Satire, it has been said, is an ignoble art; and it is probable that there are no satirists in Heaven.  Probably there are no doctors either.  Satire and medicine are our responses to a diseased world—­to our diseased selves.  They are responses, however, that make for health.  Satire holds the medicine-glass up to human nature.  It also holds the mirror up in a limited way.  It does not show a man what he looks like when he is both well and good.  It does show a man what he looks like, however, when he breaks out into spots or goes yellow, pale, or mottled as a result of making a beast of himself.  It reflects only sick men; but it reflects them with a purpose.  It would be a crime to permit it, if the world were a hospital for incurables.  To write satire is an act of faith, not a luxurious exercise.  The despairing Swift was a fighter, as the despairing Anatole France is a fighter.  They may have uttered the very Z of melancholy about the animal called man; but at least they were sufficiently optimistic to write satires and to throw themselves into defeated causes.

It would be too much to expect of satire that it alone will cure mankind of the disease of war.  It is a good sign, however, that satires on war have begun to be written.  War has affected with horror or disgust a number of great imaginative writers in the last two or three thousand years.  The tragic indictment of war in The Trojan Women and the satiric indictment in The Voyage to the Houyhnhnms are evidence that some men at least saw through the romance of war before the twentieth century.  In the war that has just ended, however—­or that would have ended if the Peace Conference would let it—­we have seen an imaginative revolt against war, not on the part of mere men of letters, but on the part of soldiers.  Ballads have survived from other wars, depicting the plight of the mutilated soldier left to beg: 

  You haven’t an arm and you haven’t a leg,
  You’re an eyeless, noseless, chickenless egg,
  You ought to be put in a bowl to beg—­
      Och, Johnnie, I hardly knew you!

But the recent war has produced a literature of indictment, basing itself neither on the woes of women nor on the wrongs of ex-soldiers, but on the right of common men not to be forced into mutual murder by statesmen who themselves never killed anything more formidable than a pheasant.  Soldiers—­or some of them—­see that wars go on only because the people who cause them do not realize what war is like.  I do not mean to suggest that the kings, statesmen and journalists who bring wars about would not themselves take part in the fighting rather than that there should be no fighting at all.  The people who cause wars, however, are ultimately the people who endure kings, statesmen and journalists of the exploiting and bullying kind.  The satire of the soldiers is an appeal not to the statesmen and journalists, but to the general imagination of mankind.  It is an attempt to drag our imaginations