Discuss Dryden as a Satirist.
B.A.Eng.Composition-Part-1.Paper-1)
Dryden is one of the greatest English satirists. He is the first practitioner
of classical satire which after him was to remain in vogue for about one
hundred and fifty years. From the very beginning of his literary career
Dryden evinced a sharp satiric bent. He translated some of the satires
of the Roman writer Persius when he was only a pupil at Westminster.
Further, in his comedies he produced numerous passages of sparkling
satire. He keenly studied the satirical traditions of Rome and France and
whatever satire England had to offer.
But it was not till he was about fifty that he came to write Absalom and
Achitophel-first of the four major satiric works on which his reputation
as a poet is based. With his practice he gave a new form and direction
to English satire and raised it to the level of French and Roman satire.
He made satire not only a redoubtable weapon to chastise personal
and public enemies but also an important, if not a very exalted genre of
literature which was later to attract such great writers as Pope, Swift,
Addison, and Dr. Johnson. Dryden’s four important satires are:a) Absalom and Achitophel
b) The second part of Absalom and Achitophel chiefly written by
Nahum Tate and including about 200 lines by Dryden.
c) The Medal.
d) Mac Flecknoe.
Dryden’s Contribution and Place:
Dryden as a satirist does not fall in with native English tradition of
Langland. Gascoigne, Donne, Lodge, Hall, Marston, Cleveland, etc.
which was carried on by his contemporaries like Oldham and Samuel
Butler. Just as in his non-satiric poetry he reacted against the
“romanticism” of the Elizabethans and the confusion, grotesqueness,
and formlessness of the imitators of Donne, similarly in his satire he
broke away from the harshness, disrespect of form, and denunciatory
tone of the English satirists before him. He seems to have looked for
inspiration not towards them but-a neo-classicist as he was-towards
the Roman satirists-Horace, Juvenal, and Persius-and their French
followers, the most outstanding of whom was his adored Boileau.
Both asa critic and as a creative writer, Dryden emphasised and felt the
need for artistic control and urbanity of manner. For all successful
satire these qualities are of the nature of pre-requisites. It is most
essential for a satirist to hide his disgust and moral animus behind a veil
of equanimity and urbanity of manner. If he just loses his head at the
sight of the object which is to be the target of his attack and comes out
with open denunciation or direct name-calling he will not be a
successful satirist. A satirist is a propagandist in so far as his effort is to
direct the sympathies of the reader into harmonic with his own and
against the object sought to be satirised, Naturally enough, if he speaks
too openly from the position of a partisan, he will cut little ice with thereader. So the satirist should not appear too serious-too serious to be
taken seriously. Of course he should be very serious, but he should give
the impression of being not very serious, or even neutral between the
two opposite points of view, one of which his effort is to promote and
the other to counteract. He should lessen, as far as possible, the
intensity of self-involvement through the employment of some sly
indirection of technique. Dryden himself was aware of it when he said
that the satirist should make a man “die sweetly,” call him a fool ora
rogue without using these “opprobrious terms.” He distinguished
between the “slovenly butchering” done by a bad satirist and the
dexterous stroke which severs the head but leaves it standing. Seldom
does Dryden indulge in open denunciation or invective, but he often
uses such indirect techniques as irony, sarcasm, and above all his
exuberant wit. It is what primarily distinguishes him from his
predecessors who were always open and direct in their attacks. His
satire is indirect and, therefore, smooth, urbane, and without
angularities or harshness. The same-is the case with his versification.
He found a good satiric vehicle in the heroic couplet and chiselled and
planed it to brilliance. His versification avoids the harshness
deliberately cultivated by his young friend Oldham who also employed
the heroic couplet. Observes Hugh Walker: “It is this combination-
smoothness of verse, lucidity of style, urbanity of manner-which makes
Dryden’s satire so strikingly original. In English there had hitherto been
nothing comparable to it.”
