Page:Satire in the Victorian novel (IA satireinvictoria00russrich).pdf/71

 *ser, Shakespeare, Milton (in his prose), Johnson, Scott, Shelley, Browning. Similar but of lesser magnitude are Erasmus, More, Defoe, Young, Cowper, Blake, De Quincey. Here are found the other half of the novelists,—Lytton, Disraeli, Gaskell, Reade, Brontë, Kingsley. The impression given by these is not so much a solution at all as of separate and distinguishable particles: of elements native and yet not integral,—like fish in water. They might be taken away, and though the total effect would be very much changed, the real character of the liquid would not.

Quite the opposite of this is the condition of the fourth estate. Here the process of amalgamation is carried to an extreme, one might say, paradoxically, to the vanishing point. It resembles the first class in that the satire is pervasive, and the third in that it is of relatively small quantity; so small that it hardly seems worth taking into account, yet it could not be abstracted. If it could, it would leave a scarcely dinimished but almost unrecognizable remainder. It is not revealed so much as betrayed. It seldom indulges in anything so bald as overt satire, or so conscious even as covert innuendo. It is the tone of a personality. It is not Aristotle nor Virgil nor Wyclif nor Wordsworth nor Tennyson. It is Homer, Plato, Lucretius, Dante, Langland, Burton, Gibbon, Sterne, Austen, Arnold, Carlyle, Hardy, Anatole France. Among the Victorian novelists it is George Eliot.

To this matter of quantity there is a fairly definite relation of quality. The fact that the largest quantity is now a discarded type indicates that relation to be one of inverse proportion. The second and third divisions evince hilarity, sarcasm, shoddy flippancy, or profound wit, according to the temperaments of the writers.