SATIRE

SATIRE

WE have now come, I think, to the point where this argument about the purpose and the meaning of fiction begins to have a shape and a recognizable direction. I have proposed, as the purpose and highest general end of fiction, the attainment of disinterestedness or impersonality. Leaving aside for the moment the hundred technical questions of method and Design, we begin to see that whatever furthers and enforces this quality is theoretically to be desired, and whatever impedes or befogs it to be deplored. The sentimental spirit and the didactic or preaching spirit, two influences of a close cousinship, fall into their places in the argument as two of the principal forces which defeat impersonality or disinterestedness. The relation between these two is that of a greater and a lesser—or, if we must have a distinction, let didacticism be the cant of the mind, sentimentalism the more fundamental cant of the soul. The two are one at least in the egotism which gives them breath and being; the didactic feeling is sentimental egotism with a specialized twist. We have seen also that Comedy, "the laughter of the mind, " is the mortal enemy of sentimentalists in general. Here is the basic conflict, that between impartial and partisan, between disinterested and egotistical. We shall have enlarged the argument and deepened its foundation still further on

this other side, the constructive, as soon as we have seen that, just as didacticism is the sentimental spirit specialized, so Comedy is only a specialized and concentrated mode of the spirit which always opposes the egotism in fiction—the spirit which we may broadly and loosely name Satire.

For the sake, then, of generalizing the historical conflict between two tendencies, I take our two important and familiar words and do some apparent violence to them by giving each the largest, least technical definition possible. Sentimentalism is the spirit that enjoys ; in fiction, it is a preponderance of the emotional element. Satire is the spirit that protests; and nearly always so far it has constituted the intellectual element in fiction. The sentimentalist feels more than he thinks; we measure him by his enjoyments. The satirist thinks more than he feels, and we measure him by his aversions. Unreflective sympathy and reflective hatred, these are the two great opposed spirits of fiction, the self-interest and the disinterestedness of the novel as we know it in history.

There can be no great difficulty about the use of our two words in this somewhat lax way: we use words as we will, so long as it is kept before us exactly how we are using them. But there is a seeming paradox in the assertion that the hatred in fiction is more intellectual than the sympathy. Enjoyment is a purely personal predilection, indeed : but is not hate a personal predilection inverted? Is there anything more intellectual in choosing arbitrarily against a thing than in choosing arbitrarily for it? Why

are not both matters of caprice, of temperamental accident merely? In ethics, perhaps they are; not, I think, in literature. Our retort may well be that, in the novel, enjoyment remains as arbitrary as in personal experience, whereas aversion ceases to be purely arbitrary by the very fact of its successful transference to literature. You may love with no argument beyond the wholly personal one of your own quickened intuitions and sympathies. And so, in practical life, you may hate, with no argument except that of the nerves. But put your hatred into a book, and you have to make some show of impersonal justification for it; you have to imply categories, discriminations, and find other than merely personal excuses for them. In short, you have to adduce plenty of sound logical reasons why other persons, your readers among them, should hate as you do. In actual practice, then, hate turns out to be the more impersonal feeling—the more reasoned, the more intellectual, the more disinterested, and by all odds the more social.

Theorizing, it will have appeared, lends some color of probability to the contrast as I have just stated it. Now, to come from theory to history. It happens that we can observe the workings of these two forces, the self- asserting love and the self-forgetting hate, especially well in English fiction, because in English fiction rather more than elsewhere the novel has achieved greatness rather through splendid particular excesses than through the balance and matching of all qualities. Whenever the novel has not had

the heart-ache of sensibility, it has had the head-ache of ratiocination.

We see the duel between the man of feeling and the man of reflection, not begun, indeed, but momentously represented, in Richardson and Fielding. We can follow it through their descendants to the edge of our own generation. The novel has grown, as Dean Briggs says colts and young boys do, "one end at a time, " and its major prophets are those who have obviously thought more than they felt or felt more than they thought. I do not of course mean to blame Richardson and Fielding for all, or most, that clutters our modern field, though they do seem prototypical of a great deal of it. But one must insist on what they broadly represent; the general contest between thinking and feeling, the everlasting tug-of-war between temperaments, which in each generation has pulled at fiction and stretched it more or less out of shape, giving it here a decided bulge toward the emotional, there the opposite bulge toward the intellectual, as sentimentalism or satire has predominated. And it oddly appears everywhere, in confirmation of my present point, that the intellectualist is a person whom we'remember by his dislikes, and describe in terms of the things he makes war on. So far in the history of fiction, there is a link between emotionalism and irresponsibility, between intellect and responsibility. The personal aversions are more closely reasoned than the personal predilections. Richardson loved, with all his sensibilities, some things that do not commend

