CHAPTER XII.
Continental Influence—The “Ana”—The “Convivial Discourses”—Whimsical Inventions—Shakespear Jest-books—Change in Public Taste.
THE influence of Erasmus, More, and a few of their illustrious contemporaries, at the revival of learning, contributed a good deal to make extracts from the ancient writers popular among the limited reading community, and to draw the literary thought of the sixteenth century into harmony for a time with that of the later Roman era. This renders it less difficult to understand why the first makers of jest-books thought fit to intersperse their collections with choice passages from Plutarch and the rest. They appealed to a current taste and a sure market. The great Rotterdam wit and philosopher appreciated sallies and strokes of humour which, in a modern English club or at a modern dining table, would scarcely stir a muscle; and he almost killed himself with laughing over the Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum, in which it is hard to discern where the peculiar piquancy ever lay. It is certainly fair to recollect that we cannot transfer ourselves to the intellectual air in which Erasmus and his friends lived. We are unable to look at things of this kind from their seeing-point. What does not strike us as very droll might strike a Dutchman three centuries since very naturally and very forcibly as being so. We know, of course, how much depends in these cases on a turn of phrase, a trick of pronunciation, or any other subsidiary element; and so far as the Epistolæ are concerned, it must be borne in mind that such a travesty was then a novel experiment in literature, and was apt enough to tickle the fancy of a man who was at once so good a classical scholar and modern Latinist as Erasmus.
The taste for selections of Anecdotes, historical, literary, and miscellaneous, must appear more intelligible; and long before anything on the same scale was attempted in England, or even in Southern Europe, the Basle press found a sufficient demand for this sort of light, gossiping literature, freely salted with gaillardise, to exhaust at least four editions of a work three volumes strong—namely, the Convivial Discourses, a Latin compilation, which lays down the lines on which our own early books of the same class were modelled, and which profess to have been gleaned over the dinner-table, from the private conversation of friends, from ordinary hearsay, and out of books. It is observable that the second and third volumes signify—which the first does not—the special value of the miscellany Omnibus verarum virtutum studiosis; which, as many of the examples and anecdotes given are conspicuously licentious, must be taken in a deterrent sense.
But the ingredients of these evidently popular Discourses bespeak the prevalent tolerance in the country of their birth, and on the Continent generally, for a robust freedom of tone and expression parallel with that which made jest-books cast in a similar mould acceptable to the early Englishman—not, perhaps, so much for the virtues which they inculcated, as for the pervading vein of comicality and diversion from severer reading. The old-fashioned school of humour, which the Continental literati may be considered to have established, long survived its founders, and was still in a tolerably flourishing condition when Shakespear wrote. It did not die thoroughly out till the end of the last century; but the Georgian period in England saw the rise of a different taste and style, which largely resulted from constitutional and social changes in our system, and which gradually elbowed out of favour the archaic jocular spirit and the multitudinous Ana.
To that revolution I shall have an opportunity of adverting presently; and I must now call attention to the collection of Old English Jest-Books which I edited in 1864.
This was a fairly representative Corpus, embracing the best productions of the class, in all its varieties, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was advertised by the publishers as Shakespear Jest-Books, because Shakespear mentions one of them casually in one of his dramas; but the volumes seem to connect themselves with him in a more direct and sympathetic manner, when we examine them side by side with his own comic episodes and creations, and see how the old-world, quaint fun of the plays is in unison with that of the books.
Both are emanations from the time; and they occupy a middle station between the Dutch school and our own. Shakespear and his fellow-dramatists placed upon the stage familiar types, employing familiar language; and the setters-out of jest-books and they had, commercially speaking, one mission—that of putting forward only what use had stamped current.
There was still one remaining class of jest, which was once a very favourite form of pleasantry, and which, if it survives at all, survives under an altogether changed aspect. This is the Whimsical Invention, such as—
The Merry Tales of the Mad Men of Gotham.
The Sackful of News.
Jack of Dover his Quest of Inquiry for the Veriest Fool in Christendom.
Pasquil’s Jests, with Mother Bunch’s Merriments and a Brown Dozen of Gulls.
One of the Puritan writers denounces the first article on our list as one of the “witless devices” of the Elizabethan age; and he is very near the truth. Of course, they are far older than that reign, and are mentioned in the Hundred Merry Tales; nor does the small book which holds them, contain them all, or represent the original date of their introduction to the public notice in a printed shape. They belong to the family of Noodledoms, Gaulardisms, and Gasconades, which seems to have enjoyed such general acceptance for a great length of time both in England and on the Continent; and while they are no doubt prodigiously silly, I am quite serious in my assurance, that I should be very sorry not to have them, and that I would liefer spare many literary memorials than this and the other Fooleries, with which they are on terms of relationship. Any one who chooses to refer to Old English Jest-Books, 1864, will understand my idiosyncracy, for there, at a much earlier period of my life, I took considerable pains to illustrate both their former acceptability and their to-day’s use. I have seen them described as ineptitudes; but that was by such as lacked critical insight, and left the mineral treasure ungotten. A superficial examination will not do; the divining rod must be applied. We must break the surface, and within are wonders surpassing those of the cave of Aladdin.
