The Art of Satire [Reprint 2014 ed.] 9780674594067, 9780674365599

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THE ART OF SATIRE

LONDON : HUMPHREY MILFORD OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

THE ART OF SATIRE DAVID WORCESTER Instructor in English and Tutor in the Department of English in Harvard University

CAMBRIDGE : MASSACHUSETTS

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1940

COPYRIGHT,

1940

B Y THE PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE

PRINTED AT THE HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS CAMBRIDGE, M A S S . , U . S . A .

PREFACE A SMALL book on a large subject needs some justification in a day when the advancement of learning is served by larger and larger books on smaller and smaller subjects. Although the history of satire reaches back beyond the earliest written records, scholarship has bestowed on it an insignificant fraction of the attention that has been lavished on epic, lyric, and drama. At various epochs criticism has sought to define satire and to fix it in a conventional form or genre, but the satiric spirit is hardy and impatient of bondage. Life departs from one form only to enter into another. Recently satire has been a lively witness of its own funeral rites and like Tom Sawyer has gloated over the sermon and the remarks of the mourners. In pursuing this volatile and Protean spirit through its several incarnations, I have attempted to show that the vast lanx satura or hotch-potch of satiric literature is susceptible of classification and that a natural evolution has occurred, whereby complex and subtle forms have arisen out of simple and primitive ones. The principles outlined in Chapters II to V should enable a reader to recognize a given piece of ironic or satiric writing for what it is, to reckon with the conventions that govern it, and to judge it by rational criteria. If I have dealt with the dry bones of satire by outlining a comparative anatomy of satiric forms, I have also tried to celebrate its living spirit. Irony, the highest expression of

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PREFACE

that spirit, has informed so many masterpieces of literature that it deserves wider recognition as one of the most powerful, though one of the most subtle, principles of literary art. A comprehension of irony gives new meaning and delight to reading; even more, it opens a new dimension in criticism, for it brings to light many secrets of greatness in literature. Without such comprehension, many writers cannot be understood at all, as the appalling stupidities of many critics of Jonathan Swift plainly show. If these pages could add even a trifle to the pleasure of readers in visiting or revisiting Lucian, Chaucer, Erasmus, Rabelais, Swift, Fielding, or either of the Samuel Butlers, I should be well content. The plan of the book deserves a word. After an introductory chapter, four chapters trace the evolution of satire through one form after another. The discussion depends on rhetorical analysis, not on chronological history. Yet any one who notices the dates of the illustrative quotations will observe that they move forward in time; generally speaking, the early chapters draw on ancient and the late chapters on modern literature. If the main discussion be conceived of as the warp, the concluding chapter is the woof. It attempts to demonstrate that the results reached by abstract analysis are not mere academic theory, but that an actual evolution of satire has taken place in time. Literary history is summoned to testify that in English literature the simpler satiric forms occur early and the more complex forms later. Since a competent history of English satire would fill a large volume, the final chapter is intended not as a contribution to history but as a simple knotting together of vertical and horizontal strands.

PREFACE

vii

I wish to express my gratitude to the friends and colleagues whose generous gifts of time and erudition I can scarcely hope to repay. Professor Emeritus Bliss Perry, whose course on Political Satire lives in the memories and writings of many students, gave me a number of valuable suggestions. Professor James Buell Munn kindly read all the manuscript; Professor Howard Mumford Jones read a part; I am deeply obliged to both for their criticisms. Mr. Frederick Glover White has given me constant encouragement and advice. Mr. William Michael Murphy has read and criticized the manuscript. Last and greatest, my obligation to Professor Hyder Edward Rollins for unremitting counsel and encouragement is such as to deserve Rabelais's acknowledgment to Erasmus: "I have called you Father; I would very willingly call you Mother." D. W . CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS

CONTENTS I. THE PROTEUS OF LITERATURE

. . . .

II. INVECTIVE The Engine of Anger, 13. Curses and Epithets, 19. The Comic, 32

III. BURLESQUE Satire by Comparison, 41. High and Low Burlesque, 46. The Burlesque Personality, 51. Rabelais, 55. Grotesque Satire, 60

IV. IRONY, THE ALLY OF COMEDY The Range of Irony, 73. Verbal Irony, 77. Irony of Manner, 90. Chaucer, 95. Ingenu Satire, 102

V. IRONY, THE ALLY OF TRAGEDY

. . . .

Dramatic Irony, HI. Romantic Irony, 122. Cosmic Irony, 127. Tragedy and Comedy, 138. The Abuse of Irony, 141

VI. THE EVOLUTION OF ENGLISH SATIRE

.

Primitive Satire, 147. Invective Satire, 150. The Great Age of Ridicule, 157. Rebirth of Irony, 162. Sphinxes without Secrets, 165

CHAPTER I

The Proteus of Literature

Say at a word, are they fools? I refer it to you, though you be likewise fools and madmen yourselves, and I as mad to ask the question. Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy Broad is the road, nor difficult to find, Which to the house of Satire leads mankind; Narrow and unfrequented are the ways, Scarce found out in an age, which lead to Praise. Charles Churchill, The Candidate Strange! that a Man who has enough wit to write a Satire should have folly enough to publish it. Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanac

CHAPTER I

The Proteus of Literature H E W O R D "satire" entered the English language in 1509,1 since when its significations have steadily multiplied. Not only have the ways in which we use it increased, but the kurion onoma or soul of the word has shown a progressive change from a specific, narrow meaning to an abstract, broad one. It is this capacity for growth which has led to widespread confusion with respect to the word. The most casual reader in the literature of the subject will come across definitions of satire which cannot by the furthest stretch of imagination be applied to Byron or Peacock or Dickens or Aldous Huxley. The same reader must wonder at the mutually antagonistic conceptions of their art entertained, say, by Nashe and Swift, Pope and Young, or Wyndham Lewis and Evelyn Waugh. What has happened is that criticism has failed to keep pace with the expansion and diffusion of satire during the past four hundred years. A man's judgment of what constitutes satire may have hardened at one of the salient historical points, about 1600, when the Elizabethan fad for satire had expressed itself; or 1700, the year of Dryden's death; or 1730, when Swift and Addison and Mandeville had given prose equal rights with verse satire; or 1824, when Byron died, leaving the colossal fragment of Don Juan. Thus, among writers of the twentieth century, some use

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T H E A R T OF SATIRE

the word "satire" to signify the particular kind of verse known as formal satire; some will allow it to embrace any type of verse written with satiric intent; some would have it that satire is a formal genre of literature, one that, including prose as well as verse, yet possesses uniform characteristics; some, finally, convinced that any formal theory must involve contradictions and anomalies, identify a work of literature as satire by its motive and spirit alone. These four views develop historically out of one another. The self-conscious conventions of modern satire begin with Joseph Hall and Donne. At their birth, they are conspicuous conventions, many in number and artificial in character, and calculated at first glance to inform the reader that he has picked up a sample of a new and exciting literary form. There will be some later discussion of these earmarks, but to give an idea of their nature it may be said that in writing a satyr Hall, for example, felt himself bound to verse, to the decasyllabic couplet, to roughness of versification and rudeness of manner. He must closely imitate Horace, Persius, and Juvenal (even to using Latin type-names and Roman manners), indulge in darksome innuendo, feel a divine mission, and burn with wrath as he wields the flail. These requirements, although they do not exhaust the list, might well gravel a greater poet by their diversity in addition to their sheer weight of numbers. Hence the air of naive bewilderment that occasionally hangs over Elizabethan satire. Satire thus arose in modern English literature as a rigid poetic form. Its distinguishing marks might be highly artificial and difficult for an Englishman to compass with his barbarous Gothic language, yet was there not classical

T H E PROTEUS OF L I T E R A T U R E

5

precedent and authority? In very truth, there was all too little precedent in the classics. Most of the conventions of formal satire are derived from an incomplete and distorted view of Latin and Greek literature. T h e nature of this deception, all-important as it is, has never been adequately exposed, and we shall return to consider it. T h e early formal satirists felt compelled to steer a tortuous and meticulous course. T h e y could not know that their chart was inaccurate, but they soon found it irksome to follow. Little b y little they tended to ignore its provisions; when challenged, however, they flew to it for authority. Their efforts at independent navigation have made us the heirs of a rich satiric literature, while their lip-service to a moribund tradition has left us poor in the criticism of that literature. If w e were composing an anthology of satire, we should astonish many authors long dead, could they see us turning almost instinctively to their compositions. Horace never gave the title saturae to his "satires," but called them merely sermones or discourses. Spenser must have felt himself outside the province of satire when he wrote Mother Hubberds Tale. Bernard Mandeville, discussing his delightful verse satire, The Grumbling Hive: or, Knaves Turned Honest, declares that his lines "are neither heroic nor pastoral, satire, burlesque nor heroi-comic; to be a tale they want probability, and the whole is rather too long for a fable." 2 Swift, called our greatest English satirist, claims irony as his own: Arbuthnot is no more my friend, Who dares to irony pretend, Which I was born to introduce, Refined it first, and show'd its use.3

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THE ART OF SATIRE

It does not appear, however, that he ever refers to his prose writings as "satires." His favorite pose is that of the projector. Characteristically, A Modest Proposal is a project ironically argued with all the resources of rhetoric. Charles Churchill loves to bid his readers tremble and turn pale When Satire wields her mighty flail.4 Yet it often suits his purpose to drop the heavy tradition of wrath. His verse is then no less satirical in its effect, but he is conscious of having fallen away from a standard. Yet in this book, where ease should join With mirth to sugar every line; Where it should all be mere chit-chat, Lively, good-humour'd, and all that; Where honest Satire, in disgrace, Should not so much as show her face, The shrew, o'erleaping all due bounds, Breaks into laughter's sacred grounds, And in contempt plays o'er her tricks In science, trade, and politics.5 More than any other people, the English have associated virulence and malevolence with the idea of satire. Churchill, in the lines just quoted, sets "honest Satire" over against good humor and mirth. In theory the satirist is a sober, slogging fellow. When he shows a spark of liveliness or reveals a polished art, he is apt to be called a humorist. Thackeray's English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century opens with a long essay on Swift — an essay, by the way, which sinks to almost incredible depths of Philistinism. In a later chapter, the reader is hurried in a twinkling over

T H E PROTEUS OF L I T E R A T U R E

7

Prior and G a y in order to plunge into Pope and conclude with the Dunciad.

Pope and Swift are evidently great

enough to receive the accolade of "humorist" instead of the stigma of "satirist." Meredith, likewise, in his Essay on Comedy

and the Uses of the Comic Spirit shrinks from

satire. The laughter of satire is a blow in the back or the face. The Satirist is a moral agent, often a social scavenger, working on a storage of bile. If you detect the ridicule, and kindliness is chilled by it, you are slipping into the grasp of Satire.6 The intellectual, critical spirit that attacks pretense and acts as the watchdog of society is the comic spirit. Byron is primarily a satirist; he "had no strong comic sense, or he would not have taken an anti-social position." 7 Meredith is betrayed into absurdity by arbitrary use of terms. If we accept his boundary-line between satire and comedy, we leave only misanthropes and libelers on the side of satire. W h a t would become of the Horace of the Epodes and Satires, the self-styled "sheep-dog of the flock," what of Lucian's gay and devastating art, or the rich humanity of Erasmus's Praise of Folly ? W i l l any reader, however moved to laughter by their pages, doubt that they are more satiric than comic? If Meredith has decimated the company of satirists, others have killed them outright. Brander Matthews, G . K . Chesterton, and Professor Bliss Perry have severally remarked the death of satire as a branch of literature and held post mortems over the body. But lest any opinion on this troubled subject stand uncontested, behold Mr. Wyndham

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THE ART OF SATIRE

Lewis describing his book, Men without Art, "as a defense of contemporary art, most of which is unquestionably satiric, or comic," and further declaring that "satire is a very live issue today, about that there can be little mistake." 8 Enough has been said to account for the mental confusion that a student of satire must experience. The problems of motives and literary types, the classification of such terms as burlesque, irony, mock-heroic, and lampoon, and the conflicts among views of satire held at different periods — all combine in a trackless tangle across the traveler's path. In former times, a man might have turned for help to the study of rhetoric; nor would he have come away emptyhanded. Today, however, rhetoric is in disgrace, and students must either make their own maps, or else With weary tread, Each wrapt in his own doom, they wander, wander, Or sit foredone and desolately ponder Through sleepless hours with heavy drooping head. T o lament the decline of rhetoric may seem captious and irrelevant. As the schoolboy said, defending his dislike of history, "I believe in letting bygones be bygones." Satire, however, is the most rhetorical of all the kinds of literature. Whether in Juvenal's swelling vein, or in the use of rhetorical tropes like irony and the Hudibrastic simile, or in the careful argumentation of Dryden in verse and Swift in prose, the devices of rhetoric are conspicuous in great satire. Contrary to popular belief, satire is seldom "honest" in the sense of forthright expression of emotion or opinion. It has an aim, a preconceived purpose: to instill a given set of emotions or opinions into its reader. T o succeed, it must

THE PROTEUS OF LITERATURE

9

practise the art of persuasion and become proficient with the tools of that art. Rhetoric once taught these lessons. Whence came the Socratic irony, the diatribe of Juvenal, the sparkling dialectic of Lucian? Sometimes, it is true, rhetoric has turned venal or fallen among pedants. We should remember, however, that it was the school in which nearly all the world's great authors formed their taste and developed their powers. Nowadays when we say that a piece of writing is "rhetorical," we usually mean to call attention to its tumid style and trumpery ornamentation — its false rhetoric, in other words. The true function of rhetoric is to teach the writer how to translate the undefined stirring in his breast into an objective form that speaks to all men. It instructs him in the choice of a vehicle, or literary genre, and guides him to an appropriate style. Quintilian's Institutiones Oratoriae is full of observations that would be new and striking to many writers and speakers today. If scholars had continued with the work of that great man, felix et pulcher et acer, Felix et sapiens et nobilis et generosus, as Juvenal calls him; if they had joined forces with psychology and kept abreast of the times, we should have more writers with high seriousness, and we should not be in almost total ignorance about three of the most fascinating subjects in the world, irony, laughter, and satire. The first object of these pages is to construct a simple rhetoric of satire. Without attempting a historical survey, let us consider philosophically the several divisions of the subject and the principles by which they may be distin-

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THE ART OF SATIRE

guished and classified. W e can hardly avoid the reproach of rushing in where angels fear to tread. Nearly every step of the way is on thorny ground, and if we penetrate too far into the purlieus of laughter and the comic, we shall think ourselves in Chaucer's whirling house, with our reason threatened by a hundred voices shrilling discordant opinions. Richter remarked with reason, "Definitions of the comic serve the sole purpose of being themselves comic." An attempt will be made, nevertheless, to add to the province of satire a little of the territory now occupied by the comic. The function of satire as a regulating force in society will also be discussed. The cumbrous machinery of law is the guardian of the flock. Where the task is too subtle or intricate for the heavy-footed shepherd, the nimble sheep-dog comes into his own.

CHAPTER II

Invective

The Satire should be like the porcupine That shoots sharp quilles out in each angry line. Joseph Hall, Virgidemiarum Ring the bells backward! I am all on fire. Not all the buckets in a country quire Shall quench my rage. A poet should be feared When angry, like a comet's flaming beard. Cleveland, The Rebel Scot When giant Vice, and Irreligion rise, On mountain'd falsehoods to invade the skies: Then warmer numbers glow through Satire's page And all her smiles are darkened into rage: On eagle-wing she gains Parnassus' height, Not lofty Epic soars a nobler flight: Then keener indignation fires her eye; Then flash her lightnings, and her thunders fly: Wide and more wide her flaming bolts are hurl'd, Till all her wrath involves the guilty world. John Brown, Essay on Satire

C H A P T E R II

Invective I.

T H E E N G I N E OF A N G E R

N T H E formation of any kind of satire there are two steps. The author first evolves a criticism of conduct — ordinarily human conduct, but occasionally divine. Then he contrives ways of making his readers comprehend and remember that criticism and adopt it as their own. Without style and literary form, his message would be incomprehensible; without wit and compression it would not be memorable; without high-mindedness it would not "come home to men's business and bosoms." Juvenal's ringing words, "difficile est saturam non scribere," have given many thousands of readers the concept of a man forced by frightful wrongs to pour forth his indignation, careless of whether he has any hearers or no. In reality, Juvenal's phrase is a brilliant stroke of rhetoric. Intense suffering does not often leave a man in a literary frame of mind. Even if the sly Roman rhetorician had himself experienced the bygone ills that he denounces, he need have felt no difficulty in refraining from satire. People threatened with suffering or forced to watch others suffer are far more apt to "take pen in hand" than the man who has spent ten years in a mercury mine or who has been run down by a drunken driver. Feminine readers may find in this observation a possible explanation for the fact that no woman has ever made a mark in satire.

I

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THE ART OF SATIRE

Juvenal's words pertain to our second step — that of appeal to the reader. Without expressing any opinion, he transfixes our attention by the awful suggestion of his remark, and we anxiously await his criticism. It is this necessity of winning the reader's sympathy that makes satire a paradoxical subject. The satirist must simultaneously appear amiable to his audience, hostile to his enemies. Where the audience is small and prejudiced, the problem hardly exists. If you undertook to denigrate the character of Hitler before a company of Jewish refugees, you would find no great difficulty in appearing amiable; but if you sought fame in the wider field of literature, among casual, impartial, and even hostile readers, you would find the trick of riding two horses at once less easy than it looks. It takes genius to be able to boast with Erasmus and Dryden of the applause of your victim. Erasmus wrote, The Pope himself read the Moria and laughed. His only comment was this: "I am glad our Erasmus is in the Moria himself"; and yet I deal with no one more scathingly than with the Popes.1 Dryden observes of the character of Zimri, or Buckingham, in Absalom and Achitophel, It is not bloody, but it is ridiculous enough; and he, for whom it was intended, was too witty to resent it as an injury.2 Rhetorical devices, then, serve to win the reader and to soften the impact of the writer's destructive or vengeful sentiments. Such devices are all-important for the study of satire. The skill with which they are employed serves as a criterion between good satire and bad. The reader who

INVECTIVE

15

has trained himself to recognize and appreciate them, like the amateur of music who has trained himself in harmony and counterpoint, receives much because he gives much. What is more to the present point, the presence or absence of such devices determines what is satire and what is not. Many persons instinctively shrink from satire as they might from a scorpion. Is not satire the expression of controversial heat, of venomous rancor, of the raw, negative emotion out of which humanity struggles to rise, age by age? Granted one dispensation, I hope to show that no such generalization is valid. A writer on lyric poetry feels no obligation to take account of newspaper jingles, yet a writer on satire finds it difficult to assume the same standard of excellence. Oceans of ink have been poured out in acrimonious and shocking libels and invectives; but so have oceans been spent on nauseous obituary verse and summerverandah romances. In thinking of satire, we should consider the hundreds of works that have risen to the top. The millions below, graduated from acidulous gruel to a thick sludge of hell-broth, are interesting only insofar as they help to explain the principles of great satire. How easily satirists acquire a bad name! Lucian, the Antichrist, deservedly torn to pieces by dogs; Rabelais, the filthy mocker; Swift, the inhuman misanthrope, not content with crucifying the women who loved him but bent on destroying the virtue and happiness of all mankind; one smiles on encountering these fancies, until damnable iteration brings on ironic melancholy. How little humanity, how little study, are needed to show that these and many other illtreated satirists are the cleanest and brightest and merriest

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minded of men! Mark Twain remarked that the presence of only the Best People was enough to damn even heaven. The content of satire is criticism, and criticism may be uttered as direct rebuke or as impersonal logic. Innumerable intermediate stages, by combining emotion and intellect in different proportions, lead from one pole of blind, human feeling to the opposite pole of divine, or inhuman, detachment. The spectrum-analysis of satire runs from the red of invective at one end to the violet of the most delicate irony at the other. Beyond either end of the scale, literature runs off into forms that are not perceptible as satire. The ultra-violet is pure criticism; the infra-red is direct reproof or abuse, untransformed by art. In view of the pain, already mentioned, with which persons of delicate sensibilities are apt to regard satire, a large proportion of satiric literature might be expected to consist of direct attack, that is, open name-calling and nose-thumbing. Unquestionably many people hold this belief. To test it, Hugh Kingsmill's twin anthologies, Invective and Abuse and More Invective, may be consulted.3 Shuddering anticipation dies as the pages are turned and such old friends appear as Skelton's extravagant burlesque of Wolsey; Prince Hal's mock-denunciation of Falstaff; Donne's lyric "The Apparition"; Jeremy Taylor's meditation on life's ills; the famous verse-portraits of Sir Hudibras, Achitophel, Og, Doeg, Atticus, and Sporus; the King of Brobdingnag's Olympian summing-up of the English nation; Goldsmith's almost jocular mock-epitaph, "Retaliation"; Burke's legal forensic against Warren Hastings; Keats's anguished appeal to Fanny Brawne; and Dickens' humorous description of

INVECTIVE

17

Mr. Pickwick, routed from Bob Sawyer's rooms by Mrs. Raddle. The editor writes: Invective has been understood in this Anthology to mean direct verbal attack. Irony and satire are therefore, as far as possible, excluded, though the line of demarcation is sometimes indistinct.4 Here are grounds for wonder. Are the great verseportraits to be excluded from "satire" and Swift's masterstrokes from "irony"? Surely, invective must be stretched far beyond its usual acceptation to include such mild and circuitous attacks. An occasional stinger does appear, like Swinburne's letter to Emerson or Browning's lines to Edward FitzGerald. On the whole, however, wrath and hatred find little expression. The crux of the matter lies in the words "direct verbal attack." It is the direct attack that people expect to find in satire, particularly in invectivesatire, yet in almost every instance the emotion is controlled, the blow is softened, and the approach is indirect. Parody is not direct, nor are irony and mock-heroic. Their whole force may be traced to the fact that they are indirect. The reason for the scarcity of direct invective in literature is not far to seek. Anger is the most repellent of emotions. It is acute discomfort to be present where a man has fallen into a furious passion. If you are in such a situation, and the object of your acquaintance's rage has no connection with you, you will experience an instinctive craving to escape into humor, to turn the painful situation into a ludicrous one. This is done by withdrawing all sympathy from the blusterer and by taking a more relativistic view

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THE ART OF SATIRE

of him as a lobster-faced baboon in a fit. A little boy receiving a wigging will concentrate on a purple wart, if such there be, on his tormenter's nose. Anger does not beget anger. Remember the artful self-control of Mark Antony as he whipped the Roman populace to a frenzy of rage by means of the cumulative irony of his "So are they all, all honorable men." Satire is the engine of anger, rather than the direct expression of anger. Before our sympathy is won, we must be freed from the distress of witnessing naked rage and bluster. Like Mark Antony, the artist must simulate coolness and detachment. Like the vaudeville marksman with his mirror, he must look in one direction while he shoots in the opposite direction. To avoid the possibility of misunderstanding, it may be emphasized that the actual text of an invective piece is the only subject under discussion. A satire may be inspired by rage; it may produce rage in its readers; but ninety-nine times out of a hundred, rhetorical analysis of its language will reveal the widest differences between its style of attack and the style of a rattling good set-to between man and wife, or between a Communist lecturer and a member of the American Legion. T o write in cold anger is to show detachment in language; to write in lofty anger is to affect disregard of an opponent; to write in cutting anger is to hold a victim in the icy grasp of irony. Mark Twain's To the Person Sitting in Darkness (1901) provoked a wilder furor than any other American satire before or since. His exposure of the looting and extortion practised by our missionaries in China was described by friends and foes as savage, blistering, and vitriolic. So it

INVECTIVE

19

was — in its intent and in its effect, but not in its manner or its language. Mark Twain prefaces his article with a newspaper dispatch, telling how a missionary had first collected 300 taels for each of 300 murdered native Christians and then had imposed a fine of thirteen times the total amount.5 The Catholics, having lost 680 in the uprising, demanded 750,000 strings of cash and 680 Chinese heads! Mark Twain's opening words are: By happy luck, we get all these glad tidings on Christmas Eve — just in time to enable us to celebrate the day with proper gayety and enthusiasm. Our spirits soar, and we find we can even make jokes: Taels, I win, Heads you lose.6 With the same amused detachment, he proceeds in a leisurely way to roast the missionaries; but they are roasted by chilling irony, just as Bird's-Eye peas come to the pot already half cooked by the action of extreme cold. Nor does he depart at any time from the tone of irony. Clearly, some attention is due to the devices whereby detachment becomes the propelling force of strong emotion. II.

CURSES AND E P I T H E T S

Invective falls into two divisions. One lies within the province of satire, one outside it. A man who writes, "The asinine folly and loathsome immorality of the Government make decent citizens see red," is producing invective, but not satire. This gross invective, or abuse, is distinguished from satiric invective by direct, intense sincerity of expression. Satiric invective shows detachment, indirection, and complexity in the author's attitude.

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T H E ART OF SATIRE

There are exceptions to this judgment, but they are few. When an invective-piece is sublime in utterance, when it reflects the thwarted passion of a great soul for the good, when it is sincere, and when its wrath is not too longsustained, it is satire. In such an unusual conjunction, no psychological tricks are necessary to make the reader feel that the author has risen above his subject. Ezekiel denouncing sixth-century Jerusalem, Dante committing his contemporaries to hell, Juvenal pouring vitriol into his "Legend of Bad Women," as J. W. Mackail calls the sixth satire, these achieve satirical greatness with a minimum use of wit, irony, or burlesque. If we think a trifle less respectfully of Juvenal today than our grandfathers did, it is partly owing to our growing doubts of his sincerity. Dryden, who prefers him to Horace, bears out our point about the necessary brevity of invective: [Juvenal] drives his reader along with him; and when he is at the end of his way, I willingly stop with him. If he went another stage, it would be too far; it would make a journey of a progress, and turn delight into fatigue.7 In general, philippic, jeremiad, and political diatribe lie outside the field of satire, because of their blunt directness. Likewise with the anathema, soberly committing its victim to hellfire. Let us glance at a portion of the prodigious curse of Ernulphus, so exhaustive that Walter Shandy remarked, "I defy a man to swear out of it." May the holy and eternal Virgin Mary, mother of God, curse him!—May St. Michael, the advocate of holy souls, curse him! —May all the angels, and archangels, principalities and powers, and all the heavenly armies, curse him! (Our

INVECTIVE

2i

armies swore terribly in Flanders, cried my uncle Toby, — but nothing to this. — For my own part, I could not have a heart to curse my dog so.) . . . May he be cursed in his brains, and in his vertex, (That is a sad curse, quoth my father) in his temples, in his forehead, in his ears, in his eye-brows, in his cheeks, in his jaw-bones, in his nostrils, in his foreteeth and grinders, in his lips, in his throat, in his shoulders, in his wrists, in his arms, in his hands, in his fingers! . . . May he be cursed in all the joints and articulations of his members, from the top of his head to the sole of his foot! May there be no soundness in him.8 The whole excommunication, with its context, is humorous beyond any other passage in Tristram Shandy. The Catholic Dr. Slop beguiled into reading the curse aloud as the only fit expression of his sentiments; the discrepancy between that heroic bombination and its unheroic object, Obadiah; Uncle Toby setting off the inhuman virulence of the curse by his humane ejaculations; — a more brilliant concatenation of ironies could hardly be conceived. The keystone of the humor is the anathema itself, so sweeping, so literal, and so direct that the reader must sidestep its crushing force and escape into laughter. The serious curse is no longer satire. It was satire once, however, before men came to think it naive to invoke supernatural forces in a trivial cause. The archeology of satire and its relation to sorcery will be discussed in a later chapter. T o illustrate the curse become literature and transformed into great poetry, let us consider Job's complaint of his life: After this opened Job his mouth, and cursed his day. And Job spake, and said, Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, There is a man child conceived.

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T H E A R T OF SATIRE

Let that day be darkness; let not God regard it from above, neither let the light shine upon it; let the blackness of the day terrify it. As for that night, let darkness seize upon it; let it not be joined unto the days of the year, let it not come into the number of the months. Lo, let that night be solitary, let no joyful voice come therein. Let them curse it that curse the day, who are ready to raise up their mourning. Let the stars of the twilight thereof be dark; let it look for light but have none; neither let it see the dawning of the day: Because it shut not up the doors of my mother's womb, nor hid sorrow from mine eyes.9 Here the sincerity of the speaker is beyond question; there is no ironic duplicity or burlesque mystification in his attitude. Between his naked sentiment ("A curse on my nativity") and the reader, he has nevertheless interposed a rhetorical pattern of astonishing complexity. Seizing the profound antithesis of light and darkness, symbolic of universal creation, he builds on it with parallelism, repetition, personification, and other devices, until an organic whole emerges, worthy of being set beside such miracles of ingenuity as Bach's Ricercare from the Musikalische Opfer or the Beethoven quartet, Opus 131. Perhaps some hint of the balance and forward movement may be conveyed by a diagram: Let the day perish, Let that day be darkness. Let the blackness of that day terrify it.

and the night.

As for that night, let darkness seize upon it. Let that night be solitary.

INVECTIVE

23

Let them curse it

that curse the night. Let the twilight thereof be dark. Let it not see the dawning. Because it shut not up the doors of my mother's womb.

T h e curse, in Job, has lost most of its supernatural and incantational quality. It retains just enough of that quality to provide emphasis and symbolism. T h e symbolism, in turn, carries the reader into the universal and introduces him to the cosmic irony upon which Job is built: that is, the revolt of the creature against the creator, the return of life to the giver. T h e curse of Job introduces the first and greatest example in a high tradition of satire that has endured to the present day. 10 T h e problem of evil with its corollaries, the questioning of divine justice and the extravagance of human faith, has been treated in a spirit of gentle irony or bitter sarcasm or open revolt by Horace, Lucian, Chaucer, Erasmus, Rabelais, Burton, Omar Khayyam, the second James Thomson, and Hardy, to name a few. For an example of the curse altered almost out of recognition, we draw upon the Father of Laughter. And therefore, to make an end of this Prologue, even as I give myselfe to an hundred Pannier-fulls of faire devils, body and soul, tripes and guts, in case that I lie so much as one single word in this whole History: After the like manner, St. Anthonies fire burne you; Mahoom's disease whirle you; the squinance with a stich in your side, and the Wolfe in your stomack trusse you, the bloody flux seize upon you, the curst sharp inflammations of wilde fire, as slender and thin as Cowes haire, strengthened with quick silver, enter into your fundament, and like those of Sodom and Gomorrha, may you fall into

24 T H E A R T OF SATIRE sulphur, fire and bottomlesse pits, in case you do not firmly beleeve all that I shall relate unto you in this present Chronicle.11 This genial fulmination tickles the audience by an overstatement resembling that of Ernulphus's curse. The exaggeration is clearly intentional, however; it belongs to the writer's attitude of self-parody. He barks, but lets us see that he is not going to bite. The real Rabelais stands apart, smiling at the simulacrum that he presents to the audience in place of himself. The curse is thus diverted into burlesque. Three devices draw its teeth. There is first the absurd exaggeration with its implied satire on authoritarians who try to inculcate belief by bluster. Second, the reader is challenged to a game of wits by the histrionic division of the writer's personality. When the fellow's threats turn out to be so much gammon, we suspect that his professions of telling the truth are gammon likewise. We look forward to smoking him out; but he in his turn will do his best to mystify us, sometimes giving us the simulacrum and sometimes speaking in his own person. The third device is verbal luxuriance. The most deadly insult or curse is spoken in the simplest, most direct language, as witness the manner of Junius or Swift. The virulence lessens in proportion as the language grows bombastic, exotic, or sesquipedalian. Something of all these qualities appears in Rabelais's curse. The same principle is at work in the next most direct mode of invective, the string of damaging epithets. " M y opponent is a coarse, stupid, ugly man" is dull abuse, not satire. Heighten the language with bombast, novelty, or polysyllabic verbosity, and the satiric effect is instantly

INVECTIVE

25

produced. T h e common use of this heightening in everyday speech is illustrated by the articles "Pedantic Humour" and "Polysyllabic Humour" in Fowler's Dictionary

of

Modern English Usage. Next to Rabelais, Thomas Nashe bears the bell in the field of heightened invective. Here is a sample of the delicate manner in which he treats Gabriel Harvey:

Why, thou arrant butter whore, thou cotqueane & scrattop of scoldes, wilt thou neuer leaue afflicting a dead Carcasse, continually read the rethorick lecture of Ramme-Allie? a wispe, a wispe, a wispe, rippe, rippe, you kitchinstuffe wrangler. . . . Thou art mine enemie, Gabriell, and, that which is more, a contemptible vnder-foote enemie, or else I would teach thy olde Trewantship the true vse of words, as also how more inclinable verse is than prose, to dance after the horrizonant pipe of inueterate antiquitie. It is no matter, since thou hast brought godly instruction out of loue with thee, vse thy own destruction, raigne sole Emperour of inkehornisme; I wish vnto thee all superabundant increase of the singular gifts of absurditie, and vaineglory: from this time forth for euer, euer, euer, euermore maist thou be canonized as the Nunparreille of impious epistlers, the short shredder out of sandy sentences without lime, as Quintillian tearmed Seneca all lime and no sande; all matter and no circumstance; the factor for the Fairies and night Vrchins, in supplanting and setting aside the true children of the English, and suborning inkehorne changlings in their steade, the galimaufrier of all stiles in one standish, as imitating euerie one, & hauing no seperate forme of writing of thy owne; and to conclude, the onely featherdriuer of phrases, and putter of a good word to it when thou hast once got it, that is betwixt this and the Alpes. So bee it, worlde without ende.12 Shakespeare's love of words made him a master of contumely. Surely Cicero would have admitted the following

26

T H E A R T OF SATIRE

passage to the genus grande, with its attributes of fortis, acer, ardens. Kent. Fellow, I know thee. Oswald. What dost thou know me for? Kent. A knave, a rascal, an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy worsted-stocking knave; a lily-livered, action-taking knave; a whoreson, glass-gazing, super-serviceable, finical rogue; onetrunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pandar, and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch.13 Here is God's plenty; and when we find such profusion attended with a "nice derangement of epithets," we feel the author's artistic detachment and are relieved from the pain of naked wrath. It is but an inconsiderable step from calling a man fool or blackguard to calling him monkey or fox. There is less virulence, however, in the figurative than in the direct assault. This is not to say that a man would prefer the title of skunk to that of fool, for the degrees of intended censure are clearly different; but, other things being equal, men find simile and metaphor less offensive than plain epithet. A lady forced to choose between the alternatives would rather be described as a "weather-beaten she-dragon" than as a trouble-making old harridan, hag, virago, or trot. The metaphor opens the gates to imagination and suggestion. Moreover, it takes longer to manufacture and longer to digest, allowing anger to cool and wit to come into play. Whereas a man can harden himself before a torrent of

INVECTIVE

29

From whence they start up chosen Vessels, Made by Contact, as Men get Meazles. As Beards the nearer that they tend T o th' Earth grow still more reverend; And Cannons shoot the higher Pitches, The lower we let down their Breeches: I'll make this low dejected Fate Advance me to a greater Height. 15 T o the curse, the epithet, the metaphor and the simile, used as rhetorical instruments of invective, the epigram m a y be added. Its requirements of compression and wit appear in Rochester's well-known lines on Charles II: Here lies our Sovereign Lord the King; Whose word no man relies on, Who never said a foolish thing, N o r ever did a wise one. A glance at these instruments in the order given reveals a progressive rise in intellectual content and in the author's detachment; correspondingly, there is a progressive decline in capacity to convey pure anger or hatred. A t the same time, each instrument is capable of variation;

without

rhetorical heightening, the curse and the damaging epithet remain gross invective; with it, they pass over into invectivesatire. T h e epigram, based as it is upon wit, cannot drop back into gross invective without ceasing to be an epigram. F r o m each instrument to the next, there is an increase in detachment and complexity.

Likewise there is a pro-

gressive increase in what may be called the "time-lag," that is, the interval between the perception of printed or spoken words and the full comprehension of their message.

30

T H E A R T OF SATIRE

T o make this principle plain, the speed of impact of the following expressions may Be noticed: God damn you. Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, There is a man child conceived. I give myselfe to an hundred Pannier-fulls of faire devils, body and soul, tripes and guts. Why, thou arrant butterwhore, thou cotqueane & scrattop of scoldes. Some superficial slime of poison hast thou driueld from thy pen in thy shallow footed sliding. From whence they start up chosen Vessels, Made by Contact, as Men get Meazles. I am his Highness' dog at Kew; Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?

16

T h e first explains itself fully even as it reaches the ear. T h e last enters the mind with a simple meaning, arouses some suspicion upon arrival, and after a moment explodes into a different meaning. One strikes with the direct impact of an old-fashioned cannon ball; the other resembles a shell with a time fuse that drives into the heart of a building and then explodes f r o m within. T h e increase of the time-lag is accompanied by other interesting changes. T h e writer's point of view, subjective in the gross epithet, becomes objective in the epigram. W i l f u l assertion yields to cool observation. Private opinion gives w a y to reason. "There is a beautiful image in Bacon upon this subject: testimony is like an arrow shot f r o m a long bow; the force of it depends on the strength of the hand

INVECTIVE

31

that draws it. Argument is like an arrow shot from a crossbow, which has equal force though shot by a child." 17 As the process of communication approaches the universal, the part played by the reader or auditor also changes. A curse, a gross epithet, is driven down the throat. The victim may only reject it or passively accept it; there is no room for qualification or criticism. The greater the time-lag, the more he is called on to participate in the game. In reading Butler's lines, just quoted, the reader accepts in reasonably good faith the description of ministers, or chosen vessels, until at the end he bruises his shins over "as Men get Meazles." There is a small explosion in the brain, and he skims back over the whole, revising his opinion in the light of the degrading conclusion. He shares the work of authorship with the writer; his labor is necessary to complete the meaning; and he presses on, flattered and interested. Reading has become a game of wits. The reader's creative participation is essential to the author's design, and this principle of participation, though only rudimentary in invective, rises to great importance in burlesque and irony. The writer of effective satiric invective keeps the abuse that he is attacking always before the reader's eyes. The light is clear, the object plain. Enough heightening and detachment are present to make the reader feel that he retains some independence, that he is not being forcibly fed, but not enough to obscure the object of satire. The writer of burlesque gives flickering glimpses of his object; he distorts it, magnifies it, reduces it, pushes it forward and snatches it back. The reader sees the goal, but a pretty chase the author leads him before he reaches it. The ironist gravely

32

THE ART OF SATIRE

argues in favor of the abuse and forces the reader to work furiously at inverting a long chain of reasoning. The principle we have been discussing may be stated thus: Virulence varies inversely as the time-lag. One may well proceed to ask, what substance fills this aching void in time? Is it an abhorrent vacuum, a mere interval of oblivion between reading a sentence and getting the point? Or is it the mechanical motion of the mind, tracking the steps of the author? In a sense it is the last. And yet, the process that may be dismissed as "mechanical motion" is nothing less than the arcane mystery of laughter. III.

T H E COMIC

I have promised not to wander too far into the bewildering maze of the comic. I shall emerge from it, with God's help, as quickly as I may, but some few words are necessary. The critic who, like Meredith or Thackeray, makes great claims for comedy and pushes satire into the dunce's corner will find that I have begun to tread close behind him and to gall his kibe. Nevertheless, it must be maintained in his teeth that the devices which convert gross invective and abuse into satire — into even lowly invectivesatire — are the devices of comedy. Indeed, the past discussion in the interests of rhetoric has already touched on comic theory at many points. Whatever the school, there is something for each. Aristotle regarded the Comic as "an ugliness without pain." 18 What else is Nashe's metaphor of the cankerworm trailing excrement across his pages? To Hobbes, laughter was a sudden passion of self-glory, that is, of su-

INVECTIVE

27

abuse and shrug it off, his dignity can hardly survive a good Butlerian simile. T o revert to Thomas Nashe, such a figure as this doubtless galled Harvey worse than plain abuse: Squeise thy heart into thy inkehorne, and it shall but congeal into clodderd garbage of confutation, thy soule hath no effects of a soule, thou canst not sprinkle it into a sentence, & make euerie line leape like a cup of neat wine new powred out, as an Orator must doe that lies aright in wait for mens affections. Whome hast thou wonne to hate mee by light crawling ouer my text like a Cankerworme? Some superficial slime of poison hast thou driueld from thy pen in thy shallow footed sliding through my Supplication, which one pen ful of repurified inke will excessiuelie wash out.14

Perhaps no one ever wielded the simile more expertly than Samuel Butler. Hudibras, for all its feebleness of plot and its abstruseness (Hume called it "perhaps one of the most learned compositions that is to be found in any language"), remains the best verse satire oT modern times. Considering the sum of its qualities, its constant flame of satire, its great scope and length, its hidden weight of philosophy, and its pyrotechnic ingenuity, it would be hard to support even the Dunciad or Don Juan against it. Written at a time when literary energies seemed almost wholly diverted into daily toadstool-crops of libels and scandalsheets, Hudibras nowhere descends into billingsgate. At the same time, it is supreme in the art of denigration. Its power is generated from the brilliant use of rhetorical figures. A careful reader has no doubts about where Swift learned the possibilities of argument.

28

T H E ART OF SATIRE

The similes are thicker than blackberries, and they are of several sorts. This is not the place to discuss the mockheroic or burlesque variety, mainly effective through imitation; nearly all the similes, however, creep up on the reader as it were from behind. A man is presented to us with all respect and dignity. T o fill out the portrait, the poet will liken his accomplishments to other great deeds. When these prove to be scurvy trivialities, our opinion of the hero crashes to the ground. Here are a few brief examples of the simile and kindred tropes: Mighty he was at both of these. (So some Rats of amphibious nature, Are either for the Land or Water.) He could raise Scruples dark and nice, And after solve 'em in a trice, As if Divinity had catch'd The Itch, on purpose to be scratch'd; Or, like a mountebank, did wound And stab herself with Doubts profound, Only to show with how small pain The Sores of Faith are cur'd again. An Ignis Fatuus, that bewitches, And leads Men into Pools and Ditches, To make them dip themselves, and sound For Christendom, in dirty Pond; To dive like Wild-fowl for Salvation, And fish to catch Regeneration. He understood the Speech of Birds As well as they themselves do Words. And as a Goose In death contracts his Talons close, So did the Knight, and with one Claw The Tricker of his Pistol draw.

INVECTIVE

33

periority.19 So Nashe crows in triumph over the dismembered form of his adversary. Kant and many critics after him concluded that laughter was to be explained as the relaxation of psychic tension.20 Our humorous response to the curse of Ernulphus arises from relief at being able to dismiss its painful threats. T o Freud, the comic is an antisocial impulse that sneaks past the "censor" in disguise; once in the conscious mind, it sheds its lamb's clothing. The accumulated psychic energy finds no object to meet, and explodes as laughter.21 Parallel with this process is the satiric practice of palliating harsh sentiments by rhetorical devices that lead off into amusement. Professor McDougall believed laughter to be a real instinct. As "the antidote of sympathetic pain," its function is to guard us from torturing ourselves by sympathy with minor mishaps.22 In the preceding pages we have no example of satire based on protective laughter, but what else is Byron's epigram? — And if I laugh at any mortal thing, 'Tis that I may not weep.23 Democritus, likewise, and his disciple Burton, and Peacock, and Fielding, and Evelyn Waugh turn to satire as an escape from the sort of sensibility that Shelley felt: Me, who am as a nerve o'er which do creep The else-unfelt oppressions of this earth.24 Mr. Max Eastman, violently reacting against all animustheories, also calls laughter an instinct, but to him it is an act of welcoming a playful shock or disappointment. "The comic is the unpleasant taken playfully." 2 5 Just so Rabelais in the curse quoted above threatens extraordinarily un-

34

T H E A R T OF S A T I R E

pleasant afflictions, but lets it be plainly seen that he means to be taken playfully. Finally, Bergson defines laughter as an intellectual force, operating during an anesthesia of the heart, and socially useful in its function of correcting automatisms, or situations in which a human being resembles a puppet or piece of pure mechanism.26 In his conception of laughter as an intellectual force and as a social corrective, Bergson is close to Meredith. There is this important difference between them: whereas Meredith regards satire as one might regard a common hangman, Bergson says of humor and irony that "both are forms of satire."

27

Bergson was entirely original in this brief remark, let drop almost by chance and left undeveloped. It is the pearl that rewards the plunge into the dangerous depths of the preceding paragraph. For the present, there is no necessity for disentangling the exact relationships of irony and humor and satire, but it should be acknowledged that they are of the same stuff and belong to one family. Such is the conclusion to which the evidence has led. Satire begins where laughter enters. It need not be the tinkling laughter of drawing-room comedy. T h e grinning taunt is the lowest variety; laughter had developed not much beyond this among the ancient Hebrews. He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: the Lord shall have them in derision.28 With hypocritical mockers in feasts, they gnashed upon me in derision.29 Let them be turned back for a reward of their shame that say, Aha, aha.30

INVECTIVE

35

The laughter of exultant victory, of scorn, of derision, informs the most direct invective-satire. Following the innumerable other varieties of laughter, satire shades off into ridicule, light banter, and irony, which is a dry, inner laughter, often at the expense of oneself. W h a t of the angry satirists who announce their determination to lash vice? Gifford may be allowed to speak for this school of whips and scorpions. To raise a laugh at vice, however, (supposing it feasible), is not the legitimate office of Satire, which is to hold up the vicious, as objects of reprobation and scorn, for the example of others who may be deterred by their sufferings. But it is time to be explicit. To laugh even at fools is superfluous; — if they understand you, they will join in the merriment; but more commonly they will sit with vacant unconcern, and gaze at their own pictures: to laugh at the vicious, is to encourage them; for there is in such men a wilfulness of disposition, which prompts them to bear up against shame, and to show how little they regard slight reproof, by becoming more audacious in their guilt. Goodness, of which the characteristick is modesty, may, I fear, be shamed; but vice, like folly, to be restrained, must be overawed.31 In the days when taboo governed society and sorcery was the agency of enforcement, this argument would have had much greater force. W e should still have to recognize that the sorcerer "overawes" the transgressor not by his words, as rhetoric, but by the supernatural forces which his words control. Gifford's absurd claims for authority remind one of the shocking prevalence of crime in England at a time when capital punishment was prescribed for even trifling offenses. The principle of authority cannot be carried into literature. Even Ezekiel's rebukes were clothed under

36

T H E A R T OF SATIRE

allegory and represented as the direct communications of an angry God — a double remove from personal authority. The plain fact is that no way of "overawing vice" exists in literature. The satirists who claim that power in theory do not exercise it in practice. If they seriously try to, their works are stillborn, even as Gifford's Epistle to Peter Pindar, kept in memory only as a morbid exhibit: False fugitive! back to thy vomit flee — Troll the lascivious song, the fulsome glee, Truck praise for lust, hunt infant genius down, Strip modest merit of its last half crown, Blow from thy mildew'd lips, on virtue blow, And blight the goodness thou canst never know.32 Literature, whether oral or written, is addressed to an audience. When a salesman grows too hot or importunate over the telephone, the listener calmly hangs up the receiver. The satirist must keep his channel of communication open; and the only way he can retain his audience is by giving at least an illusion of detachment. Thus we return to the devices of rhetoric with which the chapter began. Philosophers write for brother philosophers, moralists for moralists. Satirists write not for fellow-satirists, but for a lay audience. Like religious reformers, they are concerned with abuses. The religious reformer operates under authority — whether it be the Koran, the Book of Mormon, or the Zendavesta. The satirist is outside the Law and the Prophets. He may claim a divine sanction, but he has none. His final appeal is to common sense and to reason. The tools of the comic furnish him with the best appeal to reason that exists. Intuitive and instantaneous, the comic percep-

INVECTIVE

37

tion is a flash that exposes whatever is anti-social or egotistical or inelastic in human nature. One pressing question remains. If satire uses the technique of wit and the comic, how is it to be distinguished from "pure" comedy? Clearly, no academic formula can be used to plot a sharp dividing line. Like the problem of what constitutes good taste, the question is one on which unanimity is impossible. T w o general principles are useful in deciding whether to call a given piece of writing a satire or a form of pure comedy, such as farce, skit, extravaganza, and so on. First we should consider the closeness with which the camera pursues the object of satire. If the comic devices are applied to a single object or group of related objects, if a sense of unity is produced by the common bearing of diverse illustrations, we are on the side of satire. If the operations of wit are promiscuous and casual, the presumption is in favor of comedy. Secondly, we may consider the degree of virulence in the comic devices. Here we find use for the foregoing remarks on detachment, time-lag, and participation of the reader with the author. At one end of the scale, harsh derision denotes satire; at the other end, gentle banter and mild amusement denote comedy. The final conclusion is reached by a comparison of two readings, one closeness of pursuit, the other the intensity of condemnation. Young's Satires, for example, are mild in feeling but earn their name by strict attention to business. Artemus Ward and Finley Peter Dunne are comic rather than satiric artists; many satirical touches are to be found in them, but these strokes do not combine into a single, sustained object. Swift writes with

38

THE ART OF SATIRE

passion under iron control, and pursues his object relentlessly; hence he belongs to satire. The laughter of comedy is relatively purposeless. The laughter of satire is directed toward a preconceived end. Comedy demands little of the audience. Reading Stephen Leacock's delightful Nonsense Novels may be compared to lying in a hammock and being pleasurably tickled. A half-hour with Jonathan Wild, on the other hand, makes the brain reel with the constant effort of unraveling the irony and capturing Fielding's true meaning.

CHAPTER III

Burlesque

Though thou shouldest bray a fool in a mortar among wheat with a pestle, yet will not his foolishness depart from him. Proverbs Thou little thinkest what a little foolery governs the world. Seiden, Table Talk Bastings heavy, dry, obtuse, Only dulness can produce; While a little gentle jerking Sets the spirits all a-working. Swift, " T o a Lady" If any man take exceptions, let him turn the buckle of his girdle, I care not. I owe thee nothing (Reader), I look for no favour at thy hands, I am independent, I fear not. N o , I recant, I will not, I care, I fear, I confess my fault, acknowledge a great offense. I have overshot myself, I have spoken foolishly, rashly, unadvisedly, absurdly, I have anatomized mine own folly. And now methinks upon a sudden I am awaked as it were out of a dream; I have had a raving fit, a fantastical fit, ranged up and down, in and out, I have insulted over the most kind of men, abused some, offended others, wronged myself. Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy

C H A P T E R III

Burlesque I.

SATIRE BY COMPARISON

N M A K I N G the rounds of an amusement park, you can always find people "laughing like a swarm of flies" in front of the eccentric mirrors. You draw near to one of them and see a squat, obese goblin goggling at you. With a pang of surprise, you observe that the monster wears your clothes, mimics your gestures, and is, in horrid fact, you. Before the next mirror, behold yourself shot up into the wasted wreck of a giant, with pipestem arms and legs and elongated horse-face. These two experiences have introduced you to burlesque in its simplest form.

I

It has been shown how invective-satire, compelled to gain the sanction of society, uses wit mechanisms to circumvent mankind's prejudice against naked rage. Derision is the purpose of invective-satire. The reader has no choice in accepting the subject of condemnation, for it is held steadily before his eyes; yet he derives some sense of selfdetermination, for example from the simile, which permits him to make a comparison and draw his own deductions from it. The reader would sympathize with the condemnation still more, if the simile could be expanded from a brief trope into a literary vehicle capable of carrying a multipleseries of comparisons between the ideal and the real. He

42

T H E A R T OF SATIRE

could then see how a man's deeds compare with his words, how the operation of a law fulfils the purpose for which it was enacted, how far a would-be hero falls short of true greatness. Burlesque is just such a vehicle. It is a kind of extended simile. "Look here, upon this picture, and on this," says the author. The reader looks first on one, then on the other, and decides for himself whether the mirrored image faithfully reproduces the object. Of course, in satire it does not do so, for the satirist secretly aims at exposing a discrepancy in the strongest possible light. Once he has exposed it, the fewer words the better, for his insistence on pointing the moral will rob the reader of his share in the game. So long as he abstains from sermonizing, he has the reader with him. Far from using the goad of invective, he lures his audience by posing as a passive agent, letting the condemnation come home to roost by analogy. The reader then appears to himself to draw his own independent conclusions. The reader's sense of participation is given an extra fillip by suppression of one term of the simile. We do not find a parody printed side by side with its original. It is the reader's part to supply knowledge of the model. He must hold up the model, and the author will furnish him with a distorted reflection of it. Herein lies the strength of burlesque, and its weakness. So long as the author can depend on his audience for the necessary information, he need not utter a word of reproach or obloquy; his audience will provide the curses, and he will yet "have a thank" for his good offices. And yet, knowledge that seems to one age to be graven in adamant seems to the next to have been written in the sand.

BURLESQUE

43

The Batrachomyomachia, or Battle of Frogs and Mice, finds a small audience today although it parodies Homer, the Bible of the ancient world. Likewise all the machinery of the mock-heroic — the invocations, epithets, and set speeches so delicious to the eighteenth century — raises only an occasional smile today. Dry den, in writing Absalom and Achitophel, must have been confident that his allegory would be comprehended at sight by readers born hundreds of years to come. How many today can read it for the first time without recourse to Bible or to "Notes"? Just as invective dies when the social occasion that countenanced it passes, so burlesque withers away when the knowledge that supports it is forgotten. T w o courses are open if we wish to use the method of comparison to show up a man's shortcomings. We may draw a picture of a low fellow engaged in vicious or trivial pursuits and endow him with the features of our victim. These features, perhaps degraded and brutalized, are not altered past recognition. The first reaction of the audience on recognizing the likeness is one of pure comedy. And comic enough it is to see a hawk's bill doing duty for a human nose, or a human face translated into a fox's mask. The satiric reaction is overlaid on the comic. Comparing what we know of the real man with the caricaturist's distorted image, we single out a hawk-like rapacity in his character, or a foxy duplicity. Once this quality has been impressed on our minds, we shall find it hard to think of the man without remembering it. Thus by altering the true image, by degrading it and presenting it without dignity, the artist acts like the first of the two mirrors, the glass that

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reduces the spectator to a fat goblin. This process of diminishing and degrading the object is the method of low burlesque. L o w burlesque creates a standard below its victim and makes the reader measure him against that standard. Fox ethics, for example, are lower than human ethics. When the reader is led to regard a man as a fox, whatever f o x y qualities the man possesses are thrown into sharp relief. In the same way, a piano with the loud pedal held down will give back whatever note is sung into it. L o w burlesque calls forth these sympathetic notes or hidden affinities. It is clear that we can obtain a second scale of comparison by placing our standard, not below the victim, but above him. Holding him up against a standard obviously too elevated for him will make his shortcomings stand out sharply. If he conceives of himself as an exalted personage, let him be invested with the trappings and dignities of a real hero, retaining only his proper features. His pretentiousness will then stand out, to the exclusion of all other qualities. The artist in this instance does the work of our second mirror. He draws us out to an unconscionable length. W e seem to knock at the stars with our exalted head, until our legs, too frail to support such eminence, give way. Great then is our fall, and hugely pleasing to bystanders. It is this principle of magnification that gives us high burlesque. Both forms of burlesque differ importantly from invective-satire. Invective-satire is the direct and didactic expression of opinion, relieved from tedium and bad taste by comic mechanisms. Burlesque is mimetic. The author acts

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a part; he pretends to be Tennyson writing a poem, but he is careful to give himself away by the triviality of his subject. Lucian poses as a venerable philosopher, and when he has won the reader's respect gives him a flirt over the head with his bladder. Rabelais, in pedant's skull-cap and slops, overwhelms one with erudition that proves on closer examination to serve no other end than nonsense. The burlesque artist puts on an act for his audience. He must keep the show going and at the same time step out of his part and assure the audience that it is only a show. Consequently burlesque requires of an author more detachment and higher aesthetic gifts than does invective. The indirect, mimetic, and aesthetic qualities of burlesque give us one set of criteria for dividing it from invective. The use of the comic is a second means of discrimination. Invective employs the comic in various ways, as small, palliative tropes or units of rhetoric, secondary to the main design. The comic element in burlesque is enlarged until it takes the proportions of the central design or "fable." The core of MacFlecknoe and of the Dunciad is the crowning of a monarch of dulness. The Battle of the Books shows animated volumes engaged in Homeric warfare. The Praise of Folly is a mock-oration by a mock-goddess. The frame of these and of countless other burlesques is in itself purely comic. Satire enters only when specific persons or manmade conditions are recognized as the source of the distorted reflection in the burlesque. T o a reader entirely ignorant of history, Hudibras would be pure comedy, with only a trace of satire. Children find in Gulliver's Travels a story of funny little men and funny big men. They lack

46 THE ART OF SATIRE all knowledge of the true objects so curiously reflected in the satiric mirror of Swift's mind. Burlesque, then, first moves us to the purposeless laughter of pure comedy by its ludicrous plot or frame. This explains the mechanics whereby most of the greatest satires convey an air of geniality and warm humanity. The critical or corrective laughter of satire enters when the story is recognized as a mirror in which the actions or conditions of men are purposely distorted. II.

H I G H AND L o w BURLESQUE

Such are the differences between invective-satire and general burlesque. A further extension of the same principles serves to divide low from high burlesque. Low burlesque invites the reader to compare its subject with what is base and sordid. A satirist might, for example, represent Aeneas as a vagabond and Dido as a fishwife. He would then be creating a sort of expanded simile. The laughter to which his degrading comparison gives rise is derisive, scornful, and self-congratulatory. Since it is of the same sort that arises from calling names, low burlesque is evidently half-brother to invective-satire. High burlesque, on the other hand, depends not on noticing similarities but on noticing differences. Contrast rather than comparison is its method. In reading MacFlecknoe we care nothing for any actual resemblance Shadwell may bear to a monarch of letters. We are all eagerness to learn how unfit he is for his heroic setting. We love to see him magnified in one line, but only for the pleasure of seeing him knocked down in the next. What we are faced with in high burlesque is a

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simile in reverse, a simile without similitude. We must invert the comparison before we arrive at the sense. High burlesque, then, partakes of irony, which must preserve its fiction with scrupulous care. There will of course be clues to tell us to reverse the literal meaning of an ironical argument, but they are cunningly concealed. So long as the fiction is transparent, and the author lets us see behind the mask, and the knock-down blow is given in public, we are still in the realm of burlesque. The conclusion of MacFlecknoe gives us a brilliant illustration of the art of building up with one hand and knocking down with the other: The hoary prince in majesty appear'd, High on a throne of his own labours rear'd. At his right hand our young Ascanius sate, Rome's other hope, and pillar of the state. His Brows thick fogs, instead of glories, grace, And Lambent dulness play'd around his face. As Hannibal did to the altars come, Swore by his sire, a mortal foe to Rome; So Shadwell swore, nor should his vow be vain, That he till death true dulness would maintain: And, in his father's right, and realm's defence, Ne'er to have peace with art, nor truce with sense. Conventionally, high burlesque treats a trivial subject in an elevated manner, and low burlesque treats an elevated subject in a trivial manner. Professor R. P. Bond, after a study of English burlesque poetry from 1700 to 1750, finds grounds in contemporary criticism for further discrimination. Parody and mock-heroic belong to the family of high burlesque. Both use the grand manner for trifling themes, but parody adopts the manner of a specific work, while

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mock-heroic copies a whole class of writing. Conversely, travesty and the Hudibrastic poem are branches of low burlesque. Travesty imitates a particular model, the Hudibrastic a general type. 1 These distinctions may be expressed graphically thus: High Low

Specific

Parody Travesty

General

Mock-heroic Hudibrastic

No better schematization is possible, yet difficulties arise when one attempts to sort out poems and assign them quickly and easily to their proper pigeon-holes. Seldom is a burlesque poem true to type throughout. Cogitation is usually necessary to determine whether the prevailing manner is diminishing or degrading; and when the object of imitation is specific at one moment, general at the next, classification may become so laborious that it breaks down of its own weight. Prose evades exact labels more readily than verse. With all its virtues, neither this nor any other scheme may be applied thoughtlessly and automatically. The incongruity inherent in satiric and humorous writing and the elasticity of critical terms in common usage will convert any rigid system of definitions into a bed of Procrustes. In the preceding chapter, mention was made of the timelag, or interval between the perception of the spoken or printed word and the full comprehension of the author's meaning. The greater the time-lag, it appeared, the sharper the sense of the comic and of the author's detachment. It is as though the time spent by the author in aiming his shaft gave him a chance to let his emotions cool and to approach his subject through reason. There is a progressive increase

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in the time-lag as we ascend each of the steps between abuse, invective-satire, low burlesque, and high burlesque. In the last, it is incumbent on the reader to provide his own knowledge of the object of satire and to reverse the burlesque magnification in terms of that knowledge. Satire is thus at two or three removes from its object. It is well mixed with the comic and free from blustering wrath. So far as "overawing vice" is concerned, high burlesque is worse than useless. Often it treats its victim with reverent admiration. Dry den's satirical portraits in the first part of Absalom and Achitophel are the greatest in the language because of the civil, well-bred manner in which he speaks. He seldom needs to raise his voice, thanks to his marvelous talent for rhetoric. Of all the types of satire — here classified as invective, burlesque, and irony — burlesque offers the greatest freedom to the artist and exacts the most from him in terms of creative invention. Burlesque is imitative, it is true, yet the imitation goes no deeper than surface and form. Once an affinity with the model has been established, the more extravagant and ludicrous the action the better the public is pleased. Unless the author has skill in creating original incidents, the work is likely to drag. MacFlecknoe has enough action for its length. The Dunciad has not; the heroic games of poets, critics, and booksellers give the second book a backbone that is wanting in the third book with its tedious visions and in the fourth with its lengthy prophecies. Burlesque, as it is close to the art of the clown, calls for nimble friskings. It can no more afford to stand still than

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a play can. The great masters amaze and delight by the perpetual motion of their drolling antics. Erasmus burdened himself in the Praise of Folly with an abstract, philosophical subject. Yet his inventive genius keeps us constantly diverted, until it tires and invective-satire supplants burlesque in the second half of the book. Following the technique of his master, Lucian, he personifies his subject as a goddess and employs a hundred specific touches to make us actually see her as she delivers her harangue, and see likewise the expressions on the faces of her auditors. Once launched on her mock-encomium, the goddess gives an unequaled display of intellectual juggling, sporting with it, and treating it in true burlesque fashion, as Diogenes in Rabelais treated his tub: There, I say, in a great vehemency of his Spirit, did he turn it, veer it, wheel it, whirl it, frisk it, jumble it, shuffle it, huddle it, tumble it, hurry it, joult it, justle it, overthrow it, evert it, invert it, subvert it, overturn it, beat it, thwack it, bump it, batter it, knock it, thrust it, push it, jerk it, shock it, shake it, toss it, throw it, overthrow it upside down, topsiturvy, arsiturvy, tread it, trample it, stamp it, tap it, ting it, ring it, tingle it, toul it, sound it, resound it, stop it, shut it, unbung it, close it, unstopple it.2 Erasmus's language is concrete and picturesque, never abstruse. His style, like Rabelais's, shows that delightful mingling of scholarly niceness with the salty idiom of the common man which is the hallmark of most great satire. T o be sure, there is no central narrative, but neither is there a moment's tedium. The ideas go by us so fast and in such odd disguises that we seem to be trying to take in all three rings of the circus at once. Invention, motion, forward movement — these are indis-

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pensable for good burlesque. The admirers of The Hind and the Panther are scholars every one. For the general reader, the triviality of the fable breaks down the illusion of burlesque-satire. Dryden has used the animal-allegory simply to lend objectivity to his remarks on a painful subject. The action is practically static; the distorted reflection is promised but never delivered; hence he has not so much used as abused the burlesque convention. I I I . T H E BURLESQUE PERSONALITY

Literary satire started as philosophy for the common man, the evangel of common sense. Burlesque, besides being an art-form, is the most painless device ever invented for imparting ideas, propaganda, and criticism. Much of its painlessness is due to the author's expressed attitude toward himself. The philosopher bruises our brains, the critic soon leaves us cold, the formal moralist makes us yearn for a little rapine. They are so sober and dignified and self-important! Now if we could only see one of the long-bearded gentry break off his discourse, crack his heels together, and stand on his thumbs, we should feel a warm surge of affection for him and settle down contentedly to hear him out. Burlesque writers win our hearts from the start by putting off their dignity. Often their masterpiece is represented as an idle toy, cast off in a moment of leisure. Erasmus affects to have composed the Praise of Folly sitting a-horseback on his way to England. Rabelais declares of his jovial chronicles, When I did dictate them, I thought upon no more then you, who possibly were drinking (the whil'st) as I was; for in the

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composing of this lordly book, I never lost nor bestowed anymore, nor any other time then what was appointed to serve me for taking of my bodily refection, that is, whil'st I was eating and drinking.3 Moreover, he writes only to divert the poor, common fellows under his medical care, with many a "How now, my thrice-precious pockified blades!" Charles Churchill says, with less exaggeration, When the mad fit comes on, I seize the pen, Rough as they run, the rapid thoughts set down, Rough as they run, discharge them on the town.4 Swift presents A Tale of a Tub to Prince Posterity in these words: SIR, I here present your highness with the fruits of a very few leisure hours, stolen from the short intervals of a world of business, and of an employment quite alien from such amusements as this, the poor production of that refuse of time, which has lain heavy upon my hands, during a long prorogation of parliament, a great dearth of foreign news, and a tedious fit of rainy weather.5 For Byron's later satiric style we have to thank not only his knowledge of the Italian medley poets but also the profound impression made on him by the art of the improvvisatore.6 Don Juan, "a poem written about itself," as Hazlitt remarked, is one long, unabashed improvisation. If many great examples of burlesque-satire have thus come into the world like casual, unpreconceived jeux $ esprit, we need only read them thoughtfully to see that their offhand quality is more pretense than reality. Their authors are setting about to play the fool. They cannot

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pretend to high seriousness, or the fun would melt away and with it the lay audience. Even Burton throws a cloak of Socratic ingenuousness about his book, saying, Like a ranging spaniel that barks at every bird he sees, leaving his game, I have followed all, saving that which I should. . . . I have confusedly tumbled over divers authors in our libraries, with small profit for want of art, order, memory, judgment. . . . I write of melancholy, by being busy to avoid melancholy. . . . To this end I write, like them, saith Lucian, that "recite to trees, and declaim to pillars for want of auditors." 7 What though he declares on the next page but one that he has"laboriously collected this Cento out of diverse writers"? He has wittily identified himself with the burlesque convention of unpremeditated fun, and we are well content to follow him. He has given security that he will neither inflict systematic logic on us nor weary us with didactic morality. When the burlesque writer has allayed our suspicions by pretending to have thrown off an idle toy, and when we follow him into the body of his book, how does he live up to his promise? For he is bound to be diverting, and yet no less bound to undermine the object of his satire and to leave a few grains of wisdom to work like yeast within us. Broadly speaking, his solution is to play the fool. Infinitus numerus stultorum, and infinite also is the variety of fools. Only a few of the most significant fooleries adopted by satirists can be mentioned here. Where the writer's personality is kept strictly behind the scenes, as in most parodies, the only way of playing the fool at his disposal is through incident and comic invention.

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Lucian's True History, the great-grandfather of a thousand voyages imaginaires, uses parody to satirize the superstition and gullibility of historians. Unaccountably it remains one of his most frequently read pieces. Time has erased whatever specific application it once possessed, and there remains only a succession of fantastic incidents that soon cease to be engaging. Incredible or almost incredible actions are the center of interest in the Secchia rapita of Tassoni, in Don Quixote, Boileau's Lutrin, and Gulliver's Travels. When a model is followed closely, as in pure mock-heroic, action in the sphere of the impossible is the only plain way of showing one's motley to the audience. The same holds true for works of sustained irony; in them the author is as it were parodying himself. Another dimension is added to literature when we find our author coming forward to shake us by the hand in propria persona. Burlesque-satire is historically the form developed for the informal observation of human nature and for the seemingly artless revelation of the writer's personality. Even the intense emotion of lyric poetry is objectified and universalized by the Greeks until the author's private individuality is lost. T o parade one's own ego would be bad taste. While burlesque has long continued the natural vehicle for self-revelation in a whimsical way, it is notable that the attempt to carry self-revelation into more serious forms of literature has always been stigmatized as a lowering of artistic standards. Greek literature of the Alexandrian school, the Latin verse of Propertius and Tibullus, the generation of Webster and Ford in the drama or that of Oscar Wilde in poetry —these are called decadent. By

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decadent we are to understand not the prurient description of picturesque vices, but the falling away from universal standards in the direction of arbitrary and personal standards. Only the burlesque author is able to indulge his private caprice, yet leave with us a sense of high art. Hence for some of us, the warmest and most genial experiences that literature offers are our adventures with the living and lively spirits of great burlesque writers. Innumerable are the ways in which we find wise men wearing their motley. To name a few, Erasmus plays the fool by skipping around us and binding us in his chain of paradoxes and oxymorons. Skelton, in Speke, Parrot, looses a torrent of gibberish. Butler jerks the strings of his grotesque puppets in plain view of his audience. Sterne plays the fool typographically, among other ways. Churchill employs a clever device in Book I of Gotham·, a ludicrous six-line refrain recurring again and again supports the burlesque and draws the sting from intervening passages of invective. Byron's only serious care in Don Juan is to reinforce his own attitude of carelessness by scores of references to the haphazard plot and casual method of composition. When Peacock feels that his strain is growing monotonous, he makes his characters crack their skulls together or fall downstairs or meet with some other violent bodily mishap. I V . RABELAIS

Greatest of all, and deserving of a much longer study than we can here afford, is Rabelais, the Father of Laughter, the Fool-King. He expands his beloved hamlet of Chinon

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into a land populated by giants, and he binds us under horrific penalties to believe in the fiction. Mystification, that little-understood principle of art and of the fool's art in particular, is ever-present. Rabelais compares his book with the Silenes, or grotesquely carved boxes used to hold jewels; he bids us strive to crack the bone and suck the marrow of his secret doctrine, a command that has set scholars at odds with one another even to the present day. With Panurge, we visit sage fools and foolish sages, seeking enlightenment on the problem of marriage. With Pantagruel we make the voyage to the Oracle of the Bottle to learn ultimate wisdom. Rabelais himself inducts us into the esoteric mysteries of the herb Pantagruelion. In each of these adventures, when we have reached the journey's end, we find we have come on a fool's errand. Yet the suggestion lingers that here is more than meets the eye — here are portentous secrets. W e are frustrated, yet mystified, fascinated, and tickled to the very heart-root. What I would speak of in particular, however, is the strength of personality that Rabelais infused into every page of his burlesque philosophic romance. W e are all given to the worship of great natures. W e feel tenderly towards Sam Johnson, not because he sheltered the unfortunate or wrote a dictionary, but simply because he had a hulking frame, huge appetites, a mighty voice, and a burning curiosity about men and women of all ranks. Rabelais imparts this hugeness of nature to the printed page as no other writer has done in the world's history. His erudition is encyclopedic, his vocabulary rich beyond the wildest dreams of a lexicographer, his observation piercing and all-embracing.

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For all his elephantine size, he can still maneuver with the effortless agility of a dragon-fly. The sublime, the grotesque, the wildly comic, even the pathetic, take turns in classic medley fashion. The two predominant moods of the author make that rare and happy combination which is the peculiar property of great satire. We find now the intellectual ardor of the scholar pursuing knowledge through the dry pages of forgotten philosophers, scholiasts, alchemists, grammarians; and now the coarse and healthy gusto of the man who knows the common people through and through and who finds much to love in their grimy toilings and clownish junketings. If Rabelais affects the polished classical sententia and besprinkles his pages with Greek and Latin, no less does he relish the peasant's even more ancient heritage of folkknowledge. The great philosophic romance of Gargantua and Pantagruel is grounded in folklore; local traditions and landmarks are tenderly enshrined in it; innumerable proverbs and hoary jests and gnomic sayings bind it to the earth, assuring it of immortality. Rabelais is perfectly at home in both worlds. Whether he speaks to us from the professor's chair or makes room for us on the meadow, among the roaring, honest pot-hoisters and true pitcher-men, he is equally himself, wise and humorous and tolerant. What of the literary form in which the leviathan could sport so freely? It is a medley, a meeting-place of many forms. The skeleton of the narrative is a burlesque of the chap-book romance in which local heroes are glorified and associated with familiar landmarks and legends. The leading characters are giants, but as the Pantagrueline mythology becomes established, physical size and feats of strength yield

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the stage to dialectic. Countless conversations, harangues, and arguments leave us with the same impression of free and brilliant talk that we have in reading Lucian, whose gods chat in astonishingly human fashion. One form in which Rabelais demonstrates his surpassing skill in dialectic is the burlesque encomium. Originally this was a device to test the ingenuity of a rhetorician in the Greek schools, and as such it flourished in the schools of Rabelais's France. T o plead successfully a manifestly rotten cause or to show the universal properties of a trifling subject has always been an entertaining exercise of the wits. Passing over the doubtful question of how far Plato indulged in this sort of diversion, we find comparatively serious examples in Lucian's "Amber," "The Fly," and "The Hall." The full power of irony inherent in this form is developed in the famous defense of "sponging" as a noble profession, one of Lucian's wittiest pieces. Erasmus, soaked in Lucian as he was (he and More together translated works of this "blasphemous author" into Latin), transferred Lucian's pattern to the great literary subject of the day, Folly. Rabelais is no less skilful than his two masters. Panurge, upon being created Laird of Salmygondin, spent three years' revenue in fourteen days by Keeping open House for all Comers and Goers; yea, to all good Fellows, young Girls, and pretty Wenches; felling Timber, burning the great Logs for the sale of the Ashes, borrowing Money before-hand, buying dear, selling cheap, and eating his Corn (as it were) whilst it was but Grass.8 When Pantagruel offers "a sweet Remonstrance and mild Admonition," Panurge delivers a prodigious encomium on

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waste and debt, embellished with "fine Graphides and Diatyposes, Descriptions and Figures," and reinforced by borrowings from Plato, Caesar, Petronius, Lucian, Hippocrates, Galen, and many others. It is one of the greatest tours de force in literature, not only for the marvelous management of ironical argument, but also for the exuberance and intimacy of the style. It belongs to burlesquesatire because the speaker deliberately makes a fool of himself, because it imitates a serious legal forensic, and because it exposes and mocks the rationalizations that so often confound human efforts at reason. Some think that it particularly satirizes doctrinaire Utopias. Rabelais has given us other examples of the same form in the encomium on Pantagruelion, or hemp, and that on Gaster, or the belly. Conceived in the same spirit is the extravagant praise of wine that runs through the five books, unifying them by its symbolism of joy, optimism, naturalism — in a word, Pantagruelism. Apart from the general burlesque tone of self-parody, there are many more specific parodies. Rabelais imitates the Bible, the decretals, the jargons of the legal and medical professions, and the stilted speech of scholastic theologians. A series of satirical allegories occurs in the fourth and fifth books. Pantagruel and his officers visit many islands peopled with fantastic monsters, such as the Pope-hawks, the Lawcats, or the Gastrolaters. Travesty may be found in the description of the illustrious dead, brought by Epistemon from Hell,9 and in the magnificent Prologue to the fourth book, which carries us into a council of the Greek gods. Both episodes owe a considerable debt to Lucian.

6o

THE ART OF SATIRE

Primarily, then, Rabelais's work is fiction, fiction of the distorted, imitative type that we have called burlesque. It is further distinguished by its medley of literary forms, satiric, purely comic, and sober. Its essential unity arises from the author's free and uninhibited exhibition of his own antic personality. Let no one mistake this freedom for the naive outpourings of a child of nature. It is the freedom of wise simplicity, the last gift that the reluctant muse yields to her servants. V.

GROTESQUE SATIRE

"Madpash bedlam" is an epithet used by the inimitable Urquhart in translating Rabelais. The very words suggest eccentricity, grotesquerie, and macabre humor; as such, they well describe both writers. A glance at Urquhart's original works — perhaps the most eccentric writings in our language — is enough to show that he was a madpash bedlam through and through, while Rabelais, as we have seen, became one for the purposes of literature. The element of the grotesque in these and other satiric writers deserves discussion, for one branch of our subject can best be entitled grotesque satire. Before venturing into this dangerous territory, let us recall to mind a few literary works that are informed by the grotesque spirit. Horace's Epodes, his maiden efforts in poetry, reveal the extravagant temper that passed with his youth. In one direction, it spilled over into invective; in another, into repulsive portraiture. The third Epode presents the witches Canidia and Sagana preparing to sacrifice a young boy; the eighth spares no nasty physical detail in

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depicting an amorous hag; the twelfth describes the rank lust of a "mangey queane." 10 English literature has its own line of genre paintings of women. The Wife of Bath, with each successive reading, grows in moral worth, but on first acquaintance she is a startling and even a sordid figure. Offspring of her less attractive qualities are Dunbar's Tava Maryit Wemen and the Wedo, Skelton's Elinour Humming, and Samuel Rowlands' Dialogue of a Maid, a Wife, and a Widoiv. What a crew of raffish queans and dropsical old drabs parade through Skelton's pages! Elinour herself is a bolting-hutch of beastliness, yet something of the heroic hangs about her tattered petticoats. Wherein lies the charm of sluttishness? For charm these gamy pieces do possess. It is surely not in the "lovely phosphorescence of decay." The nosophilitic taste of a Huysmans or a Wilde would be repelled at a dish so salty, so vulgarly healthy and boisterous. Let us think of Panurge, certainly one of the greatest characters in fiction; of the Sybil of Panzoust;11 and of Chaucer's portrait of the scabrous Summoner in the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales. Sir Hudibras confronting Trulla or haranguing in the stocks is a grotesque figure, created — one might think — expressly for the pencil of Hogarth. The Beggar's Opera uses Fielding's favorite theme of "Greatness" and the "Great Man," yet this intellectual irony is supplemented, in a good performance, by the gruesome atmosphere of the jail and the villainous aspect which human life is made to assume. Burns is at his happiest in mingling the lyrical with the lurid. The glare of the grotesque illuminates The Jolly Beggars, and a subject repulsive

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in itself is thereby transformed into high art. The orgiastic warlocks and witches in Τam O'Shunter cast over us a spell of horror like that of Horace's Canidia. Readers of Thomas Mann may recall with a shudder the revolting scene of sorcery in the second volume of Joseph in Egypt. Other examples may be found in the writings of Theocritus, Herondas, Lucian, Nashe, Tom Brown, Lamb, Beddoes, and Dickens, to name a few. Contrasting with the usual tenor of W . S. Gilbert's genial vein stands the "elderly ugly daughter," thrusting her "caricature of a face" into one opera after another. Professor Quiller-Couch calls it "humanly vile" to taunt a female with her decaying charms;12 Gilbert, however, is working in the age-old tradition of the grotesque, and the question is one of artistic fitness, not of humanitarianism. From these rapid observations, what may be learned of the range of the grotesque? At one extreme we may set the Horatian hag or the animated gargoyle of Skelton: Maude Ruggy thyther skypped: She was ugly hypped, And ugly thycke lypped, Lyke an onyon syded, Lyke tan ledder hyded . . . Wyth that her hed shaked, And her handes quaked: Ones hed wold have aked T o se her naked: She dranke so of the dregges The dropsy was in her legges; Her face glystryng lyke glas; All foggy fat she was; . . . Such a bedfellaw Wold make one cast his craw.

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It is interesting to find Skelton rounding off his astonishing performance by a characteristic burlesque snap of the fingers, reminiscent of the burlesque openings discussed in the preceding section: For my fyngers ytche: I have written to mytche Of this mad mummyng Of Elynour Rummynge. Thus endeth the gest Of this worthy fest. Quod Skelton, Laureate

13

Quite apart from the arraignment of specific vices, such as intemperance or imprudence, the plain observation of Dame Elynour and her attendant drabs carries with it a satirical overtone. We are accustomed to view unsavory objects from a safe distance. Skelton's photography gives us a series of enlarged close-ups. The shift from the normal point of view to that of the microscope is a favorite device of Swift's. Gulliver's description of the Maids of Honor in Brobdingnag is perhaps as frequently cited as any passage in the book: Their skins appeared so coarse and uneven, so variously coloured, when I saw them near, with a mole here and there as broad as a trencher, and hairs hanging from it thicker than pack-threads, to say nothing further concerning the rest of their persons. 14

Students of Swift will recall many less quotable examples. Grotesque description need not be confined to the human body and its parts and functions. Contemplation of a bizarre way of life yields the same kind of sensations as a distorted view of physiological features. Chaucer's portrait

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of Perkyn Revelour, in the fragment of the Cook's Tale, describes Perkyn's appearance in two lines and devotes fifty-five to his habits of dicing, dancing, and wenching. The tale breaks off at the end of the portrait, before the plot begins to unfold. W h y then do so many readers delight in the Cook's Tale and hold it in affectionate remembrance? Because they discover in it a subtilized form of the same description of the eccentric which characterizes so much of the General Prologue. In the hands of anyone but Chaucer, characters so singular and eccentric would produce melodrama. Of the Friar, we read: In alle the ordres foure is noon that kan So muche of daliaunce and faire langage . . . Ther nas no man nowher so vertuous. The Sergeant of the Law: Nowher so bisy a man as he ther nas, And yet he semed bisier than he was. The Franklin: Was nowher swich a worthy vavasour. The Cook: For blankmanger, that made he with the beste. The Doctor: In al this world ne was ther noon hym lik. The Parson: A bettre preest I trowe that nowher noon ys. The Summoner: A bettre felawe sholde men noght fynde.

BURLESQUE The Pardoner: Ne was ther swich another pardoner. I have quoted ironic hyperbole as well as direct, since both kinds create the impression of singularity. Chaucer's insistence on the unique quality of his characters serves two purposes. It makes us regard the scamps and rogues of the party with tolerant delight, such as we feel in reading the grotesque pieces mentioned above. It also contributes to the air of wide-eyed ingenuousness in which Chaucer everywhere seeks to cloak himself. Often the grotesque enters into character-drawing of the most delicate order. Two brilliant performances in this kind are Chaucer's lines on the Prioress in the General Prologue and Lucian's Dialogues of Courtesans. Where Skelton and Horace have given us powerful genre-paintings, Lucian and Chaucer seem to paint miniatures on enamel. Restraint, refinement, and an irony fused with sympathy combine in these exquisite pieces of lapidary art. They show us satire tenderly caressing the subject it feeds on, and grotesquerie sublimed into loveliness. Chinese painting often possesses the same quality. Grotesque satire, then, is as it were a by-product of description. The subject of description is usually low life. Satire, as the branch of literature that takes human nature for its province, is perpetually turning its searchlight on the natural man. Grotesque art makes the ugly seem fascinating. In the delineation of low life, the two are met, and their union has given us many satires with "low" settings, and many descriptions of the underworld that live in litera-

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ture thanks to their satirical flavor. On the one hand we have Jonathan Wild, The Beggar's Opera, the Satyricon of Petronius; on the other, the Cony-Catching pamphlets, The English Rogue, picaresque literature in general, and many hundreds of pages from Fielding, Smollett, Dickens, and Thackeray. T o be a writer of grotesque satire, it is hardly enough to imitate the sordid, the ugly, or the distorted. Manner is quite as important as matter. Just as the author's manipulation of his own personality proved to be one of the secrets of burlesque, so the author's point of view toward his subject is the secret of grotesque satire. The examples of grotesque satire mentioned or quoted above yield one factor common to their subject matters: repulsiveness. We should naturally recoil if in our everyday life we were confronted with a beldame muttering incantations, with an enormously enlarged photograph of a patch of human skin, or with a roaring fishwife, drunken and "all foggy fat." Few of us, perhaps, would be wholly at ease in the society of courtesans, pimps, pickpockets, and highwaymen. More than ten minutes with Panurge would be death to any lady of refinement. Yet in the contemplation of these ruffianly characters readers pass some of their pleasantest hours. Two devices bridge the gap between loathing and liking. These are closeness of vision and detachment. Dislike is the child of fear, and fear is the child of mystery. With intimate knowledge, repugnance dies, as anyone knows who has interested himself in the welfare of a serpent or a spider. The apparitions that scared us as children were

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vague shapes, dough-like ghosts, "things that go Boomp! in the night." If we had read of Bluebeard, as we read of Chaucer's Miller, that on the top of his nose he had a wart, whereon stood a tuft of red hairs, his usefulness as a scarebabe would have been impaired. The tendency of burlesque satire to particularize has already been mentioned. The accumulation of exact details, small facts, and minute observations confirms the reader in his illusion. Continued long enough, it moves him to a smile or to laughter. Under the name of "humorous realism" this practise has been widely discussed. Yet, in such works as have been called grotesque satire, there is a principle that goes far beyond "realism." Richardson describes a woman's dress with patient fidelity, and we believe in her, not as an idea, not as a challenge, but simply as a familiar presence, about whom we need not bother our heads. Turning from sober realism to the grotesque, we discover the same minuteness of detail, but the detail itself is unusual and eccentric, and it serves a most un-Richardsonian purpose. Let us recall the food-lists of Greek mime-literature and of gastronomic satura; Rabelais's interminable "kyrielles," or lists of books, games, parts of the body, and so on; Poins's catalogue of the contents of Falstafi's pockets; Chaucer's account of the Prioress's table-manners; the brush-strokes in the portraits of Og and Corah. These minute details are not, as it were, in focus for a person of normal vision. They startle and upset our ordinary sense of reality, for they compel a shift in our point of view. Unfamiliar aspects of familiar objects are thrust upon us, as when Swift makes us view a patch of skin through his magnifying glass. Horace

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and Skelton bring our heads to within a foot of objects from which we usually avert our eyes. Surely this is realism with a difference. Its purpose is to shock our complacent, everyday sense of reality. By making us accept an eccentric, or grotesque, scale of values in opposition to our normal scale, the author creates positive and negative poles. Across the gap leaps the spark of irony. The secret of detail in grotesque satire is that its ultimate appeal is to ideas. Yet, as I have said, the patient cataloguing of repulsive details is not enough. The author must be aware of what he is about. For the highest result, there must lurk in his manner something of the burlesque pose, the deliberate distortion of his own personality, that we have discussed earlier in these pages.15 Most pornographic writers, as well as professional purveyors of the gruesome like Monsieur Celine, lose themselves in their earnest pursuit of the eccentric. Not so Rabelais in his treatment of the grotesque Panurge. When that worthy has caused Dingdong and his shepherds to be carried into the sea by their flock, he exults in their destruction. Panurge on the Gunnel of the Ship with an Oar in his Hand, not to help them, you may swear, but to keep them from swimming to the Ship, and saving themselves from drowning, preach'd and canted to them all the while like any Friar Maillard, . . . laying before them Rhetorical common Places concerning the Miseries of this Life, and the Blessings and Felicity of the next; assuring them that the Dead were much happier than the Living in this Vale of Misery, and promising to erect a stately Cenotaphe and Honorary Tomb to every one of them . . . ; wishing them nevertheless, in case they were not yet dispos'd to shake Hands with this Life, and did not like

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their salt Liquor, they might have the good Luck to meet with some kind Whale which might set them ashoar safe and sound, on some bless'd Land of Gotham after a famous Example.16 H o w little humor would there be in this episode if Panurge had had good reason to hate his victims and to seek a just vengeance on them! Instead, he took an artistic pride in destroying them. " B y water he sente hem hoom to every land." In the same way, Rabelais takes an aesthetic pleasure in letting Panurge pursue his inhuman knaveries. W e accept the substitution of an archdevil's scale of values because Rabelais has expressed his own kindliness and humanity in a hundred ways. Detachment is the quality that lets a writer wield the grotesque with satiric force. Like a visitor from another planet, he can take an objective point of view toward subjects that are surrounded with sentiments in the minds of ordinary mortals. He can probe the open sores of society with the same unholy joy that a doctor feels over an unusually "interesting" case. Where common souls react to a situation with moral feeling, he sees only aesthetic values. Thus he can deal lovingly with loathsome hags or unpleasant functions of the human body. 17 Grotesque satire, in its choice of detail and in its manipulation of the point of view, belongs with burlesque. Its pursuit of the odd, macabre, and eccentric has been shown to be fantastic rather than "realistic," and the fantastic is a property of burlesque. Yet it is satire by description. Facts speak for themselves. A clash of ideas is implicit in the process of creating a scale of values at variance with the common standards of mankind. These properties carry us

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over into the province of irony. In the following chapter, I hope, some light will be thrown on the function of the grotesque, that is, on the artistic and social value of dislocating absolute standards and shocking men into an awareness of the relativity of things.

CHAPTER IV

Irony, the Ally of Comedy

And ner he com, and seyde, "How stant it now This mury morwe? Nece, how kan ye fare?" Criseyde answerde, "Nevere the bet for yow, Fox that ye ben! God yeve youre herte kare! God help me so, ye caused al this fare, Trowe I," quod she, "for al youre wordes white. O, whoso seeth yow, knoweth yow ful lite." Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde Such are most human actions that to relate is to expose them. Young, Preface to The Universal Passion I am so entirely satisfied with the whole present procedure of human things, that I have been some years preparing materials toward A Panegyric upon the World to which I intended to add a second part, entitled, A Modest Defense of the Proceedings of the Rabble in all Ages. Both of these I had thought to publish, by way of Appendix to the following treatise; but finding my common-place book fill much slower than I had reason to expect, I have chosen to defer them to another occasion. Swift, Preface to A Tale of a Tub

CHAPTER IV

Irony, the Ally of Comedy I.

T H E R A N G E OF I R O N Y

H E N thunder-clouds, freighted with positive electricity, mass overhead, we are unaware of the negative charges that course through the earth in secret rivulets, hurrying to build their head of opposition. It requires the lightning-stroke to make clear to us the cosmic drama of which we have witnessed only the catastrophe. Irony is just such a flash. By its illumination we look back and see, often for the first time, the artifices of our author in accumulating a charge antagonistic to his apparent purpose. With this revelation, a third dimension is added to literature. One reading is never enough. The great masters, Lucian, Chaucer, and Swift, draw us again and again to pay our devotions. Within the narrow compass of a single page they provide room for us to promenade by the hour. With every turn we perceive subtler overtones, new layers of meaning. Some barbed shafts we might have perceived on a first reading, had we been more alert. Such is the Merchant's declaration that neither pen nor tongue may do justice to the wedding of Januarie and May:

W

Whan tendre youthe hath wedded stoupyng age, Ther is swich myrthe that it may nat be writen.1

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Such also is the Reeve's statement of the height to which Symkyn, the miller, was led by his social ambitions: A wyf he hadde, yeomen of noble kyn; The person of the toun hir fader was.2 The taint of illegitimacy troubles "deynous Symkyn" so little that his first startled roar on hearing of Aleyn's conquest is, My doghter, that is come of swich lynage!

3

Ofttimes irony is imperceptible on a first reading. We have no occasion to smile on hearing of Symkyn that As piled as an ape was his skulle.4 Subsequent readings of the line, however, compel us to grin, for we anticipate the destiny of that bald sconce. It is to glimmer in the reflected moonshine and to be mistaken for Aleyn's nightcap. Alas, poor Symkyn! Little may it avail him that Ther was no man, for peril, dorste hym touche.5 No man indeed, but his own wife, is to administer the coup de grace, bringing down a staff with might and main on that same "piled skulle." Our vision of her, poised for the blow, gives a heart-warming relish to the opening description of the proud miller with his armament of "long panade" and "joly poppere" and "Sheffeld thwitel." Beneath the surface currents of the story, deeper and contrary tides are flowing. Our work as reader is doubled, yet, oddly enough, our sense of spectatorship is greatly stimulated. We feel a new awareness of cosmic forces as we see in the humblest objects the operation of chance and destiny and necessity.

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Irony complicates the structure of a work of art, increases the reader's participation, and introduces universal principles. Hence we are justified in repeating that it adds a new dimension to literature. Irony is so versatile in operation, so Protean in its forms, that electricity is the only natural force with which we may compare it. Electricity can perform the humble office of cooking our egg and browning our toast; it can dazzle us as lightning; if we take undue liberties with it, it can kill us or leave us shocked and shuddering. Irony may appear as a minute trope of rhetoric, useful for pointing up a phrase; it may inform a brilliant style, like Jane Austen's; it may become a habit of thought, an unseen governor in the choice and ordering of literary material. Finally, it may take on itself the form of the Adversary, or diabolos, and confronting God with self-comparisons put His justice and His mercy to the question. James Thomson and John Davidson were thus led to curse God and die. The power of killing outright, however, is generally reserved to the invective branch of satire, as we learn from consulting the deathdealing ancient Irish satirists and Semonides and Hipponax among the Greeks. Irony has not always owned the grandiose aspects that I have just described. Falling as it does within the larger orbit of satire, it has, like satire itself, evolved from a fixed, specific form to abstract, freely combinable elements. The elements of general satire we have isolated as invective, burlesque, and irony. Irony in its own right has expanded from a minute verbal phenomenon to a philosophy, a way of facing the cosmos. To capture and analyze each successive

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stage in this growth would be the labor of a lifetime. Like the analogous process of criticizing a motion picture by studying each separate photograph on the film, that labor would be about as profitable as milking a he-goat into a sieve. The significant points, the phases that most reward our curiosity, are four in number. W e begin with verbal irony; we end with cosmic irony. Between these terminal stages, we may mark two convenient milestones. Irony of manner betokens a deliberate pose on our author's part, a manipulation of the literary personality. Just as the principles of burlesque are extensions of the principles of invective, so an additional turn of the screw converts burlesque into Socratic or Chaucerian irony. Irony of fact, or dramatic irony, needs no ironic style or pose to make itself felt. It arises from the author's choice of subject-matter; or, more accurately, it appeals to the reader to produce the ironic lightning-flash, without help from the author. Verbal irony and irony of manner are close to burlesque; irony of fact and cosmic irony produce satire of a tragic cast. Neither these distinctions nor the attempt to isolate each kind of irony for purposes of discussion should blind us to the close family relationship of our four ironies. Some writers employ only one of them; other writers employ two or three. Chaucer, in Troilus and Criseyde, and Lucian, in the Dialogues of the Gods, ride all four horses abreast. The transition from burlesque to irony and that from one sort of irony to another go by imperceptible gradations. W e can no more determine their limits by hard and fast rules than we can discern every shade of color in a rainbow with unaided senses.

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I I . V E R B A L IRONY

Irony might be defined in two words as an impractical joke. T o see a top-hatted dandy slip on a banana-peel is always pleasant. But the pleasure becomes truly exquisite to the watcher who has seen the banana-peel in advance or perchance placed it where it would do the most good. While the jest of irony is played with ideas, instead of slippery or blunt objects, the distinction between the initiated and the about-to-be-initiated still remains. T h e little audience (Horace's pauci lector es) is quick-witted enough to see the trap in advance; the "many-headed vulgar" rush blindly to meet their fate. In a practical joke a single victim is enough, and comedy is the result. In literature the percipients of irony always feel themselves to be members of a small, select, secret society headed by the author. T h e victims, by implication, are legion. Satire enters when the f e w convict the many of stupidity. T h e implication of a large audience is not always justified by the fact. The New Yorker owes its success to the skill with which its editors charm five million readers into the illusion of belonging to an aloof, sophisticated, esoteric, and fastidious minority. Critics of its sometimes mastodonic irony in turn plume themselves on being the true cognoscenti. So, naturalists observe, a flea Has smaller fleas that on him prey; And these have smaller still to bite 'em, And so proceed ad infinitum? T h e ironist appeals to an aristocracy of brains. It requires mental exertion to comprehend even the simplest and crud-

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est form of irony — sarcasm. Sarcasm is derived from a Greek word that means "flesh-tearing." When someone smiles pityingly at your criticism of a novel and remarks, "Of course, we all know you could write a much better book if you only would," your flesh is torn, so to speak, but it is not the going in of the barb that wounds, but rather the pulling out. For the words build you up only to knock you down; you must perceive the intentional inversion of meaning and translate back into the original, to your own hurt, if you would not appear a blockhead and natural butt. When we dislike a writer's irony, we call it sarcasm. The word has unpleasant connotations, and we reserve it for obvious double-dealing in words, such as appears in conversation or in written jibes and taunts. Sarcasm is irony, none the less. The Arte of English Poesie (1589) mentions "ironeia, or the dry-mocke," and the New English Dictionary cites as the earliest use of the word "irony" a passage from Wynken de Wörde (1502) in which "yronye of grammar" occurs when "a man sayth one & gyveth to understande the contrarye." Sarcasm is then a form of verbal irony, produced by an inversion of meaning. It may be distinguished from the more literary kinds of irony by the fact that it never deceives its victim. It carries its sting exposed; and lest it should be misunderstood, it has established a set of non-verbal conventions to accompany it — a curl of the lip, a special intonation and falling inflection, and often a shaking or nodding of the head. Such obvious self-advertisement means that the time-lag between hearing and comprehending is much shorter than it would be in a

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purely ironical speech, delivered without change in voice or expression. When protracted, sarcasm quickly degenerates into "heavy sarcasm." N o settled habit of speech is more wearisome and vexatious, for a long string of sarcasms is a series of jokes on the hearer which the speaker noisily explodes and relishes in advance. As a substitute for fist-fights, corporal punishment, and invective, sarcasm has become indispensable in social intercourse. Any reader who finds this observation cynical is invited to try the experiment of living for a week, or even a day, without allowing a sarcastic utterance or intonation to cross his lips. Even the Lord found it expedient to meet Job's reasonable complaints with a crushing sarcasm: Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? . . . Wilt thou play with him as with a bird? or wilt thou bind him for thy maidens? The existence of a double audience — an esoteric and an exoteric — is rather implied than real when sarcasm is used. There are few too dull to scent the reversed meaning. Writers, dealing with the subtleties of frozen language instead of the ephemeral spoken word, naturally produce a purer irony than do speakers, formal orators excepted. When they set down words and sentences that express the opposite of their real meaning, they have no warning flags to fly, no special intonations of the voice, no raising of the eyebrows. The reader discovers the deception for himself, unravels the contradiction, and feels happily at one with the author. Irony of inversion involves a longer timelag than invective, burlesque, or sarcasm, and it demands

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that the reader join more energetically with the author in the act of artistic creation. It is scarcely necessary to give examples of irony of inversion, since every grand, artistic lie, told with a poker face, belongs to this category. M y own favorites are from Chaucer. In The Nun's Priest's Tale, Chauntecleer, the know-it-all cock, tells his dame that, sure as Gospel, Mulier est hominis confusio, — Madame, the sentence of this Latyn is, "Womman is mannes joye and al his blis." 7 In The Merchant's Tale, the "faire, fresshe" May, after one brief interview with her husband's squire, resolves to love him though she is but a four days' bride. B y way of comment, the Merchant adds a single line — Chaucer's favorite line, it has been called, from its use elsewhere: Lo, pitee renneth soone in gentil herte! 8 Earlier in the same tale is the startling observation, already noted: Whan tendre youthe hath wedded stoupyng age, Ther is swich myrthe that it may nat be writen.9 Irony of inversion ordinarily compels the reader to convert apparent praise into blame. Its shocking power is greatest when it is thus used to shatter complacent truisms and unthinking optimism. Occasionally contempt and insult are to be understood as praise. Swift's disconcerting way with his friends was to address them in terms of reproach and abuse, and then, by a fine stroke of wit, to convert the whole into a compliment. In Jonathan Wild,

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Fielding represents Heartfree's simplicity and benevolence as low sentimentality and want of spirit. Stevenson in his celebrated defense of Father Damien ironically acknowledges the blemishes in Damien's character and makes them appear faint shadows that only set off the brilliance of his hero's virtues. But Swift, after all, was a virtuoso in irony, and Heartfree is only a counterpoise to Jonathan Wild, the prince of rogues, and Stevenson was answering a bill of indictment, point by point. The negative function of irony in making approval explode into dislike is more frequent and more effective than the reverse method. Irony is a form of criticism, and all irony is satirical, though not all satire is ironical. Skepticism and pessimism and melancholy are the ironist's portion, and he is content to have it so. Lucian boldly declares: I profess hatred of pretension and imposture, lying, and pride. . . . However, I do not neglect the complementary branch, in which love takes the place of hate; it includes love of truth and beauty and simplicity and all that is akin to love. But the subjects for this branch of the profession are sadly few. 1 0

Swift echoes this conclusion, saying, "The materials of panegyric, being very few in number, have been long since exhausted." 11 It is in the mock encomium that irony of inversion reaches its greatest concentration and brilliance. Mention has been made in the preceding chapter of the jeux (Γesprit in this kind by Lucian, Erasmus, and Rabelais. The encomiums of sponging, of folly, and of debt are orations, with classical sources in Roman satura and in the Greek spoudaiogeloion and mime-literature in general. Fielding breathed the spirit

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of the mock encomium into a modern form, that of the full-length novel (most burlesque novels of the eighteenth century were as long as their models). Jonathan Wild furnished a model for Barry Lyndon, although Thackeray's genius falls below Fielding's in the dexterous handling of irony and in intellectual power. In recent years Aldous Huxley has transferred the mock encomium to the field of the Utopia. Burlesque Utopias containing occasional satire existed before Brave New World, but Huxley's Utopiain-reverse is in a class by itself. T o the reader who satisfies the inordinate demands made upon him, it offers a carefully worked out criticism of life. In its mirror writing, every comment or surface meaning requires only to be reversed before falling into its place in Huxley's social philosophy. Of all the themes that lend themselves to ironical panegyric, none has proved so fruitful as the theme of Jonathan Wild — the Great Man. Peacock may be allowed to speak for his predecessors in his succinct way: Marry, your hero guts an exchequer, while your thief disembowels a portmanteau; your hero sacks a city, while your thief sacks a cellar: your hero marauds on a larger scale, and that is all the difference, for the principle and the virtue are one: but two of a trade cannot agree: therefore your hero makes laws to get rid of your thief, and gives him an ill name that he may hang him: for might is right, and the strong make laws for the weak, and they that make laws to serve their own turn do also make morals to give colour to their laws.12 Treatment of this theme had gradually become more and more ironical since the Renaissance, as a few illustrations will show. Following upon the satiric invectives of Eras-

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mus and More against war and those who made it, Rabelais uttered a burlesque snarl against a certain King Anarchus: These devillish Kings which we have here are but as so many calves, they know nothing, and are good for nothing, but to do a thousand mischiefs to their poor subjects, and to trouble all the world with warre for their unjust and detestable pleasure: I will put him to a trade, and make him a crier of green sauce.13 Burton speaks his mind on the Great Man, but uses his words, angrily ironical in themselves, to construct a detached and whimsical indictment of human folly. In the following extract, we meet Alexander, who was to become the proverbial example of the Great Man: Every nation had their Hectors, Scipios, Caesars, and Alexanders! . . . These are the brave spirits, the gallants of the world, these admired alone, triumph alone, have statues, crowns, pyramids, obelisks to their eternal fame, that immortal genius attends on them. . . . Alexander was sorry, because there were no more worlds for him to conquer, he is admired by some for it, animosa vox videtur, et regia, 'twas spoken like a Prince; but as wise Seneca censures him, 'twas vox iniquissima et stultissima, 'twas spoken like a Bedlam fool. . . . One is crowned for that for which another is tormented. . . . A poor sheep-stealer is hanged for stealing of victuals, compelled peradventure by necessity of that intolerable cold, hunger, and thirst, to save himself from starving: but a great man in office may securely rob whole provinces, undo thousands, pill and poll, oppress ad libitum, flea, grind, tyrannize, enrich himself by spoils of the commons, be uncontrollable in his actions, and after all, be recompensed with turgent titles, honoured for his good service, and no man dare find fault, or mutter at it.14

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In Paradise Regained, Christ speaks to the same point with sarcastic disdain: What do these worthies, But rob and spoil, burn, slaughter, and enslave Peaceable nations, neighboring or remote, Made captive, yet deserving freedom more Than those their conquerors, who leave behind Nothing but ruin wheresoe'er they rove, And all the flourishing works of peace destroy, Then swell with pride, and must be titled Gods, Great Benefactors of mankind, Deliverers, Worshipped with temple, priest, and sacrifice.15 Oldham likewise grows sarcastic over massacres performed by the "great," 1 6 and Young satirizes Alexander as the type of the Great Man. 17 Shamela, the sluttish little hypocrite of Fielding's wicked parody, writes to her mamma: The Fate of poor Mr. Williams shocked me more than my own: For, as the Beggar's Opera says, Nothing moves one so much as a great Man in Distress.16 Indeed, The Beggar's Opera stands alongside Jonathan Wild as the ultimate working-out of this ironical idea. Swift had tossed out the notion of a "Newgate pastoral" in a letter, and G a y developed the suggestion in true Swiftian fashion. When the irony of this best of ballad-operas bit into its object and repressive measures were talked of, Swift rushed to his friend's defense in his celebrated paper on the limits of satire (Intelligencer, No. III). 1 9 Elsewhere Swift embroidered the same theme with characteristic elaboration of irony: Heroic virtue itself, hath not been exempt from the obloquy of evil tongues. For it hath been objected, that those ancient heroes, famous for their combating so many giants, and drag-

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ons, and robbers, were in their own persons a greater nuisance to mankind, than any of those monsters they subdued; and therefore to render their, ob ligations more complete, when all other vermin were destroyed, should in conscience have concluded with the same justice upon themselves. Hercules most generously did, and hath upon that score procured to himself more temples and votaries, than the best of his fellows.20 Gulliver, on his voyage to Laputa, is disgusted to learn how the "great" in war, government, and religion are in truth cowards, traitors, and atheists; and how those who have performed real services to humanity have been ignored by history or enrolled as the vilest rogues. By such thoughts Swift was led to embrace the perverse philosophy of history that appears in the "Digression Concerning Madness" in A Tale of a Tub, and in many other of his writings. The great events that shape the world's course, he assures us, are brought about by fortuitous and trifling accidents. One great king was moved to undertake world conquest by a vapor arising from unsatisfied sexual desire; another was diverted from the same ambition when a vapor left his brain and condensed in an anal tumor. In 1725, three years before The Beggar's Opera, Defoe's second pamphlet on The Life of Jonathan Wild had briefly explored the ironical possibilities of its subject. The great "Thief-taker General of Great Britain and Ireland," as Wild liked to be called, is said to have given encouragement to youths of a promising genius. He once gave half a crown to a little boy who had stolen a pair of silver buckles out of a man's shoes, with the comment, " M y life on't, he'll prove a great man." Thus, in 1754, when Fielding set about rewriting his

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earlier Jonathan Wild, he was in a position to improve on an already rich literary tradition of the Great Man. Nor was the tradition merely literary. The public of that day seems to have had a greater relish for irony than any public before or since. The term, "Great Man," caught on as an expressive bit of banter and appeared in contemporary journals as an ironic title for Robert Walpole, who had created and long occupied the post of Prime Minister. The ironical praise of the Great Man which forms the core of Fielding's masterpiece requires inversion on several different levels before all the satire emerges. There is first an attack on Walpole, the "modern Sardanapalus," as Morley called him, with his private castle and his secret police and his conviction that only a raw schoolboy could believe that human nature ever performed anything for nothing or was actuated by lofty and unnecessary motives. Next is the attack on "Pollitricks," or corruption in public life. Finally, the mirror is held up to the great in many fields — the schemers who acquire power over their fellows and put it to ill uses. Where Fielding writes "the GREAT MAN," we are to read "Walpole." Where he writes "Prig" (thief), we are usually to read "Whig." These expressions are the key to the occasional, political level of his satire, and they call upon the reader's special knowledge for elucidation, like the terms of burlesque. But the best of the satire and the cream of Fielding's thought come to light by simple inversion of meaning. For "high" we read "low"; praise means dispraise; greatness stands for crime; folly and uncouth vulgarity replace simple goodness; and so for nearly three hun-

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dred pages. Jonathan Wild the Great is converted into a gangster by simple verbal irony. The gangster is elevated by allegory into the Prime Minister of England, only to be degraded once more to a hoodlum. Perhaps a book that compels the reader to perform mental acrobatics at this rate is bound to remain caviar to the general; yet Fielding, with his power of sustaining and refreshing the irony, can never fail of his pauci lectores, the little audience with which irony is content. Irony is never so sweet as when a character seems to defend his cause with consistency but in reality gives it completely away. Jonathan does just this in his famous soliloquy on Greatness in Chapter I V . Even more subtly does Samuel Butler make boomerangs out of the passionate orations of Sir Hudibras and Ralpho. The knight checks the rabble, on their way to a bear-baiting, and harangues them in the interest of their own cause —the Commonwealth. Was it for such base brawlings, he asks, that the great business of revolution was begun? For as we make war for the King Against himself, the self-same Thing. Some will not stick to swear we do For God, and for Religion too; For, if Bear-baiting we allow, What Good can Reformation do? 21

If only for this, he inquires at great length, what was the good of this treachery, and that lie, and the other robbery? The answer becomes only too obvious, as the knight in his partisan heat presses his breast ever harder against the sword.

88 THE ART OF SATIRE A parting quotation from Jonathan Wild introduces a variety of verbal irony that is more common and probably older than irony of inversion. When I consider whole nations rooted out only to bring tears into the eyes of a great man, not indeed because he hath extirpated so many, but because he had no more nations to extirpate, then truly I am almost inclined to wish that Nature had spared us this her MASTERPIECE, and that no GREAT MAN had ever been born into the world.22 The words "I am almost inclined to wish" are charged with the irony of understatement. The writer means much more than he says, so that the reader exaggerates the statement instead of reversing it. This device is known in rhetoric as litotes.23 Both forms of verbal irony — inversion and litotes — understate the author's meaning. Even where a sentence must be reversed, not exaggerated, a striking observation is concealed under an unemotional, matter-offact surface. Understatement has always been practised in referring to the supernatural. The Greeks believed in lying low in order to escape the notice of the supernal powers; accordingly, they spoke of the Furies as the Gracious Ones, or Eumenides. Among the Hebrews, the name of God was unpronounceable. In recent memory it was thought better luck to say "the old W or "old Nick" instead of "Satan" or "the devil." Such euphemisms reassure men in their dealings with fate and may develop into a habitual attitude towards life and a habitual way of speech. The Yankee of tradition and fact is not one to expose himself by ill-considered enthusiasm. In those unexploited

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regions of Maine whose inhabitants do not winter in Florida, it is still usual for a man to remark, "Yep, some little breeze, after the shower," when you have narrowly escaped with your life from a deluge followed by a hurricane. T o the guide I most admire, a heaped platter is never anything but a "bite," while a "leetle mite of comfort" is notice that I may as well throw away the cork; I shan't be needing it. T h e same temper is revealed in the sardonic understatement of Old English poetry. W i t h grim satisfaction the author of Beowulf comments on the death of a sea-monster: " H e was slower in swimming in the waves when death took him off." 24 Even more scornful are Beowulf's words to Unferth: Grendel, the frightful demon, would never have done so many dread deeds to thy prince, such havoc in Heorot, if thy heart, thy spirit, were so warlike as thou sayest thyself. But he has found out that he need not too much dread the antagonism, the terrible sword-storm of your folk.25 Similar examples will readily occur to the student of Old English. American humor of the last century drew largely upon the gigantic imagination of the frontiersman. In his early days Mark T w a i n made Nevada and California almost too hot to hold him by his burlesque satires. He was addicted to the hoax, and he dealt profusely in massacres and other bloodcurdling enormities. As he matured, he became almost as great a master of understatement as he was of exaggeration. Some of his best effects depend upon the use of litotes as the final snapper to a tall statement.

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When the Eclipse and the A. L. Shofwell ran their great race many years ago, it was said that pains were taken to scrape the gilding off the fanciful device which hung between the Eclipse's chimneys, and that for that one trip the captain left off his kid gloves and had his head shaved. But I always doubted these things.26 Artemus W a r d likewise showed mastery of understatement, as in the following grave meditation: A bean pole, legitimately used, is an instrument of good, yet if it be sharpened at one end and run through a man it will cause the most intense pain and perhaps produce contortions. The wick of an unlighted candle may safely be manipulated, but if you light the wick and thrust your hand into the blaze and keep it there half an hour a sensation of excessive and disagreeable warmth will be experienced.27 Understatement can hardly go further than this. At the opposite extreme, it may be used with the utmost delicacy, as a scarcely perceptible shadow that deepens the meaning of a lyric by subtle suggestion. III.

IRONY OF MANNER

Irony was practised long before it was named and defined. T h e first man to be called ironical was Socrates.28 It was his extraordinary destiny to elevate irony into a method of dialectic, an informing principle of personality, and a way of life. Just as the "discovery" of oxygen inaugurated a new epoch in science, so after Socrates had actually lived irony, the world grew conscious of that natural force, that electricity of the mind, whence he drew his power. Professor Ε. K. Rand once remarked, "The nil admirari of Horace, the sprezzatura of the Renaissance,

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the Oxford manner, and Harvard indifference all go back to Socratic irony." The personality of Socrates, apart from his ethical teaching, has exerted an incalculable influence and has proved more fascinating than that of any other human being in secular history. Contradictions multiplied in that personality. Here was a man who turned sober philosophical inquiry into a game, and who took seriously the aspirations of street-corner loafers toward the one true way; who mingled with the most aristocratic and "polite" society, yet was equally at home in the marketplace; who concealed a prophet's mission and a mystical daimonion beneath ugliness and buffoonery; who claimed to be the most ignorant and was declared by the oracle to be the wisest man in Greece; whose intellect was diabolically clever, and whose spirit was innocent to the point of saintliness. He could outdrink the most heroic tosspots and, when morning came, leave them wallowing while he calmly departed to go about the business of the day. He could stand rooted to one spot in meditation from mid-day until sunrise. He could be accused, at least, of tampering with the handsome youths who gathered round him to study virtue. He could crack jokes and indulge his irony at the expense of the jury that was trying him for his life and in the same speech give a sublime vindication of his mission. This series of contradictions makes up what we know of the personality of Socrates. How closely the portrait resembles the living man, how much is heightening or invention added by Plato, is a question that has long been agitated and that can never be answered with assurance.

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Increased knowledge of Greek comedy and of the minor genres of Greek literature makes it seem likely that Plato drew on literary sources for materials to use in heightening the ironical qualities which were already well developed in the historical Socrates. It is unnecessary to suppose that Plato grafted on many of the humorous and ironical features, however, since the comic muse found Socrates congenial during his middle life. He appears "treading the air and gazing at the sun" in a famous scene of the Clouds of Aristophanes, and again in the lost Connus of Ameipsias. T o some extent his own character may have been influenced by comic literature. The principal character types in Greek comedy are the buffoon, who makes fun for others, the ironical man, who makes fun for himself, and the impostor.29 The ironical man is called eiron, or the foxy, crafty one. He is a specialist in understatement; he is the close-mouthed Yankee who has no objection to being thought a fool. He will even encourage his detractors by speaking in a thick dialect, tugging his forelock obsequiously, or otherwise depreciating himself. The imposter, or alazon, representing the principle of overstatement, struts about in false security, venting his heavy wit and braggadocio on the eiron. But the gods love a shining mark — everyone knows that — and the eiron grins secretly, the while his dense manner encourages his adversary to ever greater extravagances. When fate has been tempted beyond endurance, the blow falls. The ironical one has had the double pleasure of watching gleefully from his hidden coign and of triumphing at the last. Thus described, the foxy fellow will not seem to embody a very

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lofty ethical concept. Indeed, the word for ironical conduct (eironeia) appears late in Greek and is thought of as a vulgar word for an offensive quality. Aristotle observes that the arrogant man overshoots the mean of truth, whereas the ironical man undershoots it. Both alazon and eiron are terms of reproach; but, if one must choose between evils, the eiron is to be preferred: He who pretends that he possesses things of greater consequence than he really does, and this for the sake of nothing else, resembles indeed the depraved man. . . . Dissemblers, or the ironical, who speak less than the truth, appear indeed to be more elegant in their manners. . . . But these persons especially deny that they possess things of an illustrious nature, as also Socrates did. Those, however, who pretend that they do not possess small things, and which are obvious, are called crafty or delicate deceivers, and are very contemptible men.30 The base connotation of the word lingers on in Theophrastus (372-287 B . C . ) . Untouched by Aristotle's partial vindication, he confines himself, in his "Character of the Ironical Man," to the qualities of cynicism, hypocrisy, and duplicity. There are points of contact with the comic tradition in the life of Socrates himself and in Plato's writings about him. Over and above the qualities already enumerated, the dialectical method of Socrates is that of a supersubtle eiron who feigns ignorance and draws out his interlocutors by disingenuous questions. Having maneuvered themselves into the trap, they have only themselves to thank when the jaws snap and the glaring absurdity of their position bursts upon them. An argument conducted along these lines is extremely difficult to meet. It makes no attempt to refute

94 THE ART OF SATIRE an opponent's logic, and offers no display of malice. A cloak of self-depreciation and sympathetic approval enables the ironist to extend the argument to absurdity. As in jiujitsu, the expert presses gently and the victim ties himself into knots. Plato's decision to use the dialogue form for his representation of the personality and the ideas of his master brings us close to comedy. Form in literature meant much more in the ancient world than it does today. Having elected a form, an author endeavored to abide by its conventions and respect its traditional subject-matter, tone, and decorum. The dialogue is semi-dramatic. The speakers are sharply differentiated. Their points of view may be conflicting, or erroneous. The dialogue is thus closely related to the Mime. It was in fact classed with the Mime by Aristotle and assigned to an intermediate position "between a poem and ordinary prose." 31 Originated by the Sicilian, Epicharmus, and developed by Sophron, the Mime made the eiron its hero, as comedy did, employed no chorus, was realistic in tone, and frequently contained philosophical or pedantic dissertations. The Socratic discourses represent one branch of the dialogue; the other branch is the "diatribe" (διατριβή), originated about the beginning of the third century by Bion of Borysthenes, — a coarser, more jocose offshoot of the Mime than the Socratic dialogue. If it seems curious that the sublime poetry of Plato should stoop to such a form, one can only point out that the Greeks took delight in the sportive discussion of serious ideas. Plato himself revealed the ironist's secret: "Serious things cannot

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be understood without laughable things, nor opposites at all without opposites, if a man is really to have intelligence of either." 32 The genre of literature called serio-comic (spoudaiogeloion) made this double attack on truth. The diatribe in particular, with its ethical tone, its informal manner, and its examination of human nature, is the literary ancestor of Roman satura in general, and the sermo in particular — the "discourse" of Lucilius, Horace, Persius, and Juvenal. In this way, the grand tradition of satire in the western world has an important source in the irony of the Greeks. IV.

CHAUCER

Socratic irony involves an understating of the whole personality. A writer who employs it deliberately handicaps himself and takes his chance that a few readers, at least, will have the penetration to share his private jest and give him due credit. The gay, incomparably felicitous irony of Chaucer's manner is as precious to us today as any other mark of his genius, yet between his generation and our own it lay unregarded, a quality which there were few to know, and very few to love. N o critic could wish his brother critics a more dismal fate than to take Chaucer at his own valuation. For he seems to be bashful and a little weak in the head: My wit is short, ye may wel understonde.33 He is all anxiety to please; when the monk scornfully dismisses the notion that monks should stay in their cloister and avoid meddling with secular affairs, Chaucer overflows with mock sympathy.

96

T H E A R T OF S A T I R E And I seyde his opinion was good. What sholde he Studie and make hymselven wood, Upon a book in cloystre alwey to poure, Or swynken with his handes, and laboure, A s Austyn bit? H o w shal the world be served? Lat Austyn have his swynk to hym reserved! 3 4

Perhaps his wit is too short to have taken in the popular outcry against the monopolies and exactions of churchmen in "the world," that is, the secular world. Yet he blunders on the truth in praising the parson, who "sette nat his benefice to hyre." 35 As for literary powers, he does not pretend to those. The Man of Law remarks that Chaucer is a prolific writer, "though he kan but lewedly on metres and on rymyng craftily." 36 In The House of Fame, Apollo's aid is invoked: But for the rym ys lyght and lewed, Yit make hyt sumwhat agreable, Though som vers fayle in a sillable; And that I do no diligence T o shewe craft, but ο sentence.37

Even the eagle, in the same poem, is led on by Chaucer's monosyllabic peeping to think of him as an ignoramus. " A ha!" quod he, "lo, so I can Lewedly to a lewed man Speke." 3 8

Elsewhere Chaucer is a mere stenographer, a translator, a harmless drudge. In setting down bawdy speech, he is only doing his duty: Whoso shal telle a tale after a man, He moot reherce as ny as evere he kan

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Everich a word, if it be in his charge, Al speke he never so rudeliche and large, Or ellis he moot telle his tale untrewe, Or feyne thyng, or fynde wordes newe.39 A truly appalling alternative, that Chaucer should write fictions! Alceste, the Queen of Love in The Legend of Good Women, is inclined to forgive him for writing heresies against her law; after all, he is so used to making translations that he pays no attention to his subject-matter, but drives his quill without knowing what he is saying.40 Again, in Troilus and Criseyde we hear nothing of sources and authorities for a long while prior to the harrowing scene in which Chaucer must tell of the degradation of his heroine. Criseyde is the most attractive woman in literature, and Chaucer has fallen in love with her as everyone must do. When it comes to describing her betrayal of love, he rebels. Thick and fast come the disclaimers of responsibility: "as bokes us declare," "in storye it is yfounde," "and after this the storie telleth us," "men seyn — I not [know not]," and so on.41 The impression of pain conveyed by this pretended compulsion adds immeasurably to the reader's sense of tragedy. When Chaucer abandons the crutch of translation and reporting, he promptly falls down. The Canterbury pilgrims have listened to the Prioress's tale, and even the hardest heart among them has melted in pity for the "litel clergeon, seven yeer of age." The Host feels responsible for dispelling the gloom into which the company have plunged. His covert glance falls on Chaucer and fastens there, as though he were taking him in for the first time.

