Satire in the Victorian Novel, by Frances Theresa Russell

“If my countrymen would take the hint and grow better-natured from my ill-natured poem, as some call it, I would say this of it, that though it is far from the best satire that ever was written, it would do the most good that ever satire did.”

Gifford[25] also, though a believer in the mission of satire, admits that “to laugh at fools is superfluous, and at the vicious unwise.”

“But it is possible that satire may not do much good; men may rise in their affections to their follies, as they do to their friends, when they are abused by others. It is much to be feared that misconduct will never be chased out of the world by satire; all, therefore, that is to be said for it is, that misconduct will certainly never be chased out of the world by satire, if no satires are written. Nor is that term unapplicable to graver compositions. Ethics, Heathen and Christian, and the scriptures themselves, are, in a great measure, a satire on the weakness and iniquity of men; and some part of that satire is in verse, too. * * * Nay, historians themselves may be considered as satirists and satirists most severe; since such are most human actions, that to relate is to expose them.”

“Satire is the weapon of the man at odds with the world and at ease with himself. The dissatisfied man—a Juvenal, a Swift, a youthful Thackeray—belabors the world with vociferous indignation, like the wind on the traveller’s back, the beating makes it hug its cloaking sins the tighter. Wrong runs no danger from such chastisement. * * * Satire is harmless as a moral weapon. It is an old-fashioned fowling piece, fit for a man of wit, intelligence, and a certain limited imagination. It runs no risk of having no quarry; the world to it is one vast covert of lawful game. It goes a-travelling with wit, because both are in search of the unworthy.”

Two comments on Aristophanes illustrate the pro and con of satiric accomplishment. Cope, in the Preface to his translation, remarks:

“He felt it his duty to do all he could to counteract the increasing influence of Euripides upon the rising generation, and knowing the power of ridicule, he employs this weapon constantly and mercilessly; but he is careful not to injure his own cause by exaggerated caricature, which might have created sympathy for the object of his censure.”

But White, while warning us against regarding the dramatist as either “a mere moralist or a mere jester,” judges by record:[29]

“If Aristophanes was working for reform, as a long line of learned interpreters of the poet have maintained, the result was lamentably disappointing; he succeeded in effecting not a single change. He wings the shafts of his incomparable wit at all the popular leaders of the day—Cleon, Hyperbolus, Peisander, Cleophon, Agyrrhius, in succession, and is reluctant to unstring his bow even when they are dead. But he drove no one of them from power.”

Yet after due deduction has been made, Satire has left to it an asset of considerable net value; an influence that may be subjective if not objective, general if not specific, and artistic if not rampantly ethical. As an instrument of self criticism, whereby a man may be saved from making a solemn pompous fool of himself, as an antitoxin to vanity, a solvent of sentimentality, a betrayer of hypocrisy, satire may find all the mission it needs to be respectable; and if it can also acquire a degree of grace and comeliness, it may be listed among the muses.

Now this spirit of humorous criticism, sprung from innate prejudice, nurtured by penetrating observation, enlisted at least nominally under the banner of righteousness, and out for conquest, obviously must have something to conquer;—whether he is a soldier fighting an enemy alien, or a roving knight, bound to offer combat on chivalric grounds, though aware in his candid heart that the surpassing loveliness of his lady is a claim gallantly to be maintained rather than an incontrovertible fact. In either case, whether he uses archery or artillery, he must have a target; and a student of his tactics must understand what it is, even better perhaps than he does himself.

Taken individually, the objects of satiric attack are legion, being no fewer than all such victims of human displeasure as may suitably come in for jesting rebuke. Our only chance for any sort of synthesis is to see first if these individuals may be grouped into classes, and next, if these classes may be generalized under some principle, discovered to be under some supreme command.

The grouping is indeed easily discernible. Political parties stand out, social strata, various professions and institutions and movements. But to look upon these as ridiculed for themselves is to be satisfied with a superficial view. The fault is not in themselves but in their stars that they are underlings. What are these evil stars that seem in their courses to fight against them?

