ment, and make a rule never to force anything beyond that. By acting in that way you will give more strength and power to the Government, and reflect more honour upon the House, than by any of the most brilliant triumphs of oratory and legislation." 66 How well the opener of this debate on the negative side contrasts with H. K's narrow view! H. K. gives us a sort of Vidimus— useful enough in its way, and valuable, no doubt, for its matter, although nearly irrelevant to the debate-of free trade and its results; but "Samuel" arraigns the affirmatives on three counts. He certainly makes a good argument against the wisdom of the policy of our financiers. An eminent authority on finance once told the writer that a paper far more interesting than a novel could be written on The Curiosities of Taxation."I am myself unable to supply this matter, but Mr. Lowe evidently agrees with my informant, for he got not a few cheers from the House of Commons when he was detailing the absurdities of the stamp laws, and what might be called in general the grievance finance which the wisdom of Parliament had invented-the stillmaker's licence, the card licence, soapmakers' licences, &c., most of which were foolish and many of them unjust as well as inexpedient, for they cost far too much to collect. They were not remunerative, but they were annoying. I complain that the financial policy of the country during the century has not been governed by any general, well-thought-out set of principles; that it has been oppressive to the poor; and that it has transgressed the true laws of equity. F. M. MODERN RESEARCH AND CREEDS.-What modern research has done is to extend vastly our knowledge of the personality of the scriptural writers, and of the circumstances under which they wrote. Let every iota of the knowledge thus acquired be applied to correct and improve our idea of Scripture as a whole, our conception of its unity, our estimate of what it denounces, what it enunciates, what it enjoins. To take a verse from a spritual lyric, and fit it into your logical mosaic beside a verse from a doctrinal Epistle, without regarding the context in either case, is absurd and pernicious; but we cannot admit that the orchestral music of Scripture has no central harmony, no certain sound, no grand rhythmic unity. Away with this cant about intellectual formulas and systems. If the intellectual formulas are wrong, break them up and cast them away. If the systems are outworn or unsound, let their fragments be carted off, as men cart off the stones of ruins, to be built up into modern habitations which still keep out the rain. Calvin's "Institutio" appears to us as a syste matization of scriptural truth, on a level, viewed as an intellectual achievement, with Newton's systematisation of astronomical law; but in looking at Scripture we would be no more trammelled by the system of Calvin, than in contemplating the heavens we would be trammelled by the system of Newton. Literature. HAS THE AGE OF SATIRISTS PASSED AWAY? AFFIRMATIVE ARTICLE.-II. WIT is dying out from among us; sensationalism is getting the mastery over us. We are becoming as dull as ditchwater in company. Conversation is an accomplishment almost as little cultivated now as letter writing. We grind puns without pungency, merely to be grinned at. Nobody now jests at scars; everybody is scared if a jest be but attempted in the polite conventional society of our time. Slang has got the better of satire, and singerie or monkeyishness has taken the place formerly occupied by the lively raillery of the wits. We hoard every peppercorn of seeming wit for the comic periodicals, magazines of the manufactured article, museums of contorted and distorted words and sounds, but sadly wanting in the fine flavoured acerbity of a genuine jest. Joe Millerisms spun into bab-y-ish millinery, old jokes done brown, and "Lemon" "Punch" down done to insipidity of spirit. Who will undertake to adjudicate on the worth of the wit of Judy? Taking all our comic periodicals together, I am afraid that they would scarcely afford "a groatsworth of wit" to any one, however Greene. Our plays when they intend to be comical are satyrical, not satirical. " Formosa" and "Dundreary can scarcely compete with "The Rehearsal" and " Hurlythrumbo," or " Box and Cox" with She Stoops to Conquer." Our wit expends itself not in jests, but burlesques, travesties, or screaming farces, where the main incidents are vulgarly ludicrous and mere property incongruities. Actors now do not act, but transact, and writers of humorous poetry put very little of Juvenal's pithiness, Pope's serene but severe stinging, or even Byron's well-simulated rage and courage, into their verse. It was not so in the olden time; we had then wit that was terse and striking, and in our comedies and farces we had wit that was startling and sterling. We have lost even the art of nicknaming, that art in which the ill-nature of man becomes linked to wit and induces it to condense hate into "the tersest compactness of the epigram," or roll up dislike along with humour. We are grown so civilized and so courteous that satirists cannot live among us, and even anonymous bitterness is disliked. It is true that some people have been able to write about the Assinæum, the Saturday Reviler, the Chimes, and Mourning Post, but these are not attractive or provocative of 1870. 2 B "Sport that wrinkled care divides, Or Laughter holding both her sides." Ours is an age of co-admiration and limited liability praise. We form cliques with each other, but we more frequently ignore than sneer, and if we do sneer we do it very much on the sly. Hazlitt was almost the last of our great prose satirists. Douglas Jerrold was perhaps our most distinguished modern dramatic censor morum. I suppose even the most sceptical person in regard to modern wit would scarcely be worthy of capital punishment if he refused to regard Byron, Brough, and A' Becket as of higher grade than punsters. Do we admit Kennealy or Austin to be satirists ? The former has coarseness and force, but has he the quirky essence of good spirits-wit? The latter has spleen but little splendour, and is he not rather given to whine about himself than to make others wince? The fibre of his verse is not strong enough to form the tissue of satire. Walter Savage Landor of course belongs to a past age, and does not come within the scope of our debate. Perhaps the affirmative may quote Disraeli; but are his sarcasm and his biting criticism satire or raillery? Is combative arrogance not more observable in his writings and speeches than the keen causticity of severe truth? R. Fielding refers to Punch, but Punch is in his dotage and has of late shown strong signs of having reason on his side for his lampoons on the Permissive Bill. Indeed, the number of rivals rising up around the man of jokes shows that many think that it is weak punch. 