CHAPTER I

INDIVIDUALS

As the target to the missile, so is its object to satire. A target is in itself a thing of sufficient identity to be amenable to definition,--even if that can be no more precise than “something aimed at.” But in the concrete there are targets and targets. So, while the satirized may be reduced to an abstract entity, as deception or some other ubiquitous trait of human nature, there exist in fact as many varieties of the satirized as of satirists. Anything which any one may criticise, if it be subject to humorous treatment, may be a satirical object.

But since subdivisions are convenient, we make three for this purpose, which seem fairly inclusive, though not at all mutually exclusive. The simplest and narrowest class is that of actual Individuals. The next is formed by the cohesion of individuals into groups, creating Institutions. The third is made by the artistic conversion of individuals into fictitious characters, sufficiently artificial to be designated as Types,--more or less complex, according to the nature of their creator, but never entirely simple, if they are fashioned of human stuff.

Even more than usual, however, is the caution necessary that the classification is artificial and the classes inseparable. An individual may, and indeed generally does, represent an idea or an organization or a certain temperament. Particularly when an object of satire, John Doe is not viewed as John Doe but as an embodiment of some principle or kind of conduct disapproved of by his critic. And conversely, institutions and types, being abstractions, must be made concrete to get them into workable shape. “The position of the satirist,” says Lowell, in _The Bigelow Papers_, “is oftentimes one which he would not have chosen, had the election been left to himself. In attacking bad principles, he is obliged to select some individual who has made himself their exponent, and in whom they are impersonate, to the end that what he says may not, through ambiguity, be dissipated _tenues in auras_.” Lowell was of course not unaware that the satirist’s obligation might be met and fulfilled through the method of dramatic disguise, but it is evident that the author of the _Fable for Critics_ had his leanings toward the personal type. Yet he confirms the pious English tradition by adding,--

“Meanwhile let us not forget that the aim of the true satirist is not to be severe upon persons, but only upon falsehood. * * * Truth is quite beyond the reach of satire. * * * The danger of satire is, that continual use may deaden his sensibility to the force of language.”

The real secret is that our primitive impulses clamor for the delectable diet of personalities, and must be appeased by a little judicious indulgence. Under pristine conditions, before we learned to be apologetic for our instincts, we could enjoy our Fescinnine gibings without a qualm. As we grew in poise and culture, we began to feel the need of a finer diet for Cerberus, to gratify his acquired taste. Such a sop was found in the altruistic motive, inexpensive and immediately satisfying.

But, since motives are rarely single, there is frequently in this unconscious pose an admixture of genuine idealism, most often of the patriotic sort. _La Satire Ménippée_, for instance, was said to have been worth as much to Henry of Navarre as was the battle of Ivry; and its real object was the eternal one of good satire. Says a historian,[248]

“All the mean political rivalries which pretend to work only for the public good are exposed there; all those men who take God as a shield to hide their own personal baseness, pass before us.”

So also was the _Anti-Jacobin_ designed as an instrument for the public weal, though conceived in panic and brought forth in extravagance. Both these productions, moreover, illustrate the difficulty of distinguishing between personal and political or some sort of partisan satire.[249] When Claudius was exposed on his bad eminence by Seneca, Nero, by Persius, Domitian, by Juvenal, Wolsey, by Skelton, Napoleon and George the Third, by Byron, and all four Georges, by Thackeray, it was in every case, not as a mere human Doctor Fell, but as a crafty tyrant or an incompetent mannikin made absurd by an incongruous position of power and authority; although at first the personal interest predominated over the political, the latter increasing with time.

In any case, what has preserved personal satire in literature has been the amber, not the flies. Such satiric portraits as are saved from oblivion,--as those in _Absalom and Achitophel_, _Macflecknoe_, _The Dunciad_, _The Vision of Judgment_,--are spared, not for their subjects but for the wit in which they are dressed, irrespective of the justice or the slander stitched into the costume.

