Satire and the satirist have been in evidence in well-nigh all ages of
the world's history. The chief instruments of the satirist's equipment
are irony, sarcasm, invective, wit, and humour. The satiric
denunciation of a writer burning with indignation at some social wrong
or abuse, is capable of reaching the very highest level of literature.
The writings of a satirist of this type, and to some extent of every
satirist who touches on the social aspects of life, present a picture
more or less vivid, though not of course complete and impartial, of the
age to which he belongs, of the men, their manners, fashions, tastes,
and prevalent opinions. Thus they have a historical as well as a
literary and an ethical value. And Thackeray, in speaking of the office
of the humorist or satirist, for to him they were one, says, "He
professes to awaken and direct your love, your pity, your kindness,
your scorn for untruth, pretension, imposture, your tenderness for the
weak, the poor, the oppressed, the unhappy. To the best of his means
and ability he comments on all the ordinary actions and passions of
life almost."[1]
Satire has, in consequence, always ranked as one of the cardinal
divisions of literature. Its position as such, however, is due rather
to the fact of it having been so regarded among the Romans, than from
its own intrinsic importance among us to-day. Until the closing decades
of the eighteenth century--so long, in fact, as the classics were
esteemed of paramount authority as models--satire proper was accorded a
definite place in letters, and was distinctively cultivated by men of
genius as a branch of literature. But with the rise of the true
_national_ spirit in the various literatures of Europe, and notably in
that of England, satire has gradually given place to other types of
composition. Slowly but surely it has been edged out of its prominent
position as a separate department, and has been relegated to the
position of a _quality of style_, important, beyond doubt, yet no
longer to be considered as a prime division of letters.[2]
Rome rather than Greece must be esteemed the home of ancient satire.
Quintilian, indeed, claims it altogether for his countrymen in the
words, _Satira tota nostra est_; while Horace styles it _Græcis
intactum carmen_. But this claim must be accepted with many
reservations. It does not imply that we do not discover the existence
of satire, together with favourable examples of it, long anterior to
the oldest extant works in either Grecian or Latin literature. The use
of what are called "personalities" in everyday speech was the probable
origin of satire. Conversely, also, satire, in the majority of those
earlier types current at various periods in the history of literature,
has shown an inclination to be personal in its character. De Quincey,
accordingly, has argued that the more personal it became in its
allusions, the more it fulfilled its specific function. But such a view
is based on the supposition that satire has no other mission than to
lash the vices of our neighbours, without recalling the fact that the
satirist has a reformative as well as a punitive duty to discharge. The
further we revert into the "deep backward and abysm of time" towards
the early history of the world, the more pronounced and overt is this
indulgence in broad personal invective and sarcastic strictures.
The earliest cultivators of the art were probably the men with a
grievance, or, as Dr. Garnett says, "the carpers and fault-finders of
the clan". Their first attempts were, as has been conjectured, merely
personal lampoons against those they disliked or differed from, and
were perhaps of a type cognate with the Homeric _Margites_. Homer's
character of Thersites is mayhap a lifelike portrait of some
contemporary satirist who made himself dreaded by his personalities.
But even in Thersites we see the germs of transition from merely
personal invective to satire directed against a class; and Greek
satire, though on the whole more personal than Roman, achieved
brilliant results. It is enough to name Archilochus, whom Mahaffy terms
the Swift of Greek Literature, Simonides of Amorgos (circ. 660 B.C.),
the author of the famous _Satire on Women_, and Hipponax of Ephesus,
reputed the inventor of the Scazon or halting iambic.
But the lasting significance of Greek satire is mainly derived from
its surpassing distinction in two domains--in the comico-satiric drama
of Aristophanes, and in the _Beast Fables_ of 'Æsop'. In later Greek
literature it lost its robustness and became trivial and effeminate
through expending itself on unworthy objects.
It is amongst the Romans, with their deeper ethical convictions and
more powerful social sense, that we must look for the true home of
ancient satire. The germ of Roman satire is undoubtedly to be found in
the rude Fescennine verses, the rough and licentious jests and
buffoonery of the harvest-home and the vintage thrown into
quasi-lyrical form. These songs gradually developed a concomitant form
of dialogue styled saturæ, a term denoting "miscellany", and derived
perhaps from the _Satura lanx_, a charger filled with the first-fruits
of the year's produce, which was offered to Bacchus and Ceres.[3] In
Ennius, the "father of Roman satire", and Varro, the word still
retained this old Roman sense.
Lucilius was the first Roman writer who made "censorious criticism" the
prevailing tone of satire, and his work, the parent of the satire of
Horace, of Persius, of Juvenal, and through that of the poetical satire
of modern times, was the principal agent in fixing its present
polemical and urban associations upon a term originally steeped in the
savour of rustic revelry. In the hands of Horace, Roman satire was to
be moulded into a new type that was not only to be a thing of beauty,
but, as far as one can yet see, to remain a joy for ever. The great
Venusian, as he informs us, set before himself the task of adapting the
satire of Lucilius to the special circumstances, the manners, the
literary modes and tastes of the Augustan age. Horace's Satires conform
to Addison's great rule, which he lays down in the _Spectator_, that
the satire which only seeks to wound is as dangerous as arrows that fly
in the dark. There is always an ethical undercurrent running beneath
the polished raillery and the good-natured satire. His genial
_bonhomie_ prevents him from ever becoming ill-natured in his
animadversions.
Of those manifold, kaleidoscopically-varied types of human nature which
in the Augustan age flocked to Rome as the centre of the known world,
he was a keen and a close observer. Jealously he noted the
deteriorating influence these foreign elements were exercising on the
grand old Roman character, and some of the bitterest home-thrusts he
ever delivered were directed against this alien invasion.[4] In those
brilliant pictures wherewith his satires are replete, Horace finds a
place for all. Sometimes he criticises as a far-off observer, gazing
with a sort of cynical amusement at this human raree-show; at others he
speaks as though he himself were in the very midst of the bustling
frivolity of the Roman Vanity Fair, and a sufferer from its follies.
Then his tone seems to deepen into a grave intensity of remonstrance,
as he exposes its hollowness, its heartlessness, and its blindness to
the absorbing problems of existence.
After the death of Horace (B.C. 8) no names of note occur in the
domain of satire until we reach that famous trio, contemporary with one
another, who adorned the concluding half of the first century of our
era, viz.:--Juvenal, Persius, and Martial. They are severally
representative of distinct modes or types of satire. Juvenal
illustrates rhetorical or tragic satire, of which he is at once the
inventor and the most distinguished master--that form of composition,
in other words, which attacks vice, wrongs, or abuses in a high-pitched
strain of impassioned, declamatory eloquence. In this type of satire,
evil is designedly painted in exaggerated colours, that disgust may
more readily be aroused by the loathsomeness of the picture. As a
natural consequence, sobriety, moderation, and truth to nature no
longer are esteemed so indispensable. In this style Juvenal has had
many imitators, but no superiors. His satires represent the final
development the form underwent in achieving the definite purpose of
exposing and chastising in a systematic manner the entire catalogue of
vices, public and private, which were assailing the welfare of the
state. They constitute luridly powerful pictures of a debased and
shamelessly corrupt condition of society. Keen contemptuous ridicule, a
sardonic irony that held nothing in reverence, a caustic sarcasm that
burned like an acid, and a vituperative invective that ransacked the
language for phrases of opprobrium--these were the agents enlisted by
Juvenal into the service of purging society of its evil.
