English Satires Part 1

English Satires.

by Various.

Edited by William Henry Oliphant Smeaton.

PREFACE.

In the compilation of this volume my aim has been to furnish a work that would be representative in character rather than exhaustive. The restrictions of s.p.a.ce imposed by the limits of such a series as this have necessitated the omission of many pieces that readers might expect to see included. As far as possible, however, the most typical satires of the successive eras have been selected, so as to throw into relief the special literary characteristics of each, and to manifest the trend of satiric development during the centuries elapsing between Langland and Lowell.

Acknowledgment is due, and is gratefully rendered, to Mrs. C.S.

Calverley for permission to print the verses which close this book; and to Messrs. Macmillan & Co. for permission to print A.H. Clough's "Spectator ab Extra".

To Professor C.H. Herford my warmest thanks are due for his careful revision of the Introduction, and for many valuable hints which have been adopted in the course of the work; also to Mr. W. Keith Leask, M.A.(Oxon.), and the librarians of the Edinburgh University and Advocates' Libraries.

OLIPHANT SMEATON.

INTRODUCTION.

Satire and the satirist have been in evidence in well-nigh all ages of the world's history. The chief instruments of the satirist's equipment are irony, sarcasm, invective, wit, and humour. The satiric denunciation of a writer burning with indignation at some social wrong or abuse, is capable of reaching the very highest level of literature.

The writings of a satirist of this type, and to some extent of every satirist who touches on the social aspects of life, present a picture more or less vivid, though not of course complete and impartial, of the age to which he belongs, of the men, their manners, fas.h.i.+ons, tastes, and prevalent opinions. Thus they have a historical as well as a literary and an ethical value. And Thackeray, in speaking of the office of the humorist or satirist, for to him they were one, says, "He professes to awaken and direct your love, your pity, your kindness, your scorn for untruth, pretension, imposture, your tenderness for the weak, the poor, the oppressed, the unhappy. To the best of his means and ability he comments on all the ordinary actions and pa.s.sions of life almost."[1]

Satire has, in consequence, always ranked as one of the cardinal divisions of literature. Its position as such, however, is due rather to the fact of it having been so regarded among the Romans, than from its own intrinsic importance among us to-day. Until the closing decades of the eighteenth century--so long, in fact, as the cla.s.sics were esteemed of paramount authority as models--satire proper was accorded a definite place in letters, and was distinctively cultivated by men of genius as a branch of literature. But with the rise of the true _national_ spirit in the various literatures of Europe, and notably in that of England, satire has gradually given place to other types of composition. Slowly but surely it has been edged out of its prominent position as a separate department, and has been relegated to the position of a _quality of style_, important, beyond doubt, yet no longer to be considered as a prime division of letters.[2]

Rome rather than Greece must be esteemed the home of ancient satire.

Quintilian, indeed, claims it altogether for his countrymen in the words, _Satira tota nostra est_; while Horace styles it _Graecis intactum carmen_. But this claim must be accepted with many reservations. It does not imply that we do not discover the existence of satire, together with favourable examples of it, long anterior to the oldest extant works in either Grecian or Latin literature. The use of what are called "personalities" in everyday speech was the probable origin of satire. Conversely, also, satire, in the majority of those earlier types current at various periods in the history of literature, has shown an inclination to be personal in its character. De Quincey, accordingly, has argued that the more personal it became in its allusions, the more it fulfilled its specific function. But such a view is based on the supposition that satire has no other mission than to lash the vices of our neighbours, without recalling the fact that the satirist has a reformative as well as a punitive duty to discharge. The further we revert into the "deep backward and abysm of time" towards the early history of the world, the more p.r.o.nounced and overt is this indulgence in broad personal invective and sarcastic strictures.

The earliest cultivators of the art were probably the men with a grievance, or, as Dr. Garnett says, "the carpers and fault-finders of the clan". Their first attempts were, as has been conjectured, merely personal lampoons against those they disliked or differed from, and were perhaps of a type cognate with the Homeric _Margites_. Homer's character of Thersites is mayhap a lifelike portrait of some contemporary satirist who made himself dreaded by his personalities.

But even in Thersites we see the germs of transition from merely personal invective to satire directed against a cla.s.s; and Greek satire, though on the whole more personal than Roman, achieved brilliant results. It is enough to name Archilochus, whom Mahaffy terms the Swift of Greek Literature, Simonides of Amorgos (circ. 660 B.C.), the author of the famous _Satire on Women_, and Hipponax of Ephesus, reputed the inventor of the Scazon or halting iambic.

But the lasting significance of Greek satire is mainly derived from its surpa.s.sing distinction in two domains--in the comico-satiric drama of Aristophanes, and in the _Beast Fables_ of 'aesop'. In later Greek literature it lost its robustness and became trivial and effeminate through expending itself on unworthy objects.

It is amongst the Romans, with their deeper ethical convictions and more powerful social sense, that we must look for the true home of ancient satire. The germ of Roman satire is undoubtedly to be found in the rude Fescennine verses, the rough and licentious jests and buffoonery of the harvest-home and the vintage thrown into quasi-lyrical form. These songs gradually developed a concomitant form of dialogue styled saturae, a term denoting "miscellany", and derived perhaps from the _Satura lanx_, a charger filled with the first-fruits of the year's produce, which was offered to Bacchus and Ceres.[3] In Ennius, the "father of Roman satire", and Varro, the word still retained this old Roman sense.

Lucilius was the first Roman writer who made "censorious criticism" the prevailing tone of satire, and his work, the parent of the satire of Horace, of Persius, of Juvenal, and through that of the poetical satire of modern times, was the princ.i.p.al agent in fixing its present polemical and urban a.s.sociations upon a term originally steeped in the savour of rustic revelry. In the hands of Horace, Roman satire was to be moulded into a new type that was not only to be a thing of beauty, but, as far as one can yet see, to remain a joy for ever. The great Venusian, as he informs us, set before himself the task of adapting the satire of Lucilius to the special circ.u.mstances, the manners, the literary modes and tastes of the Augustan age. Horace's Satires conform to Addison's great rule, which he lays down in the _Spectator_, that the satire which only seeks to wound is as dangerous as arrows that fly in the dark. There is always an ethical undercurrent running beneath the polished raillery and the good-natured satire. His genial _bonhomie_ prevents him from ever becoming ill-natured in his animadversions.

Of those manifold, kaleidoscopically-varied types of human nature which in the Augustan age flocked to Rome as the centre of the known world, he was a keen and a close observer. Jealously he noted the deteriorating influence these foreign elements were exercising on the grand old Roman character, and some of the bitterest home-thrusts he ever delivered were directed against this alien invasion.[4] In those brilliant pictures wherewith his satires are replete, Horace finds a place for all. Sometimes he criticises as a far-off observer, gazing with a sort of cynical amus.e.m.e.nt at this human raree-show; at others he speaks as though he himself were in the very midst of the bustling frivolity of the Roman Vanity Fair, and a sufferer from its follies.

Then his tone seems to deepen into a grave intensity of remonstrance, as he exposes its hollowness, its heartlessness, and its blindness to the absorbing problems of existence.

After the death of Horace (B.C. 8) no names of note occur in the domain of satire until we reach that famous trio, contemporary with one another, who adorned the concluding half of the first century of our era, viz.:--Juvenal, Persius, and Martial. They are severally representative of distinct modes or types of satire. Juvenal ill.u.s.trates rhetorical or tragic satire, of which he is at once the inventor and the most distinguished master--that form of composition, in other words, which attacks vice, wrongs, or abuses in a high-pitched strain of impa.s.sioned, declamatory eloquence. In this type of satire, evil is designedly painted in exaggerated colours, that disgust may more readily be aroused by the loathsomeness of the picture. As a natural consequence, sobriety, moderation, and truth to nature no longer are esteemed so indispensable. In this style Juvenal has had many imitators, but no superiors. His satires represent the final development the form underwent in achieving the definite purpose of exposing and chastising in a systematic manner the entire catalogue of vices, public and private, which were a.s.sailing the welfare of the state. They const.i.tute luridly powerful pictures of a debased and shamelessly corrupt condition of society. Keen contemptuous ridicule, a sardonic irony that held nothing in reverence, a caustic sarcasm that burned like an acid, and a vituperative invective that ransacked the language for phrases of opprobrium--these were the agents enlisted by Juvenal into the service of purging society of its evil.