themselves to the intelligence; and Fielding—to put

the matter shortly—hated Richardson. The "Gothic"

romance loved spookery and neurasthenia for their

own sakes; Jane Austen hated those things for the

sake of common sense. It would make a long story

if one were to recount the hatreds of Dickens—for

brutal schools and brutal prisons, for the injustice

and incompetence of the law, for the pretentiousness

and coxcombry of church and press and forum. We

can summarize Dickens in this context by saying that

even the characters whom he loves are presented to

us in terms of the things they rationally hate, as the

elder Weller in terms of his most rational hatred of

Stiggins.

If one had, \then, to affix a single label to the evolution of fiction in the last hundred and fifty years, that label would be the search for impersonality, for a larger way of looking at things than the way of merely capricious preference. From Lyly to Richardson fiction gropes for realism of method and of detail—for verisimilitude. From Richardson to Thomas Hardy, the period when the novel was attaining its majority as a formal art, it groped for disinterestedness, intellectual strength, a social point of view. Sensibility could not supply these, because it was not critical enough ; reasoned antipathies, oftenest sharpened with scorn, supplied or tended to supply them in terms of adverse criticism—or, as I have put it in a roughly summarizing term, Satire.

II

We ought perhaps to retrace enough steps to find the distinction between this general spirit of protest, or Satire, and didacticism. Both of them take a stand, both are designed to instruct; but the stand taken by satire is against rather than for something, and it instructs us in what to avoid, not in what to do. The difference is that between affirmative and negative. What to do can be one of the most difficult of human problems, soluble after all more in terms of motives than in terms of actions themselves—a point which didactic writers nearly always miss. But what to reject, what to loathe—this is oftenest a much easier problem. The socializing influence of hatred is a subject hardly done justice to in the theorizing of moral economists, who will have perhaps somewhat to learn from the vast and terrific exhibitions of that very principle among great modern nations at war.

Most persons, even those of extremely divergent positive tastes, can finding footing of solidarity in endless common aversions. Henry James gave, in The American, a sentence of proof how he understood this potentiality in the unlovely side of human nature. Christopher Newman, outraged and humiliated, sees, as he reflects upon the family which has done him a calculated wrong, that their conjoint will to injure was after all, in its way, an aspiration above individual self- seeking: ". . . it was a link for them, perhaps, their having so hurt him. " This is not an

achievement of community on the highest possible plane, this solidarity of hatred in a nation, a class, or a family ; but it is at least not all evil. We shall find perhaps that neither is the hatred in fiction the ultimate moral achievement ; but it is at least a moral achievement, as the merely basking and irresponsible enjoyment quite fails to be. Satire, like didacticism, does then affirm something, but only a negative something—a denial. The novel cannot recommend a cause without preaching; but it can riddle a cause, it can point the scornful finger, without so prejudicially committing itself.

I have said that satire is clearly negative instead of affirmative ; but this does not mean that it is necessarily destructive instead of constructive. It is an axiom of literature, whatever may be said of politics and religion, that some sort of destruction is often the only possible kind of construction. Satire has at different times—notably in verse of the second third of the 18th century—fallen to the low estate of a convention; the accent of Juvenal has become the accent of fashion. But at its best satire is the gesture of idealism and of righteous human indignation in the presence of abuses not to be borne ; the natural response of the moral sense to the various affronts by injustice and corruption in a world out of joint, or seen by the satirist as being out of joint. When there is so much for ordinary decency to loathe, how idle to give one's self up to tender dreaming ! this is the mood underlying really noble satire. The method may be destructive, but the spirit is something more.

