FOOTNOTES:
[1] Churchill, in The Author.
[2] Satires, I, 10, 15.
[3] Drummond’s translation. A similar couplet is rendered by Evans,
[4] Preface to Every Man in his Humour.
[5] Essay on Satire, by the Duke of Buckingham: Dryden’s Works, XV, 201.
[6] Young: Preface to the Seven Satires.
[7] Fielding: Historical Register: Dedication to the Public, III, 341.
[8] Fielding: Tom Jones: Dedication to George Lyttleton, VI, 5.
He also says, in The Covent Garden Journal: “Few men, I believe, do more admire the works of those great masters who have sent their satire (if I may use the expression) laughing into the world. Such are the great triumvirate, Lucian, Cervantes, and Swift.”
[9] Browning: Aristophanes’ Apology.
[10] Garnett, in the Enc. Brit. 9th edition.
Some modern echoes are heard. Says Byron,—
Taine applies his general theory to this instance:
“No wonder if in England a novelist writes satires. A gloomy and reflective man is impelled to it by his character; he is still further impelled by the surrounding manners.” Hist. of Eng. Lit. IV, 166.
In Shaw’s An Unsocial Socialist, one character says of another: “Besides, Gertrude despises everyone, even us. Or rather, she doesn’t despise anyone in particular, but is contemptuous by nature, just as you are stout.”
[12] Scourge of Villainy.
[13] Apology for Smectymnuus.
[14] “The end of Satire is reformation.” Preface to The Trueborn Englishman.
[15] “The true end of Satire is the amendment of vices by correction.” Preface to Absalom and Achitophel.
[16] “Now the author, living in these times, did conceive it an endeavour worthy an honest satirist, to dissuade the dull, and punish the wicked, in the only way that was left.” Preface of Martinus Scriblerus to The Dunciad.
[17] An Essay on Satire. Occasioned by the death of Pope. Inscribed to Dr. Warburton. In Dodsley’s Collection of Poems, Vol. III.
[18] Fielding: Covent Garden Journal.
[19] Preface to the Translation of Juvenal.
[20] Essay on Comedy, 76.
[21] The Renaissance in Italy, V, 270.
[22] Makers of English Fiction, 86.
[23] Scourge of Villainy, Satire II.
[24] Preface to The Trueborn Englishmen.
[25] Preface to his translation of Aristophanes.
[26] The Task: The Time-Piece.
His object is to point out the superiority of the preacher, who steps in
Later, however, he inadvertently admits even clerical insufficiency:
[27] Preface to The Universal Passion.
The last part of the passage anticipates our discussion of satire as exposure.
[28] Essays on Great Writers: Some Aspects of Thackeray.
[29] Introduction to Croiset’s Aristophanes and the Political Parties at Athens.
[30] Skelton: Colyn Clout.
[31] Barclay: Preface to Ship of Fools.
“This present Boke myght have been callyd nat inconvenyently the Satyr (that is to say) the reprehencion of foulysshnes. * * * For in lyke wyse as olde Poetes Satyriens repreved the synnes and ylnes of the peple at that tyme lyvynge; so and in lyke wyse this our Boke representeth unto the iyen of the redars the states and condicions of men.”
[32] Essay on Satire.
[33] Trueborn Englishman.
[34] Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift.
He adds, as to motive:
[35] Preface to The Intriguing Chambermaid: Epistle to Mrs. Clive.
[36] Prologue to The Coffee-House Politician.
[37] Hist. of Eng. Lit.: on Dickens.
[38] Post Liminium.
[39] These relationships may be suggested by a graphic diagram. Not all folly is vicious, though all vice is foolish. Not all deception is either vicious or foolish, though folly and vice are for the most part deceitful. The circle of the satirizible practically coincides with that portion of the deception-circle which falls within vice and folly, a small margin being left outside to safeguard against inelasticity.
The connection between these two pairs of subdivisions is evident; hypocrisy belonging on the whole to the vicious branch, and sentimentality, to the foolish.
[40] Satires, II, 1.
[41] The Steele Glas.
[42] Preface to The Journey to Parnassus. Gibson’s translation.
[43] Fielding: Tom Jones.
The phrase omitted from the Dryden citation above is, “where the very name of satire is formidable to those persons, who would appear to the world what they are not in themselves:”
[44] Raleigh: The English Novel.
[45] Hist. of Eng. Lit.: on Dickens.
[46] Imaginary Conversations: Lucian and Timotheus.
