Studies in jocular literature

by William Carew Hazlitt

The Jest resembles a tree of many branches. It is couched in a wide variety of shapes—namely, the Riddle, the Epigram, the Apologue or Tale, the Repartee, the Quibble, and the Pun.

Of these, the Apologue and the Riddle are the most ancient—the latter being entitled to priority, if we take into account its positive origin in the Hebrew Scriptures themselves, although the jocular or comic development is so much more recent. The same criticism applies to the Apologue which was transplanted from Oriental soil, where it has ever been a favourite method of conveying instruction and amusement, into the oldest Western vehicles for the same twofold purpose, such as the Gesta Romanorum, the Fables of Æsop, and Reynard the Fox. These productions, with many others, were designed as a method of inculcating moral precepts and political lessons under a fictitious or romantic garb. The facetious adaptation was a later growth, and first manifests itself in the French and Latin fabliaux in prose or verse edited for us by Méon and Wright.

Next in the scale of antiquity to the Apologue and Riddle we may be warranted in ranking the Epigram; and this, too, like the two others to which I have been referring, was in its inception and early employment satirical rather than burlesque for the most part. Humour did not enter at first into its composition or design. Any one who looks through the Greek Anthology may see that the productions in that language are serious narratives treated in a terse and condensed style.

The Quibble and Repartee were tolerably popular features and characteristics in the jest-books of the seventeenth century, when the formation of literary clubs, and the increased correspondence between men of parts and wit, naturally led to the growth of that large body of sayings which the printed and MSS. collections have handed down to us. The age immediately succeeding that of Shakespear saw the uprise of the quip and crank, and the retort courteous, “conceits, clinches, flashes, and whimzies,” and all the rest of the merry, motley company. Such utterances they were as undoubtedly appealed with success to their auditors and readers; but so thorough is the change which has stolen over our taste and feeling in these matters, that, in turning over the leaves of a volume of facetiæ, which was once read with avidity and delight, the impression now produced is a mingled one of surprise and disappointment.

The humorous literature, like the coinage, of a particular era, seems as if it were part of it; and it is in a vast majority of instances incapable of assimilation or transfer, as I shall endeavour to prove by a few casual selections from miscellanies which were in prime vogue and favour when James I. was on the throne, and those three renowned hostelries, the Mermaid, the Mitre, and the Devil, were flourishing centres of all that was cultivated and spiritual.

The serious Anecdote naturally took precedence of its jocular evolution or offspring; and indeed the latter, as is obvious enough, could hardly exist as a congener, till artificial and more or less complicated forms of social life had been developed. Even the entries in such books as Plutarch, where he narrates some incident in the biography of one of his heroes of a nature less grave than usual, and of a sufficiently playful or salient nature to have tempted the editors of the ancient collections of facetiæ to include them in their pages, cannot quite properly be said to be exceptions to the rule, that the Jest, as we understand it, was unknown to the ancients, although all civilised nations have in their turn possessed a keen sense of the laughable, and have devised methods of holding up to derision those who deviated from the prevailing standard of decorum, morality, or etiquette; or, again, who exposed themselves to personalities from special causes.

The selections from classic sources in the Merry Tales and Quick Answers, printed in the time of Henry VIII., have on this account a tendency to weight the book, and render it less attractive and readable at the present time than its famous contemporary, entitled A Hundred Merry Tales, which was prepared on a more judicious principle, and excluded all but tales of more or less current interest.

The favourite Greek and Roman authors with compilers of Ana have been at all periods Plutarch, Aulus Gellius, Lucian, Athenæus, and Diogenes Laertius. It is very rarely that Homer or Cicero is enlisted in their service by the caterers for popular entertainment; and even in the case of the Merry Tales and Quick Answers the stories about the ancients are appended at the end, as if they had been an afterthought or a stratagem for making out the copy.

There is a coincidence between Lucian and Athenæus in this respect,—that the jeux d’esprit, such as they are, in both writers occur almost exclusively in their remarks on Courtesans; and we ought to be the less surprised at such a circumstance, when we call to mind that the Greek hetairai were precisely the class which chiefly mixed with men of wit, and was most apt to yield subject-matter for pleasant sallies and epigrammatic clinches. Among the Romans, too, as we easily collect from the writings of their amatory poets and the lighter productions of Horace, the women of pleasure were accomplished and attractive; but no type exactly parallel to the Greek hetaira, as she is depicted in the pages of literary history, seems ever to have existed in Italy, and the nearest approach to her socially is perhaps the Parisian grisette, and, in point of culture and mental qualities, the gay female throng which haunted the court of Charles II. Both these, however, were, while presenting features of resemblance, essentially dissimilar from their prototype, who was a natural emanation of the climate, government, and moral atmosphere in which she was born and bred.

Notwithstanding the undoubted presence of a feeling for humour among the Greeks and other remote nationalities, one finds it possible to lay down the Deipnosophistæ and the Hetairæ with an unrelaxed countenance; and one arrives at the conclusion that all the best things have perished, or that much of the comic effect produced at table or on the stage was due to local costume and to evanescent gesture and pantomime,—just as the triumphs of Grimaldi and Liston among ourselves, and Richard Tarlton before them, depended so materially on personal mannerism and extempore grimace.