Greater for less, your crime for our mistake!”
The demand for kindliness of temper may seem paradoxical, but for that very reason it is the more insistent. Being under suspicion of unkindness, vindictive spite, retaliation, satire must either admit the charge or prove the contrary, for the real paradox lies in the highest moral claim being made for the literary genre of the greatest immoral possibilities.
However, until the modern humanitarian cult came in, it seemed content to admit the charge. After Horace, with a few isolated exceptions, as Swift[59] and Cowper,[60] satire seemed rather to cherish malice and glory in rudeness, often mistaking peevish scolding for noble scorn. Its keynote was “A flash of that satiric rage,” or, according to Hall,
“The Satire should be like the porcupine,
That shoots sharp quills out in each angry line.”
Byron was the last example of both the professional, concentrated form and the truculent mood. Tennyson[61] voices the new spirit of his century:
“I loathe it: he had never kindly heart,
Nor ever cared to better his own kind,
Who first wrote satire, with no pity in it.”
Birrell,[62] less caustic than De Quincey about Pope, still uses him as an instance of how not to do it: