CHAPTER IV.
Justification for the Present Undertaking—Literary Interest of the Subject—The Various Classes of Jest—The Serious Anecdote the Original Type and the Jest an Evolution—Greek and Roman Examples—The “Deipnosophistæ” of Athenæus.
A JUSTIFICATION for the present inquiry may be found, then, in the historical, biographical and literary interest with which it abounds, and in the multiplicity of aspects under which the topic is capable of being contemplated.
The Jest resembles a tree of many branches. It is couched in a wide variety of shapes—namely, the Riddle, the Epigram, the Apologue or Tale, the Repartee, the Quibble, and the Pun.
Of these, the Apologue and the Riddle are the most ancient—the latter being entitled to priority, if we take into account its positive origin in the Hebrew Scriptures themselves, although the jocular or comic development is so much more recent. The same criticism applies to the Apologue which was transplanted from Oriental soil, where it has ever been a favourite method of conveying instruction and amusement, into the oldest Western vehicles for the same twofold purpose, such as the Gesta Romanorum, the Fables of Æsop, and Reynard the Fox. These productions, with many others, were designed as a method of inculcating moral precepts and political lessons under a fictitious or romantic garb. The facetious adaptation was a later growth, and first manifests itself in the French and Latin fabliaux in prose or verse edited for us by Méon and Wright.
Next in the scale of antiquity to the Apologue and Riddle we may be warranted in ranking the Epigram; and this, too, like the two others to which I have been referring, was in its inception and early employment satirical rather than burlesque for the most part. Humour did not enter at first into its composition or design. Any one who looks through the Greek Anthology may see that the productions in that language are serious narratives treated in a terse and condensed style.
The Quibble and Repartee were tolerably popular features and characteristics in the jest-books of the seventeenth century, when the formation of literary clubs, and the increased correspondence between men of parts and wit, naturally led to the growth of that large body of sayings which the printed and MSS. collections have handed down to us. The age immediately succeeding that of Shakespear saw the uprise of the quip and crank, and the retort courteous, “conceits, clinches, flashes, and whimzies,” and all the rest of the merry, motley company. Such utterances they were as undoubtedly appealed with success to their auditors and readers; but so thorough is the change which has stolen over our taste and feeling in these matters, that, in turning over the leaves of a volume of facetiæ, which was once read with avidity and delight, the impression now produced is a mingled one of surprise and disappointment.
The humorous literature, like the coinage, of a particular era, seems as if it were part of it; and it is in a vast majority of instances incapable of assimilation or transfer, as I shall endeavour to prove by a few casual selections from miscellanies which were in prime vogue and favour when James I. was on the throne, and those three renowned hostelries, the Mermaid, the Mitre, and the Devil, were flourishing centres of all that was cultivated and spiritual.
The serious Anecdote naturally took precedence of its jocular evolution or offspring; and indeed the latter, as is obvious enough, could hardly exist as a congener, till artificial and more or less complicated forms of social life had been developed. Even the entries in such books as Plutarch, where he narrates some incident in the biography of one of his heroes of a nature less grave than usual, and of a sufficiently playful or salient nature to have tempted the editors of the ancient collections of facetiæ to include them in their pages, cannot quite properly be said to be exceptions to the rule, that the Jest, as we understand it, was unknown to the ancients, although all civilised nations have in their turn possessed a keen sense of the laughable, and have devised methods of holding up to derision those who deviated from the prevailing standard of decorum, morality, or etiquette; or, again, who exposed themselves to personalities from special causes.
The selections from classic sources in the Merry Tales and Quick Answers, printed in the time of Henry VIII., have on this account a tendency to weight the book, and render it less attractive and readable at the present time than its famous contemporary, entitled A Hundred Merry Tales, which was prepared on a more judicious principle, and excluded all but tales of more or less current interest.
The favourite Greek and Roman authors with compilers of Ana have been at all periods Plutarch, Aulus Gellius, Lucian, Athenæus, and Diogenes Laertius. It is very rarely that Homer or Cicero is enlisted in their service by the caterers for popular entertainment; and even in the case of the Merry Tales and Quick Answers the stories about the ancients are appended at the end, as if they had been an afterthought or a stratagem for making out the copy.
There is a coincidence between Lucian and Athenæus in this respect,—that the jeux d’esprit, such as they are, in both writers occur almost exclusively in their remarks on Courtesans; and we ought to be the less surprised at such a circumstance, when we call to mind that the Greek hetairai were precisely the class which chiefly mixed with men of wit, and was most apt to yield subject-matter for pleasant sallies and epigrammatic clinches. Among the Romans, too, as we easily collect from the writings of their amatory poets and the lighter productions of Horace, the women of pleasure were accomplished and attractive; but no type exactly parallel to the Greek hetaira, as she is depicted in the pages of literary history, seems ever to have existed in Italy, and the nearest approach to her socially is perhaps the Parisian grisette, and, in point of culture and mental qualities, the gay female throng which haunted the court of Charles II. Both these, however, were, while presenting features of resemblance, essentially dissimilar from their prototype, who was a natural emanation of the climate, government, and moral atmosphere in which she was born and bred.
