Get complete information on Poetry of the Age (C) Prose-Satire

(1) Addison:

Addison aims were frankly and degradedly reformative and corrective, and he laughs at the follies of the age in order to correct and improve them. He is more concerned with social reform and moral instruction than with pure entertainment.

The characteristic humor of Addison is satiric, and we come across satire everywhere in the pages of the Spectator Papers. As a matter of fact, Addison is one of the greatest satirists in the English language.

As a satirist, Addison is neither malicious nor ferocious nor virulent. He ridicules to correct and improve and not to degrade, slander or insult. Neither is his satire universal, like that of Swift, who laughs bitterly at mankind as a whole.

Addison ridicules the follies and frivolities, weaknesses and absurdities of his age, but never virtue and good sense. Feminine vanity, coquetry, triviality, and their craze for fashion are most frequently satirized. He regards women as another name for triviality, but he never means to insult them or degrade them.

As Court hope points out, irony is the very essence of Addison’s humor and satire. Irony may be defined as the use of language with a meaning opposite to what the words apparently convey. Irony may also be defined as the simulated adoption of another’s point of view.

The ironist praises highly what he, reality, seeks to expose and ridicule. In short, irony is an indirect means of exposure and ridicule, and satirists make good use of it as an instrument. The difference between the satire of Swift and that of Steele and Addison is due mainly to two causes. The first and fundamental cause is the difference between the men in character.

Swift’s satire was savage because there was savagery in his own nature; whereas Steele was the most genial and kind-hearted of men, and though there may have been some taint of malice in Addison, he was essentially good-natured.

The second and subsidiary cause was the difference in the circumstances in which the satires were produced. Swift’s great satires were substantive works; and even the shorter, occasional papers were, for the most part, independent of their surroundings.

But the papers of Steele and Addison had to conform to the general tone of the periodicals to which they were contributed. We cannot imagine the Yahoos in The Spectator. The spirit of the papers on MacDonnell spread over The Taller and from it transmitted to The Spectator, in place of the raillery about puffs and patches and furbelows and Pacts and Salamanders.

(2) Swift:

Swift, in his satires, lashes with rare Zeal at all kind of aberrations and departures from the normal. In a Tale of a Tub he lashes at the follies and corruptions of religion and in the Battle of the Books it is the literary affectations and hypocrisy that come under his lash.

In the Gulliver’s Travels, he strips the whole of humanity with a mad glee and shows that man is a filthy creature filled all over with excrements. He uses all the known stylistic devices, allegory, digression, fable, irony, etc. as instruments of his satire. He knew that satire conveyed indirectly is more effective than the direct one, and so often invests it with a double meaning.

In The Talofa Tub the story of the three brothers dividing their father’s coat is a brilliant allegorical cloak to hide the satire on religious intolerance and pretension. The Meditations upon a Broomstick and the Battle of the Book are both complete, long drawn out metaphors, right from the beginning. The whole of The Gulliver’s Travels is a story with a double meaning. Swift is a master of the art of story-telling and it is a measure of his greatness that the greatest of the children’s classics is also one of the greatest and bitterest of satires in the language.

Irony is the most potent weapon of satire in the armory of Jonathan Swift. Irony is the uses of language with an opposite or at least different tendency. Thus in The Battle of the Books, Swift does not tell us that Bentley, the keeper of the Kings’ Library, was very rude to Boyle. Rather he praises him for his courtesy. Irony is like homeopathic treatment. It was such a simulated attitude which Swift used to expose the hypocrisy arid pretension of Porridge, the almanac-maker.

A very similar attitude did he adopt in A Modest Proposal to Irish Parents, containing his calibrated advice that children should be pickled and eaten to save the cost and trouble of brining them up.

In The Battle of the Books we get this type of irony in the accounts of Momus and the Goddess of Criticism helping the moderns in their war with the ancients, as well as in the march of Wotton and Bentley in search of some isolated ancients. In the Gulliver’s Travels every aspect of English life, English professions, politics, religion, habits, institutions, has been ironically treated.

In the beginning of The Battle of the Books mankind is likened to the Commonwealth of Dogs, and human quarrels are said to be motivated by the same reasons- a bone or a female is always at the root of it.

These are examples of imagery in his satires. In some way swift’s satire comes to have an element of the comic in it. In The Battle of Books we get the humorous picture of the pot-bellied Bentley who, “endeavoring to climb up, is obstructed by his own unhappy weight, and tendency towards his centre”, in fact all the moderns have a mighty “pressure about their posteriors and their heels”, which always keeps them down. This humorous vein runs throughout the description of the fighting between the ancients and the moderns.

Thus both the bulk of Swift’s satire and its quality make him undoubtedly the prince of English satirists.