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Dryden’s Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire drew heavily and eclectically upon these commentaries, investing their judgments with a new popularity and authority. Although Dryden condemned Persius for obscurity and other defects, he agreed with Casaubon that Persius excels as a moral philosopher and that “moral doctrine” is more important to satire than wit or urbanity. Dryden knew, moreover, that the satirist’s inculcation of “moral doctrine” meant a dual purpose, a pattern of blame and praise–not only “the scourging of vice” but also “exhortation to virtue”–long recognized as a definitive characteristic of formal verse satire.[19] But if Dryden insisted on the moral dignity of satire, he laid equal stress on the dignity attainable through verse and numbers. After complimenting Boileau’s Lutrin for its successful imitation of Virgil, its blend of “the majesty of the heroic” with the “venom” of satire, Dryden speaks of “the beautiful turns of words and thoughts, which are as requisite in this [satire], as in heroic poetry itself, of which the satire is undoubtedly a species”; and earlier in the Discourse he had called heroic poetry “certainly the greatest work of human nature.”[20]

It is clear that Harte’s Essay belongs in the tradition of criticism established by the commentaries on classical satire and continued by Dryden. Like these predecessors, Harte believes that satire is moral philosophy, teaching “the noblest Ethicks to reform mankind” (p. 6). Like them again, he believes that to fulfill this purpose satire must not only lash vice but recommend virtue, at least by implication:

Blaspheming Capaneus obliquely shows
T’adore those Gods Aeneas fears and knows, (p. 10)[21]

But perhaps Harte’s overriding concern was to do for satire (with The Dunciad as his focus) what Dryden’s Discourse had done: to reassert its dignity and majesty.

Although Harte is quite careful to distinguish satire from epic poetry, the total effect of his Essay is to blur this distinction and to raise The Dunciad very nearly to the level of genuine epic. The term ” Epic Satire ” (p. 6) certainly seems to refer to the wedding of two disparate genres in The Dunciad, lifting it above satire that is merely “rugged” or “mischievously gay” (p. 8). (The epithet is also, perhaps, a thrust at Edward Ward, who had pinned it on The Dunciad with a sneer.)[22] Harte’s claim that

Books and the Man demands as much, or more,
Than He who wander’d to the Latian shore (p. 9)

has a similar effect. The greatest epic poets and satirists have always transcended rules to follow “Nature’s light”; Pope, over-topping them all, has “still corrected Nature as she stray’d” (pp. 19, 21). But perhaps Harte’s most successful attempt to elevate The Dunciad comes in section two of his poem. Unlike Dryden, in whose Discourse the account of the “progress” of satire is confined almost exclusively to a few Roman writers, Harte begins his account of its progress with Homer and brings it down to Pope. Deriving the ancestry of The Dunciad from Homer, the greatest epic poet, obviously enhances Pope’s satire. Perhaps less obviously, by extending Dryden’s account to the present, Harte makes The Dunciad not only a chronological terminus ad quem but, far more important, the fruit of centuries of slowly accumulating mastery and wisdom.

The strategies mentioned thus far constitute one series of answers to critics who charged Pope with debasing true epic. But Harte also addressed himself to such critics more directly. Although Aubrey Williams (p. 54) has clearly demonstrated Harte’s awareness that the world of
The Dunciad does in one sense sully epic beauties, at the same time, I think, Harte knew that the epic poems to which The Dunciad continually alludes remain fixed, unsullied polestars; otherwise the reader of the poem would lack a way of measuring the meanness of its characters and principles. The “charms of Parody ” in The Dunciad provide a contrast between its dark, fallen world and the undimmed luster of epic realms (p. 10). By using the ambiguous word parody, which in the eighteenth century could mean either ridicule or straight imitation,[23] Harte skillfully suggests the complex purpose of Pope’s epic backdrop. The dunces, not Pope, ridicule the epic world by their words and deeds; but in turn, this world ridicules them simply by being “imitated” and incorporated in The Dunciad. And its incorporation is by no means equivalent to the pollution of epic. That, Harte hints, is the achievement of scribblers like Blackmore (p. 12). It is they who inadvertently write mock-epics, parodies which degrade their great models; Pope, nominally writing mock-epic, actually approaches epic achievement.