Parodies of Ballad Criticism | Page 2

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.
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, 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 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 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