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 ideas.” 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 understand 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,”[18] 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 parody 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—
Now thickly and more thickly
To the Five Orders gates,
In cap and gown throng through the town
White-chokered candidates.
Stunner of Christ Church, ne’er before
In academics seen;
And Nobby of the collars high,
Girt with the scarf none else may tie;