Studies in jocular literature

by William Carew Hazlitt

It would not be possible to offer a complete introductory survey of the subject under consideration without turning back to see what the sources were to which later wits would resort—without inspecting the basement of the edifice, so to speak. Otherwise, vastly interesting as they are on literary and archæological grounds, such relics of antiquity as Athenæus and Gellius yield mainly pure Anecdota in the strict acceptation of the term. The pages of the former are more redolent of the theatre and the gymnasium; those of the author of the Attic Nights breathe the atmosphere of the study, and where he tells a story of some hetaira or dancing-girl, he cites his original. But Gellius has devoted much of his space to topics which were more congenial than the adventures and amours of the gay folks of or about the time; he is more profuse on philological dissertation, serious pieces of personal history, and points relevant to the general costume of the Rome which he knew. Now and then, but not so often as might have been expected and excused, the lawyer peeps out. Here and there, too, he reminds us of the Deipnosophistæ, as in the twenty-second section, which opens with an account of the conversation and readings which took place at the table of Favorinus; and the very following chapter is occupied by a sample of dramatic criticism, in which his opinion is given of some Roman play founded on the Greek comedians, as we now adapt pieces for the stage from the French.

It is a most strangely heterogeneous, and at the same time most charming, miscellany, lacking which our knowledge of Roman literature, society and manners would be far less complete. But, as it has been already indicated in a general way of all the books of the sub-classical period, the Noctes Atticæ does not prove of great service to the gatherer of facetiæ; and the few scattered trifles of that nature which the work contains would not be held of sufficient consequence to find a place in a modern collection. Such as they are, they occur for the most part in the early jest-books, and are precisely such as an editor nowadays would instinctively skip as out of keeping with present notions and demands.

This fact tends to substantiate the position which I have asserted, that our ideas of wit and humour are widely and essentially different from those of the ancients; for it is only, I apprehend, in this single particular that Gellius fails to keep touch with us. He is in most respects, like all eminent writers, remarkably modern and contemporary; and, as a rule, the matters which he judged worth writing down so many centuries ago, we read with gratitude and enjoyment.

The Lives of the Philosophers, by Diogenes Laertius, is a very familiar title and even book. But it is at the same time almost to be regarded and taken as the prototype of literary works based, with every wish on the part of the writer to be accurate and veracious, on hearsay and tradition. Diogenes is the Greek Aubrey. His transactions in conjecture and conflicting opinions are marvellously large; and, as a consequence, his text abounds with uncertainty and confusion. One is reminded nearly at every page of the story of the Southern gentleman who once undertook a journey to the Highlands of Scotland to inquire for Meester Grant; and, singularly enough, the source of the difficulty is very much the same. Diogenes made himself the biographer of a people whose choice of names was limited, and among whom the same name was of common occurrence. So long as the men themselves lived, it signified little or nothing; but if they became famous and historical, or if one out of several did so, the facilities for mixture of identity were, as a matter of course, immense. This circumstance, which is not casual, but is the rule not proving the exception, sensibly diminishes the value of the Lives as an authority; and it is easy to see how the taint has been communicated to the best of our modern Cyclopædias, where the contributors of articles are obliged to own repeatedly, that some fact or other is attributed by half a dozen ancient writers to as many different persons of the same name, nationality and approximate period.

I shall pass over the circumstance that the biography of Diogenes is almost as involved and obscure as his text, for I am merely dealing with him and his celebrated book in a prefatory way. I should be very sorry indeed to undervalue such a unique and fascinating magazine of gossip and tradition; nor have I at present to concern myself with the contradictory statements, not only about men of inferior fame, but about such prominent characters as Thales and Plato; and, besides, in relation to the most important events of their careers and the points most vital to their reputation.

Take, for instance, in the account of Thales, the well-aired anecdote of the Golden Tripos. I quote from the old English translation. “As for what is recorded,” says he, “concerning the Tripos found out by the fishermen, and sent to the Wise Men by the Milesians, it still remains an undoubted Truth.” He then narrates this “undoubted truth”; and when he has done so, he successively furnishes three other versions materially differing; and we have to go only a step further, when we encounter a saying of Thales as to his gratitude for three things—that he was a man, and not a beast; that he was a man, and not a woman; and that he was a Greek, and not a barbarian—which, it seems, is as likely to have been a saying of Socrates. We have all heard something very similar of Dr. Parr and Sir James Mackintosh.

These discrepancies are very thickly sown throughout the Lives, and throughout those of whom it might be conceived that, in the time at least of Diogenes, something like authentic and consistent information would have been preserved in Greece, at all events regarding salient facts. Yet between the era of the biographer and that of many, if not most, of his subjects, the lapse of years was more than sufficient, in the absence of systematic records, to accumulate a vast amount of error and entanglement, especially when so many individuals of the same name flourished about the same date. We perceive that even as to the number of the Wise Men, and who they were, there is a conflict of opinion. But, on the other hand, in his memoir of Solon, Diogenes is remarkably minute, and supplies us with the very words which he employed in addressing the Athenian Assembly and the texts of several letters written to contemporaries, which, to be just, he does also in the case of Thales. His tone, however, in the life of Solon is more confident; and he does not trouble himself or us with parallel traditions and various readings. We may discern equally strong ground for scepticism here and there; but he felt his footing surer, as Homer, in some parts of the Odyssey, evidently writes from report, and in others from personal information. Where, as he does so freely in the case of Thales and others, he lays before us all the theories about an event or a fact, Diogenes reminds us of Herodotus, who so often absolves himself from responsibility by setting down all the accounts which had reached him, and leaving us to pick out the truth among them.

A considerable proportion of the aphorisms ascribed to the Wise Men strike us as rather commonplace; but that may be the result of familiarity. James I. observed that he was a bold man who first ate an oyster; but the attributes of strangeness and courage have alike ceased to exist. Perhaps one of the maxims which still most preserves its verdure is that of Pittacus of Mitylene: To observe the season, which is just our Selden’s Distingue tempora.

The anecdotes with which the pages of Diogenes are plentifully illustrated are, as I have hinted, familiar to the point of indifference; and I believe that they almost invariably suffer from translation into a foreign idiom and epoch. If we are scarcely able to relish the good things which passed current in our own country in the days of the Tudors and the Stuarts, what likelihood is there of a cordial sympathy with such fragments of the wit and wisdom as have survived of men who lived at such an immeasurably greater distance of time under wholly different conditions and influences? From an historical and philosophical point of view we try to make the best of them; but jocularly they amount to very little indeed.