Controlled Contempt:
Dryden’s satire is remarkable-as an artistic expression of controlled
contempt. Broadly speaking, the three great English satirists-Dryden,
Pope, and Swift-work through different channels Dryden is a master of
scorn or contempt, Pope of rage, and Swift of disgust. Of course, all of
them artistically control their respective presiding feeling, else theywould not have been “great” satirists. Dryden who in T. S. Eliot’s phrase
is “the great master of contempt, unlike his predecessors, does not take
any moral airs. Donne, Hall, and Marston seem to be speaking from a
moral elevation, as if they were saints whose moral sense has been
outraged. Now, this takes for granted a kind of moral pose which
debars satire from assuming an appearance of genuineness or sincerity.
Once this moral pose has been seen through by the reader, he cannot
accept to be dictated or “moved” by the satirist whom he knows to be
an erring being like himself. Dryden speaks as one civilised being to
others, without pretending to give them lessons in morality. For one
thing he eschews all moral and religious issues. The issues he tackles
concern politics, taste and good breeding and, only incidentally, morals
or religion, Saintsbury observes: “It never does for the political satirist
to lose his temper and to rave and rant and denounce ...” As a critic
says, “Dryden assumes no moral airs, firmly controls his satirical spirit
and skilfully selects the points and the manner of his attacks... The result
is a humorous, disdainful, and yet incisive mockery.”
Dryden’s Elevating Style:
One of Dryden’s unique gifts is his capacity to ennoble and elevate the
objects of his satire even when his motive is to demean or depress
them. The buoyant vigour of his poetry does not let them touch the
lowly ground. T. S. Eliot was the first to direct attention to this point
when he wrote in his essay on Dryden: “Much of Dryden’s unique art
consists in his ability to make the small into the great, prosaic into the
poetic, the trivial into the magnificent.” Even when Dryden pours the
vials of his scorn on such characters as Titus Gates, Slingsby Bethel, and
Shadwell, he gives them something of heroic dignity. He extends the
dimensions of their being (in the case of Shadwell, his physical being
too!) and makes them “poetic”. His scorn diminishes and depresses
them, but his poetry extends and exalts them. His personal animus isoften lost in the energy of creation, so that a Mac Flecknoe becomes
much more important than the real man called Shadwell, Corah than
Titus Dates, and Shimetthan Slingsby Bethel.
Personal envy and malice shed their grossness and are burnished into
real poetry. The end product has little resemblance with the material
Dryden starts with. Bonamy Dobree observes: “We have only to think
of Mac Flecknoe to forget Shadwell; to think of Achitophel is to forget
Shaftesbury; the persons are lost in history, the satires are part of our
national consciousness. Everything is all the time compared not with
something little but with something great.” That way, Dryden’s modus
‘operandi is much different from Pope’s. When Pope satirises, he
diminishes; when Dryden satirises, he exalts.
By exalting arid enlarging the objects of his satire, Dryden also raised
the lowly genre of satire to the level of epic. This was a no small
achievement. His work Absalom and Achitophel which he gave the title
“a Poem” and not “a Satire”-is the first instance in English of a heroic
satire. As lan Jack has pointed out in Augustan Satire, this poem
consists of passages peculiar not only to one “kind” of poetry but to
many kinds-epic, satire, panegyric, etc. The style seldom becomes low,
the kind of which may be employed for an ordinary satire. Even in his
mock-heroic satire Mac Flecknoe, which is conceived on a much lower
plane than Absalom and Achitophel, Dryden does not use very low or
vulgar imagery to punish Shadwell. The mock-heroic effect is created by
the element of incongruity generated by the use of high idiom and
imagery for such an allegedly “low” character as Shadwell. The use of
contemporary locations, stress, etc., has a further ludicrous effect.
In Absalom and Achitophel the use of biblical parallels has an exalting
effect but in Mac Flecknoe the reference to concrete historical details
has the effect of the mock heroic. Thus, in a word, whereas Absalom
and Achitophel is a heroic satire, Mac Flecknoe is a mock-heroic satire.However, in both the satirist works through high, and not low or vulgar,
imagery and idiom.
