Delphi complete works of.., p.600
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 600
And my language is plain,
That for plots that are dark
And not always in vain,
The heathen Pass-ee is peculiar,
And the same I would rise to explain.
I would also premise
That the term Pass-ee
Most fitly applies,
As you probably see,
To one whose vocation is passing
The “ordinary B.A. degree.”
Tom Crib was his name,
And I shall not deny
In regard to the same
What the name might imply,
But his face it was trustful and childlike,
And he had the most innocent eye, etc., etc.
Most of us would know what we think of it, but, as the writer of it has been dead half a century, we need not be unkind about it. It appears here as a specimen does in a laboratory. Yet it is quoted in one of the best-selected anthologies of English Comic Verse.
But a much higher level is reached when the parody not only reproduces the original but reproduces it in such a way as to show its weakness — its oversentiment, its bombast or what not. In this case the parody is often better than the original for such a form of parody could not be made against a poem that was not faulty. In this sense one could no more parody “Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean” than he could parody the Sermon on the Mount.
Yet sometimes the parodist can be greatly daring and yet get away with it. Look at this beautiful thing. Captain Harry Graham’s name is mentioned so often in this book that I won’t say he wrote it. But he did. The original is easily recognized.
For each man eats his favorite meats
Provided by his wife:
Or cheese or chalk, or peas or pork
(For such, alas!, is life).
The rich man eats them with a fork,
The poor man with a knife.
Everybody in America knows the popular and virtuous but rather twaddle-twaddle poem called Maud Muller. Maud, it appears, is out raking hay on her father’s farm when Judge Jenkins rides past on his way to Court. Well, everyone knows what new-mown hay is, and summer time, and what judges are like! For half a minute the judge is inclined to leap from his horse, or at least slide off it, and go and say, “Come, I don’t know you and your station seems pretty humble but that’s all right, come and marry me.” But he restrains the impulse and passes on, and thus their lives part for ever. And the poet says:
Yet the lawyers smiled that afternoon,
When he hummed in the Court an old love tune.
· · · · · · · ·
The poem ends with the reflection
Alas! for maiden, alas for Judge
For rich repiner and household drudge
· · · · · · · ·
For of all sad words of tongue or pen
The saddest are these: “It might have been.”
Now the theme of this poem may appeal to the young and romantic. But as adult common sense it is a little wobbly. Suppose that the judge had got off his horse and proposed to Maud Muller just because she had on a light blue print dress and was throwing hay round? He’d have been sorry in five minutes. She would have said, “Oh, Jedg, ain’t you the Kidder, te-he!” And it would have been all off for him, but he’d have had to marry her.
This view of the episode was brought out by Bret Harte in his famous parody sequel “Mrs. Judge Jenkins.” Those who have read it will certainly recall the charming stanza:
And thought of the twins and wished that they
Looked less like the men who raked the hay.
And the mournful close:
If, of all sad words of tongue or pen
The saddest are, “It might have been,”
More sad are these we daily see:
“It is, but hadn’t ought to be.”
There comes a higher stage of parasitic literature when it moves away from the single poem or story and reproduces and satirizes merely the type. In fact this represents the dividing line between parody and burlesque. The one is a reproduction of a particular thing, the other of a class. Thus in poetry one may take the once famous Bon Gauthier Ballads as satirizing, by means of burlesque, the heroic, the martial and the sentimental verse of early Victorian days.
Here we have a Royal Banquet in the days when the Queen was young:
The queen she kept high festival in Windsor’s lordly hall,
And round her sat the gartered knights and ermined nobles all;
There drank the valiant Wellington, there fed the wary Peel,
While at the bottom of the board Prince Albert carved the veal.
Or take this, as voicing the indignation of the America of 1842 against the young Charles Dickens whose speeches on copyright had angered the hospitable nation:
Sneak across the wide Atlantic, worthless London’s puling child,
Better that its waves should bear thee than the land thou hast reviled;
Better in the stifling cabin on the sofa thou shouldst lie,
Sickening as the fetid nigger bears the greens and bacon by.
It will be easily seen from the above examples that parody passes by a gradual transition from parody pure and simple to mock heroic verse, or, turning in another direction, moves into the higher realm of comic satire.
Poetry seems naturally better suited than prose for parody. The form of the verse invites a literal adaptation. But burlesque in the broader sense makes use of prose, reproducing not a particular author but a whole mode of writing. The form is so familiar to us as a current mode of humor that it hardly needs illustrations. George Ade in his Fables and Bob Benchley in all that he does — and on the other side of the Atlantic A. P. Herbert and Charles Graves, whenever they want to, are cases in point.
One may even mention, with becoming modesty, the little book called Nonsense Novels that has had no small vogue in the last quarter of a century. The ten stories that make it up are not parodies of any particular stories or of any particular author. They reproduce types.
A higher variant of a burlesque is created when the type form of the story is used with an entirely new situation fitted into it. The new situation, though utterly different in time and place, has a queer similarity with the setting of the old story, and the mixed contrast and analogy become the basis of the humor.
Here are one or two examples, given at some length — with proper apologies, seeing that they are my own.
