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--
_The Merry Tales of the Mad Men of Gotham._
_The Sackful of News._
_Jack of Dover his Quest of Inquiry for the Veriest Fool in
Christendom._
_Pasquil’s Jests, with Mother Bunch’s Merriments and a Brown Dozen of
Gulls._
One of the Puritan writers denounces the first article on our list as
one of the “witless devices” of the Elizabethan age; and he is very
near the truth. Of course, they are far older than that reign, and are
mentioned in the _Hundred Merry Tales_; nor does the small book which
holds them, contain them all, or represent the original date of their
introduction to the public notice in a printed shape. They belong to
the family of Noodledoms, Gaulardisms, and Gasconades, which seems to
have enjoyed such general acceptance for a great length of time both in
England and on the Continent; and while they are no doubt prodigiously
silly, I am quite serious in my assurance, that I should be very sorry
not to have them, and that I would liefer spare many literary memorials
than this and the other Fooleries, with which they are on terms of
relationship. Any one who chooses to refer to _Old English Jest-Books_,
1864, will understand my idiosyncracy, for there, at a much earlier
period of my life, I took considerable pains to illustrate both their
former acceptability and their to-day’s use. I have seen them described
as ineptitudes; but that was by such as lacked critical insight, and
left the mineral treasure ungotten. A superficial examination will not
do; the divining rod must be applied. We must break the surface, and
within are wonders surpassing those of the cave of Aladdin.
I would not have it to be supposed that these Gothamite and other
drolleries are altogether destitute of point or legibility; but for my
present purpose I have no space to linger over them, and hardly any
occasion, as they offer no original types. They are, for the most
part, _bis cocta_--an unconscious homage to preceding authors, with
the subsidiary features varied for the nonce. Even _Mother Bunch_ is
nothing more than Elinor Rumming revived with certain additions and
melodramatic embellishments; and _Jack of Dover_ offers little that is
novel to our consideration beyond the conception of a jury of penniless
poets--reaching, so far as it is possible to make out, the abnormal
number of twenty-eight--as a vehicle for a series of thin, vamped-up
jokes, in the majority of which we easily identify old friends, and not
improved by a change of clothes.
The present rarity of the bulk of this species of literature, and even
disappearance in not a few cases of works or editions which must once
have existed, are to be explained indeed by the insatiable hunger for
novelty in external presentment and the neglect of discarded favourites
quite as much as by the other more usual incidence of popularity.
When we cross over from an investigation of the older literature in
order to make a general survey of the modern school, it is like the
migration to a different climate. Something resembling an organic
revolution has occurred in this sphere of action and ingenuity.
New literary and theatrical agencies have been in operation. Great
political convulsions and the overthrow of dynasties have made their
secondary effects sensible. The Georges have turned everything
upside down. Grandfather’s jest-book is equally out of date with his
opinions and his costume. Joe Miller has won a victory more signal and
more enduring than Blenheim. He is the jocular laureate of the new
Hanoverian time, and of all time to come. His book, if he only knew it,
is to see as many editions as the _Pilgrim’s Progress_, and to have as
many readers as the Bible. He is to become in his way a colossus--a
cyclopædia in himself.
What more could the most aspiring solicit or desire?
Soberly speaking, the appearance of _Joe Miller’s Jests, or the Wit’s
Vademecum_, under fortuitous circumstances in the time of George II.,
marked the new era in this description of industry, and was an English
Hegira.
It was as if the jest-books of all prior epochs had been gathered
unexceptionally up, and burned by the common hangman, to let the
British community start afresh. So broad was the line of demarcation
between the Old _régime_ and the New; and it is not difficult to see
that this truly marvellous change is an evolution from novel phases and
developments of social life, and was just what was to be anticipated.
In this special way, perhaps, a more complete alteration had taken
place since the Tudor period than has taken place between the last
century and the present one; or, in other words, in the last hundred
and fifty years. We cannot believe that an ordinary reader of Henry
VIII.’s days would have had any relish or value for the fun of the
earlier half of the eighteenth century; but an ordinary reader of
the present time perfectly appreciates the anecdotes and humour--not
exactly of the primitive lean _fasciculus_ to which _Joe Miller_ was at
the outset limited, but of the wits who flourished under Walpole and
side by side with Pope.
This group of men, authors, actors, dandies, and _bons viveurs_--is
the true lineal ancestry of Sheridan and Matthews, Sydney Smith and
Jerrold; and, _mutatis mutandis_, the form, temper, and tone of the
school have suffered no material variation, since its first rise into
an immortal existence under the auspices of Miller within the genial
precinct of Clare Market.
It is upward of two decades since I launched the so-called “Shakespear
Jest-Books”; and, looking at them to-day, I cannot help saying that I
see in them a means supplied to the inquirer of forming a comparative
estimate between the ancient school and the early English on the one
hand, and the modern English on the other. The volumes form a selection
of types from 1526 to 1639, and embrace within their limits almost
every variety of jocular invention. Even in the miscellany which passed
under the name of _Tarlton’s Jests_ there had been commencing symptoms
of a change of fashion and requirement; and in Taylor the Water Poet’s
budget of _facetiæ_, which he christened his _Wit and Mirth_, 1629, we
perceive that the revolution has reached a farther stage. The strokes
of fun, which delighted the contemporary readers of the _Hundred
Merry Tales_, still preserved their place; but with them are mingled
anecdotes more redolent and characteristic of the Stuart period,
preparing us for those still later and still grosser publications which
marked the reign of the second Charles.
The _Hundred Merry Tales_, with which the series naturally and properly
opens, sets the example of plagiarism by adopting stories from still
earlier sources; but the obligations of the book to ready-made or
convertible material are relatively slight, and the best portions,
including the inimitable account of the “Miller that stole the nuts of
the tailor that stole a sheep,” and the dramatic story of the Maltman
of Colebrook, seem, so far as one has the means of judging, to be
founded on actual incidents.
The tales bear constant and unmistakable testimony of having been
composed by some one who possessed a keen sense of humour and a hearty
relish for the ludicrous; that they were from the hand of a literary
man and a scholar of no mean ability, is not to be reasonably doubted;
and if we were informed on credible authority that some of them offered
to us the fruits of the leisure of even so distinguished a public
character as Sir Thomas More, we should receive the ascription without
misgiving, and feel that there were among his graver works some which
we could better spare.
Not only the relationship subsisting between More and the Rastells,
but the peculiar tone and cast of the tales, long since induced me to
speculate on the possible concern of the author of _Utopia_ in their
production; and every one is aware that More was noted for his pleasant
and facetious conversation, although it may not be so generally
familiar that he signalised himself as a versifier, and as the writer
of the droll tale of the tipstaff who tried to pass himself off as a
friar. Yet of course there is not a tittle of direct evidence in this
direction; and, again, it is impossible to avoid the persuasion that
not indeed the mere fatherlessness of the work or absence of a name on
the title, but the complete silence of the biographers and literary
critics of and after the time on this point, tell against the idea.
On the other hand, the official position of More, in an even greater
measure than his religious tenets as a strict upholder of the Romish
hierarchy, made the open association of his name with an enterprise
so uncomplimentary to the Catholic priesthood eminently impolitic and
inexpedient either as actual part of the title or as mere matter of
hearsay.
But if it was not More himself, it was a person of congenial
temperament, of whose identity he must have had some shrewd hint from
the printer, and who had no taste for literary notoriety or for the
ordinary bookseller’s garnish in the way of seductive forefronts. For a
title-page more laconic and uncommercial was probably never bestowed on
a book of the kind.
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