Persius, on the other hand, was the philosophic satirist, whose
devotion to Stoicism caused him to see in it a panacea for all the
evils which Nero brought on the empire. The shortness of his life, his
studious tastes, and his exceptional moral purity all contributed to
keep him ignorant of that world of evil which, as Professor Sellar has
pithily remarked, it is the business of the satirist to know. Hence he
is purely a philosophic or didactic satirist. Only one of his poems,
the first, fulfils the special end of satire by representing any phase
whatever of the life of his time, and pointing its moral.
Finally, Martial exchanged the epic tirade for the epigram as the
vehicle of his satire, and handled this lighter missile with
unsurpassed brilliance and _verve_. Despite his sycophancy and his
fulsome flattery of prospective benefactors, he displays more of the
sober moderation and sane common-sense of Horace than either of his
contemporaries. There are few better satirists of social and literary
pretenders either in ancient or modern times. No ancient has more
vividly painted the manners of antiquity. If Juvenal enforces the
lesson of that time, and has penetrated more deeply into the heart of
society, Martial has sketched its external aspect with a much fairer
pencil, and from a much more intimate contact with it.
In the first and second centuries of our era two other forms of satire
took their rise, viz.:--the Milesian or "Satiric Tale" of Petronius and
Apuleius, and the "Satiric Dialogue" of Lucian. Both are admirable
pictures of their respective periods. The _Tales_ of the two first are
conceived with great force of imagination, and executed with a happy
blending of humour, wit, and cynical irony that suggests Gil Blas or
Barry Lyndon. _The Supper of Trimalchio_, by Petronius, reproduces with
unsparing hand the gluttony and the blatant vice of the Neronic epoch.
_The Golden Ass_ of Apuleius is a clever sketch of contemporary manners
in the second century, painting in vivid colours the reaction that had
set in against scepticism, and the general appetite that prevailed for
miracles and magic.
Finally, ancient satire may be said to close with the famous
_Dialogues_ of Lucian, which, although written in Greek, exhibited all
the best features of Roman satire. Certainly the ethical purpose and
the reformative element are rather implied than insistently expressed
in Lucian; but he affords in his satiric sketches a capital glimpse of
the ludicrous perplexity into which the pagan mind was plunged when it
had lost faith in its mythology, and when a callous indifference
towards the Pantheon left the Roman world literally without a rational
creed. As a satire on the old Hellenic religion nothing could be racier
than _The Dialogues of the Gods_ and _The Dialogues of the Dead_.
It is impossible in this brief survey to discuss at large the vast
chaotic epoch in the history of satire which lies between the end of
the ancient world and the dawn of humanism. For satire, as a literary
genre, belongs to these two. The mediæval world, inexhaustible in its
capacity and relish for abuse, full of rude laughter and drastic
humour--prompt, for all its superstition, to make a jest of the priest,
and, for all its chivalry, to catalogue the foibles of women--had the
satirical animus in abundance, and satirical songs, visions, fables,
fabliaux, ballads, epics, in legion, but no definite and recognised
school of satire. It is sufficient to name, as examples of the
extraordinary range of the mediæval satiric genius, the farce of
_Pathelin_, the beast-epic of _Renart_, the rhymes of Walter Map, and
the _Inferno_ of Dante.
Of these satirists before the rise of "satire", mediæval England
produced two great examples in Chaucer and Langland. They typify at the
outset the two classes into which Dryden divided English satirists--the
followers of Horace's way and the followers of Juvenal's--the men of
the world, who assail the enemies of common-sense with the weapons of
humour and sarcasm; and the prophets, who assail vice and crime with
passionate indignation and invective scorn. Since Dryden's time neither
line has died out, and it is still possible, with all reserves, to
recognise the two strains through the whole course of English
literature: the one represented in Chaucer, Donne, Marvell, Addison,
Arbuthnot, Swift, Young, Goldsmith, Canning, Thackeray, and Tennyson;
the others in Langland, Skelton, Lyndsay, Nash, Marston, Dryden, Pope,
Churchill, Johnson, Junius, Burns, and Browning.
Langland was a naïve mediæval Juvenal. The sad-visaged, world-weary
dreamer of the Malvern hills, sorrowing over the vice, the abuses, and
the social misery of his time, finding, as he tells us, no comfort in
any of the established institutions of his day, because confronted with
the fraud and falsehood that infected them all, is one of the most
pathetic figures in literature. As Skeat suggests, the object of his
great poem was to secure, through the latitude afforded by allegory,
opportunities of describing the life and manners of the poorer classes,
of inveighing against clerical abuses and the rapacity of the friars,
of representing the miseries caused by the great pestilences then
prevalent, and by the hasty and ill-advised marriages consequent
thereon; of denouncing lazy workmen and sham beggars, the corruption
and bribery then too common in the law-courts--in a word, to lash all
the numerous forms of falsehood, which are at all times the fit
subjects for satire and indignant exposure. Amid many essential
differences, is there not here a striking likeness to the work of the
Roman Juvenal? Langland's satire is not so fiery nor so rhetorically
intense as that of his prototype, but it is less profoundly despairing.
He satirizes evil rather by exposing it and contrasting it with good,
than by vehemently denouncing it. The colours of the pictures are
sombre, and the gloom is almost overwhelming, but still it is illumined
from time to time with the hope of coming amendment, when the great
reformer Piers the Plowman, by which is typified Christ,[5] should
appear, who was to remedy all abuses and restore the world to a right
condition. In this sustaining hope he differs from Juvenal, the
funereal gloom of whose satires is relieved by no gleam of hope for the
future.
Contrast with this the humorous brightness, the laughter, and the light
of the surroundings associated with his great contemporary, Geoffrey
Chaucer. His very satire is kindly and quaint, like that of Horace,
rather than bitterly acidulous. He raps his age over the knuckles, it
is true, for its faults and foibles, but the censor's face wears a
genial smile. One of his chief attractions for us lies in his bright
objectivity. He never wears his heart on his sleeve like Langland. He
has touches of rare and profound pathos, but these notes of pain are
only like undertones of discord to throw the harmony into stronger
relief, only like little cloudlets momentarily flitting across the
golden sunshine of his humour.
We read Chaucer, as we read Horace, from love of his piquant
Epicureanism, and the scintillating satire wherewith he enlivens those
matchless pictures of his epoch which he has handed down to us.
