Studies in jocular literature

by William Carew Hazlitt

Although the independent reading of the more thoughtful and studious had long brought them, of course, to a more enlightened inference, I almost apprehend that, until Mr. Wright’s volume on Grotesque and Caricature appeared, the loose general notion was that there was not much worth regarding in the present direction beyond the imperishable pages of Joe Miller; and I certainly think that a very narrow minority conceived in how wide and many-sided a meaning the Jest is susceptible of being understood.

On the contrary, the Jest offers itself to our consideration in a surprising diversity of types and garbs; and the project which I have now before me is, in fact, an attempt to treat for the first time, in a catholic and critical spirit, a theme which has been usually viewed as frivolous and undignified.

It is a matter of notoriety that some of our best antiquaries have loved to trace to their sources the comic and romantic tales which we have borrowed from the Continent, and to note the variations introduced for the sake of novelty, local requirement, or dramatic exigency, by a succession of writers in the same or in different languages.

A vast amount of labour and scholarship has been expended in illustrating by this light the works of Shakespear and our other early playwrights, as well as in recovering the clues to the material on which Chaucer and Spenser built their undying productions. Moreover, both in England and abroad, a great deal has been achieved in elucidating the literary history of our ancient jest-books, and improving our intimacy with the true origin of the stories and their subsequent adventures, in more or less numerous disguises, from the Hundred Merry Tales to Joe Miller or what may perhaps be termed the Milleriana.

But when one has assiduously sifted all this learning, one finds that it very naturally limits itself, as a rule, to the very early books, so far as facetiæ are concerned,—to that branch of the subject which belongs to Archæology; and, in short, I do not know that I have been to any but the most trifling extent forestalled in the design which I here try to carry out, of arranging and analysing the humorous traditions which we have received from our forefathers touching the celebrities of all ages and countries, yet more exclusively those who flourished within a measurable distance of time, or those whom no distance of time is capable of affecting; or, once more, such relations as owe, not to the names, but to the matter, their continuity of life.

The origin of all jocular or semi-serious literature and art is referable, of course, to a stage of human development when the deviation from a certain standard of feeling or opinion could be appreciable; and it does not require the long establishment of a settled society, judging from the habits of savage and illiterate communities, before a sense of the ludicrous and grotesque begins to form part of the popular sentiment.

The ludicrous and grotesque are, to a certain extent, relative or conditional terms. The canons of propriety and right in primitive life are so widely different from those which prevail in a state of civilisation, that what we should regard as fit material for a jest-book is elsewhere treated as a piece of serious history. A departure from the line of expression or deportment sanctioned by common usage has proved in all countries and all ages a fertile source of satire and caricature; but then that line, like the needle, is subject to variation, and the fixture of character is not, as is the case with straight and curved lines in mathematics, a matter of doctrine and fact, but one mainly of local circumstance and costume.

The joke has proved in all ages a factor of manifold power and use. It has ridiculed and exposed corruptions in the body politic and in the social machinery. It has laughed at some things because they were new, and at others because they were old. It has preserved records of persons and ideas, and traits of ancient bygone manners, which must otherwise have perished; and it frequently stands before us with its esoteric moral hidden not much below its ostensible and immediate purport.

Jests present humanity to our observation in its holiday attire, its Sunday best, or at least under some exceptional and temporary aspect. Quin and Foote, Mathews and Sydney Smith, Frank Talfourd and Henry Byron, had their grave, and very grave, intervals. Hood himself said that he had to be a lively Hood for a livelihood; and it was mournfully true, as the records of his every-day life, chastened by illness and sorrow, only too well establish. The pleasant or comic episodes may be an occasional incidence of the least happy existence or the least fortunate career; and the anecdotes, humorous or otherwise, of celebrated men and women are receivable with allowance as traits of character and conduct, for which some special circumstance, or a union of circumstances, is answerable. In the general tenor of the most favoured experiences the serious element is apt to preponderate; the heyday of our years is like short, intermittent sunshine; and we ought to come to the study of ANA, if we wish to judge them correctly, with a recollection of what they are, and also what they are not. They who have enjoyed the privilege of a personal acquaintance with the gayest of our modern humourists—and there are many such (including the present writer) among us still—are best qualified to pronounce an opinion upon this point; and they know how much of darkness and anguish often there is behind the scenes or off the boards. The jokes by or about any given individual do not, after all, amount to a great deal, when they are spread over thirty or forty years: all the genuine sayings of Theodore Hook or Douglas Jerrold would not fill more than a few octavo pages; and these things are to be taken, not as indices to the habitual unbroken mood of the man, but rather as samples of felicity of phrase or thought to be gotten, like mineral ore, under auspicious conditions from a wealthy soil.

We are too grossly subservient to habit and use. We naturally accustom ourselves, unless we reflect, to figure the clown with his tongue perpetually in his cheek and the wit discharging his shafts without cessation or repose—just as, on the contrary, no one would be prepared to believe, without the strongest proof, that a tailor had made a pun, or that a railway porter had written a Greek epigram.