You would perhaps agree with me that the surest way of realizing what satire is would be to take a mental card-index of the satirists. Drum them over in your head-Lucian, Voltaire, Swift, and so on-and the name is a sign-post to the thing. But look at the matter a little more closely and its boundaries seem to turn into rivers, to melt and twist and flow into other territories. Satire, in its restricted meaning, is the most definite, if one of the most varied in method, of the arts. But any kind of offensive directed against society is satire by implication. The implicit suggestion therefore becomes satire proper by that kind of process which Stendhal calls

crystallization." It detaches itself and forms a body and outline of its own. In this letter then I mean to begin by rambling about satire, in so much as it is part of, a subconsciously impulsive force of an art that has a wider and more general signification.

The history of literature, with all its whirligig of fashions and exclusions, has never at any period ostracized the satirist. Even the crystal Elizabethan age, that reintegration of the human spirit which welcomed tragedy not as reality but as an adventurous exercise for

literary dexterity, is as replete with satire as it is empty of criticism. True, its legitimate application is pretty well confined to the Puritans, who disliked pleasure on principle, whether manifested in bawdry or rhymed bucolics. But the most exuberant darlings of the Muses also shared the passion of complaint. The gay Dekker rails at prostitutes; the brilliant and raffish journalist Thomas Nashe (our English Aretine) writes "Christ's Teares over Jerusalem" and strikes an attitude at London; Robert Greene repents his vagabondage and grasps the occasion of applying his particular to the universal; Bacon out of the glooms of his calculating soul constructs a Fabian New Atlantis that might have served Belloc as an example of the dim historical beginnings of his Servile State; the parfit gentle Spenser exterminates the Irish with jets of poisonous ink; Shakespeare writes, "Tired with all these, for restful death I cry."

I repeat that I am using satire in the generic sense, which it does not externally possess. I am casting the widest net I can—including, that is, under the titlepage of satire, irony and indeed any continuous criticism of society and letters, whatever cloak of fiction, poetry or imagination that it may wear. I would even throw Montaigne into so wide a definition, though he is neither a satirist nor an ironist within the letter, but rather a connoisseur of life-combining a personal taste with easy detachment. Lamb too, who is not unlike Montaigne (especially as translated by Florio), and essayists of his colour, might at a pinch be recruited. Not so Hazlitt, who in his art is a man of action and pugnacity. John Synge, who became, for a time, a light-headed fashion

and has now been shelved, needs no compulsion. He is a born (and trained) satirist and a singular example of that rarest artistry which can combine the most sardonic appreciation of contrasts with a glorious prosperity in poetic discovery and passion.

The Elizabethans employed satire for literary rather than for moral purposes. They had discovered it as a new continent of feeling, an orchid in the rich cornucopia of offerings to the Muses. In the next age, when literature extended its conquests no further afield, but mined deeper within the territory it had won, satire assumes more shape. Marston, Bishop Hall and Donne wrote verse with a definite satiric purpose, but only Donne, daffing aside bombast and invective, realized the art of satire. It was the age of the first Stuarts-with a scientific ardour, violent spiritual reactions, and a philosophic insight that made it nearly the most profound of our literary history-which really delivered the tender monster, satire, into the world. Ben Jonson is the orthodox satirist, but what infinite, dark-moving, massive, ghostly, sombre and terribly beautiful shapes of satiric suggestion are evoked by Shakespeare, Massinger, Ford, Webster, Middleton, Burton, the Bible translators, Donne, Milton and Sir Thomas Browne. "Troilus and Cressida" of course is pure satire-satire (for all its personal bitterness) within the most precise and most imaginative meaning of the term. You will insist that here I am confusing tragedy and spiritual curiosity with satire. But satire as I suggested is not necessarily an accompaniment to a set piece. Loosely defined, it is an artistic prompting, unable to gratify itself on account of its contact with the foes of beauty. The satirist's idea

of beauty is so tremendous (and perhaps so impossible of achievement) that he has to remove mountains of encumbrances before his faith can become operative. More substantially it is Man's doubtful spirit moving on the face of the waters.

Precedence in satire is usually given to the eighteenth century, and the claim (in spite of a good number of exceptions really finer than it could produce) must be allowed. Surely satire to be good must be based upon taste and discrimination, moral and artistic. The satirist is so appalled by the prevalent bad taste that he discards his peaceful occupation, sharpens his ploughshare into a snicker-snee and falls upon the Philistines. Now eighteenth-century taste is in many respects debased enough. Look at the transition in book engraving from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century; at the false classicism of the Augustans; at the mechanical conceptions of technique in poetry; at the fencing-in of the literary acreage to so many square yards of cultivated soil; at the coffee-house etiquette of amenities; at its abominable bowdlerising of Shakespeare; at its grotesque pseudo-Gothic-its most promising symptom of salvation, since it actually had the hardihood to admit the claims of the literature of another age as worthy of imitation. This is how the good Bishop Percy waxes judicial upon "The Ballad of the Nut-Brown Maid": "Indeed, if it had no other merit than the having afforded the ground-work to Prior's Henry and Emma, this ought to preserve it from oblivion.”

But if these disfigurements took their toll of the charms of satire, there were plenty of redeeming qualities to the age that heightened them. The good sense of the period,

the moderation and lucidity of its prose, its firm understanding of exactly where it stood and exactly what it wanted, even its confinement of literature to club standards and exclusions had a powerfully educative effect upon satire. They gave it the self-conscious, independent maturity that it had lacked in the previous century. They gave it a cheque-book and a latch-key. Henceforward, its twenty-firster over, it was launched upon a career of its own. I think it possible that, in any other circumstances, the sheer bourgeois weight of the age might have smothered satire. What the eighteenth century did was to disentangle that satiric part which belonged to a composite literary whole and make that part a whole in itself.

But there was a cost and a penalty attached. The imaginative element was left out, just as in Wordsworth's ode the man takes leave of the spiritual relationships of his boyhood. But it got stability and self-confidence. It knew itself. In the eighteenth century a good deal of edifying precept (false when you look into it) overlaps into a good deal of sound doctrine. Satire by its very nature ignored the one and learned its style of the other. Once in possession of a sound style of its own, it was ready, as the seasons went their course, to make thereof an instrument of beauty.