THE FIRST AMERICAN SATIRIST

Who cracked the first joke in America? The early records do not state. We are not even quite sure as to the first American who tried to be funny on paper. Of course, some of the very earliest colonists in both Virginia and New England wrote humorous and sarcastic accounts back home, and the ludicrous situations portrayed in these are not lost upon us of a later date. One might call to mind John Pory of the Jamestown settlement, whose letters to the "home folks" were quaintly witty; Francis Higginson, sturdy old New Englander, in his "True Relation" (1629) and his "New England Plantations" (1629), sometimes came dangerously near joking; and some students of American literature would say that William Wood of Massachusetts, by his sprightly "New England Prospect" (1634), deserves the place as first of the numerous "fathers of American humor." But the first man to do it with malice aforethought and with the intention of publishing also, seems to have been the New England preacher, Nathaniel Ward (1578-1652).

This first of our American satirists was no mere laughing fool. Few men of those grave and stubborn colonial days had received a better mental training for civil and theological strife, and few had held themselves more persistently to an uncomfortably stormy career. Your true Puritan fought sin and everything else in the neighborhood, and Nathaniel Ward was not an exception. He graduated at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and old Bishop Fuller has spoken of him as one of the most learned writers in the ancient institution. But his was a knowledge far wider than the range of books. He had travelled the nations of Europe and had conversed with their leaders; he had attended the lectures of that daring theologian, Paraeus of Heidelberg; he was a good friend of Francis Bacon; and he had been so intimate with royalty that he had held in his arms the infant Prince Rupert, the swaggering cavalier of Cromwell's day.

For some years Ward had been a lawyer, and if the trend of the times had not been toward religious discussions, his subtle

reasoning power might have made him one of the greatest jurists of the century. But the question "What think ye of Christ?'' was on every man's lips, and Ward felt called upon, like many another brilliant intellect of that stern era, to explain the Higher Law. For ten years he fervently "wagged his pow in a pulpit" - ten stormy years harassed by the watchful eye of that Churchmen's terror, Bishop Laud, who sent innumerable bits of advice and innumerable warnings to the little rectory at Stondon Massey in Essex for the future pioneer of American satire was a trifle too original in his theological views to suit the theologically petrified old bishop, and the tenor of their way was not always that of brotherly love.

At length the crisis came. In 1633 the bishop summoned the rector, bitterly rebuked him for having anti-Christ theories, silenced him (technically but not actually), and excommunicated him for non-conformity. Naturally Ward looked to the hills of Massachusetts whence came his help; everybody who dissented in those days did that. And so it happened that early in 1634 Nathaniel Ward, preacher, satirist, and "pig-headed" citizen, took charge of the little church at Aggawam (now Ipswich), Massachusetts, and began to impress upon the people of the commonwealth the fact that something in the nature of a human firebrand had fallen in their midst. His friends called it godly zeal; but his enemies designated it plain pigheadedness. Perhaps it was both.

We may not enter into a detailed account of his varied activities; he seemed to have a hand in everything. History tell us, for one thing, that he helped John Cotton and other Puritan leaders draw up that strange code of laws with the misleading title of "Body of Liberties." This decidedly unhumorous deed was done in 1641, but five years later he wrote, doubtless as a recompense, the first American book of humor, the "Simple Cobbler of Aggawam," a work showing how badly, according to the cobbler's views, the world was theologically and socially out of joint. Other books he composed, but as they deal extensively in promises of volcanic landscapes in the next world, they cannot with propriety be called funny. Ward returned to England in 1647, and there in 1652 was gathered to his fathers, several of

whom were preachers, and therefore doubtless missed entirely the scenery just mentioned or else caught but distant glimpses of it from the windows of the Heaven-bound observation car.

This "Simple Cobbler" is a most sarcastic fellow. It turns out that he has been "a solitary widower almost twelve years,” and perhaps that explains some of his bitter jokes. He is especially biting when discussing the fashions affected by ladies of the early seventeenth century:

"Should I not keep promise in speaking a little to women's fashions, they would take it unkindly - I was loath to pester better matter with such stuff; I rather thought it meet to let them stand by themselves, like the quæ genus in the grammar, being deficients or redundants, not to be brought under any rule: I shall therefore make bold for this once, to borrow a little of their loose-tongued Liberty, and misspend a word or two upon their long-waisted, but short-skirted Patience. . .

Gray Gravity itself can well beteem

That Language be adapted to the theme.
He that to Parrots speakes, must parrotise;
He that instructs a Fool, may act th' unwise.