Timotheus, exultant over the Dialogues, remarks that “Nothing can be so gratifying and satisfactory to a rightly disposed mind, as the subversion of imposture by the force of ridicule.” Disappointed, however, in his assumption that Lucian is now ready to embrace the true faith, which turns out to be a non sequitur, he accuses the inflexible pagan of sacrilege, ready to turn into ridicule the true and the holy. To which Lucian in turn replies “In other words, to turn myself into a fool. He who brings ridicule to bear against Truth, finds in his hands a blade without a hilt. The most sparkling and pointed flame of wit flickers and expires against the incombustible walls of her sanctuary.”
Lucian himself, in The Angler, declares it his business to hate quacks, jugglery, lies, and conceit.
[47] Essay on Comedy.
[48] Laughter, 174.
[49] Byron as a Satirist, 180.
[50] Political Satire in English Poetry, 240.
In his Temper of the Seventeenth Century in English Literature, Wendell contributes another link to the chain of evidence:
“Sincere or not, satire is essentially a kind of writing which pretends to unmask pretense.”
[51] Hazlett, in his essay on Wit and Humour, remarks that “it has appeared that the detection and exposure of difference, particularly where this implies nice and subtle observation, as in discriminating between pretence and practice, between appearance and reality, is common to wit and satire with judgment and reasoning.”
[52] Meredith characterises the chase of Folly by the Comic Spirit as conducted “with the springing delight of hawk over heron, hound after fox.”
[53] Satires: I, IV, 78 ff.
[54] Universal Passion.
[55] Charity.
[56] Literary Theory and Criticism. The Poetry of Pope.
[57] Imag. Conv. Lucian to Timotheus.
[58] Arist. Apol.
[59] In spite of Cowper’s and Byron’s assertions to the contrary.
[61] Sea Dreams.
[62] Collected Essays, I, 187.
[63] Post Liminium.
[64] Preface to Headlong Hall, in the Aldine edition of Peacock, 40. In his Essay on Comedy, Meredith goes beyond mere absence of hate:
“You may estimate your capacity for comic perception by being able to detect the ridicule of them you love, without loving them the less; and more by being able to see yourself somewhat ridiculous in dear eyes, and accepting the correction their image of you proposes,” 72.
It is true that on the next page he differentiates,—“If you detect the ridicule, and your kindliness is chilled by it, you are slipping into the grasp of satire.” But he is evidently using satire in the older, narrower sense.
[65] John Brown’s Essay on Satire.
[66] Spectator, 209. L.
[67] Browning: Aris. Apol. Cf. Fielding, Tom Jones, VI, 357, for a similar distinction.
[68] Cf. Brown’s Essay on Satire for scorn of Shaftesbury’s idea that ridicule is the test of truth; refuted ironically in the lines,—
He concludes that wit is safe only when rationalized:
(Carlyle expresses a similar opinion in his essay on Voltaire.)
[69] Heinsius, in his Dissertations on Horace. A conception drawn perhaps from the Aristotelian “purging of our passions” through tragedy.
[70] Rise of Formal Satire in England. 49.
[71] Leslie Stephen: George Eliot, 67–68.
[72] Thorndike, English Literature in Lectures on Literature, 268–9.
[73] This theoretically includes only the novel, though the term is used in the widest sense. In the cases of Thackeray, Dickens, Eliot, and Meredith, the line is rather hard to draw between the novel and sketches, tales, short stories, and burlesques. Peacock, Lytton, Disraeli, and Butler force us to make the limits of the novel decidedly flexible.
[74] If it were desirable to eliminate the thirteenth chair, it might be done in a number of ways. Peacock might be ruled out as a contemporary of the earlier generation, as Gryll Grange is all that carries him over. Butler on the other hand belongs to the later, except that Erewhon appeared in the year of Middlemarch. As a satirist, Brontë is so near the edge of the circle that her inclusion at all is questionable. Since it happens, however, that the year of her death coincides with that of Reade’s first novel, we might fancy her yielding a place to him, so that there were never more than twelve at one time.
[75] English Humorists; Swift, 2.
Cf. Kingsley: “One cannot laugh heartily at a man if one has not a lurking love for him.” Two Years Ago, 143.
And Meredith: “And to love Comedy you must know the real world, and know men and women well enough not to expect too much of them, though you may still hope for good.” Essay on Comedy, 40. Also: “You share the sublime of wrath, that would not have hurt the foolish, but merely demonstrate their foolishness.” Ibid. 85.
[76] Autobiography, 133.
[77] Preface to Oliver Twist, xv.
That Dickens was mistaken as to the real point of Don Quixote, does not impair his argument.
Thackeray had the same motive, of course, in his ridicule of Paul Clifford and the sentimental-picaresque; not because it was sentimental or picaresque, but because it was misleading. In that respect it was he who inherited the mantle of Cervantes, as did Fielding before him in his ridicule of Richardson.
