CHAPTER I
RELATIONSHIPS
To call a man a satirist or a satirical writer is to say
something about him, certainly. It is, however, a piece
of information which can be nothing more than a curiosity
of literature so long as it remains an isolated fact. Although
we are for the time being interested in a group of
novelists primarily as satirists, we cannot even understand
them as such, much less come to any fuller comprehension,
unless we also view the satirists as novelists,
as artists, as human beings.
These relationships extend on the internal side, so to speak, into such matters as quantity, quality, and range; and on the external, into the larger realms of the two satiric factors—criticism and humor—and thence into the neighboring domains of pessimism and tragedy, comedy and wit, realism and romanticism, emotion and intellect, and idealism. In none of these things, of course, can we do more than indicate briefly the effect they may have upon satire, or satire upon them.
Those who have furnished the largest amount of satire,—proportionately, as it happens, both to their own total production, and to the satiric production of others,—are Peacock, Dickens, Butler, and Meredith. But when it comes to quality,—tested by subtlety of wit, self-command, justice as to objects, and moderation of amount,—the only one to remain on the preëminent list is Meredith.
At the other extreme we find the same overlapping as
