Parodies of Ballad Criticism (1711-1787) Part 1

Parodies of Ballad Criticism (1711-1787).

by William Wagstaffe and Gregory Griffin AKA George Canning.

INTRODUCTION

Joseph Addison's enthusiasm for ballad poetry (_Spectators_ 70, 74, 85) was not a sheer novelty. He had a ringing English precedent in Sidney, whom he quotes. And he may have had one in Jonson; at least he thought he had. He cited Dryden and Dorset as collectors and readers of ballads; and he might have cited others. He found comfort in the fact that Moliere's Misanthrope was on his side. The modern or broadside version of _Chevy Chase_, the one which Addison quoted, had been printed, with a Latin translation, in the third volume of Dryden's _Miscellany_ (1702) and had been appreciated along with _The Nut-Brown Maid_ in an essay _Of the Old English Poets and Poetry_ in _The Muses Mercury_ for June, 1707.

The feelings expressed in Addison's essays on the ballads were part of the general patriotic archaism which at that time was moving in rapport with cyclic theories of the robust and the effete, as in Temple's essays, and was complicating the issue of the cla.s.sical ancients versus the moderns. Again, these feelings were in harmony with the new Longinianism of boldness and bigness, cultivated in one way by Dennis and in another by Addison himself in later _Spectators_. The tribute to the old writers in Rowe's Prologue to _Jane Sh.o.r.e_ (1713) is of course not simply the result of Addison's influence.[1]

Those venerable ancient Song-Enditers Soar'd many a Pitch above our modern Writers.

It is true also that Addison exhibits, at least in the first of the two essays on _Chevy Chase_, a degree of the normal Augustan condescension to the archaic--the vision which informs the earlier couplet poem on the English poets. Both in his quotation from Sidney ("... being so evil apparelled in the Dust and Cobweb of that uncivil Age, what would it work trimmed in the gorgeous Eloquence of _Pindar_?") and in his own apology for the "Simplicity of the Stile" there is sufficient prescription for all those improvements that either a Ramsay or a Percy were soon actually to undertake. And some of the Virgilian pa.s.sages in _Chevy Chase_ which Addison picked out for admiration were not what Sidney had known but the literary invention of the more modern broadside writer.

Nevertheless, the two _Spectators_ on _Chevy Chase_ and the sequel on the _Children in the Wood_ were startling enough. The general announcement was ample, unabashed, soaring--unmistakable evidence of a new polite taste for the universally valid utterances of the primitive heart. The accompanying measurement according to the epic rules and models was not a qualification of the taste, but only a somewhat awkward theoretical dimension and justification.

It is impossible that any thing should be universally tasted and approved by a Mult.i.tude, tho' they are only the Rabble of a Nation, which hath not in it some peculiar Aptness to please and gratify the Mind of Man.... an ordinary Song or Ballad that is the Delight of the common People, cannot fail to please all such Readers as are not unqualified for the Entertainment by their Affectation or Ignorance.

Professor Clarence D. Thorpe is surely correct in his view of Addison as a "grandfather" of such that would come in romantic aesthetics for the next hundred years.[2] Not that Addison invents anything; but he catches every current whisper and swells it to the journalistic audibility.

Here, if we take Addison at his word, are the key ideas for Wordsworth's Preface on the language of rustic life, for Tolstoy's ruthless reduction of taste to the peasant norm. Addison went on to urge what was perfectly just, that the old popular ballads ought to be read and liked; at the same time he pushed his praise to a rather wild extreme, and he made some comic comparisons between _Chevy Chase_ and Virgil and Homer.

We know now that he was on the right track; he was riding the wave of the future. It will be sufficient here merely to allude to that well established topic of English literary history, the rise of the ballad during the eighteenth century--in _A Collection of Old Ballads_ (1723-1725), in Ramsay's _Evergreen_ and _Tea-Table_, in Percy's _Reliques_, and in all the opinions, the critiques, the imitations, the modern ballads, and the forgeries of that era--in _Henry and Emma_, _Colin and Lucy_, and _Hardyknute_, in Gay, Shenstone, and Gray, in Chatterton's Rowley. All these in a sense testified to the influence of Addison's essays. Addison was often enough given honorable mention and quoted.

