Frances Theresa Russell

“ Wherever there are boundaries, there are always some sections of the enclosure nearer the margin than others. Thus, although satire is a compound, it does not follow that its fractions stand in a constant uniform ratio. On the contrary, the proportion ranges all the way from a minimum of humor in a Juvenal or a Johnson to a minimum of criticism in a Horace, a Gay, or a Lamb. Either quality may reach the vanishing point, but when it passes it, the remaining one cannot alone create satire, any more than oxygen or hydrogen can be transformed into water. ”

“ The paradox arises in the fact that while criticism is essentially scientific, satire is a branch of esthetics, which nevertheless has practical proclivities. These it does no harm to exercise, providing it wreaks no violence on its character as an art. But the effect of satire must not be confused with its quality. It cannot be said that he satirizes best who reforms most,—the harvest of reform from satiric seed being granted. ”

“ The satirist has not only these normal obligations, but some peculiar dangers. He is in as perilous a position as Sir Guyon in his voyage to the realm of Acrasia: threatened by the didacticism that besets the critic, the vulgarity and rudeness that prey upon the jester, the prejudice and injustice that warp the opponent, the smugness that undermines the reformer. Moreover, he has his hampering limitations. He is forever confined to the middle plane of life, shut out alike from its sublime heights and tragic depths. ”

“ Laughter throws a far more illuminating ray on the laugher than the laughed at, for it indicates not only taste and mood but the trend of one’s philosophy. In betraying a man’s idea of the incongruous, it implies his conception of the congruous, and reveals his whole coördination of life. We may, it is true, define humor by saying that intellectually it is a contemplation of life from the angle of amusement, and emotionally, a joyous effervescence over the absurdities in life ever present to the discerning eye; but we can never quite capture it, any more than pleasure or tragedy. ”

“ We can, however, use these abstractions as refracted definers of character, by noting what sort of a man it is who regards such and such things as amusing, or delightful, or unendurable. For not only as a man thinks, but also as he laughs and exults and censures and suffers, so is he.
That satire is woven from double strands, the blue of rebuke and the red of wit,—becoming thereby in a chromatic sense the purple patch of literature,—is testified to by satiric theory as well as practice. ”

“ It is scarcely hazardous to say that irony is the very salt of the novel; and that just as you put salt even in a cake, so it is not wise to neglect it wholly even in a romance. Life itself, as soon as it gets beyond mere vegetation, is notoriously full of irony; and no imitation of it which dispenses with the seasoning can be worth much. ”

“ The thing to be remembered is that in all ages the satirist of manners has been of the utmost service to society in exposing its follies and lashing its vices. It is the work of a great satirist to apply the caustic to the ulcers of society; and if we are to let our dislike of satire overrule our judgment, we shall not only record our votes against a Juvenal and a Swift, but equally against the whole line of Hebrew prophets. ”

“ In the downfall of Becky there is less of the comic and more of the tragic, though Thackeray does not choose to invest her with enough dignity for tragedy. She is less absurd than Pecksniff or Sir Willoughby for several reasons. She is more human and has the claim of normal humanity on our sympathy; she is the product of circumstances, clearly shown to be largely responsible for her failure both in aspiration and achievement, whereas theirs is gratuitous and without excuse; and she is herself too much of a jester to be patronized by the ridicule of others. ”

“ Satire, being frankly a destructive process, makes no pretense of supplementing its iconoclasm by reconstruction. But such implication of reform as may lurk in the criticism that paves the way may be looked for more assuredly than elsewhere in attacks on institutions. Such criticism is neither lowered by the recrimination that puts satire of individuals below the normal satiric level, nor elevated by the artistic detachment that lifts satire of human nature above it. ”

