Page:Satire in the Victorian novel (IA satireinvictoria00russrich).pdf/244

 be sent where he would be taught to think for himself. By refusing to "think like other people," a man may become a poet and even a beautiful, ineffectual angel, but he cannot lead a comfortable nor a really effectual life. The problem as to who may safely be intrusted to lead public opinion, and who are safest as followers, is an intricate one, but it is certainly true that a sane and modest agnosticism is not necessarily synonymous with "the art of sitting gracefully on a fence," which Butler concludes was brought to its greatest perfection in the Colleges of Unreason.

On the subjects of Literature and the Press too much has been said to be ignored, but not much of any great consequence. Trollope took Journalism as a satiric province, with some little aid from Meredith. He also takes a shot, not too well aimed, at the current humanitarian fiction which purposes to set the world right in shilling numbers. He adds,—

"Of all such reformers, Mr. Sentiment is the most powerful. It is incredible the number of evil practices he has put down. It is to be feared he will soon lack subjects, and that when he has made the working classes comfortable, and got bitter beer put into proper sized pint bottles, there will be nothing left for him to do. Mr. Sentiment is certainly a very powerful man, and perhaps not the less so that his good poor people are so very good; his hard rich people so very hard, and the genuinely honest so very honest. * * * Divine peeresses are no longer interesting, though possessed of every virtue; but a pattern peasant or an immaculate manufacturing hero may talk as much twaddle as one of Mrs. Ratcliffe's heroines, and still be listened to."

A favorite theme, especially among the earlier writers, is the pose of pessimism, alien to the self-satisfied opti-*