CHAPTER X.
Affiliation of Stories—Parallel Illustrations—The Literary Club—Reynolds, Johnson, and Garrick—Two Tudor Jest-books—European Grafts on Oriental Originals—Martin Elginbrod—Parson Hobart—The “Bravo of Venice.”
BUT it must not be supposed that those who have interested themselves in the manufacture of these agreeable diversions made any rule of waiting for the objects of appropriation to grow old. The account of Dr. Parr mistaking his saturated wig, as it dried at the fire, for rothe gothe, was equally narrated and believed of his contemporary Dr. Farmer; and that about Bishop Watson and the Old Cock at Windermere is nothing more than a re-issue, with a change in the bill, of the Duke of Cumberland and the Original Old Grey Ass. It demanded in neither case the possession of archæological insight to detect the double paternity; for the two versions and the two men were living nearly abreast.
Where a certain type is before the world as a model, it seldom fails to multiply itself with trivial variations. Take, for example, three articles from sources dated between 1640 and 1790; the same thing, too, is recorded of Sydney Smith:—
| “‘That fellow,’ said Cyrano de Bergerac to a friend, ‘is always in one’s way, and always insolent. The dog is conscious that he is so fat that it would take an honest man more than a day to give him a thorough beating.’” | “A man being rallied by Louis XIV. on his bulk, which the King told him had increased from want of exercise, ‘Ah, sir,’ said he, ‘what would your Majesty have me do? I have already walked three times round the Duc D’Aumont this morning.’” | “A man was asked by his friend when he last saw his jolly comrade ——? ‘Oh,’ said he, ‘I called on him yesterday at his lodgings, and there I found him sitting all round a table by himself.’” |
The affinity between these is unmistakable. The same train of thought may produce the same fruit with an absolute freedom from indebtedness. It is a rather interesting problem, of which the solution will, perhaps, never be forthcoming. A second illustration is admissible, shewing the same process at work at a different angle:—
| Eighteenth Century. | Nineteenth Century. |
| “Sheridan told his son that he thought it was high time for him to take a wife. ‘Whose wife shall I take, sir?’ was the inquiry.” | “When Sydney Smith’s physician (Abernethy) told him that he ought to take exercise on an empty stomach, he inquired, ‘upon whose?’”[1] |
[1] There can be no doubt that the faulty or varying versions of stories of modern origin are often ascribable to the neglect of immediate registration, and the subsequent oral or written repetition from memory.
It is not in the least degree a ground for astonishment, that jeux d’esprit appertaining to old times have descended to our own in a decomposed or mutilated condition, when we find such fugitive trifles connected with men, who were all but our contemporaries, already parting with the bloom of the mint. Two of the biographers of Charles Lamb offer to public consideration simultaneously a mot from his lips, in terms beginning to be fairly devious, but which, when a few more years have run out, will by possibility have ceased to be recognisable by the author. Ecce!
| “Mr. Procter. | “Mr. Fitzgerald. |
| “An old lady, fond of her dissenting minister, wearied Lamb by the length of his praises. ‘I speak, because I know him well,’ said she. ‘Well, I don’t,’ replied Lamb, ‘I don’t; but damn him at a venture.’” | “A lady once bored him a good deal. ‘Such a charming man! I know him! Bless him! I know him!’ To her Charles, wearied with repetition of this encomium,—‘Well, I don’t; but damn him at a hazard.’” |
The two records are approximately similar; yet the discrepancies are rather serious, taking into calculation the nearness of Lamb to us and to the literary gentlemen who have made it their business to chronicle his good sayings. The editorial setting has somewhat overlaid the mounted jewel.
