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 CHAPTER II

THE CONFLUENCE

Our present study is concerned with the union of two ancient streams of literature as they come together on the fertile plain of the nineteenth century. This marriage of a satiric Medway and a fictional Thames is a happy English event, though by no means the first alliance between these historic families. In their long careers they are found sometimes entirely separate, but very often united. The latter course works for a decided mutual advantage, with a preponderance of gain accruing to satire, as fiction can live without satire far better than satire without fiction.

A narrative of entire gravity may be a gracious and splendid thing; indeed, pure tragedy is perhaps the highest form of art. But when satire is divorced from fiction it must dispense with fiction's great contribution, the garment of warm imagination and colorful concreteness; and be content with the severe raiment of bald didacticism and chill abstraction. In truth, satire has always been not only the greater beneficiary but the more dependent partner, though what it has in turn supplied is of unquestionable value. It is like an entertaining but unequipaged traveler, always asking for a ride. Even when it apparently had an establishment of its own and was recognized as a literary genre, it was not independent with the independence of the lyric, the drama, or the treatise, but was constantly borrowing furniture from them all.