In the field of prose fiction we find a comparatively small amount of direct personal satire, and that modicum attached to the romantic or fantastic section rather than the realistic. In the latter the fusion of fact and fancy is too subtle to result in overt portraiture. What Dickens says of Squeers is true in some degree of all fictitious characters. All are drawn from observation, but none remain precisely as observed, after passing through the crucible of their creator’s imagination. Of some we chance to know more definitely than of others that they were “taken from life.” Disraeli, for instance, in his _Coningsby_, made the Honorable J. W. Croker into the politician Rigby, Lord George Manners into Henry Sidney, and Lord Hertford into the Duke of Monmouth. The last achieved his real immortality as the Marquis of Steyne, and Theodore Hook also had the double honor of being the original of Disraeli’s Lucian Gay and Thackeray’s Mr. Wagg. Richard Monckton Milnes became the Vavasour of _Tancred_, John Bright, the Mr. Turnbull of _Phineas Redux_, and Gerald Massey played the title rôle in _Felix Holt_. We are aware too that their own families supplied material to Dickens, Brontë, Eliot, and Meredith,[250] but we could hardly class Mr. Micawber, Shirley Keeldar (or her friend Caroline Helstone), Adam Bede, Dinah Morris, or Melchisedek Harrington as examples of personal satire, even when given satirical treatment.

It is natural, therefore, that the member of our group who stands preëminent in the line of individual satire is the one who also heads the list chronologically; that the next are the two Victorian forerunners; and that the only real Victorian left to complete this small tale does it by virtue of his early work. After Thackeray’s burlesques, ending about 1850, the personal species becomes practically extinct.

Of Peacock’s seven stories, the first three, published during the second decade of the century, are full of thinly veiled contemporary personalities. The next two, in the third decade, have at least the thicker veils of a historical perspective. In _Crochet Castle_ (1831) the early symptoms recur, but in much lighter form; and in Peacock’s last appearance, thirty years after, they have vanished, though the staging is current and local.

The characters in the first three and the sixth are a sort of stock company, who reappear in the different _dramatis personæ_. Shelley has been identified with Foster of _Headlong Hall_, Scythrop of _Nightmare Abbey_, and Forester of _Melincourt_, though this last might also be Lord Monboddo, as Peacock, like Spenser, had no objection to the economy of duplication. Southey plays the unenviable parts of Nightshade in _Headlong Hall_, Feathernest in _Melincourt_, and Sackbut in _Crochet Castle_. In the last story, however, he may be Mr. Rumblesack Shanstee, since Wordsworth is probably meant in Mr. Wilful Wontsee. The latter is also Mr. Paperstamp in _Melincourt_. Coleridge is another of triple incarnation, appearing as Mystic in _Melincourt_. Flosky in _Nightmare Abbey_, and Skionar in _Crochet Castle_. In this last volume Byron figures as Cypress, and is probably also the Honorable Mr. Listless of _Nightmare Abbey_. Either Gifford or Jeffrey may be intended in Gall, in _Headlong Hall_. In _Melincourt_, Canning is Mr. Anyside Antijack, and Malthus, Mr. Fax.

Of all these the most purely personal, in the sense that they are satires on the men as individuals and not as representatives of a philosophy or an organization, are the hits at Coleridge and Southey.[251] The former is allowed to speak for himself:[252]

“‘I divide my day,’ said Mr. Mystic, ‘_on a new principle_: I am always poetical at breakfast, moral at luncheon, metaphysical at dinner, and political at tea. Now you shall know my opinion of the hopes of the world. * * *

“Who art thou?--MYSTERY!--I hail thee! Who art thou?--JARGON!--I love thee! Who art thou?--SUPERSTITION!--I worship thee! Hail, transcendental TRIAD!’”

Later while his companions are concerned practically over the catastrophe of an explosion of gas in his room, he bewails it as--[253]

“* * * an infallible omen of evil--a type and symbol of an approaching period of public light--when the smoke of metaphysical mystery, and the vapours of ancient superstition, which he had done all that in him lay to consolidate in the spirit of man, would explode at the touch of analytical reason, leaving nothing but the plain common sense matter-of-fact of moral and political truth--a day that he earnestly hoped he might never live to see.”

