Page:Satire in the Victorian novel (IA satireinvictoria00russrich).pdf/102

 Thackeray's German knight was pricking o'er the plain, but it was in the time of Richard the Lion-Hearted, and "on the cold and rainy evening of Thursday, the twenty-sixth of October." In addition to his full armor he was equipped with an oiled silk umbrella and a bag with a brazen padlock.

On a subsequent adventure he halts at a wayside shrine covered with "odoriferous cactuses and silvery magnolias," and recites "a censer, an ave, and a couple of acolytes before it." A victim of his mighty lance wishes for a notary-public to take down his dying deposition. And a lost champion is advertised for in the Allgemeine Zeitung.

The Shaving of Shagpat out-Herods Herod in Arabian Nightism, and is not devoid of satiric pith, but we are expressly forbidden by the author himself to allegorize his geyser of ebullient mirth. The humor is Rabelaisian—or American—in its pure love of size; it floats in a gigantic, inflated balloon, to which a small basket of mental cargo is attached. In this, however, is wrapped up the very important secret that continuous laughter releases one from enchantment and restores one's true form.

The romantic satirist must have, like any other compound, certain more or less inconsistent traits. There must be the inventive wit of romance plus the shrewd logic of satire. Yet this rare combination does not insure the best satiric results. Indeed the contrary is more likely to be the case, as the union at best is somewhat adventitious.

Then, too, there must be a degree of exaggeration, with the strain on our credulity so evenly distributed that it is not felt. The sound sense that satire calls for must