"Parodies of Ballad Criticism
The Project Gutenberg EBook of Parodies of Ballad Criticism (1711-1787), by William Wagstaffe and Gregory Griffin AKA George Canning This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
Title: Parodies of Ballad Criticism (1711-1787) A Comment Upon the History of Tom Thumb, 1711, by Wm. Wagstaffe; The Knave of Hearts, 1787, by Gregory Griffin AKA George Canning Author: William Wagstaffe Gregory Griffin AKA George Canning Release Date: July 16, 2007 [EBook #22081] Language: English Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PARODIES OF BALLAD CRITICISM ***
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The Augustan Reprint Society Parodies of Ballad Criticism (1711-1787) William Wagstaffe, A Comment Upon the History of Tom Thumb, 1711 George Canning, The Knave of Hearts, 1787 Selected, with an Introduction, by William K. Wimsatt, Jr. Publication Number 63 Los Angeles William Andrews Clark Memorial Library University of California
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1957 Introduction A Comment Upon the History of Tom Thumb The Reformation of the Knave of Hearts (Microcosm Nos. XI, XII) List of Publications GENERAL EDITORS Richard C. Boys, University of Michigan Ralph Cohen, University of California, Los Angeles Vinton A. Dearing, University of California, Los Angeles Lawrence Clark Powell, Clark Memorial Library ASSISTANT EDITOR W. Earl Britton, University of Michigan ADVISORY EDITORS Emmett L. Avery, State College of Washington Benjamin Boyce, Duke University Louis Bredvold, University of Michigan John Butt, King’s College, University of Durham James L. Clifford, Columbia University Arthur Friedman, University of Chicago Louis A. Landa, Princeton University Samuel H. Monk, University of Minnesota Ernest C. Mossner, University of Texas James Sutherland, University College, London H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., University of California, Los Angeles CORRESPONDING SECRETARY Edna C. Davis, Clark Memorial Library The Augustan Reprint Society regrets to announce the death of one of its founders and editors, Edward Niles Hooker. The editors hope, in the near future, to issue a volume in his memory.
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NTRODUCTION
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 Molière’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 classical 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 Shore (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 iv 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 passages 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 Multitude, 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.
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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, iii 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-classic 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 iv 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 advertisement 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 classical
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scholarship 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, v 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 passages in Homer and Virgil. That method is now hardly invoked at all. Criticism according to the epic rules of Aristotle had been well enough illustrated by Addison on Paradise Lost (see especially Spectator vi 267) if not by Addison on ballads. The decline of simple respect for the "Practice and Authority" of the ancient models during the neo-classic 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 title, 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 historical13 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 vii century that moves from "classic" 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
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opens the Spectator on the Children in the Wood. But this passage, as it happens, requires only a slightly sophistical application to be taken as a cue to a useful attitude 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 viii
NOTES TO THE
NTRODUCTION
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. 2. "Addison’s Contribution to Criticism," in R. F. Jones et al., The Seventeenth Century (Stanford, 1951), p. 329. 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
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collection of such pieces was published, with an anonymous memoir, in 1726 under the title 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. 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. 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. 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, XXXIII (October, 1926), 451-456. 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. ix 8. Advertisement inserted before No. I in a collected volume dated 1787 (Yale 217. 304g). 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. 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. 11. No. XXXVI 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. 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. 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
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not Byron’s assailant Hewson Clarke (born 1787, author of The Saunterer in 1804), as asserted 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. ——Juvat immemorata ferentem Ingenuis oculisq ue legi manibusq ue teneri. LONDON, Printed for J. Morphew near Stationers-Hall. 1711. Price 3 d. Hor.
3 A2 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 pass unobserv’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 Enterpri..."
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