The reduction of pleasantries and satirical thrusts to form must be an outcome of topographical, climatic and social conditions, and is necessarily dependent on habits of life, pronunciation, diet, and dress—nay, on the most trifling minutiæ connected with national usages. The happiness of a witticism or of a taunt hangs on its relationship at some sort of angle to the customs and notions prevalent in a country. It exists by no other law than its antagonism or contrast to received institutions and matters of common belief; and hence what in one part of the world is apt to awaken mirth or resentment, in another falls flatly on the ear.
The essence and property of a saying lie under very weighty obligations to local circumstances and colouring. There can be no more familiar illustration of my meaning to an English reader than the large debt which an Irish or Scottish piece of humour owes to the Irish or Scottish brogue. But it has been the same everywhere from all time. Among the ancient Greeks an Ionian would have found much difficulty in appreciating the point of an Attic sally, while among the modern Italians a Tuscan would listen with unmoved countenance to a jeu d’esprit in the Venetian patois. The turn of a syllable, the inflexion of a vowel, is enough to mar the effect; and a similar observation holds good of the numberless dialects spoken throughout the German Fatherland and the Low Countries.
It is comparatively easy to comprehend a joke, when there is a well-understood acceptation of terms and a community of atmosphere and costume; but to study these matters at a distance both of time and place, and to have to allow for altered circumstances or surroundings is immeasurably more difficult; and this is what I do not think we always remember that we have to do in estimating the good things of our own precursors on this soil, and still more those of individuals governed in all their ways of thinking and acting by considerations which we can never perfectly bring home to ourselves.
Taking the United States, again, the same expression will be treated in one part as of obnoxious significance; in another it will perhaps raise a smile; and in a third it will bear no meaning whatever.
CHAPTER IV.
Justification for the Present Undertaking—Literary Interest of the Subject—The Various Classes of Jest—The Serious Anecdote the Original Type and the Jest an Evolution—Greek and Roman Examples—The “Deipnosophistæ” of Athenæus.
A JUSTIFICATION for the present inquiry may be found, then, in the historical, biographical and literary interest with which it abounds, and in the multiplicity of aspects under which the topic is capable of being contemplated.