Page:Satire in the Victorian novel (IA satireinvictoria00russrich).pdf/203

 As to the institutions themselves, started early in the human stage through gregariousness and mutual dependence, and gradually increased until now it is no longer possible for two or three to meet together without organizing and equipping themselves with officers and constitutions, any sort of classification must be as tentative, interpenetrating, and unsatisfactory as are most topical outlines. But a possible listing of satirized groups or provinces may be made under half a dozen headings: Society, State, Church, School, Art, and Ideals.

By Society is meant that powerful but intangible influence that has a name but no local habitation. It is in effect a federation of homes, organized on the caste system. Known as "fashionable," or "polite," its chief concern is with the lighter side of man's life; with his recreation if a worker, or his amusement if a drone. In view of the fact that it is particularly the feminine domain, with the corollary that Woman's Place is in the Home, She, as a satirized class, belongs here as appropriately as anywhere.

The State includes such ramifications as politics, law, charities and corrections, labor and capital, and warfare. It is in this connection that satire may be defined, as by Myers, as "essentially a weapon of the weak against the strong, of a minority against a majority;" and by Besant in the same terms, the latter adding, "Satire began when man began to be oppressed." This statement occurs in his French Humourists, and it is interesting to note the confirmation implied in Lenient's description of France suffering under oppression: "Esclave, elle tremble et obéit, mais se venge par la satire de ceux qui lui font peur."

The Church, when allied with the State, assumed dominion not only over it but over the Home as well. This last, indeed, was raised to the high estate of an Institution