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A contemporary print of the time, represents Woodward being weighed in one scale, with all the great actors of the day in the other, and Woodward makes them all kick the beam. To satirise the prevailing fashion, Garrick penned the following:
Mongan corrected him, and the Bard was so incensed at the correction that he threatened to satirise the kingdom so that it should become barren. And he would only agree to withhold his terrible satire if Mongan would give him his wife. "Mrs. Mongan?" "Yes, just so," Ulick replied, laughing.
Not in such a mood as this does humanity fare further and higher. Men become cautious, prudent, and decisive thus, instead of generous, hopeful, and high-hearted. But to despair too soon of an era, to despise and satirise an age, a national temper, is a deep and fatal mistake. The world moves onwards patiently and inevitably, obeying a larger and a mightier law.
Rabelais and Sterne were not perhaps inferior in genius, and they were read with as much avidity and delight as the Spaniard. "Le docte Rabelais" had the learning which the Englishman wanted; while unhappily Sterne undertook to satirise false erudition, which requires the knowledge of the true.
But du Maurier gives us a real impression of the Society in which he moved. His ability to satirise society while still leaving it its dignity is unique. It may be said to be his distinctive contribution to the art of graphic satire. It gave to the Anglo-Saxon school its present-day characteristic, putting upon one of the very lightest forms of art the stamp of a noble time.
The Doctor looked queer: the Doctor smiled in the very gravest moments, with life and death pending, such strange contrasts and occasions of humour will arise, and such smiles will pass, to satirise the gloom, as it were, and to make it more gloomy! "I have it," at last he said, re-entering the study; and he wrote a couple of notes hastily at the table there, and sealed one of them.
As he leaned over her she raised her face to the light, and the blood mounted angrily to his head. Though a man accustomed to dissect rather than obey his passions, he possessed that universal quality of man which demands the weakness of the feminine nature in the woman who interests him. He will satirise that failing; if he be a writer, it will serve as an endless theme for light cynicism.
And the fact of his art passing over the individual, for ever prevented it from cruelty, for to be cruel the individual must be hit. He did not satirise humanity, but Society. And his criticism was not of its members, but of its ways. Except in the case of children, he left unrevealed the individual heart that Keene so sympathetically exposed.
Can anyone imagine Mark Twain, that admirable author, writing even a tolerable imitation of authors so intellectually individual as Hugo or Charlotte Brontë? Mark Twain would yield to the spirit of contempt which destroys parody. All those who hate authors fail to satirise them, for they always accuse them of the wrong faults.
The new edition appeared with a prefatory note, "from the Publisher to the Reader," which although it bears no signature conveys, undoubtedly, Fielding's intention, if not his actual words. Then follows an explicit reference to a chapter in the History of the arch-villain Wild, which is obviously designed to satirise the condition of English politics, if not the person of any one politician.
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