Everybody knows the types of the dear old Christmas stories, always the same and yet always new. A year or two ago I took some of the most familiar models of Christmas fiction and fitted them in with a few of the leading events of the British world of the day. The Editor of the London Spectator will at least remember them.
I took, for example, the well-known Christmas story of the stern old earl. All his life he had sacrificed affection to rigid principle, had sacrificed love to prejudice, and repelled, by the unforgiving sternness of his creed, the affection of those who should have been dearest to him. On Christmas Eve he relents and all is changed. Now observe how this beautiful old story could be revived and applied to the existing tariff situation in England, with Lord Snowden cast for the leading part.
I — STORY OF THE REPENTANT EARL
It was Christmas Eve. The stern old Earl sat in his library, his stern old face bent over his desk with its usual stern expression. He was alone in the library. It was late. The fire had burned low.
The stern old Earl wrote on. But as his hand moved over the paper somehow the sternness seemed to die out of his face, and leave in it nothing but the human kindliness for which nature long ago had framed it. For he wrote thus:
My dear Stanley, — Of late I have been thinking things over and I have come to realize that I have been wrong. I see now that all my ideas about free trade arose only from pride and prejudice. This I must now cast aside. For years I believed, or tried to believe, that industry was limited by the quantity of capital, and that a demand for commodities was not a demand for labor. This led me, as I now freely confess to you, my dear boy, to think that value under free competition was governed by the cost of production, and that unrestricted international trade supplied all consumers with a maximum of goods at a minimum of cost. I see now that this was wrong and wicked, and while I still have time I must try to set it right —
The old Earl paused. He looked up from the paper before him with an expression of firm resolution. For a moment, as the eye noted above his desk the portrait of Adam Smith, he seemed to hesitate. Then speaking to himself out loud, he said:
“No, no; I’ll do better than write. I’ll tell the boy now.”
He pulled the bell rope, and to the aged butler who entered he asked:
“Can you tell me if Mr. Stanley has gone to bed?”
“I think not, my lord. I think he is still in his sitting room.”
“And Master Ramsay and Master Neville?”
“In bed, I think, my lord.”
“Very good. Please do not disturb them. But will you ask Mr. Stanley to be kind enough to come down for a moment.”
“Grandfather!” exclaimed Stanley as he stepped, with outstretched hands, across the threshold of the library from which he had been banished for months.
The old Earl clasped the lad to his breast.
“My boy,” he said, striving to control the emotion in his voice, “it is Christmas Eve. I have done you a great wrong. I want to try to set it right while I can. I sat down to write to you, but I have found it easier and better to speak to you face to face. Stanley, I have been wrong about Free Trade.”
“Grandfather!”
“Wrong, utterly wrong,” continued the old Earl, with something like passion in his voice. “It is not true, Stanley, that value under free importation tends to equal the cost of production. I have been wrong, obstinate, pig-headed, but I see it now.”
“Not pig-headed, grandfather,” exclaimed Stanley, “not pig-headed; a little mulish if you like, but not that. But let me call Ramsay and Neville. Do, pray.”
“No, no,” said the Earl; “they are too young to understand.”
“Ramsay begins to understand about the tariff, grandfather,” said Stanley, “and little Neville seems to have always understood it. I’ll call them.”
But there was no need. Roused by the unwonted sound of voices in their grandfather’s library, little Ramsay and little Neville, still in their sleeping pyjamas, came bursting into the room.
“Ramsay! Neville!” cried Stanley. “Isn’t it wonderful! Grandfather has given up Free Trade.”
“Grandfather!” exclaimed the little boys.
And at that moment the sound of the church bells, tolling for Christmas Eve, came faintly on the air.
The old Earl moved across the room and drew back the heavy curtain from the French windows. Outside the bright snow and the air, crystaled with snowflakes, was bright with the moonlight.
“Look,” he said, “a fall of snow. That will mean a lot of work for the villagers. And work, my children, means wages; for it is true, my dear lads, that a demand for labor is really a demand for commodities.”
The old Earl threw open the window.
All four stood listening to the sound of the bells, now loud and clear.
“How beautiful the bells sound!” said little Ramsay.
“Beautiful indeed,” said the Earl. “We buy them in Belgium.”
“No, grandfather,” said little Neville gently, “in Birmingham.”
· · · · · · · ·
II — STORY OF THE CHRISTMAS GHOST
(In this story, the most familiar and typical of all, a man, hitherto harsh and remorseless, has a dream of a ghost on Christmas Eve and wakes a changed being. The greatest of all our writers has immortalized the theme as a Christmas tale. But even he never realized the use he might have made of it to settle the most bitter of all political controversies. Here it is retold in its applied form.)
Mr. de Valera leaped from his bed in his London lodgings, still filled with the new resolution that had come to him as the result of his dream.
He threw open the window.
Christmas morning! Clear and bright and cold: cold piping for the blood to dance to: “Fine place this town!” thought Mr. de Valera. “Jolly morning for Christmas! Capital to be alive on such a day! Now then, for the new resolutions.”
Outside in the street was a boy, swinging on the area railings.