Mr. Floskey is thus described:[254]

“He had been in his youth an enthusiast for liberty, and had hailed the dawn of the French Revolution as the promise of a day that was to banish war and slavery, and every form of vice and misery, from the face of the earth. Because all this was not done, he deduced that nothing was done, and from this deduction, according to his system of logic, he drew a conclusion that worse than nothing was done, * * *” etc.

And thus he describes his opinion of current literature:[255]

“This rage for novelty is the bane of literature. Except my works and those of my particular friends, nothing is good that is not as old as Jeremy Taylor; and, _entre nous_, the best parts of my friends’ books were either written or suggested by myself.”

In the _Noctes Ambrosianæ_, Coleridge gets a contemporary thrust for his conceit and dogmatism, with the conclusion,--

“The author o’ _Christabel_, and _The Auncient Mariner_, had better just continue to see visions, and to dream dreams--for he’s no fit for the wakin’ world.”

The most direct attack on Southey is in the comment on Mr. Feathernest:[256]

“* * * to whom the Marquis had recently given a place in exchange for his conscience. The poet had, in consequence, burned his old ‘Odes to Truth and Liberty,’ and published a volume of Panegyrical Addresses ‘to all the crowned heads in Europe,’ with the motto, ‘Whatever is at court, is right.’”

In Disraeli’s _Ixion_, Enceladus has been identified as Wellington, Hyperion as Sir Robert Peel, Jupiter as George the Third, and Apollo as Byron. Byronism indeed is one of the shining marks loved by the nineteenth century, a fact that not only labels the British temper, but illustrates the irony of time’s revenges. The last great satirist of the old school himself becomes the prime object of satire for the new,

## partly through mutual lack of understanding, and partly because Byron,

like some other brilliant wits, lacked a real sense of humor. Both these reasons enabled Lytton to flatter himself that his _Pelham_ had “contributed to put an end to the Satanic Mania--to turn the thoughts and ambitions of young gentlemen without neckcloths, and young clerks who were sallow, from playing the Corsair and boasting that they were villains.”[257]

Nearly a half century after _Pelham_, we have a reference which strikes indirectly the keynote of satire, made by a genius great enough to admire judiciously (as he elsewhere testifies) another genius.[258]

“Beauchampism, as one confronting him calls it, may be said to stand for nearly everything which is the obverse of Byronism, and rarely woos your sympathy, shuns the statuesque pathetic, or any kind of posturing.”

It was Lytton, in turn, who was attacked by Thackeray. He heads the list of _Novels by Eminent Hands_, and is brought up again in the _Yellowplush Papers_ and _Epistles to the Literati_.

But here, as everywhere, the complexity of this type obtrudes itself. Most of the preceding illustrations have been concerned with men as authors, that is to say, with certain products of literature; and this puts them out of the personal class. The same thing is true of Trollope’s sarcastic allusions to the novels of Disraeli and Dickens, and Kingsley’s little flings at _Coningsby_ and Young England generally.

No comment on the whole matter of personal satire could be more to the point or more conclusive than that given informally by Thackeray in a couple of letters concerning his own attack on Lytton,--which he calls by the right name. The first is addressed to Lady Blessington, and accounts for his objection to E. L. B.[259]

“But there are sentiments in his writings which always anger me, big words which make me furious, and a premeditated fine writing against which I can’t help rebelling. My antipathy don’t go any further than this.”

The other is written to Lytton himself, calling his attention to a paragraph in his Preface to the 1856 edition of his (Thackeray’s) Works; it is this that really contains the apology:

“There are two performances especially (among the critical and biographical works of the erudite Mr. Yellowplush) which I am very sorry to see reproduced, and I ask pardon of the author of _The Caxtons_ for a lampoon which I know he himself has forgiven, and which I wish I could recall. * * * I wonder at the recklessness of the young man who could fancy such satire was harmless jocularity, and never calculate that it might give pain.”

This fine utterance, coming at just the right time and from the right person,--the last of the personal satirists, reformed into the author of _Vanity Fair_,--might be used as an appropriate epitaph for individual satire. Since the time when Lamb observed that “Satire does not look pretty upon a tombstone,” we have not only agreed with him, but gone enough further to admit that it is no more winsome applied to the living than to the dead. And if we still for the most part reserve our eulogy until it can serve as elegy, we are willing to let the dead past of spiteful, recriminating satire bury its dead.