66 It would surely require a great stretch of the meaning of the word satire to include Lord Lytton among the satirists. His New Timon" contains some bitters and bile, but the old "Timon" was an embittered spirit, and no satire could be greater than the name given to the gin and ginger rhymes of the Bulwerian satire! Then to think of Tennyson being lugged in as a satirist! The silver-bell jingle of the Tennysonian verse could never be used for satire; it would not ring out at all. Oh, no! we cannot now speak in the splendid strain of the satire schools. Now and again one professing to be a plain speaker may chatter scandal, but there is too much politeness on the surface of society to permit of satire. We speak too often "with bated breath and whispering humbleto show the scornful its own image. We have too little honourable honesty, too little power of withstanding to the face the enemies of society and social order. We do not want material for satire, but we want the moral courage and the brilliancy of spirit to scathe with the shining fire of ridicule and satiric song the vileness and vice of our times. We think, on the whole-until our opponents furnish us with a list-we are justified in concluding that the age of satirists, like that of chivalry, is gone. A. C. S. ness NEGATIVE ARTICLE.-II. THE age of satire is not likely to pass away so long as there are faults in man, moral condemnation felt in the mind; and the inclination exists in the human spirit to lash the vices and the follies of men. Satire is not a mere makeshift, like clothes, which are a sort of decent way of covering up defects. Quite the opposite. Satire rubs the gilding off, and strips away the finery in which man endeavours to hide the deformities of his moral nature. It makes short work with "Those troublesome disguises which we wear over our thoughts and around our hearts. The millinery of character possesses no privilege from its effacing if not defacing fingers. It wishes to get close to the soul, and to get at the truth; and it refuses to accept of appearance for the reality, or to associate "Wisdom with periwigs, cassocks with grace, "Great is truth," shouts satire, "and it will prevail;" and falsehood is weak, puny, worthless, and despicable, and it would be ill for the world should it acquire fertility or abundance, therefore we shall laugh it out of countenance, and scorn it into banishment. Place it on the pillory and raise the shout of derision around it, and blow the trumpet of despite wherever it is found, so that the base thing may evanish. Satire is a good thing in the moral universe. It has an undying import and function. In its essence it is a contrast between right and wrong; so as to kindle anger against the latter, and awake reverence and admiration of the former. It is the product and issue of a high and holy hatred of the mean, the hypocritical and the dishonourable, and of a lively indignation against anything that violates the moral and the proper. We have been endowed by nature with the powers of praise and blame,-the ability " to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image ;" and satire is the means by which we turn the edge of the tongue against the unseemly and the vile. When we can conceive a high principle and then perceive a dereliction from it, we feel inclined to shift the sunshine from shining on it, and to set the chill mist of freezing scorn to fasten on it and to bite its bitterness into it. The deformed and haggard actual which we see compels our thoughts to go upward to the high and true ideal, and when we look upon this picture and on that, disdain is inevitable. The age of satire cannot pass away till the age of moral distinctions palls and fades. But so long as man retains his place as a moral being, he cannot avoi desiring to sink the ignoble into contempt under the weight. ridicule and this desire is the very begetter of satire. Among the satirists of our day a first place must be accorded to the great hater and noble denouncer of shams and simulacra of puppets and poppets,-Thomas Carlyle, the finest of the sons of men for scourging villany and hooting off the hypocrite and the pretender. He it is who has brought the "clothes philosophy" of appearance into disrepute, and blighted to the very core the makebelieve of our age. His is a satirical pen, which acts like the sword of Joachim II. of Brandenburg. In the days of this worthy, luxury had got so prevailing that the breeches of the fashionable sometimes contained as many as two hundreds yards of silk. Joachim II. disliked this show of bravery, this silken fulness and foolishness, and strove to abate its enormity. He clothed his hangman in this outrageous garb, as a satire, but that passed unheeded. One day, however, when one of the high solemnities of the Church was going on, and the mighty men of braggadocio, dressed in these bagged and baggagy breeches, were met in the greatness of their paraphernalia in large numbers at the festival, Joachim marked out one of those flaunting wind-bags, and stretching over, sword in hand, he cut the girder which held the hated article up; and behold, in the face of the congregation, the wearer was inexpressibly untrussed, for they fell all down about his heels. Carlyle, in a similar manner, cuts sheer into the enormities of our age, and performs the duty of a satirist. Robert Browning is another of our modern satirists. What is "The Ring and the Book" but a biting satire on the cloak of maliciousness so often worn in the world, and the delight in scandal which the age evinces. There is a most intense satirical dash in his late wife's "Aurora Leigh." Among the satirists of our time, too, are Richard H. Horne, Philip James Bailey, Benjamin Disraeli, Lord Lytton, Charles Mackay, Thomas Cooper the Chartist; and of those who have but recently passed away we may mention W. E. Aytoun and Thackeray. Yet Walter Sherrington affirms that "not one of the rising litterateurs of the day has written satires"! (p. 53). If he knew anything about the writings of James Hannay he would not have represented him as one who "has never attempted to increase the literature of satire," and would have put the word succeeded in the sentence instead. 66 Besides, in a large number of our literary reviews satire has become an established weapon of attack upon men, fashions, aims, and books. We have satiric farces like "Dundreary," dramas like Formosa," on both of which satire has been largely expended. Have we not even had satiric theology written by Whately, and sacred biography satirised by Renan. The age of satirists has not passed away; but the rage for satire increases; hence the spawn of so-called comic periodicals, and of a certain or uncertain kind of novel has such ready sale. It would be well for us if we would try to make satire impossible in our age. M. R. N. |