On the other hand, neo-cla.s.sic stalwart good sense and the canons of decorum did not collapse easily, and the cultivation of the ballads had, as we have suggested, a certain aspect of silliness. It is well known that Addison's essays elicited the immediate objections of Dennis. The Spectator's "Design is to see how far he can lead his Reader by the Nose." He wants "to put Impotence and Imbecility upon us for Simplicity." Later Johnson in his _Life of Addison_ quoted Dennis and added his own opinion of _Chevy Chase_: "The story cannot possibly be told in a manner that shall make less impression on the mind."

It was fairly easy to parody the ballads themselves, or at least the ballad imitations, as Johnson would demonstrate _ex tempore_. "I put my hat upon my head And walked into the Strand, And there I met another man Whose hat was in his hand." And it was just as easy to parody ballad criticism. The present volume is an anthology of two of the more deserving mock-criticisms which Addison's effort either wholly or in part inspired.

An anonymous satirical writer who was later identified, on somewhat uncertain authority, as the Tory Dr. William Wagstaffe was very prompt in responding. His _Comment Upon the History of Tom Thumb_ appeared in 1711 perhaps within a week or two of the third guilty _Spectator_ (June 7) and went into a second edition, "Corrected," by August 18. An advertis.e.m.e.nt in the _Post Man_ of that day referred to yet a third "sham" edition, "full of errors."[3] The writer alludes to the author of the _Spectators_ covertly ("we have had an _enterprising Genius_ of late") and quotes all three of the ballad essays repeatedly. The choice of _Tom Thumb_ as the _corpus vile_ was perhaps suggested by Swift's momentary "handling" of it in _A Tale of a Tub_.[4] The satirical method is broad and easy and scarcely requires comment. This is the attack which was supposed by Addison's editor Henry Morley (_Spectator_, 1883, I, 318) to have caused Addison to "flinch" a little in his revision of the ballad essays. It is scarcely apparent that he did so. The last paragraph of the third essay, on the _Children in the Wood_, is a retort to some other and even prompter unfriendly critics--"little conceited Wits of the Age," with their "little Images of Ridicule."

But Addison is not the only target of "Wagstaffe's" _Comment_. "Sir B------ B--------" and his "Arthurs" are another, and "Dr. B--tly"

another. One of the most eloquent moments in the _Comment_ occurs near the end in a paragraph on what the author conceives to be the follies of the historical method. The use of the slight vernacular poem to parody the Bentleyan kind of cla.s.sical scholars.h.i.+p was to be tried by Addison himself in _Spectator_ 470 (August 29, 1712) and had a French counterpart in the _Chef d'oeuvre d'un inconnu_, 1714. A later example was executed by Defoe's son-in-law Henry Baker in No. XIX of his _Universal Spectator_, February 15, 1729.[5] And that year too provided the large-scale demonstration of the _Dunciad Variorum_. The very "matter" of Tom Thumb reappeared under the same light in Fielding's _Tragedy of Tragedies or the Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great with the Annotations of H. Scriblerus Secundus_, 1731. Addison's criticism of the ballads was scarcely a legitimate object for this kind of attack, but Augustan satire and parody were free and hospitable genres, always ready to entertain more than one kind of "bard and blockhead side by side."[6]