The best satire of Swift, of Goldsmith, of Dickens, even of Smollett—is it not at once both humanistic and humanitarian in its effect f To denounce a wrong is to enforce some alternative right; when the heart is made to burn most hotly against obvious injustices, then it is nearest to melting in that pity and fear which, according to Aristotle, are the purifying emotions of tragedy. And even when the satire is cold, as it commonly is when given the inflection known as irony, it still makes us hate in a greater cause than self- interest, and encourages us to want noble things while resenting ignoble ones. Anyone can verify for himself this constructive and humanizing power of rightly directed aversion, by considering for a moment Fielding's picture of hypocrisy in Blifil, George Eliot's of weak infidelity in Tito Melema, Hardy's of narrow self- righteous goodness in Angel Clare, or any of a hundred other portraits of characters whom we were meant to admire as inventions but to detest as personal embodiments of certain traits.

Satire makes hatred impressive and valid, in short, whenever it makes it most nearly universal. If it be asked whether the satirist is not in some danger of tumbling into the pitfall of sentimentalism and of missing a just breadth of appeal by stressing aversions not belonging to our common human idealism, we may indeed concede the point. And for illustration of it we have to look no farther than to Swift as he wrote in the hours when, carried along on the force of his own invective and lashing himself into a misanthropic fury, he ceased to make the good hate the evil in man

and portrayed all humankind as evil utterly. In the last book of Gulliver's Travels, where man is exclusively a Yahoo and all his character is in "the teeth and the claws, " pity recoils upon the author himself, and fear shrivels us more than it purifies. Satire is purging only when it points to aversions which we can all be made to share ; when it denounces inhumanity for the sake of humanity. It is beside the point to denounce humanity, for to do that is to reject everything. Satire must keep its categories and discriminations; and they must be founded on principles which go deeper than argument, principles which we are bound to hold to by virtue of our existence as social human beings of a common origin, common interests, and a common destiny.

III

This paradox, the constructive potentiality of a method purely negative, appears in the most dab- orate examples of satire of the type voyage imaginaire, all the way from The Ultimate Things Beyond Thule by Antonius Diogenes ['1] to M. Anatole France's Lite des Pingouins, and, in classic English, from De- foe's Memoirs of Sundry Transactions in the World of the Moon and Swift's Gulliver to the late Samuel Butler's Erewhon and Erewhon Revisited. All of these are the Utopian romance more or less inverted. I pass over this form, with but this incidental note, in order to come to a still more refined and specialized application of satire which has rather more to do with the

realistic novel ; a genre of satire reduced to a formal, calculated, and sustained system of irony, of which we have two illustrious examples in English, separated by almost exactly a century: Fielding's Jonathan Wild the Great and Thackeray's Barry Lyndon, the second of these in definite and unmistakable imitation of the first.

These are the old picaresque novel in an elaborate mask. Their subject matter is unscrupulous but picturesque roguery; their method is to hold that roguery up to mock admiration, very much as Swift, in such essays as A Modest Proposal, affects a mock admiration for the ruthless inhumanity of oppressors of the poor. Jonathan Wild is a personage of undeviating criminality; the beautiful consistency of his life is marred by scarce a single generous deed or decent impulse. From the time of his youthful captaincy over a gang of orchard robbers, when he was invariably "treasurer of the booty, some little part of which he would now and then, with wonderful generosity, bestow on those who took it, " until his consummation on the scaffold or "tree of glory, " when he found breath to deliver "a hearty curse" upon the assembled crowd, he showed himself to be "not restrained by any of those weaknesses which disappoint the views of mean and vulgar souls, and which are comprehended in one general term of honesty, which is a corruption of HONOSTY, a word derived from what the Greeks call an ass. " From the title-page to the closing sentence there is an incessant harping on the word "greatness, " used in this scheme of irony

to mean material success without moral goodness. And when, near the end, Fielding reduces the career of his infamous protagonist to a list of elementary principles of "greatness, " behold ! that list exactly defines and delineates the practices by which Fielding saw eminence achieved in the most respected careers of his own 18th century world. His purpose is

to show how a boot-licking society worshipped prestige no matter how gained; his method is to draw a

grotesque parallel between the successful man of the great world and the successful criminal of the underworld, and to signify that the one is as little worthy of admiration as the other. This catalogue of principles, as applicable to a Robert Walpole as to a Jonathan Wild, seems to me to be among the most ingenious and pointed uses of savage irony in English:

"1. Never to do more mischief to another than was necessary to the effecting of his purpose; for that mischief was too precious a thing to be thrown away.

"2. To know no distinction of men from affection; but to sacrifice all with equal readiness to his interest.

"3. Never to communicate more of an affair than was necessary to the person who was to execute it.

"4. Not to trust him who hath deceived you, nor who knows he hath been deceived by you.