“ It does go without saying that real respect and admiration for honesty and sincerity is a fundamental human trait, as witness the glowing encomiums bestowed on those guileless virtues, and it might follow that our unmoral impulses are half consciously focussed through a moral function. We must have a sin offering; and deceit is in the most eligible. Thus the satirist may, deliberately or unthinkingly, read deception into his disapproved, in order to have an excuse for laughter, just as he may read vice and folly into his disliked, in order to condemn. ”

“ When in love they do not at all understand what has befallen them. What they want they try to compass as a cow does when it stands stretching out its head toward a stack of hay which it cannot reach. Indeed, there is no such thing as a young man, for a man is not really a man till he is middle-aged. But take them at their worst, they are a deal too good for us, for they become men some day, whereas we must only be women to the end.”
Dickens is again a contributor of portraits, though not of the best, and is joined this time by Thackeray, Trollope, and Meredith. ”

“ This marriage of a satiric Medway and a fictional Thames is a happy English event, though by no means the first alliance between these historic families. In their long careers they are found sometimes entirely separate, but very often united. The latter course works for a decided mutual advantage, with a preponderance of gain accruing to satire, as fiction can live without satire far better than satire without fiction.
A narrative of entire gravity may be a gracious and splendid thing; indeed, pure tragedy is perhaps the highest form of art. ”

“ This gentle diffusion of her presence is a less obtrusive rôle than satire has hitherto enjoyed but is none the less essential, and in any case it is all that can be allowed by a scientific, democratic society, too well informed to deal only with surfaces, too preoccupied with its own business and desires, such as they are, to worry much about the fiasco others make of theirs, too polite to scold even with wit, and too truly humorous to tolerate the superior pose. ”

“ There is no more effective satiric machinery than that of the Foreign State, or Adventures among Strange People. It may take the form of a serious though perhaps fantastic conception with incidental satire, as in Utopia, New Atlantis, The Coming Race, Modern Utopia; or a travesty of these, an inverted pyramid, made grotesque by the dominating satire, though none the less freighted with serious intent, as Gulliver, Journey from This World to the Next, Erewhon. ”

“ So persistent and insistent in the mind of man has been, and still is, the satiric mood, so devoted has he been from immemorial ages to the habit of story-telling (and seldom for the mere sake of the story) , so voluminous and emphatic did he become in the nineteenth century, that no complete account of him can be rendered up until, amid the infinite variety of his aspects, he has been viewed as a Victorian satirist, using as his medium the English novel. ”

“ It brings fine professions down to fact, points the contrast between the commonplace reality and its tinsel dress, and by the dread of ridicule raises the standard of plain-dealing. Other means of criticism as well act as a check on more opprobrious faults in public life. But satire is the best agent to keep us free from taking words for substance.”
Apparently, then, we may conclude that deception in some form is, so far as any one thing can be, the basic object of satire, or at least is so considered by those who reflect upon it. ”

“ In Disraeli’s Ixion, Enceladus has been identified as Wellington, Hyperion as Sir Robert Peel, Jupiter as George the Third, and Apollo as Byron. Byronism indeed is one of the shining marks loved by the nineteenth century, a fact that not only labels the British temper, but illustrates the irony of time’s revenges. The last great satirist of the old school himself becomes the prime object of satire for the new, partly through mutual lack of understanding, and partly because Byron, like some other brilliant wits, lacked a real sense of humor. ”

“ The combination in him of cynic, self-pamperer, and Sir Oracle forms a type which Meredith especially delights to dishonor, because its own smugness puts a splash of [259] color, as it were, on the bull’s-eye and renders it more conspicuous. Not only is the epicure pierced with many an ironic shaft, but the Wise Youth is made the veritable error incarnate of the Feverel tragedy. For it was his Fabian policy, dictated and obeyed, that knotted still more the sad tangle, just as it was Austin Wentworth’s simple manly directness that proved the knot could be cut easily by prompt and silent action. ”