No less a person than George Canning (as a schoolboy) was the author of the second of the two parodies reproduced in the present volume. A group of precocious Eton lads, Canning, J. Hookham Frere, John Smith, and Robert (Bobus) Smith, during the years 1786-1787 produced forty octavo numbers of a weekly paper called _The Microcosm_. They succeeded in exciting some interest among the literati,[7] were coming out in a "Second Edition" as early as the Christmas vacation of 1786,[8] and in the end sold their copyright for fifty pounds to their publisher, Charles Knight of Windsor.[9] Canning wrote Nos. XI and XII (February 12, 1787), a critique of the "Epic Poem" concerning "The Reformation of the Knave of Hearts."[10] This essay in two parts, running for nearly as many pages as Wagstaffe's archetypal pamphlet, is a much more systematic and theoretically ambitious effort than any predecessor. _The Knave of Hearts_ is praised for its _beginning_ (_in medias res_), its _middle_ (all "bustle and business"), and its _end_ (full of _Poetical Justice_ and superior _Moral_). The earlier writers had directly labored the resemblance of the ballads to pa.s.sages in Homer and Virgil. That method is now hardly invoked at all. Criticism according to the epic rules of Aristotle had been well enough ill.u.s.trated by Addison on _Paradise Lost_ (see especially _Spectator_ 267) if not by Addison on ballads. The decline of simple respect for the "Practice and Authority" of the ancient models during the neo-cla.s.sic era, the general advance of something like reasoning in criticism, finds one of its quainter testimonials in the Eton schoolboy's cleverness. He would show by definition and strict deduction that _The Knave of Hearts_ is a "_due and proper Epic Poem_," having as "good right to that t.i.tle, from its adherence to prescribed rules, as any of the celebrated master-pieces of antiquity." The post-Ramblerian date of the performance and a further if incidental aim of the satire--a facetious removal from the Augustan coffeehouse conversation--can be here and there felt in a heavy roll of the periods, a doubling and redoubling of the abstractions.[11]

The essay, nevertheless, shows sufficient continuity with the earlier tradition of parody ballad criticism--for it begins by alluding to the _Spectator's_ critiques of Shakespeare, Milton, and _Chevy Chase_, and near the end of the first number slides into a remark that "one of the _Scribleri_, a descendant of the famous _Martinus_, has expressed his suspicions of the text being corrupted." A page or two of irony concerning the "plain and simple" opening of the poem seems to hark back to something more subtle in the Augustans than the Wagstaffian derision, no doubt to Pope's victory over Philips in a _Guardian_ on pastorals.

"There is no task more difficult to a Poet, than that of _Rejection_.

Ovid, among the ancients, and _Dryden_, among the moderns, were perhaps the most remarkable for the want of it."[12]

The interest of these little pieces is historical[13] in a fairly strict sense. Their value is indirect, half accidental, a glancing revelation of ideas concerning simplicity, feeling, genius, the primitive, the historical which run steadily beneath all the ripples during the century that moves from "cla.s.sic" to "romantic." Not all of Addison's parodists taken together muster as much fun, as such whimsical charm, as Addison himself in a single paragraph such as the one on "accidental readings"

which opens the _Spectator_ on the _Children in the Wood_. But this pa.s.sage, as it happens, requires only a slightly sophistical application to be taken as a cue to a useful att.i.tude in our present reading.

"I once met with a Page of _Mr. Baxter_ under a Christmas Pye....

I might likewise mention a Paper-Kite, from which I have received great Improvement."

William K. Wimsatt, Jr.

Yale University

NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION

[Footnote 1: The chief authorities for the history which I am summarizing are W. L. Phelps, _The Beginnings of the English Romantic Movement_, Boston, 1893, Chapter VII; E. K. Broadus, "Addison's Influence on the Development of Interest in Folk-Poetry in the Eighteenth Century," _Modern Philology_, VIII (July, 1910), 123-134; S. B. Hustvedt, _Ballad Criticism in Scandinavia and Great Britain During the Eighteenth Century_, New York, 1916.]

[Footnote 2: "Addison's Contribution to Criticism," in R. F. Jones _et al._, _The Seventeenth Century_ (Stanford, 1951), p. 329.]