[78] “The vices that call for the scourge of satire, are those which pervade the whole frame of society, and which, under some specious pretense of private duty, or the sanction of custom and precedent, are almost permitted to assume the semblance of virtue.” Melincourt, 160. (And here it is the pretense that makes it vulnerable.)
In the Introduction, Maid Marian is described to Shelley as a “comic romance of the twelfth century, which I shall make the vehicle of much oblique satire on all the oppressions that are done under the sun.”
He became, however, so carried away with the romance that he lost sight of the satire, except for brief glimpses.
In the Preface to Headlong Hall (1837 edition) he rounds up the current follies, under the name Pretense:
“Perfectibilians, deteriorationists, statu-quo-ites, phrenologists, transcendentalists, political economists, theorists in all sciences, projectors in all arts, morbid visionaries, romantic enthusiasts, lovers of music, lovers of the picturesque, and lovers of good dinners, march, and will march forever, pari passu, with the march of mechanics which some facetiously call the march of intellect. * * * The array of false pretensions, moral, political, and literary, is as imposing as ever; * * * and political mountebanks continue, and will continue, to puff nostrums and practice legerdemain under the eyes of the multitude; following * * * a course as tortuous as that of a river, but in a reverse process: beginning by being dark and deep, and ending by being transparent.” 46–7.
His motto for Crochet Castle is:
[79] “And as I had ventured to take the whip of the satirist in my hand, I went beyond the iniquities of the great speculator who robs everybody, and made an onslaught also on other vices—on the intrigues of girls who want to get married, on the luxury of young men who prefer to remain single, and on the puffing propensities of authors who desire to cheat the public into buying their volumes.” Autobiography, speaking of The Way We Live Now.
Of Framley Parsonage: “The story was thoroughly English. There was a little fox-hunting and a little tuft-hunting; some Christian virtue and some Christian cant. There was no heroism and no villainy.” Autobiography, 129.
[80] The Young Duke, 173.
[81] Never Too Late to Mend, 216.
[82] Vanity Fair, I, 104.
[83] Ibid., I, 106.
Cf. his Preface to The Newcomes: “This, then, is to be a story, may it please you, in which jackdaws will wear peacocks’ feathers, and awaken the just ridicule of the peacocks, in which, while every justice is done to the peacocks themselves * * * exception will yet be taken to the absurdity of their rickety strut, and the foolish discord of their pert squeaking;” 7.
[84] Preface to Pickwick (1847 edition), xix.
Cf. his letter to Charles Knight: “My satire is against those who see figures and averages, and nothing else—the representatives of the wickedest and most enormous vice of this time—and the men who, through long years to come, will do more to damage the real, useful truths of political economy than I could do (if I tried) in my whole life:” Letters, I, 363.
[85] The Later Renaissance, 113.
[86] Evolution of the English Novel, 120.
- 1816 Headlong Hall
- 1817 Melincourt (also Northanger Abbey)
- 1818 Nightmare Abbey
- 1822 Maid Marian
- 1828 The Voyage of Captain Popanilla
- 1829 The Misfortunes of Elphin
- 1831 Crochet Castle
- 1833 Ixion, and The Infernal Marriage
- 1839 Catherine
- 1841 The Yellowplush Papers
- 1845 The Legend of the Rhine
- 1847 Novels by Eminent Hands
- 1849 The Great Hoggarty Diamond
- 1850 Rebecca and Rowena
- 1855 The Rose and the Ring
- 1856 The Shaving of Shagpat
- 1857 Farina
- 1861 Gryll Grange
- 1871 The Coming Race
- 1872 Erewhon
- 1901 Erewhon Revisited
[88] Samuel Butler, Author of Erewhon, 65.
[89] Draper: Social Satire of Thomas Love Peacock. Modern Language Notes, XXXIV, i
[90] With the exception of The Way of All Flesh; another instance of Butler’s wider range.
[91] The word novel must of course be stretched if it is to include this set of fantastic fiction. But that is easily done by accepting Chesterton’s dictum: “Now in the sense in which there is such a thing as an epic, in that sense there is no such thing as a novel.” Charles Dickens, 114.
The other alternative is the one taken by Mrs. Oliphant: “We use the word adventurer advisedly, for we cannot regard Peacock’s entry into the field of fiction as by any means an authorized one. One cannot help feeling that he did not want to write novels, but that he found that he could not get at the public in any other way; * * * The consequence is that his novels are not novels in the proper sense of the word.” Victorian Age of English Literature, 16.
