Page:Satire in the Victorian novel (IA satireinvictoria00russrich).pdf/197



"But there are sentiments in his writings which always anger me, big words which make me furious, and a premeditated fine writing against which I can't help rebelling. My antipathy don't go any further than this."

The other is written to Lytton himself, calling his attention to a paragraph in his Preface to the 1856 edition of his (Thackeray's) Works; it is this that really contains the apology:

"There are two performances especially (among the critical and biographical works of the erudite Mr. Yellowplush) which I am very sorry to see reproduced, and I ask pardon of the author of The Caxtons for a lampoon which I know he himself has forgiven, and which I wish I could recall. * * * I wonder at the recklessness of the young man who could fancy such satire was harmless jocularity, and never calculate that it might give pain."

This fine utterance, coming at just the right time and from the right person,—the last of the personal satirists, reformed into the author of Vanity Fair,—might be used as an appropriate epitaph for individual satire. Since the time when Lamb observed that "Satire does not look pretty upon a tombstone," we have not only agreed with him, but gone enough further to admit that it is no more winsome applied to the living than to the dead. And if we still for the most part reserve our eulogy until it can serve as elegy, we are willing to let the dead past of spiteful, recriminating satire bury its dead.

It would not, as a matter of fact, be quite fair to the past to ignore its own repudiation of this brackish current that has discolored the main satiric stream. For it was undoubtedly this element that Cervantes had in mind when he declared,—