Satire

Arthur Pollard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315313832
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 1970, this work explores the literary genre of satire. After identifying the definitive aspects of satire, it goes on to examine the subjects which can be susceptible to satire, the modes and means of satire, the tone of satire and the satirist's relationship with the reader. In doing so, it introduces the reader to a number of key satirical writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer, Jonathan Swift, John Dryden, Samuel Johnson and Henry Fielding.

This book presents a comprehensive overview the genre and provides a useful starting point for those wishing to further study satirical literature.

1

Aims and Attitudes

The satirist is not an easy man to live with. He is more than usually conscious of the follies and vices of his fellows and he cannot stop himself from showing that he is. He is in a difficult position, for he can so easily lay himself open to the charge of moral superiority or even of hypocrisy if people think that they see in him the faults he condemns in others. If he escape these charges, he may still have to counter that of mere personal animosity against his victims, of being ‘a mean spiteful little wretch’, as Humbert Wolfe described Pope (Notes on English Verse Satire, 1929, p. 105). Like the preacher, the satirist seeks to persuade and convince, but his position in relation to those he addresses is more delicate and more difficult than that of the preacher. The latter seeks primarily to make his hearers accept virtue; the former must make his readers agree with him in identifying and condemning behaviour and men he regards as vicious. These men are our fellow-beings, and the vast majority of us would prefer not to condemn, if only because we recognize that ‘There but for the grace of God go I’. The satirist may seem to condemn too easily, even to enjoy doing it. His enthusiasm with verbal bludgeon, rapier or ‘mighty flail’ is often the evidence of such enjoyment. He asks us to admire the skill with which he uses these weapons, to recognize him as an artist and satire as an art.

This desire, however, is usually implicit. Though he may enjoy his talent and may hope that we will enjoy it too, the satirist normally avows a more serious intent. Dr Johnson in the Dictionary defined satire as ‘a poem in which wickedness or folly is censured’. Dryden and Defoe went further than this, the one in claiming that ‘the true end of satire is the amendment of vices’ (Discourse Concerning Satire), the other that ‘the end of Satyr is Reformation: and the Author, tho’ he doubts the work of Conversion is at a general Stop, has put his Hand to the Plow’ (Preface to The True Born Englishman).¹ They both believe that satire can heal and restore, even though Defoe is rather doubtful of his own contemporaries. With his characteristic pessimism Swift had fewer doubts. In the preface to The Battle of the Books (1704) he wrote:

Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own, which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.

and at a later date (1728) he saw satire as at best a kind of moral policeman restraining the righteous but helpless against the wicked, assisting ‘to preserve well inclin’d men in the course of virtue but seldom or never reclaim[ing] the vicious’. Satire as healer and corrective gives way to satire as punishment. In that great and gloomy work The Epilogue to the Satires (1738), as the ageing and crippled poet drew to the end of what he called that ‘long disease, [his] life’, Pope looked around, believing that, like the Hebrew prophets of old, he stood alone to denounce what was beyond redeeming (Dialogue I. 141–70):

Yes, I am proud; I must be proud to see
Men not afraid of God, afraid of me:
Safe from the Bar, the Pulpit, and the Throne,
Yet touch’d and sham’d by Ridicule alone.
  O sacred Weapon! left for Truth’s defence,
Sole Dread of Folly, Vice, and Insolence!
To all but Heav’n-directed hands deny’d,
The Muse may give thee, but the Gods must guide.
Rev’rent I touch thee!

(Dialogue II. 208–16)

The reference to ‘Truth’s defence’ reminds us of the satirist as guardian of ideals. The best satire, that which is surest in tone, is that which is surest in its values. In our own literature the age of Pope and of all those quoted in the previous paragraph provided our best satire – because in that Augustan age (the epithet itself a mark of confidence in its achievement and attainment) men felt sure of the standards to which they could refer. Indeed, much both of the sorrow and the anger in Pope’s last works derives from the feeling that those standards had collapsed:

 Truth, Worth, Wisdom daily they decry –

‘Nothing is Sacred now but Villany.’

(Dialogue I. 169–70)

Satire is always acutely conscious of the difference between what things are and what they ought to be. The satirist is often a minority figure; he cannot, however, afford to be a declared outcast. For him to be successful his society should at least pay lip-service to the ideals he upholds. If it does, he is placed in a more subtle and potentially more effective position than that of simple denouncer of vice. He is then able to exploit more fully the differences between appearance and reality and especially to expose hypocrisy. The hypocrite’s skin is notoriously more tender than that of the openly vicious. The one has nothing to conceal, the other everything. His whole reputation is at stake. Openly he subscribes to the ideals that secretly he ignores or defies.

Such a man, we may feel, deserves exposure. To this extent the satirist is performing a socially and morally useful task of universal validity. Dr Johnson, however, would distinguish between general and particular satire: ‘Proper Satire is distinguished, by the generality of the reflections, from a lampoon which is aimed at a particular person’ (Dictionary). Pope had other views:

F. Spare then the Person, and expose the Vice,
P. How Sir! not damn the Sharper, but the Dice?

(Epilogue to the Satires, Dialogue II. 12–13)

But the lampoon can have a more than personal application. When Pope attacks Atticus or Sporus in the Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot, he is attacking not only Addison and Hervey but all those who resemble what he claims they are, all who are accomplished but aloof, jealous and complacent, all superficial, effeminate, flattering, scandal-mongering persons. Nevertheless, there are dangers in personal satire. No matter how much its point and penetration in its own day, in time it may easily lose its point. Its sheer topicality may obscure or obliterate its universality. Thus many of the Grub-Street writers in The Dunciad and their fellows in Dryden’s MacFlecknoe are now mere names, and even when the industry of scholars has rescued the contemporary relevance of a reference, it may still remain remote and lacking in any immediate relevance to us. In this context, however, we need to remember that the act of writing badly is not for us so great a crime as it was for Pope and his contemporaries. The satirist needs to know what he can convince his audience of as being important. If he gives too much rein to his own hobby-horse, as Juvenal does in his misogynistic sixth Satire, reaching a crescendo with the accusation that women had become so depraved that they had even taken to learning Greek, he is likely to find that his audience is laughing at him instead of at his intended victims.

