seek, veiling and unveiling, blowing bubbles and pricking them, which is exhilarating through the play of wits and the fun of outwitting.[1]
This would perhaps be a sufficient account were it not for a certain left-handed yet inseparable connection of the psychology of the question with its ethics. Whether or not an intruder, the latter has entered in and firmly entrenched herself. When therefore she maintains that her satiric discontent is divine, she must be given a respectful hearing; though after it we seem unable to concede more than the possibility.
A lively enthusiasm for showing up the ingenuous sentimentalist or the crafty hypocrite may or may not argue a freedom on the exposer's part from these or other modes of hiding or distorting the truth; or a disinterested love for truth itself. It does go without saying that real respect and admiration for honesty and sincerity is a fundamental human trait, as witness the glowing encomiums bestowed on those guileless virtues, and it might follow that our unmoral impulses are half consciously focussed through a moral function. We must have a sin offering; and deceit is in the most eligible. Thus the satirist may, deliberately or unthinkingly, read deception into his disapproved, in order to have an excuse for laughter, just as he may read vice and folly into his disliked, in order to condemn. Nevertheless it is possible to enjoy the process of unmasking without making it a corollary that masking is wrong and therefore deserving of exposure.
Some observers are more impressed with the resem-*
- [Footnote: nice and subtle observation, as in discriminating between pretence and practice,
between appearance and reality, is common to wit and satire with judgment and reasoning."]
- ↑ Meredith characterises the chase of Folly by the Comic Spirit as conducted "with the springing delight of hawk over heron, hound after fox."
