Even more than usual, however, is the caution necessary that the classification is artificial and the classes inseparable. An individual may, and indeed generally does, represent an idea or an organization or a certain temperament. Particularly when an object of satire, John Doe is not viewed as John Doe but as an embodiment of some principle or kind of conduct disapproved of by his critic. And conversely, institutions and types, being abstractions, must be made concrete to get them into workable shape. “The position of the satirist,” says Lowell, in The Bigelow Papers, “is oftentimes one which he would not have chosen, had the election been left to himself. In attacking bad principles, he is obliged to select some individual who has made himself their exponent, and in whom they are impersonate, to the end that what he says may not, through ambiguity, be dissipated tenues in auras.” Lowell was of course not unaware that the satirist’s obligation might be met and fulfilled through the method of dramatic disguise, but it is evident that the author of the Fable for Critics had his leanings toward the personal type. Yet he confirms the pious English tradition by adding,—
“Meanwhile let us not forget that the aim of the true satirist is not to be severe upon persons, but only upon falsehood. * * * Truth is quite beyond the reach of satire. * * * The danger of satire is, that continual use may deaden his sensibility to the force of language.”
The real secret is that our primitive impulses clamor for the delectable diet of personalities, and must be appeased by a little judicious indulgence. Under pristine conditions, before we learned to be apologetic for our instincts, we could enjoy our Fescinnine gibings without a qualm. As we grew in poise and culture, we began to feel the need of a finer diet for Cerberus, to gratify his acquired taste. Such a sop was found in the altruistic motive, inexpensive and immediately satisfying.
But, since motives are rarely single, there is frequently in this unconscious pose an admixture of genuine idealism, most often of the patriotic sort. La Satire Ménippée, for instance, was said to have been worth as much to Henry of Navarre as was the battle of Ivry; and its real object was the eternal one of good satire. Says a historian,[248]
“All the mean political rivalries which pretend to work only for the public good are exposed there; all those men who take God as a shield to hide their own personal baseness, pass before us.”
So also was the Anti-Jacobin designed as an instrument for the public weal, though conceived in panic and brought forth in extravagance. Both these productions, moreover, illustrate the difficulty of distinguishing between personal and political or some sort of partisan satire.[249] When Claudius was exposed on his bad eminence by Seneca, Nero, by Persius, Domitian, by Juvenal, Wolsey, by Skelton, Napoleon and George the Third, by Byron, and all four Georges, by Thackeray, it was in every case, not as a mere human Doctor Fell, but as a crafty tyrant or an incompetent mannikin made absurd by an incongruous position of power and authority; although at first the personal interest predominated over the political, the latter increasing with time.
In any case, what has preserved personal satire in literature has been the amber, not the flies. Such satiric portraits as are saved from oblivion,—as those in Absalom and Achitophel, Macflecknoe, The Dunciad, The Vision of Judgment,—are spared, not for their subjects but for the wit in which they are dressed, irrespective of the justice or the slander stitched into the costume.
In the field of prose fiction we find a comparatively small amount of direct personal satire, and that modicum attached to the romantic or fantastic section rather than the realistic. In the latter the fusion of fact and fancy is too subtle to result in overt portraiture. What Dickens says of Squeers is true in some degree of all fictitious characters. All are drawn from observation, but none remain precisely as observed, after passing through the crucible of their creator’s imagination. Of some we chance to know more definitely than of others that they were “taken from life.” Disraeli, for instance, in his Coningsby, made the Honorable J. W. Croker into the politician Rigby, Lord George Manners into Henry Sidney, and Lord Hertford into the Duke of Monmouth. The last achieved his real immortality as the Marquis of Steyne, and Theodore Hook also had the double honor of being the original of Disraeli’s Lucian Gay and Thackeray’s Mr. Wagg. Richard Monckton Milnes became the Vavasour of Tancred, John Bright, the Mr. Turnbull of Phineas Redux, and Gerald Massey played the title rôle in Felix Holt. We are aware too that their own families supplied material to Dickens, Brontë, Eliot, and Meredith,[250] but we could hardly class Mr. Micawber, Shirley Keeldar (or her friend Caroline Helstone), Adam Bede, Dinah Morris, or Melchisedek Harrington as examples of personal satire, even when given satirical treatment.
It is natural, therefore, that the member of our group who stands preëminent in the line of individual satire is the one who also heads the list chronologically; that the next are the two Victorian forerunners; and that the only real Victorian left to complete this small tale does it by virtue of his early work. After Thackeray’s burlesques, ending about 1850, the personal species becomes practically extinct.
Of Peacock’s seven stories, the first three, published during the second decade of the century, are full of thinly veiled contemporary personalities. The next two, in the third decade, have at least the thicker veils of a historical perspective. In Crochet Castle (1831) the early symptoms recur, but in much lighter form; and in Peacock’s last appearance, thirty years after, they have vanished, though the staging is current and local.