Chaucer, as Professor Minto puts it, wrote largely for the court
circle. His verses were first read in tapestried chambers, and to the
gracious ear of stately lords and ladies. It was because he wrote for
such an audience that he avoids the introduction of any discordant
element in the shape of the deeper and darker social problems of the
time. The same reticence occurs in Horace, writing as he did for the
ear of Augustus and Mæcenas, and of the fashionable circle thronging
the great palace of his patron on the Esquiline. Is not the historic
parallel between the two pairs of writers still further verified?
Chaucer wisely chose the epic form for his greatest poem, because he
could introduce thereinto so many distinct qualities of composition,
and the woof of racy humour as well as of sprightly satire which he
introduces with such consummate art into the texture of his verse is of
as fine a character as any in our literature. In Langland's great
allegory, the satire is earnest, grave and solemn, as though with a
sense of deep responsibility; that in Chaucer's _Canterbury
Tales_--nay, in all his poems--is genial, laughing, and good-natured;
tolerant, like Horace's of human weaknesses, because the author is so
keenly conscious of his own.
Langland and Chaucer both died about the beginning of the fifteenth
century. But from that date until 1576--when Gascoigne's _Steel Glass_,
the first verse satire of the Elizabethan age, was published--we must
look mainly to Scotland and the poems of William Dunbar, Sir David
Lyndsay, and others, to preserve the apostolic succession of satire.
William Dunbar is one of the greatest of British satirists. His _Dance
of the Seven Deadly Sins_, in which the popular poetic form of the
age--allegory--is utilized with remarkable skill as the vehicle for a
scathing satire on the headlong sensuality of his time, produces by its
startling realism and terrible intensity an effect not unlike that
exercised by the overpowering creations of Salvator Rosa. The poem is a
bitter indictment of the utter corruption of all classes in the society
of his period. Like Juvenal, to whose school he belongs, he softens
nothing, tones down nothing. The evil is presented in all its native
hideousness. Lyndsay, on the other hand, would have been more vigorous
had he been less diffuse, and used the pruning-knife more unsparingly.
His finest satiric pictures often lose their point by verbosity and
tediousness. Brevity is the soul of satire as well as of wit.
The most vigorous English satire of this entire period was that which
we owe to the scurrilous pen of Skelton and the provocative personality
of Wolsey. With his work may be mentioned the rude and unpolished, yet
vigorous, piece bearing the rhyming title,
"Rede me and be nott wrothe,
For I saye no thing but trothe",
written by two English Observantine Franciscan friars, William Roy and
Jerome Barlowe;[6] a satire which stung the great cardinal so sharply
that he commissioned Hermann Rynck to buy up every available copy.
Alexander Barclay's imitation, in his _Ship of Fools_, of Sebastian
Brandt's _Narrenschiff_, was only remarkable for the novel satirical
device of the plan.
Bishop Latimer in his sermons is a vigorous satirist, particularly in
that discourse upon "The Ploughers" (1547). His fearlessness is very
conspicuous, and his attacks on the bishops who proved untrue to their
trust and allowed their dioceses to go to wreck and ruin, are outspoken
and trenchant:
"They that be lords will ill go to plough. It is no meet office for
them. It is not seeming for their state. Thus came up lording
loiterers; Thus crept in unprechinge prelates, and so have they
long continued. For how many unlearned prelates have we now at this
day? And no marvel; For if the ploughmen that now be, were made
lordes, they would clean give over ploughing, they would leave of
theyr labour and fall to lording outright and let the plough
stand. For ever since the Prelates were made lords and nobles, the
plough standeth, there is no work done, the people starve. They
hawke, they hunte, they carde, they dyce, they pastime in their
prelacies with galaunt gentlemen, with their dauncing minions, and
with their freshe companions, so that ploughing is set aside."[7]
But after Gascoigne's _Steel Glass_ was published, which professed to
hold a mirror or "steel glass" up to the vices of the age, we reach
that wonderful outburst of satiric, epigrammatic, and humorous
composition which was one of the characteristics, and certainly not the
least important, of the Elizabethan epoch. Lodge's _Fig for Momus_
(1593) contains certain satires which rank with Gascoigne's work as the
earliest compositions of that type belonging to the period. That they
were of no mean reputation in their own day is evident from the
testimony of Meres,[8] who says, "As Horace, Lucilius, Juvenal,
Persius, and Lucullus are the best for satire among the Latins, so with
us, in the same faculty, these are chiefe, Piers Plowman, Lodge, Hall
of Emanuel College, Cambridge, the author of _Pygmalion's Image and
Certain Satires_[9] and the author of _Skialethea_". This contemporary
opinion regarding the fact that _The Vision of Piers Plowman_ was
esteemed a satire of outstanding merit in those days, is a curious
commentary on Hall's boastful couplet describing himself as the
earliest English satirist.
To name all the writers who, in this fruitful epoch of our literature,
devoted themselves to this kind of composition would be impossible.
From 1598 until the death of James I. upwards of one hundred separate
satirists can be named, both in verse and prose. Of these Bishop Hall
is one of the greatest, and I have chosen him as the leading
representative of the period. To the study of Horace and Juvenal he had
devoted many years of his early manhood, and his imitation of these two
great Romans is close and consistent. Therefore, for vigour, grave
dignity, and incisiveness of thought, united to graphic pictures of his
age, Hall is undeniably the most important name in the history of the
Elizabethan satire, strictly so called. His exposures of the follies of
his age were largely couched in the form, so much affected by Horace,
of a familiar commentary on certain occurrences, addressed apparently
to an anonymous correspondent.
Contemporary with Hall was Thomas Nash, whose _Pierce Penilesse's
Supplication to the Devil_ was one of the most extraordinary onslaughts
on the social vices of the metropolis that the period produced. Written
in close imitation of Juvenal's earlier satires, he frequently
approaches the standard of his master in graphic power of description,
in scathing invective, and ironical mockery. In _Have with you to
Saffron Walden_ he lashed Gabriel Harvey for his unworthy conduct
towards the memory of Robert Greene. Both satires are written in prose,
as indeed are nearly all his works, inasmuch as Nash was more of a
pamphleteer than anything else. Other contemporaries of Hall were
Thomas Dekker, whose fame as a dramatist has eclipsed his reputation
as a satirist, but whose _Bachelor's Banquet--pleasantly discoursing
the variable humours of Women, their quickness of wits and unsearchable
deceits_, is a sarcastic impeachment of the gentler sex, while his
_Gull's Hornbook_ must be ranked with Nash's work as one of the most
unsparing castigations of social life in London. The latter is a volume
of fictitious maxims for the use of youths desirous of being considered
"pretty fellows". Other contemporaries were John Donne, John Marston,
Jonson, George Chapman, and Nicholas Breton--all names of men who were
conspicuous inheritors of the true Elizabethan spirit, and who united
virility of thought to robustness and trenchancy of sarcasm.