It would not, as a matter of fact, be quite fair to the past to ignore its own repudiation of this brackish current that has discolored the main satiric stream. For it was undoubtedly this element that Cervantes had in mind when he declared,--[260]

“My humble pen hath never winged its way Athwart the field satiric, that low plain Which leads to foul rewards, and quick decay.”

In the bitterly partisan seventeenth century Sir Thomas Browne might well say, “It is seldom that men who care much for the truth write satire.” And in the beginning of the next century we find the confession,--[261]

“Our Satire is nothing but Ribaldry and Billingsgate. Scurrility passes for wit; and he who can call names in the greatest variety of phrases, is looked upon to have the shrewdest pen.”

A later eighteenth century view is voiced by Cowper:[262]

“Most satirists are indeed a public scourge; Their mildest physic is a farrier’s purge; Their acrid temper turns, as soon as stirr’d, The milk of their good purpose all to curd. Their zeal begotten, as their works rehearse, By lean despair upon an empty purse, The wild assassins start into the street, Prepar’d to poignard whomsoe’er they meet.”

It is with reference to this conception, induced by this type of satire, that a modern critic observes, “It is commonly held by the unreflecting that your satirist is bitter, your humorist a jester.”[263]

But in the nineteenth century comes a change brought about by two influences: a finer discrimination, which shrinks from passing snap judgments on things in the lump; and a more gracious urbanity, sometimes springing from that humanitarianism which is the Victorian’s pride, sometimes masquerading under its guise, sometimes even in scorn of it, but always characterized by tact and taste, if not by a tender regard for possibly hurt feelings.

Amidst the abundance of indirect testimony to this fact we have two direct ones, from an earlier and a later novelist. Lytton declared in _Pelham_ that he “did not wish to be an individual satirist.” And George Eliot said in one of her letters,--

“We may satirize character and qualities in the abstract without injury to our moral nature, but persons hardly ever.”

One of her own critics makes an observation on her work which shows the new idea of satire struggling with the old, that all satire must be toothed,--in spite of Bishop Hall. In the _milieu_ of Eliot, says Mrs. Oliphant, “the satirist need be no sharper than the humorist, and may almost fulfil his office lovingly.”[264]

Whether or not the satirist has any more of an “office” than that of being an artist, he is at least beginning to have love enough for his art, if not for humanity, to do his work as graciously as the nature of it will permit. In Mallock’s _New Republic_, for instance, there is a sort of Peacockian revival of personalities. But, while the figures of Carlyle, Arnold, Huxley, Jowett, Pater, Ruskin, Rossetti, and others, are recognizable through their thin disguises, they are not drawn with the caricaturistic strokes that distorted those of Southey, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley and Byron, a generation or so earlier. It is, however, from a member of that earlier generation that we get a vivacious expression of the self-reflexive irony which is for the satirist literally a _saving_ sense of humor. In his _Lyric Odes to the Royal Academicians_, Peter Pindar reports a dialogue with Satire, who urges him to attack certain of his contemporaries:

“‘Not write!’ cried Satire, red as fire with rage: ‘This instant glorious war with dulness wage;

* * * * *

Flay half the Academic imps alive; Smoke, smoke, the Drones of that stupendous Hive.’”

Later, made compunctious by the fable of the frogs pelted to death with stones thrown merely in sport, he resolves to reform, but is dissuaded:

“‘Poh, poh!’ cried Satire with a smile, ‘Where is the _glorious freedom_ of our isle, If not permitted to call names?’ Methought the argument had weight: ‘Satire,’ quoth I, ‘You’re very right;’ So once more forth volcanic Peter flames.”

“Life,” says Hawthorne, “is a mixture of marble and mud.” In this

## particular fragment of life as represented in literature, we have

the two in paradoxical combination. Personal satire has the effect sometimes of being an ugly little gargoyle made of marble, and sometimes, of a harmonious form done in muddy clay. The ideal union of matter and manner,--an Apollo in marble,--is not for such an impish sculptor as satire. Only to the true artist, poetry, is allotted the task of shaping beauty into rounded perfection.

##