Persius, on the other hand, was the philosophic satirist, whose devotion to Stoicism caused him to see in it a panacea for all the evils which Nero brought on the empire. The shortness of his life, his studious tastes, and his exceptional moral purity all contributed to keep him ignorant of that world of evil which, as Professor Sellar has pithily remarked, it is the business of the satirist to know. Hence he is purely a philosophic or didactic satirist. Only one of his poems, the first, fulfils the special end of satire by representing any phase whatever of the life of his time, and pointing its moral.

Finally, Martial exchanged the epic tirade for the epigram as the vehicle of his satire, and handled this lighter missile with unsurpa.s.sed brilliance and _verve_. Despite his sycophancy and his fulsome flattery of prospective benefactors, he displays more of the sober moderation and sane common-sense of Horace than either of his contemporaries. There are few better satirists of social and literary pretenders either in ancient or modern times. No ancient has more vividly painted the manners of antiquity. If Juvenal enforces the lesson of that time, and has penetrated more deeply into the heart of society, Martial has sketched its external aspect with a much fairer pencil, and from a much more intimate contact with it.

In the first and second centuries of our era two other forms of satire took their rise, viz.:--the Milesian or "Satiric Tale" of Petronius and Apuleius, and the "Satiric Dialogue" of Lucian. Both are admirable pictures of their respective periods. The _Tales_ of the two first are conceived with great force of imagination, and executed with a happy blending of humour, wit, and cynical irony that suggests Gil Blas or Barry Lyndon. _The Supper of Trimalchio_, by Petronius, reproduces with unsparing hand the gluttony and the blatant vice of the Neronic epoch.

_The Golden a.s.s_ of Apuleius is a clever sketch of contemporary manners in the second century, painting in vivid colours the reaction that had set in against scepticism, and the general appet.i.te that prevailed for miracles and magic.

Finally, ancient satire may be said to close with the famous _Dialogues_ of Lucian, which, although written in Greek, exhibited all the best features of Roman satire. Certainly the ethical purpose and the reformative element are rather implied than insistently expressed in Lucian; but he affords in his satiric sketches a capital glimpse of the ludicrous perplexity into which the pagan mind was plunged when it had lost faith in its mythology, and when a callous indifference towards the Pantheon left the Roman world literally without a rational creed. As a satire on the old h.e.l.lenic religion nothing could be racier than _The Dialogues of the G.o.ds_ and _The Dialogues of the Dead_.

It is impossible in this brief survey to discuss at large the vast chaotic epoch in the history of satire which lies between the end of the ancient world and the dawn of humanism. For satire, as a literary genre, belongs to these two. The mediaeval world, inexhaustible in its capacity and relish for abuse, full of rude laughter and drastic humour--prompt, for all its superst.i.tion, to make a jest of the priest, and, for all its chivalry, to catalogue the foibles of women--had the satirical animus in abundance, and satirical songs, visions, fables, fabliaux, ballads, epics, in legion, but no definite and recognised school of satire. It is sufficient to name, as examples of the extraordinary range of the mediaeval satiric genius, the farce of _Pathelin_, the beast-epic of _Renart_, the rhymes of Walter Map, and the _Inferno_ of Dante.

