Page:Satire in the Victorian novel (IA satireinvictoria00russrich).pdf/303

 having the faculty of stating in cold logic what he had conceived in hot wrath. In such a temperament the feelings are more likely to be turned against those responsible for misery than toward the victims, thus producing a negative effect, with the positive side left to our inference. The only one whose work is entirely unemotional is Peacock, and even he waxes warm over the exploitation of the helpless, and the crimes committed in the name of Progress. Aside from this he shines with a hard mental brilliance,—which, be it said, does not insure soundness of viewpoint, as no one on the whole list can surpass him in prejudice and injustice.

George Eliot, admitted by all to have a better intellectual equipment than any of her predecessors, admired above others by Meredith because her fiction was "the fruit of a well-trained mind," herself says, "Our good depends on the quality and breadth of our emotion." And again, "There is no escaping the fact that want of sympathy condemns us to a corresponding stupidity." This realization that mental inertness itself is the result of callous or defective emotion, and that these two elements are not only inseparable but mutually dependent, is one secret of the fine quality of her satire. It is the sheen on the surface of a deep current of sympathetic com-*