By the nineteenth century the general inheritance in ideas and methods had become so cumulatively rich and various that the chances for novelty might seem correspondingly meager. But there is always something new under the sun, and the process of amalgamating that modicum of newness with the great bulk of the old and established goes steadily and eternally on—except for abnormal phases of retrogression, or revolution—forming that ceaseless change in changelessness we call history. The body of satiric tradition bequeathed to the Victorians underwent, accordingly, a normal amount of subtraction, addition, and modification, before being passed on to their successors.

The endowment itself was large and comprehensive, including both substance and modes, as well as a supplementary current of criticism and interpretation. In none of these were the Victorians responsible for a transformation, yet none did they leave in statu quo. In form, however, a great change had recently occurred, operating both positively and negatively, of which they were just in time to take advantage. The positive side of it was the development of the satiric novel in the preceding century, whereby the channel of fiction had already been accommodated to the satiric stream. This tendency was reinforced by the negative side, the abandonment of English satire’s one conventional outlet, the heroic couplet, which naturally diverted the current still more. The chance that made Byron not only a brilliant climax to the long line that extended back to Hall and Lodge, and through them to Juvenal and Horace, but the conclusion as well, is one of the striking situations in the history of literature. This transference of the main bulk of satire from the medium of poetry to that of prose would probably have been accomplished in any case, for since the Romantic Triumph, poetry had been again devoted to its true mission as the voice of imagination and spiritual vision, while at the same time the novel was finding a congenial sphere of action as a public forum for the discussion of all things from current events to a philosophy of life. Satire, being presumably a utilitarian product, would naturally be more suitably allied with fiction, a branch of Applied Art, than with the Pure Art of poetry. This union is advantageous for another reason,—the improvement as to proportion. In verse satire the emphasis is on the satire; in satiric fiction, the former noun has been relegated to the qualifying function of the adjective. Since one of the perils of satire is over-emphasis, and since it can best avoid this peril by combination, the gain in this arrangement is obvious. As a matter of fact, pure, isolated satire is a non-existent abstraction, as is illustrated by the very circumstance of the origin of the name. The satura lanx was a dish of assorted fruit, and the primitive saturæ which borrowed its name were the impromptu miscellanies in speech which constituted the social part of the old Roman Harvest Home. Lucilius and later Horace, wanting a title for their running commentary on men and manners, found this conveniently ready. When Juvenal adopted it, he had no notion of restricting the application:[427]

With all these things is the modern novel also concerned, and it too finds some of them amenable to humorous treatment, and some only to serious. But so far as change is concerned, it occurs during this period more in substance than in form. Vice and Folly are still the nominal targets, whenever these traits seem to be a cause or an effect of Deceit.[428] But they are somewhat altered in shape, in consequence of a more subtle analysis of their nature. The great discovery was made about the deceiver that he is quite as likely as not to be deceiving himself as well as others,—more than others, indeed, inasmuch as his very blindness renders him the more transparent. The world, moreover, growing in suspiciousness and incredulity, is the less easily deceived and the more able to detect the fraud, which thus reacts like a boomerang against its perpetrator. In the nineteenth century Pecksniff really was an archaism; and since Dickens no novelist has portrayed anything so bald as an unadulterated and unexplained hypocrite.[429] The evolution in portrayal from the hypocrite to the sentimentalist is perfectly illustrated by the difference between Pecksniff and Bulstrode. For the latter we have only a little less sympathy than for Hawthorne’s Arthur Dimmisdale, in spite of his inferiority in fineness and ultimate courage. For we are shown the “strange, piteous conflict in the soul of this unhappy man, who had longed for years to be better than he was.”[430] Even his prayer after becoming virtually a murderer is not really a piece of hypocrisy. “Does anyone suppose,” asks Eliot, “that private prayer is necessarily candid—necessarily goes to the roots of action?”[431]

George Eliot is, however, even more impressed with the auto-intoxication of optimism as it manifests itself in what might be called group psychology; and especially against a disregard of the law of cause and effect does she turn the shafts of her quiet irony. At the period when the Raveloe tale opens,—[432]

In pursuance of this comfortable philosophy,—

In another story we are introduced to some “pious Dissenting women, who took life patiently, and thought that salvation depended chiefly on predestination, and not at all on cleanliness.”[433] In a higher social class this innocence of the connection between effort and achievement leads to the fatuous complacency from which Gwendolen Harleth was aroused by the cruel shock of being told the truth about her musical abilities:[434]