The terms oftenest on the lips of satirists and historians of satire are Vice and Folly. But these fine large entities are taken at their face value and given a conventional interpretation. We are not enlightened as to what vice and folly are, and can define them only as those things which seem vicious and foolish to their several opponents. They also are among the baffling subjectivities.

Juvenal’s conclusion that it is hard not to write satire, from the premise that the number of fools is infinite, is said by Herford to be “the fundamental axiom of all satire.” But as a matter of fact, it was Horace who took the fool for his province, while his sterner successor rather specialized on the knave. From then on there has been as little endeavor to disentangle the two strands as to define them.

One of the earliest English satirists[30] emphasised the knavery; and another[31] includes that and folly in the same indictment. Dryden,[32] inclined to the serious Juvenalian type, discriminates between positive and negative attitudes, but not between the two stock objects.

Speaking of the narrowed use of the word satire in French and English, he adds,

“For amongst the Romans it was not only used for those discourses which decried vice, or exposed folly, but for others also where virtue was recommended. But in our modern languages we apply it only to invective poems, * * * for in English, to say Satire, is to mean reflection, as we use that word in its worst sense; or as the French call it, more properly, medisance.”

And Fielding,[35] though he actually finds good game in folly, evidently considers vice the prime object:

“But while I hold the pen, it will be a maxim with me, that vice can never be too great to be lashed, nor virtue too obscure to be commended; in other words, that satire can never rise too high, nor panegyric stoop too low.”

Although vice is now too powerful for such censure, he dares the lion in his den, and comforts the virtuous with reassurances:

The nineteenth century is full of straws still blowing in the direction of Vice and Folly: such as Taine’s[37] “Satire is the sister of elegy; if the second pleads for the oppressed, the first combats the oppressors.” And Lionel Johnson[38] comments that Erasmus “had something in common with Matthew Arnold: a like satiric yet profoundly felt impatience with intellectual pedantry and social folly.”

We may, however, see satire as opposition, and moreover opposition to vice and folly, and still be taking for granted that which demands more probing. For even if it were so simple a crusade as that, no crusade is as simple as it looks, and this one is particularly open to suspicion.

It is therefore not wholly superfluous to ask why vice and folly are the favorite satiric goals. Psychologically it would be sufficient to say that it is because anything a man disapproves of naturally seems to him foolish if not actually vicious. But socialized man cannot admit that his reaction to anything is based on mere temperamental prejudice. Condemnation of vice and folly is of course its own justification, and humor is its own reward. Unfortunately, however, humorous condemnation is not always applicable to these offenders against taste and morality. Folly is sometimes too artless to be censured, and vice is often too serious to be ridiculed. Evidently then, yet another solution is needed, a least common denominator that will go into both, even if it does leave a remainder.

Now it happens that a body of explicit testimony, substantiated by a review of satiric practice, does indicate the existence of this unifying bond, this thing which, when present, makes both vice and folly criticizably absurd; and its generic name is deception.

This fraudulent family has two main branches: the intentional type, including hypocrisy and humbug; and the unconscious, represented by sentimentality and other forms of self-befoolment; besides a half-conscious variety, whence come vanity, snobbishness, superstition, vulgarity, and other children of perverted ambition and false reasoning. All these give plenty of scope to the satirist, even when we subtract some possibilities by the important qualification that not all that deceives is ludicrous; deception being sometimes too innocent and even altruistic and sometimes too tragic and cruel.[39]

According to this test, anything which assumes a virtue when it has it not may draw satiric fire. It is the assumption itself, the pose, that furnishes the shining mark loved by the satirist.

Gascoigne[41] symbolised by his steel glass that which reflected the beholders as they were, not flattered as by the plated mirror; and said his effort was to “sing a verse to make them see themselves.” He also identified the root of all evil with hypocrisy;—“So that they seem, and covet not to be.”

Cervantes[42] spoke of his “Herculean labor” as being “nothing more nor less than to banish mediocrity from the realm of Spanish poetry, and to sweep from its sacred precincts, which had become as foul as an Augean stable, all shams, lies, hypocrisies, and vulgar baseness whatsoever.”

But the first to stress this idea with discriminating analysis was, quite appropriately, the first in his own satirical field:[43]

“The only source of the true Ridiculous (as it appears to me) is affectation. * * * Now affectation proceeds from one of these two causes, vanity or hypocrisy; for as vanity puts us on affecting false characters, in order to purchase applause; so hypocrisy sets us on an endeavour to avoid censure, by concealing our vices under an appearance of their opposite virtues. * * *

“From the discovery of this affectation arises the Ridiculous; * * * I might observe, that our Ben Jonson, who of all men understood the Ridiculous the best, hath chiefly used the hypocritical affectation.”

He remarks that this is more amusing than vanity, from the sharper contrast with reality, and adds:

“Now, from affectation only, the misfortunes and calamities of life, or the imperfections of nature, may become the objects of ridicule. * * *

“The poet carries this very far:

‘None are for being what they are in fault,

But for not being what they would be thought.’”

“Great vices are the proper objects of our detestation, smaller faults of our pity; but affectation appears to me the only true source of the Ridiculous.”

Fielding’s comment on Jonson is in turn applied to him by a modern critic:[44]

“All Fielding’s evil characters, it may be remarked, are accomplished hypocrites; on pure vanity or silliness he spends very few of his shafts.”

“The first-fruits of English society is hypocrisy. It ripens here under the double breath of religion and morality; we know their popularity and sway across the channel. * * * This vice is therefore English. Mr. Pecksniff is not found in France. * * * Since Voltaire, Tartuffe is impossible.”

“I have ridiculed the puppets of all features, all colours, all sizes, by which an impudent and audacious set of impostors have been gaining an easy livelihood these two thousand years. * * *

“The falsehood that the tongue commits is slight in comparison with what is conceived by the heart, and executed by the whole man, throughout life.”

Meredith’s portrait of The Comic Spirit is applicable to satire, for throughout the essay he gives to the term comic the connotation generally allowed to the term satiric:

“Men’s future upon earth does not attract it; their honesty and shapeliness in the present does; and whenever they wax out of proportion, overblown, affected, pretentious, bombastical, hypocritical, pedantic, fantastically delicate; whenever it sees them self-deceived or hoodwinked, given to run riot in idolatries, drifting into vanities, congregating in absurdities, planning short-sightedly, plotting dementedly; whenever they are at variance with their professions, * * * whenever they offend sound reason, fair justice; are false in humility or mined with conceit, * * * they are detected and ridiculed.”

Meredith[47] also reiterates the distinction made by Swift and Fielding in regard to misfortune:

“Poverty, says the satirist, has nothing harder in itself than that it makes men ridiculous. But poverty is never ridiculous to Comic perception until it attempts to make its rags conceal its bareness in a forlorn attempt at decency, or foolishly to rival ostentation.”

“He strips Folly to the skin, displays the imposture of the creature, and is content to offer her better clothing.”

Of the two forms of affectation, Fielding chooses hypocrisy as better satirical game, but Bergson[48] votes for the other:

“In this respect it might be said that the specific remedy for vanity is laughter, and that the one failing that is essentially laughable is vanity.”

Fuess[49] makes for the last great poetic satirist the familiar conventional claim:

“Byron is attacking not virtue, but false sentiment, false idealism, and false faith. His satiric spirit is engaged in * * * tearing down what is sham and pretence and fraud.”

“Finally, there is another service political satires render, which is peculiarly necessary to a government based on discussion. One of the greatest evils in such a state is the presence of mere words and phrases, and of the vague Pecksniffian virtues. Now to satire cant and humbug are proper game. It brings fine professions down to fact, points the contrast between the commonplace reality and its tinsel dress, and by the dread of ridicule raises the standard of plain-dealing. Other means of criticism as well act as a check on more opprobrious faults in public life. But satire is the best agent to keep us free from taking words for substance.”

