The literary historian who is to write the story of the complex literature of the nineteenth century, will trace, as colors and figures are traced in tapestries, a gradual fading of the bright strands of epic and satiric poetry amid the preponderance of the lyric. Following the major threads of formal English satire as they run successively from Dryden to Swift, from Swift to Pope, and from Pope to Churchill, Gifford, and Byron, he will finally find them fled in modern times, as if for a last refuge, to the domain of the New World. Beyond the nucleus they form in the work of certain American writers to which reference shall be made later, they reappear, so far as the present shows, no more.

It is this strange, exotic, and anachronistic development and decay of satire, which we are here to consider, as well as the causes that have operated against the wider influence and appreciation of what was once a vital force in literature.

There can be no doubt that satire per se, whether personal or general, is out of accord with the spirit of the time. Its lightnings and thunders may awaken astonishment or afflict an individual, but to-day they seem powerless to shatter prejudice or custom. Humanity, discerning progress with clearer eyes, and with stumbling steps achieving it, hearkens rather to the voice of tolerance than of condemnation. This mental atmosphere, essentially and ethically optimistic, is one in which the nettles and cacti of satire cannot flourish.

The satire which attained such perfection in the eighteenth century was the product of a pedantic, artificial age. It reflected and imitated the literary forms and fashions of the ancients, and was dominated by the elegant

pseudo-classicism of the epigrammatic, antithetic school of Pope and his contemporaries. They satirized not life, but manners. Swift alone, following with savage rancour in the footsteps of the laughing Rabelais, produced original and spontaneous work. Later came Churchill and Wolcott, laying sturdily about them with their bludgeon-like couplets. Finally, in a new century, the galled and resentful Byron snatched up the mask left by Pope, and through it petulantly pronounced his English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. The voice was the voice of Byron, but the language and form were those of Pope. All subsequent satirists borrowed their arms from the keen-witted dwarf of Twickenham-all who wrote satire wrote it according to his model. Who has not wearied of the tiresome, interminable, heroic couplets of the prolific authors and casual satirists of the eighteenth century and those of the beginning of the nineteenth? They poured their satiric matter into slavish forms and faithfully followed a despotic fashion.

Heine, through the medium of a foreign tongue, was the first to embody and blend the satirical with the lyrical note, and to show the possibilities of irreverent laughter. Flinging aside the lofty denunciatory declamation of the old satirists, the German singer smote with laughing lips, gracefully throwing his glittering javelins of wit at what seemed most secure and sacred, often pouring his bitterest sarcasm into his sweetest songs. This scintillating, sentimental satire was the offspring of a union between the rose of Romanticism and the acrid aloe of his own experience. His genius converted the rod of the censor into a flute on which he piped, by turns, the sweetest strains or the most biting

blasts, or intermingled both. His influence was not unfelt in England. It swept in, about 1830, with the wave of enthusiasm over the newly-discovered treasures of German literature, of which Carlyle was the first prophet and path-finder. Thenceforth satire was divided and sub-divided again and again, until it lost all its old identity, its classic and long-established character. It underwent, by all who presumed to use it, a constant adulteration, diffusion, and metamorphosis. It lost its dignity and importance as an individual unit, and became subservient to other ends. After passing and sifting through the successive periods of the Romantic, the Idealistic, and Naturalistic, through Transcendental and later Estheticism, and finally, through modern Realism, satire, as we behold it to-day, is scarcely recognizable. The old satire seems certainly dead. What survives is a new, hybrid, and harmless thing.

The most obvious vehicles for the diluted and indirect satire of modern times are, beyond doubt, the novel and the stage. Poetic forms are almost monopolized by the purely lyric. Indignation or enthusiasm for reform, or personal vindication or revenge, now seldom fire men to rail in rhyme. The voice of righteous wrath, wise admonition or awful prophecy, speaking as with the burning lips of an Ezekiel or an Isaiah, is dumb or unheard in this age of many voices. Vehemence and uncompromising attack are not considered in taste, and denunciation of shams is thought to be actuated by intolerance or private malignance. This, it would seem, is a direct outgrowth of an epoch of productive mediocrity, which, banded together by a certain sentiment among its representatives, resents anything that may prove a danger to all. Softer sentiments sway the censor, and the critics are no longer tyrants, safe and unmo

lested in their strongholds, but timid and tender-hearted, or, at least, indifferent reviewers, loth to damn the bad, and exhausting their powers of panegyric upon the passable commonplaces wherewith the presses flooded them. Mediocrity, observe, has to-day attained a certain respectable level.

This is true, not only of literary, but of all art, and of society in general. Ruskin ventures to criticise Whistler; Whistler invokes the aid of the law, and points out how enemies may be made. In England an iron-armored law of libel protects the character of the good and the bad alike; in America the myriad-voiced irreverence and disregard for authority bar out the dominance of any censor. The newspapers, too, with their swift, infallible readiness, forestall and render inept any attempt to write satire of consequence on occasions of consequence. Ere indignation or protest brings inspiration, the event lies dead in the past and interest is cold. It has also become the function of the journals to act as censors of morality or taste so far as their catering to public prejudice or their own interests will permit. Here is a power enormous indeed, but rendered singularly ineffectual by the necessarily superficial mode of its presentation and its ephemeral-interest.

