CHAPTER XI.
The Ballad and the Nursery Rhyme—Philosophical Side of the Question—“Jack The Giant-killer.”
THE normal jest-book limits itself to stories of the ordinary jocular cast relative to incidents either of the current or past time. Neither the compiler nor the peruser, as a rule, concerns himself with any other aspect of the question than the utility of the volume as a source of immediate amusement. The existence of a philosophical side to the matter remains unsuspected.
But I have already tried to demonstrate that this is an intrinsically valuable body of literary material, with which we have to deal, and that it lurks in a wide variety of forms. I have illustrated some of them; but there are yet others—namely, the Ballad and the Nursery Rhyme.
The taste for burlesque in composition set in at a very early period, as will become evident from a perusal of these pages, and may be regarded to some extent as a counter-movement to the practice of moralising secular productions which were thought to be of an irreligious tendency, and to be susceptible of a different kind of treatment, like the New Nutbrown Maid upon the Passion of Christ, the Court of Venus moralized, the Gude and Godly Ballets of our Northern neighbours, and Come over the bourne, Bessy, to me. Of the last, singularly enough, there are two parodies—one political, in which Queen Elizabeth is the heroine, and the other allegorical, in which the speaker is Christ, and Bessy, Mankind. But the original was of an amatory complexion.
Certainly, on the whole, one of the ballads in a printed collection of the reign of James I., entitled Deuteromelia, 1609, affords the most powerful and diverting example of the manner in which our own ancestors handled the present class of undertaking, as well as a proof of the appreciation of the ludicrous by the readers of those days. It is an extremely clever production, which I am tempted to transfer hither entire:—
“Martin said to his man,
Fie! man, fie!
Oh, Martin said to his man,
Who’s the fool now?
Martin said to his man,
Fill thou the cup, and I the can;
Thou hast well drunken, man:
Who’s the fool now?
“I see a sheep shearing corn,
Fie! man, fie!
I see a sheep shearing corn;
Who’s the fool now?
I see a sheep shearing corn,
And a cuckoo blow his horn;
Thou hast well drunken, man:
Who’s the fool, now?
“I see a man in the moon,
Fie! man, fie!
I see a man in the moon,
Who’s the fool now?
I see a man in the moon,
Clouting of St. Peter’s shoon.
Thou hast well drunken, man:
Who’s the fool now?
“I see a hare chase a hound,
Fie! man, fie!
I see a hare chase a hound,
Who’s the fool now?
I see a hare chase a hound,
Twenty mile above the ground;
Thou hast well drunken, man:
Who’s the fool now?
“I see a goose ring a hog,
Fie! man, fie!
I see a goose ring a hog,
Who’s the fool now?
I see a goose ring a hog,
And a snail that bit a dog;
Thou hast well drunken, man:
Who’s the fool now?
“I see a mouse catch the cat,
Fie! man, fie!
I see a mouse catch the cat,
Who’s the fool now?
I see a mouse catch the cat,
And the cheese to eat the rat;
Thou hast well drunken, man:
Who’s the fool now?”
Of course, it is easy to condemn such lines as foolish or old-fashioned; but there is nothing else exactly like them in our literature, and they shew the relish for humorous travesty on the part of the English public in the sixteenth century. They obviously do not respond to the later and existing notion of what a Jest is; but they may be regarded as forming an antique type of the songs introduced into the modern extravaganza and burletta, and they fall within the present category as representing one of the shapes which facetious literature assumed, before the Ana existed as a distinct branch of research and source of entertainment.
In ballad-lore there are many other relics of a playful or comic turn, which do not involve any jocular sense or plot, as the Wedding of the Frog and the Mouse, the Wedding of the Fly, and some of the familiar pieces in the Drolleries by the wits of the court of the Stuarts. A playwright once offered a MS. farce to a manager, and assured him, by way of recommendation, that it was no laughing matter. That was a bull; but a story or an idea may be funny without fulfilling the conditions of a jest; and, paradoxical as it may appear, there are cases where jests may be fairly admissible as such without offering a direct provocation to laughter. I refer to the nature, not to the quality, of the performance.
In the Nursery Rhymes of this country, of which Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps has made an excellent collection, there is a good deal that seems suggestive beyond the mere jingle of the verse or even the oddity of the subject. The editor himself, indeed, has indicated numerous instances in which an historical or archaic interest underlies the surface; and it is curious that this is usually latent. The rhymes upon the oldest themes, such as King Arthur, Robin Hood, and Tom Thumb, are by no means the most ancient compositions.
A little quatrain:—
“Three wise men of Gotham,
Went to sea in a bowl;
And if the bowl had been stronger,
My song would have been longer”—
is a remarkable survival of the familiar traditions about the Gothamites, and may be commended for its elliptical succinctness. It is within the bounds of possibility that the author of Jack a Nory had this before him as a model. The conception and structure are so similar. How much is told in a few words! The brush of a Turner could not have wrought a result so instantaneous and impressive. The writer, a true poet, shrinks from harrowing details, and tells the tale with a simplicity almost Druidical.
The next is of a varying texture:—
“Hush thee, my babby,
Lie still with thy daddy
Thy mammy has gone to the mill,
To grind thee some wheat,
To make thee some meat,
And so, my dear babby, lie still.”
We here find ourselves thrown back on a period when each district or village had its common mill; and all the racy stories about the jolly miller and his golden thumb, and his tricksome toll-dish, and his amours with the fair sex, come into our heads. How dull and pithless some of our earliest books of facetiæ would have been without the miller and his brother-rogue, the priest! The drollest anecdotes are of one or the other of these two. How many homes must have been rendered wretched by the visits of the goodwives to Dusty-poll and their intrigues with the sly rascal; and if the husband went in lieu of his spouse, the priest was at hand, in the grey of the morning even, to take his place. It was Scylla or Charybdis—between the devil and the deep sea.
The nursery epic of Jack the Giant-killer, of which we do not possess any archaic text or form, displays in a sort of allegory the protest of the people against the oppression of their feudal lords. This tyranny survived perhaps longest in such regions as Cornwall and Wales, or the Cornish and Welsh were unusually intolerant of it. The two-headed giant, whom Jack exterminates in Wales, may be taken to be a landlord or seigneur of a more than commonly malignant type.
Here is a final sample of a relic ostensibly recent in origin, yet on closer examination with the crust of antiquity collected upon it:—
“A cow and a calf,
An ox and a half,
Forty good shillings and three;
Is that not enough tocher
For a shoemaker’s daughter,
A bonny lass with a black e’e?”
Agricultural statistics would shew one, no doubt, how long ago—how many kings’ and queens’ reigns ago—it was that a cow and a calf could be had for £2 3s. That is the key to the date of the rhyme, in fact; for the difference in the value of money merely goes to establish that the personage who espoused the shoemaker’s daughter had no reason to complain of the fortune given with her. But the pecuniary equivalent has ceased to be quoted these two centuries or so; and the lines thus carry within themselves a proof of their appurtenance by birthright to a prior era.
There is another class of tale, comprised in the Nursery Series, which resembles a new dwelling built out of old materials. It is the one beginning,—
“There was an old man, who lived in a wood,
As you may plainly see;
He said he would do as much work in a day
As his wife could do in three.”
The idea was used by the author of a farce called Domestic Economy, in which that eminent comedian, Mr. Edward Wright, formerly signalised his genius; but the true original, both germ and substance, is a jocular invention of at least the fifteenth century, and what we see before us is an elaborate amplification, reminding us of the difference between a country and the map of it drawn to scale, or between a tragedy in five acts and the slender plot.
The evidence which the Nursery Rhyme so often supplies of having once belonged to a remote literature and society, is not directly relevant to the present subject. But it seemed to enter into my scheme to draw attention to this among the many repertories in which the all-pervading Jest is to be found in new attire—to the hidden properties which may reside in popular trifles, and to the strange mutations which a certain section of folk-lore has undergone in the process of transmission to us. A jeu d’esprit of Ben Jonson, which was not impossibly an affiliation in his case, leaves its last echo, as it were, in a witticism still more degrees below proof,—videlicet, the following:—
“I’ll sing you a song,
Though not very long,
Yet I think it as pretty as any;
Put your hand in your purse,
You’ll never be worse,
And give the poor singer a penny.”
Here the soul of the humour is, that the preamble is the text—the house is all portico, or like the shop-frontage in a pantomime.
But occasionally items present themselves which are jests without any attempt at disguise, and appear more properly, indeed, to belong to Joe Miller’s Miscellany than to Aunt Louisa’s. Is this not a retort pure and simple, thrown into metrical form, rather than a little poem for little masters?—
“The man in the wilderness asked me,
How many strawberries grew in the sea?
I answered him, as I thought good,
As many red herrings as grew in the wood.”
This cross-bred effusion, with its share of epigrammatic character, is traced backward to the last century but one; it is in reality of unascertained age; it bears no chronological stamp; it is precisely a mot, which might have been uttered to-day or five hundred years ago. It alludes to the wild berry mentioned by Shakespear, with a probable stretch of poetic licence, as cultivated in the Bishop of Ely’s garden near Holborn in the fifteenth century; it may have been so in Gerarde the botanist’s time, a hundred years after. But the small sylvan variety must be of great antiquity.
In the entire body of nursery literature, however, the humorous element seldom exceeds a sportive under-meaning; for the fully developed joke it is an uncongenial atmosphere; and the interesting constituency to which it addresses itself would not be capable of penetrating the drift of a thorough-paced Joe. Where such features occur in a collection of children’s rhymes, they are to be treated as waifs and strays, which have smuggled themselves in under some disguise, and require an experienced eye to single them out. All that can be said is, that the book is not much the better for them, and would not be much the worse without them. They have a bizarre air. They are apt to strike a jarring chord.