Apparently, then, we may conclude that deception in some form is, so far as any one thing can be, the basic object of satire, or at least is so considered by those who reflect upon it. But we must admit here as elsewhere that to recognise a phenomenon is easier than to account for it.

Not that it is difficult to account for the deception itself. No instinct is more fundamental and irresistible than that of concealment. The primary fear of molestation or harm in which it originates becomes, in a social state of sophistication and artifice, fear of exposure. With increased development, such complex and opposing factors as pride and shame, avarice and generosity, ostentation and modesty, lead us to hide things. We hide all sorts of things, good and bad; faults, virtues, deficiencies, accomplishments, hoardings, and charities. We hide from ourselves as well as from others. The left hand is as a rule not on terms of confiding intimacy with the right, whether it is scattering seeds of kindness or getting into mischief. In the mental realm the same trick of camouflage prevails. Out of spiritual cowardice we conceal from ourselves the disturbing facts of life, and purchase optimism at the easy price of sentimentalism.

But just why this ubiquitous habit should be the peculiar province of the satirist, is another psychological problem; and as such, is best reached through a psychological solution. Why is there about deception something inherently repugnant and at the same time automatically amusing? Why is our incorrigible human predilection for belonging to the Great Order of Shams equalled only by our incorrigible human predilection for joyous exposure of others? The game seems to be mutual and perpetual, and the honors about even.

The repugnance undoubtedly comes less from a noble devotion to truth than from the dislike we all have of being deceived. Nothing do we discover with more exasperation, and admit with more reluctance than the fact that we have been fooled or hoodwinked. It is an experience that fosters present irritation and future distrust; but one which, from its very nature, demands the retort ironic rather than the lofty indignation accorded to an open injury. Most emphatically “We all hate fustian and affectation,” and any knavish trickery, especially in others.

The amusement arises from the triumph of frustrating this attempt at deceptive concealment, intensified by the pleasure in perceiving an incongruity—in this case, between the assumed and the actual—which is the essence of humor.[51] The zest lies in the endless sport of hide and seek, veiling and unveiling, blowing bubbles and pricking them, which is exhilarating through the play of wits and the fun of outwitting.[52]

This would perhaps be a sufficient account were it not for a certain left-handed yet inseparable connection of the psychology of the question with its ethics. Whether or not an intruder, the latter has entered in and firmly entrenched herself. When therefore she maintains that her satiric discontent is divine, she must be given a respectful hearing; though after it we seem unable to concede more than the possibility.

A lively enthusiasm for showing up the ingenuous sentimentalist or the crafty hypocrite may or may not argue a freedom on the exposer’s part from these or other modes of hiding or distorting the truth; or a disinterested love for truth itself. It does go without saying that real respect and admiration for honesty and sincerity is a fundamental human trait, as witness the glowing encomiums bestowed on those guileless virtues, and it might follow that our unmoral impulses are half consciously focussed through a moral function. We must have a sin offering; and deceit is in the most eligible. Thus the satirist may, deliberately or unthinkingly, read deception into his disapproved, in order to have an excuse for laughter, just as he may read vice and folly into his disliked, in order to condemn. Nevertheless it is possible to enjoy the process of unmasking without making it a corollary that masking is wrong and therefore deserving of exposure.

Some observers are more impressed with the resemblances among the members of the great human family, and some more sensitive to the differences. When a consciousness of this variance is dissolved in a humorous solution, it precipitates a satire. The satirist is not always a victorious Saint George, and the satirized a downed and disgraced Dragon. Still, if the Saint could be secularized to the extent of a mocking light in his eye, and a taunting finger pointing at a removed disguise under which the Dragon had been masquerading, we might take the picture as a symbol of an ideal relationship between them, both ethically and artistically.