In the novel, then, and on the stage must modern satire seek its field. By example and by portrayal of human life, and not by criticism of it, nor by direct precept or punishment, is mankind to be lessoned and disciplined. In an age

of anæsthetic and apathetic nature, the nauseous, medicinal satiric draught must be sweetened, the bitter pill disguised with sugar; the satire must be enforced under the guise of amusement. Modern culture, with its hedonistic and Epicurean tendencies and perversions, finds this not unacceptable, but for corrective purposes this Janusfaced presentment is, unfortunately, a

palpable failure. The vague moral is undone by the amusement, the disguised lesson is annulled by the laugh. All lacks serious point and emphasis. In the satiric comedies of the ancients, the forces of lampoon and ridicule attacked vice and folly in open warfare; the avowed purpose was to render them odious. There was no confusion nor concealment of means or end. When Aristophanes attacked the innovators of religion, philosophy, or politics in Greece, every Athenian cobbler knew that it was Socrates who was ridiculed in Clouds, Euripides in the Frogs and Acharnians, and Cleon the demagogue in the Knights. The principle and the person satirized were apparent enough, and the satire, frank and outright in speech and form, worked plainly towards its goal.

It was Molière, casting ridicule and scorn upon whole classes of society, who first set up a model for the satire of the modern stage. Although he seldom attacked concrete individualities, his types were common and unmistakable, his manner sure and merciless. The last of this school, as exemplified in the English satiric drama, was Sheridan, brilliantly bringing to a seemly close the light, licentious school of eighteenth-century comedy which took satire as an excuse for its existence. Pope in England, Boileau in France, and Lessing in Germany, the latter applying satire to art as well as to literary criticism, had left their corrective influence upon public taste, which was already rising to a loftier level in the new century.

In England, the thistles and nettles of satire found little room to grow in those pleasant natural fields and tenderly-nurtured gardens, full of flowers of sensuous and desirous beauty and spiritual introspection which the new poetry of Shelley and Keats, and the human naïveté of Wordsworth cre

ated. In vain the scornful, prejudiced Giffords shot his vigorous and venomous volleys into this ethereal literature; uncongenial to satire it thrived and survived, and his own perished with the dominance of the older school he sought to defend. Byron's onslaught upon the poets and critics was the last echo of the school of Pope. Into his Vision of Judgment he had, however, infused a strain of Dantesque sublimity, which, heretofore, had been foreign to satire. The satire of Shelley, though it comprises one-twelfth of his work, has little significance. In the Anti-Jacobin we have some indication of a new note, some original satiric document of that time, and in the droll rhymes and clever parodies of George Canning, some evidence of the tendency of satire towards humor.

Life became more complex, new visions broke upon the world, metaphysics, analyzing the soul, proclaimed it subject to improvement. Humanity assumed another and more sacred aspect. In England part of this was due to the growth of ideas fertilized by the blood of the French Revolution, that grim satiric tragedy of the rights of man, to sublime ideals beaming from the celestial thought of Goethe, and to a new and broader humanitarianism. As we glance backward and listen for the voice of the time that followed close upon this period, we seem to see the weird, looming figure of Professor Teufelsdrochk in contention with the Zeit-Geist, and to hear the sonorous voice of Carlyle rising in a vast protest against the spiritual slave. Satire here found another form, another voice, another prophet. Nor is Samuel Butler, the author of Erewhon, to be overlooked with his once-pithy workdone on the model of Gulliver. On the Continent Heine sparkled and sang, smiling sardonically.

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, poetical satire, like the satiric

drama long before, appeared to be extinct. The Arthurian inspiration in literature laid a spell with its Merlinwand upon the tongue of censure. There were at times weak, sporadic attempts, such as The Age, by Bailey, the author of Festus. Only when combined with humor was satire permitted to speak, and on the stage it appeared only in conjunction with humor and music, as in the comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan. Robbed of its seriousness, it fell into inanition-the laugh annulled the lesson-the eagle fell pierced by the shaft his own wing had feathered. Then the problem play was born, and conscious satire was changed into the form of a riddle, debate, or question, whose solution or conclusion involved either approval or condemnation on the spectator's part. As Balzac, objectively and magnificently, created his Comédie Humaine, analyzing society with the happy fire of his genius, so Ibsen, searching with merciless and mordant precision, based his dark Tragédie Humaine upon the disease and ill-being he found in the body of modern mankind. His iron scalpel dissected the living framework of the soul, the icy and terrible mirror of his implacable art disclosed to us our wan and weary faces, sick with civilization. Like Goethe, he placed his finger upon Humanity, and said: "Thou ailest here and here."

