is the basis of humor, and so, to a less degree, have Trollope and Mrs. Gaskell. At the other extreme stand Reade, Kingsley, and Charlotte Brontë, with very little perspective or artistic detachment. The unfortunate thing about them is that they did not dare be as serious in expression as they were in temperament. Their humor does not bubble up from a natural spring but is manipulated through an artificial fountain, with varying effects of spontaneity. Lytton, Disraeli, and Thackeray had some youthful smartness of this sort to outgrow, and to a large extent they did it. But these others never did; and Reade especially has moments of a truculent pertness and shrill sarcasm that do an injustice to the really fine spirit of his work.
That there are more of these fitful gleams and partial visions than of an inclusive view of the cosmos, is not astonishing. The wide, clear outlook requires not only an infinite radius but a lens of powerful magnitude. To train a small telescope on a remote object achieves nothing. None of the novelists evinces the cosmic perspective that reports back in terms of a universe. That, indeed, is the function of the seer,—poet, prophet, or philosopher. But if only these see life in all its panoramic vastness, there are others who at least splash at a ten-league canvas, and insist on having real figures to draw from, whether saint or sinner. These have no use for the trivial and frivolous, yet they know better than to scorn the small and unpretentious. They delight in spaciousness, but are not enamored with mere bulk or nebulous vagueness. Such are our satiric novelists at their best, those among them ranking highest whose philosophical humor is greatest in proportion to their love of the comic, and who are granted sufficient wit to transmute their perception of the absurd into effective expression.