[Footnote 3: Edward B. Reed, "Two Notes on Addison," _Modern Philology_, VI (October, 1908), 187. The attribution of _A Comment Upon Tom Thumb_ and other satirical pieces to the Dr. William Wagstaffe who died in 1725 as Physician to St. Bartholomew's Hospital depends entirely upon the fact that a collection of such pieces was published, with an anonymous memoir, in 1726 under the t.i.tle _Miscellaneous Works of Dr. William Wagstaffe_. Charles Dilke, _Papers of a Critic_ (London, 1875), I, 369-382. argues that not Wagstaffe but Swift was the author of some of the pieces in the volume. The case for Wagstaffe is put by Nicholas Moore in a letter to _The Athenaeum_, June 10, 1882 and in his article on Wagstaffe in the _DNB_. Paul V. Thompson, "Swift and the Wagstaffe Papers," _Notes and Queries_, 175 (1938), 79, supports the notion of Wagstaffe as an understrapper of Swift. The negative part of Dilke's thesis is perhaps the more plausible. _A Comment Upon Tom Thumb_, as Dilke himself confesses (_Papers_, p. 377), scarcely sounds very much like Swift.]

[Footnote 4: Text, p. 6. The nursery rhyme _Tom Thumb, His Life and Death_, 1630, and the augmented _History of Tom Thumb_, c. 1670, are printed with introductory remarks by W. C. Hazlitt, _Remains of the Early Popular Poetry of England_, II (London, 1866), 166-250.]

[Footnote 5: Cf. George R. Potter, "Henry Baker, F.R.S.

(1698-1774)," _Modern Philology_, XXIX (1932), 305. Nathan Drake, _The Gleaner_, I (London, 1811), 220 seems mistaken in his remark that Baker's Scriblerian commentary (upon the nursery rhyme "Once I was a Batchelor, and lived by myself") was the model for later mock-ballad-criticisms.]

[Footnote 6: For another early instance of our genre and a very pure one, see an anonymous Cambridge correspondent's critique of the burlesque broadside ballad of "Moor of Moore-Hall and the Dragon of Wantley," in Nathaniel Mist's _Weekly Journal_ (second series), September 2, 1721, reproduced by Roger P. McCutcheon, "Another Burlesque of Addison's Ballad Criticism," _Studies in Philology_, x.x.xIII (October, 1926), 451-456.]

[Footnote 7: _Diary & Letters of Madame d'Arblay_ (London, 1904-1905), III, 121-122, 295: November 28, 1786; July 29, 1787; William Roberts, _Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs.

Hannah More_ (London, 1834), II, 46, letter from W. W. Pepys, December 31, 1786.]

[Footnote 8: Advertis.e.m.e.nt inserted before No. I in a collected volume dated 1787 (Yale 217. 304g).]

[Footnote 9: The source of the anecdote seems to be William Jordan, _National Portrait Gallery_ (London, 1831), II, 3, quoting a communication from Charles Knight the publisher, son of Charles Knight of Windsor.

The present reprint of Nos. XI and XII of _The Microcosm_ is from the "Second" octavo collected edition, Windsor, 1788. _The Microcosm_ had reappeared at least seven times by 1835.]

[Footnote 10: Iona and Peter Opie, _The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes_ (Oxford, 1951), are unable to find an earlier printed source for this rhyme than the _European Magazine_, I (April, 1782), 252.]

[Footnote 11: No. x.x.xVI of _The Microcosm_ is a letter from Capel Lofft defending the "Middle Style" of Addison in contrast to the more modern Johnsonian eloquence. Robert Bell, _The Life of the Rt. Hon. George Canning_ (London, 1846), pp. 48-54, in a helpful account of _The Microcosm_, stresses its general fidelity to _Spectator_ style and themes.]

[Footnote 12: Canning's critique closes with an appendix of three and a half pages alluding to the Eton Shrovetide custom of writing Latin verses, known as the "Bacchus." See H. C. Maxwell Lyte, _A History of Eton College_ (London, 1911), pp. 146-147.]

