Part 7

On another occasion, Nasur, having succeeded so well with his figs, acknowledged the clemency of Timour, by presenting him with a few fresh gherkins, for the great warrior’s supper. The chief ordered him a reward of ten gold crowns, and Nasur went home rejoiced. When the season came that other gherkins had grown into cucumbers, Nasur, expecting commensurate recompense, carried to the residence of Timour a basket full of the refreshing vegetable. The door-keeper, however, refused to allow him to pass until he had agreed to give him half the reward that might be paid to Nasur by order of the chief. It happened that the latter was “not i’ the vein,” and instead of commanding a recompense of gold crowns, he sentenced the unfortunate gift-bearer to receive a hundred blows from the stick. Nasur took fifty patiently; but _then_ he cried to the unpleasant official to hold his hand; and he explained how the other half of the acknowledgment belonged to the door-keeper. Timour swore that the stipulation should be observed, and the remaining half-hundred blows were paid where they were justly due.

A whole Encyclopædia might be written of the sayings and doings of the Eastern “simpletons,” alone. My space is too limited to allow of my doing much more than to offer a few illustrations; but, to those who have much curiosity in the matter, and who may not be disinclined to spend whole hours with a single class of the Oriental Fools, I recommend the well-known book, which contains the birth, parentage, and education, life, character, and behaviour, lively sayings, last dying speech and confession of the Gooroo Noodle. From that tempting chronicle, I return to the “Toorke” jester, with the remark that, great as was his freedom of speech, it was not every witty fellow at Court who was so licensed. The courtier who ventured to take a liberty with a Turkish potentate was as uncertain, as to the effect, as the Roman wits were when bold enough to joke with the Emperor. Selim, the son of Bajazet, was one with whom the most favoured of his followers could not with impunity venture on freedom of speech. When engaged on his Egyptian expedition, one of his officials the most closely attached to his person, hazarded the question as to when his Majesty expected to be at Cairo. “_We_ shall be there,” said Selim, “when it may please God. As for thy arrival there, it rather pleases me that thou shalt stay here.” And therewith, on a sign from the Sultan, the unlucky querist was instantly put to death.

Murad the Third, though as savage by nature as Selim, could take a joke better than his predecessor could a simple question. There was one thing, however, which he could _not_ tolerate--tobacco; the use of which he punished with death. But among the few members of his court was a man renowned for his wit, and for his power of raising the spirits of the Sultan, even when these had been depressed by a three days’ fit of drunkenness. Now this court-wit loved smoking, and was resolved, not only to have his pipe, but to escape the penalty of death attached to the enjoyment of it. Accordingly, he caused a deep pit to be dug in his tent, and when he desired to give himself up to his dearest indulgence, he would descend into it, sitting there concealed by a sieve-like construction drawn over the top, and lightly covered with turf. One evening, Murad became sagacious of the hookah from afar, and, tracing the offender to the very pit in which he was quietly smoking, threatened him with instant death. The offender, however, coolly thrusting his head upward, as he provokingly drew another mouthful of reeking luxury, exclaimed, “Go to, thou son of a bond-woman! Thy edicts extend _over_ the earth, certainly; but they do not extend under it.” “Take thy life for thy joke,” said Murad, laughing and coughing,--the first at the jest, and the second at the odour and vapour, which he detested,--“I only wish thy pipe were as enjoyable as thy wit.”

Many samples of this sort I could continue to place before my readers; but, having regard to the patience of those who have so often borne patiently with me, I will only trace the Eastern jester down to modern times. Till after the commencement of the present century, the courts of the Hospodars of Moldavia and Wallachia were never without the mirthful official. The latter was usually an Armenian. Indeed, there were, ordinarily, several at each court. Their duty was to amuse their lord when he was at table, by every means in their power, by strange remarks, by droll stories, or by burlesques more or less extravagant. In processions, they walked before their masters, and carried long staves covered with silver bells. Since they fell into disuse, the Gipsies succeeded to the exercise of one part of their office, and these are admitted to the palaces of the great, on particular festivals, to amuse their illustrious hearers with national and comic songs.