Of these satirists before the rise of "satire", mediaeval England produced two great examples in Chaucer and Langland. They typify at the outset the two cla.s.ses into which Dryden divided English satirists--the followers of Horace's way and the followers of Juvenal's--the men of the world, who a.s.sail the enemies of common-sense with the weapons of humour and sarcasm; and the prophets, who a.s.sail vice and crime with pa.s.sionate indignation and invective scorn. Since Dryden's time neither line has died out, and it is still possible, with all reserves, to recognise the two strains through the whole course of English literature: the one represented in Chaucer, Donne, Marvell, Addison, Arbuthnot, Swift, Young, Goldsmith, Canning, Thackeray, and Tennyson; the others in Langland, Skelton, Lyndsay, Nash, Marston, Dryden, Pope, Churchill, Johnson, Junius, Burns, and Browning.

Langland was a nave mediaeval Juvenal. The sad-visaged, world-weary dreamer of the Malvern hills, sorrowing over the vice, the abuses, and the social misery of his time, finding, as he tells us, no comfort in any of the established inst.i.tutions of his day, because confronted with the fraud and falsehood that infected them all, is one of the most pathetic figures in literature. As Skeat suggests, the object of his great poem was to secure, through the lat.i.tude afforded by allegory, opportunities of describing the life and manners of the poorer cla.s.ses, of inveighing against clerical abuses and the rapacity of the friars, of representing the miseries caused by the great pestilences then prevalent, and by the hasty and ill-advised marriages consequent thereon; of denouncing lazy workmen and sham beggars, the corruption and bribery then too common in the law-courts--in a word, to lash all the numerous forms of falsehood, which are at all times the fit subjects for satire and indignant exposure. Amid many essential differences, is there not here a striking likeness to the work of the Roman Juvenal? Langland's satire is not so fiery nor so rhetorically intense as that of his prototype, but it is less profoundly despairing.

He satirizes evil rather by exposing it and contrasting it with good, than by vehemently denouncing it. The colours of the pictures are sombre, and the gloom is almost overwhelming, but still it is illumined from time to time with the hope of coming amendment, when the great reformer Piers the Plowman, by which is typified Christ,[5] should appear, who was to remedy all abuses and restore the world to a right condition. In this sustaining hope he differs from Juvenal, the funereal gloom of whose satires is relieved by no gleam of hope for the future.

Contrast with this the humorous brightness, the laughter, and the light of the surroundings a.s.sociated with his great contemporary, Geoffrey Chaucer. His very satire is kindly and quaint, like that of Horace, rather than bitterly acidulous. He raps his age over the knuckles, it is true, for its faults and foibles, but the censor's face wears a genial smile. One of his chief attractions for us lies in his bright objectivity. He never wears his heart on his sleeve like Langland. He has touches of rare and profound pathos, but these notes of pain are only like undertones of discord to throw the harmony into stronger relief, only like little cloudlets momentarily flitting across the golden suns.h.i.+ne of his humour.

We read Chaucer, as we read Horace, from love of his piquant Epicureanism, and the scintillating satire wherewith he enlivens those matchless pictures of his epoch which he has handed down to us.

Chaucer, as Professor Minto puts it, wrote largely for the court circle. His verses were first read in tapestried chambers, and to the gracious ear of stately lords and ladies. It was because he wrote for such an audience that he avoids the introduction of any discordant element in the shape of the deeper and darker social problems of the time. The same reticence occurs in Horace, writing as he did for the ear of Augustus and Maecenas, and of the fas.h.i.+onable circle thronging the great palace of his patron on the Esquiline. Is not the historic parallel between the two pairs of writers still further verified?

Chaucer wisely chose the epic form for his greatest poem, because he could introduce thereinto so many distinct qualities of composition, and the woof of racy humour as well as of sprightly satire which he introduces with such consummate art into the texture of his verse is of as fine a character as any in our literature. In Langland's great allegory, the satire is earnest, grave and solemn, as though with a sense of deep responsibility; that in Chaucer's _Canterbury Tales_--nay, in all his poems--is genial, laughing, and good-natured; tolerant, like Horace's of human weaknesses, because the author is so keenly conscious of his own.

