unconsciously to myself, has been that the theory on the subject, with which I started in life, has made room for one of a different complexion and drift; and I propose to offer in the following pages some suggestions for reducing to a better and more intelligent order certain of the facetiæ and jeux d’esprit, by way of sample, in the Collections, and to point out, to the best of my ability, how they have been subjected to disguising or transforming processes by political, literary, or commercial inducements.
Although the independent reading of the more thoughtful and studious had long brought them, of course, to a more enlightened inference, I almost apprehend that, until Mr. Wright’s volume on Grotesque and Caricature appeared, the loose general notion was that there was not much worth regarding in the present direction beyond the imperishable pages of Joe Miller; and I certainly think that a very narrow minority conceived in how wide and many-sided a meaning the Jest is susceptible of being understood.
On the contrary, the Jest offers itself to our consideration in a surprising diversity of types and garbs; and the project which I have now before me is, in fact, an attempt to treat for the first time, in a catholic and critical spirit, a theme which has been usually viewed as frivolous and undignified.
It is a matter of notoriety that some of our best antiquaries have loved to trace to their sources the comic and romantic tales which we have borrowed from the Continent, and to note the variations introduced for the sake of novelty, local requirement, or dramatic exigency, by a succession of writers in the same or in different languages.
A vast amount of labour and scholarship has been expended in illustrating by this light the works of Shakespear and our other early playwrights, as well as in recovering the clues to the material on which Chaucer and Spenser built their undying productions. Moreover, both in England and abroad, a great deal has been achieved in elucidating the literary history of our ancient jest-books, and improving our intimacy with the true origin of the stories and their subsequent adventures, in more or less numerous disguises, from the Hundred Merry Tales to Joe Miller or what may perhaps be termed the Milleriana.
But when one has assiduously sifted all this learning, one finds that it very naturally limits itself, as a rule, to the very early books, so far as facetiæ are concerned,—to that branch of the subject which belongs to Archæology; and, in short, I do not know that I have been to any but the most trifling extent forestalled in the design which I here try to carry out, of arranging and analysing the humorous traditions which we have received from our forefathers touching the celebrities of all ages and countries, yet more exclusively those who flourished within a measurable distance of time, or those whom no distance of time is capable of affecting; or, once more, such relations as owe, not to the names, but to the matter, their continuity of life.
The origin of all jocular or semi-serious literature and art is referable, of course, to a stage of human development when the deviation from a certain standard of feeling or opinion could be appreciable; and it does not require the long establishment of a settled society, judging from the habits of savage and illiterate communities, before a sense of the ludicrous and grotesque begins to form part of the popular sentiment.
The ludicrous and grotesque are, to a certain extent, relative or conditional terms. The canons of propriety and right in primitive life are so widely different from those which prevail in a state of civilisation, that what we should regard as fit material for a jest-book is elsewhere treated as a piece of serious history. A departure from the line of expression or deportment sanctioned by common usage has proved in all countries and all ages a fertile source of satire and caricature; but then that line, like the needle, is subject to variation, and the fixture of character is not, as is the case with straight and curved lines in mathematics, a matter of doctrine and fact, but one mainly of local circumstance and costume.
The joke has proved in all ages a factor of manifold power and use. It has ridiculed and exposed corruptions in the body politic and in the social machinery. It has laughed at some things because they were new, and at others because they were old. It has preserved records of persons and ideas, and traits of ancient bygone manners, which must otherwise have perished; and it frequently stands before us with its esoteric moral hidden not much below its ostensible and immediate purport.
Jests present humanity to our observation in its holiday attire, its Sunday best, or at least under some exceptional and temporary aspect. Quin and Foote, Mathews and Sydney Smith, Frank Talfourd and Henry Byron, had their grave, and very grave, intervals. Hood himself said that he had to be a lively Hood for a livelihood; and it was mournfully true, as the records of his every-day life, chastened by illness and sorrow, only too well establish. The pleasant or comic episodes may be an occasional incidence of the least happy existence or the least fortunate career; and the anecdotes, humorous or otherwise, of celebrated men and women are receivable with allowance as traits of character and conduct, for which some special circumstance, or a union of circumstances, is answerable. In the general tenor of the most favoured experiences the serious element is apt to preponderate; the heyday of our years is like short, intermittent sunshine; and we ought to come to the study of ANA, if we wish to judge them correctly, with a recollection of what they are, and also what they are not. They who have enjoyed the privilege of a personal acquaintance with the gayest of our modern humourists—and there are many such (including the present writer) among us still—are best qualified to pronounce an opinion upon this point; and they know how much of darkness and anguish often there is behind the scenes or off the boards. The jokes by or about any given individual do not, after all, amount to a great deal, when they are spread over thirty or forty years: all the genuine sayings of Theodore Hook or Douglas Jerrold would not fill more than a few octavo pages; and these things are to be taken, not as indices to the habitual unbroken mood of the man, but rather as samples of felicity of phrase or thought to be gotten, like mineral ore, under auspicious conditions from a wealthy soil.
We are too grossly subservient to habit and use. We naturally accustom ourselves, unless we reflect, to figure the clown with his tongue perpetually in his cheek and the wit discharging his shafts without cessation or repose—just as, on the contrary, no one would be prepared to believe, without the strongest proof, that a tailor had made a pun, or that a railway porter had written a Greek epigram.
If we try to realise in our imagination Grimaldi stretched on a bed of sickness, a jovial companion in a gouty paroxysm, or an excellent friend, the author of utterances which have delighted and convulsed the stage, in the extremity of mental depression or physical suffering, we shall be better able to see that the Anecdote generically, and the Jest in particular, are fortuitous emanations and not parcel of our daily being.
Facetious narrations are too seldom subjected to the test of circumstantial evidence. We are not apt to ask ourselves the question, who delivered the joke, or ushered it into print? There are cases, of course, where the author of a sally or rejoinder himself repeats it to a third party, possibly in its original shape, possibly with embellishments; but there must be, nay, there are numberless instances in which a funny thing is given to a person, not because he said it, but because he might or would have done so. It is an assignment by inference and likelihood.
