Page:Satire in the Victorian novel (IA satireinvictoria00russrich).pdf/56



sails; and pumping up into his face hideous grimaces in order to appear convulsed with histrionic rage. * * * As it is, the short puffs of anger, the uneasy snorts of fury in Pope's satires, give one painfully the feeling of a locomotive-engine with unsound lungs."

Whether these strictures are just or not, the principle back of them is sound; and more pithily summed up by Landor's "Nobody but an honest man has a right to scoff at anything."

Browning carries the idea a step farther, and sounds a warning to dwellers in glass houses:

"Have you essayed attacking ignorance, Convicting folly, by their opposites, Knowledge and wisdom? Not by yours for ours, Fresh ignorance and folly, new for old, Greater for less, your crime for our mistake!"

The demand for kindliness of temper may seem paradoxical, but for that very reason it is the more insistent. Being under suspicion of unkindness, vindictive spite, retaliation, satire must either admit the charge or prove the contrary, for the real paradox lies in the highest moral claim being made for the literary genre of the greatest immoral possibilities.

However, until the modern humanitarian cult came in, it seemed content to admit the charge. After Horace, with a few isolated exceptions, as Swift and Cowper,