“ As there is a snobbishness free from coarseness, so there is a vulgarity unembellished even by pseudo-culture. In this ugly and gross scum of the earth no novelist really delights except the creator of Mrs. Gamp, Quilp, Squeers, and Fagin and his crew, though Thackeray is able to depict Sir Pitt Crawley; Trollope, the Scathards; and Meredith, Sedgett.
The compound of snobbishness and vulgarity has the additional complexity of ramifying into hypocrisy on one side and sentimentality on the other. ”

“ But irony is no more personal than the sun that sends his flaming darts into the world. The satirist is a purely practical man, with a business instinct, bent on the main chance and the definite object. He is often brutal, and always overbearing; the ironist, never. Irony may wound from the very fineness and delicacy of the attack, but the wounding is incidental. The sole purpose of the satirist and the burlesquer is to wound ”

“ In youth the exuberant and undisciplined spirit, not yet checked by the reins of reality, riots in the glory of extravagance; the inventive faculty is awake but unfurnished by experience with material for original creation; the critical scent is keen but unpracticed, and impatient of sober, qualified judgment. [114] Such a condition is prime for the production of a Love’s Labour’s Lost, a Joseph Andrews, a Northanger Abbey, a Pickwick, a Barry Lyndon, a Shaving of Shagpat; to be followed by Twelfth Night, Tom Jones, Emma, David Copperfield, Vanity Fair, The Egoist. ”

“ One would hardly accuse this critic of a conservative reluctance to expose the public to iconoclastic bacilli, though he had not yet become the author of Beauchamp’s Career, nor would one suppose his “public” to be composed entirely of tired business men and sentimental school girls. There remain the two cruxes in the history of satire: failure of the satirist Thackeray to appreciate the satirist Swift, and of the satirist Meredith to appreciate the satirist Butler. ”

“ And while neither the statement nor the solution of the nineteenth is reckoned adequate today, still the Victorians did accomplish something if not much, and all we can say for ourselves is that we have not accomplished much, if something. Moreover, to flatter ourselves that we are the first to discover the social onus of poverty and other ills, is to ignore the contributions not only of the novelists but of Carlyle, Ruskin, Morris, and Henry George. When the remaining four-fifths of our century shall have been added to history, we may perhaps applaud ourselves. ”

“ A wholesome fear of being absurd serves to reduce one’s chances of being that rich anomaly, a ridiculous satirist. The modern satirist may possess a mind conscious to itself of right and a conviction that he has a mission to perform. But he is more prone to conceal or even disclaim these things than to advertise them. Even Fielding did not proclaim, as he might have done, that he first adventured. Peacock trusted to his readers to discover that fools being his theme, satire must be his song. ”

“ The ironist is as dogmatic as the theist; and he no doubt gets as much satisfaction from his denial of a rationally ordered universe, as the other does from his assertion of it. To be able to fling back a jest into the face of the Sphinx is undeniably a poor equivalent for guessing her riddle, but it at least helps to take the edge off her inscrutability.
In his La Satire en France, Lenient makes irony the opposite of enthusiasm, and emphasizes the fact and the necessity of their perennial alternation, like the recurrence of day and night. ”

“ Indeed, the only others to deserve mention are Lytton, Trollope, and Thackeray, and the last in his extra-novel productions. Those, on the other hand, who are most endowed with wit are Meredith, Butler, and Peacock, with George Eliot not quite to be omitted. More important than comicality or wit is the sense of humor, for while they are largely in the nature of devices whereby the object is made ex post facto ludicrous to others, it is the quality which enables the critic himself to perceive the absurdity, and is thus the sine qua non of his being a satirist at all. ”

“ When a consciousness of this variance is dissolved in a humorous solution, it precipitates a satire. The satirist is not always a victorious Saint George, and the satirized a downed and disgraced Dragon. Still, if the Saint could be secularized to the extent of a mocking light in his eye, and a taunting finger pointing at a removed disguise under which the Dragon had been masquerading, we might take the picture as a symbol of an ideal relationship between them, both ethically and artistically. ”