For there is an ideal in this as in all things that have variation and flexibility; and, as in them all, the question of quality is the most important one. Without some sort of criterion we can form no judgments as to value. The points we have been considering,—what satire is made of, why and how made, against what directed, and in what effective, all lead to the final one,—what is the highest type?

The trend of testimony seems to converge on three requirements for that satire which would disarm criticism while indulging in it: purity of purpose, kindliness of temper, and discrimination as to objects of ridicule.

The first is not to be confused with the reformatory motive. It means simply freedom from the very affectation censured in others. What it rules out is not so much the railing to gratify one’s spleen, as the pose of altruism while doing it; the grieved this-hurts-me-more-than-it-does-you attitude so particularly annoying to the castigated. It also discounts the selfish vanity which courts applause for wit, regardless of the means by which it is won.

On this point Horace[53] again heads the list. He denies the accusation that the satirist is spiteful, and continues:

From the nature of English satire up to the eighteenth century, we do not expect, nor do we find, much interest in this phase of it. Then comes Young,[54] reviving the Horatian caution:

De Quincey[56] uses Pope as a horrible example of this failing, contrasting him with the indignant Juvenal:

“Pope, having no such internal principle of wrath boiling in his breast, * * * was unavoidably a hypocrite of the first magnitude when he affected (or sometimes really conceited himself) to be in a dreadful passion with offenders as a body. It provokes fits of laughter * * * to watch him in the process of brewing the storm that spontaneously will not come; whistling, like a mariner, for a wind to fill his satiric sails; and pumping up into his face hideous grimaces in order to appear convulsed with histrionic rage. * * * As it is, the short puffs of anger, the uneasy snorts of fury in Pope’s satires, give one painfully the feeling of a locomotive-engine with unsound lungs.”

Whether these strictures are just or not, the principle back of them is sound; and more pithily summed up by Landor’s[57] “Nobody but an honest man has a right to scoff at anything.”

Browning[58] carries the idea a step farther, and sounds a warning to dwellers in glass houses:

The demand for kindliness of temper may seem paradoxical, but for that very reason it is the more insistent. Being under suspicion of unkindness, vindictive spite, retaliation, satire must either admit the charge or prove the contrary, for the real paradox lies in the highest moral claim being made for the literary genre of the greatest immoral possibilities.

However, until the modern humanitarian cult came in, it seemed content to admit the charge. After Horace, with a few isolated exceptions, as Swift[59] and Cowper,[60] satire seemed rather to cherish malice and glory in rudeness, often mistaking peevish scolding for noble scorn. Its keynote was “A flash of that satiric rage,” or, according to Hall,

Byron was the last example of both the professional, concentrated form and the truculent mood. Tennyson[61] voices the new spirit of his century:

Birrell,[62] less caustic than De Quincey about Pope, still uses him as an instance of how not to do it:

“Dr. Johnson is more to my mind as a sheer satirist than Pope, for in satire character tells more than in any other form of verse. We want a personality behind—a strong, gloomy, brooding personality; soured and savage, if you will * * * but spiteful never.”

Even the traits of gloom and savagery might be dispensed with, and room made for an infusion of sweetness and light. This is implied in the condition laid down by Lionel Johnson:[63]

“To tilt at superstition, to shoot at folly, is seldom a grateful or a gratifying pursuit, if there be no depth of purpose in it, nothing but pleasure in the consciousness of destructive power, no feeling of sympathetic pity, no tenderness somewhere in the heart, no cordiality sweetening the work of overthrow.”

“Satirists have met with much ignorant and invidious depreciation, as though a talent for ridicule was necessarily the index of an unkindly nature. The truth is just the reverse.”

Discrimination as to objects of satire has reference not to their nature, as foolish, vicious, deceitful, but to their legitimacy as objects. It is a matter of taste and justice on the part of the satirist.

The first definite reproof of heedlessness on this score is given in the memorial tribute to Pope:[65]

“A satire should expose nothing but what is corrigible, and make a due discrimination between those who are, and those who are not the proper objects of it.”

The best modern expression[67] of this idea happens to be an interpretation of a pioneer satirist. And it is distinctly modern in its recognition that while the real object of satire must be an abstraction,—the sin not the sinner—it must, to be artistic, have a concrete embodiment,—the sinner rather than the sin. The Greek dramatist explains:

But while the good satirist must have these assets, it does not follow that the possession of them will guarantee good satire. It can only be said that without them he cannot be ranked high, though, having them, he may not be ranked at all. It may be difficult for a Juvenal not to write satire, but it is difficult for anyone to produce a fine example of this, as of any other form of art. No more than any art is it exempt from a recognition of truth[68] and even beauty, though its connection with them is the paradoxical one of drawing attention to their opposites. It is a truism that many things are best understood and appreciated by a portrayal of contrasts. In this case it is a perception of the congruous that is particularly concerned, and it is implied in the satirist’s keen sense of the incongruous.

The satirist has not only these normal obligations, but some peculiar dangers. He is in as perilous a position as Sir Guyon in his voyage to the realm of Acrasia: threatened by the didacticism that besets the critic, the vulgarity and rudeness that prey upon the jester, the prejudice and injustice that warp the opponent, the smugness that undermines the reformer. Moreover, he has his hampering limitations. He is forever confined to the middle plane of life, shut out alike from its sublime heights and tragic depths.

Added to this restriction in range is another in quantity. The nature of satire makes it better adapted for the trimming than the whole cloth. Its rôle in the dramatis personæ of literature is restricted to the minor parts, but this subordination in place does not mean a negligible rank. The untrimmed garment, the all-star cast, these are not desirable even when possible. For the accessory there is also an ideal whose attainment is quite as important as though it pertained to the main substance. In the case of satire such a standard would call for censure that is candid and just, wit that is spontaneous and refined, both actuated by sincere motives, and directed against certain failings of humanity rather than against the human individuals themselves, though these must body forth the abstractions otherwise intangible,—the combination producing an effect essentially truthful and artistic. That all this can come only from one who is more than a mere satirist is axiomatic, and indeed so fundamentally true that it might be said that the more of a satirist a man is in quantity, the less is his chance for fine quality.

The modern author has conquered these requirements and obstacles, not by taking arms against his sea of troubles, but by the less intrepid and more diplomatic method of disowning his title. The satirist is obsolete, but the satiric writer, or even better, the writer with a satiric touch, is more in evidence than ever. It is perhaps too much of a challenge to say that Shakespeare is a greater satirist than Aristophanes, Jonson, or Molière; but no one would deny the superior quality of his smaller amount. The aroma of his delicate spice and lemon extract has not only lasted longer than their pepper and vinegar, but is better relished by the modern palate. The nineteenth century had no Shakespeare to “stoop from the height of a serene intelligence to sport with satire,” but its best satire came from those who took it least seriously and insinuated it with least pomp and circumstance. And so far from being the most conspicuous in the satiric field, these who are greatest in this matter are also greatest and best known for other than satiric gifts and accomplishments.

While these humorous critics would be more content than their forerunners with the early dictum that satire was “invented for the purging of our minds,”[69] rather than for the practical consequences sometimes claimed for it, yet they would not adopt the succeeding phrase of the definition,—“in which human vices, ignorance and errors, * * * are severely reprehended;” for they would qualify more carefully the objects, and abstain from severity in their reprehension.

This dividing line among objects would make, however, a scientific rather than an ethical bisection. The “stolidly conscientious performance” of confining the practice of satire to a moral issue, does indeed, as Dr. Alden points out,[70] argue a “deficiency in wit” that marks the Anglo-Saxon mind. But as the Englishman became more cosmopolitan, he learned to disguise such of his innate solemnity as he could not shed. That he has absorbed more completely the more easily assimilated Hebrew and Roman traits, has not prevented him from acquiring some also from the Greek and the French. The Victorian is naturally a multiplex compound, and in him we see all these elements in various stages of conflict and combination.