Page:Satire in the Victorian novel (IA satireinvictoria00russrich).pdf/293

 Those most exclusively novelists were Disraeli, Dickens, and Brontë, but those to produce the most novels were Trollope, Lytton, Dickens, and Meredith. Lytton and Disraeli had more outside interests and underwent more varieties of social and political experience than any of their successors, though Trollope and Kingsley had occupations and avocations outside those of literature.

All these internal relationships have some significance but much less than the external ones. They deal primarily with accomplishments, which have their value chiefly as emanating from character and so defining it, whereas the various elements of which character itself is composed are in the nature of vital statistics in the life spiritual. Of these elements those most closely related to satire are naturally its constituents, though they may exist independently of it. Although satire is a form of criticism, it does not follow that those writers who are most consistently satirical have the most widely or deeply critical attitude toward life in general. Such fundamental criticism branches out into two philosophies: the hopeless, or pessimistic, shading off into flippant cynicism or bitter misanthropy; and the hopeful, or unsentimentally optimistic, which is the basis of all dynamic idealism. For whithersoever the idealist may tend, he certainly cannot start from a point of uncritical satisfaction with things as they are. Locke may have made some errors regarding the human understanding, but he was eminently correct in identifying the stimulus to action, not with a vision of fulfilled desire, but with the sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go. We must be driven out before we can be led on, but the driving process once being inaugurated, we make it more dignified and endurable by conceiving a goal upon which our endeavors may be focussed.