Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 21.djvu/338

Rh 318 SATIRE grave and elevated subjects, removes them further and further from the domain of satire can confer satiric dig- nity upon the most scurrilous lampoon. The distinction between the intellectual form and the raw material of satire is admirably illustrated by a passage in an accom- plished novelist. The clever young lady happening to compare a keen and bright person to a pair of scissors, lid- unrefined companion is for the moment unable to under- stand how a human being can resemble a piece of cutlery ; but suddenly a light breaks in upon her, and, taking up a broken pair of scissors from the table, she imitates the halting gait of a lame lady, declaring that Mrs Brown resembles that particular pair of scissors to the life. The first interlocutor could have been satirical if she would; the second would if she could. The nice and delicate per- ception of the former type of character may be fairly driven into satire by the vulgarity and obtuseness of the second, as in the case of Miss Austen ; and it may be added that the general development of civilization, repressing high- handed wrongs against which ridicule is no defence, and encouraging failings which can be effectually attacked in no other manner, continually tends to make satire more congenial to the amiable and refined, and thus exalt its moral tone and purpose. The first exercise of satire was no doubt sufficiently coarse and boisterous. It must have consisted in gibing at personal defects ; and Homer's description of Thersites, the earliest example of literary satire that has come down to us, probably conveys an accurate delineation of the first satirists, the carpers and fault-finders of the clan. The character reappears in the heroic romances of Ireland, and elsewhere ; and it is everywhere implied that the licensed backbiter is a warped and distorted being, readier with his tongue than his hands. The verdict of unso- phisticated man on satire is clearly that it is the offspring of ill-nature ; to redeem and dignify it by rendering it the instrument of morality or the associate of poetry was a development implying considerable advance in the literary art. The latter is the course adopted in the Old Testa- ment, where the few passages approximating to satire, such as Jotham's parable of the bramble and Job's ironical address to his friends, are embellished either by fancy or by feeling. An intermediate stage between personal ridi- cule and the correction of faults and follies seems to have been represented in Greece by the Margites, attributed to Homer, which, while professedly lampooning an individual, practically rebuked the meddling sciolism impersonated in him. In the accounts that have come down to us of the writings of Archilochus, the first great master of satire (about 700 B.C.), we seem to trace the elevation of the instrument of private animosity to an element in public life. Though a merciless assailant of individuals, Archilochus was also a distinguished statesman, naturally for the most part in opposition, and his writings seem to have fulfilled many of the functions of a newspaper press. Their extraordinary merit is attested by the infallible judgment of Quintilian eight hundred years after their com- position ; and Gorgias's comparison of them with Plato's persiflage of the Sophists proves that their virulence must have been tempered by grace and refinement. Archilochus also gave satiric poetry its accepted form by the invention of the iambic trimeter, slightly modified into the scazonic metre by his successors. Simonides of Amorgus, about a generation later, and Hipponax, a century later still, were distinguished like Archilochus for the bitterness of their attacks on individuals, with which the former combined a strong ethical feeling, and the latter a bright active fancy. All three were restless and turbulent, aspiring and discon- tented, impatient of abuses and theoretically enamoured of liberty; and the loss of their writings, which would have thrown great light on the politics as well as the manners of Greece, is exceedingly to be lamented. With Hipponax the direct line of Greek satire is interrupted ; but two new forms of literary composition, exceedingly capable of being rendered the vehicles of satire, almost simultaneously make their appearance. Fable is first heard of in Asiatic Greece about this date ; and, although its original intention does not seem to have been satirical, its adaptability to satiric purposes was soon discovered and turned to account. A far more important step was the elevation of the rude fun of rustic merrymakings to a literary status by the evolution of the drama from the Bacchic festival. The means had now been. found of ally- ing the satiric spirit with exalted poetry, and their union was consummated in the person of a poet who combined humour with imagination in a degree never again to be rivalled until Shakespeare. Every variety of satire is exemplified in the comedies of Aristophanes; and if he does not rank as the first of satirists it is only because he is so much beside. Such affluence of poetical genius could not be perpetual, any more than the peculiar political and social conditions which for a time made such fearless and uncontrolled satire possible. Through the half-way house of mythological parody the comedy of public life passes into the comedy of manners, metrical still, but approxi- mating more closely to prose, and consequently to satire on its own side of the line which it is convenient if not strictly logical to trace between dramatists and ordinary satiric writers. The step from Menander to Lucilius is not a long one, but it was not destined to be taken by a Greek. A rude form of satire had existed in Italy from an early date in the shape of the Fescennine verses, the rough and licentious pleasantry of the vintage and harvest, which, lasting down to the 16th century, inspired Tansillo's Vendemmiatore. As in Greece, these eventually, about 364 B.C., were developed into a rude drama, originally intro- duced as a religious expiation. This was at first, Livy tells us (vii. 2), merely pantomimic, as the dialect of the Tuscan actors imported for the occasion was not under- stood at Rome. Verse, "like to the Fescennine verses in point of style and manner," was soon added to accompany the mimetic action, and, with reference to the variety of metres employed, these probably improvised compositions were entitled Saturse, a term denoting miscellany, and derived from the satura lanx, "a charger filled with the first-fruits of the year's produce, anciently offered to Bacchus and Ceres." The Romans thus had originated the name of satire, and, in so far as the Fescennine drama consisted of raillery and ridicule, possessed the thing also; but it had not yet assumed a literary form among them. Livius Andronicus (240 B.C.), the first regular Latin dra- matic poet, appears to have been little more than a trans- lator from the Greek. Satires are mentioned among the literary productions of Ennius (200 B.C.) and Pacuvius (170 B.C.), but the title rather refers to the variety of metres employed than to the genius of the composition. The real inventor of Roman satire is Caius Lucilius (148-103 B.C.), whose Satirse seem to have been mostly satirical in the modern acceptation of the term, while the subjects of some of them prove that the title continued to be applied to miscellaneous collections of poems, as was the case even to the time of Varro, whose "Saturse" included prose as well as verse, and appear to have been only partially satirical. The fragments of Lucilius preserved are un- fortunately very scanty, but the verdict of Horace, Cicero, and Quintilian demonstrates that he was a very consider- able poet. It is needless to dwell on compositions so universally known as the Satires of Lucilius's successor Horace, in whose hands this class of composition received