ONCE upon a midnight, weary, O'er an oft-repeated story, "See that Raven," said I to them, Now, I was not drunk, but weary, (Though they said delirium tremens) And I said "It is a Raven I insisted, and I twisted, I forgot all I had read of, For that ill bird took my head off, Would I trust their words instead of Yes! it is a Raven surely, I am drunk: Not so,-I swore. Drunk? I drunk? I've not been drinking; I'm but overcome with thinking; There I saw that Raven winking In the middle of the floor. *A Parody of "THE RAVEN." Doctor! there's the Raven rampant He has hopp'd straight through the door. Yes! The Psyche lies in the shadow, TOMB'D in dishonor! Not like thine own Ghoul In heaven needs his own heart-strings for his lyre— Shall not earth's poet? And if he be weak, Can aught but discord issue? Speech absurd My mocking words aim at, not thee, but those Who would strain praise for thee, disgracing Truth. [CONCLUSION OF POT-POURRI.] THE ART OF PARODY. MANY good and honest souls, neither prigs nor pedants, are disposed to look with suspicion on the parody. They are not incapable of appreciating its good points; they will even allow it, when it is so, to be very good fun of its kind; but it is the kind they cannot away with. Nor are they always of that sort -a numerous and flourishing sort in our day—which, being itself one monstrous parody, is naturally prone to look with dislike on all who are blessed-or cursed, as some would say-with a sense of the ridiculous. But they regard it as an abuse of the gifts both of nature and of art; as apt to degrade and vulgarize what should really elevate and refine; as itself intrinsically an injustice; and, indeed, the more unjust as it is the more skilful. There is so much both of justice and reason in this dislike that one cannot but respect it, though seeing how unreasonably it may be pushed and how unjust it may become. It is based, primarily, of course, upon sentiment-but it is a sentitiment, in its original shape, both honourable and true. The word sentiment has come in these days to have a ridiculous twang in our ears partly through the silly and perverted uses to which the thing itself is too often applied, and partly through a confusion between the two qualities, sentiment and sentimentality, which may best be distinguished perhaps by defining the latter as the abuse of the former. It is sentiment which leads us to mark the houses where great mer. have been born or lived; it is sentiment which leads us to gaze with reverent admiration on that place of honour in the British Museum wherein are enshrined the handwritings of so many of our illustrious dead; all the care we take to preserve the memorials of the past is inspired by sentiment. But it is a sentiment which every right-thinking man would be far more ashamed to miss than to share. It is a very different feeling, for example, from that which induced a young lady on the other side of the world to preserve under a glass case the cherry-stones which she had snatched from the plate of a Royal Duke; it is a very different feeling from that which induces so many pious souls to play such fantastic tricks at the knees of living men. This objection, then we are not disposed in the first instance to quarrel with, especially as most of the so-called parodies, burlesques, or “perversions" of today are certainly bad enough to cover even a greater intolerance. They are bad both in art and tactics. They deal too often with subjects which should be kept free even from the most good-natured ridicule, and they deal with them clumsily. There is a sort of mind to whom every success, however lawfully and honourably gained, is sufficient cause for mockery; the higher a great figure towers above their heads the more active are their monkeyish gambols at its feet. The living and the dead are alike the objects of their impish regard, and if they perhaps enjoy a livelier pleasure in the thought of the irritation they can cause to the living, they seem to share a peculiar satisfaction in showing themselves superior to any feeling of reverence for the dead-to say nothing of the fact that in the latter case the game is apt to be a little the safest. The most part of mankind will sooner laugh at their more successful fellows than try to imitate, or, at least, to respect them; it is easy, then, to understand why the most witless and illiberal parody will never want an audience. Nevertheless, the parody in itself is not only capable of increasing the gaiety of nations by perfectly harmless and legitimate means, but can also, when properly handled and directed, be made to play the part of a chastener and instructor. It has been often said that to parody a writer is really to pay a compliment to his popularity; and this is so far true that no one would think it worth his while to parody any work which was not tolerably well known, for half the point of any imitation must always lie in the readiness with which its resemblance to the original is recognized; if the original be not known the imitation must necessarily fall flat. No really good writer was ever injured by a parody; few, we may suppose, have ever been annoyed by one. No one, for example, was more quick to recognize the cleverness and laugh at the fun of "A Tale of Drury Lane" in the Rejected Addresses than Scott himself; Crabbe, though he thought there was a little "undeserved ill-nature" in the prefatory address owned that in the versification of "The Theatre" he had been "done admirably.' On the other hand, we can fancy that Messieurs Fitzgerald and Spencer saw very little fun or wit, or anything but "undeserved ill-nature" in "The Loyal Effusion" and "The Beautiful Incendiary." The paradoxical saying attributed to Shaftesbury, which so puzzled and irritated Carlyle, that ridicule is the test of truth, finds its true explanation in his real words, "A subject which will not bear raillery is suspicious." Nothing good was ever destroyed by raillery; where it plays the part of iconoclast, the images it breaks are the images of false gods. Nay, and even to the true it may sometimes prove of service. It may gently admonish, for instance, the best and most established writer, when, from haste, from carelessness, from over-confidence, he is in danger of forfeiting his reputation; it may gently lead the tiro, while there is yet time, from the wrong into the right path. Nor on writers only may it be exercised with advantage. All men who have in any capacity become, as it were, the property of the public may by its means be warned that they are trespassing too far on their popularity, that they are in danger of becoming not only ridiculous themselves, but harmful to others; for every strong man who presumes upon his strength is capable of becoming a source of injury to his weaker brethren. We do not say that its lessons are always, or even often, taken to heart; but that does not detract from their possible virtue. If such a plea were allowed, what, in the name of humanity, would become of so many of us? What would become of our lawyers, our statesmen, our philosophers, our doctors, our policemen, our-appalling thought our critics, if the failure of their endeavours to set and to keep their erring brethren in the straight path were to be taken as a right reason for their abolition? Their resistance to error may seem hopeless, may be often ineffectual, but not for that should they abandon it; rather should they cry, with the author of Obermann, "Let us die resisting." But whatever may be the moral virtue of a parody, there can be no question that to show any reason for its existence at all it must be very good. There is nothing in the world so pitiful as poor fun, and a bad parody is perhaps the poorest kind of fun. In his review of the famous Addresses, Jeffrey discussed the various sorts of parody at some length, and with a good deal of acuteness, distinguishing between the mere imitation of externals, mere personal imitation, so to speak-and that higher and rarer art which brings before us the intellectual characteristics of the original. "A vulgar mimic," he says, "repeats a man's cant phrases and known stories, with an exact imitation of his voice, look, and gestures; but he is an artist of a far higher description who can make stories or reasonings in his manner, and represents the features and movements of his mind as well as the accidents of his body. It is a rare feat to be able to borrow the diction and manner of a celebrated writer to express sentiments like his own--to write as he would have written on the subject proposed to his imitator-to think his thoughts, in short, as well as to use his words-and to make the revival of his style appear a natural consequence of the strong conception of his peculiar i leas." And he goes on, "The exact imitation of a good thing, it must be admitted, promises fair to be a pretty good thing in itself; but if the resemblance be very striking, it commonly has the additional advantage of letting us more completely into the secret of the original author, and enabling us to under stand far more clearly in what the peculiarity of his manner consists, than most of us would ever have done without this assistance." Jeffrey here carries the parody into the regions of very high art indeed, if he does not, as we are rather inclined to think he does, lay more upon its shoulders than it can bear. In a note to the same review, when reprinted in the collected edition of his essays, he remarks of these Addresses that "some few of them descend to the level of parodies, but by far the greater part are of a much higher description;" from which it would seem that he draws a distinction between a parody and something "of a much higher description," which we must confess to being a little in the dark about, unless it be an imitation, and that we should be disposed to rank very much below a good parody. Many of our minor bards, for example, have produced extraordinarily close imitations of Mr, Swinburne's style; but we should certainly rank these far below a clever parody, such a one, for instance, as that on Locksley Hall in the "Bon Gaultier Ballads," or as Mr. Calverley's inimitable" The Cock and the Bull," or "Lovers," and "A Reflection." No better imitations, both of style and substance, have ever been written in prose than Thackeray's "Codlingsby" and "George de Barnwell;" but they are most unquestionably parodies. Indeed it is hard to see what virtue there can be in an imitation which is not also a parody-that is, as we take it, a consciously exaggerated imitation; an imitation which is not that, surely, instead of, as Jeffrey says, descending to the level of a parody, goes near to descend to the much lower level of a plagiarism. If we wished to distinguish between the paro ly designed to ridicule and that designed only to amuse, we should be inclined to say that, while the latter contents itself with an imitation of the style, the former aims also at an imitation of the thought and substance. In the parodies we have noticed, for example, Thackeray unquestionably intended to ridicule the authors of Eugene Aram and Coningsby. Both their subjects and the manner of handling those subjects seemed to him such as deserved ridicule and he ridiculed them accordingly, as no one but Thackeray could. On the other hand, we do not for a moment suppose that the clever Oxford parodist who sang the labours and ultimate triumph of "Adolphus Smalls of Boniface" intended to ridicule Macaulay. He took The Lays of Ancient Rome as his model, because they were more familiar probably to his readers than any other form of verse, and because their external characteristics were most easy to reproduce. We read such lines