Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 21.djvu/339

Rh S A T I B E 319 an entirely new development, becoming genial, playful, and persuasive. "Arch Horace strove to mend." The didactic element preponderates still more in the philo- sophical satires of Persius, the propagandist of Stoicism, a writer whose intensity, dramatic gift, obscurity, and abruptness render him, like the Browning and Meredith of our own days, the luxury of the few and the despair of the many. Yet another form of satire, the rhetorical, was carried to the utmost limits of excellence by Juvenal, the first example of a great tragic satirist. Nearly at the same time Martial, improving on earlier Roman models now lost, gave that satirical turn to the epigram which it only exceptionally possessed in Greece, but has ever since retained. The brevity, pregnancy, and polish of the Latin tongue were never more felicitously exemplified than by this gifted writer. About the same time another variety of satire came into vogue, destined to become the most important of any. The Milesian tale, a form of entertainment probably of Eastern origin, grew in the hands of Petronius and Apuleius into the satirical romance, immensely widening the satirist's field and exempting him from the restraints of metre. Petronius's " Supper of Trimalchio " is the revelation of a new vein, never fully worked till our days. As the novel arose upon the ruins of the epic, so dialogue sprung up upon the wreck of comedy. In Lucian comedy appears adapted to suit the exigencies of an age in which a living drama had become impossible. Lucian's position as a satirist is something new, and could not, from the nature of the case, have been occupied by any of his predecessors. For the first time since the origin of civilization society felt apprehensive of impending dissolution, and its fears found an interpreter in the Sophist of Samosata, " the Voltaire of paganism," an universal censor and mocker, devoid of the Christian's hope of general renovation, and unable to foresee the new social order which the barbarian conquest was destined to create. Next to his wit, Lucian's special note is his sturdy love of truth and demand for genuineness in all things. With him antique satire expires as a distinct branch of literature, though mention should be made of the sar- casms and libels with which the population of Egypt were for centuries accustomed to insult the Roman conqueror and his parasites. An exceedingly curious specimen, a denunciation of the apostate poet Hor-Uta a kind of Egyptian " Lost Leader " composed under Augustus, has recently been published by M. Revillout from a demotic papyrus. It is highly interesting to remark how, after the great deluge of barbarism has begun to retire, one form of satire after another peeps forth from the receding flood, the order of development being determined by the circum- stances of time and place. In the Byzantine empire, indeed, the link of continuity is unbroken, and such raillery of abuses as is possible under a despotism finds vent in the pale copies of Lucian published in Ellissen's Analekten. The first really important satire, however, is a product of Western Europe, recurring to the primitive form of fable, upon which, nevertheless, it constitutes a decided advance. Reynard the Fox, a genuine expression of the shrewd and homely Teutonic mind, is a landmark in literature. It gave the beast-epic a development of which the ancients had not dreamed, and showed how cutting ridicule could be conveyed in a form difficult to resent. About the same time, probably, the popular instinct, perhaps deriving a hint from Rabbinical litera- ture, fashioned Morolf, the prototype of Sancho Panza, the incarnation of sublunar mother-wit contrasted with the starry wisdom of Solomon ; and the Till Eulenspiegel is a kindred Teutonic creation, but later and less significant. Piers Ploughman, the next great work of the class, adapts the apocalyptic machinery of monastic and anchoritic vision to the purposes of satire, as it had often before been adapted to those of ecclesiastical aggrandizement. The clergy were scourged with their own rod by a poet and a Puritan too earnest to be urbane. Satire is a distinct element in Chaucer and Boccaccio, who nevertheless cannot be ranked as satirists. The mock-heroic is successfully revived by Pulci, and the political songs of the 14th and 15th cen- turies attest the diffusion of a sense of humour among the people at large. The Renaissance, restoring the knowledge and encouraging the imitation of classic models, sharpened the weapons and enlarged the armoury of the satirist. Partly, perhaps, because Erasmus was no poet, the Lucianic dialogue was the form in the ascendant of his age. Erasmus not merely employed it against supersti- tion and ignorance with infinite and irresistible pleasantry, but fired by his example a bolder writer, untrammelled by the dignity of an arbiter in the republic of letters. The ridicule of Ulric von Hutten's Epistolse, Obscurorum Virorum is annihilating, and the art there for the first time fully exemplified though long previously introduced by Plato, of putting the ridicule into the mouth of the victim, is perhaps the most deadly shaft in the quiver of sarcasm. It was afterwards used with even more pointed wit though with less exuberance of humour by Pascal, the first modern example, if Dante may not be so classed, of a great tragic satirist. Ethical satire is vigorously represented by Sebastian Brant and his imitator Alexander Barclay ; but in general the metrical satirists of the age seem tame in comparison with Erasmus and Hutten, though including the great name of Machiavelli. Sir Thomas More cannot be accounted a satirist, but his idea of an imaginary common- wealth embodied the germ of much subsequent satire. In the succeeding period politics take the place of literature and religion, producing in France the Satyre Menippee, elsewhere the satirical romance as represented by the Argenis of Barclay, which may be defined as the adaptation of the style of Petronius to state affairs. In Spain, where no freedom of criticism existed, the satiric spirit took refuge in the novelet picaresca, the prototype of Le Sage and the ancestor of Fielding ; Quevedo revived the medi- aeval device of the vision as the vehicle of reproof; and Cervantes's immortal work might be classed as a satire were it not so much more. About the same time we notice the appearance of direct imitation of the Roman satirists in English literature in the writings of Donne, Hall, and Marston, the further elaboration of the mock- heroic by Tassoni, and the culmination of classical Italian satire in Salvator Rosa. The prodigious development of the drama at this time absorbed much talent that would otherwise have been devoted to satire proper. Most of the great dramatists of the 17th century were more or less satirists, Moliere perhaps the most consummate that ever existed ; but, with an occasional exception like Les Precieuses Ridicules, the range of their works is too wide to admit of their being regarded as satires. The next great example of unadulterated satire is Butler's Hiidibras, and perhaps one more truly representative of satiric aims and methods cannot easily be found. At the same period dignified political satire, bordering on invec- tive, received a great development in Andrew Marvell's Advices to a Painter, and was shortly afterwards carried to perfection in Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel ; while the light literary parody of which Aristophanes had given the pattern in his assaults on Euripides, and which Shakespeare had handled somewhat carelessly in the Midsummer Night's Dream, was effectively revived in the duke of Buckingham's Rehearsal. In France Boileau was long held to have attained the neplus ultra of the Horatian style in satire and of the mock-heroic, but Pope was soon