None of our Shakespearian students has hitherto addressed himself to the special task of tracing to, their sources the few pieces of gossip about the poet, save, perhaps, the deer-stealing episode. The Richard III. and William the Conqueror story, in which Burbage and Shakespear are made to figure, is recorded by Manningham in his Elizabethan Diary, and no earlier analogue has fallen in my way. The scandal about Davenant is another item of the same class, which we are almost ashamed to find ourselves cherishing, even though it be, as it were, formâ pauperis, from sheer lack of better matter. It seems lamentable that, while the anecdote-hunter was on the trail, he did not appropriate, for the benefit, instruction and delight of every intelligent individual coming after him, some particulars of Shakespear’s private and literary life, once so easy of access, now so irretrievably lost! How many thousand biographies of all kinds of nonentities might not be exchanged for an account of Shakespear by an educated contemporary!
Malone refers to the foundation of the Literary Club and to a little episode about Garrick and Johnson in connection with that event:—
“Not very long after the institution of the Club,” he says, “Sir J. Reynolds was speaking of it to Garrick. ‘I like it much,’ says he; ‘I think I’ll be of you.’ When Sir J. Reynolds mentioned this to Dr. Johnson, he was much displeased at the actor’s conceit. ‘He’ll be of us!’ says Johnson; ‘how does he know we will permit him? The first duke in England has no right to hold such language.’ However, when Garrick was regularly proposed, some time afterwards, Johnson warmly supported him....”
“On the former part of this story,” adds Malone, “it probably was that Sir John Hawkins grounded his account that Garrick never was of the Literary Club, and that Johnson said he never ought to be of it. And thus it is that this stupid biographer, and the more flippant and malicious Mrs. Piozzi, have miscoloured and misrepresented every anecdote that they have pretended to tell of Dr. Johnson.”
The reader does not require to have the story of Raleigh, questioning the cause of some disturbance under his window in the Tower, retold. Tradition is too indispensable to be cut away, yet too treacherous to believe without misgiving or without some convergence of proof. I have been turning over the pages of the Hundred Merry Tales and the Merry Tales and Quick Answers in quest of a few specimens of what might be adduced and regarded as original matter, and how thin is my harvest! Yet, onerous as are the obligations even of these ancient collections, the debt, it must be owned, is of a character and degree differing very essentially from that under which their successors lie to them again. For where there is loan or trespass, it is almost exclusively from obscure foreign sources unknown to the generality of readers, and betwixt we certainly get many an enjoyable bit of downright home-grown merriment or rascality. Among these I may be permitted to commend to attention the tales “Of the miller that stole the nuts of the tailor, that stole a sheep,” a piece of masterly structure, “Of the fat woman that sold fruit,” “Of the courtier that bad the boy hold his horse,” “Of him that healed frantic men,” which is cited both by Sir John Harington and Robert Burton, and “Of the two young men that rode to Walsingham.” These, and a dozen more scattered over the two books, have an insular air, although they may not be without their continental analogues. They look as if they had first seen the light on British ground, circumscribed by the waves which wash our cliffs; but anyhow they in their turn formed part of the general stock-in-trade, out of which a totally distinct class of men from More and Heywood here, and Erasmus abroad, carried on for ever and for ever the business of amusing a not very fastidious and not very critical constituency.
The gratification at meeting once in a way with an anecdote in its pure and pristine state, is like the feeling when one secures an old picture with which the cleaner has not tampered, or a coin exempt from tooling and corrosion.
There is, comparatively speaking, a handsome residuum after all deductions of genuine English Ana in the two Tudor books, in which I elsewhere intimated a suspicion that Sir Thomas More and John Heywood had a hand; and there are also a few exceptions to the almost universal rule, that the old jest is by nature intractable—that is to say, archaic—not merely in language and orthography, but in temper, structure and blood. If one arranges in parallel columns the original text of the greater number, or rather the mass, of these relations, and a modern version, the alteration is merely external. The costume and tone in both are alike obsolete. Conspicuous and valuable illustrations of the contrary occur, however, in No. 7 and No. 48 of the Hundred Merry Tales, and No. 14 of the companion book. Nothing can be less dependent upon time than the account “Of the friar that told the three children’s fortunes”: if it is out of date, Boccaccio and Chaucer are; and in that other, “Of the chaplain, that said Our Lady’s matins a-bed,” there is a piquancy worthy of Sydney Smith.
