CHAPTER II.
Origin of this Class of Literature, and its Dependence on the Conditions of Society—Jests before Jest-books—Influence of the Arts of Writing and Printing Long Subsequent to the Introduction of Caricature and Humour.
THE earliest form or phase of the Jest was the product of an illiterate age. A knowledge of the art of writing was a discovery long subsequent to the rise of a taste for the expression of the laughable, for the sake either of amusement or of ridicule. The primitive authors of jokes were men who employed, not the pen, but the chisel and the brush; and the most venerable existing specimens of this branch of human ingenuity belong to art, not to literature; and to Egypt, the cradle and nursery of art.
In his admirable History of Caricature and Grotesque, 1865, Wright has accumulated such an immense body of information on this most interesting subject of inquiry that, so far as it goes, it will supersede the necessity for traversing the ground again. He has traced with singular industry and scholarship the growth and development of the jocular sentiment in all its varied points of view, from its first infancy among the Egyptians, through the Greeks and Romans, to modern times and our own country.
For while during centuries the feeling for the grotesque or absurd, together with the almost inborn propensity for the exposure of foibles and vices in an enemy, a rival, or an obnoxious public character, had its outlets only through the agency of art, and the sculptor or draughtsman was the sole resource of those who loved caricature and farce, the introduction of caligraphy by no means diminished the call for the graphic delineators of comedy and satire. The English artists of the Georgian epoch were equally prolific and unsparing; and even now, when all the civilised communities of the world have their printing presses without number at command, the pencil remains a favourite vehicle for the exhibition of humorous or unpopular traits in distinguished persons of the day, and among many connoisseurs and students a volume of Gillray or Rowlandson is a more welcome object of attention or notice than a printed record.
The engraving has in all ages enjoyed over its literary counterpart or equivalent the great advantage, that it immediately attracts the eye, and enables one to embrace every point of view and the whole story at a glance; whereas in the other case the same effect is scarcely produced on the mind by many pages of letterpress or the most elaborate inscription on metal or stone. The spectator is in fact a far older student than the reader or the listener to a reading, or than the audience of the minstrel of yore. The organs of sight have been the direct media through which innumerable generations of mankind have received all the knowledge and culture which they ever possessed; and we perceive at the present moment how far the cheap print and the gay shop-window go to supply such Englishmen of the nineteenth century as have small leisure and perhaps equally small inclination for books with notions of current sentiments and transactions.
The manuscript or printed page has not a co-ordinate power with the mural sketch or other pictorial representation, with or without its adjunct of hyperbole and broad colouring, in an instantaneous appeal to the passions, or to the sense of the ridiculous, or, again, to the public instinct of wrong. The press bears its part; but whatever its development in the future may prove to be, it will never completely obliterate the demand and admiration for the labours of the graphic illustrator, whose origin is positively lost in antiquity, and whose pursuit was, doubtless, among the subjects of the Rameses dynasty themselves-an accomplishment derived from Oriental (possibly Turanian) instructors; for the most archaic published examples manifest a tolerable intimacy with design and the combination of effect, as well as a capability of awakening hilarious sensations by the burlesque perversion of serious matters.
The joke-wright and the anecdote-monger may be treated as two exceptionally fortunate professional persons, who enter the field of their labours and researches with a light heart and an empty budget. Their accumulation of stock is immense. The capital of all their ancestors becomes their fee simple ex officio. There need be among them no struggling beginners, no modest apprenticeship; and all that is expected at their hands is a certain proficiency in conveyancing, and the addition, before they and the world bid each other farewell, of a donation or two to the bank for the benefit of the public and of ensuing freeholders for evermore.
The introduction of typography, in jocular as in all other branches of literature, was instrumental in accomplishing a transition from oral delivery to the printed collection. In lieu of the minstrel and the bordeur, such sections of the public as could read might have in their closets and window-recesses garlands of facetiæ in prose or verse. The press slowly superseded the reciter and the professional buffoon with his budget of witticisms and tales. But the process was of course a very gradual one, so long as the diffusion of culture remained imperfect and partial; and for a great length of time the old-world system of reading from the MS., or repeating extempore to an audience, and of the passage of jests and tales from mouth to mouth, continued more or less to flourish, just as it does in the form of a revival, among certain classes of the modern English community, who seem to do from choice what their forerunners did from need.
A vein of exaggeration, which is apt to characterise anecdotes as they are repeated from mouth to mouth, or transferred from one book to another, resolves itself into mere innocuous caricature or gasconade, where the plot is of a comic turn; but where a certain indelicacy or double sense accompanies the original version, the new-renderer has it in his power to pander to the prevailing taste by making a gross story immeasurably more exceptionable, either by simple intensification or by connecting incidents and expressions with persons to whom they never in point of fact belonged.
Now, this I take to be very much the case with the Jests of Scogin, a compilation of the Tudor era by a doctor, as it is said, who was guilty of writing a fair amount of matter in a similar vein, but who, if these Jests were truly of his composition, shewed by his Book of the Introduction of Knowledge, and one or two other works, that he was capable of something higher. I refer to Doctor Andrew Borde, a learned and ingenious man, as we may perceive, but far from being fastidious in his writings, or (which is worse) in ascribing to the most exalted characters of an antecedent epoch a tolerance of the most outrageous and vulgar buffoonery.
It is exceedingly likely that the court of the susceptible and profligate Edward IV., to which Scogin is supposed to have resorted, was a scene of coarse simplicity and no model of decorum; and so late down as the reign of George II. the great ladies permitted themselves a licence in speech, which prevented the editor of Maloniana from printing the whole of the MS. But so far as the latter circumstance goes, these were mostly passages inter se (so to speak); and it remains incredible, that some of the adventures with which Scogin is reported to have met within the very precincts of the palace, can have actually happened under the eyes of the queen and her attendants. Dr. Borde, I apprehend in fact, has committed the impropriety of transferring to another age the manners of his own, which was so far venial enough, and consonant with dramatic usage; but he has most unwarrantably taken some of his characters from a sphere of life in which the enactment of such low pranks would hardly have been suffered. To cast aspersions on the representatives of an extinct dynasty, however, was a tolerably safe game. The Jests of Scogin had no political significance; and the occasional reflections on the clergy were not calculated to give serious offence in influential quarters, or to Henry VIII. himself, just at the juncture when the Reformation was imminent. Not in the pages of Borde alone, but throughout the literature of the later part of Henry’s reign, sly strokes at the doomed papal hierarchy were eyed with evident indulgence and favour. Borde knew his ground and his customers: had his satire been levelled at the Government in an infinitely milder and more covert way, the stake or the block would have been his portion; had his book been published twenty years sooner, his strictures on the Church would scarcely have been prudent; but he confined his pen, where he rose above a humble social level, to names which were little more than historical, and to an institution whose days were numbered.
