[69] Heinsius, in his Dissertations on Horace. A conception drawn perhaps from the Aristotelian “purging of our passions” through tragedy.
[70] Rise of Formal Satire in England. 49.
[71] Leslie Stephen: George Eliot, 67–68.
[72] Thorndike, English Literature in Lectures on Literature, 268–9.
[73] This theoretically includes only the novel, though the term is used in the widest sense. In the cases of Thackeray, Dickens, Eliot, and Meredith, the line is rather hard to draw between the novel and sketches, tales, short stories, and burlesques. Peacock, Lytton, Disraeli, and Butler force us to make the limits of the novel decidedly flexible.
[74] If it were desirable to eliminate the thirteenth chair, it might be done in a number of ways. Peacock might be ruled out as a contemporary of the earlier generation, as Gryll Grange is all that carries him over. Butler on the other hand belongs to the later, except that Erewhon appeared in the year of Middlemarch. As a satirist, Brontë is so near the edge of the circle that her inclusion at all is questionable. Since it happens, however, that the year of her death coincides with that of Reade’s first novel, we might fancy her yielding a place to him, so that there were never more than twelve at one time.
[75] English Humorists; Swift, 2.
Cf. Kingsley: “One cannot laugh heartily at a man if one has not a lurking love for him.” Two Years Ago, 143.
And Meredith: “And to love Comedy you must know the real world, and know men and women well enough not to expect too much of them, though you may still hope for good.” Essay on Comedy, 40. Also: “You share the sublime of wrath, that would not have hurt the foolish, but merely demonstrate their foolishness.” Ibid. 85.
[76] Autobiography, 133.