The Satirist and the Physical World
By WYNDHAM LEWIS To the outsider the " shop " of any man is bound to appear somewhat cynical. Familiarity may not breed contempt, but it develops a matter-of-factness, and an informal ease of approach that is the first cousin of cynicism. A man who trades in illusion and effect, like the actor or for that matter the novelist, has a " shop " that will not bear the light of common day. This was demonstrated in the case of the un- fortunate Trollope, whose reputation has even yet not wholly recovered from the blow he gave it when he published his too veracious account of how he worked.
Some trades more than others possess a compromising " shop." To overhear two physicians—not to say surgeons —exchanging notes is enough to make the flesh of the bravest creep. But the " shop " of many professions is sufficiently grim to the outside ear. Does not most pure business, from stockbroking downwards, sound to the non-business man like a corroboree of crooks planning a mauvais coup ?
There is no craft the open discussion of which, upon " shoppy " lines, would awaken a graver mistrust—and even in the very susceptible a sensation approaching horror—than that of the satirist. To surprise two satirists comparing notes would be for many, I am sure, in the nature of an alarming experience. It would be like being privy to the unguarded ohat of a couple of headsmen : or to be at the elbow of a congenital slanderer at the moment when he addresses himself to the composition of a particularly vile anonymous letter.
Such reflections as these must assail even the boldest satirist when he sets out to analyse, at all a fond, even the most obvious aspects of his art. Everyone, from the bucolic Georgian poetaster down to the youngest steno- graphic reader of Photoplay, would be bound to cry out in an ecstasy of protest : " But why satire after all ? Why cannot you make us beautiful ? Why cannot you make us noble ? Why cannot you make us kind ? " (It is, of course, the voice of a deluded democracy that we hear in this complaint.) Nevertheless, observing such precautions as are appropriate, we may today with far more' likelihood of understanding than, say, six years ago canvass a few of the major assump- tions upon which all effective satire rests.
Unquestionably the satirist is a sort of realist—suffering intim the same disabilities as the latter—though only a sort :
he is anything but a realist tout court. He may be regarded as in a sense the poet among realists. His " real " is so much more imaginatively imposing than the " real " of the mere reporter or snapshotter that he can only be classed with the " realist " in a very restricted way.
On the other hand, the " materialism " of the matter of the grotesque is liable to shock in somewhat the same fashion, and to shock the same people, as the more sinister varieties of realistic art. That informal and surprising world of Every Man out of his Humour, of the Satyricon, of the Femmes Savantes is after all an unpopular region of cold- blooded laughter. It is a highly controversial and even scandalous playground of the intellect. The man who gives himself up to the enjoyment of the satiric is decidedly not k premier venu ; and, indeed,' entire nations forbid satire within their. frontiers, as if it were on a par with cockfighting or tauromachy, and would Consider themselves as brutes to relish it, if that ever happened to them—as in some cases it literally could not, being as it were a physical impossibility, since nausea would supervene: It is almost like the question of consuming frogs and snails, or birds' nests and sharks' eyes. There are nations—often strongly satiric nations— who do these things ; and there are nations—often who abhor satire—who do not. The great satirists have usually been steeped in physical manners of feeling. If we posit the body as what best may stand for what is " savage," and the spirit as what best
may stand for what is " polite," the satirist is then certainly apt to wear a savage aspect, and is seen- to be at home with
what is most objective if not animal in this world. Thus it is reported that Paracelsus (a great satirist, as well as a great mystic), when he wished to indicate the relation in which he stood to the learned world, remarked that " all the universities have less experience than my beard, and the down upon my neck has more knowledge than my auditors." He might have said that his nose knew more than all the followers of Galen put together—or his big toe, or the nails of his feet ! We can see Bombastus von Hohenheim as he must have confronted his students as professor at Basel, conscious of every bristle upon the back of his neck, or sprouting upon the lip engaged in delivering his satiric dictums.
English literature possesses some of the greatest satire, and that is what we should expect. Very near to the Flemish, both racially and in cast of mind, the English would seem cut out for satire. But for nearly two centuries there has been no great satire in our tongue : and today there is no nation so averse from satire as are the English. Even our law of libel witnesses to that fact : although those laws (I am ignorant of their history) may be the distant aftermath of measures that had to be taken to curb what was an overmastering propensity of the English mind. If this is the case, they have succeeded only too well. For today, whereas a Frenehman or an American is able to publish satiric opinions, or vigorous lampoons, that leave nothing to be desired on the score of " savagery," an Englishman must think twice before he ventures upon the mildest flight of disrespectful imagery. And in these hard times, when the hungry " golddigger " abounds, sniffing out on all hands the lucrative " libel," it is even unsafe to suggest that our neighbour is in any respect other than' the most perfect gentlemin or perfect lady, or. by the merest fraction, otherivise than " as straight as a gun-barrel." Even a suggesticn of intellectual dishonesty h disallowed. That the present anti-satiric dispositions of the English are not endemic is certain. Proof, even of the great natural propensity to satire of the. English; may be elicited from the Most unlikely quarters. ' Horace Walpole in his letters affoids such an instance. Writing from the bucolic faStnesses of eighteenth-centUry Norfolk (he is discussing man and his diet, with special reference to beef), he exclairns : " Only imagine that I here every day see men who are mountains of roast beef, and only seem just roughly hewn out into the outlines of huinan form, like the giant rock at Pratolin3. I shudder *hen I see them brandish their knives in act to carve, and look on them as savages that devour one another. I should not stare at all more than I do if yonder Alderman at the loWer end of the table was to stiok his fork into his neighbour's jolly cheek and cut a brave slice of brown and fat." '
Is not that as good as Rowlandson ? The print entitled " The Grumblers " is cut out of the same spiritif I may be allowed to make use of spirit upon a footing, and in the same breath, with Horace Walpole's beef.
The particular aspect of satire I have been at pains to bring out in this article is its great awareness of the body. Satire is anthropomoiphic ; it is, in the technical jargon of art. Mentalist. 'And the objective world of common sense is its philosophic field. Don Quixote attacking the full-bellied wineskinS—Excalibur against the bloated Dionysos—might supply the material for its device, if Satire should one day turn, in company with the other arts, to heraldry, to repair some of the dignity all of them have lost in the democratic age.
Previous page