Marston and Breton were amongst the best of the group, though they are
not represented in these pages owing to the unsuitability of their
writings for extract. Here is a picture from one of the satires of
Marston which is instinct with satiric power. It is a portrait of a
love-sick swain, and runs as follows:--
"For when my ears received a fearful sound
That he was sick, I went, and there I found,
Him laid of love and newly brought to bed
Of monstrous folly, and a franticke head:
His chamber hanged about with elegies,
With sad complaints of his love's miseries,
His windows strow'd with sonnets and the glasse
Drawn full of love-knots. I approach'd the asse,
And straight he weepes, and sighes some Sonnet out
To his fair love! and then he goes about,
For to perfume her rare perfection,
With some sweet smelling pink epitheton.
Then with a melting looke he writhes his head,
And straight in passion, riseth in his bed,
And having kist his hand, strok'd up his haire,
Made a French _congé_, cryes 'O cruall Faire!'
To th' antique bed-post."[10]
Marston manifests more vigour and nervous force in his satires than
Hall, but exhibits less elegance and ease in versification. In Charles
Fitz-geoffrey's _Affaniæ_, a set of Latin epigrams, printed at Oxford
in 1601, Marston is complimented as the "Second English Satirist", or
rather as dividing the palm of priority and excellence in English
satire with Hall. The individual characteristics of the various leading
Elizabethan satirists,--the vitriolic bitterness of Nash, the
sententious profundity of Donne, the happy-go-lucky "slogging" of
genial Dekker, the sledge-hammer blows of Jonson, the turgid
malevolence of Chapman, and the stiletto-like thrusts of George
Buchanan are worthy of closer and more detailed study than can be
devoted to them in a sketch such as this. I regret that Nicolas
Breton's _Pasquil's Madcappe_ proved too long for quotation in its
entirety,[11] but the man who could pen such lines as these was, of a
truth, a satirist of a high order:--
But what availes unto the world to talke?
Wealth is a witch that hath a wicked charme,
That in the minds of wicked men doth walke,
Unto the heart and Soule's eternal harme,
Which is not kept by the Almighty arme:
O,'tis the strongest instrument of ill
That ere was known to work the devill's will.
An honest man is held a good poore soule,
And kindnesse counted but a weake conceite,
And love writte up but in the woodcocke's soule,
While thriving _Wat_ doth but on Wealth await:
He is a fore horse that goes ever streight:
And he but held a foole for all his Wit,
That guides his braines but with a golden bit.
A virgin is a vertuous kind of creature,
But doth not coin command Virginitie?
And beautie hath a strange bewitching feature,
But gold reads so much world's divinitie,
As with the Heavens hath no affinitie:
So that where Beauty doth with vertue dwell,
If it want money, yet it will not sell.
Of the satiric forms peculiar to the Elizabethan epoch there is no
great variety. The _Characters_ of Theophrastus supplied a model to
some of the writers. The close adherence also which the majority of
them manifest to the broadly marked types of "Horatian" and
"Juvenalian" satire, both in matter and manner, is not a little
remarkable. The genius for selecting from the classics those forms both
of composition and metre best suited to become vehicles for satire, and
adapting them thereto, did not begin to manifest itself in so
pronounced a manner until after the Restoration. The Elizabethan
mind--using the phrase of course in its broad sense as inclusive of the
Jacobean and the early Caroline epochs--was more engrossed with the
matter than the manner of satire. Perhaps the finest satire which
distinguished this wonderful era was the _Argenis_ of John Barclay, a
politico-satiric romance, or, in other words, the adaptation of the
"Milesian tale" of Petronius to state affairs.
During the Parliamentary War, satire was the only species of
composition which did not suffer more or less eclipse, but its
character underwent change. It became to a large extent a medium for
sectarian bitterness. It lost its catholicity, and degenerated in great
measure into the instrument of partisan antagonism, and a means of
impaling the folly or fanaticism, real or imagined, of special
individuals among the Cavaliers and Roundheads.[12] Of such a character
was the bulk of the satires produced at that time. In a few instances,
however, a higher note was struck, as, for example, when "dignified
political satire", in the hands of Andrew Marvell, was utilized to
fight the battle of freedom of conscience in the matter of the
observances of external religion. _The Rehearsal Transposed, Mr.
Smirke, or the Divine in Mode, and his Political Satires_ are
masterpieces of lofty indignation mingled with grave and ironical
banter. Among many others Edmund Waller showed himself an apt disciple
of Horace, and produced charming social satires marked by delicate wit
and raillery in the true Horatian mode; while the Duke of Buckingham,
in the _Rehearsal_, utilized the dramatic parody to travesty the plays
of Dryden. Abraham Cowley, in the _Mistress_, also imitated Horace, and
in his play _Cutter of Coleman Street_ satirized the Puritans'
affectation of superior sanctity and their affected style of
conversation. Then came John Oldham and John Cleiveland, who both
accepted Juvenal as their model. Cleiveland's antipathy towards
Cromwell and the Scots was on a par with that of John Wilkes towards
the latter, and was just as unreasonable, while the language he
employed in his diatribes against both was so extravagant as to lose
its sarcastic point in mere vulgar abuse. In like manner Oldham's
_Satires on the Jesuits_ afford as disgraceful a specimen of sectarian
bigotry as the language contains. Only their pungency and wit render
them readable. He displays Juvenal's violence of invective without his
other redeeming qualities. All these, however, were entirely eclipsed
in reputation by a writer who made the mock-epic the medium through
which the bitterest onslaught on the anti-royalist party and its
principles was delivered by one who, as a "king's man", was almost as
extreme a bigot as those he satirized. The _Hudibras_ of Samuel Butler,
in its mingling of broad, almost extravagant, humour and sneering
mockery has no parallel in our literature. Butler's characters are
rather mere "humours" or _qualities_ than real personages. There is no
attempt made to observe the modesty of nature. _Hudibras_, therefore,
is an example not so much of satire, though satire is present in rich
measure also, as of burlesque. The poem is genuinely satirical only in
those parts where the author steps in as the chorus, so to speak, and
offers pithy moralizings on what is taking place in the action of the
story. There is visible throughout the poem, however, a lack of
restraint that causes him to overdo his part. Were _Hudibras_ shorter,
the satire would be more effective. Though in parts often as terse in
style as Pope's best work, still the poem is too long, and it undoes
the force of its attack on the Puritans by its exaggeration.
All these writers, even Butler himself, simply prepared the way for the
man who is justly regarded as England's greatest satirist. The epoch of
John Dryden has been fittingly styled the "Golden Age of English
Satire".[13] To warrant this description, however, it must be held to
include the writers of the reign of Queen Anne. The Elizabethan period
was perhaps richer, numerically speaking, in representatives of certain
types of satirical composition, but the true perfection, the
efflorescence of the long-growing plant, was reached in that era which
extended from the publication of Dryden's _Absalom and Achitophel_
(Part I.) in 1681 to the issue of Pope's _Dunciad_ in its final form in
1742. During these sixty years appeared the choicest of English
satires, to wit, all Dryden's finest pieces, the _Medal_,
_MacFlecknoe_, and _Absalom and Achitophel_, Swift's _Tale of a Tub_,
and his _Miscellanies_--among which his best metrical satires appeared;
all Defoe's work, too, as well as Steele's in the _Tatler_, and
Addison's in the _Spectator_, Arbuthnot's _History of John Bull_,
Churchill's _Rosciad_, and finally all Pope's poems, including the
famous "Prologue" as well as the "Epilogue" to the _Satires_. It is
curious to note how the satirical succession (if the phrase be
permitted) is maintained uninterruptedly from Bishop Hall down to the
death of Pope--nay, we may even say down to the age of Byron, to whose
epoch one may trace something like a continuous tradition. Hall did
not die until Dryden was twenty-seven years of age. Pope delighted to
record that, when a boy of twelve years of age, he had met "Glorious
John", though the succession could be passed on otherwise through
Congreve, one of the most polished of English satirical writers, whom
Dryden complimented as "one whom every muse and grace adorn", while to
him also Pope dedicated his translation of the _Iliad_.[14] Bolingbroke,
furthermore, was the friend and patron of Pope, while the witty St.
