“Now, earnestness seems never earnest more
Than when it dons for garb—indifference;
So, there’s much laughing: but, compensative,
When frowning follows laughter, then indeed
Scout innuendo, sarcasm, irony!”[9]
Finally, turning to the encyclopedia for a modern official pronouncement, we find humor again cited as a sine qua non.[10]
“Satire in its literary aspect may be defined as the expression in adequate terms of the sense of amusement or disgust excited by the ridiculous or unseemly, provided that humor is a distinctly recognisable element, and that the utterance is invested with literary form. Without humor, satire is invective; without literary form, it is mere clownish jesting. * * * This feeling of disgust or contempt may be diverted from the failings of man individual to the feebleness and imperfection of man universal, and the composition may still be a satire; but if the element of scorn or sarcasm were entirely eliminated it would become a sermon.”
The matter of ingredients is more easily disposed of, however, than that of causation. It is obviously easier to scrutinize a finished product and see what it is made of than to go back to its origin and discover why it was made. For the latter process leads us to the domain of motives, that shadowy realm where the real is often made to hide behind the assumed or at least the instinctive kept down by the acquired. In this mental kingdom many an impulsive little prince has been smothered by a deliberative, ambitious usurper who felt a call to rule.
In the province of satire the real internal stimulus is temperament. If a man has a critical disposition, he is bound to criticise. If he has a keen sense of humor, he will be alive to the absurd. If he possesses both, he is a natural-born satirist and cannot escape his manifest destiny,—so long as he is not inarticulate. But the declared motives are for the most part ethical and altruistic, a lineage much more presentable and worthy of high command.
This human tendency to justify its instinctive behavior by ex post facto morality has produced an impressive symposium on the thesis that satire has a definite purpose and moreover a noble one. Thus while the satirist admits his malice aforethought, he protests that the malicious suffers a sea change into the beneficent, for that he must be cruel only to be kind. The modest and honest confession of Horace[11] that he wrote satire because he had to write something and was not equal to epic, was soon supplanted by the Juvenalian declaration of saeva indignatio, and it is from this perennial spring that a steady flow of eulogy has irrigated the history of satire.