Langland and Chaucer both died about the beginning of the fifteenth century. But from that date until 1576--when Gascoigne's _Steel Gla.s.s_, the first verse satire of the Elizabethan age, was published--we must look mainly to Scotland and the poems of William Dunbar, Sir David Lyndsay, and others, to preserve the apostolic succession of satire.

William Dunbar is one of the greatest of British satirists. His _Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins_, in which the popular poetic form of the age--allegory--is utilized with remarkable skill as the vehicle for a scathing satire on the headlong sensuality of his time, produces by its startling realism and terrible intensity an effect not unlike that exercised by the overpowering creations of Salvator Rosa. The poem is a bitter indictment of the utter corruption of all cla.s.ses in the society of his period. Like Juvenal, to whose school he belongs, he softens nothing, tones down nothing. The evil is presented in all its native hideousness. Lyndsay, on the other hand, would have been more vigorous had he been less diffuse, and used the pruning-knife more unsparingly.

His finest satiric pictures often lose their point by verbosity and tediousness. Brevity is the soul of satire as well as of wit.

The most vigorous English satire of this entire period was that which we owe to the scurrilous pen of Skelton and the provocative personality of Wolsey. With his work may be mentioned the rude and unpolished, yet vigorous, piece bearing the rhyming t.i.tle,

"Rede me and be nott wrothe, For I saye no thing but trothe",

written by two English Observantine Franciscan friars, William Roy and Jerome Barlowe;[6] a satire which stung the great cardinal so sharply that he commissioned Hermann Rynck to buy up every available copy.

Alexander Barclay's imitation, in his _s.h.i.+p of Fools_, of Sebastian Brandt's _Narrenschiff_, was only remarkable for the novel satirical device of the plan.

Bishop Latimer in his sermons is a vigorous satirist, particularly in that discourse upon "The Ploughers" (1547). His fearlessness is very conspicuous, and his attacks on the bishops who proved untrue to their trust and allowed their dioceses to go to wreck and ruin, are outspoken and trenchant:

"They that be lords will ill go to plough. It is no meet office for them. It is not seeming for their state. Thus came up lording loiterers; Thus crept in unprechinge prelates, and so have they long continued. For how many unlearned prelates have we now at this day? And no marvel; For if the ploughmen that now be, were made lordes, they would clean give over ploughing, they would leave of theyr labour and fall to lording outright and let the plough stand. For ever since the Prelates were made lords and n.o.bles, the plough standeth, there is no work done, the people starve. They hawke, they hunte, they carde, they dyce, they pastime in their prelacies with galaunt gentlemen, with their dauncing minions, and with their freshe companions, so that ploughing is set aside."[7]

But after Gascoigne's _Steel Gla.s.s_ was published, which professed to hold a mirror or "steel gla.s.s" up to the vices of the age, we reach that wonderful outburst of satiric, epigrammatic, and humorous composition which was one of the characteristics, and certainly not the least important, of the Elizabethan epoch. Lodge's _Fig for Momus_ (1593) contains certain satires which rank with Gascoigne's work as the earliest compositions of that type belonging to the period. That they were of no mean reputation in their own day is evident from the testimony of Meres,[8] who says, "As Horace, Lucilius, Juvenal, Persius, and Lucullus are the best for satire among the Latins, so with us, in the same faculty, these are chiefe, Piers Plowman, Lodge, Hall of Emanuel College, Cambridge, the author of _Pygmalion's Image and Certain Satires_[9] and the author of _Skialethea_". This contemporary opinion regarding the fact that _The Vision of Piers Plowman_ was esteemed a satire of outstanding merit in those days, is a curious commentary on Hall's boastful couplet describing himself as the earliest English satirist.

To name all the writers who, in this fruitful epoch of our literature, devoted themselves to this kind of composition would be impossible.