John, in turn, was bound by ties of friendship to Mallet, who passed on
the succession to Goldsmith, Sheridan, Ellis, Canning, Moore, and
Byron. Thereafter satire begins to fall upon evil days, and the
tradition cannot be so clearly traced.
But satire, during this "succession", did not remain absolutely the
same. She changed her garb with her epoch. Thus the robust bludgeoning
of Dryden and Shadwell, of Defoe, Steele, D'Urfey, and Tom Brown, gave
place to the sardonic ridicule of Swift, the polished raillery of
Arbuthnot, and the double-distilled essence of acidulous sarcasm
present in the _Satires_ of Pope. There is as marked a difference
between the Drydenic and the Swiftian types of satire, between that of
Cleiveland and that of Pope, as between the diverse schools known as
the "Horatian" and the "Juvenalian". The cause of this, over and above
the effect produced by prolonged study of these two classical models,
was the overwhelming influence exercised on his age by the great French
critic and satirist, Boileau. Difficult indeed it is for us at the
present day to understand the European homage paid to Boileau. As
Hannay says, "He was a dignified classic figure supposed to be the
model of fine taste",[15] His word was law in the realm of criticism,
and for many years he was known, not alone in France, but throughout a
large portion of Europe, as "The Lawgiver of Parnassus". Prof. Dowden,
referring to his critical authority, remarks:--
"The genius of Boileau was in a high degree intellectual, animated
by ideas. As a moralist he is not searching or profound; he saw too
little of the inner world of the heart, and knew too imperfectly
its agitations. When, however, he deals with literature--and a just
judgment in letters may almost be called an element in morals--all
his penetration and power become apparent. To clear the ground for
the new school of nature, truth, and reason was Boileau's first
task. It was a task which called for courage and skill ... he
struck at the follies and affectations of the world of letters, and
he struck with force. It was a needful duty, and one most
effectively performed.... Boileau's influence as a critic of
literature can hardly be overrated; it has much in common with the
influence of Pope on English literature, beneficial as regards his
own time, somewhat restrictive and even tyrannical upon later
generations."[16]
Owing to the predominance of French literary modes in England, this was
the man whose influence, until nearly the close of last century, was
paramount in England even when it was most bitterly disclaimed.
Boileau's _Satires_ were published during 1660-70, and he himself died
in 1711; but, though dead, he still ruled for many a decade to come.
This then was the literary censor to whom English satire of the
post-Drydenic epochs owed so much. Neither Swift nor Pope was ashamed
to confess his literary indebtedness to the great Frenchman; nay,
Dryden himself has confessed his obligations to Boileau, and in his
_Discourse on Satire_ has quoted his authority as absolute. Before
pointing out the differences between the Drydenic and post-Drydenic
satire let us note very briefly the special characteristics of the
former. Apart from the "matter" of his satire, Dryden laid this
department of letters under a mighty obligation through the splendid
service he rendered by the first successful application of the heroic
couplet to satire. Of itself this was a great boon; but his good deeds
as regards the "matter" of satiric composition have entirely obscured
the benefit he conferred on its manner or technical form. Dryden's four
great satires, _Absalom and Achitophel_, _The Medal_, _MacFlecknoe_,
and the _Hind and the Panther_, each exemplify a distinct and important
type of satire. The first named is the classical instance of the use of
"historic parallels" as applied to the impeachment of the vices or
abuses of any age. With matchless skill the story of Absalom is
employed not merely to typify, but actually to represent, the designs
of Monmouth and his Achitophel--Shaftesbury. _The Medal_ reverts to the
type of the classic satire of the Juvenalian order. It is slightly more
rhetorical in style, and is partly devoted to a bitter invective
against Shaftesbury, partly to an argument as to the unfitness of
republican institutions for England, partly to a satiric address to
the Whigs. The third of the great series, _MacFlecknoe_, is Dryden's
masterpiece of satiric irony; a purely personal attack upon his rival,
Shadwell, "Crowned King of Dulness, and in all the realms of nonsense
absolute". Finally, the _Hind and the Panther_ represents a new
development of the "satiric fable". Dryden gave to British satire the
impulse towards that final form of development which it received from
the great satirists of the next century. There is little that appears
in Swift, Addison, Arbuthnot, Pope, or even Byron, for which the way
was not prepared by the genius of "Glorious John".
Of the famous group which adorned the reign of Queen Anne, Steele lives
above all in his Isaac Bickerstaff Essays, the vehicle of admirably
pithy and trenchant prose satire upon current political abuses. But,
unfortunately for his own fame, his lot was to be associated with the
greatest master of this form of composition that has appeared in
literature, and the celebrity of the greater writer dimmed that of the
lesser. Addison in his papers in the _Tatler_ and the _Spectator_ has
brought what may be styled the Essay of Satiric Portraiture--in after
days to be developed along other lines by Praed, Charles Lamb, Leigh
Hunt, and R.L. Stevenson--to an unsurpassed standard of excellence.
Such character studies as those of Sir Roger de Coverley, his household
and friends, Will Honeycomb, Sir Andrew Freeport, Ned Softly, and
others, possess an endless charm for us in the sobriety and moderation
of the colours, the truth to nature, the delicate raillery, and the
polished sarcasm of their satiric animadversions. Addison has studied
his Horace to advantage, and to the great Roman's attributes has added
other virtues distinctly English.
Arbuthnot, the celebrated physician of Queen Anne, takes rank among the
best of English satirists by virtue of his famous work _The History of
John Bull_. The special mode or type employed was the "allegorical
political tale", of which the plot was the historic sequence of events
in connection with the war with Louis XIV. of France. The object of the
fictitious narrative was to throw ridicule on the Duke of Marlborough,
and to excite among the people a feeling of disgust at the protracted
hostilities. The nations involved are represented as tradesmen
implicated in a lawsuit, the origin of the dispute being traced to
their narrow and selfish views. The national characteristics of each
individual are skilfully hit off, and the various events of the war,
with the accompanying political intrigues, are symbolized by the stages
in the progress of the suit, the tricks of the lawyers, and the devices
of the principal attorney, Humphrey Hocus (Marlborough), to prolong the
struggle. His _Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus_--a satire on the abuses
of human learning,--in which the type of the fictitious biography is
adopted, is exceedingly clever.
