Part 1 (1/2)

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