But leaving these imaginative heights, and walking along the level ground of daily life, common sense, and sane criticism, we go on to assert that private satire, lower than the highest, is intolerable. The grandeur of moral indignation in Juvenal, never is altogether without a secret inkling of disquietude at the bottom of the breast. It may be the Muse's legitimate and imposed office to smite the offending city; but it is never her joyous task. The judge never gladly puts on the black cap. The reality oppresses us—we are sore and sick in the very breath of the contagion, even if we escape untainted by it. The power of poetry possesses us for the time, and we must submit. Perhaps it is right, if the Muse be a great magistra vitæ, that she should present life under all its aspects, and school us in all its disciplines; and the direct, real, official censure of manners may be a necessary part of her calling. But how differently does the indirect censure affect us! Shakspeare creating Iago, censures wily, treacherous, envious, malignant, cold-blooded villany, where and whensoever to be found. He does not fix the brand upon the forehead of a time, or of a profession, or of a man, or of a woman; but of a devil who is incarnate in every time, who exercises every profession, is an innate, is the householder rather, now in the steeled breast of a man, and now in woman's softest bosom. This ubiquitous possibility of the Mark's occurring—the ignorance of the archer where his gifted arrow will strike—ennobles, aggrandizes his person and his work. It does not weaken the service which the poet is called upon to render to humanity, by showing himself the foe of her foes. And we, the spectators of the drama—what is that strangely balanced and harmonized conflict of emotions, by means of which we at once loathe and endure the poisonous confidant of the Moor? From the depths of the heart abhorring the odious, execrable man, whilst our fancy hovers, fascinated, about the marvellous creation! Yet we do not call Shakspeare here a Satirist. The distinction is broad. The Satirist is, in the most confined, or in the most comprehensive sense—PERSONAL.
And now we doubt not, readers beloved, that while you have been enjoying these our reflections on Satire, you may likewise have been dimly foreseeing the purposed end towards which our drift is setting in, as on a strong tide. We have been dealing with first-raters. In them the power of the poetry reconciles us to the matter—mitigates the repugnancy otherwise ready to wait, in a well-constituted mind, upon a series of thoughts and images which studiously persevere in venting the passions of hate and scorn. The curse of the Muse on all middling poets—and upon Parnassus one is tempted to ascribe to the middle zone of the mountain, all those who do not cluster about one of the summits—the common curse seems to fall with tenfold violence upon the middling Satirist. The great poet has authority, magistery, masterdom, seated in his high spirit; and when he chooses to put forth his power, we bow before him, or stoop our heads from the descending bolt. But if one not thus privileged leap uncalled into the awful throne, to hurl self-dictated judgments, this arrogant usurpation of supremacy; justly offends and revolts us. For he who censures the age, or any notable division of contemporary society, in verse, does in fact arrogate to himself an unappealable superiority. He speaks, or affects to speak, muse-inspired, as a prophet, oracularly. He does not enquire, he thunders. Now, the thunder of a scold is any thing but agreeable—and we exclaim—
"Demens! qui nimbos et non imitabile fulmen
Ære et cornipedum cursu simulârat equorum."
Poets are the givers of renown. Their word is fame. But fame is good and ill; and therefore they speak Eulogy and Satire. They are the tongues of the world. The music of verse makes way for Lear's words to all our hearts. It makes way for the Satirist's to the heart, where they are to be mortal. If mankind justly moved condemn, the Poet will find voice for that condemnation. Wo be to those who by goading provoke him, who is the organ of the universal voice, to visit his own wrong, to wreak his own vengeance on their heads! The wrong, the wrath is private; but the voice retains its universality, and they are withered as if by the blast of the general hate or scorn—
"He was not for an age, but for all time,"
said one poet of another. There are two ways of belonging to one's age. You are born of it—you die with it. Johnson disclaims for Shakspeare the co-etaneousness by birth and by death. He is the son of all time; and the inheritor of all time. His mind is the mind of ages deceased, and of ages unborn; and his writings remain to each succeeding generation, as fresh as if it had witnessed their springing into existence. They take no date.
Something of this is common to all essential poetry—
"Vivuntque commissi calores
Æoliæ fidibus puellæ."
The loves of Sappho live. They have not passed away. They are immortally. Therefore the Poet, as we said, is the giver of fame. His praise—his scorn—lives for ever.
All who are worthy to read Us know how well the rude primeval people comprehended the worth of the poet. The song rang to the borders of the land or of the name, and that was glory or ignominy alive in every heart. Honour given by the poet was then a substantial possession; to be disgraced by his biting vituperation was like the infliction of a legal punishment. The whole condition of things—men's minds and their outward relations—corresponded to that which seems now to us an extraordinary procedure—that of constituting the poet, in virtue of that name, a state functionary, holding office, rank, and power. Now, the poet is but a self-constituted Censor. He holds office from the Muse only; or upon occasion from the mighty mother, Dulness. The Laureateship is the only office in the State of Poetry that is in the Queen's gift; and that, thanks to her benignity and the good sense of the nineteenth century, has become a sinecure conferred on an Emeritus.