This would perhaps be a sufficient account were it not for a certain left-handed yet inseparable connection of the psychology of the question with its ethics. Whether or not an intruder, the latter has entered in and firmly entrenched herself. When therefore she maintains that her satiric discontent is divine, she must be given a respectful hearing; though after it we seem unable to concede more than the possibility.
A lively enthusiasm for showing up the ingenuous sentimentalist or the crafty hypocrite may or may not argue a freedom on the exposer’s part from these or other modes of hiding or distorting the truth; or a disinterested love for truth itself. 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. Nevertheless it is possible to enjoy the process of unmasking without making it a corollary that masking is wrong and therefore deserving of exposure.
Some observers are more impressed with the resemblances among the members of the great human family, and some more sensitive to the differences. 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.
For there is an ideal in this as in all things that have variation and flexibility; and, as in them all, the question of quality is the most important one. Without some sort of criterion we can form no judgments as to value. The points we have been considering,—what satire is made of, why and how made, against what directed, and in what effective, all lead to the final one,—what is the highest type?
The trend of testimony seems to converge on three requirements for that satire which would disarm criticism while indulging in it: purity of purpose, kindliness of temper, and discrimination as to objects of ridicule.
The first is not to be confused with the reformatory motive. It means simply freedom from the very affectation censured in others. What it rules out is not so much the railing to gratify one’s spleen, as the pose of altruism while doing it; the grieved this-hurts-me-more-than-it-does-you attitude so particularly annoying to the castigated. It also discounts the selfish vanity which courts applause for wit, regardless of the means by which it is won.
On this point Horace[53] again heads the list. He denies the accusation that the satirist is spiteful, and continues:
“Liberius si
Dixero quid, si forte jocosius, hoc mihi juris
Cum venia dabis.”