Another busy circle had made two important discoveries: the superiority of the probable over the actual; and the advantage of a well-chosen nomenclature, whereby a taste for cruelty may be gratified by the simple device of calling it kindness. The first was made over the gossip about Bulstrode:[435]

The second developed in a later phase of the same affair:[436]

It was because of this understanding of the limitless possibilities and universal prevalence of self-deception that Meredith was able to see the absurdity in egoism, which is the form of the malady induced by vanity. And this perception, as a modern critic observes, is the source of the contrast between two well-known egoists,—Sir Charles Grandison and Sir Willoughby Patterne:[437]

If one should ask, remembering the necessity for self-assertion in the exacting requirements of our human destiny, why so indispensable a thing as egoism should be ridiculous, Meredith has his answer ready:[438]

It is in “imposing figures” that the malign imps “love to uncover ridiculousness.” Moreover,—[439]

This turn of the satiric road from the hypocritical to the sentimental side of deceit marked a passage not only through traits of character, as already noted, but through the realm of institutions, where it might at first seem to be more out of place. But there is no reason why organizations should not be as sentimental as the individuals of which they are composed. Indeed, so far as crowd psychology is in operation, they would be strengthened in self-deception by their very numbers. Whether this is the case or not, it is true that the tendency increased from Peacock to Butler to see in organized groups the absurdity of a complacent inefficiency. Not because they were failures did English institutions come under the rod, but because they flourished under a mighty delusion of success. Smug incompetence, self-satisfied futility, these were the gaping incongruities between pretense and performance that made tempting targets out of Society, Church, School, and State; and thitherward were trained the big and little guns of the satirists.

There is, of course, an underlying cause of this transference of interest from the more simple and patent hypocrite to the more subtle and baffling sentimentalist, individual and collective, and that is found in the spirit of investigation, analysis, probing beneath surfaces,—not new, to be sure, but newly operative on a large scale,—known as Science. Science in the intellectual world, and democracy in the political are the two forces which began in the nineteenth century the Conquest of Canaan that now in the twentieth they are gradually completing.

That these two armies are allies is obvious. The end of democracy is an elevation of the whole plane of human life,—a leveling up and not the leveling down so feared by Carlyle and the conservative English opinion of the time. On the emotional and ethical side it is humanitarian, but in itself it is a rational utilitarian principle. For this unquestionably practical end, Pure Science furnishes the justification, indeed, the initial premises, by showing the biology and psychology of all relationships, the respective effects of coöperation and antagonism in the natural world, and kindred factors; while Applied Science supplies the means to that end by discoveries and inventions bearing on the amelioration and enhancement of living conditions.

The recognition of such startling innovations would be inevitably slow, and their adoption still slower. But it is precisely in their ultimately successful struggle for admission into the life and thought of the nineteenth century that we trace the evolution of the satire of the period, for the satiric reaction is merely one of the many reflections of that struggle.

A humanitarian democracy has turned the old ex cathedra criticism into the forensic. The satirist has been obliged, as one commentator observes, to descend from the upper window whence he had been haranguing the mob below; he might have added, much of the mob itself has been admitted into the entrance halls at least of the great Administration Building of modern life. But meanwhile the scientific method has added reason to emotion, so that while the democratic ideal was conceived in a rationalized sympathy, the stress has slipped more and more from the sympathetic to the rational element. None of the Victorians expressly would have denied the Moral Obligation to be Intelligent, but George Eliot, Meredith, and Butler were the first to make a real point of it. For by the latter half of the century the laboratory had come to be acknowledged as the colleague, if not the successor, of the pulpit, for implicit sermonizing as well as explicit instruction. And in the exercise of these functions, while the pulpit may indulge at times in a decorous ridicule, it is the laboratory that is the real, spontaneous, unconscious satirist. When the solemn moral exhortation, Ought, was supplanted by the autocratic scientific command, Must—if, the expression changed from earnest pleading to detached humor. For the moralist takes himself, his message, and his hearers, seriously, but the scientist has the indifferent attitude that if you refuse to obey, the consequences, serious indeed and not to be averted or escaped, will come, not in the guise of punishment or retribution, but through the inexorable operation of law. Accordingly, if you try to delude yourself into the supposition that you can evade the orders of nature, the joke is on you.

