III

SATIRE (II)

MY DEAR X,

In this letter I intend to justify the discursive rights of the epistle and to write less about the principles of satire than the various practices of the satirist. The one may perhaps suggest the other. A partial excuse is that satire and its relations with literary and social changes are, like yourself, terra incognita. Obviously the genuine satirist is an idealist, to be moved only indirectly by personal affronts, failure or injustice. Pope would hardly have been a satirist at all had he not been weakly, vindictive and ambitious. Topham Beauclerk once asked Dr. Johnson why Pope had written the couplet :

"Let modest Foster, if he will, excel

Ten metropolitans in preaching well."

:

Said the Doctor," Sir, he hoped it would vex somebody." Pope was not possessed of the universal vision. The great satirist's concept of beauty needs to be very fine and true for him to realize so acutely what distorts it.

For all that, his energies cannot be measured by the social and political corruptions under whose shadow he lives. Why are there so few satirists to-day? Is Government so enlightened as to throw them out of work, or so

reactionary as to stifle their expression? Fortunately it is usually so stupid as to be unconscious that their shafts are aimed at its own hide. Perhaps the explanation is that the period parodies and caricatures itself so outrageously that nothing is left for the satirist to do. If you, he addresses the public, haven't a ghost of a notion what an exhibition of themselves your governors are making, what on earth is the good of my telling you? For this self-parody is so flat and gross that the true satirist, alert to artistic as well as to moral criteria of excellence, disdains to be a copyist.

For if in quite modern times the satirist has gained in the area of his operations, he has lost in effectiveness. Modern society, as I suggested, offers so many vulnerable targets to his archery that decent workmanship is handicapped. He cannot see the wood, not so much for the trees but because the wood has grown into a forest. Stick up a single post and you aim at it deliberately and without distraction; stick up a thousand and, in the assurance of hitting one of them, you aim at random. That is one reason which makes Belloc's "Caliban's Guide to Letters one of the most finished and deadly satires of the twentieth century. It is exclusively directed at one poison-literary pretentiousness-not at a whole pharmacopeia. Thus Belloc's masculine style keeps a tight hold upon his subject, and he selects almost ruthlessly.

Indeed, with so much distracting material open to the moderns, still greater demands are made. upon the satirist's style and form than a simpler community would exact to enable him to choose and to contain it. From that point of view I may glance at Samuel Butler. There

was something at once monumental and elvish in him, and he reminds one more than twice or thrice of Dr. Johnson. But what attaches him to my random discourse is his quite inimitable style. He is the example by excellence of the happy marriage between style and satire. I should like too to write copiously about Dr. Richard Garnett, whom this age has so strangely forgotten. Yes, it has forgotten "The Twilight of the Gods," an excellent illustration of finely used irony. In its own way it makes an indissoluble match between style and meaning.

Compare him with the greater Anatole France, in that way of masking his batteries with such innocent-seeming urbanity. In France they would have encouraged him, and I cannot but believe that we latter English do not like irony, partly because we do not understand it and partly because we would not understand it. Why should we? Satire breaks the spell of our absorption in the present. It sees men, not infinite in capacity and in い action like gods, but pitiable, shrunk, agitated under the impassive arc of the heavens. Calm and tranquillity it must have. How hard it is for the satirist to break from the surging, gesticulating crowd in the present! How strenuously must he strive to control the twitching of his limbs and the rolling of his eyes! Modern civilization generates a modern type of individual, who is its peculiar darling. I mean that restless, discordant, dissatisfied, doing-as-against-thinking being who is at his liveliest in business, letters and politics. War is the natural state for such creatures, because it is the macrocosm of their own internal states. A society dominated by such men can never produce satire, though they themselves are so

vulnerable to it. For it is one of the ironies directed at satire itself that the satirist realizes that he must (to fufil his art) keep his mind clear of the heady fumes of the present, or he may be and is stupefied by them into inactivity.

Belloc is, I think, the one genuine satirist of our times. Chesterton-brilliant as he is—is too flighty and opinionated for the solid, concrete, almost sculpturesque quality of the satiric genius. His verse is a very different matter. Bernard Shaw is rather baffling, because he has never quite made up his mind between pamphleteering of the old-fashioned type and satire. "John Bull's Other Island” is really fine satire-it grasps and transforms into a lucid artistic whole the complex play of hostile ideas between two countries. But Shaw is not really quite big enough to form a complete artistic satire. He is more frequently the combatant than the artist. Also his taste is sometimes dubious-witness the lyrical effusions of "Candida.” As clever as, though so much more correct than Lucifer, he does not seem to get much further than rating people for their lack of common sense. In some ways he reminds you of an orator apostrophizing an audience (the Victorians) who are no longer there, owing perhaps to that love of verbal counterplay which spoils so much of his work. But what jolly things he has done! I call to mind a dashing article of his in which he rewrites the last scene in 66 Macbeth as Wells and Bennett respectively would have handled it in their novels. As for Wells himself he is so handicapped by an abominable style, by a lack both of restraint and of inevitable intuition that he has done little more than mirror in his own temperament the restless surfaces of things.

The younger school, alas! has little to say for itself. Gilbert Cannan has adherents; but he works painfully, and uses larger canvases than he can manage. He has, I know, both written satire and discussed its theory. But I can no more believe him to be a satirist than a modest, discerning and agreeable writer. He just hacks about with a meat-chopper. He possesses neither style, nor condensation, nor strength of mind, nor ironical apprehension, nor detachment-all or some of which are the midwives to the birth of satire. As a writer, he possesses talents (no more than talents). But for satire, he has no natural or acquired disposition whatever. Had his work that satiric quality which so many people claim for him, it would have been the coherent entity it certainly is not. His characters would have acquired a new distinctness and momentum, the frayed edges would be cut away, the over-elaboration fined down, proportions kept, and some central purpose imperceptibly and implicitly impressed upon the reader. His novels seem to say: "That is what life is—a surge

of base and beautiful forces, intensified in the consciousness of man." But that is a fallacy. Life is like that to the layman, but it is the business of the artist to see a clue in it, to give it shape and order, to weld its particles into congruity. Here is where his lack of a constructive or satiric purpose growing out of and controlling the material tells to his hurt. He knows life in the raw, but the satirist would put it in the oven and dish it up. So he wanders in the dark, and we blunder after him. But we want light, if it be only from a tallow candle.

Squire is a parodist pure and simple-a very adroit and almost intuitive observer of styles and mannerisms. He

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