In her Preface to the belated edition of _The Professor_, Charlotte Brontë declared her own preference for a depiction of a normal and unadorned existence to be thwarted by the lack of editorial enthusiasm. After stating the condition of things she adds-- “* * * the publishers in general scarcely approved of this system, but would have liked something more imaginative and poetical--something more consonant with a highly wrought fancy, with a taste for pathos, with sentiments more tender, elevated, unworldly. Indeed, until an author has tried to dispose of a manuscript of this kind he can never know what stores of romance and sensibility lie hidden in breasts he would not have suspected of casketing such treasures.” An accurate description of Victorianism is contained in this ironic indictment, and perhaps also an explanation of the romantic trend of its realism on the ground of the law of supply and demand as well as that of natural propensity. Lytton prided himself prodigiously on his true rendering of life, though of his two dozen novels, _The Caxtons_ alone approaches the realistic type, and pictures in one of his heroes[119] a phase at least of his artistic ideal: “The humblest alley in a crowded town had something poetical for him; he was ever ready to mix in a crowd, if it were only gathered round a barrel-organ or a dog fight, and listen to all that was said, and notice all that was done. And this I take to be the true poetical temperament essential to every artist who aspires to be something more than a scene-painter.” That the satirical element in this romantico-realistic form of fiction should be characterized by humor, exposure, and comparative rarity, instead of wit, exaggeration, and ubiquity, is inevitable, since the former qualities accord not only with realism but with one another. Humor is the comic sense which is amused by things as they are, whereas wit either creates the absurdity or ferrets it out of obscurity. Hence the former is allied to the actual more than to the fanciful, and uses the method of simple disclosure rather than caricature. While therefore the imaginative energy of wit is dynamic, that of humor is more quiescent, being sufficiently exercised by its function of interpretation, of showing wherein lurks the spirit of the laughable, however grave and solemn the appearance to the unseeing eye. Where the quality of the satire is of this realistic order, the quantity must necessarily be restricted and more or less incidental rather than dominant; subdued, not rampant. For the true satirical humorist, seeing life steadily and whole, observes that while certain parts of it are unquestionably absurd, whether flauntingly or subtly so, these ludicrous shreds and patches, absolutely integral and ineradicable as they are, are nevertheless only a portion and not so large a one, of the stupendous whole.