Studies in jocular literature

by William Carew Hazlitt

“Monsieur Goussaut, President of the Chamber of Accompts, was celebrated for stupidity. One day standing behind a player at piquet, who did not know him, the player throwing a foolish card, exclaimed, ‘I am a mere Goussaut!’ The president, enraged at finding his name used as a proverb, said, ‘You are a fool.’ ‘True,’ said the other, without ever looking back, ‘that is just what I meant to say.’”

Had Goussaut been an English, instead of a French, name, we might have looked upon it as an inadvertent felicity.

Of course these merriments have their equivalents or survivals in the later life and literature; and I may adduce as a specimen the question raised in some company as to the age of Lord Chesterfield, when one of the party suggested that his lordship must be older than was generally supposed, as he would be at least one-and-twenty when he signed the bond which was forged by Dr. Dodd!

Then, once more, there is Mrs. Malaprop, the celebrated persona in Sheridan’s Rivals, who shares with her creator the honour of having said many things for which neither has any actual responsibility. That so familiar aphorism, “Comparisons are odorous,” is in a play printed more than a century before Sheridan was swaddled.

In other words, the gaulardism and Malapropism are of all, time, just as the intellectual abortions which produce them are. An inadvertence which may be thought to merit classification among gaulardisms, is recorded of a German writer (F. von Raumer) upon England as it was, or seemed to him to be, in 1835, where he speaks of becoming acquainted with the famous Vicar of Wakefield, and describes his gooseberry wine as quite answering to the description of it given in the book!

It is very far from being generally apprehended, indeed, how plentiful and how varied this description of gaucherie always has been and still remains. Two instances, separated by a wide interval of time, and entirely distinct in their character, occur to me. In 1615 an anonymous personage reproduced a tract which Robert Greene, the dramatist, published in 1592, under a new title and with an original preface, purporting to be by Greene, in which he refers to works belonging to a date long posterior to his decease.

My second illustration is from another field and from modern life. Mr. Alma Tadema exhibits a picture representing a room in ancient Pompeii, with all the supposed coeval appurtenances; and among these we recognise patinated bronze vases, the property, not of the Pompeian, but of the R. A.

This may be as appropriate an opportunity as I shall have of noticing an analogous type of solecism. In the farce of High Life Below Stairs one of the characters inquires who was the author of Shakespear, to which a second responds, Kolley Kibber. We are here face to face with a piece of small wit, which belongs to the same family as that where surprise is expressed by some sapient individual at the literary activity of Mr. Finis and M. Tome; or where the foolish Duke of Gloucester envied the good fortune of that rich fellow Co., who seemed to be a partner in so many firms.

I once saw a copy of Thomas May’s translation of Lucan’s Pharsalia, on the flyleaf of which some simpleton had written, “Ben Jonson, from Thomas May,” in order to lead to the supposition, of course, that the book had been presented by one poet to the other. This was a sort of compromise between a jest and a fraud; but an equally ludicrous inconsistency may be found in Joe Miller’s Jests, 1832, No. 1107, where the familiar anecdote about Randolph being identified by Jonson at the Devil Tavern is given; and the dramatist, when Randolph had delivered his extempore rhyme about John Bo-peep, is made to exclaim: “By Jasus, I believe this is my son Randolph!” and we are gravely informed by the editor that By Jasus! was Jonson’s “usual oath.”

But the complexion of the story, as a whole, is fictitious; and while I do not for a moment believe that the verse is a contemporary impromptu, I am strongly sceptical as to its claim to the character even of a contemporary production. There is no ground for accrediting the poet with the degree of poverty presumable from the description of his clothes and his need of a trifling gratuity; and the very texture of the lines is apocryphal. Besides, the narrator first makes us understand that Randolph was unknown to Jonson and the rest of the company, and then alleges their identification of him from a specimen of poetry which could have furnished no clue whatever to the improviser.