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The Pattern of Formal Verse Satire in the Restoration and the Eighteenth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Howard D. Weinbrot
Howard D. Weinbrot*
Affiliation:
Yale University, New Haven, Conn.
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Extract

Though formal verse satire was a major genre in the Augustan age, students of satire have generally been reluctant to define its essential traits. Perhaps the most illuminating study is Mary Claire Randolph's “The Structural Design of the Formal Verse Satire.” She remarks that the satire of Lucilius, Horace, Persius, and Juvenal was “bi-partite in structure,” that a particular vice or folly was attacked in “Part A,” and its opposite virtue praised in “Part B.” There is always more attack than praise in satire “since, paradoxically, in the very act of presenting the negative or destructive side of human behavior the satirist is establishing a positive foundation on which he can base his specific recommendation to virtue.” Whether introduced by direct exhortation, implication, or quotable proverb, the “admonition to virtue” is inevitably present in formal verse satire: “it must be there, spoken or unspoken, if the piece is to be more than mere virulence and fleeting invective. … In any case, whatever the plan, the positive rational mode of procedure advocated or unmistakenly implied in a satire will be the precise opposite of the vice or folly ridiculed.”

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 80 , Issue 4-Part1 , September 1965 , pp. 394 - 401
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1965

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References

1 PQ, xxi (1942), 369, 373. Miss Randolph refers to two studies which discuss this structure in classical satire: Augustin G. C. Cartault, Étude sur les satires d'Horace (Paris, 1899), p. 347, and Oscar E. Nybakken, An Analytical Study of Horace's Ideas (Iowa City, Iowa, 1937), p. 12. See also the Yale diss. by Arthur H. Weston, Latin Satirical Writing Subsequent to Juvenal (Lancaster, Pa.: New Era Printing Co., 1915), p. 5.

2 Ibid., pp. 374–375.

3 Ibid., pp. 383–384.

4 See: Maynard Mack, “The Muse of Satire,” Yale Review, xli (1951), 80–92; John Butt, The Augustan Age (London, 1950), pp. 68–70; Robert W. Rogers, The Major Satires of Pope, Illinois Studies in Lang. and Lit., xl (Urbana, 1955), 83; Rebecca Price Parkin, The Poetic Workmanship of Alexander Pope (Minneapolis, 1955), pp. 126, 166–168. See also: Alvin B. Kernan, The Cankered Muse (New Haven, 1959), pp. 11–32, and passim; Robert C. Elliott, The Power of Satire (Princeton, 1960), pp. 109–112. For an earlier study of Pope's satiric method, see Elder Olson's “Rhetoric and the Appreciation of Pope,” MP, xxxvii (1939–40), 13–35.

5 The Essays of John Dryden, ed. W. P. Ker (Oxford, 1926), ii, 282–283; see also Randolph, p. 383.

6 See, for example, “To Matthew Prior, Esq.; Upon the Roman Satirists” (1721), in The Critical Works of John Dennis, ed. Edward Niles Hooker (Baltimore, 1943), ii, 218, 220.

7 It was included in Charles Gildon's Miscellany Poems and as an appendix to René Le Bossu's Treatise of the Epick Poem, to which are added an Essay Upon Satyr by Mons. D'Acier and a Treatise on the Pastoral, by Mons. Fontenelle (London, 1695; 2nd ed., 1719), and in the first volume of The Works of Mr. Thomas Brown, Serious and Comical (London, 1707; 9th ed., 1760). Brown is probably the translator of the essay in Gildon's Miscellany; see Benjamin Boyce, Tom Brown of Facetious Memory (Cambridge, Mass., 1939), p. 38.