“Hi — you boy!” called Mr. de Valera, “can you tell me what town this is?”
“Why, London, to be sure!” replied the boy.
“Intelligent boy that,” thought Mr. de Valera, rubbing his hands. “London, eh? London in England?”
“Yes, sir, in England right enough,” said the boy.
“Ha! ha!” said Mr. de Valera, “and in the British Empire, eh?”
“Yes, sir, in the British Empire.”
“Smart boy that,” murmured Mr. de Valera. “In the British Empire, eh? The dear old Empire. Never broken up yet, I’ll be bound?”
“No, sir; never broken up.”
“Then, here’s a shilling for you. Now then, do you know the spot where they keep the Irish Land Annuities?”
“Oh, yes sir. Right around the corner. Commissioners of the National Debt. My eye! Do I know it? I saw a whole big bundle of them in the windows yesterday. Christmas sale, sir.”
“Do you think if I gave you some money you would go and buy me some?”
“How many do you want?”
“All they have!” said Mr. de Valera. “The whole lot.
“Here,” he continued, throwing a tied-up bundle out of the window. “There’s a couple of million pounds. Buy the annuities, call a cab, and bring them back here and I’ll give you an Irish Free State Terminable Debenture. Off you go now, like a shot.”
Off like a shot! He would have been a quick hand with a gun who could have got a shot off half so fast.
When the boy came back with the Land Annuities — and they filled the whole cab — Mr. de Valera was standing fully dressed on the steps, his genial face beaming with benevolence.
“Right, my boy,” he said, as he handed the little fellow a 1975 debenture.
“Now then, cabby, in with those annuities into the hall here. Smartly now, and I’ll give you a Free State Consolidated Loan Coupon for 1981.”
“My hat!” said the cabman.
“I’ll fill it with annuities, if you like,” said Mr. de Valera. And they both roared with laughter.
“Comic fellow the cabman,” thought Mr. de Valera. “Genuine, hearty, English spirit.
“Now then, my man,” he said, when the debentures were piled up in the hall — and they filled one side of it— “do you think you know the way to drive me to Buckingham Palace?”
“Buckingham Palace!” exclaimed the man. “Do I know it? Why I drove the King there last night!”
“Good! Then off we go.”
“But they’ll never let you in at this hour, sir,” said the cabman. “It’s too early.”
“Won’t they,” chuckled Mr. de Valera as he got into the cab. “You just drive up and ring the bell and say that I’ve come to take the Oath of Allegiance!”
· · · · · · · ·
Ever after that Mr. de Valera was a better and nobler man, a kinder father, an easier uncle and a more religious pew-holder. Often in his old age he used to say: “It is nobler and wiser to perform a good action when you can than wait till you have to.”
· · · · · · · ·
III — CHRISTMAS IN THE CASUAL WARD
(This dear old story of Christmas is laid in and around a great London hospital. There has been an accident on Christmas morning and — but let the story speak for itself, with only the preliminary explanation that if Mahatma Gandhi never was in London at Christmas time he might easily have been there.)
The pathetic figure on the little stretcher was carried up the steps of the great hospital.
“What is it?” asked the group of people who had gathered about the entrance.
“Street accident,” said the policeman (he was, of course, a burly policeman). “Poor chap!”
“Christmas, too,” said the doorman. “Hard luck!”
(The doorman had little doormen of his own at home.)
“Is he much hurt?” asked a sympathetic bystander.
(The unsympathetic ones hadn’t thought of this question.)
“Can’t live, I heard ’em say,” said the policeman. “Knocked down by a dray, I understand.”
“I saw it happen,” said a woman in the crowd. “Can’t say it was the drayman’s fault, either. The little chap didn’t seem to know where he was going. Kind o’ dazed like, queer in his mind and talking to himself. Wasn’t a white man, either; more like a Canadian or something.”
Upstairs in the ward a little group of nurses and house surgeons stood about the bed on which lay the pathetic little figure. They were waiting for the great specialist who had been hurriedly summoned. (It’s the only way to get them.)
“Do you know who he is?” asked one of the nurses.
The house surgeon shook his head. “No clue,” he said. “Linen, such as he had, marked ‘Gandhi, Bombay.’ ”
“Anything in that bundle he was carrying?”
“Nothing really to go on. Two spoons with a coronet, marked ‘Willingdon’; another spoon marked ‘United Service Club, Bombay.’ That was all.”
The conversation hushed as the great specialist, Sir Magnus Alhell, stepped into the ward.
He bent over the bed, removed the bedclothes and ran his trained hand over the poor shrunken chest and the feeble limbs of the little figure.
“Nothing there,” he murmured. “I find no injury.”
The patient opened his eyes.
“I refuse to coöperate,” he said. Then his eyes closed again.
“Can you answer my questions?”
“Yes, but I won’t,” came the faint reply as the eyes again opened.
“Yes, but you will,” said the great specialist. There was something in the touch of his hand, something in the mesmerism of his eye — the legacy of Hippocrates — that compelled the will of the patient.
“Now then,” said Sir Magnus. “When did you last have a square meal?”
