Page:Satire in the Victorian novel (IA satireinvictoria00russrich).pdf/70

 Nor can one be estimated independently of the other. There is, of course, no such thing as a pure, or mere, satirist. Even a saturated solution involves two elements. The dissolved substance must have a medium to be dissolved in. Starting from this point, we may classify the most conspicuous names according to this relationship.

There are first the completely surcharged. But the important matter is whether the container is itself large,—Aristophanes, Juvenal, Swift, Voltaire,—or of smaller mold and less capacity,—Dunbar, Skelton, Smollett, Churchill, Gifford. To this class come no recruits from the nineteenth century. Sæva indignatio, no longer makes verses, even when witticized, having been put out of fashion by the autonomic humor which informs the sophisticated critic that of all incongruous things the most incongruous and absurd is the satirist who takes himself seriously.

Next come those whose absolute amount of satire may be equal to that of the preceding, but whose versatile interests make it relatively smaller. It is neither of their life a thing apart, nor yet their whole existence. Such are Horace, Cervantes, Jonson, Dryden, Boileau, Pope, Fielding, Burns, Byron. This class on a smaller scale is represented by Gascoigne, Wyatt, Hall, Donne, Lodge, Addison, Goldsmith, Hood, Moore, Mark Twain. Among these we find about half of our novelists,—Peacock and Butler, Dickens and Trollope, Thackeray and Meredith.

In the third division satire is measured still more by the law of diminishing returns. It is composed of those who are never thought of as satirists, not even as satirical, and yet are very far from being innocent. Such are the Hebrew Prophets and the author of Job, Euripides, Spen