ORIGIN OF THIS CLASS OF LITERATURE, AND ITS DEPENDENCE ON THE
CONDITIONS OF SOCIETY--JESTS BEFORE JEST-BOOKS--INFLUENCE OF THE
ARTS OF WRITING AND PRINTING LONG SUBSEQUENT TO THE INTRODUCTION OF
CARICATURE AND HUMOUR.
The earliest form or phase of the JEST was the product of an illiterate
age. A knowledge of the art of writing was a discovery long subsequent
to the rise of a taste for the expression of the laughable, for the
sake either of amusement or of ridicule. The primitive authors of jokes
were men who employed, not the pen, but the chisel and the brush; and
the most venerable existing specimens of this branch of human ingenuity
belong to art, not to literature; and to Egypt, the cradle and nursery
of art.
In his admirable _History of Caricature and Grotesque_, 1865, Wright
has accumulated such an immense body of information on this most
interesting subject of inquiry that, so far as it goes, it will
supersede the necessity for traversing the ground again. He has traced
with singular industry and scholarship the growth and development of
the jocular sentiment in all its varied points of view, from its first
infancy among the Egyptians, through the Greeks and Romans, to modern
times and our own country.
For while during centuries the feeling for the grotesque or absurd,
together with the almost inborn propensity for the exposure of foibles
and vices in an enemy, a rival, or an obnoxious public character,
had its outlets only through the agency of art, and the sculptor or
draughtsman was the sole resource of those who loved caricature and
farce, the introduction of caligraphy by no means diminished the
call for the graphic delineators of comedy and satire. The English
artists of the Georgian epoch were equally prolific and unsparing;
and even now, when all the civilised communities of the world have
their printing presses without number at command, the pencil remains a
favourite vehicle for the exhibition of humorous or unpopular traits
in distinguished persons of the day, and among many connoisseurs and
students a volume of Gillray or Rowlandson is a more welcome object of
attention or notice than a printed record.
The engraving has in all ages enjoyed over its literary counterpart or
equivalent the great advantage, that it immediately attracts the eye,
and enables one to embrace every point of view and the whole story
at a glance; whereas in the other case the same effect is scarcely
produced on the mind by many pages of letterpress or the most elaborate
inscription on metal or stone. The spectator is in fact a far older
student than the reader or the listener to a reading, or than the
audience of the minstrel of yore. The organs of sight have been the
direct media through which innumerable generations of mankind have
received all the knowledge and culture which they ever possessed; and
we perceive at the present moment how far the cheap print and the gay
shop-window go to supply such Englishmen of the nineteenth century as
have small leisure and perhaps equally small inclination for books with
notions of current sentiments and transactions.
The manuscript or printed page has not a co-ordinate power with the
mural sketch or other pictorial representation, with or without its
adjunct of hyperbole and broad colouring, in an instantaneous appeal
to the passions, or to the sense of the ridiculous, or, again, to the
public instinct of wrong. The press bears its part; but whatever its
development in the future may prove to be, it will never completely
obliterate the demand and admiration for the labours of the graphic
illustrator, whose origin is positively lost in antiquity, and whose
pursuit was, doubtless, among the subjects of the Rameses dynasty
themselves-an accomplishment derived from Oriental (possibly Turanian)
instructors; for the most archaic published examples manifest a
tolerable intimacy with design and the combination of effect, as well
as a capability of awakening hilarious sensations by the burlesque
perversion of serious matters.
* * * * *
The joke-wright and the anecdote-monger may be treated as two
exceptionally fortunate professional persons, who enter the field of
their labours and researches with a light heart and an empty budget.
Their accumulation of stock is immense. The capital of all their
ancestors becomes their fee simple _ex officio_. There need be among
them no struggling beginners, no modest apprenticeship; and all that
is expected at their hands is a certain proficiency in conveyancing,
and the addition, before they and the world bid each other farewell,
of a donation or two to the bank for the benefit of the public and of
ensuing freeholders for evermore.
The introduction of typography, in jocular as in all other branches
of literature, was instrumental in accomplishing a transition from
oral delivery to the printed collection. In lieu of the minstrel and
the _bordeur_, such sections of the public as could read might have
in their closets and window-recesses garlands of facetiæ in prose or
verse. The press slowly superseded the reciter and the professional
buffoon with his budget of witticisms and tales. But the process was
of course a very gradual one, so long as the diffusion of culture
remained imperfect and partial; and for a great length of time the
old-world system of reading from the MS., or repeating _extempore_ to
an audience, and of the passage of jests and tales from mouth to mouth,
continued more or less to flourish, just as it does in the form of a
revival, among certain classes of the modern English community, who
seem to do from choice what their forerunners did from need.
A vein of exaggeration, which is apt to characterise anecdotes as they
are repeated from mouth to mouth, or transferred from one book to
another, resolves itself into mere innocuous caricature or gasconade,
where the plot is of a comic turn; but where a certain indelicacy or
double sense accompanies the original version, the new-renderer has it
in his power to pander to the prevailing taste by making a gross story
immeasurably more exceptionable, either by simple intensification or by
connecting incidents and expressions with persons to whom they never in
point of fact belonged.
Now, this I take to be very much the case with the _Jests of Scogin_,
a compilation of the Tudor era by a doctor, as it is said, who was
guilty of writing a fair amount of matter in a similar vein, but who,
if these Jests were truly of his composition, shewed by his _Book of
the Introduction of Knowledge_, and one or two other works, that he was
capable of something higher. I refer to Doctor Andrew Borde, a learned
and ingenious man, as we may perceive, but far from being fastidious
in his writings, or (which is worse) in ascribing to the most exalted
characters of an antecedent epoch a tolerance of the most outrageous
and vulgar buffoonery.
It is exceedingly likely that the court of the susceptible and
profligate Edward IV., to which Scogin is supposed to have resorted,
was a scene of coarse simplicity and no model of decorum; and so late
down as the reign of George II. the great ladies permitted themselves
a licence in speech, which prevented the editor of _Maloniana_ from
printing the whole of the MS. But so far as the latter circumstance
goes, these were mostly passages _inter se_ (so to speak); and it
remains incredible, that some of the adventures with which Scogin is
reported to have met within the very precincts of the palace, can have
actually happened under the eyes of the queen and her attendants.
Dr. Borde, I apprehend in fact, has committed the impropriety of
transferring to another age the manners of his own, which was so far
venial enough, and consonant with dramatic usage; but he has most
unwarrantably taken some of his characters from a sphere of life in
which the enactment of such low pranks would hardly have been suffered.
To cast aspersions on the representatives of an extinct dynasty,
however, was a tolerably safe game. _The Jests of Scogin_ had no
political significance; and the occasional reflections on the clergy
were not calculated to give serious offence in influential quarters,
or to Henry VIII. himself, just at the juncture when the Reformation
was imminent. Not in the pages of Borde alone, but throughout the
literature of the later part of Henry’s reign, sly strokes at the
doomed papal hierarchy were eyed with evident indulgence and favour.
Borde knew his ground and his customers: had his satire been levelled
at the Government in an infinitely milder and more covert way, the
stake or the block would have been his portion; had his book been
published twenty years sooner, his strictures on the Church would
scarcely have been prudent; but he confined his pen, where he rose
above a humble social level, to names which were little more than
historical, and to an institution whose days were numbered.
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