While, therefore, in Victorian satire the old familiar faces of Society, State, and Church reappear, they are subjected to a new treatment, as the result of a new diagnosis.

The School and the Press are the only additions to the time-honored objects, because of their more recent emergence into the light. The erection of the School into a public institution, together with the subsidence of the Church into the sphere of private life, marks indeed a radical change in viewpoint,—advancing from the assumption that the State must insure the religion of its citizens, let them be educated how they might (except that for a long time they had no choice but to take their secular learning from the hands of the clergy) to the realization that if those responsible for the general welfare would provide for a general diffusion of enlightenment, the religious sentiment might safely be trusted to those whom it concerned, namely, the individuals themselves. In regard to all these institutions the old, sharply defined contrast between guilty, satirized protagonist and indicting, satirical antagonist has disappeared. In its place is a decided tendency toward the fellow-member, fellow-citizen, fellow-sinner attitude, which at least has the advantage always held by the empiric knowledge of the insider over the deductive inference of the outsider.

In the social field the most notable alteration is in the satire of woman. From the time of the Greek Simonides and the Hebrew epigrammatists, feminine foibles have been alluring game for masculine-made arrows. The shrew, the gossip, the blue-stocking, the interfering stepmother, the intriguing wife, the extravagant daughter, the lady of fashion, have been detected with unerring clarity of vision and pursued with accomplished skill. They have also been taken for granted. It was not until the modern inquiry into cause and effect was instituted that the feminine failure was viewed as an effect of which society was largely the cause, by withholding opportunity on one hand, and on the other encouraging the very ignorance and inanity it affected to despise. This discovery led logically to the shifting of the satire from effect back to cause, and the addition of another item to the list wherein the concerted action of the social group is held accountable for any malign influence on its members.

This probing into causes is even more sweepingly operative in the larger society of mankind and the body politic. The study of economics and sociology inevitably has switched the old partisan antagonism into a new opposition based more consciously on theories of government,—still partisan, to be sure, but less on personal and more on philosophical grounds. The new element this brings into political satire is the effort to create a public sense of shame for official incompetence, since in a democracy (and such, in some form or other, is almost every modern State) the blame for this incompetence rests ultimately on the public. Modern critics may echo Isaiah’s scornful complaint of state officialdom,—“The ancient and the honorable man, he is the head; and the prophet that teacheth lies, he is the tail,”—but their remedy would lie not in increased reliance on a theocracy but in a more adequate popular referendum. John Barton concludes his impassioned tirade against mill-owners and capitalists with the argument,—[440]

On another occasion he adds this explanation,—[441]

To this serious and personal grief Meredith responds, as it were, in his more impersonal and ironic manner. Diana represents the view from a position of equality, and the satire of one’s own class:[442]

Kingsley is spurred by the subject to a bitter sarcasm:[443]

Nor is he lacking in a constructive outlook. In connection with a fling at the “amusingly inconsistent, however well-meant scene in Coningsby,” in which Disraeli illustrates his idea of a beneficent aristocracy, he has one of his characters meditate that—[444]

At that time there was not much disposition to believe these ills could be cured by legislation. On the contrary, the numerous satiric hits at various governmental departments were aimed not at the general laissez faire policy of the State, but at its indifferent success in the matters over which it had already assumed jurisdiction, and its unwarranted encroachment into others. The reasoning seemed to be that an institution which had been unfaithful and convicted of inertness, graft, and stupidity in its limited operations would be unlikely to be more alert, honest, and intelligent if its burdens were increased. David Copperfield is shocked to learn from Mr. Spenlow the ways of the law, and still more so at Mr. Spenlow’s coldness toward the idea of reform.[445] Henry Little wades through and climbs over all sorts of official obstacles until “he had done, in sixty days, what a true inventor will do in twenty-four hours, whenever the various metallic ages shall be succeeded by the age of reason.”[446] A prison inspector is finally confronted with actual facts of a horrifying nature:[447]

But more subtle and vital than all these errors,—the error indeed at the root of them all,—is the failure of the State to utilize the fine material placed at its disposal, potentially if not actually, in the lives of noble and capable youth. No one before Lytton could have laid at the door of society the wasted possibilities of a Godolphin. No one before Meredith could have made the thwarted career of a Beauchamp a pitiful satire on “his indifferent England,” who appeared, “with a quiet derision that does not belie her amiable passivity, to have reduced in Beauchamp’s career the boldest readiness for public action, and some good stout efforts besides, to the flat result of an optically discernible influence of our hero’s character in the domestic circle: perhaps a faintly outlined circle or two beyond it.”[448]