Items are frequently inserted in jest-books by the editors or collectors without the most distant suspicion of their veritable origin and character; and it also happens to this sort of literary composition, as it is known to do to engravings, that they exist in various stages of recension and in various degrees of divergence from their prima stamina.
The process of affiliation, as I venture to call it, is necessarily cognate to that of corruption. The emigrant tale, whether from one part of the world, or from one book, to another, is bound to undergo a change of garb or one in the dramatis personæ. I shall proceed to exemplify this:—
“In a village of Picardy, after a long sickness, a farmer’s wife fell into a lethargy. Her husband was willing, good man, to believe her out of pain; and so, according to the custom of that country, she was wrapped in a sheet and carried out to be buried. But, as ill luck would have it, the bearers carried her so near a hedge, that the thorns pierced the sheet and waked the woman from her trance. Some years after, she died in reality; and as the funeral passed along, the husband would every now and then call out, ‘Not too near the hedge, not too near the hedge, neighbours.’”
This is not the version of the incident usually current, for that substitutes a hearse for the bearers, a coffin for the sheet, and a tree against which the carriage was run, overturning the supposed corpse, and causing her to revive.
But, first removing this latter superincumbent stratum, or ignoring it, let us examine the particulars, as I have just printed them. Have we not before us a mode of sepulture unknown to Western Europe in the conveyance of the woman to her grave simply enveloped in a cloth? That is, of course, Mohammedan, and is precisely the method pursued in India by the disciples of that creed at the present moment.
One doubt begets another; and the presence of a hedge appears to betray the revising touch of one of my own countrymen, as it is so infinitely more characteristic of the narrow gorge-like lanes of rural England than of the route which a similar procession would be likely to have followed on the other side of the Channel.
So it seems as if we had before us an Oriental tradition or invention, first introduced into French literature at a period when the languages and learning of the East were more cultivated in that country than among ourselves, and finally Anglicised, first with the hedge, and secondly with the bearers and the coffin, as novel and improving ingredients.
But the whimsical anecdote of Martin Elginbrod perhaps even more strikingly exhibits the longevity of certain tales or apologues, the curious phases through which they pass, and the need of approaching them, for their full appreciation, in a critical temper. Here we have, for instance, what appears superficially to be a mere piece of grotesque incongruity and irreverence on the part of a sober-minded Caledonian, who figures as the composer of his own epitaph:—
“Here lie I, Martin Elginbrod:
Have mercy on my saul, Lord God!
As I wad do, were I Lord God,
And ye were Martin Elginbrod,”
which constitutes at first sight a libel on parity of reasoning and the law of proportion, and at the same time a piece of speculative licence unusual among the disciples of the Kirk; but on closer scrutiny the lines present to us perhaps the most successful attempt ever made in the way of a revival. The inscription itself is probably an immediate transfer from the Dutch, in which language it occurs mutato nomine; but the idea was mooted three thousand years ago in the sacred books of the Hindoos. In its modern dress the notion is, of course, a pure extravagance; but such an inversion of established doctrine and belief in the Vedas becomes less startling, when we reflect that the theological system there developed is of a less sublime and immutable type than our own, and does not so entirely forbid this hypothetical or imaginative change of relationship.
These transmitted relics of Elginbrod and of the coffin seem to shew in a pronounced manner how a sentiment or idea which is implanted in our very nature is susceptible of reproduction and adaptation without an obvious betrayal of its original appurtenance to former ages and other creeds.
The story in Merry Tales and Quick Answers of the woman who lifted up her nether garments to conceal her head has the air of having voyaged from Egypt or some other Oriental country, where it would be the instinct of any female, even at the present day, to do exactly the same thing at all risks, the exposure of the face being contrary to religious canons. The author of the Englishwoman in Egypt relates an anecdote to this point.