From a very early period, the public and private buffoons of the East seem to have been selected from among the Armenians. Joinville introduces to us some very sprightly professionals of this sort, in his ‘History of St. Louis.’ “There came with the Prince,” he says, “three minstrels from Armenia (trois ménestriers de la Grande Hyrménie). They carried three horns, and when they began to perform on them, you might have taken the sound for that of swans. They produced the softest melody....” He then informs us how, having fulfilled their office of minstrels, they performed that of buffoons, for the amusement of the illustrious personages present. “They made three marvellous leaps (_sauts_); ... a cloth (_touaille_) being placed beneath their feet, they threw a somersault upon it, without any spring, and two of them leaped in this way, head backwards.”

The old fashion in the East did not altogether expire till a very recent period, for we find a jester at the court of the father of the present Sultan of Turkey. It was said of some eminent individual, that he had made two centuries illustrious; and something like it may be said of this oriental jester, who flourished at the court of Constantinople at the close of the last, and above a quarter of the present century. In 1836 died Abdi Bey, who, for nearly half a century previous, had been the favourite jester of successive Sultans. He worked hard and reaped a large fortune. In the early part of his career, his masters treated him as a mere brutish buffoon, on whom they might play any trick. Sometimes they set him off in a gallop, mounted on a giraffe, or tumbled him headlong into a pond, to the danger of his life. The late Sultan Mahmoud had no stomach for such sorry jokes, and Abdi Bey devoted his capacity to keep his patron in good spirits by amusing him with smart sayings and pleasant stories. He must have been an incomparable fool in his time, or his masters must have been greater fools than he, for out of their imperial bounty, he contrived to save £150,000, which he left to his grateful and deeply-resigned heirs. It was nearly as much as the late Mr. Greenough made by the manufacture of lozenges--“ten a penny!”

Abdi Bey has been called the last of the household buffoons. But this is not the case; for though the official fool has disappeared from Court, he is still to be found attached to families, or heads of families. We even meet with this rather impudent than merry fellow in the household of Christian Patriarchs. Only a few years ago, when the Nestorian Patriarch was flying, with a large number of his followers, from their would-be murderers in the mountains, they found refuge at Mosul, in the houses of the English Consul and the Rev. Mr. Fletcher. The latter gentleman, in his ‘Notes from Nineveh,’ so describes his reverence’s buffoon as to induce us to believe that to have much to do with him was really “no joke at all.” “My new guests,” he says, “were very orderly in their manners, though wild in their appearance. Only one decided quarrel broke out among them during their abode with me; and this was occasioned by a half-crazy old man who served the Patriarch in the double capacity of a domestic and buffoon. This worthy was addicted, like many of his countrymen, to the vice of intoxication; and having on one occasion partaken rather freely of the juice of the grape, he grew riotous, and addressed a reproachful epithet to one of his companions. The fiery nature of the mountaineer was excited, and he retorted in no complimentary terms. The old buffoon drew his dagger, and made a rush at his antagonist, who retreated into an inner apartment and shut the door. Nothing could equal the rage of old Yohanan at being thus baulked of his vengeance. Two or three times he burst from those who were restraining him, and drove his knife into the hard wood of the door. At length he was quieted, and after sleeping-off his drunkenness, appeared the next morning with a sober and abashed countenance.” I suppose old Yohanan was past being amusing, for we are subsequently told, that to raise the drooping spirits of the Patriarch, an itinerant Italian juggler was hired. At _his_ tricks and witticisms the pious head of the Nestorian Church forgot the slaughter of his friends and the devastation of their and his homesteads. The saintly and sympathetic man laughed till he could hardly sit upright on his cushions, and only ceased then because some wonderful stroke of the juggler’s art induced him suddenly to suspect that such marvellous proficiency was only an inspiration of the devil.

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By way of supplement to this Chapter, I will add a few short illustrations of the jester at other barbarous courts than those of the East;--and first, of “that beyond the Atlantic.”

When Cortez first visited the court of Montezuma, he found there various instances of high civilization:--among others, light ladies, strong drinks, court fools, and a spirit of infidelity against the established church, inspired by an influence called the “Rational Owl.” The Aztec monarch resembled Heliogabalus in one respect;--“he had a museum,” says Brantz Mayer, in his excellent work, ‘Mexico, Aztec, Spanish, and Republican,’ “in which, with an oddity of taste unparalleled in history, there had been collected a vast number of human monsters, cripples, dwarfs, albinos, and other freaks and caprices of nature.” Bernal Diaz saw the monarch at dinner, and among the incidents recorded by the old Spaniard, is, that, “at different intervals during the time of dinner, there entered certain Indians, hump-backed, very deformed and ugly, who played tricks of buffoonery; and others, who they said were jesters.” The fashion of maintaining the latter was followed by the nobles. “The principal men,” says Acoste, quoted by Prescott, “had also buffoons and jugglers in their service, who amused them, and astonished the Spaniards by their feats of dexterity and strength.”

Montezuma patronized rather the witty buffoons than the skilful jugglers. “Indeed, he used to say, that more instruction was to be gathered from them than from wiser men, for they dared to tell the truth.” Prescott adds in a note, founded on Clavigero, that “the Aztec mountebanks had such repute, that Cortez sent two of them to Rome, to amuse his Holiness, Clement VII.” This was only an exchange of personages of similar profession, for the European official house fool had already been imported into America. In 1519, at St. Jago, when Velasquez the governor was beginning to be suspicious of the designs of Cortez to supplant him, the two great men were walking together towards the port. As they passed on, the fool of the former called aloud, “Have a care, Master Velasquez, or we shall have to go a-hunting, some day or other, after this same captain of ours.” “Do you hear what the rogue says?” exclaimed the Governor to his companion. “Do not heed him,” said Cortez, “he is a saucy knave, and deserves a good whipping.” The hint of the fool, however, heightened the suspicions of his master; but how the latter was too slow of wit and action to profit thereby, is known to all who have read the graphic pages which tell of the conquest of Mexico.

But neither Aztec nor Spanish monarch rivalled their less civilized brother of Monomotapa in this peculiar department of his household. Gallienus alone deserves to be mentioned, in this respect, with the African potentate, who never stirred abroad with less than five hundred official fools in his vast and noisy retinue!

There were, as late as the last century, and there probably still linger on the Gold Coast, traditions of the mythological jester of Africa, Nanni, son of the Spider. His busy parent had spun all the human race from the thread of his bowels, and found no gratitude from the living produce of his labours. The Fetis seduced all creation to sin, and the Spider bethought him how to annoy the Fetis. With what little material he had left, he spun the last man, and educated him at his own paternal feet, on the edge of the domestic web. The tricks the father taught his boy were long the delight of polished and perspiring African tribes. Nanni was the ebony Owlglas of the land of Ham. He served the Fetis, but only as Jocrisse did his master, to his great vexation. Was Nanni commissioned to provide a chicken for dinner, he knew how, after devouring the bird himself, to replace bones and skin, and place it before his employer, the very model of a plump pullet. Was an egg ordered for breakfast, Nanni first sucked out the contents through a minute orifice, and filled up the shell with the finest sand. Nanni, too, was a married man, with numberless children, and more wives than “that Sardanapalus of Snobs,” Brigham Young. In a time of scarcity, when even a bean was worth more than its weight in gold, the hungry wives and offspring of Nanni drove him forth by their importunity, to seek food. He came upon a company of boys and girls who had been left by their father in charge of a quantity of beans, to dry and turn them in the air. Nanni leaped in among them, made them shriek with laughter at his jokes, and stamp with delight at his dancing. The latter exercise he concluded by rolling his well-oiled body among the beans, with which, sticking to him as he rose, he made off, after bidding the children look at his hands, to see that he carried nothing away with him. By repeating this feat, he nourished his household for days; and the alarmed owner of the precious vegetables could not account for their diminution from any account rendered by the young guardians. But detecting Nanni in the fact, the owner chopped off both his hands, as he lay rolling his greased body among the beans. The wit of the national jester had been grievously at fault, and his household becoming more hungry and angry than ever, his wives broke into open revolt, and eloped in a body, in search of another mate. But Nanni was beforehand with them in every respect; for taking the guise of a woodman, and having recovered his lost members, he met them in their flight, without being recognized by them. They told him of the fate of their husband, and of their intentions, concluding with a gentle hint that they were well enough inclined to accept a well-built young wood-cutter for their common husband. “No! no!” cried Nanni, “times are so very hard, that I have been obliged to dismiss forty-nine of my wives, and to live as well as I can with one!” This speech alarmed the ladies, who forthwith hurried homeward; but the active Nanni encountered them at the threshold, over which he would not allow them to pass till they had entered into stipulations whereby he was secured in full and despotic authority over his entire family.

The jokes of Nanni, son of the Spider, for a long time formed all the history, literature, and amusement of Negro circles. A thousand times over have his tricks been told and acted, in a semi-dramatic way, to delighted groups of swarthy listeners beneath the African moon. I may notice that the story-teller has always been a greater favourite in Africa than the mere jester. I remember, indeed, having read of one potentate, the Kaffir chief Tshaka, or Chaka, who would tolerate neither, at his horridly solemn court. On one occasion, however, and in full council, a merry fellow gave utterance to a frolicsome thought which he could not repress. It succeeded admirably,--gloomy king and grave counsellors were thrown into the most convulsive hilarity. When they had all recovered, the chief, pointing towards the jester, showed his grateful sense of a rare delight, by exclaiming, “Take that dog out, and kill him; he has _made me laugh_!”

To make his patron laugh was the especial and variously-rewarded vocation of the jester whom I now proceed to introduce to my readers. The English Court Fool was a very peculiar fellow, and in the history of some members of the order of Motley, in this country, there are incidents unparalleled in the history of the official jesters of any other nation. Let us see whence they came, as well as who they were.

ENGLISH MINSTREL AND JESTER.

All writers who have taken the ancient English minstrels for a subject, agree in stating that the old Saxon invaders of our land brought with them bards, and a profound reverence for the bards themselves and the art they professed. These highly-esteemed personages were rhyming historians, chroniclers, theologians, and philosophers. They held the key, or, what was the same thing to them, men believed that they held the key, of many secrets appertaining, not only to earth, but heaven. They were mighty personages in their day; but they could not withstand a ray from the Star of Bethlehem. When the Saxons became Christians, or at least professed Christianity, the vocation of the old, mysterious, rapt, inspired bard, with his eternal memory of the past, and his prophetic view into a long future, was entirely gone. He had been a sort of god, and he became a mortal who sang for hire. The Jupiter of yesterday was now, in most cases, and in most men’s eyes, only a Jupiter Scapin.

In _most_ cases, but not in all; for, such as were scholars among the bards devoted themselves to the cultivation of poetry. There were others, like the early German jester who remarked that he did not know the Lord’s Prayer, but only the tune of it. They had more music in their souls,--such as the music was, and such as their souls were,--than religion. These turned minstrels, and sang and played for a reward.