Finally, we reach the pair of satirists who, next to Dryden, must be
regarded as the writers whose influence has been greatest in
determining the character of British satire. Pope is the disciple of
Dryden, and the best qualities of the Drydenic satire, in both form and
matter, are reproduced in his works accompanied by special attributes
of his own. Owing to the extravagant admiration professed by Byron for
the author of the _Rape of the Lock_, and his repeated assurances of
his literary indebtedness to him, we are apt to overlook the fact that
the noble lord was under obligations to Dryden of a character quite as
weighty as those he was so ready to acknowledge to Pope. But the
latter, like Shakespeare, so improved all he borrowed that he has in
some instances actually received credit for inventing what he only took
from his great master. Pope was more of a refiner and polisher of
telling satiric forms which Dryden had in the first instance employed,
than an original inventor.
To mention all the types of satire affected by this marvellously acute
and variously cultured poet would be a task of some difficulty. There
are few amongst the principal forms which he has not essayed. In spirit
he is more pungent and sarcastic, more acidulous and malicious, than
the large-hearted and generous-souled Dryden. Into his satire,
therefore, enters a greater amount of the element of personal dislike
and contempt than in the case of the other. While satire is present
more or less in nearly all Pope's verse, there are certain compositions
where it may be said to be the outstanding quality. These are his
_Satires_, among which should of course be included "The Prologue" and
"The Epilogue" to them, as well as the _Moral Essays_, and finally the
_Dunciad_. These comprise the best of his professed satires. His
_Satires and Epistles of Horace Imitated_ are just what they claim to
be--an adaptation to English scenes, sympathies, sentiments, and
surroundings of the Roman poet's characteristic style. Though Pope has
quite as many points of affinity with Juvenal as with Horace, the
adaptation and transference of the local atmosphere from Tiber to
Thames is managed with extraordinary skill. The historic parallels,
too, of the personages in the respective poems are made to accord and
harmonize with the spirit of the time. The _Satires_ are written from
the point of view of opposition to Sir Robert Walpole, the great Whig
minister. They display the concentrated essence of bitterness towards
the ministerial policy. As Minto tersely puts it, we see gathered up in
them the worst that was thought and said about the government and court
party when men's minds were heated almost to the point of civil war.[17]
In the "Prologue" and the "Epilogue" are contained some of the most
finished satiric portraits drawn by Pope in any of his works. For
caustic bitterness, sustained but polished irony, and merciless
sarcastic malice, the characters of Atticus (Addison), Bufo, and Sporus
have never been surpassed in the literature of political or social
criticism.[18]
The _Dunciad_ is an instance of the mock-epic utilized for the purposes
of satire. Here Pope, as regards theme, possibly had the idea suggested
to him by Dryden's _MacFlecknoe_, but undoubtedly the heroic couplet,
which the latter had first applied to satire and used with such
conspicuous success, was still further polished and improved by Pope
until, as Mr. Courthope says, "it became in his hands a rapier of
perfect flexibility and temper". From the time of Pope until that of
Byron this stately measure has been regarded as the metre best suited
_par excellence_ for the display of satiric point and brilliancy, and
as the medium best calculated to confer dignity on political satire.
The _Dunciad_, while personal malice enters into it, must not be
regarded as, properly speaking, a malicious satire. From a literary
censor's point of view almost every lash Pope administered was richly
deserved. In this respect Pope has all Horace's fairness and
moderation, while at the same time he exhibits not a little of
Juvenal's depth of conviction that desperate diseases demand radical
remedies.[19]
By the side of Pope stands an impressive but a mournful figure, one of
the most tragic in our literature, to think of whom, as Thackeray says,
"is like thinking of the ruin of a great empire". As an all-round
satirist Jonathan Swift has no superior save Dryden, and he only by
virtue of his broader human sympathies. In the works of the great Dean
we have many distinct forms of satire. Scarce anything he wrote, with
the exception of his unfortunate _History of the Last Four Years of
Queen Anne_, but is marked by satiric touches that relieve the tedium
of even its dullest pages. He has utilized nearly all the recognized
modes of satiric composition throughout the range of his long list of
works. In the _Tale of a Tub_ he employed the vehicle of the satiric
tale to lash the Dissenters, the Papists, and even the Church of
England; in a word, the cant of religion as well as the pretensions of
letters and the shams of the world. In the _Battle of the Books_ the
parody or travesty of the Romances of Chivalry is used to ridicule the
controversy raging between Temple, Wotton, Boyle, and Bentley,
regarding the comparative merits of ancient and modern writers. In
_Gulliver's Travels_ the fictitious narrative or mock journal is
impressed into the service, the method consisting in adopting an absurd
supposition at the outset and then gravely deducing the logical effects
which follow. These three form the trio of great prose satires which
from the epoch of their publication until now have remained the wonder
and the delight of successive generations. Their realism, humorous
invention, ready wit, unsparing irony, and keen ridicule have exercised
as potent an attraction as their gloomy misanthropy has repelled. Among
minor satires are his scathing attacks in prose and verse on the war
party as a ring of Whig stock-jobbers, such as _Advice to the October
Club_, _Public Spirit of the Whigs, &c._, the _Virtues of Sid Hamet_,
_The Magician's Wand_ (directed against Godolphin); his _Polite
Conversations_ and _Directions to Servants_ are savage attacks on the
inanity of society small-talk and the greed of the menials of the
period. But why prolong the list? From the _Drapier's Letters_,
directed against a supposed fraudulent introduction of a copper
currency known as "Wood's Halfpence", to his skit on _The Furniture of
a Woman's Mind_, there were few topics current in his day, whether in
politics, theology, economics, or social gossip, which he did not
attack with the artillery of his wit and satire. Had he been less
sardonic, had he possessed even a modicum of the _bonhomie_ of his
friend Arbuthnot, Swift's satire would have exercised even more potent
an influence than it has been its fortune to achieve.
Pope died in 1744, Swift in 1745. During their last years there were
signs that the literary modes of the epoch of Queen Anne, which had
maintained their ascendency so long, were rapidly losing their hold on
the popular mind. A new literary period was about to open wherein new
literary ideals and new models would prevail. Satire, in common with
literature as a whole, felt the influence of the transitional era. As
we have seen, it concerned itself largely with ridiculing the follies
and eccentricities of men of letters and foolish pretenders to the
title; also in lashing social vices and abuses. The political enmity
existing between the Jacobites and the Hanoverians continued to afford
occasion for the exchange of party squibs and lampoons. The lengthened
popularity of Gay's _Beggars' Opera_, a composition wherein a new mode
was created, viz. the satiric opera (the prototype of the comic opera
of later days), affords an index to the temper of the time. It was the
age of England's lethargy.
