AFFILIATION OF STORIES--PARALLEL ILLUSTRATIONS--THE LITERARY
CLUB--REYNOLDS, JOHNSON, AND GARRICK--TWO TUDOR JEST-BOOKS--EUROPEAN
GRAFTS ON ORIENTAL ORIGINALS--MARTIN ELGINBROD--PARSON HOBART--THE
“BRAVO OF VENICE.”
But it must not be supposed that those who have interested themselves
in the manufacture of these agreeable diversions made any rule of
waiting for the objects of appropriation to grow old. The account of
Dr. Parr mistaking his saturated wig, as it dried at the fire, for
_rothe gothe_, was equally narrated and believed of his contemporary
Dr. Farmer; and that about Bishop Watson and the Old Cock at Windermere
is nothing more than a re-issue, with a change in the bill, of the
Duke of Cumberland and the Original Old Grey Ass. It demanded in
neither case the possession of archæological insight to detect the
double paternity; for the two versions and the two men were living
nearly abreast.
Where a certain type is before the world as a model, it seldom fails
to multiply itself with trivial variations. Take, for example, three
articles from sources dated between 1640 and 1790; the same thing, too,
is recorded of Sydney Smith:--
“‘That fellow,’ “A man being “A man was
said Cyrano de rallied by Louis asked by his
Bergerac to a XIV. on his friend when
friend, ‘is always bulk, which the he last saw
in one’s King told him his jolly comrade
way, and always had increased ----?
insolent. The from want of ‘Oh,’ said he,
dog is conscious exercise, ‘Ah, ‘I called on
that he is so fat sir,’ said he, him yesterday
that it would ‘what would at his lodgings,
take an honest your Majesty and there
man more than have me do? I found him
a day to give I have already sitting all
him a thorough walked three round a table
beating.’” times round the by himself.’”
Duc D’Aumont
this morning.’”
The affinity between these is unmistakable. The same train of thought
may produce the same fruit with an absolute freedom from indebtedness.
It is a rather interesting problem, of which the solution will,
perhaps, never be forthcoming. A second illustration is admissible,
shewing the same process at work at a different angle:--
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. NINETEENTH CENTURY.
“Sheridan told his “When Sydney
son that he thought Smith’s physician
it was high time for (Abernethy) told him
him to take a wife. that he ought to take
‘_Whose_ wife shall I exercise on an empty
take, sir?’ was the stomach, he inquired,
inquiry.” ‘upon whose?’”[1]
[1] There can be no doubt that the faulty or varying versions of
stories of modern origin are often ascribable to the neglect of
immediate registration, and the subsequent oral or written repetition
from memory.
It is not in the least degree a ground for astonishment, that _jeux
d’esprit_ appertaining to old times have descended to our own in a
decomposed or mutilated condition, when we find such fugitive trifles
connected with men, who were all but our contemporaries, already
parting with the bloom of the mint. Two of the biographers of Charles
Lamb offer to public consideration simultaneously a _mot_ from his
lips, in terms beginning to be fairly devious, but which, when a
few more years have run out, will by possibility have ceased to be
recognisable by the author. _Ecce!_
“MR. PROCTER. “MR. FITZGERALD.
“An old lady, fond of “A lady once bored
her dissenting minister, him a good deal. ‘Such
wearied Lamb by the a charming man! I know
length of his praises. ‘I him! Bless him! I know
speak, because I _know_ him!’ To her Charles, wearied
him well,’ said she. with repetition of this
‘Well, I don’t,’ replied encomium,--‘Well, I
Lamb, ‘I don’t; but don’t; but _damn him
damn him at a venture.’” at a hazard_.’”
The two records are approximately similar; yet the discrepancies are
rather serious, taking into calculation the nearness of Lamb to us and
to the literary gentlemen who have made it their business to chronicle
his good sayings. The editorial setting has somewhat overlaid the
mounted jewel.
