Byron was succeeded by Praed, whose social pictures are instinct with the most refined and polished raillery, with the true Attic salt of wit united to a metrical deftness as graceful as it was artistic. During Praed's lifetime, Lamb with his inimitable Essays of Elia, Southey, Barham with the ever-popular Ingoldsby Legends, James and Horace Smith with the Rejected Addresses, Disraeli, Leigh Hunt, Tom Hood, and Landor had been winning laurels in various branches of social satire which, consequent upon the influence of Byron and then of his disciple, Praed, became the current mode. A favourable example of that style is found in Leigh Hunt's Feast of the Poets and in Edward Fitz-Gerald's Chivalry at a Discount. Other writers of satire in the earlier decades of the present century were Peacock, who in his novels (Crotchet Castle, &c.) evolved an original type of satire based upon the Athenian New Comedy. Miss Austen in her English novels and Miss Edgeworth in her Irish tales employed satire to impeach certain crying social abuses, as also did Dickens in Oliver Twist and others of his books. Douglas Jerrold's comedies and sketches are full of titbits of gay and brilliant banter and biting irony. If Sartor Resartus could be regarded as a satire, as Dr. Garnett says, Carlyle would be the first of satirists, with his thundering invective, grand rhetoric, indignant scorn, grim humour, and satiric gloom in denouncing the shams of human society and of human nature. An admirable American school of satire was founded by Washington Irving, of which Judge Haliburton (Sam Slick), Paulding, Holmes, Artemus Ward, and Dudley Warner are the chief names.
Since the third and fourth decades of our century, in other words, since the epoch of the Reform Bill and the Chartist agitation, satire has more and more tended to lose its acid and its venom, to slough the dark sardonic sarcasm of past days and to don the light sportive garb of the social humorist and epigrammist. Robustious bludgeoning has gone out of fashion, and in its place we have the playful satiric wit, sparkling as of well-drawn Moet or Clicquot, of Mortimer Collins, H.S. Leigh, Arthur Locker and Frederick Locker-Lampson, W.S. Gilbert, Austin Dobson, Bret Harte, F. Anstey, Dr. Walter C. Smith, and many other graceful and delightful social satirists whose verses are household words amongst us. From week to week also there appear in the pages of that trenchant social censor, Punch, and the other high-class comico-satiric journals, many pieces of genuine and witty social satire. Every year the demand seems increasing, and yet the supply shows no signs of running dry.
Political satire, in its metrical form, has had from time to time a temporary revival of popularity in such compositions as James Russell Lowell's inimitable Biglow Papers, as well as in more recent volumes, of which Mr. Owen Seaman's verse is an example; while are not its prose forms legion in the pages of our periodical press? It has, however, now lost that vitriolic quality which made it so scorching and offensively personal. The man who wrote nowadays as did Dryden, and Junius, and Canning, or, in social satire, as did Peter Pindar and Byron, would be forthwith ostracized from literary fellowship.
But what more need be said of an introductory character to these selections that are now placed before the reader? English satire, though perhaps less in evidence to-day as a separate department in letters, is still as cardinal a quality as ever in the productions of our leading authors. If satires are no longer in fashion, satire is perennial as an attribute in literature, and we have every reason to cherish it and welcome it as warmly as of old. The novels of Thackeray, as I have already said, contain some of the most delicately incisive shafts of satire that have been barbed by any writer of the present century. "George Eliot", also, though in a less degree, has shown herself a satirist of much power and pungency, while others of our latter-day novelists manifest themselves as possessed of a faculty of satire both virile and trenchant. It is one of the indispensable qualities of a great writer's style, because its quarry is one of the most widely diffused of existing things on the face of the globe. There is no age without its folly, no epoch without its faults. So long, therefore, as man and his works are imperfect, so long shall there be existent among us abuses, social, political, professional, and ecclesiastical, and so long, too, shall it be the province and the privilege of those who feel themselves called upon to play the difficult part of censor morum, to prick the bubbles of falsehood, vanity, and vice with the shafts of ridicule and raillery.
[1] The English Humorists of the Eighteenth Century.
[2] Cf. Lenient, History of French Satire.
[3] Thomson's Ante-Augustan Latin Poetry.
[4] Cf. Mackail; Paten, Études sur la Poésie latine.
[5] See Skeat's "Langland" in Encyclop. Brit.
[6] See Arber's Reprints for 1868.
[7] Arber's Select Reprints.
[8] Palladis Tamia: Wits Treasury.
[9] This, of course, was Marston.
[10] From the Fifth Satire in The Metamorphosis of Pygmalion's Image and Certain Satyres, by John Marston. 1598.
[11] Pasquil's Madcappe: Thrown at the Corruption of these Times—1626. Breton, to be read at all, ought to be studied in the two noble volumes edited by Dr. A.B. Grosart. From his edition I quote.
[12] English Literature, by Prof. Craik. Hannay's Satires and Satirists.
[13] Life of Dryden, by Sir Walter Scott. Saintsbury's Life of Dryden.
[14] Thackeray's English Humorists. Hannay's Satires and Satirists.
[15] Satire and Satirists, by James Hannay. Lecture III.
[16] Dowden's French Literature.
[17] Minto's Characteristics of English Poets.
[18] Cf. Saintsbury's Life of Dryden.
[19] Cf. Gosse, Eighteenth Century Literature.
[20] Thackeray's English Humorists.
[21] The Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin—Carisbrooke Library, 1890.
[22] The Bæviad and the Mæviad, by W. Gifford, Esq., 1800.]
ENGLISH SATIRES.
WILLIAM LANGLAND.
(1330?-1400?)