With the superior class above noticed, I have nothing further to do; but have to keep companionship with the hired minstrel,--or the itinerating minstrel, who exercised his vocation for bread. The latter was not altogether wanting to the Anglo-Saxon, previous to the period of their conversion. The native gleeman who then exercised his welcome office, is described by Dr. Lingard, in his ‘History and Antiquities of the Anglo-Saxon Church,’ as being a minstrel who was “either attached to the service of a particular chieftain, or wandering from place to place, and subsisting on the bounty of his hearers.” Mr. Eccleston, in his ‘Introduction to English Antiquities,’ describes the gleeman as all-important to the in-door life of the Anglo-Saxons, before whom he “sang, played, danced, and performed sleight-of-hand tricks for the pleasure of the company.” This would hardly seem to show that the gleeman was, as some have asserted, of a higher grade than the common minstrel of later years. It is certain that he was the popular minstrel of his day; his songs were sung in castle and farmyard; and when the great St. Adhelm was sensible of a call to preaching, and was desirous of getting together a congregation, he knew no better method than to assume the character of the gleeman. Thus accoutred, harp in hand, he would station himself at some cross-road, or at the corner of a bridge, and rattle forth a series of popular songs on passing and popular subjects. He soon drew an audience around him; and when he had fairly got them into a train of attention, he would gradually slip away from his comic songs and lively airs on the harp, and fulfil his office of Christian missionary, with as much success as he had played that of the vivacious gleeman.

There is another legend, showing how the guise of the minstrel was assumed for a different purpose. The legend to which I allude is that of Alfred entering the Danish camp in this false character, and spying out the weakness of his enemies, while he amused them with his songs to the harp. The story is altogether apocryphal, and was never heard of in Alfred’s time, nor till two centuries had elapsed since his death. It is certain that Alfred could not have safely entered the camp as a Saxon; and if he found admission as a Dane, his accent would have betrayed him as a spy. It has been suggested, that if he ever went at all, he went as a _mimus_, or buffoon (a word which had already been applied to minstrels), and that he amused his fierce enemies by the ordinary tricks, tumblings, and other performances of the jester.

For, in course of time, _minstrel_ and _buffoon_ came to be terms of much the same signification. This we find by another popular legend, which is supposed to have very little truth for a basis;--namely, the legend which tells of the faithful Blondel de Nesle, minstrel to King Richard I., seeking for his captured master, and discovering him by means of a song, sung outside the prison, to which the royal captive answered from within. Whether this story be true or not, it was accepted as truth at an early period, and in ‘Les Soirées de Guillaume Bouchet,’ we find, as a comment upon it, the following query:--“I just beg to ask you, if the wisest man in the world could have done more for his master; and if this buffoon of a minstrel (_ce boufon de ménestrier_) was not of more profit to King Richard, his lord, than the wisest scholars at court.”

For a long period, the minstrel seems to have been very well paid for the exercise of his art, at least in presence of royalty. At the marriage of the Countess of Holland, daughter of Edward I., every king-minstrel present received forty shillings! This guerdon, represented in modern money, would be not much under as many pounds sterling in value. The above was, perhaps, an exceptional occasion; but even the ordinary guerdon, of twenty and thirty shillings for a single night’s attendance, shows at what an early period the musical profession was exorbitantly remunerated;--for the individuals here alluded to were actual _cantatores_, and not mere _joculatores_.

The Court always thought better of them than the Church. “Actors and jesters,” says John of Salisbury (1160 _circ._), “may not be admitted to the Sacrament.--_Histriones et mimi non possunt recipere sacram Communionem._” And forty years later, there were some people who as much objected to marry their daughters to the King’s jesters, as the coachman of George II. did to his son marrying a maid-of-honour. One of the Pipe Rolls, supposed to be of the date of 1200, informs us that “Nicola, wife of Girard of Canville, accounts to the King for one hundred marks, for the privilege of marrying her daughter Maud to whatever person she pleases,--the King’s jester excepted--_exceptis mimicis Regis_. The _mimici_, whatever their exact office was, had as part of their duty, evidently, to amuse the King (John), and they would appear, from the reference made to them, to have been but a disreputable set of fellows. They were probably a sort of actors,--pantomimic, if not altogether dramatic;--for the descent of the ancient minstrel through poet and player to mere jester, is easy to be traced in the history of the profession in nearly every nation.