Studies in jocular literature

by William Carew Hazlitt

The fons et origo of witticisms is often very difficult to reach—nearly as much so as the source of the Nile. In one of his Letters, Charles Lamb quotes, as a good saying of Coleridge, the joke, “That summer has set in with its usual severity.” The curious point is that Byron had made the same facetious remark just before; but Lamb and he belonged to different sets. It matters little, however, for Walpole had anticipated them both; and the present mot appears to be the Joseph Miller query, “When did you ever see such a winter?” To which a wag retorts, “Last summer.”

An almost exact parallel to this is found in the comparison by Coleridge of the pure and undefilable mind of Charles Lamb to “moonshine which shines on a dunghill, and takes no pollution.” In the Life of St. Agnes, by Daniel Pratt, 1677, the saint is made to liken God to the sun, shining on a dunghill without being defiled; and in the Lives of the Philosophers, by Diogenes Laertius, Diogenes the Cynic is made to employ the same figure of speech. Whence did he borrow it?

Another singular case of affiliation presents itself to our notice in the sermon preached before thieves by Parson Hobart, to whom his uncustomary congregation, after he had done what they required to their satisfaction, returned the money whereof they had relieved him on the road, adding six shillings and eightpence as a fee for the discourse. This occurs in a tract of the time of Charles I., which bears the following quaint title:—“Forced Divinity, Or Two Sermons preached by the Compulsion of two Sorts of Sinners, viz. Drunkards & Thieves. The one by Certain Ale-Bibbers, who having heard a Minister teach much against Drinking, afterwards met with him, and compelled him to make a Sermon upon one word. The second, by a Crew of Thieves, who after they had robbed a Minister, forced him to make a Sermon in Praise of their Profession, and when he had done, Returned his Money, and Six Shillings Eightpence for his Sermon.”

Now, this very tale about Parson Hobart is in an early MS. printed in Reliquiæ Antiquæ, and is in fact a mere resuscitation for the nonce, which is made additionally manifest from the sum named as the gratuity—six and eightpence or a noble, a species of currency which had gone out of use in the seventeenth century; so that, had we not known that the story was far older than it purports to be in the tract above quoted, there is a kind of internal clue to its superior antiquity—one considerable enough, but insignificant when we measure it against the distance between Martin Elginbrod and the Vedas.

Into certain works of fiction, not professedly or specifically jocular, the humorous side or element has been unwittingly introduced by the authors in connection with the treatment of their topics; and in one or two cases at least it is so much so, that the whole production amounts to little better than an elaborate and tedious jest. The Bravo of Venice, by Monk Lewis, to which I allude elsewhere, is, by way of example, from first to last a solemn absurdity. It purports to narrate a series of extraordinary adventures in the city by an Italian prince in disguise; and Lewis, who seems to have been exhaustively ignorant of the institutions, habits, and costume of the Republic, paints with the utmost nonchalance a succession of scenes in which his hero is the central figure, and not one of which could have possibly occurred under the strict and vigilant oligarchical government ruling there supreme—an administrative machinery so thorough and so omnipresent, that no one could raise a finger or utter a sound unobserved and unreported. Yet in this serio-comic romance the Bravo performs a variety of thrilling and marvellous exploits, bespeaking the existence of an executive of the loosest type, with an éclat and an impunity possible only in a melodramatic performance or a South American democracy. He even represents to us, in one of his theatrical tableaux, the lovely Rosabella of Corfu, the Doge’s own niece, seated alone in an arbour attached to some public gardens, and as rescued from assassination by the Bravo, who is discovered at the last moment, not by the Venetian officials, but his own act, to be somebody totally different from the character which he had originally assumed. It is not too much to say that on that soil such a mystery would not have outlived one round of the clock.

CHAPTER XI.

The Ballad and the Nursery Rhyme—Philosophical Side of the Question—“Jack The Giant-killer.”

THE normal jest-book limits itself to stories of the ordinary jocular cast relative to incidents either of the current or past time. Neither the compiler nor the peruser, as a rule, concerns himself with any other aspect of the question than the utility of the volume as a source of immediate amusement. The existence of a philosophical side to the matter remains unsuspected.