Introduction
One day, a shy young man addressed a stranger and was handed a withering put-down. A thoughtless onlooker was highly amused, but Richard Steele was full of righteous indignation. You may mock mankind, he said, but not men; never take aim at the weak, and never be witty in anger. And he fell to musing on what makes a good satirist.
WHEN I had run over several such [satirists] in my thoughts, I concluded, however unaccountable the assertion might appear at first sight, that good-nature was an essential quality in a satirist, and that all the sentiments which are beautiful in this way of writing, must proceed from that quality in the author. Good-nature produces a disdain for all baseness, vice, and folly; which prompts them to express themselves with smartness against the errors of men, without bitterness towards their persons.*
The ordinary subjects for satire are such as incite the greatest indignation in the best tempers, and consequently men of such a make are the best qualified for speaking of the offences in human life. These men can behold vice and folly, when they injure persons to whom they are wholly unacquainted, with the same severity as others resent the ills they do to themselves. A good-natured man cannot see an overbearing fellow put a bashful man of merit out of countenance, or out-strip him in the pursuit of any advantage, but he is on fire to succour the oppressed, to produce the merit of the one, and confront the impudence of the other.
“Her unusually quick sense of the ridiculous” said James Austen-Leigh of his aunt, the novelist Jane Austen (1775-1814), “led her to play with all the common- places of everyday life, whether as regarded persons or things; but she never played with its serious duties or responsibilities, nor did she ever turn individuals into ridicule.”
Précis
Back in the reign of Queen Anne, Sir Richard Steele was annoyed by the tale of a man who publicly humiliated a shy stranger. Steele went on to say that true humour comes only from good-natured people, for they readily feel empathy and so it is general human traits that they hold up to ridicule, not particular individuals. (58 / 60 words)
Back in the reign of Queen Anne, Sir Richard Steele was annoyed by the tale of a man who publicly humiliated a shy stranger. Steele went on to say that true humour comes only from good-natured people, for they readily feel empathy and so it is general human traits that they hold up to ridicule, not particular individuals.
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