Page:Satire in the Victorian novel (IA satireinvictoria00russrich).pdf/318

 *entific command, Must—if, the expression changed from earnest pleading to detached humor. For the moralist takes himself, his message, and his hearers, seriously, but the scientist has the indifferent attitude that if you refuse to obey, the consequences, serious indeed and not to be averted or escaped, will come, not in the guise of punishment or retribution, but through the inexorable operation of law. Accordingly, if you try to delude yourself into the supposition that you can evade the orders of nature, the joke is on you.

While, therefore, in Victorian satire the old familiar faces of Society, State, and Church reappear, they are subjected to a new treatment, as the result of a new diagnosis.

The School and the Press are the only additions to the time-honored objects, because of their more recent emergence into the light. The erection of the School into a public institution, together with the subsidence of the Church into the sphere of private life, marks indeed a radical change in viewpoint,—advancing from the assumption that the State must insure the religion of its citizens, let them be educated how they might (except that for a long time they had no choice but to take their secular learning from the hands of the clergy) to the realization that if those responsible for the general welfare would provide for a general diffusion of enlightenment, the religious sentiment might safely be trusted to those whom it concerned, namely, the individuals themselves. In regard to all these institutions the old, sharply defined contrast between guilty, satirized protagonist and indicting, satirical antagonist has disappeared. In its place is a decided tendency toward the fellow-member, fellow-citizen, fellow-sinner attitude, which at least has the advantage