CHAPTER XII.
Continental Influence—The “Ana”—The “Convivial Discourses”—Whimsical Inventions—Shakespear Jest-books—Change in Public Taste.
THE influence of Erasmus, More, and a few of their illustrious contemporaries, at the revival of learning, contributed a good deal to make extracts from the ancient writers popular among the limited reading community, and to draw the literary thought of the sixteenth century into harmony for a time with that of the later Roman era. This renders it less difficult to understand why the first makers of jest-books thought fit to intersperse their collections with choice passages from Plutarch and the rest. They appealed to a current taste and a sure market. The great Rotterdam wit and philosopher appreciated sallies and strokes of humour which, in a modern English club or at a modern dining table, would scarcely stir a muscle; and he almost killed himself with laughing over the Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum, in which it is hard to discern where the peculiar piquancy ever lay. It is certainly fair to recollect that we cannot transfer ourselves to the intellectual air in which Erasmus and his friends lived. We are unable to look at things of this kind from their seeing-point. What does not strike us as very droll might strike a Dutchman three centuries since very naturally and very forcibly as being so. We know, of course, how much depends in these cases on a turn of phrase, a trick of pronunciation, or any other subsidiary element; and so far as the Epistolæ are concerned, it must be borne in mind that such a travesty was then a novel experiment in literature, and was apt enough to tickle the fancy of a man who was at once so good a classical scholar and modern Latinist as Erasmus.
The taste for selections of Anecdotes, historical, literary, and miscellaneous, must appear more intelligible; and long before anything on the same scale was attempted in England, or even in Southern Europe, the Basle press found a sufficient demand for this sort of light, gossiping literature, freely salted with gaillardise, to exhaust at least four editions of a work three volumes strong—namely, the Convivial Discourses, a Latin compilation, which lays down the lines on which our own early books of the same class were modelled, and which profess to have been gleaned over the dinner-table, from the private conversation of friends, from ordinary hearsay, and out of books. It is observable that the second and third volumes signify—which the first does not—the special value of the miscellany Omnibus verarum virtutum studiosis; which, as many of the examples and anecdotes given are conspicuously licentious, must be taken in a deterrent sense.
But the ingredients of these evidently popular Discourses bespeak the prevalent tolerance in the country of their birth, and on the Continent generally, for a robust freedom of tone and expression parallel with that which made jest-books cast in a similar mould acceptable to the early Englishman—not, perhaps, so much for the virtues which they inculcated, as for the pervading vein of comicality and diversion from severer reading. The old-fashioned school of humour, which the Continental literati may be considered to have established, long survived its founders, and was still in a tolerably flourishing condition when Shakespear wrote. It did not die thoroughly out till the end of the last century; but the Georgian period in England saw the rise of a different taste and style, which largely resulted from constitutional and social changes in our system, and which gradually elbowed out of favour the archaic jocular spirit and the multitudinous Ana.
To that revolution I shall have an opportunity of adverting presently; and I must now call attention to the collection of Old English Jest-Books which I edited in 1864.
This was a fairly representative Corpus, embracing the best productions of the class, in all its varieties, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was advertised by the publishers as Shakespear Jest-Books, because Shakespear mentions one of them casually in one of his dramas; but the volumes seem to connect themselves with him in a more direct and sympathetic manner, when we examine them side by side with his own comic episodes and creations, and see how the old-world, quaint fun of the plays is in unison with that of the books.
Both are emanations from the time; and they occupy a middle station between the Dutch school and our own. Shakespear and his fellow-dramatists placed upon the stage familiar types, employing familiar language; and the setters-out of jest-books and they had, commercially speaking, one mission—that of putting forward only what use had stamped current.
There was still one remaining class of jest, which was once a very favourite form of pleasantry, and which, if it survives at all, survives under an altogether changed aspect. This is the Whimsical Invention, such as—