Shakespear’s witty notion of the black flea on Bardolph’s red nose, to which the modern anecdote of Sambo and the mosquito appears to be under obligations, is circumscribed by the introduction of the doctrine of eternal punishment as to date. I have thought that the same idea might have occurred to any one philosophically contemplating the dark specks in a blazing coal fire.
The fons et origo of witticisms is often very difficult to reach—nearly as much so as the source of the Nile. In one of his Letters, Charles Lamb quotes, as a good saying of Coleridge, the joke, “That summer has set in with its usual severity.” The curious point is that Byron had made the same facetious remark just before; but Lamb and he belonged to different sets. It matters little, however, for Walpole had anticipated them both; and the present mot appears to be the Joseph Miller query, “When did you ever see such a winter?” To which a wag retorts, “Last summer.”
An almost exact parallel to this is found in the comparison by Coleridge of the pure and undefilable mind of Charles Lamb to “moonshine which shines on a dunghill, and takes no pollution.” In the Life of St. Agnes, by Daniel Pratt, 1677, the saint is made to liken God to the sun, shining on a dunghill without being defiled; and in the Lives of the Philosophers, by Diogenes Laertius, Diogenes the Cynic is made to employ the same figure of speech. Whence did he borrow it?
Another singular case of affiliation presents itself to our notice in the sermon preached before thieves by Parson Hobart, to whom his uncustomary congregation, after he had done what they required to their satisfaction, returned the money whereof they had relieved him on the road, adding six shillings and eightpence as a fee for the discourse. This occurs in a tract of the time of Charles I., which bears the following quaint title:—“Forced Divinity, Or Two Sermons preached by the Compulsion of two Sorts of Sinners, viz. Drunkards & Thieves. The one by Certain Ale-Bibbers, who having heard a Minister teach much against Drinking, afterwards met with him, and compelled him to make a Sermon upon one word. The second, by a Crew of Thieves, who after they had robbed a Minister, forced him to make a Sermon in Praise of their Profession, and when he had done, Returned his Money, and Six Shillings Eightpence for his Sermon.”
Now, this very tale about Parson Hobart is in an early MS. printed in Reliquiæ Antiquæ, and is in fact a mere resuscitation for the nonce, which is made additionally manifest from the sum named as the gratuity—six and eightpence or a noble, a species of currency which had gone out of use in the seventeenth century; so that, had we not known that the story was far older than it purports to be in the tract above quoted, there is a kind of internal clue to its superior antiquity—one considerable enough, but insignificant when we measure it against the distance between Martin Elginbrod and the Vedas.
Into certain works of fiction, not professedly or specifically jocular, the humorous side or element has been unwittingly introduced by the authors in connection with the treatment of their topics; and in one or two cases at least it is so much so, that the whole production amounts to little better than an elaborate and tedious jest. The Bravo of Venice, by Monk Lewis, to which I allude elsewhere, is, by way of example, from first to last a solemn absurdity. It purports to narrate a series of extraordinary adventures in the city by an Italian prince in disguise; and Lewis, who seems to have been exhaustively ignorant of the institutions, habits, and costume of the Republic, paints with the utmost nonchalance a succession of scenes in which his hero is the central figure, and not one of which could have possibly occurred under the strict and vigilant oligarchical government ruling there supreme—an administrative machinery so thorough and so omnipresent, that no one could raise a finger or utter a sound unobserved and unreported. Yet in this serio-comic romance the Bravo performs a variety of thrilling and marvellous exploits, bespeaking the existence of an executive of the loosest type, with an éclat and an impunity possible only in a melodramatic performance or a South American democracy. He even represents to us, in one of his theatrical tableaux, the lovely Rosabella of Corfu, the Doge’s own niece, seated alone in an arbour attached to some public gardens, and as rescued from assassination by the Bravo, who is discovered at the last moment, not by the Venetian officials, but his own act, to be somebody totally different from the character which he had originally assumed. It is not too much to say that on that soil such a mystery would not have outlived one round of the clock.
