“For, as farre as I can se, It is wrong with eche degre; For the temporalte Accuseth the spiritualte; The spirituall agayne Dothe grudge and complayne Upon the temporall men:” 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] “Because they neither flattered herself nor her children, she could not believe them good-natured; and because they were fond of reading, she fancied them satirical: perhaps without exactly knowing what it was to be satirical; but that did not signify. It was censure in common use, and easily given.”