Pollard - Satire

for BONAMY DOBRE

most inspiring of teachers

This volume is one of a series of short studies, each dealing with a single key item, or a group of two or three key items, in our critical vocabulary. The purpose of the series differs from that served by the standard glossaries of literary terms. Many terms are adequately defined for the needs of students by the brief entries in these glossaries, and such terms will not be the subjects of studies in the present series. But there are other terms which cannot be made familiar by means of compact definitions. Students need to grow accustomed to them through simple and straightforward but reasonably full discussions of them. The purpose of this series is to provide such discussions.

Some of the terms in question refer to literary movements (e.g., Romanticism, Aestheticism, etc.), others to literary kinds (e.g., Comedy, Epic, etc.), and still others to stylistic features (e.g., Irony, The Conceit, etc.). Because of this diversity of subject-matter, no attempt has been made to impose a uniform pattern upon the studies. But all authors have tried to provide as full illustrative quotation as possible, to make reference whenever appropriate to more than one literature, and to compose their studies in such a way as to guide readers towards the short bibliographies in which they have made suggestions for further reading.

John D. Jump

University of Manchester

The proper study of Mankind is Man

Sole judge of Truth, in endless Error hurld:

The glory, jest and riddle of the world.

(Pope, Essay on Man II. 2, 1718)

Tremble and turn pale

When Satire wields her mighty flail.

(Charles Churchill, The Ghost, III. 9256)

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

This desire, however, is usually implicit. Though he may enjoy his talent and may hope that we will enjoy it too, the satirist normally avows a more serious intent. Dr Johnson in the Dictionary defined satire as a poem in which wickedness or folly is censured. Dryden and Defoe went further than this, the one in They both believe that satire can heal and restore, even though Defoe is rather doubtful of his own contemporaries. With his characteristic pessimism Swift had fewer doubts. In the preface to The Battle of the Books (1704) he wrote:

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