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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
In the eighteenth century a preference for Juvenal as a satirist eventually replaced the normal Augustan preference for Horace. But the post-Augustan image of Juvenal was selective and sometimes inaccurate. Critics emphasized his sublimity, his occasional pathos, and his supposedly rational piety, while ignoring his obscenity, wit, and rhetorical control. There are near parallels in post-Augustan satiric practice. In William Gifford, satire becomes invective; in Charles Churchill, declamation. The new satire borders on Richardsonian and even Gothic melodrama. Or, at the other extreme, it is pseudo-Horatian and almost at the vanishing point (Christopher Anstey's New Bath Guide). The mock-heroic dwindles into burlesque (Peter Pindar's The Lousiad). The breakdown of the Augustan equilibrium means, in satire, a progressive failure of irony and especially of ironic diminution. Churchill's Dedication to Warburton is an important exception. It uses the new image of Juvenal in the service of mock-panegyric and enforces the Augustan satirist's traditional view of evil as privation.
1 “Essay on the Roman Satirists,” Satires of Decimus Junius Juvenalis, Translated into English Verse (London, 1802), pp. Iv, xlviii.
2 The Amiable Humorist: A Study in the Comic Theory and Criticism of the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries (Chicago, 1960).
3 Nothing like it exists at present. Sherard Vines, Georgian Satirists (London, 1934), and Kenneth Hopkins, Portraits in Satire (London, 1958), draw attention to some of the material.
4 I have tried to deal with them in Lemuel Gulliver's Mirror for Man (Berkeley, Calif., 1968).
5 Essays of John Dryden, ed. W. P. Ker (Oxford, 1900), II, 84, 87. J. V. Luce thinks that Swift remembers Dryden's Juvenal, “a zealous vindicator of Roman liberty,” in his epitaph: “Strenuum pro virili Libertatis Vindicatorem.” (“A Note on the Composition of Swift's Epitaph,” Hermathena, No. civ, Spring 1967, pp. 78–81.)
6 “De Satira,” Praelectiones Poeticae, 2nd ed. (London, 1722), p. 256.
7 “Of Satire,” Lectures on Poetry (London, 1742), p. 227.
8 Lives of the Roman Poets (London, 1726), vi, 126. For the “Life of Horace,” see i, 160–265, especially I, 233, ff.
9 London, 1730, pp. 16, 17.
10 London, 1745, pp. 25, 26.
11 London, 1744, pp. 36, 37, 50–51.
12 “Cursory Thoughts on Satire and Satirists,” Essays Moral and Literary (London, 1782), II, 228.
13 The Justification: A Poem (London, 1777), p. 22.
14 In a preface to his translation of Persius, William Drummond ranks the satirists in the old way: Horace, Juvenal, Persius. Juvenal comes in second because “his tone is too generally, I had almost said invariably, grave” (Satires of Persius, London, 1797, p. xvi). Drummond is objecting less to gravity of manner than to unvaried gravity. It is an out-of-date argument according to genre: the Romans expected something else, and Juvenal promised something else in the words “farrago libelli,” than unrelieved severity.
15 “Discours sur les Satiriques Latins,” Satires de Juvénal, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1782), p. xiv: “Je vais considérer [Horace, Juvenal, Persius] relativement à leur siècle, à leurs moyens, & sur-tout à leurs intentions.” Pp. xiv-xv: “Au lieu d'exalter l'un au préjudice de l'autre . . . j'insisterai sur ce quiles caractérise le plus.” P. lxiii: “Le François doux & poli, brillant & léger, n'est pas fait pour hésiter entre ces deux Auteurs. Chez nous, comme du tems d'Auguste, un Poète agréable, élégant, & qui sait flatter à propos, en un mot, un Poëte de Cour, doit l'emporter sur celui dont le plus grand mérite est d'avoir de l'éloquence, du nerf & de la sincérité.” Pp. c-ci: “Ainsi, la politesse, l'éclat & la fatale sécurité de ce règne léthargique, n'avoient rien d'odieux pour un Poëte dont toute la morale n'é-toit, en dernière analyse, qu'un calcul de voluptés, quelquefois plus qu'Épicuriennes.” Pp. cv-cvi: “Juvénal, dédaignant toutes sortes d'artifices, & supérieur aux lois d'une vaine urbanité . . . réclama hautement contre un pouvoir usurpé.” P. cvii: “Courageuse entreprise!” P. cxix: “Il est aisé, maintenant, de sentir pourquoi Horace a plus de partisans que Juvénal. On sait que, depuis long-tems, la vertu sans alliage n'a plus de cours.” P. cxxiii: “Ainsi, Juvénal seroit le premier des Satiriques, si la vertu étoit le premier besoin des hommes: mais, comme il l'a dit lui-même, on vante la probité tandis qu'elle se morfond.”
16 “Essay on the Roman Satirists,” pp. li, liv.
17 Despite the excess of stupidity that was more, Johnson said, than nature had allotted him, Sheridan's popular lectures on elocution (which he published in 1762) and his British Education (1756), in which he attributed England's every failing to a neglect of oratory, were accurately tuned to the wants of his age.
18 “Life of Dryden,” Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill (Oxford, 1905), i, 447.
19 “Discours sur les Satiriques Latins,” p. cxxvi: “Dans mille autres endroits on entend, au plus fort de son indignation, percer le cri d'un bon naturel, comme on voit couler les larmes d'un juge sensible, & contraint de prononcer, pour la première fois, l'Arrêt du pale criminel assis sur la sellette.” Pp. cxxvii-cxxviii : “N'oublions pas qu'il a chanté les larmes; & qu'on lui doit un tableau de la pitié, tel que Platon, Sénèque, tous les Orateurs et tous les Poètes tant anciens que modernes, n'en ont jamais tracé de plus pathétique.”
20 Satire xv, 11. 131–133. G. G. Ramsay translates, in the Loeb Classical edition of Juvenal and Persius: “When Nature gave tears to man, she proclaimed that he was tenderhearted; and tenderness is the best quality in man.” For the debate about the authenticity of Satire xv, see Gilbert Highet, Juvenal the Satirist (Oxford, 1954), p. 286, ii. 9.
21 Highet, Juvenal the Satirist, pp. 222–223.
22 Lives of the Roman Poets, ii, 127.
23 Edward Owen, “Essay on the Satire of the Ancients, and the Abuses of Modern Satire,” in A Translation of Juvenal and Persius into English Verse, 2nd ed. (London, 1786), p. 207.
24 Satire and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, Conn., 1967), p. 247.
25 Epistle to Peter Pindar (London, 1800), p. 30.
26 Epistle to Peter Pindar, p. 34.
27 Portraits in Satire, p. 255.
28 Boswell to John Wilkes, 2 March 1765. Letters of James Boswell, ed. Chauncey Brewster Tinker (Oxford, 1924), I, 70.
29 Poetical Works of Charles Churchill, ed. Douglas Grant (Oxford, 1956), pp. 408, 409.
30 Poetical Works, p. 428.
31 The Justification, pp. vii, 5, 9–10. If satire can be assimilated to benevolence, irony can be assimilated to the same language of the heart that the poet spoke in the preface. The lord says: “You laugh, my friend; I see your scornful eye / Bright with the beams of sneering Irony.” The poet answers: “ 'Tis true, my noble Lord, I use no art, / My visage speaks the language of my heart” (p. 31).
32 Kensington, 1927, p. 66.
33 Works of Peter Pindar, Esq. (London, 1797), I, 131, 162, 163.
34 William Hayley's The Triumphs of Temper (1781) is also symptomatic. It is another self-styled instance of “heroicomic” poetry, with all the attendant machinery, but Hayley disclaims satire. His only purpose is to praise his long-enduring, wholly domesticated heroine. One more case pointing to the dissolution of the Augustan equilibrium is the work usually known as the Rolliad (1784—85). The name leads to expectations of a mock-heroic; but in fact Criticisms on the Rolliad (the actual title) is a prose commentary on the fragments of an invented “epic.”
35 W. J. Bate has called Johnson a satirist manqué. An essay of Bate's on the subject will be in a forthcoming Festschrift for the late Donald Hyde.
36 The conflicting demands of order and freedom that trouble Churchill from the start are most explicit in a pair of almost self-contradictory passages from Book n of Gotham (1764). First he describes the poet's duty:
To form a plan, to strike a grand Outline,
To fill it up, and make the picture shine
A full, and perfect piece; to make coy rime
Renounce her follies, and with sense keep time,
To make proud sense against her nature bend,
And wear the chains of rime, yet call her friend.
But not much more than a hundred lines farther on:
Had I the pow'r, I could not have the time,
Whilst spirits flow, and Life is in her prime,
Without a sin 'gainst Pleasure, to design
A plan, to methodize each thought, each line
Highly to finish, and make ev'ry grace,
In itself charming, take new charms from place.
(Poetical Works, pp. 309, 313)
This ambivalence Churchill shares with his great admirer, Byron, to whom he is often likened.
37 Yvor Winters did the most for its reputation, and for Churchill's, in a few pages of Primitivism and Decadence; reprinted in In Defense of Reason (New York, 1947), pp. 138–142. Winters deals with the poem again, and at more length, in Forms of Discovery (Chicago, 1967), pp. 131–145. Cf. Wallace Cable Brown, Charles Churchill: Poet, Rake, and Rebel (Lawrence, Kan., 1953), p. 144: “For powerful and sustained irony the Dedication to Dr. W. Warburton is unequalled in English poetic satire.”
38 Poetical Works, p. 431.
