The field of politics can be relied upon not only to exert a disproportionate attraction for narcissists and psychopaths (many of whom would have been playground bullies in their earlier years), but also to bring out the worst in all but those with the very highest levels of integrity and self control. Naked power games are not restricted to politics, however: they are evident in virtually every area of human life.
Literary life has always had its own (often ruthless) politics. But good writing manages to free itself, at least to some extent, from the limitations of the social matrix within which it arises. Satire and parody, for example, take what is twisted, stupid, crude, crass or childish as raw material and transmute it.
Unfortunately, technological and social changes have pretty much destroyed literary traditions. Digitization and social media have finished them off. Writers have been marginalized and replaced by “influencers”.
The high-point of secular literary culture was arguably the 18th century. Certainly it was a golden age of satire and parody.
Satires and parodies are unusual amongst literary forms in a couple of ways. For one thing, satirical works necessarily take an activist stance whereas other literary forms need not. Satires and parodies necessarily – by their very nature – take a stand. And such works take their targets from the real world of the time. Precisely because of this engagement and topicality, they are not as self-contained as other forms and tend to date more quickly.
Henry Carey is little known today. He was a gifted satirist, librettist and writer of songs. In 1725 Carey wrote a parody of the writing style of one of his contemporaries, Ambrose Philips. The latter had pioneered a simple and direct verse style utilizing a seven-syllable line. Philips was (in the efficiently dismissive words of Ian Lancashire) “a minor poet not highly regarded then or now.”
The issues at stake were primarily aesthetic but there were also political undercurrents. Carey’s parody of Philips’s poetic style was entitled “Namby-Pamby: or, A Panegyric on the New Versification.” ‘Namby-Pamby’ is a play on Philips’s first name. The nickname was picked up by Alexander Pope and others and soon became firmly embedded in the language.
Carey’s parody begins as follows:
All ye poets of the age,
All ye witlings of the stage,
Learn your jingles to reform,
Crop your numbers and conform.
Let your little verses flow
Gently, sweetly, row by row;
Let the verse the subject fit,
Little subject, little wit.
Namby-Pamby is your guide,
Albion’s joy, Hibernia’s pride.
Namby-Pamby Pilly-piss,
Rhimy pimed on Missy-Miss;
Tartaretta Tartaree,
From the navel to the knee;
That her father’s gracy-grace
Might give him a placy-place.
[…]
Now the venal poet sings
Baby clouts and baby things,
Baby dolls and baby houses,
Little misses, little spouses,
Little playthings, little toys,
Little girls and little boys.
As an actor does his part,
So the nurses get by heart
Namby-Pamby’s little rhymes,
Little jingle, little chimes,
To repeat to little miss,
Piddling ponds of pissy-piss…
Some of Carey’s wordplay verges on nonsense, but it is highly charged and nothing like the later tradition of gentle nonsense-for-its-own-sake exemplified by the likes of Edward Lear or Lewis Carroll. Carey’s critical engagement with contemporaries and with specific cultural and political issues marks and motivates his writing. The rivalries and controversies in question have faded into history, but the emotional energy they generated is still evident, even to the casual reader.
I conclude with a few remarks about Alexander Pope who was a master of subtle and civilized satire. When I studied 18th-century English literature as an undergraduate, I still had strong Romantic prejudices and was initially unimpressed. Heroic couplets, I have to say, are an acquired taste. But the personality of some of the writers showed through, especially (for me) Pope and his circle. I came to love Pope as a person and to admire him as a writer, for his warmth and wit and moral clarity.
Unfortunately, given the barriers that the verse form which he employed creates for today’s readers, he is no longer widely appreciated and never will be. Foreign and ancient authors can be translated and live again. But what Pope and other poets of that period said was not only closely tied to the preoccupations and personalities of the time but also inextricably bound up with a particular style of versifying. Form and content formed a fragile and contingent whole.
Those who have the patience to immerse themselves in Pope’s verse will come to realize that the technical constraints which he willingly adopted and embraced suited the tenor of his mind and allowed him to express serious moral and aesthetic judgments without sounding ponderous or pretentious. Poetic conventions also gave him more freedom than prose would have allowed to give voice to the deep affection which he felt for his friends, both men and women. (See, for example, the “Epistle to Miss Blount, On Her Leaving the Town, After the Coronation.”)
The more combative aspects of his writing, the skewering of his attackers and other enemies (as in The Dunciad), may hold some interest for literary and intellectual historians but hardly for the general reader.
[This is an edited and abridged version of an essay of mine which was posted recently at The Electric Agora.]
No comments:
Post a Comment