Page:Satire in the Victorian novel (IA satireinvictoria00russrich).pdf/15

 fetch and carry our theories, or the playmate to amuse our idle hours, but she must be kept in her place, and her place is with neither the esthetic aristocracy of poetry nor the didactic patricianism of philosophy and criticism. She has, indeed, recently been fitted with a golden slipper, but her Prince hails from the Kingdom of Dollars, and his rank is recorded in Bradstreet instead of the Peerage.

The indifferent or repellent nature of a subject, even though triple distilled, has nothing to do, however, with its value as a topic for investigation. I present this study neither as apologist nor enthusiast. If we expand Browning's "development of a soul" to include the mental as well as the spiritual stages, as the poet himself did in actual practice, we must agree with him that "little else is worth study." So persistent and insistent in the mind of man has been, and still is, the satiric mood, so devoted has he been from immemorial ages to the habit of story-*telling (and seldom for the mere sake of the story), so voluminous and emphatic did he become in the nineteenth century, that no complete account of him can be rendered up until, amid the infinite variety of his aspects, he has been viewed as a Victorian satirist, using as his medium the English novel.

Whatever the result of this observation may be, the process has been one of continual delight, tempered by despair; for one enters as it were a room of tremendous size not only full of curious and challenging objects (over-furnished perhaps), but supplied also with numerous doors opening into other apartments, and these ask an amount of time and attention which only the span of a Methuselah could place at one's disposal.

It must be admitted, though, that it is a happier lot to stand before open doors, even in dismay at the illimi