I would not have it to be supposed that these Gothamite and other drolleries are altogether destitute of point or legibility; but for my present purpose I have no space to linger over them, and hardly any occasion, as they offer no original types. They are, for the most part, bis cocta—an unconscious homage to preceding authors, with the subsidiary features varied for the nonce. Even Mother Bunch is nothing more than Elinor Rumming revived with certain additions and melodramatic embellishments; and Jack of Dover offers little that is novel to our consideration beyond the conception of a jury of penniless poets—reaching, so far as it is possible to make out, the abnormal number of twenty-eight—as a vehicle for a series of thin, vamped-up jokes, in the majority of which we easily identify old friends, and not improved by a change of clothes.
The present rarity of the bulk of this species of literature, and even disappearance in not a few cases of works or editions which must once have existed, are to be explained indeed by the insatiable hunger for novelty in external presentment and the neglect of discarded favourites quite as much as by the other more usual incidence of popularity.
When we cross over from an investigation of the older literature in order to make a general survey of the modern school, it is like the migration to a different climate. Something resembling an organic revolution has occurred in this sphere of action and ingenuity. New literary and theatrical agencies have been in operation. Great political convulsions and the overthrow of dynasties have made their secondary effects sensible. The Georges have turned everything upside down. Grandfather’s jest-book is equally out of date with his opinions and his costume. Joe Miller has won a victory more signal and more enduring than Blenheim. He is the jocular laureate of the new Hanoverian time, and of all time to come. His book, if he only knew it, is to see as many editions as the Pilgrim’s Progress, and to have as many readers as the Bible. He is to become in his way a colossus—a cyclopædia in himself.
What more could the most aspiring solicit or desire?
Soberly speaking, the appearance of Joe Miller’s Jests, or the Wit’s Vademecum, under fortuitous circumstances in the time of George II., marked the new era in this description of industry, and was an English Hegira.
It was as if the jest-books of all prior epochs had been gathered unexceptionally up, and burned by the common hangman, to let the British community start afresh. So broad was the line of demarcation between the Old régime and the New; and it is not difficult to see that this truly marvellous change is an evolution from novel phases and developments of social life, and was just what was to be anticipated. In this special way, perhaps, a more complete alteration had taken place since the Tudor period than has taken place between the last century and the present one; or, in other words, in the last hundred and fifty years. We cannot believe that an ordinary reader of Henry VIII.’s days would have had any relish or value for the fun of the earlier half of the eighteenth century; but an ordinary reader of the present time perfectly appreciates the anecdotes and humour—not exactly of the primitive lean fasciculus to which Joe Miller was at the outset limited, but of the wits who flourished under Walpole and side by side with Pope.
This group of men, authors, actors, dandies, and bons viveurs—is the true lineal ancestry of Sheridan and Matthews, Sydney Smith and Jerrold; and, mutatis mutandis, the form, temper, and tone of the school have suffered no material variation, since its first rise into an immortal existence under the auspices of Miller within the genial precinct of Clare Market.
It is upward of two decades since I launched the so-called “Shakespear Jest-Books”; and, looking at them to-day, I cannot help saying that I see in them a means supplied to the inquirer of forming a comparative estimate between the ancient school and the early English on the one hand, and the modern English on the other. The volumes form a selection of types from 1526 to 1639, and embrace within their limits almost every variety of jocular invention. Even in the miscellany which passed under the name of Tarlton’s Jests there had been commencing symptoms of a change of fashion and requirement; and in Taylor the Water Poet’s budget of facetiæ, which he christened his Wit and Mirth, 1629, we perceive that the revolution has reached a farther stage. The strokes of fun, which delighted the contemporary readers of the Hundred Merry Tales, still preserved their place; but with them are mingled anecdotes more redolent and characteristic of the Stuart period, preparing us for those still later and still grosser publications which marked the reign of the second Charles.
The Hundred Merry Tales, with which the series naturally and properly opens, sets the example of plagiarism by adopting stories from still earlier sources; but the obligations of the book to ready-made or convertible material are relatively slight, and the best portions, including the inimitable account of the “Miller that stole the nuts of the tailor that stole a sheep,” and the dramatic story of the Maltman of Colebrook, seem, so far as one has the means of judging, to be founded on actual incidents.
The tales bear constant and unmistakable testimony of having been composed by some one who possessed a keen sense of humour and a hearty relish for the ludicrous; that they were from the hand of a literary man and a scholar of no mean ability, is not to be reasonably doubted; and if we were informed on credible authority that some of them offered to us the fruits of the leisure of even so distinguished a public character as Sir Thomas More, we should receive the ascription without misgiving, and feel that there were among his graver works some which we could better spare.
Not only the relationship subsisting between More and the Rastells, but the peculiar tone and cast of the tales, long since induced me to speculate on the possible concern of the author of Utopia in their production; and every one is aware that More was noted for his pleasant and facetious conversation, although it may not be so generally familiar that he signalised himself as a versifier, and as the writer of the droll tale of the tipstaff who tried to pass himself off as a friar. Yet of course there is not a tittle of direct evidence in this direction; and, again, it is impossible to avoid the persuasion that not indeed the mere fatherlessness of the work or absence of a name on the title, but the complete silence of the biographers and literary critics of and after the time on this point, tell against the idea. On the other hand, the official position of More, in an even greater measure than his religious tenets as a strict upholder of the Romish hierarchy, made the open association of his name with an enterprise so uncomplimentary to the Catholic priesthood eminently impolitic and inexpedient either as actual part of the title or as mere matter of hearsay.
But if it was not More himself, it was a person of congenial temperament, of whose identity he must have had some shrewd hint from the printer, and who had no taste for literary notoriety or for the ordinary bookseller’s garnish in the way of seductive forefronts. For a title-page more laconic and uncommercial was probably never bestowed on a book of the kind.