[Footnote 13: As late as the turn of the century the trick was still in a manner feasible. The anonymous author of _Literary Leisure, or the Recreations of Solomon Saunter, Esq._ (1799-1800) divides two numbers, VIII and XV, between other affairs and a Shandyesque argument about the nursery charm for the hiccup "Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled pepper." This author was most likely not Byron's a.s.sailant Hewson Clarke (born 1787, author of _The Saunterer in 1804_), as a.s.serted in the _Catalogue_ of the Hope Collection (Oxford, 1865), p. 128.

A historical interest may be not only retrospective but contemporary. The reader of the present volume will appreciate "How to Criticize a Poem (In the Manner of Certain Contemporary Poets)", a critique of the mnemonic rhyme "Thirty days hath September," in the _New Republic_, December 6, 1943.]

A COMMENT

upon the HISTORY

of _TOM THUMB_.

It is a surprising thing that in an Age so Polite as this, in which we have such a Number of Poets, Criticks and Commentators, some of the best things that are extant in our Language shou'd pa.s.s un.o.bserv'd amidst a Croud of inferiour Productions, and lie so long buried as it were, among those that profess such a Readiness to give Life to every thing that is valuable. Indeed we have had an Enterprising Genius of late, that has thought fit to disclose the Beauties of some Pieces to the World, that might have been otherwise indiscernable, and believ'd to have been trifling and insipid, for no other Reason but their unpolish'd Homeliness of Dress. And if we were to apply our selves, instead of the Cla.s.sicks, to the Study of Ballads and other ingenious Composures of that Nature, in such Periods of our Lives, when we are arriv'd to a Maturity of Judgment, it is impossible to say what Improvement might be made to Wit in general, and the Art of Poetry in particular: And certainly our Pa.s.sions are describ'd in them so naturally, in such lively, tho' simple, Colours, that how far they may fall short of the Artfulness and Embellishments of the _Romans_ in their Way of Writing, _yet cannot fail to please all such Readers as are not unqualify'd for the Entertainment by their Affectation or Ignorance_.

It was my good Fortune some time ago to have the Library of a School-Boy committed to my Charge, where, among other undiscover'd valuable Authors, I pitch'd upon _Tom Thumb_ and _Tom Hickathrift_, Authors indeed more proper to adorn the Shelves of _Bodley_ or the _Vatican_, than to be confin'd to the Retirement and Obscurity of a private Study.

I have perus'd the first of these with an infinite Pleasure, and a more than ordinary Application, and have made some Observations on it, which may not, I hope, prove unacceptable to the Publick; and however it may have been ridicul'd, and look'd upon as an Entertainment only for Children, and those of younger Years, may be found perhaps a Performance not unworthy the Perusal of the Judicious, and the Model superiour to either of those incomparable Poems of _Chevy Chase_, or _The Children in the Wood_. The Design was undoubtedly to recommend Virtue, and to shew that however any one may labour under the Disadvantages of Stature or Deformity, or the Meanness of Parentage, yet if his Mind and Actions are above the ordinary Level, those very Disadvantages that seem to depress him, shall add a l.u.s.tre to his Character.

There are Variety of Incidents, dispers'd thro' the whole Series of this Historical Poem, that give an agreeable Delight and Surprise, _and are such as *Virgil* himself wou'd have touch'd upon, had the like Story been told by that Divine Poet_, viz. his falling into the Pudding-Bowl and others; which shew the Courage and Constancy, the Intrepidity and Greatness of Soul of this little Hero, amidst the greatest Dangers that cou'd possibly befall him, and which are the unavoidable Attendants of human Life.

Si fractus illabatur orbis, Impavidum ferient ruinae.

The Author of this was unquestionably a Person of an Universal Genius, and if we consider that the Age he wrote in, must be an Age of the most profound Ignorance, as appears from the second Stanza of the first _Canto_, he was a Miracle of a Man.