So Punch, the light and glory of the time,
His wit and wisdom brilliant as sublime,
Scares into shades Cant's hypocritic throng,
Abashes Folly, and exposes wrong."
This may sound like an echo from the Elizabethans and the Augustans; but the difference wherewith the Victorians wear their rue is as important as it is subtle. The two great influences of their time, Science and Democracy, operating upon their life and literature, made them at once sensitive to the reasons for man's shortcomings, and sensible of the absurd position of the avowed castigator—who, moreover, by his very situation as a sharp-shooter renders himself in turn the more conspicuous target.
Man's record here below gives little cause, it is true, for congratulation; so discounted are his astonishing successes by his disheartening, hopeless failures. Colossal in blunder as in achievement, stupendous in fanaticism as in imagination, nevertheless he may maintain, on the authority of a deterministic philosophy, that he has literally done the best he could. His very faculty of deception is often but an adoption of that protective coloring recognized as one of Nature's most admirable devices. The human race is indeed provocative, but who that understands can have the heart to yield to the provocation? Even the most accomplished satirist of his time concluded that he would stick to sober philosophy,—[1]
"And irony and satire off me throw.
They crack a childish whip, drive puny herds,
Where numbers crave their sustenance in words."
But though a knowledge of mortal psychology does have a tendency to take the starch out of satire, it does
- ↑ Meredith, in Patience and Foresight.
