obtrusion of its letter and not its spirit in the commonest dissensions and meanest affairs of life, to the extraordinary confusion of ignorant minds, let them understand that it is always the latter, and never the former, which is satirized here. Further, that the latter is here satirized as being, according to all experience, inconsistent with the former, impossible of union with it, and one of the most evil and mischievous falsehoods existent in society."
The theme of The Tragic Comedians is that "The
laughter of the gods is the lightning of death's irony over
mortals. Can they have," adds Meredith, "a finer subject
than a giant gone fool?" But it is in the Ode to the
Comic Spirit rather than in stray observations in the
novels or even in the Essay on Comedy that the Meredithian
satiric philosophy is most pithily set forth. For
in the myth of Momus and the Olympians, the mirthful
satirist and the self-satisfied divinities who paid a heavy
price for their resentment of his incandescent frankness,
we have a symbol of what satire might do if permitted,
and if not permitted, what penalties may descend. The
Comic Spirit is apostrophized as the "Sword of Common
Sense," whose service and sport it is
"This shifty heart of ours to hunt."
Since man is a deceiver and a self-deceiver,
"Naming his appetites his needs,
Behind a decorative cloak,"
it is obvious that the only cure for his ailment is the simple but drastic one of removing the cloak. So long indeed as there are masks, there will be fingers that itch to pluck them off. The time may come,—we can scarcely affirm that it now is,—when masks shall have vanished