Cf. Shaw, of whose dramas a similar statement might be made.
[92] “The desideratum of a Peacockian character is that he shall be able to talk.” Freeman: Life and Novels of Peacock, 233.
[93] Crochet Castle, 35.
[94] “He has knowledge, wit, humour, technical skill, cleverness in abundance, some genius, he is a keen observer, a caustic critic. What he lacks is humanity, just that which is the essence of the greatness of the great humourists—Cervantes, Rabelais, Shakespeare.” Walker: Lit. of the Victorian Era, 618. (He explains that humanity in work is meant, not of character.)
[95] “But because he laughed without responsibility he belongs less with the writers of power than with those of whom laughter has exacted a great, as of all laughter exacts a certain, penalty.” Van Doren, Life of Peacock, 281.
(One could wish the nature of this “penalty” had been elucidated a bit, instead of being entirely taken for granted. In any case, it must be largely subjective, and therefore a thing which exists only by being felt.)
[96] The phrases are Van Doren’s and Walker’s respectively. Cf. Garnett:
“It cannot be said that the satire of Gryll Grange is very Archilochian. The author has lost the power of raising a laugh at the objects of his dislike, and merely assails them with a genial pugnacity, so open, honest, and hearty as inevitably to conciliate a certain measure of sympathy.” Introduction.
[97] With The First Canterbury Settlement, in 1863.
[98] The coincidence that gave the public The Coming Race in 1871, and Erewhon in 1872 brought the charge of a possible plagiarism in the latter. If the absurd notion that Butler needed any light borrowed from Lytton, is worth expelling, Butler’s own candid statement about it should be sufficient for the purpose.
[99] Cannan says of Erewhon, “Few good books have so many faults, and yet it remains the one enduring satire of the nineteenth century.” Samuel Butler, 32.
(Whether the of means directed against or produced by, the verdict is undoubtedly valid.)
[100] One’s astonishment that it was Meredith who had the honor of rejecting the manuscript of Erewhon, submitted to Chapman and Hall, is exceeded only by the astonishment at the reason given,—that it was a philosophical treatise, not likely to interest the general public. One would hardly accuse this critic of a conservative reluctance to expose the public to iconoclastic bacilli, though he had not yet become the author of Beauchamp’s Career, nor would one suppose his “public” to be composed entirely of tired business men and sentimental school girls. There remain the two cruxes in the history of satire: failure of the satirist Thackeray to appreciate the satirist Swift, and of the satirist Meredith to appreciate the satirist Butler. If they prove anything it is the diversity among satirists.
[101] Harris: Samuel Butler, Author of Erewhon, 13.
Cf. Chesterton’s whimsical remark that “the best definition of the Victorian Age is that Francis Thompson stood outside it.”
[102] The Coming Race, 47.
[103] Women were the wooers and choosers in this feministic community, but the problem of feminism was apparently solved by the practice of voluntary relinquishment of wings, by the feminine wearers, after marriage, and a strict devotion to the domestic life.
[104] “And where a society attains to a moral standard in which there are no crimes and no sorrows from which tragedy can extract its aliment of pity and sorrow, no salient vices or follies on which comedy can lavish its mirthful satire, it has lost its chance of producing a Shakespeare, a Molière, or a Mrs. Beecher Stowe.” The Coming Race, 230.
[105] After the manner of Defoe’s Turkish Merchant: the Conduct of Christians Made the Sport of Infidels, and others of this type.
[106] Popanilla, 380. The ensuing debate is made the peg for some vivacious burlesque on Parliamentary speeches.
[107] Ibid., 385.
[108] Popanilla, 394.
[109] Ibid., 459. The whole is in ridicule of Utilitarianism.
[110] Ixion, 272.
[111] A prominent feature of this is a white ass (the Public) which the prime minister leads by the nose.
[112] The laborers.
[113] These two are alike in their handling of sparkling dialogue.
[114] 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.
[116] In one of Lytton’s first volumes is an observation interesting as perhaps the germ from which the plan of The Coming Race was developed.
Vincent, the philosopher of the story, remarks. (Pelham, 57):
“There are few better satires on a civilized country than the observations of visitors less polished; while, on the contrary, the civilized traveller, in describing the manners of the American barbarians, instead of conveying ridicule upon the visited, points the sarcasm on the visitor; and Tacitus could not have thought of a finer or nobler satire on the Roman luxuries than that insinuated by his treatise on the German simplicity.”
[117] Mill: Disraeli, the Author, Orator, and Statesman, 20.
He adds,—“although we cannot claim for it the merit of that matchless production, still, regarding it as a work of a very young man, it is to our thinking one of infinite promise.”