Satire

Aristophanes is the founder and the freest: eleven surviving comedies that mock Socrates, Euripides, the war party, the assembly and the gods, in a city that let him. Horace and Juvenal gave the form its Roman shape, and its name. Lucian mocked the philosophers and the afterlife. Erasmus put the Renaissance in the mouth of Folly, and More’s Utopia is satire so straight-faced that readers still argue about which parts are meant.

The English eighteenth century is the form’s high season. Swift is its master: Gulliver’s Travels is on five lists, and A Modest Proposal is the most savage short piece in the language. Pope’s Rape of the Lock is satire in heroic couplets, and Johnson’s Vanity of Human Wishes satire as elegy. Voltaire’s Candide, from the same decades, is the French version, faster and crueller and kinder.

The novel absorbed satire as it absorbed everything: Cervantes, Rabelais, Fielding, Sterne, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, whose narrator does not know he is exposing his world. Orwell’s Animal Farm is the twentieth century’s fable, and Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew the Enlightenment turned on itself. Chaucer is here for the Canterbury Tales, whose pilgrims satirise each other and the church as they ride.