A narrative of entire gravity may be a gracious and splendid thing; indeed, pure tragedy is perhaps the highest form of art. But when satire is divorced from fiction it must dispense with fiction’s great contribution, the garment of warm imagination and colorful concreteness; and be content with the severe raiment of bald didacticism and chill abstraction. In truth, satire has always been not only the greater beneficiary but the more dependent partner, though what it has in turn supplied is of unquestionable value. It is like an entertaining but unequipaged traveler, always asking for a ride. Even when it apparently had an establishment of its own and was recognized as a literary _genre_, it was not independent with the independence of the lyric, the drama, or the treatise, but was constantly borrowing furniture from them all. Hence when satire invaded Victorian fiction,--or was adopted by it,--the conjunction brought its benefits to both. The former profited qualitatively from the antidote furnished by creative construction to destructive censure, and quantitatively by the improvement resulting from diminution,--that subordination which is the secret of success with all seasoning, trimming, and such accessories. The latter gained, not so much by the mere infusion of pleasantry, for that refreshing element has a deplorable tendency to degenerate into ill bred pertness, as by the toning up of the criticism inseparable from the realistic novel, and by the pungent and dramatic turn given to its didacticism. “Som mirthe or som doctryne” has ever been the demand of the Englishman, and he has relished them best in that happy unison supplied by satire. Hence also the combination was but a new and more consequential celebration of an old, traditional connection. From the Greek Menippean mixture and the Milesian tale the line extends, with innumerable ramifications into fabliaux, burlesques, allegories, letters, and characters, in prose and verse, to the perfected eighteenth-century product, whence the increasingly perfected product of the nineteenth century immediately is derived. Like all such associations, this one is neither accidental on the one hand nor consciously intentional on the other, but is the result of many forces and influences set in operation by circumstances, and available for great effectiveness if rightly comprehended and wisely used. In this Victorian situation we are confronted with the dual factors: a literary form raised to tremendous prestige by a rich inheritance and an especial _rapprochement_ with its own times; and a prevailing temper of humorous criticism which could not fail to thrive under the double stimulus of a fermenting environment about which there were endless things to be said, and a general liberation from external control which allowed these seething utterances free and full play of expression.