THE MUSE OF PARODY.
Reader, are you of those who cannot tolerate their favourite authors or their favourite poems being parodied? A lady-friend of the writer’s lately said, in regard to one of the best-known poems of a distinguished poet: ‘I admired and liked it once; but I can hardly read it now, since I saw that dreadful parody of it that appeared in Punch.’ If you are of this sensitive class, we fear this article is not for you. But we feel pretty sure of an audience; for we know that the large majority of readers can relish a clever parody without in the least losing their enjoyment in or respect for the thing parodied. And it is well that it is so; for parody in some shape and to some extent is early as the beginnings of literature itself; and if the fame of poets depended on their immunity from travesty, every poet that has ever won his bays, and whose reputation now rests secure and impregnable, would have been laughed out of court long since.
In speaking of modern English parody, one’s thoughts turn first, almost inevitably, to the brothers Horace and James Smith, who, in Rejected Addresses, may be regarded as the first to practise parody in a systematised fashion, as a vehicle of fun and humour. The Rejected Addresses won high praise from Jeffrey, who pronounced the parody on Crabbe ‘an exquisite and masterly imitation;’ while the poet himself declared it to be ‘admirably done.’ We shall give a short extract from it, which we think hits off Crabbe’s manner in a way that fully justifies Jeffrey’s criticism:
John Richard William Alexander Dwyer
Was footman to Justinian Stubbs, Esquire;
But when John Dwyer listed in the Blues,
Emanuel Jennings polished Stubbs’s shoes.
Emanuel Jennings brought his youngest boy
Up as a corn-cutter—a safe employ;
In Holywell Street, St Pancras, he was bred
(At number twenty-seven, it is said),
Pacing the pump, and near the Granby’s Head.
He would have bound him to some shop in town,
But with a premium he could not come down.
Pat was the urchin’s name—a red-haired youth,
Fonder of purl and skittle-grounds than truth.
In regard to the parody of Sir Walter Scott in Rejected Addresses, the poet himself said: ‘I must have done it myself, though I forget on what occasion.’ Here are a few lines descriptive of the Drury Lane Theatre on fire:
At length the mist awhile was cleared,
When lo! amid the wreck upreared,
Gradual a moving head appeared,
And Eagle firemen knew
’Twas Joseph Muggins, name revered,
The foreman of their crew.
Loud shouted all in signs of woe,
‘A Muggins to the rescue, ho!’
And poured the hissing tide.
Thackeray was especially happy and especially funny in his Irish burlesques. Larry O’Toole, a parody of the rollicking Irish bacchanalian songs with which Charles Lever made us so familiar, admirably hits the medium between close imitation and high burlesque. There is a dash in it both of Larry O’Hale and the Widow Malone. We quote two of the three verses:
You’ve all heard of Larry O’Toole,
Of the beautiful town of Drumgoole.
He had but one eye
To ogle ye by;
Och, murther, but that was a jew’l!
A fool
He made of the girls, this O’Toole.
’Twas he was the boy didn’t fail,
That tuck down purtaties and mail;
He never would shrink
From any sthrong dthrink;
Was it whisky or Drogheda ale,
I’m bail
This Larry would swallow a pail.
Moore’s well-known lines—
I never nursed a young gazelle
To glad me with its soft dark eye,
But when it came to know me well,
And love me, it was sure to die—
have been frequently parodied. Here is one version which, we think, is not very familiar:
I never had a piece of toast
Particularly long and wide,
But fell upon the sanded floor,
And always on the buttered side.
The following is by Mr H. C. Pennel, author of Puck on Pegasus:
I never roved by Cynthia’s beam,
To gaze upon the starry sky,
But some old stiff-backed beetle came,
And charged into my pensive eye.
And oh! I never did the swell
In Regent Street among the beaus,
But smuts the most prodigious fell,
And always settled on my nose!
In those two delightful volumes, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-glass, ‘Lewis Carroll’ gives us some capital travesties. Mr Southey’s poem beginning ‘“You are old, Father William,” the young man said,’ is so familiar, that every reader will appreciate the point of the burlesque, without needing the original before him:
‘You are old, Father William,’ the young man said,
‘And your hair has become very white;
And yet you incessantly stand on your head—
Do you think at your age it is right?’
‘In my youth,’ Father William replied to his son,
‘I thought it might injure the brain;
But now that I’m perfectly sure I have none,
Why, I do it again and again.’
The old nursery song, ‘“Will you walk into my parlour?” said the Spider to the Fly,’ the same writer has likewise burlesqued:
‘Will you walk a little faster?’ said a whiting to a snail;
‘There’s a porpoise close behind me, and he’s treading on my tail.
See how eagerly the lobsters and the turtles all advance!
They are waiting on the shingle—will you come and join the dance?
Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance?
Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, won’t you join the dance?’
The late Mr J. R. Planché, whose innumerable fairy extravaganzas were so full of fun and humour, was also an expert in parody. We give the first verse of a burlesque by him of the once popular song, When other Lips:
When other lips and other eyes
Their tales of love shall tell—
Which means the usual sort of lies
You’ve heard from every swell;
When, bored with every sort of bosh,
You’d give the world to see
A friend whose love you know will wash,
Oh, then remember me!
The funniest burlesque of Wordsworth’s We are Seven, with which we are acquainted, is by Mr H. S. Leigh:
‘I thought it would have sent me mad
Last night about eleven.’
Said I: ‘What is it makes you bad?
How many apples have you had?’
She answered: ‘Only seven.’
‘And are you sure you took no more,
My little maid?’ quoth I.
‘Oh, please, sir, mother gave me four,
But they were in a pie.’
‘If that’s the case,’ I stammered out,
‘Of course you’ve had eleven.’
The maiden answered with a pout:
‘I ain’t had more nor seven.’
Here are four lines from a travesty of Tennyson’s May Queen—
‘You may lay me in my bed, mother—my head is throbbing sore;
And mother, prithee, let the sheets be duly aired before;
And if you’d do a kindness to your poor desponding child,
Draw me a pot of beer, mother—and, mother, draw it mild.’
It is not necessary to name the original of the following. We quote two of the three verses which compose the whole:
He wore a brace of pistols, the night when first we met;
His deep-lined brow was frowning beneath his wig of jet;
His footsteps had the moodiness, his voice the hollow tone,
Of a bandit chief, who feels remorse, and tears his hair alone.
I saw him but at half-price, but methinks I see him now,
In the tableau of the last act, with the blood upon his brow.
A private bandit’s belt and boots, when next we met, he wore;
His salary, he told me, was lower than before;
And standing at the O. P. wing, he strove, and not in vain,
To borrow half a sovereign, which he never paid again.
I saw it but a moment—and I wish I saw it now—
As he buttoned up his pocket with a condescending bow.
Tennyson’s well-known lyric, Home they brought her warrior dead, has been thus amusingly parodied by Mr Sawyer:
Home they brought her sailor son,
Grown a man across the sea,
Tall and broad, and black of beard,
And hoarse of voice as man may be.
Hand to shake, and mouth to kiss,
Both he offered ere he spoke;
But she said: ‘What man is this
Comes to play a sorry joke?’
Then they praised him, called him ‘smart,’
‘Tightest lad that ever stept;’
But her son she did not know,
And she neither smiled nor wept.
Rose, a nurse of ninety years,
Set a pigeon-pie in sight;
She saw him eat: ‘’Tis he, ’tis he!’
She knew him—by his appetite.
The following clever parody of Wordsworth’s Lucy is but little known. It was written by Hartley Coleridge, and reappeared some years ago in Notes and Queries. We shall quote the first verse of the original:
She dwelt among the untrodden ways,
Beside the banks of Dove;
A maid whom there were none to praise,
And very few to love.
We give two of the three verses composing the parody:
He lived among the untrodden ways,
To Rydal Mount that lead;
A bard whom there were none to praise,
And very few to read.
Unread his works—his Milk-white Doe
With dust is dark and dim;
It’s still in Longman’s shop; and oh!
The difference to him!
From a parody of Tennyson’s Mariana, which appeared in an Australian paper, we take the concluding verse. The burden of the original ballad, it will be remembered, runs:
She only said: ‘My life is dreary;
He cometh not,’ she said;
She said: ‘I am aweary, aweary—
I would that I were dead!’
They lifted him with kindly care;
They took him by the heels and head;
Across the floor, and up the stair,
They bore him safely to his bed.
They wrapped the blankets warm and tight,
And round about his nose and chin
They drew the sheets, and tucked them in,
And whispered: ‘Poor old boy—Good-night!’
He murmured: ‘Boys, oh, deary, deary,
That punch was strong,’ he said;
He said: ‘I am aweary, aweary—
Thank heaven, I’ve got to bed!’
An American magazine published some years ago a series of burlesques of the old nursery rhymes, of which we give specimens:
Little Jack Horner,
Of Latin no scorner,
In the second declension did spy
How of nouns there are some
Which, ending in um,
Do not make their plural in i.
Jack and Jill
Have studied Mill,
And all that sage has taught too;
Now both promote
Jill’s claim to vote,
As every good girl ought to.
The case for the evolutionists is thus tersely put by an American poet, parodying Sing a song of Sixpence:
Sing a song of phosphates,
Fibrine in a line,
Four-and-twenty follicles
In the van of time.
When the phosphorescence
Evoluted brain,
Superstition ended,
Man began to reign.
Pope’s familiar couplet—
Here shall the spring its earliest sweets bestow,
Here the first roses of the year shall blow—
has been thus travestied by Miss Catherine Fanshawe, who accomplishes the step from the sublime to the ridiculous by the change of two words only:
Here shall the spring its earliest coughs bestow,
Here the first noses of the year shall blow.
Among living parodists, few, if any, excel Mr C. S. Calverley, who seems to possess every qualification for success in this sort of work. The reader will at once recognise how happily he has caught Tennyson’s method and manner in the following parody of The Brook, especially in the blank-verse portion. We quote two verses and the conclusion:
‘I loiter down by thorp and town;
For any job I’m willing;
Take here and there a dusty brown,
And here and there a shilling.
‘I steal from th’ parson’s strawberry plats,
I hide by the Squire’s covers;
I teach the sweet young housemaids what’s
The art of trapping lovers.’
Thus on he prattled like a babbling brook.
But I: ‘The sun hath slipt behind the hill,
And my Aunt Vivian dines at half-past six.’
So in all love we parted; I to the Hall;
They to the village. It was noised next noon
That chickens had been missed at Syllabub Farm.
We had noted down several other examples of parody by different authors, which might have served further to illustrate our subject. Our selections have necessarily lost something of force and pertinence, from the fragmentary condition in which we have been obliged to present them; but the reader, if he be sufficiently interested in the matter, may easily go to the original sources.
It needs not to be pointed out that there are limits to parody, as to all other forms of light and sportive literature, whose main object is, after all, to divert and amuse. Good taste should guide the course of parody, in fact should never be absent from it. Let the parodist hit as hard as he pleases, but let him deal no foul blow, nor aim his strokes at aught that tradition and the world’s verdict have made sacred and to be revered. Parody may be as clever, laughable, and amusing as you can make it; but it should always be good-natured, fair, and gentlemanly.