8 See Collier's The Great Historical, Geographical, Genealogical and Poetical Dictionary, … Collected from the best Historians, Chronologers, and Lexicographers … but more especially out of Lewis Morery [Moréri], D. D. his 8th ed … (2nd ed., London, 1701). Collier remarks about satire: “Satyr amongst the Latins, is, in a large sence, applicable to all Discourses that recommend Vertue, and explode Vice: But the Word, as it is now commonly used with us, only signifies a stinging piece of Poetry, to lash and expose the Vices of Men.” Collier closely follows Moréri's Grand Dictionnaire historique which, in turn, closely follows Dacier. See the “Préface sur les satires d'Horace,” in Œuvres d'Horace en Latin, traduites en françois … par M. Dacier (Paris, 1691), vi, ∗∗6r–v. Collier might have seen the same passage translated in Brown, Works (2nd ed., 1708), i, 25, and in Dryden's “Discourse,” Essays, ii, 67. Trapp paraphrases the same passage. See the English translation of his Praelectiones: Lectures on Poetry Read in the School of Natural Philosophy at Oxford (London, 1742), pp. 223–224.

9 The Works of Horace (3rd ed., London), ii, li. Watson often refers to Dacier in his “Critical Dissertation on the Origin and Progress of Lyrick Poetry and Satire amongst the Ancients.” See especially, ii, vii, xlvi–xlvii. Although called the “third edition,” this is the first edition of the complete Works. The first volume, The Odes, Epodes, and Carmen Secularae, was printed separately in 1741, and again in 1747, and the Works reprinted in 1760 (4th ed.) and 1792.

10 Quoted from The Complete Art of Poetry, in A. F. B. Clark, Boileau and the French Classical Critics in England (1660–1830), “Bibliothèque de la Revue de Littérature Comparée,” xix (Paris, 1925), 287. For other English allusions to Dacier, see pp. 286–288.

11 Œuvres d'Horace, vi, sig. ∗∗8r–9r; spelling has been modernized.

12 Ibid., sig. ∗∗9v. Watson translates much of this passage: Works of Horace, ii, xlvi–xlvii.

13 For examples of Dacier's praise of Horace's method of inculcating virtue, see his remarks on Satires i. 1, ibid, p. 23; i.9, ibid., p. 558, and ii.7, ibid., vii, 510–511.

14 Ibid., viii, sig. A3r; original is italicized throughout.

15 Ibid., sigs. A3v–A5r; italics and roman type inverted in text. Watson also translates this passage: Works of Horace, ii, li–lii. It is likely that Dacier's view was a commonplace of continental Renaissance thought. For example, in his second Discorso sopra le epistole appended to his translation of the Epistles of Horace (1559), Ludovice Dolce observed that the satires and epistles had complementary functions: “In the satires it was his intention to remove the vices from the breast of men, and in [the epistles] to plant there the virtues.” See Bernard Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance (Chicago, 1961), i, 143.

16 London, sig. A4v–A5r; italics and roman type inverted.

17 Essays, ii, 100, 102.

18 John Dryden, et al, The Satires of Decimus Junius Juvenalis … Together with the Satires of Aulus Persius Flaccus (London, 1693), p. 2. The original is italicized throughout.

19 Ibid., pp. 87–88; italics and roman type inverted.

20 Ibid., p. 146.

21 Dryden's indebtedness to the Renaissance commentators is mentioned in Essays, ii, 43–44, 282–285. However, there is no thorough study of Dryden's sources in the “Discourse.” The theories of Casaubon, Heinsius, and Rigaultius are discussed in Chester Hubbard Cable's “Methods of Non-Dramatic Verse Satire 1640–1700” (unpubl. diss., Univ. of Chicago, 1948), pp. 9–31.

22 A Translation of Juvenal and Persius into English Verse (2nd ed., London, 1786), pp. iii–iv, xiv–xvi, 195–196.

23 Boswell's Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill and rev. by L. F. Powell (Oxford, 1934–50), iv, 38.

24 The Satires of Decimus Junius Juvenalis (London, 1802), pp. 1, lx–lxvi.

25 Essays upon Several Subjects (London), pp. 224–225.

26 Critical Works, ii, 218.

27 Essays, ii, 26; Edward Young, Love of Fame, The Universal Passion. In Seven Characteristical Satires (2nd ed., London, 1728), sig. A4v.

28 Père Dominique Bouhours, The Arts of Logick and Rhetorick, Illustrated by Examples taken out of the best Authors. … To which are added [by John Oldmixon], Parallel Quotations Out of the Most Eminent English Authors (London, 1728), pp. 360–361.

29 Works of Horace, ii, xl.

30 Allen Lyell Reade, Johnsonian Gleanings … Part V: The Doctor's Life 1728–1735 (London, 1928), v, 225. Johnson's knowledge of Dryden's work remained with him. Late in his life he called Dryden the father of English criticism, and both praised and blamed his translation of Juvenal and Persius. See Lives of the English Poets by Samuel Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill (Oxford, 1905), i, 385, 446–447.

31 Lewis Freed, “The Sources of Johnson's Dictionary” (unpubl. diss., Cornell Univ., 1939); Dryden, p. 57; Pope, p. 73; Shakespeare, p. 76. Freed has tabulated all the illustrations in the first volume and a few—an unspecified number—from the second.

32 See Dryden's Juvenal and Persius, p. 4 of “The Satires of Aulus Persius Flaccus” (new pagination and title page after p. 316 of Juvenal): “The Reader may observe that our Poet was a Stoick Philosopher; and that all his Moral Sentences, both here, and in all the rest of his Satyrs, are drawn from the Dogma's of that Sect”; original is italicized throughout. Note too that Joseph Nicol Scott, in his 1755 revision of Bailey's A New Universal Etymological Dictionary, borrowed Johnson's illustrations for underpart, arraignment, and declamatory.

33 Reade, v, 115; The Letters of Samuel Johnson, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford, 1952), i, 6, n. 2; James L. Clifford, Young Sam Johnson (New York, 1955), pp. 156–157.

34 James H. Sledd and Gwin J. Kolb, Dr. Johnson's Dictionary (Chicago, 1955), p. 107.

35 Life, i, 188, n. 2. Powell epitomizes the remarks of Dr. Thomas Percy. Note too that a remark of Johnson's in Sermon vi also suggests knowledge of Dryden's concept of satire: “every argument against any vice is equally an argument in favour of the contrary virtue; and whoever proves the folly of being proud, shews, at the same time, that with the lowly there is wisdom.” See Sermons on Different Subjects, Left for Publication by John Taylor, LL.D. (2nd ed., London, 1790), i, 137. Maurice J. Quinlan places this sermon “in the last ten years” of Johnson's life: Samuel Johnson: A Layman's Religion (Madison, Wis., 1964), p. 97.

36 Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (London, 1711), i, 9.

37 The Satyrs of Persius (London), p. xi.

38 London, p. 10.

39 The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. George Sherburn (Oxford, 1956), iv, 112.

40 2nd ed. (London), p. iii.

41 Ibid., pp. vii–viii; italics and roman type inverted.

42 In addition to the remarks of Shaftesbury quoted above, see his “Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour” (1709), in Characteristics, i, 141; see also Addison's Spectator, No. 209 (1711), Greene's Satires of Juvenal Paraphrastically Imitated and Adapted to the Times (1763), pp. v, vii, xvi, and Owen, pp. 213–214, 221–222.

43 The Works of Alexander Pope Esq. (London), iii, 229–230, 263.

44 London, p. 289.

45 Ibid., p. 302.

46 Ibid., pp. 305–306. Here, and throughout his Life of Pope, Ruffhead is probably indebted to Warburton. See W. L. MacDonald, Pope and his Critics (London, 1951), pp. 251–282.

47 Ibid., p. 360.

48 Ed. by W. Carew Hazlitt (London, 1871), iv, 409.

49 For the contrasting sections of praise and blame, see ll. 173–179, the attack on Shaftesbury, and ll. 69–78, the praise of the conservative Tories. The virtues of the moderate Tory and the vices of the extreme Whig are neatly set forth in the portrait of Edward Seymour (ll. 899–913). For a similar view of the poem, see C. V. Wedgewood, Poetry and Politics under the Stuarts (Cambridge, Eng., 1960), p. 168.

50 Satire i, pp. 14–15.

51 Ibid., pp. 15–18.

52 Satire vii, p. 168. This satire was published in 1726 as “Satire the Last,” but was followed by Satires v (1727) and vi (1728).

53 Ibid., p. 172. The three kinds of Ambition are discussed on pp. 170–172, and the King characterized on pp. 172–175.