But at length comes the calm hour, when they who look beyond the superficies of things begin to discern their true bearings; when the perception of evil, or sorrow, or sin, brings also the perception of some opposite good, which awakens our indulgence, or the knowledge of the cause which excites our pity. Thus it is with me. I can smile,-nay, I can laugh still, to see folly, vanity, absurdity, meanness, exposed by scornful wit, and depicted by others in fictions light and brilliant. But these very things, when I encounter the reality, rather make me sad than merry, and take away all the inclination, if I had the power, to hold them up to derision. MEDON. Unless by doing so, you might correct them. ALDA. Correct them! Show me that one human being who has been made essentially better by satire ! O no, no! there is something in human nature which hardens itself against the lash-something in satire which excites only the lowest and worst of our propensities. That line in Pope I must be proud to see Men not afraid of God, afraid of me! —has ever filled me with terror and pity, and sends me to think upon the opposite sentiment in Shakspeare, on "the mischievous foul sin of chiding sin." I remember once hearing a poem of Barry Cornwall's, (he read it to me,) about a strange winged creature that, having the lineaments of a man, yet preyed on a man, and afterwards coming to a stream to drink, and beholding his own face therein, and that he had made his prey of a creature like himself, pined away with repentance. So should those do, who having made themselves mischievous mirth out of the sins and sorrows of others, remembering their own humanity, and seeing within themselves the same lineamentsso should they grieve and pine away, self-punished. MEDON. "Tis an old allegory, and a sad one--and but too much to the purpose. ALDA. I abhor the spirit of ridicule-I dread it and I despise it. I abhor it because it is in direct contradiction to the mild and serious spirit of Christianity; I fear it, because we find that in every state of society in which it has prevailed as a fashion, and has given the tone to the manners and literature, it marked the moral degradation and approaching destruction of that society; and I despise it, because it is the usual resource of the shallow and the base mind, and, when wielded by the strongest hand with the purest intentions, an inefficient means of good. The spirit of satire, reversing the spirit of mercy which is twice blessed, seems to me twice accursed ;-evil in those who indulge it—evil to those who are the objects of it. MEDON. "Peut-être fallait-il que la punition des imprudens et des foibles fût confiée à la malignité, la pure vertu n'eût jamais été assez cruelle.” car ALDA. That is a woman's sentiment. MEDON. True-it was; and I have pleasure in reminding you that a female satirist by profession is yet an anomaly in the history of our literature, as a female schismatic is yet unknown in the history of our religion. But to what do you attribute the number of satirical women we meet in society? ALDA. Not to our nature; but to a state of society in which the levelling spirit of persifflage has been long a fashion, and, above all, to a perverse education which fosters it. Women, generally speaking, are by nature too much subjected to suffering in many forms have too much of fancy and sensibility, and too much of that faculty which some philosophers call veneration, to be naturally satirical. I have known but one woman eminently gifted in mind and person, who is also distinguished for powers of satire as bold as merciless; and she is such a compound of all that nature can give of good, and all that society can teach of evil MEDON. That she reminds us of the dragon of old, which was generated between the sun-beams from heaven and the slime of earth? ALDA. No such thing. Rather of the powerful and beautiful fairy Melusina, who had every talent and every charm under heaven; but once in so many hours, was fated to become a serpent. No, I return to my first position. It is not by exposing folly and scorning fools, that we make other people wiser, or ourselves happier. But to soften the heart by images and examples of the kindly and generous affections-to show how the human soul is disciplined and perfected by suffering-to prove how much of possible good may exist in things evil and perverted- how much hope there is for those who despair-how much comfort for those whom a heartless world has taught to contemn both others and themselves, and so put barriers to the hard, cold, selfish, mocking, and levelling spirit of the day-O would I could do this! |