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"What man artow?" he exclaims. The psychological crisis is over; the Host's huge but acute personality has found a natural butt for good-natured ridicule. And so Chaucer's portrait is drawn, in lines that never grow too familiar to be enjoyed anew: "What man artow?" quod he; "Thou lookest as thou woldest fynde an hare, For evere upon the grounde I se thee stare. "Approche neer, and looke up murily. Now war yow, sires, and lat this man have place! He in the waast is shape as wel as I; This were a popet in an arm t'enbrace For any womman, smal and fair of face. He semeth elvyssh by his contenaunce, For unto no wight dooth he daliaunce." 42 This is the very bearing of the ironical observer. In the company but not quite of it, observant of every nuance despite his downcast eyes, the little man with the round belly reveals to the Host's keen eye an aloofness of demeanor that is not at all inconsistent with Chaucer's earlier remark: So hadde I spoken with hem everichon That I was of hir felaweship anon.43 That is, though he is pleasant and courteous enough, he preserves his own detachment instead of wooing the regard of anyone. H o w highly Chaucer valued his own detachment may be seen in The House of Fame, which is his literary declaration of independence. It would be tedious to rehearse the course of events in detail. Chaucer eagerly undertakes to satisfy the Host by reciting the only tale he knows, and a foolish smile must

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light up his face as he makes the offer, for the host is full of gleeful anticipation: "Ye, that is good," quod he; "now shul we heere Som deyntee thyng, me thynketh by his cheere." 44 The tale that follows is of course the jerky, formless, namby-pamby Sir Thopas. In reality one of the best parodies in the language, as it jogs its absurd course it only succeeds in driving the Host to distraction. With a pained roar he cuts it short on hearing that the hero is a water-drinker. And Chaucer's crocodile tears flow once more as he complains of the interruption. A sorry enough figure Chaucer cuts thus far. But he has written many and many a love-lyric and love-story; perhaps he will shine as a lover. Alas, the Host's sarcastic description of him as "a popet in an arm t'enbrace" is borne out by the Envoy to Scogan, in which he counts himself among alle hem that ben hoor and rounde of shap, That ben so lykly folk in love to spede.45 He himself has no acquaintance with love; he only knows what he reads in the papers, as we say, but this secondhand information fills his innocent soul with an outsider's astonishment: For al be that I knowe nat Love in dede, . . . Yet happeth me ful ofte in bokes reade Of his myrakles and his crewel yre . . . But "God save swich a lord!" — I can na moore.46 In Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer humbly addresses himself to an audience of courtly lovers: For I, that God of Loves servantz serve, Ne dar to Love, for myn unliklynesse. . . .47

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Pandare is the embodiment of the fictitious personality that Chaucer's irony created for himself. Criseyde's remark well describes him, "O, whoso seeth yow, knoweth yow ful lite." 48 Yet for all his ironical sleights and his skill in other people's love affairs, he is notorious for his own ill success. At the start of the poem, Troilus spurns his aid: "Thow koudest nevere in love thiselven wisse: How devel maistow brynge me to blisse?"49 Pandare admits having failed often and grievously.50 Many a time, Chaucer remarks, love had turned Pandare's complexion green. On that momentous day, May third, when he began to soften his niece's heart towards Troilus, he rose from a bed of pain to which a reverse in love had sent him. His old wound is a standing jest between Criseyde and himself; 51 later, when she is tense and anxious over the reason for his morning call, he dissolves her fears by complaining of "a joly wo, a lusty sorwe" in his heart. She asks roguishly how he stands in love's dance. "By God," quod he, "I hoppe alwey byhynde!" And she to laughe, it thoughte hire herte brest.52 Our parting glimpse of Pandare's love-life throws a more sombre light over the whole; we wonder if our merriment may not have blinded us to an element of genuine pathos. Criseyde's departure has been decreed, and Pandare is at his wit's end trying to console Troilus. At a venture, he tells him that new love will drive out the old. Troilus turns the suggestion back on his friend with bitter irony: "But telle me now, syn that the thynketh so light To changen so in love ay to and fro, Whi hastow nat don bisily thi myght To chaungen hire that doth the al thi wo? . . .

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"If thou hast had in love ay yet myschaunce, And kanst it not out of thyn herte dryve, I, that levede in lust and in plesaunce With here, as muche as creature on lyve, How sholde I that foryete, and that so blyve? O, where hastow ben hid so longe in muwe, That kanst so wel and formaly arguwe?" 53 Only after many little brush-strokes of irony have been marked and enjoyed, can they coalesce into a new conception of Chaucer's literary personality. He uses himself as a master-character among the rest of his creations, and his ironical manner controls the tone, keeps his reader alert and amused, and diffuses an air of genial skepticism and penetrating humor through his major writings. He can extend this manner to characters within the narrative: the Clerk, for example, seems oblivious of the W i f e of Bath's discourse as he tells his tale, but at the close he turns and rends her in a satirical envoy; and the college boys of The Reeve's Tale seek most absurdly to understate their knowledge of the thieving miller's arts: "By God, right by the hopur wil I stände," Quod John, "and se how that the corn gas in, Yet saugh I nevere, by my fader kyn, How that the hopur wagges til and fra." 54 But it is Chaucer's own comments that warm and tickle our hearts. T h e y constitute almost a "little language" of their own. Such phrases as " T h o Pandarus a lyte gan to smyle" and "This yeman hym answerde in softe speche" are little windows of understatement that let in the sparkling humor of Chaucer's personality. T o one who understands this language, Chaucer's silences say more than other men's speech.

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T H E A R T OF SATIRE But God woot what May thoughte in hir herte, Whan she hym saugh up sittynge in his sherte. . . . How that he wroghte, I dar not to yow telle; Or wheither hire thoughte it paradys or helle.55

Some readers wonder whether Criseyde knew that she would meet Troilus when she accepted her uncle's invitation to pass the night in his house. Aside from the fact that Pandare's evasive words unquestionably told the whole story to her prescient understanding, and each knew that the other knew before the conversation ended, Chaucer contributes one of his pregnant silences at just the right moment: Nought list myn auctour fully to declare What that she thoughte whan he seyde so. . . .56 V.

INGENU

SATIRE

Never since Chaucer's death has irony of understatement been so expressive — and expressive not of chagrin and bitterness, but of the bright and happy laughter of the mind. The eighteenth century saw a flowering of irony in many forms. The most representative and interesting of these forms depends on an innocent, dewy-eyed, and Socratic or Chaucerian manner. A chain of voyages imaginaires, of both the realistic and the fantastic type, reaches from modern times back to the classics. Inasmuch as the "mental traveler" seldom fails to see civilizations better than his own, the Utopia falls within the same group. Gulliver's Travels, for example, contains realistic, fantastic, and Utopian elements; now one is upper-

IRONY, THE ALLY OF COMEDY 103 most, and now another. Both author and reader would find it excruciatingly wearisome to set forth a long series of comparisons between Cloud-cuckoo-land and England or France or Greece; the narrative would have no chance to gather momentum, and the satire would lose its wit. Such comparison is left to inference and to subtle suggestion. The hero, therefore, must be a plain, matter-of-fact sort of man, a close observer of detail, but no critic of higher principles and no philosopher. He may have his flashes of insight, but they must be infrequent, almost accidental, so as to keep the reader guessing. This formula achieved astonishing popularity in the eighteenth century. It is to be seen at its purest in what may be called ingenu satire, in deference to Voltaire's ironical romance, Ulngenu O757)· The "simple soul" had three incarnations. During the first third of the century and for long before, he was a traveler who set down a narrative of his marvelous adventures upon his return. After Gulliver's Travels (1726), he became a foreigner resident in England or France and described the wonders of European civilization in letters to his countrymen. Johnson's Rasselas and Voltaire's Candide (both 1759) set a fashion —the philosophical romance — that absorbed the two other types, helped to create romantic irony, and influenced the modern novel.57 For want of space, Gulliver's Travels must speak for the whole body of ingenu satire. A moment's reflection will show how essential to the success of the work is the hero's simple good-nature, his character as a normal, observant,

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but unperspicacious Englishman of the lower middle class. Gulliver is nothing if not patriotic: There were some laws and customs in this empire very peculiar; and if they were not so directly contrary to those of my own dear country, I should be tempted to say a little in their justification. . . . And to set forth the valour of my own dear countrymen I assured [my master] that I had seen them blow up a hundred enemies at once in a siege, and as many in a ship, and beheld the dead bodies come down in pieces from the clouds, to the great diversion of the spectators.58 With unconscious irony Gulliver gives the king of Brobdingnag a glowing account of the state of England. The monarch listens with rapt interest; when the panegyric is ended, he consults his notes and most Socratically puts a series of questions to Gulliver, touching education, government, justice, and finance in England. The questions take up four pages; the answers, which are not given, leave the king "wondering," "amazed," and "perfectly astonished." Then taking Gulliver into his hands and stroking him gently, he compliments him on his "admirable panegyric" and utters the most stinging irony ever penned, even by Swift — the famous denunciation of England, ending: I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.59 Gulliver's Travels is tragic and comic at the same time, as ironical works are apt to be. Gulliver sees and hears things so devastating to the self-respect of man as a rational or a political animal that he must cry, "Lend me a halter or a knife," had he the least spark of philosophy in

IRONY, T H E A L L Y OF COMEDY 105 him. But his naivete protects him, and the moral cataclysm overwhelms him only after his sojourn among the Houyhnhnms. The reader has a prodigious task to perform if he would follow all the cross-shafts of irony; indeed, it is too great a task for most minds, as the history of Swiftian criticism shows. Not only is it puzzling to follow Gulliver's manner as it changes from ingenuousness to dawning cynicism and at last to disillusioned alienation from all human affairs, but it is often difficult to follow the direction of the satire. T o be more specific, Gulliver sometimes laughs at absurdities in Lilliput — genuine absurdities and truly ludicrous, inserted by Swift to support his central fiction. A t other times, Gulliver despises foreign absurdities that prove on examination to be slightly distorted versions of absurdities actually to be found in European life. More frequently the imperfections of Gulliver's civilization are ironically assumed to be superior to the manifest excellencies of the civilizations visited.60 Accordingly, Gulliver is now in the position of a native being examined by foreigners, and now in the position of a traveler observing an exotic culture. It falls to the reader to work out an endless series of implied contrasts and comparisons. He must examine each pair of parallel lines to determine whether they are moving in the same direction or in opposite directions. Candide and Rasselas are ingenuous optimists who might as well be strangers in this world, for all they know of its ways. The wisdom of Imlac is no protection to Rasselas against the capricious bufferings of Fate; the glib maxim of Dr. Pangloss remains fixed in Candide's mind only because he is innocent to the point of feeble-mindedness. Sharing

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the author's superior knowledge of the world converts us into Gullivers gazing down on Lilliput in tolerant amusement. Beneath us the insect heroes butt their heads against stone walls that are plainly visible to us and, unmindful of reverses, continue their puny and valiant efforts. The descendants of these simple souls are the central characters — one hesitates to say heroes — of some of our most satirical modern novels. Theodore Gumbril in Antic Hay, Walter Bidlake in Point Counter Point, by Aldous Huxley; Paul Pennyfeather in Decline and Fall, Adam FenwickSymes in Vile Bodies, by Evelyn Waugh — all follow a common pattern. They are gray, subdued observers in a world of startling events and startling people. Mild and passive, they are carried along by life's current — sucked into whirlpools, dizzied in rapids, dropped in backwaters. Things happen to them; in so unequal a contest what is the use of making an effort? Through their wondering eyes we have a kaleidoscopic vision of a violent, chaotic, and purposeless civilization. They are ironical figures as they drift through life with disintegrated personalities and highly educated brains. Love touches them, but half-heartedly. They may succumb to a predatory female, or seduce an innocent one out of curiosity. Any stronger affection they resent as a glukupikric passion, a form of enslavement to a woman whom their intellect may despise. There is something new and striking in this development of the ingenu theme. Older writers used irony as a means of lending force to their creative beliefs. The Socratic irony takes wing into the Platonic myth. Swift's writings constitute an inverted evangel of

IRONY, T H E ALLY OF COMEDY 107 reason. Behind Voltaire's icy grin is the burning resolve, "Ecrasez I'infame!" But the irony of the modern hero serves no ulterior purpose and reveals no creative thought. It is irony for its own sake; a manner worn as a protective garment by a dissociated and neurotic personality. N o condemnation is intended. T o the extent that the modern world has destroyed our sources of sublimation and reduced us all to dissociated and neurotic personalities, we are happy to grasp at irony in order to preserve our sanity. It may be that the faith of the future will be a religion of irony, as Renan suggested: "We owe virtue to the Eternal, but we have a right to join to it irony, by way of personal reprisal." 61 Huxley, furthermore, has used irony with more originality and penetration than has any other English writer since Swift. A novelist has as much right to a dark vision of life as to a bright. When we meet our old friend, the ingenu, in Anatole France, Norman Douglas, Proust, Thomas Mann, Cabell, or Hemingway, 62 we must not make the mistake of looking beyond him for a revelation of truth. He himself is the revelation that Fate holds no prize to crown success; That all the oracles are dumb or cheat Because they have no secret to express; That none can pierce the vast black veil uncertain Because there is no light behind the curtain; That all is vanity and nothingness.63 Irony thus used is a confession of the soul's bankruptcy. Ordinarily, when the note of irony is struck, the hearers listen for the overtones. But the modern ingenu gives off no overtones. The listening ear is frustrated, the cleverness

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of the "little audience" is reduced to folly, the eiron is shown to be a pompous alazon, a sphinx without a secret. Hence this sort of irony turned back on itself is the natural vehicle for the writer who wishes to jar our civilization into the realization of its own frustration and spiritual chaos. Only vulgar criticism will condemn a work simply because it is pessimistic. Good taste, a sense of proportion, and a fundamental sympathy with mankind must be among the criteria. Some modern writers of ingenu satire will pass the test, and some will fail. In the gamble with oblivion, Anatole France and Aldous Huxley seem destined to survive the vagaries of literary fashion.

CHAPTER V

Irony, the Ally of Tragedy

For though fond nature bids us all lament, Yet nature's tears are reason's merriment. Romeo and Juliet It is a maxim of our fathers that there is in every god an element of the divine. Anatole France, Thais Immorality is the revolt against a state of things whose trickery one perceives. One must at the same time see it and submit. The dead planets are perhaps those on which criticism has killed the ruses of nature, and sometimes I imagine that, if everyone arrived at our philosophy, the world would stop. Renan, Dialogues Philosophiques How the moon triumphs through the endless nights! How the stars throb and glitter as they wheel Their thick processions of supernal lights Around the blue vault obdurate as steel! And men regard with passionate awe and yearning The mighty marching and the golden burning, And think the heavens respond to what they feel. James Thomson, The City of Dreadful Night

CHAPTER V

Irony, the Ally of Tragedy I.

D R A M A T I C IRONY

H E DISTINCTION between the world of uninitiate, common souls and the select few who share some special knowledge underlies every form of irony. This distinction must have been bitterly ruminated by Swift when he found that his defense of the Established Church in A Tale of a Tub had made him an object of horror in the eyes of pious Queen Anne, who thereafter refused to hear of his preferment. Defoe in the pillory must likewise have pondered the truth of the proverb, "nothing succeeds like success." And who can read the thoughts of the unfortunate man, trembling on the verge of religious conversion, to whom his mentor, Canon Ainger, innocently sent Samuel Butler's diabolical pamphlet, "In Defense of the Miraculous Element in Our Lord's Ministry upon Earth"? The sense of belonging to a privileged minority arises from verbal irony in solving the puzzle of inversion or understatement, and from irony of manner in penetrating the disguise of the ingenu. When the field of observation is enlarged from words or personalities to life as a whole and the ways of Providence, the sense of esoteric knowledge is conveyed through dramatic irony. The conflict of good and evil is the central fact of intellectual experience. From

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age to age, man wrestles with chaos, seeks to discover universal laws, and devises orderly, uniform arrangements of the universe. Social institutions, in the Occident at least, support that search for certainty by proclaiming the benevolence and justice of God, the fairness of the moral law, or the conquest of nature by the laboratory. Religion, philosophy, and science together provide the faith that is the motive power of civilization. From this body of belief is derived the "knowledge of life" of the masses. The dangers of such a system are those that confront the alazon in comedy: overstatement, overconfidence, failure to preserve the inconspicuous moderation wherein safety lies. Opposed to this general, vulgar knowledge is the private knowledge of the eiron: the horror of becoming a Pollyanna, the realization that blind chance can destroy all that the heart holds dear, the conviction that pride goeth before destruction, the observation that knowledge brings sadness, the suspicion that the universe is indifferent, or even hostile, to man. It was not for nothing that God forbad Adam and Eve to eat the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. In every attempt to regularize the cosmos, some allowance must be made for the Imp of the Perverse, for the jealousy of the gods, for the panurgic principle. The spectator of a tragedy has a number of advantages over the characters of the play. He is detached from them as they strut and fret in the shadow of their own passions. So the bystander smiles ironically to see the blind men each lay hold of a different member of the elephant and each swear to his own description of the beast. Furthermore, the

IRONY, T H E ALLY OF TRAGEDY 113 spectator has superior knowledge. He has come to see a tragedy, and he watches the protagonist unconsciouslydrawing nearer and nearer to disaster. Greek audiences were of course perfectly familiar with the traditional legends and myths to which the tragic poets restricted themselves. Their interest was not lessened by knowing the plot in advance; it was rather heightened, for they were relieved of the element of wonder. Instead of expending their energies on guessing at the outcome, as some readers impatiently flip over the pages of a detective story to get to the last chapter, they were free to concentrate on the play itself, on its meaning, and on the delicate shades of the author's art.1 Besides a superiority in factual information, dramatic irony presupposes a kind of secret knowledge in the audience. Lightning never strikes the hero out of a cloudless sky, else there would be no sense of tragedy. The storm may roll up swiftly and inconspicuously, but a man with a proper respect for heaven will read the signs. Who has not seen a cat fluffed up with electricity and looked out the window to find the sky heavy with thunder-clouds? On the stage, the cat is there to be seen. The hero, through egoism or a false sense of security, overlooks it; the audience, seeing it, sees through it to the oncoming catastrophe. Since disasters are commonly regarded as coming from heaven, manifestations of the supernatural are the stormwarnings of stage tradition. In Julius Caesar, the soothsayer cries, "Beware the Ides of March"; Casca describes the dreadful prodigies and portents in the streets of Rome; Calphurnia seeks to detain Caesar by recounting more por-

114 THE ART OF SATIRE tents and her dream of Caesar's statue spouting blood; the augurs inspect the entrails of a beast and find no heart; Cinna dreams of feasting with Caesar before he is torn to pieces; Caesar's ghost visits Brutus and promises to see him at Philippi; Brutus later says that the promise has been made good; Cassius tells how the two eagles have forsaken his ensign and how ravens, crows, and kites are its present guardians. The prophecy, the apparition, the dream, the monstrous portent, and the ill omen are so many warnings, lost on the actors, but charged with significance for the audience. They serve as preparation for the ultimate disaster, and they raise the suspense until the spectators' attention is riveted to every word. The possibility of God's malevolence toward offending mortals is clearly admitted by Greek religion and by the Old Testament. When evil is attributed to a rational cause, there is room for optimism. The New Testament, having progressed beyond an anthropomorphic god, is more pessimistic about earthly life, and provides an eschatology — the Coming of the Kingdom, the Raising of the Dead, and Judgment — to redress the injustices of this world. Modern writers generally refer the ironies of life to chance, but the Greeks had a more satisfying artistic symbolism in the gods. To the supernatural warning-signals already enumerated, we should add the voice of the god, or the oracle. A straightforward prognostication has no necessary connection with dramatic irony, but the gods, or perhaps their spokesmen, seldom commit themselves to plain statements. Chaucer's Criseyde, like many another holy man's daughter, inclines toward skepticism, saying, "For goddes speken in

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amphibologies."

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Macbeth, but not the audience, has been

deluded by the prophetic spirits That palter with us in a double sense; That keep the word of promise to our ear, And break it to our hope! 3

History and literature have a thousand similar tales to tell of the equivocation of the gods, or, in later times, of the devil and his crew. The most celebrated instance of divine quibbling is the story of Croesus. The Delphic oracle had proven its veracity by rightly declaring to his envoys that at a given moment Croesus was engaged in boiling a lamb and a tortoise together in a copper kettle. He therefore laid before it the question whether to make war on Cyrus or not, and received the reassuring answer, "Croesus, if he cross the Halys, shall undo a mighty realm." Of course, he crossed the Halys with his army and brought himself and his own realm to ruin.4 The original impulse to equivocation may have been no more than the desire of priests to keep up the credit of their shrine by rendering answers that would cover any eventuality. When the victim had interpreted the sacred words in the most favorable sense and had brought destruction on his own head, no one could hear the story without being struck by its irony. As for the oracle, no one could find it in his heart to blame it; had it not told the victim the truth? Only once is it recorded that anyone got the better of an oracle. A mission from Boeotia, seeking counsel at Dodona, was told by the priestess "that it would be best for them to do the most impious thing possible." Without a moment's hesitation, they laid

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hands on the priestess as she sat behind her cauldron of boiling water, And they upped with her heels And they smothered her squeals In the scum of the boiling broth. Two oracles furnish the spectators of Oedipus Rex with ironical foreknowledge. Oedipus had been exposed to die because Apollo in Delphi had warned Laius and Jocasta that their son was to kill his father and marry his mother. When the play opens, the prophecy has been fulfilled, and King Oedipus has sent to the oracle to learn how to drive out a frightful plague from his land. The answer comes, that the death of Laius must be avenged upon his slayer. The audience watches in fascination as Oedipus bends all his efforts to discovering the murderer — himself! Chaucer makes use of the deceitful oracle in The Knight's Tale. Mercury appears to Arcite, in exile from his love, and declares: To Atthenes shaltou wende, Ther is thee shapen of thy wo an ende.5 Again, Arcite prays to the statue of Mars before the battle: Yif me the victorie, I aske thee namoore.® Mars's hauberk rings, and a murmur of "Victory!" is heard. Both prophecies are fulfilled to the letter: Arcite loses his life in the hour of victory, and so his woe is at an end. In the last illustration is a further variant of dramatic irony, the granted wish that boomerangs back on the petitioner.

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Related as it is to the question of predestination and free will, this matter was often in Chaucer's mind. The philosophic theme of The Knight's Tale is to be found in Arcite's ironical meditation, taken from Boethius: Alias, w h y pleynen folk so in commune On purveiaunce of God, or of Fortune, That yeveth hem ful ofte in many a gyse W e i bettre than they kan hemself devyse? Som man desireth for to han richesse, That cause is of his mordre or greet siknesse. . . . Infinite harmes been in this mateere. W e witen nat what thing we prey en heere: W e faren as he that dronke is as a mous.7

From the equivocations of oracles, it is but a step to double-edged language used by characters in drama or fiction. A speech may be intended by the speaker, and received by the other stage-characters, at its face value. T o an audience prepared by ironic foreknowledge, it may convey a secondary and quite different meaning. Hearing such unintentional equivoques, one is apt to think: "He speaks truer than he knows." In the latter half of the Odyssey, Homer takes pains to make it clear that Odysseus will succeed in destroying the insolent suitors. The events between his landing in Ithaca and the death of the suitors take up eight books, but the abundance of detail is no clog on the reader's interest, for the reason that so many of the speeches and events are ironical in character. The wooers pit Irus against Odysseus, one beggar against another, and are convulsed with mirth to see Irus's bones crushed and his blood gushing out. Still laughing, they congratulate the victor:

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"May Zeus, stranger, and all the other deathless gods give thee thy dearest wish, even all thy heart's desire. . . ." So they spake, and goodly Odysseus rejoiced in the omen of the words.8 Eurymachus alludes in mockery to the brightness around the hero's head: Not without the gods' will has this man come to the house of Odysseus; methinks at least that the torchlight flares forth from that head of his, for there are no hairs on it, nay never so thin.9 When a suitor, Leiodes, has vainly tried to string the great bow, he exclaims: Ah, many of our bravest shall this bow rob of spirit and of life, since truly it is far better for us to die than to live on and to fail of that for which we assemble evermore in this place.10 Each of these passages gives the reader a little thrill, for he already knows that Odysseus will achieve his wish, that Athene has brought him home at last, and that the great bow will indeed rob many of life. Dreams, waking visions, signs, and portents help to create the atmosphere of delicate irony in which the reader moves as he follows the immortal story to its conclusion. The name, Sophoclean irony, is sometimes reserved for the use of double-edged language. Sophocles, however, employed it no more than Aeschylus or Euripides. It is best to regard dramatic irony, tragic irony, and Sophoclean irony as interchangeable terms. " T h e irony of Fate" is an expression that has caught the popular fancy. It is frequently used but more frequently abused, as in the sentence: "By the singular irony of fate, the shipment arrived two

IRONY, THE ALLY OF TRAGEDY 119 minutes before the embargo went into effect." "Oddly enough," "by a coincidence," or even "it so happened that" would have saved the writer from anticlimax. "Irony of Fate" has a right to exist in contexts where "dramatic irony" might be misleading, but it should be remembered that the two are usually indistinguishable in literature and that "dramatic irony" has the sanction of established usage. Our progress from verbal irony to irony of manner and thence to dramatic irony involves interesting changes in the point of view. The reader of verbal irony keeps his eyes close to the page, for he must wrestle with every sentence of inversion or understatement. T h e irony is presented to him, ready-made. In irony of manner, the ingenu collects his ironic materials behind the scenes; then, making his entrance, he presents the materials as simple and obvious truths. The audience wonders at the first discrepancy in his logic, grows suspicious at the second, and at the third discovers the fraud in the actor's manner. Thereafter, the audience is aware that all the facts and arguments presented have been chosen by the ringmaster. T h e y are warned that irony is present, but it is largely their responsibility to discover and interpret it for themselves. T h e ringmaster may be a fictitious character whose demeanor calls attention to the ironic materials. Pandare in Troilus and Criseyde, Theseus in The Knight's Tale, the simple hero of the philosophical romance, and the foreign observer are such characters. T h e ringmaster may, however, be the author himself, who steps into the performance from time to time in order to crack his whip and let it be seen that he is running the show. Chaucer in the outer framework of

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the Canterbury Tales, Swift in A Modest Proposal and An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity, Fielding in Jonathan Wild, give this sense of self-conscious control. In dramatic irony, the ringmaster disappears. There is no signpost, not even a misleading one, to inform the spectators that irony is present. All the work of detection and interpretation is left to them. There is no obligation to explore beneath the surface level of the narrative. As a result, everyone who does so is translated into a ringmaster on his own account. To detect for oneself the freakish operations of chance in human life, the opportunities missed by a hair, the warnings ignored, the prayers that, granted, bring destruction, is to be the omniscient author, to look down from a great height, and to feel a complete detachment from human affairs. This invisible irony has always been an important element in literature; indeed, it is present in almost every plot, just as in life it is possible to take an ironical view of any situation whatsoever, given the power of detachment and the superior information. One reason why the novel has shouldered aside other types of literature is that the novelist gives his readers godlike insight into his characters. Their heredity, social background, thoughts, even the operations of their unconscious minds, are made visible and, as it were, laid like a map under their own feet. The characters see the map partially and dimly, and their feet often go astray or at random; the reader, watching them move against the map, knows the reasons for failure or success better than they do themselves. The tendency of satirical novelists is to progress from

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burlesque to irony of manner and finally to dramatic irony, in which follies and vices speak for themselves without assistance. Fielding's career as a novelist began with a vitriolic parody, Shamela, and a more general burlesque, Joseph Andrews; next came Jonathan Wild, an exercise in irony of manner; next, Tom Jones, in which overt irony is largely restricted to the several introductory passages. Jane Austen graduated from the burlesque Love and Freindship to irony of manner in Νonhanger Abbey, in which she lets it be seen that she is laughing at her heroine's quixotism. Her career was crowned by Pride and Prejudice, in which irony is everywhere felt and nowhere conspicuous. Meredith, starting with the metaphysical burlesque, The Shaving of Shagpat, employs an ironic spectator (Adrian Harley) in The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, makes only sparing use of his ironic machinery of imps in The Egoist, and subsequently is content to let his actors make their own effects. Thackeray's career lends itself to a similar analysis. Conrad uses dramatic irony with exquisite art. His modesty, sincerity, and spiritual integrity made him detest literary chatter, mannerisms, and conspicuousness in an author. At the same time, his profound vision of human character and of destiny brought him to the threshold of mysticism. Hence the awe-inspiring complexity of his technical devices, those Chinese puzzle-boxes of a second narrative inside the first and a third inside the second. The points of view are enfolded within one another, but always kept simple and on a plane lower than the sophisticated reader's. Thus the reader's sense of Conrad's control is comparable to his sense of Shakespeare's control; and Conrad himself

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remains behind the scenes, elusive and fascinating.11 Youth, although comparatively simple in technique, takes the idea, "Si la jeunesse savait, si la vieillesse pouvait!" and builds a story thereon that is more crisscrossed by dramatic ironies than anything — I had almost said since Chaucer. Aldous Huxley is the novelist and satirist par excellence who gives the reader an illusion of omniscience about his characters. "Man . . . is a very unsatisfactory subject for literature," he declares. "For this creature of inconsistencies can live on too many planes of existence." 12 How many of these planes are presented to us in Point Counter Pointl Biological determinism is impressed on us by descriptions of the involuntary workings of cells, kidneys, spermatozoa; the emotional content of music is contrasted with the mechanics of sound waves and the auditory system; conventional sentimentalism and behaviorism jostle each other on the same page; the small actions of the present are projected against the historical past, of which the actors are unaware; the dignity of man as a rational animal is undermined by appalling revelations of the preponderance of irrationality in conduct and memory. These are but a few devices, which fail to do justice to the most ingenious ironist of modern times.13 II.

