Chapter 3

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.]