at the possibility of these failures being transformed into successes. Sir Telegraph Paxarett, accused of extravagance, retorts with a conditional promise of retrenchment:[1]
"When ecclesiastical dignitaries imitate the temperance and
humility of the founder of that religion by which they feed and
flourish; when the man in place acts on the principles which
he professed while he was out; when borough electors will not
sell their suffrage, nor their representatives their votes; when poets
are not to be hired for the maintenance of any opinion; when
learned divines can afford to have a conscience; when universities
are not one hundred years in knowledge behind all the rest
of the world; when young ladies speak as they think, and when
those who shudder at a tale of the horror of slavery will deprive
their own palates of a sweet taste, for the purpose of contributing
all in their power to its extinction:—why then, Forester,
I will lay down my barouche."
Satire, being frankly a destructive process, makes no pretense
of supplementing its iconoclasm by reconstruction.
But such implication of reform as may lurk in the criticism
that paves the way may be looked for more assuredly than
elsewhere in attacks on institutions. Such criticism is
neither lowered by the recrimination that puts satire of
individuals below the normal satiric level, nor elevated by
the artistic detachment that lifts satire of human nature
above it. For it is not in the too small lump of the solitary
specimen that the leaven can best work, nor yet in the too
large mass of the whole human race. It is in the unit between
these two extremes, the body politic or social or religious
or educational, that it may best perform its fermenting
ministrations.
Even so, however, the idealism of the Victorian novel-*
- ↑ Melincourt, II, 47.
