It is to these that satire should reach if it is to
touch the man at whom it is aimed. And to reach these it must pass and
salute a whole army of virtues.
If we turn to the great English satirists of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, for example, we find that they had this rough, but
firm, grasp of the size and strength, the value and the best points of
their adversary. Dryden, before hewing Ahitophel in pieces, gives a
splendid and spirited account of the insane valour and inspired cunning
of the
"daring pilot in extremity,"
who was more untrustworthy in calm than in storm, and
"Steered too near the rocks to boast his wit."
The whole is, so far as it goes, a sound and picturesque version of the
great Shaftesbury. It would, in many ways, serve as a very sound and
picturesque account of Lord Randolph Churchill. But here comes in very
pointedly the difference between our modern attempts at satire and the
ancient achievement of it. The opponents of Lord Randolph Churchill,
both Liberal and Conservative, did not satirise him nobly and honestly,
as one of those great wits to madness near allied. They represented him
as a mere puppy, a silly and irreverent upstart whose impudence supplied
the lack of policy and character. Churchill had grave and even gross
faults, a certain coarseness, a certain hard boyish assertiveness, a
certain lack of magnanimity, a certain peculiar patrician vulgarity. But
he was a much larger man than satire depicted him, and therefore the
satire could not and did not overwhelm him.
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