In Society and the State all opposition is necessarily factional, for none can stand entirely outside. This was true of the Church also, during its undisputed supremacy, when to be excommunicated was equivalent to being imprisoned or otherwise put outside the pale. But by the sixteenth century Skelton could say in Colyn Clout,

By the eighteenth, Voltaire could get a hearing, albeit a hostile and scandalized one. And by the nineteenth, we have not only Brontë and Kingsley censuring from within, but Meredith and Butler from without. So far as there is a new note in the censure, it is in harmony with the whole strain of the time. For the old crude gibes against the old crude faults of hypocrisy, sensuality, and greed, is substituted the criticism that a huge organization fails to utilize the tremendous power of its equipment, prestige, and authority, in the furtherance of general progress and the establishment of a genuine kingdom of God here upon earth. For from the spiritualte as well as the temporalte the new humanitarian spirit demands recognition and service.

These modifications in form and substance were induced by a modification, probably unconscious, of the idea of satire itself, and they in turn reacted on it to strengthen the changing conception. The two main elements,—a wider socialization in the point of view, and a firmer insistence on an understanding of conditions such as could not be secured under the old artless habit of accepting the premises,—stand for that union of feeling and intelligence which was the ideal of the nineteenth century. “Men,” says Meredith, “and the ideas of men, which are * * * actually the motives of men in a greater degree than their appetites; these are my theme;”[449] and again, “The Gods of this world’s contests demand it of us, in relation to them, that the mind, and not the instincts, shall be at work.”[450] The corollary of this is that though satire may be “a passion to sting and tear,” it must do so “on rational grounds.”[451] “Satire,” says Trollope, “though it may exaggerate the vice it lashes, is not justified in creating it in order that it may be lashed. Caricature may too easily become a slander, and satire a libel.”[452] Sympathy and intelligence have no objection to pungency and forcefulness, but they have no real need for truculence or unfairness. It is, as Garnett suggests, the unsophisticated man who regards satire as the offspring of ill-nature. Such was the intellectual status of Lady Middleton, who could not feel an affinity for Elinor and Marianne Dashwood:[453]

The vague notion that a satirist is something disagreeable will of course never quite be eradicated, at least not until people learn to like being ridiculed and criticised. But in manner he is undeniably growing less disagreeable than has been his wont. Another reason for this, in addition to the changes already noted, is the increased activity of that reflexive sense of humor which operates as an antitoxin to the vanity inherent in all critics. A wholesome fear of being absurd serves to reduce one’s chances of being that rich anomaly, a ridiculous satirist. The modern satirist may possess a mind conscious to itself of right and a conviction that he has a mission to perform. But he is more prone to conceal or even disclaim these things than to advertise them. Even Fielding did not proclaim, as he might have done, that he first adventured. Peacock trusted to his readers to discover that fools being his theme, satire must be his song. Since his time, satire, while questioning all things with a new penetration, has succeeded in taking on an air of unconcern and in realizing that neither promises nor apologies are necessary. Post-Byronic satire seldom vaunts itself, and, however superior it may feel, it pretends that it is not puffed up. A historian describes the change that takes place between the Age of Elizabeth, when satire “was the pastime of very young men, who ‘railed on Lady Fortune in good set terms,’” and the Commonwealth, when the combatants “left Nature and Fortune with their withers unwrung, and aimed at the joints in the harness of their enemies.”[454] To the Victorians, satire was neither a pastime nor a matter for deadly earnestness. Armored antagonists had gone out of fashion; and Lady Fortune was left to the metaphysicians.

It is, indeed, a matter of curious interest that one object of satire, life itself, which had drawn fire occasionally all the way from Aristophanes to Byron, should have been neglected by the Victorians,—though the neglect may be accounted for by their interest in the concrete and their generally optimistic outlook. On the other hand, one of the most philosophic and least optimistic of them devotes several bow-shots to a sort of counter attack, against those who consider the universe a fit subject for satire. The Prelude to Middlemarch identifies the heroine as one of those unfortunate women of deep souls and shallow circumstances, “who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action.” To this the comment is added:[455]

The fact, however, that “Here and there is born a Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing,” is not an irony of fate so much as a folly of society. Later in the story the philosophizing of one of the characters leads the author to the reflection:

Nay, the metaphysician himself does not altogether escape. Piero de Cosimo is accused of being one and repudiates the idea:[456]

This perception of the Idol of the Cave, and the whole trend of Eliot’s argument is evidence that the pragmatic attitude existed some time before it was so vividly and enduringly defined by Professor James.

