For satire, as a literary
genre, belongs to these two. The mediaeval world, inexhaustible in its
capacity and relish for abuse, full of rude laughter and drastic
humour--prompt, for all its superstition, to make a jest of the priest,
and, for all its chivalry, to catalogue the foibles of women--had the
satirical animus in abundance, and satirical songs, visions, fables,
fabliaux, ballads, epics, in legion, but no definite and recognised
school of satire. It is sufficient to name, as examples of the
extraordinary range of the mediaeval satiric genius, the farce of
_Pathelin_, the beast-epic of _Renart_, the rhymes of Walter Map, and
the _Inferno_ of Dante.
Of these satirists before the rise of "satire", mediaeval England
produced two great examples in Chaucer and Langland. They typify at the
outset the two classes into which Dryden divided English satirists--the
followers of Horace's way and the followers of Juvenal's--the men of
the world, who assail the enemies of common-sense with the weapons of
humour and sarcasm; and the prophets, who assail vice and crime with
passionate indignation and invective scorn. Since Dryden's time neither
line has died out, and it is still possible, with all reserves, to
recognise the two strains through the whole course of English
literature: the one represented in Chaucer, Donne, Marvell, Addison,
Arbuthnot, Swift, Young, Goldsmith, Canning, Thackeray, and Tennyson;
the others in Langland, Skelton, Lyndsay, Nash, Marston, Dryden, Pope,
Churchill, Johnson, Junius, Burns, and Browning.
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