ROMANTIC IRONY

The distinctions made in the preceding section will go far, it is hoped, toward simplifying the concept of romantic irony. The hardy student who succeeds in penetrating this labyrinthine subject discovers that it is no single, logical division of thought, but a complex of religious, psycholog-

IRONY, T H E ALLY OF TRAGEDY 123 ical, and literary ideas. Only the nation that developed the Zeppelin could have assembled such disparate materials and kept them so long aloft in the ether of metaphysical speculation. Romantic irony never had much meaning outside Germany. Within Germany, it was accepted and discussed by two generations of critics without being defined or illustrated.14 Since its elements have been divided and separately discussed in these pages, it is mentioned here solely as a historical phenomenon. In his youth, Friedrich Schlegel was an enthusiastic supporter of the ancients against the moderns. He worshiped the Greeks for the objectivity of their art, and disliked his contemporaries for their subjectivity. A Greek artist scrupulously refrained from admitting any trace of his own personality to his work. Modern writings, however, contained so much of the author's personality that the reader's attention wandered back and forth from the creation to the creator. The ancients were objectiv, the moderns interessant.15 Schlegel's mind was perplexed by a guilty love for Shakespeare, whom he regarded as the most interessant of moderns and the incarnation of the romantic spirit. How were the instinctive enthusiasm and the critical theory to be reconciled? One hint was furnished by Schiller, whose celebrated essay, Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung (1796), classes Shakespeare as a "natural" or objective poet, together with Homer and Moliere and Goethe. A further hint came from theology. Theism is conventionally defined as a religious system in which God is both immanent and transcendent. Theism is thus set off against pantheism,

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in which God is immanent only, and against deism, in which God is transcendent only. Could not the artist be to his creation as God is to the universe, the objective creator who is yet revealed in all his works? Shakespeare was objectiv and interessant at the same time. His personality was elusive and inscrutable, yet it pervaded all his creations and was glorified by them. The way was now clear for Schlegel's spectacular conversion to romanticism. It was in the second number of the Athenaeum (1798) that he first proclaimed the supremacy of "die romantische Poesie," and thus converted the adjective — already a Modewort in some of its older uses — into the designation of an aesthetic ideal and the catchword of a philosophical movement.16 Thenceforth, to Schlegel and his followers, literature was romantic when the spirit of its author had been liberated by irony. This shift in meaning, from the objective appearance of irony to the internal attitude of mind of its author, opened the door to the subjective, mystical, and ego-worshiping propensities of the German romanticists. Fichte had seen human experience as conflict between the perfect freedom of the spirit and the limitations imposed on it. Man is engaged in the hopeless struggle to realize the absolute ego. The doctrine of romantic irony was a way of beating the game. The spirit of the creator flows in boundless freedom around his puppets. His love for them is seen in his perfect mastery of them, and they in turn testify to his power and glory. Solger called irony the operation of God's mind, wherein essence and actuality coalesce. Irving Babbitt sufficiently castigated such extravagances in

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his Rousseau and Romanticism. Professor Sedgewick has preserved Tieck's exquisite definition of irony as "the earnest and the highest proof of true inspiration, of that Etherspirit which, while it saturates its work with love, yet sweeps rejoicing and unfettered over the whole." 1 7 We should cheerfully take leave of the subject, committing it to those who enjoy being saturated with ether, were it not that a second variety of romantic irony calls for brief mention. Professor Lussky has clearly shown that some, at least, of the confusion surrounding romantic irony is caused by identifying the doctrine of Schlegel with the practice of Tieck, Goethe, Brentano, Heine, and the later romanticists in general. The quality that Schlegel prized was objectivity, the artist's selflessness which paradoxically compelled his audience to worship his godlike personality. The characters were indeed only puppets, but they behaved in a consistent and autonomous manner. Romantic irony as practised by Goethe and Tieck, however, involves the deliberate destruction of objectivity. The artist reveals his godlike control over his puppets by jerking the strings capriciously. Tieck's characters criticize their master's art; his plots are ostentatiously haphazard; his antic breaches of decorum constitute a steady stream of self-depreciation and selfparody. Shorn of verbiage and afflatus, these two strains of "romantic" irony may be easily identified in the light of the last two chapters. What Schlegel admired was dramatic irony, in which the author suppresses his own personality and arranges his materials in such a way that every spectator is his own ironic observer. Although the author is inscru-

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table, he is revealed in the choice and juxtaposition of materials. What Tieck practised was irony of manner, bolstered up by the traditional tricks of burlesque. Most of his artifices are calculated to reassure the stupid reader in his prejudices and to delight the astute reader by the concealed satire on those prejudices, literary, moral, and aesthetic. Tieck's fictitious personality, constantly intruding in his work, is reminiscent of Sterne, Cervantes, Fielding, and Byron, though less finished than any of these. In English, the best example of romantic irony is Sartor Resartus, in which lyricism and metaphysics, invective and allegory, are huddled together in the German tradition of soulful obscurity. In its day, romantic irony was thought to be a great discovery. Nothing that the romantic generation wrote in either the subjective or the objective variety was in any profound sense new, as I have just shown. The recognition of irony and of its immense importance in great literature was, however, something of a discovery. Strangely enough, the eighteenth century, which had performed such prodigies in both verbal irony and irony of manner, never troubled to break down its practice into principles of literary criticism. Dramatic irony was inconspicuous in the century; its rediscovery enriched not only literary criticism but belles lettres. Much of what an idolatrous generation professed to see in Shakespeare was not there, yet romantic criticism has bequeathed to us our sense of his finest and rarest powers. Among these, dramatic irony is not the least.

I R O N Y , T H E A L L Y OF T R A G E D Y III.

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COSMIC IRONY

The Ptolemaic system, as accepted by the Christian world, was none too kind to man in allotting him the lowest of cosmic habitations. His home was "the sphere of generation and corruption"; his existence was "sublunary." Only after death might his spirit escape from this earth, the catchall of the cosmos, and soar outward, through ever purer spaces, to its appointed destination. Yet there were important compensations. For all earth's imperfections, it was still the center of things. Man's lot might be tragic, but he was the hero of the cosmic drama. The universe was compact; its neat and logical system of concentric spheres not only quieted man's natural dread of the waste spaces of eternity, but provided those definitions, those limitations, without which man can no more move and act than a motor-car can move without a transmission. There is no motion without friction, in the moral as in the physical world. The Copernican revolution caused the older system to undergo a series of spasmodic contractions. It dwindled and dwindled, now to a tennis-ball, now to a pea, at last to a microscopic speck of dust. Man's self-importance, to his pained consternation, suffered a similar squeeze. Fortunately, the conservative force of religion was able to take up most of the initial shock. Little by little, over centuries, the full weight of the revelation came to be felt. Had it not been so, panic terror and insanity would have been epidemic. As it was, the time of greatest strain came in the nineteenth century. It is not generally known even today how many

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suicides and spiritual breakdowns and wrecked lives followed the advance of rationalism. In literature, irony is the shoe-horn of new ideas. T o the ironist, everything is relative, nothing absolute. Satire has always been a powerful agent in the secularization of thought, for it directs men's attention to their own conduct and teaches them that their faults lie in themselves, not in their stars.18 Irony in particular compels detachment and a remote point of view. It stretches the fibers of the brain. Swift exercised the imagination by making his readers look at the human race through the eyes of a giant, a tiny dwarf, and a horse. Voltaire's romance, Micromegas, uses the cosmic journey of Lucian's True History to produce a devastating sense of the relativity of things. An inhabitant of Sirius pays a call on one of the pygmies of Saturn, who is only 1,000 fathoms in height, and who laments possessing only 72 senses. Together they visit the earth and study men through a microscope. The human mites disclose their own madness or ignorance in respect to war, philosophy, and religion. Finally, a diminutive philosopher coolly surveys the visitors and announces that they, and all the suns and stars of the heavens, were created solely for the use of man. The conversation is ended when the giants explode in inextinguishable laughter. The expansion of the cosmos allowed the ironist to place his judgment-seat at a point so infinitely remote from human affairs that every "law" of sentiment, faith, and morality lost its absolute sanction and appeared as a strictly human makeshift. The process of disillusion and self-scrutiny advanced more rapidly in France than in England. Balzac,

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summarizing the progress of literature in a single year, comments as follows on the four most conspicuous books of 1830: In these four conceptions lies the literary genius of the epoch; in them is the cadaverous odour of a dead society. The anonymous author of the Physiologie du Manage [Balzac himself] takes pleasure in stripping away our illusions as to marriage, that first good of all societies. De Musset's Confession completes the book of M. de Lammenais, and declares that religion and atheism are both dead, killed by each other, and there is no consolation for the honest man who wants to commit a crime. Nodier arrives [with his Histoire du Roi de Boheme], casts a glance upon our city, our laws, our knowledge, and says, with a ringing laugh, "Knowledge! nonsense! what good does that do me?" and he sends the Bourbons to die in a stable in the shape of an old aristocratic mare. Then, in December, M. de Stendhal [in Le Rouge et le Noir] tears away the last shred of humanity, of human belief that remains to us, and tries to prove that gratitude is only a word like Love, God, Monarch. . . .They are all piercing satires, and the last is the laugh of a devil delighted to find in every man an abyss of selfishness in which all benefits are swamped.19 Cosmic irony is the satire of frustration, uttered b y men who believe that however high man's aspirations and calculations may reach, there is always a still higher, unattainable level of knowledge, in the light of which those aspirations and calculations must become stultified and abortive. Action loses all value in the light of this super-knowledge, for, in the words of Lowes Dickinson, "the springs of action lie deep in ignorance and madness." 20 One of the natural themes for cosmic irony is tedium. Robert Burton had felt the pangs of spiritual ennui, but in being driven in upon himself, he found something to feed on in his own breast.

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The greatest sufferer from tedium who ever lived was Leopardi, poet, pessimist, and brilliant prose-writer. He found vacuum not only in the world, but in his own heart. His spokesman in a dialogue declares an intention to commit suicide, not from any misfortune which has happened to me, or which I expect to overtake me; but from a disgust for life; from a tedium I endure, so intense that it resembles a pain or spasm; from a certain not merely knowledge, but sight, taste, touch of the vanity of everything that occurs to me throughout the day. Tedium is like air, which fills up all the spaces between material things and all the voids in the things themselves. . . . Suffering and tedium, in fact, are the stuff of which human life is made up, and a man only escapes from one of them to become the prey of the other.21 Leopardi's disciple and translator, James Thomson, echoes the same sentiments in Vane's Story (1864), an extraordinary satirical poem in which the spirits of Heine and Leopardi seem to combine: For I am infinitely tired With this old sphere we once admired, With this old earth we loved too well; Disgusted more than words can tell, And would not mind a change of Hell. The same old solid hills and leas, The same old stupid patient trees, . . . Same men with the old hungry needs, Puffed up with the old windy creeds; Old toil, old care, old worthless treasures, Old gnawing sorrows, swindling pleasures; The cards are shuffled to and fro, The hands may vary somewhat so,

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The dirty pack's the same we know Played with long thousand years ago; Played with and lost with still by Man, — Fate marked them ere the game began. I think the only thing that's strange Is our illusion as to change.22 If the spectacle of man, the lord of creation, desiring death out of sheer boredom is ironical, much more so is the spectacle of the creature turning in wrath against his Creator. Indictments of God are so numerous in nineteenth-century literature that only a small proportion of them can be mentioned here; the greater number are reserved for an Anthology for Cynics. Many of these attacks are identical in substance, but the motives behind them cannot be reduced to a single formula. Sometimes there is sincere pain for the loss of the most precious of illusions; or there may be chagrin and self-scorn, as in Chaucer's Merchant's Tale, for past folly; often satire is intended against those who still hold the traditional conception of the Deity. There is always ironical pretense. After all, despite the Irishman who said, "I am an atheist, God forgive me," a man does not argue with a god whom he no longer believes to exist, any more than he consults a doctor for a twinge in a wooden leg or false tooth. The pain is often real and severe, however, and it gives some satisfaction to turn the tables on even a dead god. The romantic poets of Germany came to familiar terms with God through their doctrine of romantic irony, which made them equal to God in respect of their own writings. For all his religious enthusiasm, Schlegel handled the Creator

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pretty roughly in calling him "der grosse Maschinist im Hintergrunde des Ganzen." Heine's wicked impertinence is at its most delightful when he moralizes on his own terrible sufferings at the end of the Concessions·. What does it profit me that all the roses of Shiraz open and burn for me, fulgent with passion? . . . Alas, the mockery of God weighs heavy upon me. The great Author of the Universe, the Aristophanes of Heaven, has resolved to make the petty earthly author, the so-called Aristophanes of Germany, feel keenly that his wittiest sarcasms are in fact but pin-pricks compared with the thunderbolts of satire which the Divine humor can launch against frail mortals. Yes, the bitter flood of railleries which the great Master pours on me is terrible, and the cruelty of his epigrams makes me shudder. At the moment of death, he is said to have remarked airily, "Dieu me pardonnera; c'est son metier." In a wild and lovely poem on "The Gods of Greece," he proclaims his hatred for the deities of Greece and Rome; yet, when he considers how knavish and windy are the gods who overcame them, he is ready to fight for the fallen Olympians. The same aversion to the new order is expressed in The Gods in Exile and in many other places. So Leopardi's poem " T o Spring" and Schiller's "Gods of Greece" passionately lament the banished divinities. Shelley's youthful invectives against God and Christ in Queen Mab 23 need no quotation. Although he outgrew the crude iconoclasm of that poem, he predicts the overthrow of Christianity in the glorious chorus of Hellas, "Worlds on Worlds are rolling ever." Equally familiar are Swinburne's strictures on the "pale Galilean" and "the ghastly glories of saints, dead limbs of gibbeted gods." Swinburne helped to "discover" The Rubaiyat, a year after its unre-

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marked appearance in 1859. In his "Essay on Social Verse," he singled out as "the crowning stanza" of the poem a quatrain that contains the essence of cosmic irony: Oh Thou, who Man of baser Earth didst make, And ev'n with Paradise devise the Snake: For all the Sin wherewith the Face of Man Is blacken'd — Man's forgiveness give — and take!

24

It is significant that neither the Persian text nor any other translation approaches the thought of this quatrain. Entirely original with FitzGerald is the firecracker at the end, the last two words that convey a world of ironic reproach. FitzGerald's literal-minded Persian teacher wrote to him about the "mistake" of introducing the snake and inventing the last line, but "he never cared to alter it." 2 5 Small wonder! Anyone who troubles to read a literal prose translation will be struck by the frequency with which FitzGerald gives Omar a dexterous twist to bring out the tragi-comedy of man's chagrin when faced by the choice between a blasted universe and an intolerable God. James Thomson is the laureate of cosmic irony. N o other writer has treated disillusion with greater sincerity, and none save Lucretius has wrought more beauty out of materials that seem abhorrent to poetry — mechanism, depression, and despair. Little as The City of Dreadful Night lends itself to quotation, one out of many ironic passages may be given. The poet in his Dantesque journey about the City hears a voice uplifted in the gloom: "Who is most wretched in this dolorous place? I think myself; yet I would rather be My miserable self than He, than He Who formed such creatures to his own disgrace.

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THE ART OF SATIRE "The vilest thing must be less vile than Thou From whom it had its being, God and Lord! Creator of all woe and sin! abhorred, Malignant and implacable! . . . "As if a Being, God or Fiend, could reign, At once so wicked, foolish, and insane, As to produce men when He might refrain! "The world rolls round forever like a mill; It grinds out death and life and good and ill; It has no purpose, heart or mind or will. "Nay, does it treat him harshly as he saith? It grinds him some few years of bitter breath, Then grinds him back into eternal death." 26

Many other Victorian writers taunted God in this bitter and superior fashion. Hardy and Housman carried the practice past the turn of the century, and examples are still plentiful, in Osbert Sitwell's Collected Satires and Poems, for instance. In America, Eugene O'Neill continues to belabor the Creator. All God's ChilVun is not a statement of a white girl's folly in marrying a negro; it is an indictment of God, who can let such things happen, and its central thought is, "How can He forgive himself?" The most conspicuous God-baiting in American letters, and perhaps the finest use of sustained irony, occurs in Mark Twain's The Mysterious Stranger. This allegorical fantasy is the distillate of its author's anticlericalism and pessimism. The Stranger is Satan, whose explanations reveal how often men wish for the things that would only bring them torture.27 Before leaving the earth, he condescends to impart cosmic enlight-

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enment to his friends in words of ironic pity that sum up the meaning of the whole book: "Strange! that you should not have suspected years ago — centuries, ages, eons, ago! — f o r you have existed, companionless, through all the eternities. Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fiction! Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane — like all dreams: a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and invented hell — mouths mercy and invented hell — mouths Golden Rules, and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for men's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor abused slave to worship him!" 28 And for once, Mark Twain utters no anticlimax. If some writers, as has been remarked, disbelieve in the God whom they berate, we must understand them aright. T h e y are sharply to be differentiated from serious opponents of the Christian Church like Bradlaugh, Foote, Reade, and Holyoake. One group is writing literature, the other is writing propaganda. The quality that divides them is irony. Mark Twain and the rest follow the Socratic course of caressing the object which they mean to demolish. A t its worst, the process degenerates into beating a dead dog,

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but, as the cleric remarked, "Any stigma is good enough to beat a dogma." The superior knowledge of irony is present as well as the duplicity. The multitude who cling blindly to their prejudices are satirized; the former ages of men, lost in superstition, are satirized; the very nature of man is satirized by cosmic irony. If the universe is a fraud, the author himself is "sold"; the only difference between him and the vulgar many is that he, like Socrates, knows it, and they do not. He attains his knowledge in the usual fashion for irony, by detaching his emotions from the conflict and rising to a lofty position above it. It is from this elevation, carried to the extreme altitudes of stellar space, that the bombshells of cosmic irony are dropped. Besides tedium vitae and the revolt against God, a third theme for cosmic irony is the vision of earth as a speck of dust. This idea has reached even children. Many a smudgy composition has likened the earth to a ball of mud and man to a miserable fungus. Every reader can illustrate the thought from his casual reading. One interesting example is to be found in " A Cosmic History" by Frederic W . H. Myers, a poet who deserves to be better known. Out of the bitterness of superior knowledge, he addresses himself ironically: Come then, poor worm at war with Fate,— (What inward Voice spake stern and low?) Come, paltry Life importunate, Enough of truth thou too shalt know; Since man's self-stirred out-reaching thought Hath seen in visions sights of awe; Hath from a darker Sinai brought Damnations of a vaster Law.

IRONY, T H E A L L Y OF T R A G E D Y 137 He tells how the iron hail of the flaming cosmos formed comets and nebulae; how the earth cooled and life appeared. The gods were invented to account for man's sufferings, but the gods themselves await their end, "Forth-gazing on the waste of things with stern philosophies of woe." Ultimately, freezing darkness will steal over the cosmos, yet the laws of the conservation of matter and energy will still hold: Nor yet thereby one whit destroyed, Nor less for all that life's decay, Thro' the utter darkness, utter void, Sweeps the wild storm its ancient way: Still fresh the stones on stones are hurled; Their soulless armies shall not fail; — Beyond the doom of world and world Drives in the night the iron hail.29 The ironist looks more deeply than most men into the laws of cause and effect and of unconscious motivation. Men and women, in his view, tend to become puppets, jerked about by their passions. He therefore finds ways of extricating himself from the normal, or vulgar, point of view with its fatal limitations. Semonides sees women as foxes, bitches, polecats, and mares; Ennius tells man that the ape is the spitting image of him; Chaucer soars into the heavens to gain perspective on fame; likewise the soul of Troilus, escaping to the eighth sphere, laughs with cosmic irony at the mourners at his own funeral and at the vanity of human life. Cosmic irony represents the most distant perspective, the most complete detachment, that it is possible to achieve in the present state of knowledge.

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T H E A R T OF SATIRE IV.

TRAGEDY AND COMEDY

If irony is an escape from the passions, how does its presence affect the feelings roused by tragedy and by comedy? Tragedy creates sad feelings, comedy merry feelings, yet the essence of both escapes from so crude a distinction. If, in sauntering down the sidewalk, one hears the scream of brakes and turns to see a pedestrian mangled by a motorcar, one's unprepared senses suffer a terrifying shock. Yet this is scarcely the stuff of tragedy, even though the victim were the beholder's brother. A bad melodrama administers similar shocks by piling up horrors no one of which is sufficiently "motivated." That is, the calamities depend on coincidence or on acts of God and so are unforeseen by spectators who thoughtfully study the unfolding plot. The villain tries to supply the playwright's deficiencies by wearing sinister mustachios and otherwise exaggerating his ferocity. The virtuous hero lectures, the villain leers lecherously, the heroine lachrymates; though these crude shifts the audience learns what to expect. Even this is not enough; the play leaves the onlookers disagreeably agitated, or, more frequently, perfectly indifferent owing to their withdrawal of sympathy. Katharsis is achieved when the feeling of tragedy is not confined to acts of murder or suicide but is spread more or less evenly over the entire play. A climax must be the culmination of a series of actions; it cannot materialize out of thin air, like the Cheshire Cat, and still be a climax. The necessary preparation and suspense are created by dramatic irony. In studying a tragedy, it is instructive to follow the

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devices whereby the excess of tragic feeling is removed from the actual catastrophe and transferred to apparently insignificant events. If it is known that an acquaintance is to lose his life through tripping on a shoelace and falling under a train, there is horrible fascination in watching the petty offices of his morning toilet and in observing his failure to tie the fatal shoelace. Painful as his death will be, it will not stun us or derange our minds. Thus when the whole chain of causation is known, the little links become just as important as the big ones. Criseyde's "slyding of corage," Desdemona's handkerchief — trifles, but what tragic trifles! A catastrophe loses its worst terror as soon as rational causes can be found to explain it. Dramatic irony fixes the responsibility for the tragedy and helps to reconcile the audience to it. Not only are the spectators raised above the actors by superior knowledge, but their knowledge is different in quality as well as in quantity. Elevated as they are, they see something ridiculous in the power of a handkerchief to destroy lives, or, as Swift observed, the power of an anal fistula to crush empires. Moreover, for all their sympathy and pity, they feel a grim, ironic humor in watching from security while the victim walks into the jaws of a practical joke elaborately prepared by destiny. Earthly tragedy is the comedy of the Aristophanes of Heaven. If irony injects an element of comedy into tragedy, no less does it inject tragic feeling into comedy. Without irony, tragedy degenerates into melodrama and comedy into farce. Falstaff in a buck-basket is a descent artistically from Falstaff describing the man in buckram and later assur-

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ing the Prince that he spared him "upon instinct." Comic irony makes us see the ridiculous contrasts in every human being, and understand the saying that everyone has the defects of his virtues. Behind every saint lurks a hypocrite. Study the Great Man's shadow, and see a thug. N o human being, however sublime, is altogether free from the ridiculous and the pitiful. Cervantes and Hogarth and Fielding are called comedians, but who teaches the lessons of tragedy better than they? Irony, then, is that common genius of tragedy and comedy which Alcibiades in the Symposium promised to explain, just before he collapsed under the table. Laughter and tears are reconciled in irony; it brings laughter to tragedy and tears to comedy. The traditional antithesis between tears and laughter has long since been broken down by students of comedy. They are complementary rather than antithetical. Tears flow more freely at a wedding than at a funeral: it is no uncommon sight to see a bridesmaid weeping quietly into her champagne. More than any other form, the novel offers scope for the parallel development of tragic and comic themes. Troilus and Criseyde (if one may take advantage of the truism that it is the first psychological novel) is technically a tragedy. At the same time it is exquisite comedy, to be matched only by Shakespeare. Not until The Ordeal of Richard Feverel were romance, comedy, and tragedy to be blended in such nice proportions. Each work contains so much of irony that a book as long as this one would be required fully to analyze it. Balzac projects before his readers such a gigantic panorama of society that they feel La Comedie humaine to be the only adequate title.

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Are Anatole France and Aldous Huxley more tragic or more comic? It is impossible to say. They are ironists. Irony acts as a counterpoise to the emotions raised by either tragedy or comedy. It furnishes an alternative scale of values which prevents the spectator from being altogether carried away by sympathy with the actors. His attention is fascinated, but his identity remains intact. Irony increases his sense of being a spectator, so that his sensibilities are not overwhelmed by the vicissitudes of the dramatic action. In the same way, irony tends to neutralize all passions and to turn all men into spectators of the human comedy. Up to a point, this is a useful function. Irony delights in the collision of opposites. When the mind is paralyzed by conflicting drives, irony offers a way of escaping from the conflict and rising above it. The reason is saved from the shattering effect of divergent commands, and the mind regains its equilibrium. V.

T H E A B U S E OF IRONY

A man is taught from earliest childhood that nature is a kind mother, that the universe exists for the benefit of man, that God takes a personal, fatherly interest in the welfare of His children. If he is so unfortunate as to meet and accept new ideas that shatter the foundations of his cosmos, his whole personality is racked and torn in selfconflict. During the second half of the nineteenth century, many thoughtful and sensitive men read their Lyell, their Darwin, their Strauss and Renan, and suffered the loss of all that their hearts held dear. The result was the outburst of cosmic irony that has just been described. A poet might

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gain peace of a sort by closing his eyes and ears to the conflict and devoting himself to "art for art's sake," or if he chose to accept the gage, he might embark in the ironic balloon, rise to God's sphere, and soar above it, until the earth appeared a speck of cosmic dust and human affairs seemed matter for shrill and godlike laughter. Irony offers an escape from mental pain, as morphine offers an escape from physical pain. T o adopt either one as a fixed and permanent habit leads to disintegration of the personality. T o use irony skilfully for the highest artistic purposes is extraordinarily difficult; to wear it as a protection against the sunshine and rain of life is easy. N o one grows more trying than the acquaintance whose shoulders are set in a perpetual shrug, whose superior smile flows in hateful tolerance around every idea; he can expound the good side of cannibalism as well as the bad, explain why it is inevitable that Oxford Groupers and atheists should think as they do, and point to his own failures as interesting examples of the mechanical operation of heredity and environment. Delightful at first, he grows less so as it appears that the habit of irony is an escape from responsibility. The springs of action are dried up, for in the nightmare world of relativity nothing is worth doing, all things considered. It is better to talk and to analyze than to do. The inveterate ironist escapes from paralysis of the mind only to fall a victim to paralysis of the will. Meredith, one of the masters of irony, was keenly alive to its abuse. Our delight in Adrian Harley, the wise young Epicurean, "whom Epicurus would have scourged out of his garden," is mingled with contempt and ultimately with

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loathing as we find him untrue to one obligation after another. Yet he is always charming, always reasonable, always Olympian. He had no intimates except Gibbon and Horace, and the society of these fine aristocrats of literature helped him to accept humanity as it had been, and was; a supreme ironic procession, with laughter of the Gods in the background. Why not laughter of mortals also? 30 Meredith's later heroes resist the seductions of the ironic way of life. Active, athletic, matter-of-fact, and normal, they pit themselves against everything that we should today call neurotic. Redworth, the hero of Diana of the Crossways, utters the following outburst: Upon my word, I should like to write a book of Fables, showing how donkeys get into grinding harness, and dogs lose their bones, and fools have their sconces cracked, and all run jabbering of the irony of Fate, to escape the annoyance of tracing the causes. And what are they? nine times out of ten, plain want of patience, or some debt for indulgence. There's a subject: —let some one write, Fables in illustration of the irony of Fate: and I'll undertake to tack-on my grandmother's maxims for a moral to each of 'em. We prate of that irony when we slink away from the lesson — the rod we conjure. And you to talk of Fate! It's the seed we sow, individually or collectively.31 Historically, irony is the meeting-place of jest and earnest. It is abused when it is treated as a canal through which the stream of life is diverted into ridicule and absurdity. It is an intellectual instrument, and it demands a creative purpose. The high seriousness that burns through Swift's elaborate trifling, his moral integrity and quintessential sanity, and the amazing purposefulness of every one of his

T H E A R T 144 OF SATIRE ironical compositions are the pillars on which his greatness rests. Irony is negative in its nature. It reaches the height of its electric force only when it is used for a positive, creative purpose. Lacking such purpose, romantic irony and cosmic irony at their most extravagant convey an impression of megalomania and frustration — of weakness, not of strength.

CHAPTER VI

The Evolution of English Satire

No tyrant, no tyrannous idea ever came crashing to earth but it was first wounded with the shafts of satire: no free man, no free idea ever rose to the heights but it endured them. Gilbert Cannan, Satire Satire is a lonely and introspective occupation, for nobody can describe a fool to the life without much patient self-inspection. Frank M. Colby, Simple Simon Satire, always as sterile as it is shameful and as impotent as it is insolent, paid them that usual homage which mediocrity pays to genius — doing, here as always, infinite harm to the public, blinding them to what is beautiful, teaching them that irreverence which is the source of all vileness and narrowness of life, but harming the artist not at all, rather confirming him in the perfect Tightness of his work and ambition. Oscar Wilde, The English Renaissance of Art I had already flitting through my head . . . a conviction that we should satirize rather than praise, that original virtue arises from the discovery of evil. If we were, as I had dreaded, declamatory, loose, and bragging, we were but the better fitted — that declared and measured — to create unyielding personality, manner at once cold and passionate, daring long pre-meditated act; and if bitter beyond all the people of the world, we might yet lie — that too declared and measured — nearest the honeyed comb. Yeats, Autobiographies

CHAPTER VI

The Evolution of English Satire I.

PRIMITIVE SATIRE

S

INCE the time when Odysseus bashed in Irus's skull and all the wooers "died outright for merriment," laughter has been undergoing a constant process of refinement. Nowadays, cripples suffer as much from unsolicited sympathy as they used to endure in former times from mockery and banter. It is shocking to reflect that two short centuries ago one of the stock diversions of the Londoner was going to watch the lunatics at their antics. The pleasure of this spectacle need not be solitary, for there were girls aplenty to be encountered in front of the madmen's cages. Today we laugh as often as our ancestors did, but our laughter is less derisive than theirs. The sight of suffering in man or beast moves us to sympathetic pain. Each outcry of the hunted hare A fibre from the brain does tear. A good rousing Jew-hunt is no longer first-class entertainment even for the Nazis; and it scarcely raises a smile to read how Chaucer's Prioress would weep full sore if one of her little dogs received a blow. Satire has gone the same road, yoked to laughter as it is. It has followed the usual zigzag course of human progress, advancing a yard only to fall back a foot, but its general

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direction has been toward greater sensibility and understanding. Foreigners and national enemies are primeval objects of satire. Dr. Johnson spoke for generations of Englishmen when he said, "Sir, for all I can see, foreigners are fools!" A line of pitiless satires, from Laurence Minot's bloodthirsty exultations to Cleveland's Rebel Scot, and from Churchill's Prophecy of Famine to The House with the Green Shutters, testifies to the popularity of the Scots as objects of detestation to the English. Sooner or later, however, a "True-Born Englishman" will arise to jest and jeer at his own nation. An Addison further undermines the solidarity of the group by delicately filliping a man's very acquaintances in their sensitive spots. Closer and closer fly the darts of the satiric spirit: enemies, countrymen, friends are transfixed, and at last the ironist turns his weapon upon himself, with a confession of impotence and ignorance. Since the targets of ridicule have been set up ever closer to the satirist, satire has transcended its original function of sorcery. If an enemy is beyond the reach of persuasion, bribery, or physical compulsion, magic offers the only hope of controlling him. Once the ally of brute force, satire is now the instrument of social and ethical reform and of selfimprovement. N o one interested in the early history of satire can afford to overlook Professor Robinson's delightful Satirists and Enchanters in Early Irish Literature, a classic among monographs. All ancient literatures hint at the prevalence and dignity of satire in early times. Etymologists have suggested a connection between Old English scop, Old High German scof, "poet," and our verb, "to scoff"; between Old Norse

T H E EVOLUTION OF ENGLISH SATIRE 149 skald, "poet," and our "scold," German schelten; between Irish faith ("poet"; cognate with Latin votes) and Welsh givaivd, "mockery." The popularity of the Zauberlied (incantation) and the Spottlied (song of mockery) among the Germanic peoples is well established. Old English likewise had its bismerleop, or "disgrace-song." Only the early literature of the Irish, however, is archaic enough to preserve clear records of the early flowering of satire. The Irish possessed laws to control the activities of satirists. Destructive spells and poems of slander or abuse were all thought of together as the work, and it sometimes seems almost the chief work, of the tribal man of letters. . . . Numerous provisions concerning satirists appear in the ancient law of the land; their maledictions are even recognized among the sanctions of treaties; rules for the making of satires are laid down in the native treatises on poetry; and in the ancient popular sagas the part of satirist is played again and again by important poets, whose power often determines the fate of great national heroes.1 The belief that the Irish possess the power of rhyming rats to death survives in English literature to the present day. The most familiar of the examples collected by Professor Robinson 2 is Rosalynd's exclamation in As You Like It·. I was never so berhymed since Pythagoras' time, that I was an Irish rat, which I can hardly remember. Early Arabic literature, less archaic than Irish, contains the same mixture of incantation and literary satire, but the literary element now preponderates.3 By comparison, even the earliest Greek literature is highly sophisticated, yet some remnant of the awe once felt for satirists may be seen in the oft-told story of Archilochus,

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whose iambics drove Lycambes to suicide. A similar legend was told of Hipponax. These tales mark a turningpoint in culture; thereafter, satire is enlisted in the service of rationalism and its hardest blows are struck against superstition. As its magical functions declined, satire drew more and more nourishment from its secondary tap-root leading back into the origins of comedy. The rustic festival, the village procession fairly crackling with caustic repartee, the traditional license — verbal and otherwise — of the orgy, were fixtures of Greek life. In Italy contests of abuse, carried on in Fescennine verses, contributed to the festival spirit and were a feature of the recurrent phallic ceremonies.4 The tradition of verbal license lived long among the folk of Italy and France. It crystallized once in the Roman satura, later in the Italian medley, or burlesque satire, of Pulci, Boiardo, Ariosto, Folengo, and Casti. No less than by these, Byron's later satiric manner was influenced by the still-surviving art of the improvvisatore. In France, Feasts of Asses, Feasts of Fools, and boy-popes burlesqued the Mass — sermon, Host, and all — and profaned cathedrals in the most extraordinary ways until they were finally suppressed in the sixteenth century. II.