"It is known more than enough that I am neither Niggard, nor Cynic, to the due bravery of the true gentry. I honor the woman that can honor herself with her attire; a good text always deserves a fair margin; I am not much offended if I see a trim fur trimmer than she that wears it. In a word, whatever Christianity or Civility will allow, I can afford with London measure; but when I hear a nugiferous gentledame inquire what dress the Queen is in this week: what the nudiustertian fashion of the Court; with egg [desire] to be in it in all haste, whatever it be; I look at her as the very gizzard of a trifle, the product of a quarter of a cipher, the epitome of Nothing, fitter to be kicked, if she were a kickable substance, than either honored or humored."

It is evident that, besides being a widower, friend Ward must have been a dyspeptic. The world is out of joint, and woman has had a large share in this anatomical catastrophe. There are in her certain traits that the sarcastic Puritan cannot at all comprehend.

"To speak moderately," says he, "I truly confess it is beyond the ken of my understanding to conceive how those women should have any true grace or valuable virtue, that have so little wit, as to disfigure themselves with such exotic garbs, as not only dismantles their native lovely lustre, but transclouts them into gant bar-geese, ill-shapen, shotten shell-fish, Egyptian hieroglyphics, or at the best into French flurts of the pastery, which a proper English woman should scorn with her heels. It is no marvel they wear drailes on the hinder part of their heads, having nothing as it seems in the fore part but a few squirrels' brains to help them frisk from one ill-favored fashion to another.

. . . I can make myself sick at any time with comparing the dazzling splendor wherewith our gentlewomen were embellished in some former habits, with the gut-foundered goosedom wherewith they are now surcingled and debauched. We have about five or six of them in our Colony; if I see any of them accidentally, I cannot cleanse my fancy of them for a month after . . . . Methinks it should break the hearts of Englishmen to see so many goodly English women imprisoned in French cages peering out of their hood-holes for some men of mercy to help them with a little wit, and nobody relieves them."

Now and again Ward's emotions become too fervid for prose: he bursts into poetry:

The world is full of care, much like unto a bubble,
Women and care, and care and Women,

And Women and care and trouble.

Thus the "cobbler" proceeds, lashing the foibles of his day and oftentimes speaking with a Franklin-like bluntness and commonsense. In fact, there is considerable resemblance between Ward's ideas and expressions and those of Poor Richard. While paying his respects to the ladies and their fashions he does not forget the tailors. He fears for these knights of the needle:

"It is a more common than convenient saying that nine tailors make a man; it were well if nineteen could make a woman to her mind. If tailors were men indeed, well furnished but with mere moral principles, they would disdain to be led about like Apes, by such mimic Marmosets. It is a most unworthy thing

for men that have bones in them, to spend their lives in making fiddle cases for futilous women's fancies: which are the very pettitoes of infirmity, the giblets of perquisquilian toys. It is no little labor to be continually putting up English women into outlandish casks; who if they be not shifted anew once in a few months, grow too sour for their husbands. What this trade will answer for themselves when God shall take measure of tailors' consciences is beyond my skill to imagine. . . . . He that makes coats for the moon, had need take measure every noon; and he that makes for women, as often, to keep them from lunacy."

I quote thus freely from Ward's opinion on women, not to arouse the ire of the female perambulating fashion plates of today, but simply to show that the stern Pilgrim fathers did, after all, have some sort of humor, even if a grim sort. Our histories so often leave the impression that the Puritan was merely a funereal creature, the deadly enemy of mince-pie and plum-pudding, that it is well to refer to the ancient writings now and then and see for ourselves that they dared to smile, and that right often.

Many were the faults and human weaknesses attacked by this first of American satirists. Indeed, he seemed to look upon himself as divinely appointed scolder plenipotentiary to the world at large. Hear a few complimentary remarks concerning the Hibernians:

"These Irish, anciently called Anthropophagi (man-eaters), have a tradition among them, that when the Devil showed our Saviour all the Kingdoms of the Earth and their glory, that he would not show him Ireland, but reserved it for himself; it is probably true, for he hath kept it ever since for his own peculiar; the old Fox foresaw it would eclipse the glory of all the rest. . . . They are the very offal of men, dregs of mankind, reproach of Christendom, the bots that crawl on the beasts' tail."

We must not think that Nathaniel Ward was a satirist and nothing else. Often he turned from his scoffing and sarcasm to call down the curse of God upon England's enemies and to speak with heartfelt earnestness of the folly and sin about him. Satire