Ibsen paved the way for the latest phase of what was once the satiric drama, but is now represented by such ultra-original comedy as that of Mr. Bernard Shaw. This loosely-constructed, unformal theatrical craft consists of an irregular combination of more or less witty dialogue bearing upon modern, social, and economic evils, sometimes treated in a manner so facetious as to seem insincere and superficial. Shaw's "discussions," however, are not held between human beings, but rather between the incarna

tions and embodiments of those gigantic fungus-growths, saprophytes, and economic monsters which have sprung from the soil of our latter-day civilization. Indubitably Shaw is a force for social reform, his shapeless drama is based upon well-shaped beliefs, and, in its own way, achieves its end. He uses laughter both as a lever and a light.

The story of satire, as exemplified in the form of the novel, does not run a parallel course with the satiric drama, nor share the same fate as satiric poetry. Inspired by Cervantes and Le Sage, it attained strength and splendor in Fielding, reaching later on in his great disciple, Thackeray, a subtlety of expression and form and a marvellous comprehensiveness. As a censor of

the manners and morality of the English upper classes, as a worldly sermonizer and satirist of society, Thackeray remains unique. Dickens, assuming a humbler view-point and discarding cen sure in his characterization, trespassed upon the borders of caricature. But already Thackeray and Dickens stand in the dim dusk of a period close in time, but remote in ideas and manners.

The current of modern satire was set entirely in the direction of humor; it sought less to censure than to amuse, less to punish than to please. When mingled with comicality and pathos in writers like Hood and Jerrold, it became still more innocuous, and underwent an easy degeneration which was, at the same time the development of a new school of humorists.

The verbal adroitness, the deft felicity of phrase and figure, the cunning craftsmanship in literary technicalities, the acute critical insight, the smooth agility in rhyme and repartee, not to overlook the proneness to punning all these were distinguishing features of the succeeding galaxy of humorists, of which Tom Hood the younger, Charles Stuart Calverly and

Austin Dobson were the bright particular lights. They discovered the secret of investing the obviously solemn or the trivial daily commonplaces with appearances of the ludicrous or with touches of sentiment. Their fineness

of touch and form and their command of supple English gave strength and clarity unto the humoristic speech of that day, despite the growing laxity of the language in its connection with journalism,

A study of the decay and the decline of satire could not be considered complete without paying a respectful attention to certain parallel tendencies and influences that affected its expression in America. It will be necessary, therefore, first to sweep with a glance the meagre history of satire in the United States. The first professed satirist to appear was John Trumbull, writing during and after the war of the Revolution and upon themes connected with it. His most pretentious, but now forgotten, work is McFingal, the finest imitation of Hudibras ever produced. After Trumbull's. for more than fifty years, no satire of any consequence appeared. Then in the famous Biglow Papers of James Russell Lowell, written during the Mexican War in 1846 and the Civil War in 1861-65, satire again became a force, drawing the popular laughter, scorn, and indignation upon whatsoever Lowell found ripe for his wit. Like the ancient Atellanae Fabulae and the Fescennini verses, these Yankee satires were cast in a rude vernacularthe rustic idiom and dialect of the New England farmer. The petty Puritanical social institutions, the filibustering expeditions, the slave question and secession, political quackery, and other legitimate themes all came under Lowell's pen. Limited in interest as these verses were through localisms and dialect, their success in England would be the more remarkable were it due to

the satire alone. Their appeal was made through their pungent humor, quaint characterization, and kindly human quality. The satire was entirely involved with its humor, indeed, subordinated to it. There is now little warrant for still classing Lowell as the foremost American satirist, though his work is certainly the best known. Judged by the sharpest, most classic standards of satire, the superiority of a comparatively obscure Western satirist, Ambrose Bierce, in substance, strength, and style, becomes plain. Unlike Lowell, he is, however, under the disadvantage of never having devoted his splendid powers to any great movement of his time. The lover of satire at its best will find keen enjoyment and much surprise in such works of his as Black Beetles in Amber and Shapes of Clay.

Swift's dictum that mankind give so ready an acceptance to satire because in it everyone recognizes the failings of his fellows and never his own and is therefore not displeased, no longer seems valid in our day. Despite the ineradicable delight felt at the discomfiture or defeat by literary wit of men or measures obnoxious to us, it is indubitably true that the modern mind is not in sympathy with the means of satire. It resents personal censorship as it does punishment. It classes the spiritual whip, flaying-knife, brandingirons, and pillory of the satirist with those mechanical instruments of torture which civilization no longer tolerates. Reform, the true end of all satire, is slowly to be brought about by reason, and not by flagellation. The futility of satire appears particularly pronounced in republics, where, in spite of the freedom of speech and because of it, aggregate man is loth to pay reverence to self-assumed moral or literary dictatorship-though he may accept a financial or a political one. It is to be remarked, too, that with the