INVECTIVE SATIRE

Anglo-Saxon culture knew nothing of this fine satiric frenzy of the mind. The lips were better occupied in pulling at the mead-horn than in uttering nonsense. The taunt, the battle-invective, the cryptic understatement are rudimentary forms of satire, expressive at times of a grim nobil-

T H E EVOLUTION OF ENGLISH SATIRE 151 ity. The Norman Conquest partially reconciled England to frivolity. Much has been made of Chaucer's satiric technique in the foregoing pages. Where he learned his art has not yet been perfectly explained. The fabliaux doubtless taught him dramatic irony; Jean de Meun's continuation of Le Roman de la Rose taught him some of the sleights of irony of manner; Dante and, even more, Boethius quickened his sense of philosophic irony. Burlesque romances like The Tournament of Totenham, The Felon Soive and the Friars of Richmond, and The Hunting of the Hare date from the fifteenth century, but they doubtless had prototypes upon which Chaucer improved in his matchless Sir Thopas. The Nun's Priest's Tale is a mock-heroic based on the Reynard cycle. Compared with Chaucer's scintillating rapier, the weapons of English satirists before and for some time after him are rude clubs or pedants' ferules. Whether English satire, left to its own devices, would have followed the moral vein of Langland, Wyatt, and Gascoigne or the eccentric course of Dunbar and Skelton is an interesting question, but one that may be left in suspense. For an interruption came in the form of a revival of the Roman satura. The history of modern verse satire begins with the publication of Joseph Hall's Virgidemiarum Sex Libri in 1597-1598. With Hall, satire comes of age; it becomes aware of its own powers and of its past; but its adolescence, like that of a human being, suffers from self-consciousness and awkwardness. The literary coterie of London was exposed to sudden gusts of fashion, just as we are today. The pastoral, the sonnet, the poem in classical meter, the erotic poem, one after another had its

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day and declined. Fresh from Cambridge, Hall bravely announced a new fashion, crying: I first adventure: follow me who list, And be the second English satirist.5 His invitation was heeded; the wind of poetic fashion veered around and blew sharp satire for some time. Marston, with a suggestion of tongue in cheek, out-bombinates Hall; then follow Guilpin, " Τ . M." (the author of Micro-cynicon), Rowlands, Wither, and Ben Jonson. N o extended discussion of Elizabethan satire is possible here, yet something may be said about the canons of formal satire. Over-eager to follow in the footsteps of the great Romans, the Elizabethans framed a series of laws for satire which were confusing even to the lawmakers, and which have kept the subject of satire in a state of confusion ever since. In the first place, Elizabethan differed from modern scholarship in finding Horace, Juvenal, and Persius obscure, crabbed, and difficult. Persius alone, owing to the abrupt transitions of the dialogue, seems hard to translate today. Drant declared in his translation of Horace (1566), "I can soner translate twelve verses out of the Greeke Homer than sixe out of Horace," and he was referring not to the Odes but to the simpler satires. Hall has a like feeling about the Roman ancients, Whose words were short, and darksome was their sense. Who reads one line of their harsh poesies, Thrice must he take his wind, and breathe him thrice.6 Part of the difficulty may be attributed to the Elizabethan passion for moral allegory. Bacon expounded the truths of

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nature hidden in classical mythology, and scholars found complicated allegories in Homer and Virgil. N o doubt readers of Horace and Juvenal struggled to discover a body of concealed doctrine in their pages. Satire must then be darksome in its sense and full of innuendo; even more, it must be rugged and unmusical. Gascoigne explains in The Steel Glass that the lady Satyra is not Poesy, but her sister. Vaine Delight, having ravished her, cut out her tongue to cloak his villainy. Yet, says she, with the stumps of my reproved tong, I may sometimes, Reprovers deedes reprove, And sing a verse to make them see themselves. Spenser disdains to compose an invocation for Mother Hubberds Tale·. No Muses aide me needes heretoo to call; Base is the style, and matter meane withall. Hall echoes him in his first satire: Nor need I crave the Muse's midwifery To bring to light so worthless poetry. The "Defiance to Envy" speaks of his "refuse rhymes." Hall's principal fear is that he may not be able to suppress the poetry and the music of his verses. He tries his hardest, as in the following lines, but still he cannot match the fearsome obscurity of the ancients. Who dares upbraid these open rhymes of mine With blindfold Aquine's, or dark Venusine, Or rough-hewn teretisms, writ in the antique vein, Like an old satire, and new Flaccian.7

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The tradition of roughness was corroborated by an etymology that made satire appear to be the harsh taunts of the uncouth satyr as he surveyed civilized man.8 More important, however, was the misconception of Horace's style. Horace tried to make the metrical form of his satires as unobtrusive as possible. So Lucilius had done before him; so Persius did after him. This commonness of idiom was mistaken for intentional obscurity. It is noteworthy that Horace was scarcely appreciated, even by Dryden, until the eighteenth century, when delicate irony and common sense were extolled. Virgidemia means a bundle of rods, used for scourging malefactors. The Elizabethan formal satirist felt obliged to wield the flail with might and main. Relying on a partial and mistaken view of the classical satura, Hall uttered his famous definition: The Satire should be like the porcupine That shoots sharp quills out in each angry line, And wounds the blushing cheek and fiery eye Of him that hears and readeth guiltily. Ye antique Satires, how I bless your days, That brooked your bolder style, their own dispraise.9 Of almost equal interest is Hall's sanguine estimate of the effect of satire on its victim: Now see I fire-flakes sparkle from his eyes, Like a comet's tail in th' angry skies; His pouting cheeks puff up above his brow Like a swoln toad touched with the spider's blow.10 The writers of satire were young men, and it is hard for youthful censors not to be priggish. Reading their verses

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aloud gives one the feeling of having a hot potato in the mouth. This sensation arises from the self-righteous, scolding attitude of the author, rather than from any lowering of the diction to accord with satire's base pedigree. The business of satire was to denounce vice, and Hall, Marston, and Lodge worked up a lather of indignation that suggests auto-intoxication rather than ethical conviction. Formal satire thus received the stamp of censoriousness at its outset. The first age of self-conscious satire in modern England was one of invective. The Roman type-name allowed a more direct attack on the individual conscience than the earlier folly-literature had done, with its chiding of classes and professions. Though Roman manners were often incongruously adopted along with the type-name, satire was moving away from the abstraction and vagueness of medieval allegory. Invective was heightened to the satiric level by all the devices described in Chapter II above. The literary air was filled with biting and barking, thunders and threats, as the very titles show. Typical is William Goddard's titlepage: A Mastif Whelp, with other ruff-Island-lik Currs fetcht from amongst the Antipedes, which bite and barke at the fantasticall humorists and abusers of the time. In the seventeenth century Cleveland, Denham, Marvell, and Oldham elaborate the invective-principle of Elizabethan satire and apply their scorpions to political subjects. Cleveland cries: Ring the bells backward! I am all on fire. Not all the buckets in a country quire Shall quench my rage. A poet should be feared When angry, like a comet's flaming beard.11

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Occasionally, however, the poets' rage cooled to the point where they could profit by the lessons of the prose Character. Satire is dedicated to the close observation of human nature, and the Character carried the conscious, or academic, analysis of human nature a long step forward. One special form in which this analytic power appeared was the "Painter-Poem." Waller had warbled an ingenuous lay entitled Instructions to a Painter for the drawing of the posture and progress of His Maties forces at sea under command of his Highness Royal. Together with the battel and victory obtained over the Dutch, June 3, 1665. When the "victory" proved to be an earlier Jutland, and when De Ruyter sailed up the Medway and burned or scuttled sixteen of England's finest men-of-war, an epidemic of poems burst forth, on the model of: Nay, Painter, if thou dar'st, design that fight — 1 2 How the Painter-Poems encouraged the growth of the satiric portrait may be illustrated by Marvell's lusty invective: Paint then St. Albans full of soup and gold, The new Courts pattern, Stallion of the old. Him neither Wit nor Courage did exalt, But Fortune chose him for her pleasure salt. Paint him with Drayman's Shoulders, butcher's Mien, Membered like Mules, with Elephantine chine. Well he the Title of St. Albans bore, For Bacon never study'd Nature more. But Age, allaying now that youthful heat, Fits him in France to play at Cards and treat.13 This passage shows a tendency to break away from invective-satire, for the ironical imitation of Waller gives a suggestion of burlesque.

THE EVOLUTION OF ENGLISH SATIRE III.

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The second age of modern English satire, that of burlesque, falls into two divisions. Low burlesque held the scene from 1663, when the first part of Hudibras was published, until about 1700, when high burlesque became the rage. Hudibras and its spawn of imitations lie outside the province of formal satire, inasmuch as they use the octosyllabic couplet instead of the heroic couplet. It had become apparent that invective satire, however artfully heightened, grows wearisome as it multiplies and is repeated. The couplet, with its snip-snap of static moralizing and description, seems to cry out for a narrative framework, a "fable," to give it variety and life. Many a fable, in the modern sense of the word, was translated or invented during the last decade of the seventeenth century, preparing the way for Swift and Mandeville; but the original impulse to indirection and detachment in satire came from Butler. Dryden and Addison deplored the want of dignity in Butler's verse. This criticism would have seemed less absurd in times when the presses disgorged a stream of wretched Hudibrastic poems and even more contemptible travesties of Virgil, Homer, and Ovid. With Dryden, we are again within the fold of formal satire, but Dryden's poems are far removed from the rugged iambics of his predecessors. He claimed to be writing Varronian satire, by which he seems to have meant satire overlaid on a narrative pattern. The narrative was in fact as slight as Butler's. One third of Absalom and Achitophel is a series of portraits, one third is given over to five speeches, and most of the

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remaining third is description. The narrative element was present, however, and the public loved it. Dryden's greatest contribution was of course his diversion of English satire into the channel of high burlesque. From the native tradition, he retained the portrait, the heroic couplet, the political purpose and bias, and the tough, argumentative rhetoric, but he gave these features a new dignity and interest by framing them in the Heroic. Butler had thus made use of the trappings of epic and romance, yet the rough virility of his low burlesque was not sufficiently elevated or polite for Dryden's fastidious taste. Meditating on Boileau's Le Lutrin, on Spenser, on Italian burlesque, on the Batrachomyomachia, he found a way of enclosing the materials of native satire in allegorical narrative and heightening the whole by epic style. A new gravity of manner was the result, and a new detachment. Within limits, the epic dignity was serious, and satire was rescued thereby from being a non-poetic form. From time to time, however, epic dignity overflowed into mock-epic, or high burlesque. Instead of writing below his characters, Dryden wrote above them. His portraits were the most brilliant of their kind because his air of lofty gravity allowed him to scrutinize his victims coolly and to dismiss them with an almost affectionate contempt. Others might observe the Elizabethan attitude of censorious rage. Swift was to write: Each line shall stab, shall blast, like daggers and like fire.14

But Dryden preferred the "fine stroke," the restraint of emotion, the affectation of Virgilian calm. As he abandoned

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violence, so he abandoned the doctrine that satire is a subpoetic form. To the Memory of Mr. Oldham, it is true, paid lip-service to the tradition: Ο early ripe! to thy abundant Store What could advancing A g e have added more? It might (what Nature never gives the Young) Have taught the Numbers of thy Native Tongue. But Satire needs not those, and W i t will shine Through the harsh Cadence of a rugged Line. 15

Dryden's practice, none the less, combined the ease of aristocratic conversation with great rhetorical power. His diction is equally removed from the sublime and from "the harsh cadence of a rugged line." Dryden's victims found it impossible to retort upon him without making themselves ridiculous or falling into billingsgate. They were stuck in the narrative like flies in amber. Some of them were publicly known for years by the names that Dryden bestowed upon them. We may well doubt, however, whether Dryden's stroke was so fine that the victims actually enjoyed being decapitated. At most, a Zimri or an Achitophel might feel a sour relish for the jest. Even that consolation was denied to victims of The Dunciad·, Pope twisted them into grotesque postures and so impaled them with a vindictive thrust of the pen. Reading and rereading The Rape of the Lock, one is aware of a presence that had seldom been felt in England since Chaucer, the playful yet purposeful Horatian spirit. Here, for the only time in his life, Pope deserved the encomium that Persius bestowed on his master: omne vafer vitium ridenti Flaccus amico tangit et admissus circum praecordia ludit.

ιόο

THE ART OF SATIRE

Behind the ample narrative and the mock-heroic machinery, satire is everywhere concealed. The victims, male and female, are constrained to laugh heartily at themselves. Pope's indictments are sometimes dismissed as light social satire; yet is it such a little thing to be cold-hearted, frivolous, and stupid? The Rape of the Lock is part of the great war on Dulness begun by Dryden and carried on by Swift, Pope, and their friends. Formal satire of the traditional sort held its immense popularity through the first half of the eighteenth century but gradually declined in the second half. Pope defended his malice by the common procedure of regarding himself as a Hebrew prophet with a sacred mission. Young wrote in a moral, reflective vein. Churchill set London by the ears, survived for a time as a hateful memory, and passed into not-altogether-deserved neglect, forgotten by all save Byron. Gifford clung to the ancient formula, and was dull and revolting by turns. Byron wrote formal satire in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers which we should not care to lose, but which he lived to regret. There were many others whom formal satire made famous or rich in their day, but this is no book of history. With Byron, formal satire died, driven to the wall by other and higher literary types. Subsequent attempts to recapture its old glory, like The Georgiad and The Wayzgoose by Roy Campbell, possess a ghostly unreality. In its long history formal satire has been many things. Its only universal and permanent feature is the heroic couplet. To attempt to capture this slippery quarry, one might say that formal satire is a poem of short or middling length,

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designed to express the author's disapprobation of political, social, or personal actions, conditions, or qualities, written in the heroic couplet, in real or fancied imitation of one or more of the Roman satirists; its prevailing tone may be one of gross invective, satiric invective, or burlesque; it may or may not be constructed on a narrative framework; it also contains an indefinite number of the following features: Roman type-names, Roman manners, intentional roughness of style, assumption of a mission comparable to that of a Hebrew prophet, rage and bluster, Olympian disdain, dark and ominous innuendo, dialogue — often taking up the greater part of the poem, portraits of men or women, speeches that betray the speaker, passages of philosophic reflection. The list might be extended, but it is long enough to show the inadequacy of "formal satire" as a term of definition or classification. The controlling idea of formal satire — imitation of the classics — is inconsistent to begin with. Horace alone uses many literary forms; a classification that also includes Juvenal and Persius, not to mention Ennius, Lucilius, Martial, or Greek writers, is so elastic as to be useless. During the first half of the eighteenth century the older and newer forms of English satire existed side by side. Formal satires were written by the hundred. Low burlesque continued to imitate Hudibras and to travesty the ancients. In high burlesque, Garth's The Dispensary (1699) and Gay's The Fan (1714) prepared the way for The Rape of the Lock (1714 in five cantos) and its numerous imitations. The Dunciad (1728) was followed by The Scribleriad, The Rosciad, The Rolliad, The Baviad, and The Maeviad, to

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name only the most famous mock-heroics. Parody made its appearance; The Splendid Shilling ( 1 7 0 1 ) by John Philips, Namby-Pamby (1729) probably by Henry Carey, and A Pipe of Tobacco (1736) by Isaac Hawkins Browne are still among the most delightful parodies in English. Mock-ode, mock-eclogue, mock-didactic appeared in their hundreds. The obvious ridicule in these forms shaded off into a misty mid-region of poetic imitation, in which it is often impossible to tell whether the author intends to be comic or serious. Just as Dryden's use of epic devices gave some genuine dignity to his satires, so many an eighteenth-century poet walked the tightrope of the grand manner and sniggered when he felt himself in danger of falling. Thomson in The Castle of Indolence and Shenstone in The Schoolmistress felt that Spenser's language was so remote from Pope's poetic diction as to be funny, and no doubt intentionally so! Spenser and Milton seemed nearly as "quaint" to Pope's generation as a medieval bestiary seems to ours. Thomson's tongue is occasionally visible in his cheek in The Seasons, and Cowper's The Task alternates genuine romantic feeling with burlesque. Serio-comic imitation led on the one hand to the writing of what we now call preromantic poetry. On the other, it led to the grotesque, sometimes scabrous, realism of Pope's Imitation of Spenser, Swift's A City Shower, and scores of similar poems.16 IV.

R E B I R T H OF IRONY

During this heyday of burlesque, and partly arising from it, the third stage of English satire was coming into existence. With Swift, the age of irony was born. Under cover of

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his burlesque pose as a projector, an ingenu, a patriot, Swift developed a verbal irony that has never been equaled for rhetorical ingenuity and intellectual intensity. Dimmed by the luster of his greatness stand Gay, Mandeville, Arbuthnot, and Defoe. As invective-satire had yielded to burlesque, so with time the stinging irony of A Modest Proposal and An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity was tempered and sweetened. Addison's fusion of satire and pathos bore fruit in later periodical essays. Irony of manner reached maturity in Goldsmith's Citizen of the World and in its companion works of ingenu satire. The next refinement of the satiric spirit found expression in the novel. Tom Jones is the first English novel to possess the three-dimensional quality that emerges from a book when irony is built into it. Fielding carefully provides for perspective and philosophical detachment on the part of the reader, whom he lifts onto his own exalted plane of omniscience and humorous creativeness. Between the characters with their frailties and blind errors and the author in his wise remoteness, the same gap exists that divides mortal from divine vision. Across this gap leaps the spark of irony. Tom Jones is not a satire in the older sense, but it effectively satirizes hypocrisy, pharisaical righteousness, and all the forms of pusillanimity. Fielding cannot be sufficiently praised for this contribution to literary art. Without his example, Jane Austen, Dickens, Thackeray, and Meredith would have had many a difficult lesson to learn for themselves. The early eighteenth century had an almost unbearable brilliance. Its naked intellectuality and its ruthless hunting

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down of enthusiasm produced a reaction that began, roughly speaking, with the death of Swift, reached its flood in the romantic movement, and slowly subsided during the nineteenth century. The romantic poets were capable of an occasional invective piece, thrown off in the heat of generous indignation, but preoccupation with self prevented them from taking the attitude of ironic detachment. The old complacent faith in reason was gone; the universe was expanding; no fixed place remained in the heavens from which they could look down on the human comedy. In Shelley's iconoclasm and in Byron's melodramatic despair are the first hints of cosmic irony. Byron, with his fierce loyalty to Pope, followed the wellbeaten track of formal satire only to find that it led him into a blind alley. The Italian-medley form that he adopted in Beppo and Don Juan was new only in a limited sense. The air of self-mockery and witty improvisation had long been native to burlesque; Byron's tricks in verse often resemble those of Sterne in prose. Historically, Don Juan is one of the few English representatives of the secondary, Tieckian variety of romantic irony. With the outburst of cosmic irony in the second half of the nineteenth century, the cycle is complete. The sense of cosmic terror, the revolt against God, the abhorrence for nature in her mechanistic guise, have already been illustrated from the writings of FitzGerald, James Thomson, Swinburne, Myers, Hardy, and others. As a relief to the tragic perplexity of the age, nonsenseliterature flourished. Alice in Wonderland and The Bab Ballads were preferred to the dangerous questionings of

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satire. The Savoy Operas were written and received in a spirit of "innocent merriment," as Gilbert's Correspondence shows. V.

SPHINXES WITHOUT SECRETS

A glance at the present situation of literature reveals a new and extraordinarily interesting situation. Irony is the flash given off when two contradictory absolutes collide. The impact of religious faith and science produced cosmic irony fifty years ago. Today most of the absolute values of our fathers are dead, killed by irony. A sense of the relativity of things penetrates all thinking and all writing. If the past two generations exploded God and worshiped a blazing question mark which they set up in the heavens, their children have tried to explode even the question mark. Today the little that men know is spread over society more widely than ever before. Knowledge is common property of the millions; the aristocratic aloofness of the ironist with his "little audience" has all but disappeared, owing to mass education. The esoteric obscurities of T . S. Eliot, and James Joyce's demand that the reader devote an entire lifetime to his works, represent an attempt to win back a small, superior audience of cognoscenti. Irony of a sort persists, however, and grows increasingly common in all sorts of writing. A gentle, sceptical irony emerges not merely from The New Yorker, but from an article in The Saturday Evening Post, from a travel-diary, from a novel opened at random, from a newspaper editorial. What is striking is not so much the quality of the irony as its diffusion, unprecedented in any former age.

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The rapidity with which science discovers and overturns one truth after another bewilders the common man and brings Pilate's question to his lips. The "debunking" of the Great Man by biography, of diplomacy by the press, of commercial products by such agencies as the Consumer's Research proceeds apace. The word "propaganda" has lost all its former dignity and is used to neutralize any appeal to an absolute standard. In the world of scholarship, the Biblecriticism of Germany has prepared the way for the intensive study of comparative religions and comparative anthropology. Thus all belief and all morality are called in question. In colleges, the humanities, which interpret human experience, are generally declining in popularity. The rising subjects are economics and sociology, in which profitable research is confined to observation and classification. In the past, satire has either offered new beliefs for old, or, if it has taken numerus stultorum infinitus as its theme, it has rewarded its "little audience" with a sense of fraternal, secret glee. Today, the glee and the wit are departing, and satire is a sober business, for all men are in the position of Socrates, knowing that they know nothing. Scholarship and science daily expose the irony of things. That irony needs no underscoring; it speaks for itself. A world in which everything is ironical is a neurotic and unhappy place. The fear that free inquiry leads to spiritual sterility gives encouragement to the absolute authority of Nazism, Fascism, and Communism. It has been shown in these pages that the evolution of satire from one form to another has laid on the reader an ever-increasing responsibility to share the work of creation,

T H E EVOLUTION OF ENGLISH SATIRE 167 to apply the satire and to perceive the irony for himself. Our most modern writers have succeeded in developing a kind of literature in which the reader does all the work. Distrust of dogmatism has led to a horror of all theory, a shrinking from moral responsibility, that is either "scientific" or neurotic, according to the point of view. The previously discussed ingenu hero of Huxley's or Waugh's satirical novels has been replaced by the subhuman protagonist. D. H. Lawrence's search for identity and his hatred of intellectuality met in his dark, diminutive, hairy peasants. He not only looked through their vacant eyes; he also managed to insinuate himself into their dark blood and their bowels. Hence his descriptions of animals are among the best that have ever been written, whatever one may think of his human beings. Gertrude Stein's prenatal monologues and Hemingway's naive declarations of faith in blood and booze generously allow the reader to supply his own intellectual provender ad libitum. Dos Passos, James Farrell, and the lesser authors of the proletarian novel are lost in unwise passivity. By confining their observation to sensory perceptions, by making interminable catalogues of sounds, smells — most of them evil, — and the like, they give their readers the ultimate privilege of creating personalities and characters to fit the sensory patterns that stand for men and women. With Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, the cretin has come into his own. Machinery for producing irony is present in these writings. The author deliberately contracts the point of view of his characters and does so in full view of the reader. The incongruities of human life are left to speak for them-

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selves. Yet the author in reducing the inner point of view has taken a swallow too much out of Alice's little bottle and has shrunk entirely out of sight. The reader's eye roves behind the scenes, trying to meet another eye with a twinkle in it, but in vain. Only emptiness is there. The result is an abortive irony, an irony of bathos. The reader who can bring himself to sympathize with the hero thinks: "Poor fellow! Thwarted, frustrated, incapable of thought, this wretch is the type of humanity. I too have been condemned to life on an insane planet." Maudlin self-pity of this sort is an extension of the sense of cosmic irony. It might well be called subjective irony. The cycle of satire and irony has been traced to the point where the reader must first discover the weapon, then load, aim, and fire it all by himself. The cycle can go no further; it must return upon itself. The author, we may hope, will reappear in his own right, no longer scared by his own shadow. His irony will be a purposeful, intellectual communion with the reader. A fact is admittedly right and an idea is usually wrong, but neither one can have meaning without the other. To dare to create may be to risk making a fool of oneself; but if Horace and Lucian and Chaucer and Rabelais and Swift were not above making fools of themselves, what is there to fear? The fine irony of Erasmus cuts to the heart of the matter: Nor did Paul, that great Doctor of the Gentiles, writing to the Corinthians, unwillingly acknowledg his folly; "I speak," saith he, "like a fool. I am more." As if it could be any dishonour to excel in Folly! . . . And Christ himself, that he might the better relieve this Folly, being the wisdome of the Father, yet in some manner became

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a fool, when taking upon him the nature of man, he was found in shape as a man; as in like manner he was made Sin, that he might heal sinners. Nor did he work this Cure any other way than by the foolishness of the Cross, and a company of fat apostles, not much better, to whom also he carefully recommended folly, but gave 'em a caution against wisdome, and drew 'em together by the Example of little Children, Lillies, Mustardseed and Sparrows, things senseless and inconsiderable, living only by the dictates of Nature and without either craft or care. 17

NOTES

NOTES CHAPTER I ι. According to the NED. 2. The Fable of the Bees (London, 1795), p. v. 3. "On the Death of Dr. Swift," 11. 55-58. 4. The Ghost, Book III, 11. 925-926. 5. The Ghost, Book IV, 11. 856-865. 6. George Meredith, An Essay on Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit (London, 1897), pp. 88, 82, 79. 7. Page 82. 8. Wyndham Lewis, Men without Art (London, 1934), pp. 10, 160. C H A P T E R II 1. P. S. Allen, ed., The Praise of Folly (Oxford, 1925), p. xvii. 2. "Essay on Satire," Walter Scott, ed., The Works of John Dry den (London, 1808), XIII, 95. Dryden overestimates the magnanimity of his butt. See IX, 272. 3. London, 1930. 4. Invective and Abuse, p. 1. 5. It later appeared that the fine was actually one-third of the damages. "Thirteen" was a cable-error. 6. Mark Twain, " T o the Person Sitting in Darkness," Europe and Elsewhere ( N e w York, 1923), p. 252. 7. "Essay on Satire," Walter Scott, ed., The Works of John Dryden (London, 1808), XIII, 85. 8. Tristram Shandy, Book III, Chapter xi. 9. Job 3:1-10 (Authorized Version). 10. For an interesting discussion of Job's skepticism and irony, see John Owen, The Five Great Skeptical Dramas of History (London, 1896), pp. 109-167.

174 NOTES 11. Rabelais, Prologue to Book II. All quotations from Rabelais are given in the translation of Urquhart and Motteux (16531708). 12. "Foure Letters Confuted," R. B. McKerrow ed., The Works of Thomas Nashe (London, 1910), I, 299, 317. 13. King Lear, II. ii. 11-23. 14. "Foure Letters Confuted," R. B. McKerrow ed., The Works of Thomas Nashe (London, 1910), I, 307. 15. Hudibras, I, i, 26-28, 165-170, 509-514, 547-548; I, iii, 525-528, 1247-1248; II, i, 261-266. 16. Pope, "On the Collar of a Dog." 17. BoswelFs Life of Johnson (Oxford, 1922), II, 542. 18. See Poetics, 5, and Rhetoric, I, 11; B. Croce, Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic (translated by D. Ainslie, London, 1909), pp. 148-151; Lane Cooper, An Aristotelian Theory of Comedy (New York, 1922), passim. 19. Human Nature, chapter ix. 20. "Laughter is an affection arising from a strained expectation being suddenly reduced to nothing." — Kant, Critique of Aesthetic Judgement (translated by J. C. Meredith, Oxford, 1911), p. 199 (II, i, 54). 21. See Sigmund Freud, Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious (translated by A. A. Brill, New York, 1916), Chapter ii. 22. William McDougall, "A New Theory of Laughter," Psyche, New Series, Vol. II, No. iv (April, 1922), pp. 292 ff. 23. Don Juan, Canto III, stanza 4. 24. Julian and Maddalo, 11. 449-450. 25. Max Eastman, Enjoyment of Laughter (New York, 1936), p. 352. See also his earlier book, The Sense of Humor, and the criticism of his theory by J. C. Gregory in The Nature of Laughter (New York, 1924), pp. 155-160. 26. See Henri Bergson, Laughter (translated by C. Brereton and F. Rothwell, New York, 1928), pp. 17-18, 87-88. 27. Page 127. 28. Psalms 2:4. 29. Psalms 35:16. 30. Psalms 70:3. 31. William Gifford, "An Essay on the Roman Satirists,"

NOTES

175 The Satires of Juvenal and Persius Translated into English Verse (London, 1817), I, lxii-lxiv. 32. Epistle to Peter Pindar, by the Author of the Baviad (London, 1800), II. 29-34.