"5. To forgive no enemy; but to be cautious and often dilatory in revenge.

"6. To shun poverty and distress, but to ally himself as close as possible to power and riches.

"7. To maintain a constant gravity in his countenance and behavior, and to affect wisdom on all occasions.

"8. To foment eternal jealousies in his gang, one of an- another.

"9. Never to reward anyone equal to his merit: but al

ways to insinuate that the reward was above A

n& That all men were knaves or fools, and much the greater zunalier a composition of both.

all That a good name. like money, must be parted with, or at least greatly risked- in order to bring the owner any advantage.

92. That virtues, like precious atones, were easily counterfeited; that the counterfeits in both eases adorned the wearer equally, and that very few had knowledge or discernment sufficient to distinguish the counterfeit jewel from the real.

"13. That many men were undone by not going deep enough in roguery; as in gaming any man may be a loser who cloth not play the whole game.

"14. That men proclaim their own virtues, as shopkeepers

expose their goods, in order to profit by them.

"15. That the heart was the proper seat of hatred, and the

countenance of affection and friendship. "'

This extraordinary satire of Fielding, and Thackeray 's more sprightly imitation of it, serve well enough to introduce us to one of the great questions of artistic economy in the novel: To what extent is it expedient, and to what extent right, for fiction to specialize in the vicious, the criminal, the decadent, the morbid? Is it good taste, and is it ethical, for art to deal extensively with what is inherently forbidding or repulsive? Of course these two pieces of irony do not actually help us answer the question, because they mean the opposite of what they say; but they do interestingly suggest the question. And we have to face that question squarely in such stories as deal literally with evil character and action.

Theoretically and a priori, we should have to say that art ought to encourage and inspirit us, not depress. But instantly there arises another question : May not it truly hearten and inspirit us, by indirection, through display of things to be shunned, and through the moral recoil provoked by such display? And there is obviously something to be said in the affirmative. Mr. Chesterton, speaking particularly of Fielding and Tom Jones, says: "We have grown to associate morality in a book with a kind of optimism and prettiness ; according to us, a moral book is a book about moral people. But the old idea was almost exactly the opposite; a moral book was a book about immoral people. A moral book was full of pictures like Hogarth's Gin Lane or Stages of Cruelty, or it recorded, like the popular broadsheet, God's Dreadful Judgment against some blasphemer or murderer. . . . Telling the truth about the terrible Struggle of the human soul is surely a very elementary part of the ethics of honesty. If the characters are not wicked, the book is. " 1

As a matter of fact, though, it is not very helpful to try to answer such questions theoretically and a Priori. They have to be answered historically, with reference to that which has proved itself excellent. And we find, whether we begin with Euripides or With Chaucer or with Shakespeare or with Fielding, that no very enduring writer has tried to shirk the Problem of evil. Some of the characters who are

greatest as creations are least great as moral beings; some of the books which most develop and crystallize our moral ideas do so through the presentation of guilt. To summarize, still measuring by this same very handy yardstick of what has proved itself of enduring merit, we can make out at least these few tenable principles:

First, the artist's business is with the whole of life; and there is no department or phase of it into which he may not go, granted only enough conscience and enough skill.

Secondly, he must have that conscience and that skill: we must feel the soundness of his purpose, and there must be no blurring of moral values, no false glamour to make us forget that we are supposed to be reading a criticism of life performed under certain standards. Evil when shown in books can serve no self-justifying purpose unless it is known as evil. We see an infringement of this law in a modern fashion of sentimentalizing crime and criminals, and in a current fashion of looking so indulgently upon the tawdry philandering of sexually irresponsible persons as to carry indulgence over into a sort of perverted evangelism of the fleshly lusts.

Thirdly, if the artist lack critical sense, if he tacitly accept evil as normal, or as indistinguishable from good, he is convicted by his own handiwork; he has palpably made the worse appear the better reason— in which event he pays, as history abundantly proves, the penalty of a speedy oblivion. The dogma of "Art for Art's sake" is eminently productive of this danger

—Art being unintelligible except as a ministration to the highest pleasures of man, and the pleasures of the gratified moral sense being surely among those highest.

All of life, then, is open to the artist ; and we may say that the quintessence of art is some sort of struggle, on a higher or lower plane, between something which ought to enlist the moral sympathies of the reader and something else which ought to repel them. But the artist is responsible for the meaning of that struggle and for the plane on which it takes place ; and if the meaning be perverted or the plane a low one, there is no excusing the artist on the ground of his invisible good intention or his honest error or incapacity.

