Augustan Prose - Satire (unclassified)

Satire (unclassified)

A single name overshadows all others in 18th-century prose satire: Jonathan Swift. Swift wrote poetry as well as prose, and his satires range over all topics. Critically, Swift's satire marked the development of prose parody away from simple satire or burlesque. A burlesque or lampoon in prose would imitate a despised author and quickly move to reductio ad absurdum by having the victim say things coarse or idiotic. On the other hand, other satires would argue against a habit, practice, or policy by making fun of its reach or composition or methods. What Swift did was to combine parody, with its imitation of form and style of another, and satire in prose. Swift's works would pretend to speak in the voice of an opponent and imitate the style of the opponent and have the parodic work itself be the satire: the imitation would have subtle betrayals of the argument but would not be obviously absurd. For example, in A Modest Proposal (1729), Swift imitates the "projector." As indicated above, the book shops were filled with single sheets and pamphlets proposing economic panacea. These projectors would slavishly write according to the rules of rhetoric that they had learned in school by stating the case, establishing that they have no interest in the outcome, and then offering a solution before enumerating the profits of the plan. Swift does the same, but the proposed solution (cannibalism) is immoral. There is very little logically wrong with the proposal, but it is unquestionably morally abhorrent, and it can only be acceptable if one regards the Irish as kine. The parody of an enemy is note-perfect, and the satire comes not from grotesque exaggerations of style, but in the extra-literary realm of morality and ethics.

Jonathan Swift's first major satire was A Tale of a Tub (1703–1705). That satire introduced an ancients/moderns division that would serve as a handy distinction between the old and new conception of value. The "moderns" sought trade, empirical science, the individual's reason above the society's, and the rapid dissemination of knowledge, while the "ancients" believed in inherent and immanent value of birth, the society over the individual's determinations of the good, and rigorous education. In Swift's satire, the moderns come out looking insane and proud of their insanity, dismissive of the value of history, and incapable of understanding figurative language because unschooled. In Swift's most significant satire, Gulliver's Travels (1726), autobiography, allegory, and philosophy mix together in the travels. Under the umbrella of a parody of travel writing (such as Defoe's, but more particularly the fantastic and oriental tales that were circulating in London), Swift's Gulliver travels to Liliput, a figurative London beset by a figurative Paris, and sees all of the factionalism and schism as trifles of small men. He travels then to an idealized nation with a philosopher king in Brobdingnag, where Gulliver's own London is summed up in the king's saying, "I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of odious little vermin Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the face of the earth." Gulliver then moves beyond the philosophical kingdom to the land of the Houyhnhnms, a society of horses ruled by pure reason, where humanity itself is portrayed as a group of "yahoos" covered in filth and dominated by base desires. Swift later added a new third book to the satire, a heterogeneous book of travels to Laputa, Balnibarbi, Glubdubdribb, Luggnagg, and Japan. This book's primary satire is on empiricsim and the Royal Society, whose reports Swift read. "Projectors" of all sorts live in the Academy of Lagado, a flying island (London) that saps all the nourishment from the land below (the countryside) and occasionally crushes, literally, troublesome cities (Dublin). Thematically, Gulliver's Travels is a critique of human vanity, of pride. Book one begins with the world as it is. Book two shows that an ideal philosopher kingdom is no home for a contemporary Englishman. Book three shows the uselessness and actual evil of indulging the passions of science without connection to the realm of simple production and consumption. Book four shows that, indeed, the very desire for reason may be undesirable, and humans must struggle to be neither Yahoos nor Houhynymns.

There were other satirists who worked in a less virulent way. Jonathan Swift's satires obliterated hope in any specific institution or method of human improvement, but some satirists instead took a bemused pose and only made lighthearted fun. Tom Brown, Ned Ward, and Tom D'Urfey were all satirists in prose whose works appeared in the early part of the Augustan age. Tom Brown's most famous work in this vein was Amusements Serious and Comical, Calculated for the Meridian of London (1700). For poetry, Brown was important for his translation of Scarron's Le Virgile travesti, as well as the scandalous Roman satirist Petronius (CBEL). Ned Ward's most memorable work was The London Spy (1704–1706). The London Spy, before The Spectator, took up the position of an observer and uncomprehendingly reporting back. Thereby, Ward records and satirizes the vanity and exaggerated spectacle of London life in a lively prose style. Ward is also important for his history of secret clubs of the Augustan age. These included The Secret History of the Calves-Head Club, Complt. or, The Republican Unmask'd (1706), which sought humorously to expose the silly exploits of radicals. Ward also translated The Life &Adventures of Don Quixote de la Mancha, translated into Hudibrastic Verse in 1711, where the Hudibrastic, which had been born in Samuel Butler's imitation of Cervantes, now became the fit medium for a translation of the original (CBEL). Tom D'Urfey's Wit and Mirth: or Pills to Purge Melancholy (1719 for last authorial revision) was another satire that attempted to offer entertainment, rather than a specific bit of political action. D'Urfey (or "Durfey" as he was born) was a stutterer whose clownishness and willingness to be the butt of a joke so long as a joke was told made him a favorite of the nobility and court, and his career straddles the Restoration and Augustan period. Pills to Purge Melancholy is a collection of witty and bawdy songs, mainly drinking songs, with popular favorites such as "The Famous Fart." Although Pope satirized Durfey, he also wrote, in a letter in 1710, that Durfey had a power that he himself did not, for, years after the publication of Pills to Purge Melancholy, Durfey's songs were still on the lips of thousands, while no other poet had such popularity or persistence. Indeed, ten of Durfey's tunes were used in John Gay's Beggar's Opera, five years after Durfey's death.

However, particularly after Swift's success, parodic satire had an attraction for authors throughout the 18th century. A variety of factors created a rise in political writing and political satire (see above for some), and Robert Walpole's success and domination of Commons was a very effective proximal cause for polarized literature and thereby the rise of parodic satire. For one thing, the parodic structure allowed an author to indict another without directly mentioning a name. For another thing, such a satire allowed the author to criticize without offering up a corrective. Swift, for example, does not directly tell his readers what is of value. Instead, like Hume later, he criticizes the gullibility, naivette, and simplicity of others. The parodic satire takes apart the cases and plans of policy without necessarily contrasting a normative or positive set of values. Therefore, it was an ideal method of attack for ironists and conservatives—those who would not be able to enunciate a set of values to change toward but could condemn present changes as ill-considered.

Swift was a friend of Alexander Pope, Robert Harley, John Gay, John Arbuthnot, Thomas Parnell, and Henry St. John. These men together formed the "Scribbleran Club," and they had as their common goal a satire of the "abuses of learning" of all sorts. Pope, Gay, Arbuthnot, and Swift wrote a series of Miscellanies, all mislabeled (the "third part" was the first, the "first part" was the second). In them were several satirical pieces, including Pope's Peri Bathos (see Bathos), 1727, a satire of manuals of the sublime and a manual of how to write bad poetry. Pope picked verses from his contemporaries, and especially his longtime rival, Ambrose Philips, and collated them into a full schematic of how to make bad verse, how to sink in poetry. The Scribbleran Club also produced the Memoirs of Martinus Scribblerus, which is a mock-biography of a man who has learned all the worst lessons of classicism. Martinus Scribblerus is a Don Quixote figure, a man so deeply read in Latin and Greek poetry that he insists on living his life according to that literature. The resulting work is not quite a novel, as it is a sustained prose work that only serves satire.

Satire was present in all genres during the Augustan period. In poetry, all of the literary members of the Scribblerus Club produced verse satires. Gay's Trivia (1716) and many poems by Pope were satires first and foremost. John Arbuthnot's John Bull's Law Case was a prose satire that was extremely popular and generated the term "John Bull" for Englishmen. Further, satire was present in drama. Many plays had satirical scenes or characters, but some plays, like Gay's Beggar's Opera, were parodic satires early in the period (1728), and others, like Fielding's Tragedy of Tragedies (1731) were in the next generation. Additionally and perhaps primarily, satire was a part of political and religious debate. Every significant politician and political act had satires to attack it. Few of these were parodic satires, but parodic satires, too, emerged in political and religious debate.

So omnipresent and powerful was satire in the Augustan age that more than one literary history has referred to it as the "Age of satire" in literature.