HOW THEY JESTED IN THE GOOD OLD TIME.
There is nothing which contributes so much to ease social intercourse as the jest. In comparison with it, the proverb is only a humble subordinate, and song itself, with all its power, but a weak influence. Yet the song and the proverb boast a critical literature, while the brief compendiums of merriment which never die, which, once written, live through every age, and force their way through every penetrable language, are undoubtedly less studied than any other popular medium of feeling.
What is a jest? It is as little worth the while to try to define its nature, as it is to analyze wit. We all know that the world laughs, and what it laughs at, and what the droll saws, anecdotes, rhymes, quips, and facetiæ are, which give fame to a Bebel, or a Frischlin, a Tom Brown, and a Joseph Miller. Leave labored analysis to the philosophers, contenting ourselves with remarking that a jest is a laugh candied or frozen in words, and thawed and relished in the reading or utterance. And laughter? When a man is too lazy to think out an idea, and yet too active to dreamily feel it, he laughs. When he catches its leading points, and yet realizes that behind them remains the incomprehensible or incongruous, he settles it for the nonce with a smile. Hence it comes that we laugh so seldom with all our heart, a second time over a jest. It has been comprehended; the mystery, the sense of contradiction and incongruity, has vanished—we may revive it in others, and laugh electrically with them; but the first piquant gusto of its spice is gone forever.
Yet the jest, like the proverb, acquires a value by becoming current. It often illustrates an opinion or an experience, and when it is much worn, it may still gain a new point, by being brought into illustrative relation with some event or idea. Esop's fables, or any fables, are, after all, only good jokes in a narrative form, which owe their fame simply to their boundless capacity for application. Sidney Smith's story of Mrs. Partington, who tried to mop out the Atlantic, was a jest, and so too was Lady Macbeth's 'cat i' the adage,' who wanted fish, yet would not wet her paws, and let 'I dare not' wait upon 'I would.' Something of our old enjoyment of a joke for the first time, always lingers around it, and we gladly laugh again—for, 'old love never quite rusts out.' And there are many jests, which, owing to their boundless variety of application, always come before us in a new light. Such are those which illustrate character. Woe to the man among the vulgar, who once becomes the scape-goat of a story on the subject of a joke-anecdote which 'shows him up.' Woe in truth, if it grow to a nickname—for then he, of all persons, learns that there are jests which never lose their sting.
Some jests have been progressive—they have been re-made to suit the times. Diogenes, when asked which wine he preferred, replied, 'That of other people.' An Englishman answered to the same question, 'The O. P. brand,' referring the initials not only to Other People, but also to the far-famed Old Particular stamp which marked certain rare varieties—or, as others explain it, to 'Old Port.' The Scholastikos of Hierocles, having a house for sale, carried a brick around as a sample—a modern story says that a commander when asked of what material his fortifications were built, called up his troops, and said: 'There!—every man's a brick.' Here we have the 'living walls' of the Romans—two old stories blended into one, and the whole greatly strengthened by a modern slang expression. When thus changed to suit the times, jests, instead of growing old, rather grow new again. Not unfrequently, a single joke becomes, in this manner, the parent of scores of others. I think that it is Mr. Wendell Phillips, who, in a lecture on Lost Arts, declares that there were never yet more than twenty-five original 'good stories,' and that all of those now current may be traced back to them. In a certain sense, the assertion is true; but it is a mistake to confound the result of a cause with the cause itself, and an error to declare the descendant to be one and the same with the ancestor. Max Muller has proved that hundreds of words of the most different meanings descend from the same root, and, in like manner, we might show, if the traditional links were supplied, that the last 'good one' current at Washington, originated at the court of King Pharaoh. Let no one laugh, for Chaucer's Clerke of Oxforde's Tale was for years told, with Daniel Webster and Henry Clay as the heroes, and we have even met with a bold Southron who 'knew that it was true of them!'
In this connection it is worth while to observe that even the slang phrases of the day, which are popular, partly because they save trouble in thinking, and partly because the vulgar mind, like the vulgar ear, finds a relief or pleasure in monotony—are not unfrequently of ancient origin. The current expression, 'a high old time,' occurs in a Latin jest, given in an old German-Latin jest-book, which, as its preface asserts, consists entirely of a reprint from still older works. 'Henricus,' it says, 'was begged to make at a wedding (Hoch zeit—literally, 'high time') a wedding song, and complied with the following:
'Iste vetus Juvenis Socius prius ad stationem arripit
Atque altum tempus habere cupit.'[4]
The expression is better in its old form, since altum means both high and old. Those who have laughed at the instance in 'Ferdinand Count Fathom,' of the Dutchman, who boasted that his brother had written a great book of poetry as thick as a cheese, may find its original 'motive' in an anecdote given in the same work.
'A peasant going to a lawyer, begged him to undertake a case for him, to which the man of law assenting, began to refer to and read in a very small book. But the peasant, who saw many large folios in the study, touched the advocate on the arm and said: