A Lady of _bas bleu_ celebrity (the term is getting odious, particularly
to our _sçavantes_) had two friends, whom she equally admired--an
elegant poet and his parodist. She had contrived to prevent their
meeting as long as her stratagems lasted, till at length she apologised
to the serious bard for inviting him when his mock _umbra_ was to be
present. Astonished, she perceived that both men of genius felt a mutual
esteem for each other's opposite talent; the ridiculed had perceived no
malignity in the playfulness of the parody, and even seemed to consider
it as a compliment, aware that parodists do not waste their talent on
obscure productions; while the ridiculer himself was very sensible that
he was the inferior poet. The lady-critic had imagined that PARODY must
necessarily be malicious; and in some cases it is said those on whom the
parody has been performed have been of the same opinion.
Parody strongly resembles mimicry, a principle in human nature not so
artificial as it appears: Man may be well defined a mimetic animal. The
African boy, who amused the whole kafle he journeyed with, by mimicking
the gestures and the voice of the auctioneer who had sold him at the
slave-market a few days before, could have had no sense of scorn, of
superiority, or of malignity; the boy experienced merely the pleasure of
repeating attitudes and intonations which had so forcibly excited his
interest. The numerous parodies of Hamlet's soliloquy were never made in
derision of that solemn monologue, any more than the travesties of
Virgil by Scarron and Cotton; their authors were never so gaily mad as
that. We have parodies on the Psalms by Luther; Dodsley parodied the
book of Chronicles, and the scripture style was parodied by Franklin in
his beautiful story of Abraham; a story he found in Jeremy Taylor, and
which Taylor borrowed from the East, for it is preserved in the Persian
Sadi. Not one of these writers, however, proposed to ridicule their
originals; some ingenuity in the application was all they intended. The
lady-critic alluded to had suffered by a panic, in imagining that a
parody was necessarily a corrosive satire. Had she indeed proceeded one
step farther, and asserted that parodies might be classed among the most
malicious inventions in literature, when they are such as Colman and
Lloyd made on Gray, in their odes to "Oblivion and Obscurity," her
reading possibly might have supplied the materials of the present
research.
Parodies were frequently practised by the ancients, and with them, like
ourselves, consisted of a work grafted on another work, but which turned
on a different subject by a slight change of the expressions. It might
be a sport of fancy, the innocent child of mirth; or a satirical arrow
drawn from the quiver of caustic criticism; or it was that malignant
art which only studies to make the original of the parody, however
beautiful, contemptible and ridiculous. Human nature thus enters into
the composition of parodies, and their variable character originates in
the purpose of their application.
There is in "the million" a natural taste for farce after tragedy, and
they gladly relieve themselves by mitigating the solemn seriousness of
the tragic drama; for they find, that it is but "a step from the sublime
to the ridiculous." The taste for parody will, I fear, always prevail:
for whatever tends to ridicule a work of genius, is usually very
agreeable to a great number of contemporaries. In the history of
parodies, some of the learned have noticed a supposititious
circumstance, which, however, may have happened, for it is a very
natural one. When the rhapsodists, who strolled from town to town to
chant different fragments of the poems of Homer, had recited, they were
immediately followed by another set of strollers--buffoons, who made the
same audience merry by the burlesque turn which they gave to the solemn
strains which had just so deeply engaged their attention. It is supposed
that we have one of these travestiers of the Iliad in one Sotades, who
succeeded by only changing the measure of the verses without altering
the words, which entirely disguised the Homeric character; fragments of
which, scattered in Dionysius Halicarnassensis, I leave to the curiosity
of the learned Grecian.[291] Homer's Battle of the Frogs and Mice, a
learned critic, the elder Heinsius, asserts, was not written by the
poet, but is a parody on the poem. It is evidently as good-humoured an
one as any in the "Rejected Addresses." And it was because Homer was the
most popular poet that he was most susceptible of the playful honours of
the parodist; unless the prototype is familiar to us a parody is
nothing! Of these parodists of Homer we may regret the loss of one,
Timon of Philius, whose parodies were termed Silli, from Silenus being
their chief personage; he levelled them at the sophistical philosophers
of his age; his invocation is grafted on the opening of the Iliad, to
recount the evil-doings of those babblers, whom he compares to the bags
in which Æolus deposited all his winds; balloons inflated with empty
ideas! We should like to have appropriated some of these _silli_, or
parodies of Timon the Sillograph, which, however, seem to have been at
times calumnious.[292] Shenstone's "School Mistress," and some few other
ludicrous poems, derive much of their merit from parody.
This taste for parodies was very prevalent with the Grecians, and is a
species of humour which perhaps has been too rarely practised by the
moderns: Cervantes has some passages of this nature in his parodies of
the old chivalric romances; Fielding, in some parts of his "Tom Jones"
and "Joseph Andrews," in his burlesque poetical descriptions; and Swift,
in his "Battle of Books," and "Tale of a Tub;" but few writers have
equalled the delicacy and felicity of Pope's parodies in the "Rape of
the Lock." Such parodies give refinement to burlesque.
The ancients made a liberal use of it in their satirical comedy, and
sometimes carried it on through an entire work, as in the Menippean
satire, Seneca's mock _Eloge_ of Claudius, and Lucian in his Dialogues.
There are parodies even in Plato; and an anecdotical one, recorded of
this philosopher, shows them in their most simple state. Dissatisfied
with his own poetical essays, he threw them into the flames; that is,
the sage resolved to sacrifice his verses to the god of fire; and in
repeating that line in Homer where Thetis addresses Vulcan to implore
his aid, the application became a parody, although it required no other
change than the insertion of the philosopher's name instead of the
goddess's;--[293]
Vulcan, arise! 'tis _Plato_ claims thy aid!
Boileau affords a happy instance of this simple parody. Corneille, in
his Cid, makes one of his personages remark,
Pour grands que soient les rois ils sont ce que nous sommes,
Ils peuvent se tromper comme les autres hommes.
A slight alteration became a fine parody in Boileau's Chapelain
Décoiffé,
Pour grands que soient les rois ils sont ce que nous sommes,
Us fee trompent _en vers_ comme les autres hommes.
We find in Athenæus the name of the inventor of a species of parody
which more immediately engages our notice--DRAMATIC PARODIES. It appears
this inventor was a satirist, so that the lady-critic, whose opinion we
had the honour of noticing, would be warranted by appealing to its
origin to determine the nature of the thing. A dramatic parody, which
produced the greatest effect, was "the Gigantomachia," as appears by the
only circumstance known of it. Never laughed the Athenians so heartily
as at its representation, for the fatal news of the deplorable state to
which the affairs of the republic were reduced in Sicily arrived at its
first representation--and the Athenians continued laughing to the end!
as the modern Athenians, the volatile Parisians, might in their national
concern of an OPERA COMIQUE. It was the business of the dramatic parody
to turn the solemn tragedy, which the audience had just seen exhibited,
into a farcical comedy; the same actors who had appeared in magnificent
dresses, now returned on the stage in grotesque habiliments, with odd
postures and gestures, while the story, though the same, was incongruous
and ludicrous. The Cyclops of Euripides is probably the only remaining
specimen; for this may be considered as a parody on the ninth book of
the Odyssey--the adventures of Ulysses in the cave of Polyphemus, where
Silenus and a chorus of satyrs are farcically introduced, to contrast
with the grave narrative of Homer, of the shifts and escape of the
cunning man "from the one-eyed ogre." The jokes are too coarse for the
French taste of Brumoy, who, in his translation, goes on with a critical
growl and foolish apology for Euripides having written a farce; Brumoy,
like Pistol, is forced to eat his onion, but with a worse grace,
swallowing and execrating to the end.
In dramatic composition, Aristophanes is perpetually hooking in parodies
of Euripides, whom of all poets he hated, as well as of Æschylus,
Sophocles, and other tragic bards. Since, at length, that Grecian wit
has found a translator saturated with his genius, and an interpreter as
philosophical, the subject of Grecian parody will probably be reflected
in a clearer light from his researches.
Dramatic parodies in modern literature were introduced by our vivacious
neighbours, and may be said to constitute a class of literary satires
peculiar to the French nation. What had occurred in Greece a similar
gaiety of national genius unconsciously reproduced. The dramatic
parodies in our own literature, as in _The Rehearsal_, _Tom Thumb_,[294]
and _The Critic_, however exquisite, are confined to particular
passages, and are not grafted on a whole original; we have neither
naturalised the dramatic parody into a species, nor dedicated to it the
honours of a separate theatre.
This peculiar dramatic satire, a burlesque of an entire tragedy, the
volatile genius of the Parisians accomplished. Whenever a new tragedy,
which still continues the favourite species of drama with the French,
attracted the notice of the town, shortly after uprose its parody at the
Italian theatre, so that both pieces may have been performed in
immediate succession in the same evening. A French tragedy is most
susceptible of this sort of ridicule, by applying its declamatory style,
its exaggerated sentiments, and its romantic out-of-the-way nature to
the commonplace incidents and persons of domestic life; out of the stuff
of which they made their emperors, their heroes, and their princesses,
they cut out a pompous country justice, a hectoring tailor, or an
impudent mantua-maker; but it was not merely this travesty of great
personages, nor the lofty effusions of one in a lowly station, which
terminated the object of parody. It was designed for a higher object,
that of more obviously exposing the original for any absurdity in its
scenes, or in its catastrophe, and dissecting its faulty characters; in
a word, weighing in the critical scales the nonsense of the poet. Parody
sometimes became a refined instructor for the public, whose discernment
is often blinded by party or prejudice. But it was, too, a severe
touchstone for genius: Racine, some say, smiled, others say he did not,
when he witnessed Harlequin, in the language of Titus to Berenice,
declaiming on some ludicrous affair to Columbine; La Motte was very
sore, and Voltaire, and others, shrunk away with a cry--from a parody!
Voltaire was angry when he witnessed his _Mariamne_ parodied by _Le
mauvais Menage_; or "Bad Housekeeping." The aged, jealous Herod was
turned into an old cross country justice; Varus, bewitched by Mariamne,
strutted a dragoon; and the whole establishment showed it was under very
bad management. Fuzelier collected some of these parodies,[295] and not
unskilfully defends their nature and their object against the protest of
La Motte, whose tragedies had severely suffered from these burlesques.
His celebrated domestic tragedy of _Inez de Castro_, the fable of which
turns on a concealed and clandestine marriage, produced one of the
happiest parodies in _Agnes de Chaillot_. In the parody, the cause of
the mysterious obstinacy of Pierrot the son, in persisting to refuse the
hand of the daughter of his mother-in-law, Madame _la Baillive_, is thus
discovered by her to Monsieur _le Baillif_:--
Mon mari, pour le coup j'ai découvert l'affaire,
Ne vous étonnez plus qu'à nos désirs contraire,
Pour ma fille Pierrot ne montre que mépris:
Voilà l'unique objet dont son coeur est épris.
[_Pointing to Agnes de Chaillot_.
The Baillif exclaims,
Ma servante!
This single word was the most lively and fatal criticism of the tragic
action of Inez de Castro, which, according to the conventional decorum
and fastidious code of French criticism, grossly violated the majesty of
Melpomene, by giving a motive and an object so totally undignified to
the tragic tale. In the parody there was something ludicrous when the
secret came out which explained poor Pierrot's long-concealed
perplexities, in the maid-servant bringing forward a whole legitimate
family of her own! La Motte was also galled by a projected parody of his
"Machabees"--where the hasty marriage of the young Machabeus, and the
sudden conversion of the amorous Antigone, who, for her first
penitential act, persuades a youth to marry her, without first deigning
to consult her respectable mother, would have produced an excellent
scene for the parody. But La Motte prefixed an angry preface to his
_Inez de Castro_; he inveighs against all parodies, which he asserts to
be merely a French fashion (we have seen, however, that it was once
Grecian), the offspring of a dangerous spirit of ridicule, and the
malicious amusement of superficial minds.--"Were this true," retorts
Fuzelier, "we ought to detest parodies; but we maintain, that far from
converting virtue into a paradox, and degrading truth by ridicule,
PARODY will only strike at what is chimerical and false; it is not a
piece of buffoonery so much as a critical exposition. What do we parody
but the absurdities of dramatic writers, who frequently make their
heroes act against nature, common sense, and truth? After all," he
ingeniously adds, "it is the public, not we, who are the authors of
these? PARODIES; for they are usually but the echoes of the pit, and we
parodists have only to give a dramatic form to the opinions and
observations we hear. Many tragedies," Fuzelier, with admirable truth,
observes, "disguise vices into virtues, and PARODIES unmask them." We
have had tragedies recently which very much required parodies to expose
them, and to shame our inconsiderate audiences, who patronised these
monsters of false passions. The rants and bombast of some of these might
have produced, with little or no alteration of the inflated originals,
_A Modern Rehearsal_, or a new _Tragedy for Warm Weather_.[296]
Of PARODIES, we may safely approve the legitimate use, and even indulge
their agreeable maliciousness; while we must still dread that
extraordinary facility to which the public, or rather human nature, is
so prone, as sometimes to laugh at what at another time they would shed
tears.
Tragedy is rendered comic or burlesque by altering the _station_ and
_manners_ of the _persons_; and the reverse may occur, of raising what
is comic or burlesque into tragedy. On so little depends the sublime or
the ridiculous! Beattie says, "In most human characters there are
blemishes, moral, intellectual, or corporeal; by exaggerating which, to
a certain degree, you may form a comic character; as by raising the
virtues, abilities, or external advantages of individuals, you form
epic or tragic characters;[297] a subject humorously touched on by
Lloyd, in the prologue to _The Jealous Wife_.
Quarrels, upbraidings, jealousies, and spleen,
Grow too familiar in the comic scene;
Tinge but the language with heroic chime,
'Tis passion, pathos, character sublime.
What big round words had swell'd the pompous scene,
A king the husband, and the wife a queen.