C H A P T E R III 1. R. P. Bond, English Burlesque Poetry, ιηοο-ιη$ο (Cambridge, Mass., 1932), pp. 3-17. The term "mock-heroic," it may be noted, does duty for other forms of general, high burlesque, including mock-ode, mock-eclogue, and mock-didactic. 2. Rabelais, Author's Prologue to the Third Book. 3. Author's Prologue to the First Book. 4. Gotham, Book II, 11. 172-174. 5. "Epistle Dedicatory." 6. See Letters and Journals, IV, 413 and note. 7. The Anatomy of Melancholy (London, 1887), pp. 3-5. 8. Book III, Chapter ii. 9. Book II, Chapter xxx. 10. See also the third, a mock curse, and the seventeenth, a necromantic dialogue. 11. Rabelais, Book III, Chapter xvii. 12. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, Studies in Literature (Cambridge, England, 1930), III, 229. 13. Philip Henderson, ed., The Complete Poems of John Skelton (London, 1931), pp. 113, 117-118. 14. Gulliver's Travels, Part II, Chapter v. 15. See section 3, above. 16. Book IV, Chapter viii. 17. For a vigorous treatment of the points just under discussion, readers are referred to the first three chapters in Part II of Mr. Wyndham Lewis's Men without Art (London, 1934). Bergson expounds the idea that "humour delights in concrete terms, technical details, definite facts" in Laughter (translated by Brereton and Rothwell, N e w York, 1938), p. 128. As aforesaid, Bergson derives the comic from mechanizations of human nature.

176

NOTES CHAPTER IV

ι. F. Ν . Robinson, ed., Chaucer's Works (Boston, 1933), I V [ Ε ] 1738-1739. All quotations from Chaucer are taken from Professor Robinson's edition. 2. Canterbury Tales, I [ A ] 3942-3943. 3. Canterbury Tales, I [ A ] 4272. 4. Canterbury Tales, I [ A ] 3935. On the interpretation of "piled," see Professor Robinson's note. 5. Canterbury Tales, I [ A ] 3 9 3 2 . 6. Swift, "On Poetry." 7. Canterbury Tales, V I I , 3164-3166. 8. Canterbury Tales, I V [E] 1986. 9. Canterbury Tales, I V [ E ] 1738-173.9. 10. Works (translated by H. W . and F. G . Fowler, Oxford, 1905), I, 215. 1 1 . Preface to A Tale of a Tub. 12. T . L. Peacock, Maid. Marian (London, 1891), pp. 166167. See also p. 103. Peacock returns again and again to the attack: " 'Is not a rogue a rogue, call him by what name you may?' " O h , certainly not,' said Miss Danaretta; 'for in that case a poor rogue without a title, would not be more a rogue than a rich rogue with one; but that he is so in a most infinite proportion, the whole experience of the world demonstrates.' " — Melincourt (London, 1891), p. 24. " H e took castles and towns; he cut short limbs and lives; He made orphans and widows of children and wives: This course many years he triumphantly ran, And did mischief enough to be called a great man." Crotchet Castle (London, 1891), p. 154. "Here is the skull of an illustrious robber, who, after a long and triumphant process of depredation and murder, was suddenly checked in his career by means of a certain quality inherent in preparations of hemp, which, f o r the sake of perspicuity, I shall call suspensiveness. Here is the skull of a conqueror, who, after over-running several kingdoms, burning a

NOTES

177

number of cities, and causing the deaths of two or three millions of men, women, and children, was entombed with all the pageantry of public lamentation, and figured as the hero of several thousand odes and a round dozen of epics . . . you observe, in both these skulls, the combined development of the organs of carnage, plunder, and vanity, which I have separately pointed out in the tiger, the fox, and the peacock. T h e greater enlargement of the organ of vanity in the hero is the only criterion by which I can distinguish them from each other." — Headlong Hall (London, 1892), p. 142. 13. Book II, Chapter xxxi. 14. The Anatomy of Melancholy (London, 1887), pp. 2831. T h e opening sentence of the second paragraph above translates Juvenal, XIII, 105: "ille crucem sceleris pretium tulit, hie diadema." 15. Paradise Regained, III, 74-83 (J. H . Hanford, ed., The Poems of John Milton, N e w York, 1937, p. 500). 16. "On Charles IX and St. Bartholemew's Day." 17. Satire 7; compare Boileau, Satire 8. 18. An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews, Attributed to Henry Fielding (Minority Press, Cambridge, 1930), p. 44.

19. Easily available in the Oxford Standard Edition of Swift, II, 261-267. The Beggar's Opera escaped the censor, but its successor, Polly, was suppressed. Walpole is said to have sat through the first opera with a smile on his face, but he evidently considered that one such experience was enough! 20. A Tale of a Tub (Gulliver's Travels, Oxford Standard Edition), p. 437. 21. Hudibras, Part I, Canto ii, 11. 514-519. 22. Chapter xiv. 23. T h e NED defines litotes as "a figure of speech in which an affirmative is expressed by the negative of the contrary." If this definition were adopted, we should have to fall back on another rhetorical term, meiosis, "a figure of speech in which the impression is intentionally conveyed that a thing is less in size, importance, etc., than it really is" (NED). Litotes, however, admits of a much wider definition, both in classical and

178

NOTES

in modern usage. T h u s the Concise Oxford Dictionary (second edition) defines meiosis as litotes, and defines litotes as "ironically moderate f o r m of speech (as 'scoundrel' is rather a rude word), esp. the expressing of an affirmative b y the negative of its contrary, as no small f o r great" Litotes is then the technical synonym f o r irony of understatement. 24. Lines 1435-1436. 25. Lines 591-597. 26. Life on the Mississippi (Harper, N e w York, n.d.), p. 146. 27. Cited b y Max Eastman, Enjoyment of Laughter ( N e w York, 1936), p. 198. 28. See Republic, 336 f. 29. See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 4. 13-14. 30. Nicomachean Ethics (translated b y Thomas Taylor, 1811), Book IV, Chapter vii. In the Rhetoric, Book III, Chapter xviii, irony receives qualified praise as a mode of ridicule: "Irony, however, is more liberal than scurrility. For he w h o employs irony, produces the ridiculous for his own sake; but he w h o employs scurrility, f o r the sake of another person." 31. Diogenes Laertius, 3, 37; Aristotle, fragment 73, ed. Rose (1886), p. 78; Athenaeus, 11, 505 c. 32. Laws, 7,816. 33. Canterbury Tales, I [A] 746. Compare The Legend of Good Women ( G 29): "though that m y wit be lyte." 34. Canterbury Tales, I [ A ] 183—188. 3 5. Canterbury Tales, I [ A ] 5 07. 36. Canterbury Tales, II [B] 47-48. 37. The House of Fame, 11. 1096-1100. 38. The House of Fame, 11. 865-867. 39. Canterbury Tales, I [A] 731-736. 40. The Legend of Good Women, G 340-345. 41. See Troilus and Criseyde, Book V , 11. 799, 834, 1037, 1044, 1050, 1051, 1088, 1094. 42. Canterbury Tales, VII, 695-704 (B1885-1894). 4 3. Canterbury Tales, I [ A ] 31 - 3 2. 44. Canterbury Tales, VII, 7 1 0 - 7 1 1 (B1900-1901). 45. Lines 31-32. 46. The Parliament of Fowls, 11. 8-14. A f f r y c a n later ex-

NOTES

179

eludes Chaucer from the company of love's servants, remarking (11. 6 0 - 6 1 ) :

"For thow of love hast lost thy tast, I gesse, As sek man hath of swete and bytternesse." 47. Book I, 11. 15-16. Again, in Book III, 11. 39-42, he speaks of love's servants, "Whos clerc I am." 48. Book III, 1. 1568. 49. Book 1,11. 622-623. wisse: "guide." 50. Book 1,11. 645-648. 51. See Book II, U. 56-63, 92-99. 52. Book II, 11. 1107-1108. See also 11. 1164-1169. 53. Book IV, 11. 484-487, 491-497. 54. Canterbury Tales, 11^4035-4038. 55. Canterbury Tales, I V [ E ] 1851-1852, 1963-1964. 56. Troilus and, Criseyde, Book III, 11. 575-576. 57. Some important imaginary voyages are: Thomas Artus, Description de Vlsle des Hermaphrodites, 1605; Francis Godwin, The Voyage of Domingo Gonzales to the Moon, 1638; Cyrano de Bergerac, Histoire comique des estats et empires de la lune, 1656, Histoire . . . du soleil, 1657; Jean de Segrais, Ulle imaginaire, 1658; Gabriel Foigny, La Terre australe connue (Jacques Sadeur), 1676; Denis Vairasse d'Alais, Histoires des Sevarambes, 1677-1679; Daniel Defoe, The Consolidator, 1705; Ludvig Holberg, The Journey of Nicholas Klimius to the World Underground, c. 1720-1732 (translated from Danish into German, French, Latin, and English); Jonathan Swift, Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, by Lemuel Gulliver, 1726; Samuel Brunt [pseud.], A Voyage to Cacklogallinia, 1727; Voltaire, Micromegas, 1752. Some Reports by a Foreign Observer, mostly in epistolary form, are: G. P. Marana, UEsploratore turco, 1684 (L'Espion du Grand-Seigneur, 1684; Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy, 1687-1693; often reprinted); Edward Ward, The London Spy, 1698-1700; C. R. DuFresny, Amusemens serieux et comiques, 1699; T o m Brown, Amusements Serious and Comical, 1700; Anthony Hilliar, A Brief and Merry History of Great Britain, by Alt Mohammed Hadji, 1710 (?); Montesquieu, Les lettres

ι8ο

NOTES

persanes, 1721; Voltaire, Letters Concerning the English Nation, 1733 (Lettres philosophiques, 1734); George Lyttelton, Letters from a Persian in England to his Friend at Ispahan, 1735; Jean Baptiste d'Argeno, Lettres cabalistiques, 1737— 1738, Lettres juives, 1738 (The Jewish Spy, 1739), Lettres chinoises, 1739 (Chinese Letters, 1741); John Shebbeare, Letters on the English Nation by Bastista Angeloni, 1756; Oliver Goldsmith, The Citizen of the World, 1762; Charles Johnstone, The Pilgrim, 1775. 58. Gulliver's Travels (Oxford Standard Edition), pp. 64,294. 59· Page 154. 60. T o illustrate from the Voyage to Lilliput, burying the dead head-downward is a pure absurdity; the scandal about Gulliver and the Treasurer's wife is an absurdity with a potential parallel; the rope-dancing, stick-jumping, high and low-heel factions, and Big and Little Endian controversy are absurdities with obvious parallels in English life. The punishments for fraud and ingratitude and the system of educating nobles and females are points of Utopian superiority. 61. Quoted by Η. M. Chevalier, The Ironic Temper: Anatole France and his Time (Oxford, 1932), p. 47. 62. A famous passage in The Sun Also Rises makes rather pointless fun of irony: "As I went down-stairs I heard Bill singing, 'Irony and Pity. When you're feeling . . . Oh, Give them Irony and give them Pity. . . .' " 'What's all this about irony and pity?' " 'What? Don't you know about Irony and Pity?' " 'No. Who got it up?' " 'Everybody. They're mad about it in New York. It's just like the Fratellinis used to be.' " In charity, we may infer that any genuine criticism underlying this passage is directed against false and sentimental uses of the offending irony and pity. It would be hard, however, to rescue Mr. Hemingway from his own indictment. His style carries ironic understatement to the point of absurdity. The effect of this "Stein-stutter," as Mr. Wyndham Lewis calls it, is to accentuate the pathos of characters who are so much the

NOTES

ι8ι

ingenu that they are no longer capable of having ideas. An impotent hero held in thrall by sexual passion; a useless lover attending his lady through her promiscuous affairs: here is the apotheosis of irony, designed to draw iron tears down Pluto's cheek! 63. James Thomson, The City of Dreadful Night, Canto xxi, stanza 10. CHAPTER V 1. This point is more fully and eloquently expounded by J . A. K . Thomson, Irony (Cambridge, Mass., 1927), pp. 34-38. 2. Troilus and Criseyde, Book IV, 1. 1406. 3. Macbeth, IV. vii. 20-23. 4. Herodotus, I, 47. 5. Canterbury Tales, I [ A ] 1391-1392. 6. I [A] 2420. 7. I [ A ] 1251-1261. 8. Book X V I I I . All quotations from the Odyssey are from Butcher and Lang's translation. 9. Book XVIII. 10. Book X X I . 1 1 . For a penetrating study of Conrad's technical devices, see J . D. Gordan, Joseph Conrad (Cambridge, Mass., 1940). 12. Music at Night (New York, 1931), p. 259. 13. For some of the categories just enumerated, I am indebted to the researches of a former student, Mr. Tom S. Hyland. 14. Tieck's Romantic Irony by A. E. Lussky (Chapel Hill, N. C., 1932) is the safest guide and the one to which the historical account above is most indebted. Professor Lussky feels himself to be the first critic who has attempted to offer practical definitions and examples of romantic irony! Friedrich Schlegel himself gave "only a general outline of his theory"; his brother's attempt to bring it down to earth "did not serve to make the matter intelligible." "Joachimi, despite her firm grasp . . . , did not deign to go further than to assert emphatically that in

i82

NOTES

Shakespeare . . . was to be found the best elucidation of Friedrich Schlegel's theory. Enders, also, one of the chief biographers of Schlegel, not only fails to explain the phenomenon of romantic irony but even seems to warn against all attempts on the part of others to advance for Schlegel's theory examples from the pages of actual literature." (Page 90; see also pp. 87—91.) 15. The Latin inter esse was in Schlegel's mind and gave a special twist to his use of the word. 16. Cited by Lussky, p. 3, from Arthur Lovejoy, in Modern Language Notes, XXXI, 385. 17. G. G. Sedgewick, Of Irony, Especially in the Drama (Toronto, 1935), p. 18. 18. Classical satire offers fruitful themes for philosophical investigation along these lines. Among the subjects most frequently treated are food and drink (the diaita, or art of living), witches and magic (satirizing superstition), and foolish prayers (satirizing excessive piety, or white, as opposed to black, superstition) . 19. The Personal Opinions of Honore de Balzac, translated by K. P. Wormeley (Boston, 1899), pp. 40-41. 20. Quoted by G. G. Sedgewick, Of Irony, Especially in the Drama, p. 27. 21. Essays, Dialogues and Thoughts of Leopardi, translated by James Thomson ("Β. V.") (London, n.d.), pp. 277, 162. Perhaps Schopenhauer was the first Occidental philosopher who took tedium seriously, as one of the ultimate realities of life. See the second section of The Wisdom of Life and the treatise On the Sufferings of the World. 22. Poetical Works, ed. Bertram Dobell (London, 1895), I, 26-27. A century before, Charles Churchill wrote in Gotham (Book 1,11. 451-460): "The year, grand circle! in whose ample round The seasons regular and fix'd are bound, Who, in his course repeated o'er and o'er, Sees the same things which he had seen before; The same stars keep their watch, and the same sun Runs in the track where he from first hath run;

NOTES

183

The same moon rules the night; tides ebb and flow, Man is a puppet and this world a show; Their old, dull follies, old, dull fools pursue, And vice in nothing, but in mode, is new. . . ." The thought goes back to Lucretius: "Eadem sunt omnia semper, eadem omnia restant." Compare also Lucian, Dialogues of the Dead, X X V I . 2 3. Sections vi and vii. 24. Quatrain L X X X I (1889). 25. See Ν. H. Dole, ed., The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (Boston, 1898), I, 158-159. 26. Canto VIII. 27. Compare the remarks above on Chaucer's Knight's Tale. 28. Mark Twain, The Mysterious Stranger (New York, 1922), p. 139. 29. Collected Poems (London, 1921), pp. 386-387. 30. The Ordeal of Richard Fever el (London, 1914), p. 8. 31. Diana of the Crossways (London, 1915), p. 423. Both this quotation and the preceding one are cited by F. T. Russell, Satire in the Victorian Novel (New York, 1920), pp. 161, 163. CHAPTER V I 1. F. N. Robinson, "Satirists and Enchanters in Early Irish Literature," Studies in the History of Religions Presented to Crawford Howell Toy (New York, 1912), pp. 98-99, 103. 2. Pages 95-98. 3. Page 100. 4. One etymology derives Fescennine from fascinum (phallus). Horace observes (Epistles, II, 1, 145): "Fescennina per hunc inventa licentia morem Versibus alternis opprobria rustica fudit." Compare Livy, VII, 2, 7. 5. Virgidemiarum, Prologue to Book I. It has often been pointed out that Hall was preceded by Wyatt, Hake, Gascoigne, Donne, and Lodge. Yet Wyatt, Hake, and Gascoigne neither wrote in couplets nor followed a form that Hall would have acknowledged as satire. Donne's satires were still unpub-

184

NOTES

lished. Lodge had written but four satires and had sandwiched them in with his epistles and eclogues. Looking at the matter through Hall's eyes, one must admit that he is justified in his boast of precedence. Certainly no predecessor had written a long and closely wrought series of satires, like the Virgidemiarum. 6. Virgidemiarum, Prologue to Book III. 7. Virgidemiarum, Book IV, Satire 1. See also the "Postscript to the Reader" and the Prologue to Book I. 8. The locus classicus on this point is Puttenham's Arte of English Poesie, I, xiii. See also R. M. Alden, The Rise of Formal Satire in England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1899), pp. 39 if. 9. Virgidemiarum, Book V , Satire 3. 10. Virgidemiarum, Book IV, Satire 1. 11. The Rebel Scot. 12. Denham, Second Advice to a fainter. 13. Last Instructions to a Painter. 14. Ode to Saner oft. 15. Compare the opening lines of the Prologue to Amphitryon·. "The lab'ring Bee, when his sharp Sting is gone, Forgets his golden Work, and turns a Drone: Such is a Satyr, when you take away That Rage in which his Noble Vigour lay." 16. See George Kitchin's admirable discussion in A Survey of Burlesque and Parody in English (Edinburgh, 1931), Chapter iv. 17. The Praise of Folly, translated by John Wilson, 1668 (Oxford, 1925), pp. 162, 174.

INDEX

INDEX Absalom and Achitophel, see Dryden, John Addison, Joseph, 3, 148, 157, 163 Alexander, see "Great Man" Ameipsias, 92 Anatole France, 107, 141 Anatomy of Melancholy, The, see Burton, Robert Anger, 17-18 Antic Hay, see Huxley, Aldous Arbuthnot, John, 163 Archilochus, 149-150 Ariosto, 150 Aristophanes, 92 Aristotle, 32, 93, 94, 178 Arte of English Poesie, The, see Puttenham, Richard Austen, Jane, 75, 121, 163 Babbitt, Irving, 124 Balzac, Honore de, 128-129, Η 0 Barry Lyndon, see Thackeray, W . M. Batrachomyomachia, 43 Beddoes, T . L., 62 Beggar's Opera, The, see Gay, John Beowulf, 89 Bergson, 34, 175 Bion of Borysthenes, 94 Boethius, 117, 151 Boiardo, 150 Boileau, 54, 158 Bond, R. P., 47, 175 Brave New World, see Huxley, Aldous Brentano, 125 Brown, Tom, 62 Browne, Charles Farrar, 37, 90 Browne, I. H., 162 Browning, Robert, 17 Burke, Edmund, 16 Burlesque, romances, 151; low, dis-

tinguished from invective, 4446, distinguished from high, 4649

Burns, Robert, 61-62 Burton, Robert, 23, 33, 53, 83 Butler, Samuel (1612-1680), 27-29, 31, 55, 61, 87, ιJ7 Butler, Samuel (1835-1902), 111 Byron, 3, 7, 27, 33, 52, 55, 150, 160, 164 Cabell, J. B., 107 Campbell, Roy, 160 Candide, see Voltaire Canterbury Tales, The, see Chaucer Carey, Henry, 162 Carlyle, Thomas, 126 Casti, 150 Castle of Indolence, The, see Thomson, James Celine, L. F., see Destouches, L. F. Cervantes, 54, 140 Character, The, 93, 156 Chaucer, 23, 61, 63-65, 73-74, 76, 80, 95-102, 114, 116-117, 119-120, 137, 140, 151 Chesterton, G . K., 7 Churchill, Charles, 6, 55, 148, 160, 182 City of Dreadful Night, The, see Thomson, James ("Β. V.") Clemens, Samuel L., 16, 18-19, 8990, 134-135 Cleveland, John, 148, 155 Comedy, distinguished from satire, 37-38; characters of Greek, 9293

Comic element in satire, 6-7, 323 8 . 43» 77» i°4.

I

39_I4I

Conrad, Joseph, 121-122 Copernicus, 127 Cowper, William, 162

ι88

INDEX

Dante, 20, 133, i j i Decadence and burlesque, 54 Decline and Fall, see Waugh, Evelyn Defoe, Daniel, 85, h i , 163 Denham, John, 155 Destouches, L. F., 68 Dialogue, The, in Greek Literature, 94 Dialogues of Courtesans, see Lucian Dialogues of the Gods, see Lucian Diana of the Crossways, see Meredith, George Diatribe, the, in Greek literature, 94 Dickens, Charles, 16, 62, 66, 163 Don Juan, see Byron Donne, John, 4, 16, 183 Dos Passos, John, 167 Douglas, Norman, 107 Drant, Thomas, 152 Dryden, John, 3, 8, 14, 20, 43, 46, 47» 49. 51» 157-159 Dunbar, William, 61, 151 Dunciad, The, see Pope, Alexander Dunne, F. P., 37 Eastman, Max, 33, 174 Egoist, The, see Meredith, George Eliot, T . S., 165 Encomium Moriae, see Erasmus Ennius, 137, 161 Epicharmus, 94 Epigram, 29 Epodes, see Horace Equivocation, 115-117 Erasmus, 7, 14, 23, 50, 51, 55, 58, 83, 168-169 Essay on Comedy, see Meredith, George Ezekiel, 20, 35 Farrell, James, 167 Fescennine verses, 150, 183 Fichte, 124 Fielding, Henry, 33, 38, 61, 66, 8188, 120, 121, 140, 163

FitzGerald, Edward, 17, 132-133, 164 Folengo, 150 Fools and folly, 49-60, 91-93, 95-98 Fowler, H. W., 25 Freud, Sigmund, 33 Garth, Samuel, 161 Gascoigne, George, 151, 153 Gay, John, 61, 66, 84, 161, 163, 177 Gifford, William, 35-36, 160 Gilbert, W. S., 62, 164 God, 7j, 88, 114, 123-124, 131-136 Goddard, William, 155 Goethe, 125 Goldsmith, Oliver, 16, 163 Gordan, J. D., 181 "Great Man," The, 61, 82-87, 166 Greene, Robert, 66 Gulliver's Travels, see Swift, Jonathan Hall, Joseph, 4, 151—155, 183-184 Hardy, Thomas, 23, 134, 164 Heine, 125, 130, 132 Hemingway, Ernest, 107, 180-181 Herodotus, 11 j Herondas, 62 Hind and the Panther, The, see Dryden, John Hipponax, 75, 150 Hobbes, Thomas, 32 Hogarth, William, 61, 140 Homer, 43, 117-118, 147 Horace, 4, 5, 7, 20, 23; Epodes, 60-61; 77, 90, 95, 152, 154, 159, 161 House of Fame, The, see Chaucer Housman, A. E., 134 Hume, David, 27 Humor, see Comedy Huxley, Aldous, 106-108, 122, 141, 167 Huysmans, 61 Ingenu satire, 102-108, see also Voltaire

INDEX L'lngenu, see Voltaire Irish satirists, 75 Irony, range of, 75-76; Sophoclean, tragic, or dramatic, 118-119; varieties distinguished, 119-120; in tragedy and comedy, 138-141; contemporary, 165-168 Job, 21-23, 173 Johnson, Samuel, 30-31, 56, 103, 105-106, 148 Jolly Beggars, The, see Burns, Robert Jonathan Wild, see Fielding, Henry, and Great Man, The Joyce, James, 165 Julius Caesar, see Shakespeare Junius, 24 Juvenal, 4, 8, 13-14, 20, 95, 161 Kant, 33, 174 Keats, John, 16 Kingsmill, Hugh, see Lunn, Η. K. Knight's Tale, The, see Chaucer Lamb, Charles, 62 Langland, William, 151 Laughter, 17, 21, 94-95, 147. See also Comedy Lawrence, D. H., 167 Leacock, Stephen, 38 Legend of Good Women, The, see Chaucer Leopardi, 130, 132 Lewis, Wyndham, 8, 175 Litotes, 88-90, 177-178 Lodge, Thomas, 155 Love and Freindship, see Austen, Jane Lucian, 7, 9, 15, 23, 45, 50, 54, 58, 59, 62, 65, 76, 81, 128 Lucilius, 95, 154, 161 Lunn, Η. K., 16-17 Lussky, A. E., 181-182 Lutrin, Le, see Boileau MacFlecknoe, see Dryden, John Mandeville, Bernard, 3, 5, 157, 163

189

Mann, Thomas, 62, 107 Marston, John, 152, 155 Marvell, Andrew, 155-156 Matthews, Brander, 7 McDougall, William, 33 Men without Art, see Lewis, Wyndham Merchant's Tale, The, see Chaucer Meredith, George, 7, 32, 34, 121, 140, 142-143, 163 Micromegas, see Voltaire Milton, 84 Mime, 67, 81, 94 Minot, Laurence, 148 Mock-encomium, 50, 58-59, 81-82 Mock-heroic, 48 Modest Proposal, A, see Swift, Jonathan More, Thomas, 58, 83 Myers, F. W. H., 136-137, 164 Mysterious Stranger, The, see Twain, Mark Nashe, Thomas, 25, 27, 32, 33 New Yorker, The, 77, 165 Northanger Abbey, see Austen, Jane Nun's Priest's Tale, The, see Chaucer Odyssey, see Homer Oedipus Rex, see Sophocles Oldham, John, 84, 155 Omar Khayyam, 23. See also FitzGerald, Edward O'Neill, Eugene, 134 Oracles, 114-116 Ordeal of Richard Feverel, The, see Meredith, George Panurge, see Rabelais Paradise Regained, see Milton Parody, 42 Peacock, T . L., 33, 55, 82, 176-177 Perry, Bliss, 7 Persius, 4, 95, 152, 154, 159, 161 Petronius, 66

190

INDEX

Philips, John, 162 Plato, 58, 91-95, 140; see also Socrates Point Counter Point, see Huxley, Aldous Pope, Alexander, 7, 27, 49, 159-161, 162 Praise of Folly, The, see Erasmus Pride and Prejudice, see Austen, Jane Proust, 107 Psalms, 34 Pulci, 150 Puttenham, Richard, 78 Quiller-Couch, Sir Arthur, 62 Quintilian, 9 Rabelais, 15, 23-24, 33-34, 45, 50, 51-52, 55-60, 68-69, 83 Rand, Ε. K., 90 Rape of the Lock, The, see Pope, Alexander Rasselas, see Johnson, Samuel Reeve's Tale, The, see Chaucer Renan, 107, 141 Rhetoric, 8-9, 13-14, 22, 58-59 Richardson, Samuel, 67 Richter, 10 Robinson, F. N., 148-149 Rochester (Robert Wilmot, Earl of), 29 Rowlands, Samuel, 61 Rubaiyat, The, see FitzGerald, Edward Sarcasm, 78-79 Sartor Resartus, see Carlyle, Thomas Satire, range of, 16; Elizabethan, 3-5, 151-155; Irish, 148-149; Arabic, 149; Italian medley, 150, 158, 164; formal, defined, 160-161; objects of, 148; Varronian, 157. See also satura satura, 5, 67, 81, 95, 152-155

Satyricon, see Petronius Savoy Operas, The, see Gilbert, W . S. Schiller, 123, 132 Schlegel, 123-126, 131-132 Schoolmistress, The, see Shenstone, William Schopenhauer, 182 Seasons, The, see Thomson, James Secchia rapita, see Tassoni Sedgewick, G. G., 125 Semonides, 75, 137 sermo, 5, 95 Shakespeare, 16, 18, 25-26, 67, 113— 114, 115, 123, 139 Shamela Andrewes, see Fielding, Henry Shaving of Shagpat, The, see Meredith, George Shelley, P. B., 33, 132, 164 Shenstone, William, 162 Simile, 26-29, 41-42, 47 Sir Thopas, The Tale of, see Chaucer Sitwell, Osbert, 134 Skelton, John, 16, 55, 61, 62-63, 151 Smollett, Tobias, 66 Socrates, 90-95; see also Plato Solger, 124 Sophocles, 116 Sophron, 94 Sorcery, 23, 35, 148, 150 Spenser, Edmund, 5, 153, 158, 162 spoudaiogeloion, 81, 95 Steel Glass, The, see Gascoigne, George Stein, Gertrude, 167 Steinbeck, John, 167 Sterne, Laurence, 20-21, 55, 164 Stevenson, R. L., 81 Swift, Jonathan, 3, 5 7 , 8, 15, 16, 2 4> 2 7i 37-38» 5 2 . 63, 67, 77, 80, 84-85, 102-107, I J I > I20 > I28> 143-144, 157, 162-163, 1 8 0 Swinburne, A . C., 17, 132, 164 Symposium, see Plato

INDEX Tale of a Tub, A, see Swift, Jonathan Tam O'Shanter, see Burns, Robert Task, The, see Cowper, William Tassoni, 54 Taylor, Jeremy, 16 Tedium, 129-131, 136 Thackeray, W . M., 6, 32, 66, 121, 163 Theocritus, 62 Theophrastus, 93 Thomson, J. A . K., 181 Thomson, James, 162 Thomson, James ("Β. V . " ) , 23, 107, 130-131, 133-134, 164 Tieck, 125-126 Time-lag in satire, 29-30, 48, 78, 79 To the Person Sitting in Darkness, see Clemens, Samuel L. Tom Jones, see Fielding, Henry Travesty, 48, 59, 157 Tristram Shandy, see Sterne, Laurence Troilus and Criseyde, see Chaucer True History, A, see Lucian

191

Tunning of Elinour Rumming, The, see Skelton, John Twain, Mark, see Clemens, Samuel L. Understatement, see Litotes Urquhart, Thomas, 60 Vane's Story, see Thomson, James ("Β. V . " ) Vile Bodies, see Waugh, Evelyn Virgidemiarum, see Hall, Joseph Voltaire, 103, 105-106, 128 Voyages imaginaires, 102-106, 179 Waller, Edmund, 156 Walpole, Robert, 86 Ward, Artemus, see Browne, Charles Farrar Waugh, Evelyn, 33, 106-108, 167 Wilde, Oscar, 61 Wörde, W y n k e n de, 78 Yankee understatement, 88-89 Young, Edward, 37, 160 Youth, see Conrad, Joseph