not of observation. In every age it has its peculiar problems, points of vantage and specialities. But it tests, refines, remodels and transmutes, not according to the standards of the problems, but its own. It employs a kind of human alchemy upon them which, while absorbing into its crucibles the different material of the various ages, makes the satiric motive, the satiric process and the satiric conclusion, in all ages, virtually the same. To exhibit things not as they are but as they should not be (and so should be) is the aim of the satirist. Cast your eye over the satirists in the backward of time and see how frequently their properties are fabular. (Lucian, Voltaire, Andersen, Butler and Dr. Richard Garnett, to mention only five.) In Congreve the dramatic form did service for the fabular, which is an exterior device for creating the illusion of remoteness. "Gulliver's Travels " is not one, but many st tires, strung on a connecting thread, each one with its distinct and separate device. A single ironic sentence in the course of a narrative will arouse the sensation of being hurried away from the issues of the moment. I repeat that the nature and disposition of satire are something other than the chaotic substances from which it draws its subject-matter and its moral. That is true more or less of all artistic processes, but positively of satire—a kind of solid and globular planet floating in the void. One sees how it differs from parody, whose office is to stick close to its model, colouring and heightening its effects by a few neat touches of the brush; and from caricature, whose workmanship is like that of a school of engravers in the Jacobean era, who wrought by deliberately distorting perspective.

I can imagine the impression of these vague definitions

upon you, since I am so little satisfied with them myself. What I want to emphasize is the artistry of satire—as distinguished from its moral qualities. Obviously its motives are moral conviction and, in many instances, moral indignation. But the stimulus must not be confused with the final result. Is there any one who will deny that Swift's Laputa, Brobdingnag and Lilliput are superior as works of art to his Houyhnhnms and Yahoos ? For in these latter he lost his balance and detachment. Text-books chatter about his "saeva indignatio," discovering that temper indiscriminately in all the divisions of "Gulliver's Travels." But in the earlier portions it is in correspondence with other and modulating agents; in the last it is undisciplined, torrential, washing away the last supports of the author's sanity. Pathetic, kingly, tortured Swift! Forbidding the dragons of man's folly and cunning from devouring the beauty of the world, as Canute forbad the encroachment of the waves, and at last mentally overwhelmed by his perception of their irresistible advance !*

Until we climb the last slopes of Utopia, satire with its accusing, revealing question, “ Quo tendimus ?" can never but be of benefit to humanity. As the keeper of the national conscience (forgive my triteness) the satirist, if he is approved of his own generation, will be a Record Office for posterity. For satire is no less a religious vocation than most other forms of art.

In all the human and artistic gifts within the reach of the satirist Cervantes was rich. He possessed what the

*Of course, I agree that to read about the Yahoos nowadays is much more satisfactory than it would be in another age. Laputa is so tame and sensible !

worldly and respectable mother of eighteenth-century letters could not give her children imaginative reason and creative truth. Of what discoveries is the spirit of art capable, when we consider the significance of Don Quixote? Is he the scapegoat of Cervantes, as the narrative directs? No, he is his hero, his archangel a little damaged. Don Quixote designs too literally his plans for building a Jerusalem in the pleasant land of Spain; but it is the world which, buffeting him and so the splendours of which he is the warden, must bare its breast to the spear of the satirist. He is ridiculous, not because his search for truth was too impetuous, but because the world, confusing the search with the impetuosity, so thinks him. There is of course a double edge to Cervantes' masterpiece, but the edge that is not blunted by time is the forlorn idealism of Don Quixote. That meaning is what makes his recantation so terrible a comment upon life. For Don Quixote, if he did not wait upon opportunity (as every man should), waited upon God.

Finally, let me declare that at the bottom of the truest satire is the pearl-bed of human sympathy. That sympathy is not the same thing as idealism, one of the strongest motives of the satiric passion. What I mean is human sympathy-released into a large human tolerance. Some of the satirists are richer in it than others; some bring the treasure nearer to the surface. What is behind the wisdom of Rabelais and the wit of Montaigne but the golden fire of "live and let live"? It is a fire, not a mere adage, and Rabelais has thought good to feed it from all the vast store-houses of his learning and imagination. And Montaigne a cynic? In life, just as the honest man is so frequently taken for a fool, so a tolerant

man passes for a cynic. Montaigne was indeed naïve in his human curiosities. He was tolerant of follies and frailties, for one reason because they gave a sauce and fillip to his kindly inquisitive inspection, for another in order to excuse himself. He is indeed almost the only satirist who is personal (" I must speake of others but that I may the more speake of myself ") and is not a moralist. He truly fits into the nihil a me adage. How different he is from Voltaire, who is always pretending not to be a moralist, but cannot logically avoid it!

Swift indeed lost his sympathy for man, and I am not sure that his satiric genius did not tear him in pieces in the end on that account. He took a gloomy pleasure in the operating theatre, exclaiming with the tyrant-Ita feri, ut se sentiat emori. Fielding had that bounteous tolerance which blesses him that gives and him that takes, and Fielding wrote "Jonathan Wild." Meredith, indeed, I think not-in spite of the fact that "The Egoist" has become a classic and is perhaps the only work of imagination in its century that has really affected people's way of thinking. It may be its very manifest defects of manner only that urge me thus to except it-it may be because the egoist is as much Meredith as Sir Willoughby Patterne, or it may be simply that I cannot take to Meredith, that he repels me instinctively. I still think that Meredith was too much absorbed in himself to

possess this supreme quality of satire. Browning, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Dickens, Lamb-they all had it. Arthur Symons says of Lamb that his irony-an irony dressing all the delicious things of life, sun, the greenness of fields, society, the cheerful glass, jests and innocent vanities with a sharp sauce-saves his almost

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divine goodness from insipidity. Would it not indeed relieve something of the terrors of death to think of God as something like Lamb? Henry James (in the van of the ironic immortals) had it overwhelmingly. Jane Austen, a born satirist, can, I admit, be very feline—but she had more than a pinch of it. Nearly all the satirists possess that gift of God in their several degrees, not in spite of their satire, but because of it.