Iv

It was through the study of evil in character that satire achieved the most important development of its whole history on the non-technical side—a development which involved something amounting to the destruction of satire as such, and the transmutation of it into something still more disinterested and impersonal. I can state this development succinctly by saying that, before the 19th century was far advanced, the villain passed out of literature.

The passing of the villain is one of the most interesting phases of literary history since Jane. Austen. With the assimilation of the romantic blend of humanitarianism and individualism, the villain found

two possible destinies awaiting him. He could become the Byronic hero, a superman full of sin and Weltschmerz and glamour, a dark fallen angel, an attitudinizing rebel hero; or he could become a human being just a little on the lower side of the median of average human goodness—the victim of accidents in heredity or circumstance, a weaker brother but not a compendium of all possible malice and unscrupulousness. Where the romantic individualism triumphed, as in the earlier Bulwer-Lytton, the villain became the Byronic hero; where the romantic humanitarianism triumphed, as in Dickens, the villain became a human being— with a sentimental proclivity, it must be added, for becoming in the last chapter an unnaturally good one. This epoch, the late Romantic and early Victorian, is the epoch of the desperate criminal presented as a creature of good impulses misdirected, an ogre who might as easily have been an angel if he had had better luck with his parents and his education. The Byronic superman we may profitably discard: his existence in letters becomes more and more precarious, until he passes into juvenile fiction and melodrama— for example, the astonishingly ornate and intricate melodrama of Wilkie Collins.

But the other type of converted villain, the type which evolves toward average manhood, and not toward the fallen angels, is of genuine importance. Sentimentalized as was the treatment of him before 1845, illogical and shallow as was the sympathy lavished upon him in some quarters, notably in parts of Dickens, the human villain was to live on and wax

great, not only overcoming the propensity of his creators to weep and sigh over him, but actually overcoming in the end the whole practice of satire as an unequivocal issue between black and white, evil and good. The villain was originated in sentimentalism, but he was continued in the scientific spirit. When it was once seen that any really interesting villain was made up of a great deal of humanity plus a certain admixture of evil inclination, it was sure to be seen next that any really interesting person was a quite similar compound. In other words, as soon as the humanitarian feeling and the sense of brotherhood became assimilated and rationalized, the struggle of fiction became transferred from the stage where hero contends against villain to the other stage where he contends against the unheroic in himself. The issue is just as sharp, just as definitive ; the direction of our moral aversion is no more ambiguous than before; but its object is now only part of a character, the weakness or failing of an individual with whom on the whole we identify ourselves in sympathy. Mankind is no longer classifiable into devils to hate and angels to love:

"Some are fine fellows, some right scurvy; Most, a dash between the two"—

and the task of the novelist and his reader is neither to hate nor to love, but to understand.

Fielding, of course, showed a considerable mastery of this mingled affair, human nature, but came too early to discard the machinery of the superficial vil

lain. He gives us, roughly, a heroine who is perfect angel, a villain who is perfect devil except that he is not a gentleman, and a hero who is indeed "a dash between the two, " a creature near to the human average. Jane Austen, whose genius is throughout one of rare and almost miraculous anticipations, is most of all in advance of the novel of her day in this respect, the complete human credibility of practically all her puppets. Historically, the full fruition of the modern scientific and impersonal interest in evil occurs in George Eliot. The first of great English novelists to come to her proper work from philosophy and the abstract sciences, she is before all else the analyst of that sin which ii omission, and the cause of which is weakness. She studies, in one crucial instance after another, the balance of power between opposed forces in the single character ; and she never makes the mistake of alienating her character from our sympathy by creating him a prodigy of either moral extreme. Even when we study her weaklings, such as Tito Melema and Geoffrey Cass, aversion is mollified by understanding; and in her more balanced characters, such as Maggie Tulliver and Romola—they are most often women—the presence of tragic limitations is precisely what wrings out the last drop of our sympathy. If we hated the weakness more we should understand it less; and if the human imperfections were absent the struggle would lose all its moral poignancy. In George Eliot's work we see satire beginning to turn into something else.

V

This symptom, the dissolution of the personal villain and his re-emergence as the seed of evil or of weakness in average human nature, points, then, to the development which superseded satire. Sentimentalism came first, with its intuitional and unreflective enjoyment; its limitation was that it got itself valued by the intensity of the enjoyment and not by the inherent worth of the things to be enjoyed. Satire followed; a reaction against sentimentalism, and an application of the theory that you could save yourself by hating hateful things. Satire is at least, for this reason, more disinterested than sentimentalism. But the time came, with the decay of dogmatic theology and the less authoritative, more experimental interpretation of moral law, when hatred was seen to be anachronistic and not enough. It was better, of course, to hate the right things responsibly than to love the wrong things, or even the right ones, irresponsibly; but the sincere part of the Victorian humanitarian feeling had somewhat changed the emphasis of human affections generally. It will be fairly accurate to say that after a certain point the 19th century was moved to see how many things it could love humanity in spite of; that is, how much it could understandingly forgive. And its forgiveness was based, not as of old on sensibility, on emotional charity, but on the analytical charity of comprehension. The world of fiction had a sudden vision of how much alike, ultimately, we all are.

The patient anatomizing which George Eliot performed upon the conscience and the feeling of personal guilt was. as I suggested, the purely rational fruit of this new- feeling. On the purely temperamental side, we find its fruit in Thackeray and in Anthony Trollope, taking there the shape of their rare and unprecedented tolerance for their characters. This indulgent and benignant irony of the creator toward his creatures is a new strain in the novel. Jane Austen, serene in spirit as she was, quietly modulated as was her criticism, would have no nonsense from her personae; let Miss Bennet in her prejudice, or Darcy in his unregenerate pride, betray an insincerity, and she is always ready with a tart little rebuke. She will love them so long as they are honestly wrong; but let them be guilty of posturing or deceiving themselves, and she wastes no sympathy on them. . Thaekeray and Trollope perform the miracle, almost lost since Shakespeare, of keeping their characters vivid and whole in two quite separate provinces: one of moral common sense, where we know their vices exactly and will tolerate no illusions about their worth, and another of pure artistic appreciation, where they perpetually divert us by being themselves. Thackeray sustains his and our admiration for such designing adventuresses as Becky Sharp and Blanche Amory, without ever pretending that they are better than they are; he has at once the personal enjoyment of their rarity, and the impersonal estimate of their moral deficiencies. And one wonders whether Trollope could ever possibly have given any

reader the joy in Mrs. Proudie that he found in her himself. She richly merited death; there are many chapters which make the reader want to lay violent hands on her ; yet Trollope long plotted in vain to kill her, and when, under the spur of a conversation about her overheard in a library, he nerved himself to the deed and went home and committed it, he felt as though he had actually done murder. This was not in the least because he was addicted to inventing sentimental extenuations of Mrs. Proudie's general hatefulness and hypocrisy: it was because he had known her long and intimately enough to see that she could no more help being what she was than Mr. Harding could help being what he was. This tolerance, of the intellect alone in some modern persons, of the temperament alone in others, is perhaps the ultimate human wisdom. At all events, in literature it is the end of satire as a formula of methodical scorn or ridicule.

Since Trollope the indulgent view of human nature has had its way more and more. The passing of dogmatic theology weakens the feeling of a hard-and- fast moral law, before which all men are classifiable as saints or sinners; the rapid rise and triumph of the cosmic sciences make an organic unit of the world with all its living creatures, intensifying the perception that all are knit together by a common origin and a common destiny; the social sciences have their birth in this feeling; and it becomes an impossible anachronism to hate again in the old unequivocating way. One must either renounce the violent antipathies altogether and replace them by a universal tolerance, or else one must find something larger to hate.

Not unnaturally, both possibilities come to pass in a single generation. Zola in France and Gissing in England turned the novel into a sort of laboratory experiment, impersonally conducted and carefully measured; man is analyzed in certain of his crucial relations to his fellowmen. At the same time, Samuel Butler was declaiming against man's slavery to his heritage from past generations, hating thus a part of the general constitution of the world. And before long Hardy was to personify all the injustice in the world as a malignant God, and set up that God as the object of man's puny and ineffectual curses. This is as far as satire can go toward the impersonal and still be satire. When hatred has turned from actual men and women and their actions in order to expend itself on an evil principle, it is hatred quite depersonalized. Since 1895 and Jude the Obscure, there is in fact hardly a good hater left in British fiction.