exception of England, where the laws of libel are drawn even more strictly than the twelve tablets enlarged by Augustus to curtail the power of the Roman writers, satire is still a factor in monarchies. This, strangely enough is evidenced most in those States in which the Kulturkampf is waged most strenuously. It enters into the polemical battles brought about by the defence of or attack on new or old ideas. In this application, it seems to verify Shaftesbury's maxim that ridicule is the test of truth-as acid of gold. There is a necessity felt to-day for the independent expression of the pamphleteer, and this necessity newspapers, which are usually party or class organs, cannot supply. Lessing's Laocoon is a classic example of the way in which satire may be a potent aid to criticism. The purpose of satire, whether personal or abstract, should always be corrective or didactic. It must not be merely punitive, as was too often the work of the modern Juvenals. It must possess a moral purpose and the ability to discriminate between what in nature is incorrigible and essential and what is capable of improvement. Pope's belief that stupidity could be cured or fittingly punished was grounded in deep error.

Satire was first introduced into the world to remedy the shortcomings of the law, to step in where the legal code was powerless, and to correct bad taste by castigation of those who transgressed accepted canons. When the laws or canons, often under the influence of satire itself, suffered change, the satire usually lost its significance, having accomplished its purpose. Martial, coarsely flattering his patrons on the one hand, and vituperating society on the other, and Dryden, filling his very Essay on the Origin and Progress of Satire with disgusting sycophancy of the Earl of Rochester, would themselves be legitimate prey to a modern

censor. So Pope, dethroning Theobald to gratify his personal spite by making Cibber the hero of the Dunciad, degraded the inspiration of his work.

To be a force for the amendment of the world's disarray has been the just inspiration of the satiric poet. His vocation is to be, for this end, the watchdog of society, a member of the literary or critical constabulary-on the watch for offenders.

Lucilius, denouncing the foolish or wicked by name, startled Horace. The modern satirist has usually accepted Pope's principle of "lashing the sin and sparing the sinner," a purely benevolent concept which Pope himself violated in his Grub Street epic. The American satirist, Ambrose Bierce, however, maintains that satire, to be effective and corrective, must be personal and concrete. His theory is luminously proclaimed in the following lines To a Censor:

"The delay granted by the weakness and good nature of our judges is responsible for half the murders."Daily Newspaper. Delay responsible? friend,

Why, then, my

Impeach Delay and you will make an

end.

Thrust vile Delay in jail and let it rot For doing all the things that it should not:

Put not good-natured judges under bond,

But make Delay in damages respond. Minos, acus, Rhadamanthus, rolled Into one pitiless, unsmiling scoldUnsparing censor, be your thongs un

curled

To "lash the rascals naked through the world."

The rascais? thing Above whose back your knotted scourges sing.

Nay, Rascality's the

Your satire, truly, like a razor keen, "Wounds with a touch that's neither

felt nor seen;"

For naught that you assail with falchion free

At money-changing you'd have whirled the "cat"!

Good friend, if any judge deserve your blame,

Have you no courage, or has he no name?

Thus, molesting only the personified abstractions which the older satirists attacked, such as Vice, Folly, and Hypocrisy, and fearing to lash the vicious, the foolish, or the hypocritical man, or to stigmatize him fearlessly by name, the satirist deprives his work of the elements of fear and terror, and renders it of small effect. Is it not in this quality of enforced or false respect for the personality of the offender that the reason for the futility of modern satire must be sought? And yet, though essentially punitive in character, true satire must contain a corrective and instructive quality. Nor must it be limited in scope and interest by applying it to a single individual, for then it has little more than the effect of a personal castigation, and loses all its didactic strength.

It appears that only those masters of satire whose work was epic in its nature have commanded the veneration of the world and cleared paths for light and progress by demolishing error and ignorance. It is incapacity for satire on a large scale which is the greatest

lack in the few anachronistic spirits who have feebly labored to perpetuate the art of Juvenal and Martial in an unpropitious time.