The satirist has to be careful, but in one respect he has extensive freedom. He does not labour under any formal restraint, for the variety of satire is almost infinite. This variety has never been better summarized than by A. Melville Clark, who, confining himself to what he calls regular verse satire, says:

It swings backwards and forwards, on an ellipse about the two foci of the satiric universe, the exposure of folly and the castigation of vice; it fluctuates between the flippant and the earnest, the completely trivial and the heavily didactic; it ranges from extremes of crudity and brutality to the utmost refinement and elegance; it employs singly or in conjunction monologue, dialogue, epistle, oration, narrative, manners-painting, character-drawing, allegory, fantasy, travesty, burlesque, parody, and any other vehicle it chooses; and it presents a chameleon-like surface by using all the tones of the satiric spectrum, wit, ridicule, irony, sarcasm, cynicism, the sardonic and invective.

(Studies in Literary Modes, 1946, p. 32)

We should, however, make some immediate distinctions, distinctions respectively between the satiric and comic and the satiric and ironic. Irony is in Clark’s list as a tone of satire, and there is satiric irony. There is also satiric comedy – just another reminder that satire is not in itself a pure and exclusive form. But there are also comedy and irony that are not satiric, comedy that is more generous and irony that is more serious than satire. Such comedy is kindly; it makes fun but accepts, it criticizes but appreciates; it laughs at but also laughs with its butt. Such is the comedy of Shakespeare’s Falstaff. Irony more serious than satire knows no bounds short of melancholia and madness. Its seriousness loses perspective; it is marked by ferocity and gloom. Such is the irony of Swift’s Modest Proposal to cure the poverty and over-population of Ireland by the systematic rearing of its children as meat for the tables of the wealthy. Such is Hardy’s fierce indictment of ironic disposition after the execution of Tess, the ‘pure woman’: ‘Justice was done. The President of the Immortals had finished his sport with Tess’, or his cryptic celebration of ‘Christmas: 1924’:

‘Peace upon earth!’ was said. We sing it,
And pay a million priests to bring it.
After two thousand years of mass
We’ve got as far as poison gas.

¹ I am grateful to my colleague Mr A. W. Bower of the University of Hull for drawing my attention to this quotation and to that from The Intelligencer on p. 73.

2

Subjects

Whatever be these exclusions, it is a wide range which covers both ‘the flippant and the earnest’, especially when we note that these are mixed with other contradictions to make man ‘the glory, jest and riddle of the world’ (Pope, Essay on Man II. 18). Juvenal knew how much was his:

quidquid agunt homines, votum timor ira voluptas
gaudia discursus, nostri farrago libelli est.

(Satires I. 85–6)

(Whatever men do – vow, fear, anger, pleasure, joys, employments – is the motley subject of our little book.)

Whatever men do, or perhaps better, remembering the satirist’s critical eye, whatever they ‘get up to’. In Juvenal’s case this covers in various satires the conditions of life in Rome (III), the behaviour of Domitian to his cabinet council (IV), the character of women (VI) and the ‘vanity of human wishes’ (X), whilst a single satire may be, as Nettleship observed of the first, ‘a series of incoherent complaints … A married impotent, an athletic lady, a barber rich enough to challenge the fortunes of all the patricians: the Egyptian Crispinus with his ring, the lawyer Matho in his litter: the infamous will-hunter, the robber of his ward, the plunderer of the provinces: the pander husband, the low-born spendthrift, the forger, the poisoner; all these are hurried together in no intelligible order’ (Journal of Philology XVI (1888), pp. 62–3). Only Pope can rival Juvenal in the all-embracing character of his satire, but Pope focuses more precisely on his object or, rather, he keeps his audience more insistently in mind of it. ‘Satire,’ says Ian Jack, ‘is born of the instinct to protest; it is protest become art’ (Pope, 1954 (Writers and Their Work), p. 17). The satirist looks around him and cannot help himself:

quem patitur dormire nurus corruptor avarae
quem sponsae turpes et praetextatus adulter?

(Juvenal, Satires I. 77–8)

(Whom does the corruptor of a covetous daughter-in-law allow to sleep? whom base brides and the teenage adulterer?)

But the subject must be worthwhile. Juvenal felt that his age was so bad that it was difficult not to write satire (ibid., I. 30). At times, however, he seems to be too troubled over too little. Those are the occasions when we wonder whether protest has become art. The ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’ has not been subjected to the discipline of art. Here again a contrast with Pope is helpful, for whereas he destroys his victims by a relentless and penetrating finesse, Juvenal too often thrashes blindly around with Churchill’s ‘mighty flail’.

The subject of protest must be worthwhile. It should encompass one or more of the central areas of man’s experience. Satire is, however, essentially a social mode; it has nothing in it of the transcendental. It has nothing of ‘the world forgetting, by the world forgot’. The experiences which can produce this condition, the experiences, for example, of love and death are in their essential magnificence beyond the reach of satire. In comedy ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• GENERAL EDITOR’S PREFACE
• 1 AIMS AND ATTITUDES
• 2 SUBJECTS
• 3 MODES AND MEANS
• 4 TONES
• 5 CONCLUSION—THE SATIRIST AND THE READER
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX