in scorn of it, but always characterized by tact and taste, if not by a tender regard for possibly hurt feelings.
Amidst the abundance of indirect testimony to this fact we have two direct ones, from an earlier and a later novelist. Lytton declared in Pelham that he "did not wish to be an individual satirist." And George Eliot said in one of her letters,—
"We may satirize character and qualities in the abstract
without injury to our moral nature, but persons hardly ever."
One of her own critics makes an observation on her work
which shows the new idea of satire struggling with the old,
that all satire must be toothed,—in spite of Bishop Hall.
In the milieu of Eliot, says Mrs. Oliphant, "the satirist
need be no sharper than the humorist, and may almost fulfil
his office lovingly."[1]
Whether or not the satirist has any more of an "office" than that of being an artist, he is at least beginning to have love enough for his art, if not for humanity, to do his work as graciously as the nature of it will permit. In Mallock's New Republic, for instance, there is a sort of Peacockian revival of personalities. But, while the figures of Carlyle, Arnold, Huxley, Jowett, Pater, Ruskin, Rossetti, and others, are recognizable through their thin disguises, they are not drawn with the caricaturistic strokes that distorted those of Southey, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley and Byron, a generation or so earlier. It is, however, from a member of that earlier generation that we get a vivacious expression of the self-reflexive irony which is for the satirist literally a saving sense of humor. In his Lyric Odes to the Royal Academicians, Peter Pindar reports a dialogue with
- ↑ Victorian Age of Eng. Lit., 461.
