kept down by the acquired. In this mental kingdom many an impulsive little prince has been smothered by a deliberative, ambitious usurper who felt a call to rule.
In the province of satire the real internal stimulus is temperament. If a man has a critical disposition, he is bound to criticise. If he has a keen sense of humor, he will be alive to the absurd. If he possesses both, he is a natural-born satirist and cannot escape his manifest destiny,—so long as he is not inarticulate. But the declared motives are for the most part ethical and altruistic, a lineage much more presentable and worthy of high command.
This human tendency to justify its instinctive behavior by ex post facto morality has produced an impressive symposium on the thesis that satire has a definite purpose and moreover a noble one. Thus while the satirist admits his malice aforethought, he protests that the malicious suffers a sea change into the beneficent, for that he must be cruel only to be kind. The modest and honest confession of Horace[1] that he wrote satire because he had to write something and was not equal to epic, was soon supplanted by the Juvenalian declaration of saeva
- ↑
"Wolves use their teeth against you, bulls their horn;
Why, but that each is to the manner born?" Satires, I, 1. Conington, 46.Some modern echoes are heard. Says Byron,—
"Satiric rhyme first sprang from selfish spleen;
You doubt—see Dryden, Pope, St. Patrick's Dean."Hints from Horace.
Taine applies his general theory to this instance:
"No wonder if in England a novelist writes satires. A gloomy and reflective man is impelled to it by his character; he is still further impelled by the surrounding manners." Hist. of Eng. Lit. IV, 166.
In Shaw's An Unsocial Socialist, one character says of another: "Besides, Gertrude despises everyone, even us. Or rather, she doesn't despise anyone in particular, but is contemptuous by nature, just as you are stout."