For the satirist to become a power and to speak in a universal tongue, the creation of some comprehensive type becomes necessary, some embodiment or personification of what is to be censured or ridiculed. Don Quixote is but an incorporation of the fantastic chivalry Cervantes aimed to destroy, the Knight Hudibras a lay figure symbolizing all the follies of Puritanisim, the hero of the Dunciad and his subjects, though real persons, are depicted as the incarnations of Dullness and literary baseness. In Gulliver the Struldbugs and Yahoos incorporate all the vileness of humanity as Gulliver himself does its normal qualities. Judged by these standards, of wide application and significance, of power to group in masses, of command of the general instead of the particular, of appealing to all mankind irrespective of time or place, of ability to show an active identification of themselves with, for, or against the thought or tendency of their age, the vague satire of the moderns, with the exception of that of Anatole France, must be considered of moral inconsequence.

The value of the expression of satire seems often to be confounded with the value of the satire as a whole. Since .the proper purpose of satire is a didactic and not an æsthetic one, the theme and thought should be granted an importance beyond that of form and manner. Divested of its moral significance, satire may attain artistic perfection when confined to personal censure, but its brilliancy, empty of all positive import, is forced, under the name of wit, to take a lower rank in literature.

Whatever judgment posterity is to render upon the satiric labors of our day in prose or poetry, novel or drama -whether it will determine to preserve

them with the work of the masters, or embalm them as earnest but unappealing literary art, or consider them purely as an anomaly, a unique anachronism or atavism of literature, present conditions will go far towards explaining the unpopularity of undisguised satire in modern life.

It would appear that far beyond the possibilities of any other country, Americà might furnish large and legitimate themes for the satirist, out of the dense and feverish jungles of her still unformed civilization.

In a state or establishment of society in which the factors of education and the results of culture are not guided by powerful and enlightened masculine minds, or rather where such minds have relinquished these nobler pursuits and devoted themselves exclusively to politics and commerce, there is a corresponding usurpation by feminine minds, which, exercising more and more power, at last establish emasculated standards and erect a tyranny of taste in accordance with them. Since the intense strain of the competitive struggle in trade devours the leisure and the mental energy of the men, the devotion to and patronage of art and literature, as in all nations and at all times, are left to that portion of the population enjoying leisure. "This in the United States is the feminine portion. The writer who does not cater to the ideals of this all-powerful, comprehensive section foredooms his work to practical failure. In such an atmosphere, it may easily be conceived, the potent masculine product of satire would meet with no sympathy or toleration, would, in fact, be directly antagonized by a universal spirit inimical to forthright utterance, keen criticism, or fearless denunciation.

The laxity in enforcement of the laws, the flexible, ingenious code of public honor produced by the indifference to private culpability, the predom

inance of the mediocre, aggrandized and encouraged by the slavishness or timidity of indiscriminate critics, a mercenary and subsidized Press, and the wide contamination due to commercial ideals of success, all these powerful factors, crushing the criticism of the few undaunted personalities whose voices are raised in censure, are fatal to independent satire. The American people, under the influence of false standards or conceptions of living on the one hand, and the commercializing and effeminatizing of taste on the other, have developed a growth of unhealthy hedonism and slavish toler

ance.

Under these abnormal conditions, a public or national conscience cannot exist, and as it is the duty of the satirist or censor to act as this conscience, the chief of American guides or censors, in the person of ex-President Roosevelt himself, meets with increasing opposition and alienation from his audience as soon as he ventures upon blunt censure or advice.

The enforcd inactivity of men gifted to speak in the thunder-tones of Elijah to their countrymen is the more to be regretted since never before did the corrupted limbs of the American national body have greater need of satiric surgery. Great popular abuses and evils, monstrous parasitic growths, incorporated dishonesty, and organized crime tyrannize the land, "graft," that national disease, poisons the air, gigantic folly and vulgarity run amuck through people and through Press, and all national ideals and noble traditions are tainted by the spirit of Mammon. The voices of the prophets of doom and of regeneration are heard in the land, but the dragon-slayers sleep upon their swords, or, waking. toy with them in listless mood. Only one resolute voice,' lifted in sorrow rather than in anger, has for years invoked the 1 Ambrose Bierce in "An Invocation."

CHAPTER XI.