as we read such lines, and laugh at them without feeling that any injustice is done to Macaulay. Again, when we read of another and less fortunate sufferer,-in the schools of Cambridge this time-how In the crown of his cap Were the Furies and Fates, And a delicate map Of the Dorian States; And they found on his palms, which were dirty, we entirely acquit the writer of any design to laugh at Mr. Bret Harte. In both these cases the parodies are really no more than proofs of the universal popularity of the writers parodied. But when we read in Rejected Addresses the parodies on Wordsworth and Coleridge, we feel that the writers were intentionally casting ridicule on certain trivialities, certain commonplaces both of diction and thought, to which these great men did occasionally sink. It seems to us, also, that Jeffrey has rated the virtue of sound in a parody too low-which is, perhaps, only to say that he rates the whole art of parody higher than we do. Surely it is an essential of this sort of imitation that the words should strike the ear with the very echo of the original. For this reason the specimens we have quoted seem to us so particularly good; and for the same reason, with the exception of the "Lay of the Lovelorn," the clever ballads of Bon Gaultier do not seem to us to really come under the definition of parodies at all. And it is this quality which gives the point to Mr. Bromley Davenport's "Lowesby Hall. In such lines as these-though, indeed, the whole "The Heathen Pass-ee "from Light Green. This parody was given in full in Part IX. Parodies, page 135. Where and when did this Parody appear? The "Saturday Reviewer" omits this important information, whilst he tantalises his readers by saying that "the whole parody is so good that selection is difficult." It should have appeared here in full had a proper reference been given to it. All the other Parodies alluded to in the article will be included in this collection under the authors to whom they refer.-ED. Parodies. parody is so good that selection is difficult-it is the sound which does everything, but how inimitably it does it !— Here at least I'll stay no longer, let me seek for some abode, Deep in some provincial country far from rail or turnpike road; There to break all links of habit, and to find a secret charm We are very far from saying that parody is a matter of sound only; to borrow a well-known line, The sound must seem an echo to the sense. But certainly it strikes us as being a very important point, and we doubt whether any really clever parody ever was written, or ever will be, in which it does not play a conspicuous part, if not the most conspicuous. And this, perhaps, is the reason why those greatest works of poetry, where the style strikes one as the natural and inevitable vehicle of the thought, are really above the reach of parody; why all attempts to parody them, however clever, lose their cleverness in the larger consciousness of bad taste. place all parodies under this ban is surely unreasonable. It is unreasonable, as depriving the world of a great deal of harmless amusement, and also, as we have said, of a method, often more truly efficacious than more serious castigation, of exposing incompetence and affectation. But to The Saturday Review, February 14, 1885. Miss Ann Taylor's "My Mother." MY MOTHER. WHO fed me from her gentle breast, And hush'd me in her arms to rest, And on my cheek sweet kisses prest? My Mother. fear of God's vengeance. The writer proposed that Mr. Tennyson should be asked to compose a final verse more in accordance with the sentiments contained in the preceding lines. In the following number of The Athenaeum (May 19, 1866), appeared a reply from the authoress of "My Mother," then a very old lady :COLLEGE HILL, NOTTINGHAM, May 15, 1866. Allow me to thank your Correspondent of last Saturday for both his praise and blame; I am grateful for one and confess to the other, in his notice of a little poem My Mother,' of which I was the author, it may be something more than sixty years ago. I see now, so much as he does, though not in all its implications, that, should another edition pass through the press, I will take care that the offending verse shall be omitted; or, as I may hope (without troubling the Laureate), replaced. I have regarded our good old theologian, Dr. Watts, as nearly our only predecessor in verses for children; and his name -a name I revere-I may perhaps plead in part, though not so far as to accept now, what did not strike me as objectionable then. There has been an illustrated edition of our 'Original Poems' recently published by Mr. Virtue, and I am sorry to see it retained there; but, as still the living author, I have sufficient right to expunge it. " Possibly you may have heard the names of Ann and Jane Taylor, of whom I am the Ann; and remain, yours, &c., ANN GILBERT." The Editor added: "She sends us the following alteration of the verse : - This suggested alteration does not, however, remove the objectionable word "despise," which is utterly absurd as applied to such a mother as the poem describes. It may be added that the original last verse is still very generally printed with the poem. The history of the poem was thus given in that valuable storehouse of literary facts, "Notes and Queries," in August 30, 1884. "In 1798, Ann Taylor, then residing with her family in Colchester, aged about sixteen, made a purchase of A Minor's Pocket-Book, a periodical published by Harvey and Darton, 55, Gracechurch Street, London. This contained enigmas, and the solutions of previous ones, and poetical pieces to which prizes were adjudged. Fired with enthusiasm, she set to work, and unravelled enigma, charade, and rebus, and forwarded the results under the signature of Juvenilia.' They were successful, and obtained the first prize-six pocket-books. She continued 4 |