early product is sizable enough, its rank is comparatively low. It is overshadowed by the others on the list because in it the fun and nonsense is predominant and the critical element so slight as to be negligible; and it is overshadowed still more by the more mature genius of the authors themselves.
It is natural that the burlesque should have been a favorite satiric mode from Aristophanes to Rostand and Shaw. The wit it requires is imitative rather than creative, and its appeal is instantaneous.
It is also natural that it should manifest itself at the beginning of a writer's career, and form a prelude to greater achievement. This is the case for good and sufficient psychological reasons. In youth the exuberant and undisciplined spirit, not yet checked by the reins of reality, riots in the glory of extravagance; the inventive faculty is awake but unfurnished by experience with material for original creation; the critical scent is keen but unpracticed, and impatient of sober, qualified judgment.[1] Such a condition is prime for the production of a Love's Labour's Lost, a Joseph Andrews, a Northanger Abbey, a Pickwick, a Barry Lyndon, a Shaving of Shagpat; to be followed by Twelfth Night, Tom Jones, Emma, David Copperfield, Vanity Fair, The Egoist.
Thackeray's apprenticeship at this desk was rather
- ↑ Walker's dictum (Victorian Literature, 700) that "Good burlesque is impossible except through sound criticism," is an instance of the dangerous half truth. The sounder the criticism the better the burlesque, to be sure, but only as criticism: as burlesque it may be highly successful in spite of some critical unsoundness. Indeed, it must necessarily contain the element of injustice that inheres in all exaggeration,—the very foundation of burlesque and caricature. Moreover, Walker's conception of the burlesque is indicated when he calls Rebecca and Rowena "perhaps the best burlesque ever penned." As a matter of fact, it is not only far from that preëminence, but it is in form actually less of a burlesque than most of the others under consideration.