Since these various changes bring about no complete break with the satiric tradition, we may expect to find the connecting links with both the remote and the immediate past as much in evidence as are the features of novelty. Peacock’s indebtedness was to the Athenian comedy, and Lytton’s to the near-contemporary Byron. Mrs. Gaskell had Jane Austen and Crabbe and the whole gallery of eighteenth-century village vignettes for her humors of rural life; while her Mary Barton probably reached back to Sybil, as it did forward to the line of economic novels. Thackeray had a large store to draw on for his burlesques, as did Lytton and Butler for their pseudo-Utopias.

Nor is there any abrupt termination to satiric affairs as the Victorians left them at the end of the century. The years stand as sign posts along the way, and not as barriers across it. The changes they call our attention to were less patent to those in and by whom they were working than to us with our perspective. From our moderate distance we are able to discern not only the evolutionary process but some of its results.

In a national award the satiric prize would undoubtedly go to the French, whose genius for satire not only gave them preëminence among the peoples in that line, but gave their satire precedence over their other literature. But with this exception, the total effect of satire in the Victorian novel ranks artistically with the highest at large, and surpasses some other elements of the fiction itself. For the nineteenth-century novel is undeniably didactic, and therefore, while it gains in point, significance, and intellectual interest, it loses in romantic interest and esthetic purity. It is here that satire becomes its salvation, for by giving much of the criticism a humorous turn it counteracts the didactic effect, enhances delight, and, to readers of a sensitive response, makes a point that would not be sharpened by increased vehemence. No invective against the Countess de Saldar could be so illuminating as Lady Jocelyn’s thorough relish of her as a specimen. It is of a piece with Mr. Bennet’s enjoyment of Collins and Wickham;[457] with Lamb’s avowal that he would rather lose the legacy Dorrell cheated him out of than “be without the idea of that specious old rogue;” and with the dismay of Don Antonio over the restored sanity of Don Quixote.[458] It is the secret of Trollope’s charm, as Hawthorne indicated when he described the impression of those “beef and ale” novels,—

It would have been a saving grace to many of the dramatis personæ if they could have shared the experience of a romantically inclined youth who, after building an air castle in which he figured first as a conquering hero and then as a magnanimous patron, suddenly “came to:”[459]

“What a pity it is,” exclaimed Butler,[460] “that Christian never met Mr. Common-Sense with his daughter, Good-Humour, and her affianced husband, Mr. Hate-Cant.” Bunyan doubtless would have replied that he also approved of these somewhat worldly characters, but that they were people of less importance in their day than they became thereafter. The progress of the modern pilgrim is toward a City of Sanitation rather than Holiness, but sanitation is interpreted so widely as to include the soul also in the cleansing process. For this work Common-Sense and Hate-Cant are our efficiency experts; and that Good-Humour should be a member of their household is inevitable at a time when graciousness is accounted not a negligible adornment but a fundamental virtue.

To the poise and proportion contributed to satire by the emphasis on the quality of humor, must be added the justice that comes from a rationalized sympathy, and from the counter, positive element which restores the balance pulled down by destructive criticism. A striking example of both is furnished by Meredith in his explanation of one of his characters. No pretender has ever been more skillfully pursued or more thoroughly unmasked than the ambitious daughter of the great Mel. After such treatment no one before this time could have presented so fairly the case for the defendant:[461]

Thackeray and Trollope also apologize for some of the people they ridicule, but with this characteristic difference, that Thackeray bespeaks your indulgence for a Pendennis or a Philip on the Horatian ground,

But Trollope conscientiously reminds the reader that his picture of an Archdeacon Grantly, a George Bertram, even a Mrs. Proudie, is one-sided; that their dramatic and amusing faults have been allowed to overshadow their less entertaining but existent virtues; and that to know all would be, not to forgive all, but to forgive judiciously. His story of the childish lapse and manly recovery of the vicar Robarts concludes with the reflection, “A man may be very imperfect and yet worth a great deal.”[462] This is a clear, cool discrimination far more difficult to attain than Thackeray’s nebulous implication that though this man is certainly very imperfect and not worth a great deal yet his dear womenkind excuse him and we adore them for it.