This “exalting” effect on his satiric objects is made possible only by
Dryden’s effective and masterful handling of the heroic couplet-a
poetic measure which it was to his credit to perfect into an excellent
vehicle of satire by giving to it neatness, epigrammatic cogency and
smart and felicitous phrasing, and fully exploiting the scope it has for
balance and antithesis. To a large extent he regularised the heroic
couplet by discouraging the licence taken by the earlier practitioners of
this measure. He gave each line five regular stresses and avoided, as far
as possible, what is called enjambment or the trailing of sense from one
couplet to the next. His couplets are generally end-stopped and after
every line there is generally a natural stop. However, he himself took
liberties with the location of the caesura and shifted it within the line or
even dispensed with it altogether at times. His handling of the heroic
couplet is not as strict and disciplined as Pope's. For instance, he
sometimes uses an alexandrine instead of a regular pentameter, and
sometimes the couplet grows into a triplet. Pope was strict to avoid
such licence, and he even took Dryden to task for it. Nevertheless,
Dryden’s heroic couplets are more energetic, racy, and spontaneous-
looking than Pope's. As a master of contempt—sometimes expressed in
ironical terms—Dryden finds the couplet a very handy medium. Many
of Dryden's couplets come out with sizzling and scarifying intensity, and
the sound of some of them, as Saintsbury puts it, resembles the sound
ofa slap in the face.
Dryden’s Major Satires:
a) Absalom and Achitophel is Dryden’s first and by far his best satire. It
was perhaps written at the suggestion of Charles II and was out just a
week before the trial of Shaftesbury for sedition. It was thus political innature and was the representation of the Tory point of view. Its
purpose was to malign Shaftesbury as an enemy of peace and the
nation and a seducer of the Duke of Monmouth-the King’s illegitimate
son. The “poem” is conceived on near-epic dimensions though it
contains many elements below the dignity of an epic proper. There is
much too little action though considerable tenseness. Much of the
interest of this work lies in the satirical portraits of Shaftesbury, the
Duke of Buckingham, Slingsby Bethel, and Titus Gates veiled behind the
biblical or pseudo-biblical figures of Achitophel, Zimri, Shimer, and
Corah respectively. The poem, says Sir Edmund Gosse, “really consists
of satirical portraits cut and polished like jewels and flashing malignant
light from all their facets.” There are some portraits of the allies of the
King, too, but they are not so effective. Indeed Dryden is a great master
of the satiric portrait which was quite fashionable at that time. Unlike
Pope he gives his portrait a typical and, often, universal character and
significance, so that the historical character sought to be satirised is
often lost in the finished poetic portrait. (Pope was muchtoo malignant
ever to lose sight of his target). There is a sensitive variation of tone
with which Dryden handles one character after another, as there is in
each case a varying degree of contempt and remorse at the sense of
wasted or misdirected talent.
b) The two hundred odd lines which Dryden contributed to the second
part of Absalom and Achitophel authored by Nahum Tate constitute its
best part. The rest of the poem is beneath criticism, and even
contempt. In his contribution.-he satirised Shadwell and Elhanan Settle
in the characters of Og and Doeg respectively.
c) The Medal - subtitled A Satire Against Sedition, was again, topical in
genesis. In spite of Absalom and Achitophel, Shaftesbury was released
from captivity. To commemorate his release the Whigs struck a medal
bearing the effigy of their hero. This stung Dryden into action and TheMedal was the result. He calls Shaftesbury “the pander of the people's
heart” and takes him to task for his seditious activities which would,
Dryden alleges, plunge the country into ruin. He vigorously upholds, as
in Absalom and Achitophel, Hobbes’s theory of political covenant.
d) Mac Flecknoe is the only satire in which Dryden lashes a personal
enemy even though his target-Shadwell-was a vigorous upholder of the
Whig cause. The sub-title of the work is “A Satire on the True Blue
Protestant Poet, T. S.” Of Course, “T. S.” is Thomas Shadwell. The Poem
is of the nature of a lampoon. Dryden ridicules Shadwell by
representing him as the fittest heir to Flecknoe-the king of the realm of
dullness. Flecknoe was a very voluminous and terribly dull poet of
Ireland. He is shown to single out Shadwell, one of his numerous
progeny, as Shadwell alone of all my sons is he Who stands confirmed
in full stupidity.
Then is described the coronation of Shadwell in a mock-heroic style.
The poem was to serve as a model for Pope’s Dunciad-one of the most
powerful poems of the eighteenth century.
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