is of the chameleon type, which takes its colour from its environment, soaks it up, and for the time being actually becomes part of it. Such impressionability makes a good parodist, but is a danger to the satirist and critic. Neither in him nor the others is there anything to touch the admirable perspective, the large and copious presentment, the detached mastery of "Emmanuel Burden," or the fancy, delicacy and artful carelessness of "Letters to Dr. Caliban." There is true artistry-the men and styles satirized exceeding in sharpness of outline and incisive strength their tamer originals.

There is one kind of satirist who points his finger not at man but at God. One remembers the pity and terror of that story of how a friend of Lamb's met him escorting his sister across the fields to the asylum, both weeping bitterly. Of such the arms of the Titan besieging Olympus. Ibsen partly belongs to this school, in spite of the greater part of his subject-matter. "Brand," for instance, is partly heroically and partly satirically treated, and I defy the reader to interpret Ibsen's mind at the end. James Thomson, Thomas Hardy and Leopardi are certainly of this persuasion. The stanzas in "The City of Dreadful Night" (dedicated to Leopardi) are the writing cut in the granite wall for the affrighted cherubs. No wonder that he set down Dürer's 66 Melancholia with such a Miltonic might of description. How inevitably in those pages their twofold despair corresponds! Thomson indeed refutes in the variety of his achievement those pedants and schoolmen who will have it that such beleaguerers of a remote and impassive heaven are mad or liverish or just morbid and disagreeable blasphemers. For Thomson also wrote those verses so full of pathos,

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quietism and tender cheerfulness about taking his girl to Hampstead and on the Thames. Hardy's position is not so simple. His god is pagan, Judaic, and the executioner of a casual fate. He speaks in "Time's Laughing-stocks of “his blind, unweeting way." So he exhibits tragic and delicate personalities crushed in the paws of this brutish divinity. But the point is that Hardy does not even create the illusion of the impartial, impersonal operations of an inhuman fate. He himself usurps the office of the executioner. It is he and not fate who hangs the children of Jude (as gross and irrelevant a misuse of art as the hanging of Gloster in "Lear "), and dogs the flight of Tess through the world like a bloodhound. "The President of the Immortals had finished his sport with Tess." No-" I have finished." It says a good deal for the sombre stateliness of Hardy's genius (of which I am an admirer—this side idolatory) that the reader, while conscious of this unconscious arrogation, is not repelled by the author's assumption of the presidency of the Immortals. I am inclined to think that the more epical Hardy's work, the better satirist he is. This epical quality achieves its broad perfection completely in only one novel, fragmentarily in all the others. His novels so often betray an extraordinary clumsiness and old-fashionedness (in its bad sense) of treatment, that the marriage of epic and satire has its banns prohibited time and again. Marty South in "The Woodlanders," Fanny's dying tramp to Casterbridge in "Far from the Madding Crowd" are in the most consecrated and solemn pose of the epic; but the novels themselves are on a diminished scale. But "The Mayor of Casterbridge" is epical throughout, and the figure of Henchard acquires

at the end (which is like the close of some mighty hymn) a truly Sophoclean grandeur. One reason, I suspect, is his dependence on arbitrary accident for a course of destiny involving character. In " Far from the Madding Crowd," for instance, there would have been no story at all but for Fanny's going to the wrong church to marry Sergeant Troy. But in "The Mayor of Casterbridge there is a wonderful tragic rhythm between character and its consequences, between humanity and fate. There satire moves at ease: in the other novels it is cut too

closely to the author's purpose. That purpose, like everything in Hardy, is rugged and noble, and even at its most nihilist, captures our sympathy and evokes our imagination. For we feel through it Hardy's hatred of comfortable optimism—that insufferably complacent optimism that awards future blisses and penalties for the "right" and "wrong" sort of people. At any rate these haughty and massive satirists who arraign God have an advantage over those who arraign man or his rulers. They get the universal into their work more readily, and are less liable to be disoriented by the complexities of our planet at its latest and most progressive advance in time. But I have wandered enough, and you justly call for a halt.

It looks as though I should still go ambling on in my spavined way about satire for another thousand or so words. But courage! The stable turrets cubistically cut the baffled air in my sight; the oats in the manger enfragrance the wind in my titillated nostrils, and the straw pallet rustles in my metaphysic ear. Therefore, ye soft pipes, play on.

Prose satire I think is independent of literary periods, because it is self-contained in all. Rhymed satiresapparently easier and less finished embodiments of discontent than prose-seem to fulfil themselves piecemeal. They are usually too long and lend themselves to chance felicities and detached ingenuities. Hence their adaptability to the heroic couplet and to quotation. In grouping forces so as to present a united and ordered front they will not bear comparison with prose. What sandy, waterless tracts there are in Hudibras and "The Rosciad"! How Dryden's muscular strain, Oldham's virulence and Pope's diabolical cleverness and acidity defeat a coherent artistic purpose! Chesterton, of course, has shown what can be done with verse forms, and his restless dissent is more properly housed within metrical walls. Personally

I think his verse is extraordinarily good-wonderfully fresh, happy and pointed. His good ale is not drunk from the cup. Byron too is superb and very rarely tedious. Dr. Johnson, that great man whose greatness cannot be exaggerated, also upsets my theory by the Juvenalian force, the cumulative terror, the finely judged weight of "London" and "The Vanity of Human Wishes." Johnson was a pure humorist as well. Massive, manysided Doctor, that giant brain of yours could surely almost bear the iron circlet of all the follies of the world!

For all that, with a curtsey to verse, prose carries the honours from sharp-witted Lucian to Anatole France, one of the greatest satirists in the world. It is courting disaster to lay down formulas for the structure of prose satire, but I am inclined to think that it is more successful the less personal it is. It is not only that the satiric faculty demands a condensed material and a severe treatment Its method exacts a harmony and proportion of line which can only be achieved (forgive me for underlining the point) by distance and detachment. It can almost become a formal mosaic without essential loss. Ill-fitting masonry, looseness in the component parts, unkempt phraseology and its total impression is marred. Topical as its subjects often are and relative to ephemeral events it must work, so far as is possible, from the particular to the universal. It is realistic to its undoing.. The modern fashion of realism makes a point of combining the personal element with the scientific methodreflecting (as the copyist is bound to do) the queer copartnership between system and disorder in social and political life. Satire will and must have nothing to do with either of them. It is a part of art and of tradition,