None of our Shakespearian students has hitherto addressed himself to
the special task of tracing to, their sources the few pieces of gossip
about the poet, save, perhaps, the deer-stealing episode. The _Richard
III. and William the Conqueror_ story, in which Burbage and Shakespear
are made to figure, is recorded by Manningham in his Elizabethan
Diary, and no earlier analogue has fallen in my way. The scandal about
Davenant is another item of the same class, which we are almost ashamed
to find ourselves cherishing, even though it be, as it were, _formâ
pauperis_, from sheer lack of better matter. It seems lamentable that,
while the anecdote-hunter was on the trail, he did not appropriate, for
the benefit, instruction and delight of every intelligent individual
coming after him, some particulars of Shakespear’s private and literary
life, once so easy of access, now so irretrievably lost! How many
thousand biographies of all kinds of nonentities might not be exchanged
for an account of Shakespear by an educated contemporary!
Malone refers to the foundation of the Literary Club and to a little
episode about Garrick and Johnson in connection with that event:--
“Not very long after the institution of the Club,” he says, “Sir J.
Reynolds was speaking of it to Garrick. ‘I like it much,’ says he;
‘I think I’ll be of you.’ When Sir J. Reynolds mentioned this to Dr.
Johnson, he was much displeased at the actor’s conceit. ‘He’ll be of
us!’ says Johnson; ‘how does he know we will permit him? The first
duke in England has no right to hold such language.’ However, when
Garrick was regularly proposed, some time afterwards, Johnson warmly
supported him....”
“On the former part of this story,” adds Malone, “it probably was
that Sir John Hawkins grounded his account that Garrick never was of
the Literary Club, and that Johnson said he never ought to be of it.
And thus it is that this stupid biographer, and the more flippant
and malicious Mrs. Piozzi, have miscoloured and misrepresented every
anecdote that they have pretended to tell of Dr. Johnson.”
The reader does not require to have the story of Raleigh, questioning
the cause of some disturbance under his window in the Tower, retold.
Tradition is too indispensable to be cut away, yet too treacherous to
believe without misgiving or without some convergence of proof. I have
been turning over the pages of the _Hundred Merry Tales_ and the _Merry
Tales and Quick Answers_ in quest of a few specimens of what might be
adduced and regarded as original matter, and how thin is my harvest!
Yet, onerous as are the obligations even of these ancient collections,
the debt, it must be owned, is of a character and degree differing
very essentially from that under which their successors lie to them
again. For where there is loan or trespass, it is almost exclusively
from obscure foreign sources unknown to the generality of readers, and
betwixt we certainly get many an enjoyable bit of downright home-grown
merriment or rascality. Among these I may be permitted to commend to
attention the tales “Of the miller that stole the nuts of the tailor,
that stole a sheep,” a piece of masterly structure, “Of the fat woman
that sold fruit,” “Of the courtier that bad the boy hold his horse,”
“Of him that healed frantic men,” which is cited both by Sir John
Harington and Robert Burton, and “Of the two young men that rode to
Walsingham.” These, and a dozen more scattered over the two books, have
an insular air, although they may not be without their continental
analogues. They look as if they had first seen the light on British
ground, circumscribed by the waves which wash our cliffs; but anyhow
they in their turn formed part of the general stock-in-trade, out of
which a totally distinct class of men from More and Heywood here,
and Erasmus abroad, carried on for ever and for ever the business of
amusing a not very fastidious and not very critical constituency.
The gratification at meeting once in a way with an anecdote in its
pure and pristine state, is like the feeling when one secures an old
picture with which the cleaner has not tampered, or a coin exempt from
_tooling_ and corrosion.
There is, comparatively speaking, a handsome residuum after all
deductions of genuine English _Ana_ in the two Tudor books, in which
I elsewhere intimated a suspicion that Sir Thomas More and John
Heywood had a hand; and there are also a few exceptions to the almost
universal rule, that the old jest is by nature intractable--that is to
say, archaic--not merely in language and orthography, but in temper,
structure and blood. If one arranges in parallel columns the original
text of the greater number, or rather the mass, of these relations, and
a modern version, the alteration is merely external. The costume and
tone in both are alike obsolete. Conspicuous and valuable illustrations
of the contrary occur, however, in No. 7 and No. 48 of the _Hundred
Merry Tales_, and No. 14 of the companion book. Nothing can be less
dependent upon time than the account “Of the friar that told the three
children’s fortunes”: if it is out of date, Boccaccio and Chaucer
are; and in that other, “Of the chaplain, that said Our Lady’s matins
a-bed,” there is a piquancy worthy of Sydney Smith.