After the defeat of Culloden, satire languished for a while, to revive
again during the ministry of the Earl of Bute, when everything Scots
came in for condemnation, and when Smollett and John Wilkes belaboured
each other in the _Briton_ and the _North Briton_, in pamphlet,
pasquinade, and parody, until at last Lord Bute withdrew from the
contest in disgust, and suspended the organ over which the author of
_Roderick Random_ presided. The satirical effusions of this epoch are
almost entirely worthless, the only redeeming feature being the fact
that Goldsmith was at that very moment engaged in throwing off those
delicious _morceaux_ of social satire contained in _The Citizen of the
World_. Johnson, a few years before, had set the fashion for some time
with his two satires written in free imitation of Juvenal--_London_,
and _The Vanity of Human Wishes_. But from 1760 onward until the close
of the century, when Ellis, Canning, and Frere opened what may be
termed the modern epoch of satire, the influence paramount was that of
Goldsmith. Fielding and Smollett were both satirists of powerful and
original stamp, but they were so much else besides that their influence
was lost in that of the genial author of the _Deserted Village_ and
_Retaliation_. His _Vicar of Wakefield_ is a satire, upon sober,
moderate principles, against the vice of the upper classes, as typified
in the character of Mr. Thornhill, while the sketch of Beau Tibbs in
_The Citizen of the World_ is a racy picture of the out-at-elbows,
would-be man of fashion, who seeks to pose as a social leader and
arbiter of taste when he had better have been following a trade.
The next revival of the popularity of satire takes place towards the
commencement of the third last decade of the eighteenth century, when,
using the vehicle of the epistolary mode, an anonymous writer, whose
identity is still in dispute, attacked the monarch, the government,
and the judicature of the country, in a series of letters in which
scathing invective, merciless ridicule, and lofty scorn were united to
vigour and polish of style, as well as undeniable literary taste.
After the appearance of the _Letters of Junius_, which, perhaps, have
owed the permanence of their popularity as much to the interest
attaching to the mystery of their authorship as to their intrinsic
merits, political satire may be said to have once more slumbered
awhile. The impression produced by the studied malice of the _Letters_,
and the epigrammatic suggestiveness which appeared to leave as much
unsaid as was said, was enormous, yet, strangely enough, they were
unable to check the growing influence of the school of satire whereof
Goldsmith was the chief founder, and from which the fashionable _jeux
d'esprit_, the sparkling _persiflage_ of the society _flâneurs_ of the
nineteenth century are the legitimate descendants.[20] The decade
1768-78, therefore--that decade when the plays of Goldsmith and
Sheridan were appearing,--witnessed the rise and the development of
that genial, humorous raillery, in prose and verse, of personal foibles
and of social abuses, of which the _Retaliation_ and the Beau Tibbs
papers are favourable examples. These were the distinguishing
characteristics of our satiric literature during the closing decade of
the eighteenth century until the horrors of the French Revolution, and
the sympathy with it which was apparently being aroused in England,
called political satire into requisition once more. Party feeling ran
high with regard to the principles enunciated by the so-called "friends
of freedom". The sentiments of the "Constitutional Tories" found
expression in the bitter, sardonic, vitriolic mockery visible in the
pages of the _Anti-Jacobin_,[21] which did more to check the progress of
nascent Radicalism and the movement in favour of political reform than
any other means employed. Chief-justice Mansfield's strictures and Lord
Braxfield's diatribes alike paled into insignificance beside these
deadly, scorching bombs of Juvenal-like vituperation, which have
remained unapproached in their specific line. As an example take
Ellis's _Ode to Jacobinism_, of which I quote two stanzas:--
"Daughter of Hell, insatiate power!
Destroyer of the human race,
Whose iron scourge and maddening hour
Exalt the bad, the good debase;
When first to scourge the sons of earth,
Thy sire his darling child designed,
Gallia received the monstrous birth,
Voltaire informed thine infant mind.
Well-chosen nurse, his sophist lore,
He bade thee many a year explore,
He marked thy progress firm though slow,
And statesmen, princes, leagued with their inveterate foe.
Scared at thy frown terrific, fly
The morals (antiquated brood),
Domestic virtue, social joy,
And faith that has for ages stood;
Swift they disperse and with them go
The friend sincere, the generous foe--
Traitors to God, to man avowed,
By thee now raised aloft, now crushed beneath the crowd."
Space only remains for a single word upon the satire of the nineteenth
century. In this category would be included the _Bæviad_ and the
_Mæviad_ by William Gifford (editor of the _Anti-Jacobin_), which,
though first printed in the closing years of the eighteenth century,
were issued in volume form in 1800. Written as they are in avowed
imitation of Juvenal, Persius, and Horace, they out-Juvenal Juvenal by
the violence of the language, besides descending to a depth of personal
scurrility as foreign to the nature of true satire as abuse is alien to
wit. They have long since been consigned to merited oblivion, though in
their day, from the useful and able work done by their author in other
fields of literature, they enjoyed no inconsiderable amount of fame.
Two or three lines from the _Bæviad_ will give a specimen of its
quality:--
"For mark, to what 'tis given, and then declare,
Mean though I am, if it be worth my care.
Is it not given to Este's unmeaning dash,
To Topham's fustian, Reynold's flippant trash,
To Andrews' doggerel where three wits combine,
To Morton's catchword, Greathead's idiot line,
And Holcroft's Shug-lane cant and Merry's Moorfields Whine?"[22]
The early years of the present century still felt the influence of the
sardonic ridicule which prevailed during the closing years of the
previous one, and the satirists who appeared during the first decades
of the former belonged to the robust or energetic order. Their names
and their works are well-nigh forgotten.
We now reach the last of the greater satirists that have adorned our
literature, one who is in many respects a worthy peer of Dryden, Swift,
and Pope. Lord Byron's fame as a satirist rests on three great works,
each of them illustrative of a distinct type of composition. Other
satires he has written, nay, the satiric quality is present more or
less in nearly all he produced; but _The Vision of Judgment_, _Beppo_,
and _Don Juan_ are his three masterpieces in this style of literature.
They are wonderful compositions in every sense of the word. The
sparkling wit, the ready raillery, the cutting irony, the biting
sarcasm, and the sardonic cynicism which characterize almost every line
of them are united to a brilliancy of imagination, a swiftness as well
as a felicity of thought, and an epigrammatic terseness of phrase which
even Byron himself has equalled nowhere else in his works. _The Vision
of Judgment_ is an example in the first instance of parody, and, in the
second, but not by any means so distinctly, of allegory. Its savage
ferocity of sarcasm crucified Southey upon the cross of scornful
contempt. Byron is not as good a metrist as a satirist, and the _Ottava
rima_ in his hands sometimes halts a little; still, the poem is a
notable example of a satiric parody written with such distinguished
success in a measure of great technical difficulty.
It is somewhat curious that all three of Byron's great satiric poems
should be written in the same measure. Yet so it is, for the poet,
having become enamoured of the metre after reading Frere's clever
satire, _Whistlecraft_, ever afterwards had a peculiar fondness for
it. Both _Beppo_ and _Don Juan_ are also excellent examples of the
metrical "satiric tale". The former, being the earlier satire of the
two, was Byron's first essay in this new type of satiric composition.
