But in the satiric circle a nice balance would be found only at the center. Wherever there are boundaries, there are always some sections of the enclosure nearer the margin than others. Thus, although satire is a compound, it does not follow that its fractions stand in a constant uniform ratio. On the contrary, the proportion ranges all the way from a minimum of humor in a Juvenal or a Johnson to a minimum of criticism in a Horace, a Gay, or a Lamb. Either quality may reach the vanishing point, but when it passes it, the remaining one cannot alone create satire, any more than oxygen or hydrogen can be transformed into water.
Nor can either quality be defined in other than psychological terms. The critical sense is rooted in the instincts of attraction and repulsion, the reaction of an organism to any new stimulus being pro or con according to the preëstablished harmony or antagonism between them. As each human being grows to maturity by responding to experience, he acquires his individual set of opinions and ideals, largely borrowed from the habits and conventions of his groups, ethnic, social, and what not, with a small residue of his own originality. Equipped with this outfit of criteria he looks upon life and finds it complete or wanting, tests his fellow men and approves or condemns, examines all created things and calls them good or bad. But he is so constituted that his acquiescence is likely to be somewhat passive, and his protests active, his commendation grudging and qualified, his condemmation sweeping and thorough. Says an eighteenth century satirist,—[1]
"Broad is the road, nor difficult to find,
Which to the house of Satire leads mankind;
- ↑ Churchill, in The Author.