Items are frequently inserted in jest-books by the editors or
collectors without the most distant suspicion of their veritable
origin and character; and it also happens to this sort of literary
composition, as it is known to do to engravings, that they exist in
various stages of recension and in various degrees of divergence from
their _prima stamina_.
The process of affiliation, as I venture to call it, is necessarily
cognate to that of corruption. The emigrant tale, whether from one
part of the world, or from one book, to another, is bound to undergo
a change of garb or one in the _dramatis personæ_. I shall proceed to
exemplify this:--
“In a village of Picardy, after a long sickness, a farmer’s wife
fell into a lethargy. Her husband was willing, good man, to believe
her out of pain; and so, according to the custom of that country,
she was wrapped in a sheet and carried out to be buried. But, as ill
luck would have it, the bearers carried her so near a hedge, that the
thorns pierced the sheet and waked the woman from her trance. Some
years after, she died in reality; and as the funeral passed along,
the husband would every now and then call out, ‘Not too near the
hedge, not too near the hedge, neighbours.’”
This is not the version of the incident usually current, for that
substitutes a hearse for the bearers, a coffin for the sheet, and
a tree against which the carriage was run, overturning the supposed
corpse, and causing her to revive.
But, first removing this latter superincumbent _stratum_, or ignoring
it, let us examine the particulars, as I have just printed them. Have
we not before us a mode of sepulture unknown to Western Europe in the
conveyance of the woman to her grave simply enveloped in a cloth? That
is, of course, Mohammedan, and is precisely the method pursued in India
by the disciples of that creed at the present moment.
One doubt begets another; and the presence of a hedge appears to betray
the revising touch of one of my own countrymen, as it is so infinitely
more characteristic of the narrow gorge-like lanes of rural England
than of the route which a similar procession would be likely to have
followed on the other side of the Channel.
So it seems as if we had before us an Oriental tradition or invention,
first introduced into French literature at a period when the languages
and learning of the East were more cultivated in that country than
among ourselves, and finally Anglicised, first with the hedge, and
secondly with the bearers and the coffin, as novel and improving
ingredients.
But the whimsical anecdote of Martin Elginbrod perhaps even more
strikingly exhibits the longevity of certain tales or apologues, the
curious phases through which they pass, and the need of approaching
them, for their full appreciation, in a critical temper. Here we
have, for instance, what appears superficially to be a mere piece of
grotesque incongruity and irreverence on the part of a sober-minded
Caledonian, who figures as the composer of his own epitaph:--
“Here lie I, Martin Elginbrod:
Have mercy on my saul, Lord God!
As I wad do, were I Lord God,
And ye were Martin Elginbrod,”
which constitutes at first sight a libel on parity of reasoning and
the law of proportion, and at the same time a piece of speculative
licence unusual among the disciples of the Kirk; but on closer scrutiny
the lines present to us perhaps the most successful attempt ever
made in the way of a revival. The inscription itself is probably an
immediate transfer from the Dutch, in which language it occurs _mutato
nomine_; but the idea was mooted three thousand years ago in the sacred
books of the Hindoos. In its modern dress the notion is, of course, a
pure extravagance; but such an inversion of established doctrine and
belief in the Vedas becomes less startling, when we reflect that the
theological system there developed is of a less sublime and immutable
type than our own, and does not so entirely forbid this hypothetical or
imaginative change of relationship.
These transmitted relics of Elginbrod and of the coffin seem to shew in
a pronounced manner how a sentiment or idea which is implanted in our
very nature is susceptible of reproduction and adaptation without an
obvious betrayal of its original appurtenance to former ages and other
creeds.
The story in _Merry Tales and Quick Answers_ of the woman who lifted
up her nether garments to conceal her head has the air of having
voyaged from Egypt or some other Oriental country, where it would be
the instinct of any female, even at the present day, to do exactly the
same thing at all risks, the exposure of the face being contrary to
religious canons. The author of the _Englishwoman in Egypt_ relates an
anecdote to this point.