George Eliot is too stern to do much excusing, but she always gives due weight to “the terrible coercion of our deeds.” If she insists on the baleful effect of yielding to temptation, she insists also on an appreciation of the tempting force. She analyzes the culprit:[463]

But at the same time she warns his judges:

Elsewhere, on the same theme, she indicates her general impression of the relative amounts of human wisdom and folly:[464]

This is in agreement with the point of the lines written on the portrait of Beau Nash at Bath, placed between the busts of Newton and Pope:

But this Victorian painter of Folly, and at least some of her contemporaries, endeavored to make satire realistic by drawing Wit and Wisdom on a proportionate scale. It was in recognition of this that Stevenson said,

Victorian literature would not have cared to produce a Ship of Fools,—though a passenger list might easily be culled out from its fiction,—nor a Hudibras, nor a Dunciad, nor even a Tartuffe, for George Warrington voiced the general sentiment when he said of that great drama that it could not be reckoned great in comparison with Othello, because “‘a mere villainous hypocrite should not be chief of a great piece.’”[465]

This segment of literature may not be more sincere in its claim of truth-telling, but it shows more art in its method; and it is perhaps even less flattering to human nature in its assumption that simple exposure, without exaggeration, is quite enough.

Nor did it ever expect its satire to prove revolutionary. Peacock, first on the list, confessed, through one of his characters, of having been cured of a passion for reforming the world, “by the conviction of the inefficacy of moral theory with respect to producing a practical change in the mass of mankind.” He adds,—[466]

The fear of being ridiculous is of course one of those which may be punctured to the quick, and thereby a practical change effected. It is also true that, the human constitution and capacity being what they are, constant criticism is necessary. It is the spur, the brake, the corrective, to inform us when we are going too slow, too fast, or in the wrong direction. It is not by nature an agreeable thing, and there are times when it should not be made so. But if there are deeds and characters beyond the reach of humor, it is equally true, conversely, as Meredith says:[467] “There are questions as well as persons that only the Comic can fitly touch.” The paradox arises in the fact that while criticism is essentially scientific, satire is a branch of esthetics, which nevertheless has practical proclivities. These it does no harm to exercise, providing it wreaks no violence on its character as an art. But the effect of satire must not be confused with its quality. It cannot be said that he satirizes best who reforms most,—the harvest of reform from satiric seed being granted. Concerning a pitchfork or muckrake there is no question of art: concerning a statue there is no question of utility: but satire is like a silver spoon, which partakes of both qualities, and is estimated sometimes according to one, sometimes the other, and sometimes a compromise between the two.

“C’est une étrange entreprise,” exclaimed Molière, “que celle de faire rire les honnêtes gens.” The strangeness of it becomes more striking when we remember that the laughter of the race is directed against itself and at the very things over which it is most sensitive,—its own inept follies and poor flimsy pretenses. But it is unendurable only in the form of the “grinning sneer” of Blifil. Even ridicule may be welcome if it comes from the genial Allworthy, whose “smiles at folly were indeed such as we may suppose the angels bestow on the absurdities of mankind.” Not all satirists are so benign, but such benignity is not incompatible with the finest satire. Meredith himself, after writing a dozen novels permeated with the most pungent satire, said in the last one that “if we bring reason to scan our laugh at pure humanity, it is we who are in place of the ridiculous, for doing what reason disavows.”[468]

It may be that as we reason more we laugh less; and that brings the question whether it were wiser to check the reasoning or quench the laughter. Since, however, laughter is likely to improve in quality as it diminishes in quantity, we may be content to abjure the witticism at which “the fool lifteth up his voice with laughter,” and substitute the reflective wit over which “the clever man will scarce smile quietly.” Such was the mild aspiration of the humorous Victorians; but though mild, the spirit was ubiquitous. It gave tone to the pessimism of Thompson and temper to the optimism of Stevenson; it colored darkly the defiant pages of Carlyle and tinged lightly the protesting paragraphs of Arnold; it lent an edge to the sentiment of Tennyson and humanized the philosophy of Browning. It even dignified the comicality of Punch, for Douglas Jerrold, at least, was far from being an irresponsible jester. His gruesome Dish of Glory, with its ironical advice to the French to eat the Algerians as fast as they conquer them, will bear comparison with The Modest Proposal. The dedication of volume eight also illustrates the new effect of self-turned irony: