Studies in jocular literature

by William Carew Hazlitt

“On the former part of this story,” adds Malone, “it probably was that Sir John Hawkins grounded his account that Garrick never was of the Literary Club, and that Johnson said he never ought to be of it. And thus it is that this stupid biographer, and the more flippant and malicious Mrs. Piozzi, have miscoloured and misrepresented every anecdote that they have pretended to tell of Dr. Johnson.”

The reader does not require to have the story of Raleigh, questioning the cause of some disturbance under his window in the Tower, retold. Tradition is too indispensable to be cut away, yet too treacherous to believe without misgiving or without some convergence of proof. I have been turning over the pages of the Hundred Merry Tales and the Merry Tales and Quick Answers in quest of a few specimens of what might be adduced and regarded as original matter, and how thin is my harvest! Yet, onerous as are the obligations even of these ancient collections, the debt, it must be owned, is of a character and degree differing very essentially from that under which their successors lie to them again. For where there is loan or trespass, it is almost exclusively from obscure foreign sources unknown to the generality of readers, and betwixt we certainly get many an enjoyable bit of downright home-grown merriment or rascality. Among these I may be permitted to commend to attention the tales “Of the miller that stole the nuts of the tailor, that stole a sheep,” a piece of masterly structure, “Of the fat woman that sold fruit,” “Of the courtier that bad the boy hold his horse,” “Of him that healed frantic men,” which is cited both by Sir John Harington and Robert Burton, and “Of the two young men that rode to Walsingham.” These, and a dozen more scattered over the two books, have an insular air, although they may not be without their continental analogues. They look as if they had first seen the light on British ground, circumscribed by the waves which wash our cliffs; but anyhow they in their turn formed part of the general stock-in-trade, out of which a totally distinct class of men from More and Heywood here, and Erasmus abroad, carried on for ever and for ever the business of amusing a not very fastidious and not very critical constituency.

The gratification at meeting once in a way with an anecdote in its pure and pristine state, is like the feeling when one secures an old picture with which the cleaner has not tampered, or a coin exempt from tooling and corrosion.

There is, comparatively speaking, a handsome residuum after all deductions of genuine English Ana in the two Tudor books, in which I elsewhere intimated a suspicion that Sir Thomas More and John Heywood had a hand; and there are also a few exceptions to the almost universal rule, that the old jest is by nature intractable—that is to say, archaic—not merely in language and orthography, but in temper, structure and blood. If one arranges in parallel columns the original text of the greater number, or rather the mass, of these relations, and a modern version, the alteration is merely external. The costume and tone in both are alike obsolete. Conspicuous and valuable illustrations of the contrary occur, however, in No. 7 and No. 48 of the Hundred Merry Tales, and No. 14 of the companion book. Nothing can be less dependent upon time than the account “Of the friar that told the three children’s fortunes”: if it is out of date, Boccaccio and Chaucer are; and in that other, “Of the chaplain, that said Our Lady’s matins a-bed,” there is a piquancy worthy of Sydney Smith.

Items are frequently inserted in jest-books by the editors or collectors without the most distant suspicion of their veritable origin and character; and it also happens to this sort of literary composition, as it is known to do to engravings, that they exist in various stages of recension and in various degrees of divergence from their prima stamina.

The process of affiliation, as I venture to call it, is necessarily cognate to that of corruption. The emigrant tale, whether from one part of the world, or from one book, to another, is bound to undergo a change of garb or one in the dramatis personæ. I shall proceed to exemplify this:—

“In a village of Picardy, after a long sickness, a farmer’s wife fell into a lethargy. Her husband was willing, good man, to believe her out of pain; and so, according to the custom of that country, she was wrapped in a sheet and carried out to be buried. But, as ill luck would have it, the bearers carried her so near a hedge, that the thorns pierced the sheet and waked the woman from her trance. Some years after, she died in reality; and as the funeral passed along, the husband would every now and then call out, ‘Not too near the hedge, not too near the hedge, neighbours.’”

This is not the version of the incident usually current, for that substitutes a hearse for the bearers, a coffin for the sheet, and a tree against which the carriage was run, overturning the supposed corpse, and causing her to revive.

But, first removing this latter superincumbent stratum, or ignoring it, let us examine the particulars, as I have just printed them. Have we not before us a mode of sepulture unknown to Western Europe in the conveyance of the woman to her grave simply enveloped in a cloth? That is, of course, Mohammedan, and is precisely the method pursued in India by the disciples of that creed at the present moment.

One doubt begets another; and the presence of a hedge appears to betray the revising touch of one of my own countrymen, as it is so infinitely more characteristic of the narrow gorge-like lanes of rural England than of the route which a similar procession would be likely to have followed on the other side of the Channel.