The History of Court Fools. Dr. Doran

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СКАЧАТЬ neither drink nor speak, for laughing. “Dear master,” said Hebe, as she took her place behind the monarch of divinities, who looked at her inquiringly, “they laugh, because you did not say fools, such as he, should henceforward furnish kings with funny counsel and comic sermons.”

      “Let their majesties look to it,” answered Jove, “here’s a health to the first of fools!”

      In the legend of the original jester, we cannot well pass over, without some brief illustration, the old, yet ever-young and especial mirth-maker of the court of Olympus itself, where Momus reigned, the joker of the gods. Perhaps I should rather say there he was tolerated, than that there he reigned. For there was this difference between the sublime immortals and weaker mortals—that the former could never take a joke from their court fool without wincing, while the latter laughed the louder as the wit was sharper; for they wisely chose to applaud in such jesting,

      “the sportive wit,

       Which healed the folly that it deigned to hit.”

      Not so, the irritable gods, with regard to Momus, who was, significantly enough, the Son of Night. Momus however cared nothing for the irritability of his august masters and mistresses. His ready wit pierced them all in turn; and the shafts of his ridicule excited many an absurd roar of anguish. When Minerva had built the house of which she was so proud, the Olympian fool at once detected the error made by the Goddess of Wisdom, and remarked, “Had I turned house-builder, I would have had a movable mansion.”

      “Why so, you intellectual ass?” asked the lady, who was somewhat rough-tongued, and loved antithesis.

      “Because,” answered the son of Nox, “I could then get away from bad neighbourhoods, and the vicinity of foolish women who consort with owls!”

      Venus, clad in her usual attire, and proud in the conviction of her faultlessness, passed by Sir Momus, and turning gracefully in his presence, like Mademoiselle Rosati before a box-full of her admirers, defied him to detect a flaw in her unequalled and dazzling form.

      Momus clapped his hands to his eyes, half-blinded by the lustre, and said, “It is true enough, Ourania—you are not to be looked at without blinking; but before you executed that charming pirouette, I heard your foot-fall on the clouds. Now, a heavy-heeled beauty is not a vessel without a flaw.”

      Save Venus herself, there was not a goddess within hearing, who did not laugh more or less loudly, at the fool’s censure. Vulcan, to draw off attention from the queen of love, and to gain a compliment for himself, directed the notice of Momus to the clay figure of a man which he had just executed. The critic looked at it for a moment, and turned away with a curl on his lip. “My man,” said he, “should have had a window in his chest. Through such a lattice, I could have looked in, not only upon his ailments, but his thoughts.”

      “My bull here,” said Neptune, touching Momus with his trident, which at will he could extend from his own watery plain to the topmost point of Olympus—“My bull here, of which I am the artist, is more perfect than our limping brother’s man.”

      “The beast would have been more perfect still,” cried Momus, from his cradle in the clouds, “if he had had eyes nearer his horns. He would strike more surely than he can now. Leave making bulls, oh son of Ops, to your children in Ierne—though, even their bulls shall be as laughable as your own.”

      In this way the Fool of the Olympian Court treated without reserve the illustrious company, whom he fearlessly mocked and censured. They never bore the censure well; and, ultimately, they rose and ejected him from Heaven. With a mask in one hand, and a small carved figure in the other, he lightly fell to Earth. “You see I come from the skies,” said the crafty fellow to the staring crowds that gathered round him, “and therefore am worthy of welcome and worship.”

      How could the poor people know that he had been kicked out from Olympus? They raised an altar, hoisted the celestial exile above it, danced round it like fools, and went home shouting, “Vive la Folie!”

      To pretend to show the moral of my story, would be to insult the good sense of my readers.

      It is singular that the successor of Momus, as brewer of laughter to the gods, was Vulcan, and that he also was kicked out from Olympus. On the ninth day of his descent he came in sight of Lemnos, where the people, without stopping to think whether they were about to receive a precious gift or a rejected waif from Heaven, stretched out their arms to catch him. It is not everything that seems to come from above, that is divine.

      And mark!—Since Momus fell, Folly has never left the Earth. But Vulcan taught men to labour; and the founder of industry, the great doer of a good work, was reconciled with Heaven. And Olympus did not continue without its fools, near or afar. The dances of Silenus, the lumbering grace of Polyphemus, and the coarse jokes of Pan, were provocatives of the empty laughter of the gods; and roystering dances, lumbering graces, and coarse jokes became the stock in trade of fools of later years and of more mortal mould.

      They who will take the trouble to recall the incidents in the personal history of many of the philosophers of old, will not fail to perceive that, in many cases, they fulfilled the duties which were performed, much less efficiently, perhaps, by the official fools at modern courts. They appear to have exercised, generally with impunity, a marvellous license of speech, and to have communicated disagreeable truths to tyrants who would not have accepted an unpleasant inuendo from an ordinary courtier, without rewarding it with torture or death. This very rudeness of speech, on the part of many philosophers, to princes who were their patrons, was the distinguishing feature of the modern jester. In this respect they were sometimes imitated by the poets, who occasionally indulged in the criminal folly of making execrable puns; so early do we find an illustration of the remark of Ménage, that in all times the court poet was accounted as being also the court fool. Indeed, we shall see, under the head of French Jesters, a whole flock of royal poets vying with each other to receive the patent of King’s Fool, on the death of the official who had just departed full of honours and “doubles entendres.”

      I believe that a volume might be very respectably filled with illustrations of the identity of philosopher, or poet, and fool—in the sense of licensed court wit. My readers will probably be satisfied with a few rather than with a volume-full of proofs. Thus, it will be remembered that it was rather a perilous matter to joke with or to convey rough truths to the mind of the great Alexander. But his favourite philosopher, the light-hearted Anaxarchus, was able to do both, with impunity. What a necessary but disagreeable truth did he impress on his royal master, when the latter was bleeding from a recently received wound. “Ah!” exclaimed the philosopher, pointing to the place, “that shows that, after all, you are only a man, and not a god, as people call you, and as you would like to believe.”

      Alexander only smiled at this very sufficient little sermon, and did not resent what perhaps he considered as amusing ignorance. It is remarkable, however, that as in less remote days we meet with potentates who could not tolerate the free-spoken court fool, so in those earlier times we find “tyranni,” who were utterly unable to digest a joke or a reproach. Now the speech of Anaxarchus was utterly disgusting to the mind and feelings of Nicocreon of Salamis, who happened to be present when it was uttered. What the philosopher’s especial patron chose to take without discerning offence in it, it was not for Nicocreon to resent; but he never forgot or forgave it. Alexander was hardly dead when Nicocreon contrived to get Anaxarchus into his power, and he ordered that the philosopher should be pounded to death in a mortar, “Pound away! pound away!” exclaimed the heroic fellow, as the iron hammers were reducing him to pulp, “it’s only my body! you cannot pound my soul!” Nicocreon told him that if he were not more silent and less saucy, his tongue should be cut out. To show how little Anaxarchus cared for the threat, СКАЧАТЬ