Notwithstanding the undoubted presence of a feeling for humour among the Greeks and other remote nationalities, one finds it possible to lay down the Deipnosophistæ and the Hetairæ with an unrelaxed countenance; and one arrives at the conclusion that all the best things have perished, or that much of the comic effect produced at table or on the stage was due to local costume and to evanescent gesture and pantomime,—just as the triumphs of Grimaldi and Liston among ourselves, and Richard Tarlton before them, depended so materially on personal mannerism and extempore grimace.
In Lucian the most remarkable specimen, and that which has been most frequently quoted and borrowed, is the retort of the lady to her lover about the small size of the cask of wine which he had sent to her, considering its reputed age; and this is also in the Deipnosophistæ, where it is related, however, of Phryne.
Perhaps the most interesting feature in the latter work, in connection with the immediate topic, is the notice which we get of the Athenian Club of the Sixty, in the time of Demosthenes. Even the names or sobriquets of some of the members have survived; and Philip of Macedon honoured the institution by the expression of his regret that his other avocations precluded him from joining it, and by a simultaneous request that a collection of all the good sayings uttered at its gatherings should be sent to him. Whether or not this flattering requisition was supplied, there is no record; but in any case it shadows the possibility of a jest-book far more ancient, and presumably also more copious, than that of Hierocles.
It thus appears, moreover, that the earliest companionship of anecdotes of all descriptions is with the feast and the cup; the lost conversational gems of the Attic Sexagint were distilled over the convivial glass; and the pages of Athenæus are put forward in like manner as the gradual progeny of table-talk—table-talk which may have received in not a few instances the polishing touches of an editor.
The student who may be at the pains to consult the Deipnosophistæ and its analogues will probably concur with me in the opinion that such repositories were little calculated to prove advantageous resorts for later compilers of bons-mots. Not merely is it that the bulk of the matter is not with ease transfusible into a modern language, but the spirit and atmosphere of these effusions are foreign to our sympathies; and the wittiest sayings of the wittiest of Corinthian humourists, male or female, are apt to strike us, not having the context, as vapid and pointless.
Athenæus has preserved several of the repartees of Gnathæna, the celebrated courtesan. One of the best of them appears to be her play upon words, when Pausanius, who was nicknamed Laccus, fell into a cask, and she remarked that the cellar (laccus) had fallen into the cask. Another is by no means contemptible. “Once, when a chattering fellow was relating that he had just come from the Hellespont, ‘Why, then,’ said she, ‘did you not go to the first city in that country?’ and when he asked what city, ‘To Sigeum,’ said she.” But in a third, which occurs immediately below, the salt is very thinly sprinkled:—
“On one occasion, when Chærephon came to sup with her without an invitation, Gnathæna pledged him in a cup of wine. ‘Take it,’ said she, ‘you proud fellow!’ ‘I proud?’ ‘Who can be more so,’ said she, ‘when you come without even being invited?’”
Here is one of another hetaira, Nico by name:—
“Once, when she met a parasite, who was very thin in consequence of a long sickness, she said to him, ‘How lean you are!’ ‘No wonder,’ says he, ‘for what do you think is all I have had to eat these three days?’ ‘Why, a leather bottle,’ says she, ‘or perhaps your shoes.’”
Our author adduces these and several other ineptitudes of similar calibre in honest good faith, and assures us that the lady was always very neat and witty in all she said. He adds that she compiled a code of laws for banquets, in compliance with which her friends were required to pay their respects to her and her daughters; but these regulations have not been preserved. It is to be hoped that they were wiser than her jocular achievements.
The same criticism is, in the main, applicable to the gossip which Athenæus has bequeathed to us about three other distinguished members of the sisterhood—Lais, Glycera and Thais. One of these items concerns, however, the dramatist Menander, and awakens an independent interest:—
“Once, when Menander the poet had failed with one of his plays, and came to her house, Glycera brought him some milk, and recommended him to drink it. But he said he would rather not, for there was some γραῦς in it, that word signifying either an old woman or the scum on milk. But she replied, ‘Blow it away, and take what there is beneath.’”
There is a second anecdote, which deserves attention, apart from any merit of its own, because it illustrates the very ancient symbolism of the seal or signet, which survived down to modern times:—
“A lover of hers once sent his seal to Lais the Corinthian, and desired her to come to him. But she said, ‘I cannot come; it is only clay!’”