A house was taken-a large house passably furnished and, according to the house agent, "situated in the most desirable quarter of South Kensington." The house agent also assured his clients that he had secured for them an unprecedented bargain-so handsomely appointed, so replete with conveniences, and only eight guineas a week! Servants were left by the owner, the tenants of course paying wages and the extras included in that mysterious phrase "all found."

Altogether the family considered they were lucky. Mr. Fleetwood had a large smoking room opening on to well-kept gardens where children and nurses played and strolled, and ladies exercised unnatural-looking little dogs. Here he tied flies, and sorted his papers, and tried not to think about tiger shooting. Without much enthusiasm,

for the sake of air and exercise, he "took up" golf, god-fathered by a fellow pensioner from India, a near neighbor who played badly and was enchanted to find an opponent who played worse. The two passed long hours on a course within easy reach of London, losing their tempers and innumerable golf balls; but though Mr. Fleetwood with keen eye and active limbs could soon beat his disgusted friend, he never truly appreciated the game. He found the days more tedious when he did not play. A walk in the morning, not in the Park because he liked to go out in comfortable old clothes, and the girls bothered him to "make himself look decent if he was going where he would see people." So sometimes he changed the books at the library, or wandered into a museum, once actually, for something to do, he volunteered to go to the fish

monger's and select the fish for dinner. But as Mrs. Fleetwood complained afterwards, of course he bought soles which that day, according to fishmonger, "were scarce and dear." In the afternoons he went to his club and talked with men he had known in India, smoked and read the papers, and found he looked forward to seeing the Pioneer Mail. Sometimes he went to a race meeting.

He longed for the autumn when they could get into a house in the country with a little shooting, where at any rate fields and woods would be around him. . . . Sorely he missed his work, his guns, his horses; but he said little, hardly yet understanding how greatly he was bored. He accepted and endured the situation without complaint, somewhat as a child will accept adverse conditions of life with inarticulate fatalism. At least there was one unexpected palliation of the circumstances the parlormaid proved almost as excellent a valet as old Gunga.

Mrs. Fleetwood, for her part, was fairly content. She liked her big bedroom, and found the back drawingroom a pleasant refuge wherein to write letters and to rest when tired. The cook seemed an amiable individual who was willing to "manage," and who proclaimed, so to speak as her motto, that she always "laid herself out" to please her ladies. Nevertheless the housekeeping books appeared to her present lady alarmingly highbut then, of course, they were a large party, five of themselves and four servants and "help," not to speak of people always coming to luncheon or dinner. Whenever a member of the family met a friend, that friend was instantly invited to a meal as a matter of course.

During the season they gave quite a large At Home, using the gardens, having a string band, and a fortuneteller. Lady Landon lent her presence

to the party en route from and to halfa-dozen entertainments of a like nature. Also came a crowd of Indian friends and many new acquaintances acquired by the two elder girls. And all the relations attended from the suburbs, henceforward regarding the Fleetwoods as millioniares.

Marion and Isabel lived strenuously, and might be said to enjoy themselves, though certain vexations and drawbacks rather qualified their pleasures and thwarted their aspirations. Lady Landon, for example, was not all the social help they had anticipated she would be. They did not realize that some six years back at the time of their visit to her in London it was her whim to take two pretty girls about with her to pose as the kindhearted matron who "loved to see young people enjoy themselves." It was the fashion just then to make much of girls, just as at another time it was "the thing" to drive in the Park with children, instead of dogs, on the back seat of the carriage, with a discreet nurse in attendance. That particular season Lady Landon unearthed a child belonging to a distant and hitherto little noticed relative of her late husband, and displayed the darling to her admiring friends as the carriage rested in the shade by the Park railings. But the custom ended abruptly on account of the rebellion of the darling who, one afternoon, created a scene. It was because she wished to go and see the ducks on the Serpentine, and "Auntie," as she was instructed to call the kind lady who took her and Nanny out driving, preferred to remain where she was, conversing with people who gathered round the carriage. The child became unmanageable, shrieked and kicked, bit her nurse, tore a hole in Auntie's skirt, and it all happened just at the moment that the Royal carriage passed by!

But to return to Marion and Isabel.