CHAPTER XVII.
The Subject continued.
THE taste for these Analecta grew with the supply. They proved popular and easy reading, and did not exact much reflection on the part of the peruser or a large amount of literary skill in the compiler. No operation is perhaps simpler than the construction of a book out of a series of paragraphs found at intervals and strung together at random. Tarlton’s Jests seems to have led the way and set the fashion, and the press has been busy with such olla podrida ever since.
Judgment in selection is, of course, the grand postulate in this as in every department of art, and it is precisely there that the workman in all times has fallen short of success; so that the whole mass of pirated matter, from first to last, is capable of yielding scarcely more than sufficient to fill a volume of fair compass.
For instance, I discern only a single scrap in the Certain Conceits and Jests, 1614:—
“There was a certain fool that always, when the sun shone, would weep, and when the rain rained would laugh; and his reason was, that sunshine followed rain, but rain sunshine.”
So, again, in the Conceits, Clinches, Flashes, and Whimzies, of 1639, where the arrangement is similarly in paragraphs, but where at the same time the contents answer better to the title than to the Ana, there are 287 heads, and to discover half a dozen passable illustrations is a task of difficulty. These bijoux, which the author, a Lancashire man, carefully garnered up as they struck his own fancy, or fell from the society which he kept, are after the following style:—
“An antiquary,” says one, “loves everything (as Dutchmen do cheese) for being mouldy and worm-eaten.”
“A simple fellow in gay clothes is like a cinnamon-tree; the bark is of more worth than the body.”
“Another said, a woman was like a piece of old grogram, always fretting.”
A few more might be added, not for their wit, but for their casual elucidation of some obsolete word or custom; but we must not deny the writer the credit of introducing the Pun. Better have been made since; but, after all, we are here in the days of Charles I. No. 145 inquires why few women loved to eat eggs? Answer: Because they cannot endure to bear the yoke. A far from brilliant effort spoiled in the wording!
“Why are tailors like woodcocks? A. Because they live by their long bills.”
Perchance, the best in this indifferent medley is No. 177, which depends on the different meanings of liber and libra:—
“A rich bookseller wished himself a scholar, and one said to him: ‘You are one already, being doctus in libris.’ ‘Nay,’ replied the other, ‘I am but dives in libris.’”
These classical essays do not suit our climate very well, yet nothing is to be objected to them where, as in the one just cited, they are pure. But I strongly dislike hybrids, by which I intend such a retort as the Oxford Don is alleged to have made to the youths who hissed him as he passed—Laudatur AB HIS; and the quotation of a line from the Eclogue of Virgil, where a lady’s dress is torn by a fiddle, is barely more than a verbal conceit, though incomparably preferable to the aggravating all-us jelly-us of Brother Crug, which is a mere phonetic abortion.
Whatever verdict may be pronounced on their successors, as they approach our own period, it must be said of the assemblages of facetiæ, made public by former generations down to the last century, that they leave us no alternative but this conclusion—that, with exceedingly few exceptions, considering the space of time involved, the genuine, enjoyable, laughable, recallable jest was unknown to antiquity, and is the offspring of modern thought and conditions.
Of the jeux d’esprit and humour of the olden days the archaic cast is not merely in the spelling or in the matter, but it is in the bone and blood; and just as it would be idle to imagine that an Englishman of the Tudor epoch could be converted into a modern Englishman by arraying his person in modern clothes, so it is futile to attempt to draw the jocular literature of passed centuries into harmony with our own by adapting the orthography and language to the prevailing mode.
Save in a few rare cases, where the life of the subject is indestructible, the entire body of old-fashioned wit and wisdom is as exotic as a tropical plant within the Arctic circle.