A certain dramatic interest centres in the famous Phryne, whose adventure in a court of justice is so well known. There is a story that her contemporary, the courtesan Gnathæna aforesaid, once twitted her with her dulness, insinuating that her wit ought to be sharpened on a whetstone; but assuredly the two subjoined bits are quite as good as anything that is cited of Gnathæna herself:—
“Once, when a slave, who had been flogged, was giving himself airs as a young man towards her, and saying that he had been often entangled, she pretended to look vexed; and when he asked her the reason, ‘I am jealous of you,’ said she, ‘because you have been so often smitten.’”
“A very covetous lover of hers was coaxing her, and saying to her, ‘You are the Venus of Praxiteles.’ ‘And you,’ said she, playing on the double meaning of the sculptor’s name, ‘are the Cupid of Phidias.’”
Turning from the fair sex to that which claims no such distinction, we do not find ourselves face to face with any improvement in quality. The following is quoted by Athenæus from Xenophon:—
“Philip the jester, having knocked at the door, told the boy who answered, to tell the guests who he was, and that he was desirous to be admitted; and he said that he came provided with everything which could qualify him for supping at other people’s expense.”
Take another, the pith of which resides in the twofold circumstance that Lysimachus had two prime favourites, Bithys and Paris, and that the performers on the comic stage had, as a rule, short names:—
“Demetrius Poliorcetes was a man very eager for anything which could make him laugh, as Phylarchus tells us in the sixth book of his History. And he it was who said, that the palace of Lysimachus was in no respect different from a comic theatre, for that there was no one there bigger than a dissyllable.”
So Athenæus; but the particular citation goes rather to prove that Demetrius endeavoured to provoke mirth in others, and that if he succeeded in this instance, the risible organs of his friends must have been almost painfully sensitive. Thus much it appeared almost indispensable to furnish by way of warranty for what had been said just before in disparagement of the ancient school of humour.
Nor are the examples cited by Athenæus under Parodies, which might seem at first blush to belong to the same genus or family, more felicitous or impressive. There, as in the other sections devoted to Courtesans and Jesters, the double meaning and the quibble preponderate, and some of the points demand a solution which nearly amounts to a gloss or an essay. There is positively nothing worth copying.
But I have entered into these details because I can then finally dismiss the Deipnosophistæ, which offers no parallels to the modern Ana, save and except the hackneyed tale of the little cask of great age, which Taylor, the Water Poet, in his Wit and Mirth, applies to “a proper gentlewoman” in his own rather clumsy fashion.
Of semi-serious epigrams in prose-form the author of the Deipnosophistæ supplies us with at least one noteworthy specimen, where he speaks of Myrtilus as discoursing on every subject as if he had studied that alone. This fine sentiment is akin to the description of Aristippus:—
“Omnis Aristippum decuit color et status et res,”
and to the “Nihil tetigit quod non ornavit,” which has been applied to our Goldsmith.
The epigram is by nature and necessity unliteral. It is an ex-officio extravagance or hyperbole, from which you must take a liberal discount. One of the mediæval worthies, Alanus ab Insulis, was designated the Universal Doctor. It was a complimentary façon de parler.
We are here somehow reminded of the account which Macaulay makes Charles II. give of Sydney Godolphin, that he was such an excellent courtier, “because he was never in the way, and never out of the way.”
Then, again, we get it in such forms as “the Admirable Crichton,” “Single-Speech Hamilton,” “Capability Brown,” or “Athenian Stuart,” where a real or reputed specialism is summed up in a word. So that the editor of books of epigrams, who does not go beyond the ordinary familiar types, leaves a good deal of the field unreaped.
The Deipnosophistæ constituted a work, which most naturally suggested to mediæval and later compilers miscellanies formed on an analogous basis, but adapted from time to time to the changing demands of public taste. The most remarkable of these productions, perhaps, was the Mensa Philosophica, of which the authorship is a matter of dispute, but which was constructed to some extent out of the Saturnalia of Macrobius, and of which there is an Elizabethan counterpart, entitled The Schoolmaster or Teacher of Table Philosophy. This, and the Convivial Discourses elsewhere mentioned, seem to breathe the air of a social system, when men lingered over the dinner or supper table, or adjourned, as was not unusual, after the actual meal to indulge in wine and conversation.
I shall now proceed to treat the Greek Anthology, the Noctes Atticæ, and the Lives of the Philosophers, which, like Lucian and Athenæus, are simply of value as the foundations and pioneers of the class of literature which I am examining, and as introductory to the leading purpose in view. It must become evident that the sources of the vein of wit which pervades modern literature and society is to be sought elsewhere—in circumstances and conditions of life altogether different—in our political development, climate and blood.