Shakespear’s witty notion of the black flea on Bardolph’s red nose, to
which the modern anecdote of Sambo and the mosquito appears to be under
obligations, is circumscribed by the introduction of the doctrine of
eternal punishment as to date. I have thought that the same idea might
have occurred to any one philosophically contemplating the dark specks
in a blazing coal fire.
The _fons et origo_ of witticisms is often very difficult to
reach--nearly as much so as the source of the Nile. In one of his
Letters, Charles Lamb quotes, as a good saying of Coleridge, the joke,
“That summer has set in with its usual severity.” The curious point is
that Byron had made the same facetious remark just before; but Lamb
and he belonged to different sets. It matters little, however, for
Walpole had anticipated them both; and the present _mot_ appears to
be the Joseph Miller query, “When did you ever see such a winter?” To
which a wag retorts, “Last summer.”
An almost exact parallel to this is found in the comparison by
Coleridge of the pure and undefilable mind of Charles Lamb to
“moonshine which shines on a dunghill, and takes no pollution.” In
the _Life of St. Agnes_, by Daniel Pratt, 1677, the saint is made to
liken God to the _sun_, shining on a dunghill without being defiled;
and in the _Lives of the Philosophers_, by Diogenes Laertius, Diogenes
the Cynic is made to employ the same figure of speech. Whence did _he_
borrow it?
Another singular case of affiliation presents itself to our notice
in the sermon preached before thieves by Parson Hobart, to whom his
uncustomary congregation, after he had done what they required to their
satisfaction, returned the money whereof they had relieved him on the
road, adding six shillings and eightpence as a fee for the discourse.
This occurs in a tract of the time of Charles I., which bears the
following quaint title:--“Forced Divinity, Or Two Sermons preached by
the Compulsion of two Sorts of Sinners, viz. Drunkards & Thieves. The
one by Certain Ale-Bibbers, who having heard a Minister teach much
against Drinking, afterwards met with him, and compelled him to make a
Sermon upon one word. The second, by a Crew of Thieves, who after they
had robbed a Minister, forced him to make a Sermon in Praise of their
Profession, and when he had done, Returned his Money, and Six Shillings
Eightpence for his Sermon.”
Now, this very tale about Parson Hobart is in an early MS. printed
in _Reliquiæ Antiquæ_, and is in fact a mere resuscitation for the
nonce, which is made additionally manifest from the sum named as the
gratuity--six and eightpence or a noble, a species of currency which
had gone out of use in the seventeenth century; so that, had we not
known that the story was far older than it purports to be in the
tract above quoted, there is a kind of internal clue to its superior
antiquity--one considerable enough, but insignificant when we measure
it against the distance between Martin Elginbrod and the Vedas.
Into certain works of fiction, not professedly or specifically jocular,
the humorous side or element has been unwittingly introduced by the
authors in connection with the treatment of their topics; and in one
or two cases at least it is so much so, that the whole production
amounts to little better than an elaborate and tedious jest. The
_Bravo of Venice_, by Monk Lewis, to which I allude elsewhere, is, by
way of example, from first to last a solemn absurdity. It purports to
narrate a series of extraordinary adventures in the city by an Italian
prince in disguise; and Lewis, who seems to have been exhaustively
ignorant of the institutions, habits, and costume of the Republic,
paints with the utmost nonchalance a succession of scenes in which
his hero is the central figure, and not one of which could have
possibly occurred under the strict and vigilant oligarchical government
ruling there supreme--an administrative machinery so thorough and
so omnipresent, that no one could raise a finger or utter a sound
unobserved and unreported. Yet in this serio-comic romance the Bravo
performs a variety of thrilling and marvellous exploits, bespeaking
the existence of an executive of the loosest type, with an _éclat_ and
an impunity possible only in a melodramatic performance or a South
American democracy. He even represents to us, in one of his theatrical
tableaux, the lovely Rosabella of Corfu, the Doge’s own niece, seated
alone in an arbour attached to some public gardens, and as rescued
from assassination by the Bravo, who is discovered at the last moment,
not by the Venetian officials, but his own act, to be somebody totally
different from the character which he had originally assumed. It is
not too much to say that on that soil such a mystery would not have
outlived one round of the clock.
[Illustration]