From 1598 until the death of James I. upwards of one hundred separate satirists can be named, both in verse and prose. Of these Bishop Hall is one of the greatest, and I have chosen him as the leading representative of the period. To the study of Horace and Juvenal he had devoted many years of his early manhood, and his imitation of these two great Romans is close and consistent. Therefore, for vigour, grave dignity, and incisiveness of thought, united to graphic pictures of his age, Hall is undeniably the most important name in the history of the Elizabethan satire, strictly so called. His exposures of the follies of his age were largely couched in the form, so much affected by Horace, of a familiar commentary on certain occurrences, addressed apparently to an anonymous correspondent.

Contemporary with Hall was Thomas Nash, whose _Pierce Penilesse's Supplication to the Devil_ was one of the most extraordinary onslaughts on the social vices of the metropolis that the period produced. Written in close imitation of Juvenal's earlier satires, he frequently approaches the standard of his master in graphic power of description, in scathing invective, and ironical mockery. In _Have with you to Saffron Walden_ he lashed Gabriel Harvey for his unworthy conduct towards the memory of Robert Greene. Both satires are written in prose, as indeed are nearly all his works, inasmuch as Nash was more of a pamphleteer than anything else. Other contemporaries of Hall were Thomas Dekker, whose fame as a dramatist has eclipsed his reputation as a satirist, but whose _Bachelor's Banquet--pleasantly discoursing the variable humours of Women, their quickness of wits and unsearchable deceits_, is a sarcastic impeachment of the gentler s.e.x, while his _Gull's Hornbook_ must be ranked with Nash's work as one of the most unsparing castigations of social life in London. The latter is a volume of fict.i.tious maxims for the use of youths desirous of being considered "pretty fellows". Other contemporaries were John Donne, John Marston, Jonson, George Chapman, and Nicholas Breton--all names of men who were conspicuous inheritors of the true Elizabethan spirit, and who united virility of thought to robustness and trenchancy of sarcasm.

Marston and Breton were amongst the best of the group, though they are not represented in these pages owing to the unsuitability of their writings for extract. Here is a picture from one of the satires of Marston which is instinct with satiric power. It is a portrait of a love-sick swain, and runs as follows:--

"For when my ears received a fearful sound That he was sick, I went, and there I found, Him laid of love and newly brought to bed Of monstrous folly, and a franticke head: His chamber hanged about with elegies, With sad complaints of his love's miseries, His windows strow'd with sonnets and the gla.s.se Drawn full of love-knots. I approach'd the a.s.se, And straight he weepes, and sighes some Sonnet out To his fair love! and then he goes about, For to perfume her rare perfection, With some sweet smelling pink epitheton.

Then with a melting looke he writhes his head, And straight in pa.s.sion, riseth in his bed, And having kist his hand, strok'd up his haire, Made a French _conge_, cryes 'O cruall Faire!'

To th' antique bed-post."[10]

Marston manifests more vigour and nervous force in his satires than Hall, but exhibits less elegance and ease in versification. In Charles Fitz-geoffrey's _Affaniae_, a set of Latin epigrams, printed at Oxford in 1601, Marston is complimented as the "Second English Satirist", or rather as dividing the palm of priority and excellence in English satire with Hall. The individual characteristics of the various leading Elizabethan satirists,--the vitriolic bitterness of Nash, the sententious profundity of Donne, the happy-go-lucky "slogging" of genial Dekker, the sledge-hammer blows of Jonson, the turgid malevolence of Chapman, and the stiletto-like thrusts of George Buchanan are worthy of closer and more detailed study than can be devoted to them in a sketch such as this. I regret that Nicolas Breton's _Pasquil's Madcappe_ proved too long for quotation in its entirety,[11] but the man who could pen such lines as these was, of a truth, a satirist of a high order:--

But what availes unto the world to talke?

Wealth is a witch that hath a wicked charme, That in the minds of wicked men doth walke, Unto the heart and Soule's eternal harme, Which is not kept by the Almighty arme: O,'tis the strongest instrument of ill That ere was known to work the devill's will.