dissolving of the critical-humorous acid and the precipitation of satire. It secures a maximum of pungency with a minimum of flatness, and is perfectly safe to take.
As satire ramifies on the critical side into pessimism, tragedy, idealism, and the cognate matters of romanticism and realism, so it extends on the humorous into the comic, the witty, and the philosophic amusement known as a sense of humor.
Of those who launch their satire on the comic current, Dickens is again first. He is, as Taine remarks, the most railing and the most jocose of English authors. Speaking of his sportiveness, the French critic adds that "he is not the more happy for all that," and uses him to point the double moral: that "English wit consists in saying very jocular things in a solemn manner," and "The chief element of the English character is its want of happiness."[1] This last may account for the fact that none of the novelists is abreast of Dickens in fun-making. Indeed, the only others to deserve mention are Lytton, Trollope, and Thackeray, and the last in his extra-novel productions. Those, on the other hand, who are most endowed with wit are Meredith, Butler, and Peacock, with George Eliot not quite to be omitted. More important than comicality or wit is the sense of humor, for while they are largely in the nature of devices whereby the object is made ex post facto ludicrous to others, it is the quality which enables the critic himself to perceive the absurdity, and is thus the sine qua non of his being a satirist at all, It is Meredith who excels here, and this excellence, combined with his gift of wit and his restrained use of the comic, lifts him to a position of superiority on the humorous as well as the critical side. George Eliot also has the sense of proportion which
- ↑ History of English Literature, V, 140.
