Table-Talk and Jest Books

Samuel Butler’s Note-Books have now gone into another (popular) edition, issued by Mr. Fifield. I don’t know how large these editions are: if, as I fear, they run to less than fifty thousand copies apiece, Samuel Butler has not yet got his due. There is no other volume in the whole of his collected works to equal this selection from his note-books: you have here the quintessence of his wisdom, his taste, and his superb impudence. The book really belongs to the “table-talk” or “ana” class of books. Butler, that is to say, recorded his own table-talk. His principle was, he said, that if you wanted to record a thought you had to shoot it on the wing. If, therefore, he thought of or said anything especially illuminating or amusing, or heard any one else say anything of the sort, down it went. And it always went down as colloquially and freshly as if a Boswell had been present recording conversation with a faithful pen. Butler Boswellized himself. For Boswell’s Life, as has been remarked before, is the greatest collection of “ana” in the language. It consisted of Johnson’s table-talk strung on a biographical thread.

Personally I find it hard to draw the line between general table-talk and anecdotes told of certain persons: most collections include both. But such works, of whatever kind, consisting of detached scraps of great men’s wit, are an agreeable form of reading, and an old-established one. The Greeks possessed volumes of excerpts from people’s conversation, and some Latin wrote a book, now unfortunately lost, under the piquant title of De Jocis Ciceronis. The great age of such collections began, however, with the Renaissance, when Poggio the Florentine collected his “facetiæ.” My own extracts from Poggio are included in a German collection of 1603, all written in Latin, which gives also the “facetiæ” of other wits, notably of Nicodemus Frischlin of Balingen. This man was a German scholar of exceptional brilliance who finally, on being incarcerated for the last of many escapades, broke his neck trying to escape. We have no such University professors of classics now. “Ana” so-called begin with the Scaligerana, which gave the drastic conversation of the younger Scaliger as recorded by two of his disciples. The success of this led to a rush in France. Every one who had known an eminent man deceased rushed out with a volume of table-talk; Thuana, Perroniana, etc. The Sorberiana “sive excerpta ex ore Samuelis Sorbiere” was famous in its day, but I find it very dull. Much the best collection is Menagiana, “Bon Mots, Rencontres Agréables, Pensées Judicieuses, et Observations Curieuses de M. Ménage,” of which the second edition (my copy) is dated 1694-5. This man was a scholar, knew everybody and had a sharp tongue: he is extremely good reading, though, nowadays, very little read. The contents of both of these books are arranged (as is Butler’s) under subject-headings, in alphabetical order. The same order is observed in Selden’s Table-Talk, the next best book of the kind to Boswell in our tongue. It was published after Selden’s death by his private secretary, and is full of extraordinarily sensible and witty things. And, unlike many wits, Selden always possessed a sense of responsibility. He remarked himself (under heading “Wit,” as he did not realize) that

“He that lets fly all he knows and thinks may by chance be satyrically witty. Honesty sometimes keeps a man from growing rich, and civility from being witty.”

Few of the wits whose sayings are collected are so scrupulous. Our other classical example in the kind is Coleridge’s Table-Talk, which is full of fine criticism, funny stories, and good epigrams.

These collections shade off into the ordinary jest book. After all, there is no clear division between stories told by a dead man and stories collected and published by a living one, between stories about one man and stories about fifty different men. When the new learning was still new, men had a mania for collecting pointed anecdotes about the eminent. The fattest book of the kind I know is Casper Ens’s Epidorpidum, published at Cologne in the early seventeenth century. It is full of the remarks of Alexander to Diogenes and Pope Innocent to St. Vitus and the repartees of King Pyrrhus of Epirus to a recalcitrant phalanx. Right on into the eighteenth century works with titles like Elite de Bon-Mots, and full of such historical personages, were popular on the Continent. English jest books were perhaps more local and contemporary in their references. Our eighteenth-century ancestors were addicted to anecdotes about Mr. Quin and Mr. Foote and what the Duke of Wharton said to the Bishop. In our own time the larger, if not the smaller, public still shows some demand for collections of anecdotes of this sort: and popular weeklies of the Answers and Tit-Bits type usually seem to find it desirable to print columns of stories about Henry Irving, Mr. Gladstone, and such people. But it is a long way from Tit-Bits to Samuel Butler: which shows where one may land oneself if one does not know where to draw a firm line when shading-off is apparently gradual. I cannot review Butler at this time of day; but there are very few books existing which contain more sense to the square inch than this. Though the worst of his books is good reading, the Note-Books is as certainly his finest book as Boswell’s Johnson is the finest of Johnson’s.