His success therein stimulated him to attempt another "tale" which in
some respects presents features that ally it to the mock-epic. _Beppo_
is a perfect storehouse of well-rounded satirical phrases that cleave
to the memory, such as "the deep damnation of his 'bah'" and the
description of the "budding miss",
"So much alarmed that she is quite alarming,
All giggle, blush, half pertness and half pout".
_Beppo_ leads up to _Don Juan_, and it is hard to say which is the
cleverer satire of the two. In both, the wit is so unforced and
natural, the fun so sparkling, the banter and the persiflage so bright
and scintillating, that they seem, as Sir Walter Scott said, to be the
natural outflow from the fountain of humour. Byron's earliest satire,
_English Bards and Scots Reviewers_, is a clever piece of work, but
compared with the great trio above-named is a production of his nonage.
Byron was succeeded by Praed, whose social pictures are instinct with
the most refined and polished raillery, with the true Attic salt of wit
united to a metrical deftness as graceful as it was artistic. During
Praed's lifetime, Lamb with his inimitable _Essays of Elia_, Southey,
Barham with the ever-popular _Ingoldsby Legends_, James and Horace
Smith with the _Rejected Addresses_, Disraeli, Leigh Hunt, Tom Hood,
and Landor had been winning laurels in various branches of social
satire which, consequent upon the influence of Byron and then of his
disciple, Praed, became the current mode. A favourable example of that
style is found in Leigh Hunt's _Feast of the Poets_ and in Edward
Fitz-Gerald's _Chivalry at a Discount_. Other writers of satire in the
earlier decades of the present century were Peacock, who in his novels
(_Crotchet Castle_, &c.) evolved an original type of satire based upon
the Athenian New Comedy. Miss Austen in her English novels and Miss
Edgeworth in her Irish tales employed satire to impeach certain crying
social abuses, as also did Dickens in _Oliver Twist_ and others of his
books. Douglas Jerrold's comedies and sketches are full of titbits of
gay and brilliant banter and biting irony. If _Sartor Resartus_ could
be regarded as a satire, as Dr. Garnett says, Carlyle would be the
first of satirists, with his thundering invective, grand rhetoric,
indignant scorn, grim humour, and satiric gloom in denouncing the shams
of human society and of human nature. An admirable American school of
satire was founded by Washington Irving, of which Judge Haliburton (Sam
Slick), Paulding, Holmes, Artemus Ward, and Dudley Warner are the chief
names.
Since the third and fourth decades of our century, in other words,
since the epoch of the Reform Bill and the Chartist agitation, satire
has more and more tended to lose its acid and its venom, to slough the
dark sardonic sarcasm of past days and to don the light sportive garb
of the social humorist and epigrammist. Robustious bludgeoning has gone
out of fashion, and in its place we have the playful satiric wit,
sparkling as of well-drawn Moet or Clicquot, of Mortimer Collins, H.S.
Leigh, Arthur Locker and Frederick Locker-Lampson, W.S. Gilbert, Austin
Dobson, Bret Harte, F. Anstey, Dr. Walter C. Smith, and many other
graceful and delightful social satirists whose verses are household
words amongst us. From week to week also there appear in the pages of
that trenchant social censor, _Punch_, and the other high-class
comico-satiric journals, many pieces of genuine and witty social
satire. Every year the demand seems increasing, and yet the supply
shows no signs of running dry.
Political satire, in its metrical form, has had from time to time a
temporary revival of popularity in such compositions as James Russell
Lowell's inimitable _Biglow Papers_, as well as in more recent volumes,
of which Mr. Owen Seaman's verse is an example; while are not its prose
forms legion in the pages of our periodical press? It has, however, now
lost that vitriolic quality which made it so scorching and offensively
personal. The man who wrote nowadays as did Dryden, and Junius, and
Canning, or, in social satire, as did Peter Pindar and Byron, would be
forthwith ostracized from literary fellowship.
But what more need be said of an introductory character to these
selections that are now placed before the reader? English satire,
though perhaps less in evidence to-day as a separate department in
letters, is still as cardinal a quality as ever in the productions of
our leading authors. If satires are no longer in fashion, satire is
perennial as an attribute in literature, and we have every reason to
cherish it and welcome it as warmly as of old. The novels of Thackeray,
as I have already said, contain some of the most delicately incisive
shafts of satire that have been barbed by any writer of the present
century. "George Eliot", also, though in a less degree, has shown
herself a satirist of much power and pungency, while others of our
latter-day novelists manifest themselves as possessed of a faculty of
satire both virile and trenchant. It is one of the indispensable
qualities of a great writer's style, because its quarry is one of the
most widely diffused of existing things on the face of the globe. There
is no age without its folly, no epoch without its faults. So long,
therefore, as man and his works are imperfect, so long shall there be
existent among us abuses, social, political, professional, and
ecclesiastical, and so long, too, shall it be the province and the
privilege of those who feel themselves called upon to play the
difficult part of _censor morum_, to prick the bubbles of falsehood,
vanity, and vice with the shafts of ridicule and raillery.
[Footnote 1: _The English Humorists of the Eighteenth Century_.]
[Footnote 2: Cf. Lenient, _History of French Satire_.]
[Footnote 3: Thomson's _Ante-Augustan Latin Poetry_.]
[Footnote 4: Cf. Mackail; Paten, _Études sur la Poésie latine_.]
[Footnote 5: See Skeat's "Langland" in _Encyclop. Brit._]
[Footnote 6: See Arber's Reprints for 1868.]
[Footnote 7: Arber's Select Reprints.]
[Footnote 8: _Palladis Tamia: Wits Treasury_.]
[Footnote 9: This, of course, was Marston.]
[Footnote 10: From the Fifth Satire in _The Metamorphosis of
Pygmalion's Image and Certain Satyres_, by John Marston. 1598.]
[Footnote 11: _Pasquil's Madcappe: Thrown at the Corruption of these
Times_--1626. Breton, to be read at all, ought to be studied in the two
noble volumes edited by Dr. A.B. Grosart. From his edition I quote.]
[Footnote 12: _English Literature_, by Prof. Craik. Hannay's _Satires
and Satirists_.]
[Footnote 13: _Life of Dryden_, by Sir Walter Scott. Saintsbury's _Life
of Dryden_.]
[Footnote 14: Thackeray's _English Humorists_. Hannay's _Satires and
Satirists_.]
[Footnote 15: _Satire and Satirists_, by James Hannay. Lecture III.]
[Footnote 16: Dowden's _French Literature_.]
[Footnote 17: Minto's _Characteristics of English Poets_.]
[Footnote 18: Cf. Saintsbury's _Life of Dryden_.]
[Footnote 19: Cf. Gosse, _Eighteenth Century Literature_.]
[Footnote 20: Thackeray's _English Humorists_.]
[Footnote 21: _The Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin_--Carisbrooke Library,
1890.]
[Footnote 22: _The Bæviad and the Mæviad_, by W. Gifford, Esq., 1800.]