poem, Ichabod Crane fleeing when only Brom Bones pursued,—these are ludicrous to the imagination, whether or not the sentence is ratified by the intellect.
Humoristic devices are so numerous as to call for some classification, the choice of any one being made at the expense of other possibilities. The traditional cleavage between the Horatian and the Juvenalian types is characteristically described by Saintsbury:[1]
"From Horace and Persius downward there have been two
satiric manners:—one that of the easy well-bred or would be
well-bred man of the world who suspends everything on the
adunc nose and occasionally scratches with still more adunc
claws, the other that of the indignant moralist reproving the
corruptions of the times."
But by the nineteenth century the indignant moralist
was considerably subdued, even in England, and his reproof
more likely to be acidulous than acrid. For this reason
some other antithesis would seem more useful to our
present study; and from the fact that our satiric vehicle is
made on the two general models known as romantic and
realistic, the same division appears most workable to apply
to the satiric methods used in fiction. Both terms, however,
are too nebulous to be used without the precaution
of stating the sense in which they are at present used. As
to the former, this statement by Stoddard sums up the situation:[2]
"To give an exact definition of what one means by romanticism,
to give anything more than a vague idea of the notion one
intends to convey when he uses the word romantic, to give a
single definite conception to a reader by the use of the word
romance, is impossible."
