“Dr. Johnson is more to my mind as a sheer satirist than Pope, for in satire character tells more than in any other form of verse. We want a personality behind—a strong, gloomy, brooding personality; soured and savage, if you will * * * but spiteful never.”
Even the traits of gloom and savagery might be dispensed with, and room made for an infusion of sweetness and light. This is implied in the condition laid down by Lionel Johnson:[63]
“To tilt at superstition, to shoot at folly, is seldom a grateful or a gratifying pursuit, if there be no depth of purpose in it, nothing but pleasure in the consciousness of destructive power, no feeling of sympathetic pity, no tenderness somewhere in the heart, no cordiality sweetening the work of overthrow.”
And Garnett[64] concludes:
“Satirists have met with much ignorant and invidious depreciation, as though a talent for ridicule was necessarily the index of an unkindly nature. The truth is just the reverse.”
Discrimination as to objects of satire has reference not to their nature, as foolish, vicious, deceitful, but to their legitimacy as objects. It is a matter of taste and justice on the part of the satirist.
The first definite reproof of heedlessness on this score is given in the memorial tribute to Pope:[65]
“Dart not on Folly an indignant eye:
Whoe’er discharged artillery on a fly?
Deride not Vice: absurd the thought and vain,