An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad

E-text prepared by Chris Curnow, Stephanie Eason, Joseph Cooper, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)

But however appealing the Essay may be as an installment on Harte's debt to Pope, there must obviously be better reasons for reprinting it. Harte himself doubtless had additional reasons for writing it. To understand them and the poem, we must also understand, at least in broad outline, the two traditional ways of evaluating satire which Harte and others of his age had inherited. One of them was distinctly at odds with Harte's aims; to the other he gave his support and made his own contribution.
One tradition stressed the lowness of satire, in itself and compared with other genres. This tradition, moreover, had at least two sources: the practice of Elizabethan satirists and the critical custom of assigning satire to a middle or low position in the hierarchy of genres.
One senses the foregoing critical assumptions about satire behind much of the early comment on The Dunciad . Most of the critics, to be sure, were anything but impartial; in many instances they were smarting from Pope's satire and sought any critical weapons available for retaliation. But it will not do to dismiss these men or their responses to The Dunciad as inconsequential; they had the weight of numbers on their side and, more important, the authority of long-established attitudes toward satire.
In opposing this low view of satire, Harte drew upon ideas more congenial to his purposes and far more congenial to The Dunciad . Originating with the Renaissance commentaries on the formal verse satire of the Romans, their lineage was just as venerable as that of the low view. These critical concepts were probably just as influential too, for they continued to be reiterated by commentaries down to and beyond Pope's time.
It is clear that Harte's Essay belongs in the tradition of criticism established by the commentaries on classical satire and continued by Dryden. Like these predecessors, Harte believes that satire is moral philosophy, teaching the noblest Ethicks to reform mankind (p. 6). Like them again, he believes that to fulfill this purpose satire must not only lash vice but recommend virtue, at least by implication: