CHAPTER I

SATIRE IN THE VICTORIAN NOVEL

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SATIRE IN THE VICTORIAN

NOVEL

BY

FRANCES THERESA RUSSELL, PH.D.

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH, STANFORD UNIVERSITY

SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT

OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR

THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

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1920

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COPYRIGHT, 1920,

BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Set up and electrotyped. Published January, 1920.

VIRO DOCTISSIMO

DAVID STARR JORDAN

ET

DIS MANIBUS

GUILELMI JAMES

SACRUM

QUI MIHI TEMPORE MEO GRAVISSIMO, NOVA SUPPEDITANTES

OFFICIA NOVAM VITÆ SEMITAM MONSTRAVERUNT

PREFACE

If the following monograph were to be presented from the point of

view of a proponent, the author would be put triply on the defensive

in relation to the theme. For, from one cause or another, the trio of

terms in the title lies under a certain blight of critical opinion.

Satire, being a thistle “pricked from the thorny branches of reproof,”

cannot expect to be cherished in the sensitive human bosom with the

welcome accorded to the fair daffodil or the sweet violet. It must be

content to be admired, if at all, from a safe distance, with the cold

eye of intellectual appraisal.

Victorianism has the distinction of being the only period in literature

whose very name savors of the byword and the reproach. To be an

Elizabethan is to be envied for the gift of youthful exuberance and

an exquisite joy in life. To be a Queen Annian (if the phrase may

be adapted) is to be respected for the accomplishments of mature

manhood,--a dignified mein, ripened judgment, and polished wit. To be

a Victorian--that indeed provokes the question whether ’twere better

to be or not to be. The chronological analogy cannot, however, be

carried out, for the Victorian, whatever the cause of his unfortunate

reputation, can hardly be accused of senility. On the contrary, the

impression prevails that the startled ingenuousness, for instance,

with which he opened his eyes at Darwin, Ibsen, and the iconoclasts in

Higher Criticism; the vehemence with which he opposed and refuted and

fulminated against everything hitherto undreampt of in his philosophy;

the complacency with which he viewed himself and his achievements, were

attributes more appropriate to adolescence than to any later time of

life. Withal there was little of the grace and gayety of youth, and

not much more of the poise and humor of manhood. That the Victorian

was never at ease, in Zion or elsewhere, that he was prone to take

himself and his disjointed times very seriously, without achieving

a proportionate reformation, is a charge from which he never can be

acquitted. To our modern authorities, especially such dictators as

Shaw and Wells, contemplating him from the vantage ground of a higher

rung in the ladder of civilization, the Victorian looks as Wordsworth

did to Lady Blandish, like “a very superior donkey,” protected by the

side-blinders of conventionality, saddled and bridled by authority, and

ridden around in a circle by sentiment (most tyrannical of drivers),

with much cracking of whip and raising of dust, but no real change of

intellectual or spiritual locality. Nor can all the cavorting fun of

Dickens, all the pungent playfulness of Thackeray, all the sardonic

gibes of Carlyle, all the grotesque gesturing of Browning, all the

winged irony of George Eliot and Matthew Arnold, not even all the

quips and cranks in _Punch_ itself, avail to quash the indictment. The

Victorian may be defended, appreciated, exonerated even; he may in time

succeed in living it down. But to live it down is not quite the same as

to have had nothing that had to be lived down.

The Novel has been called the Cinderella of Literature. And it is true

that while she may be useful, indispensable, a secret favorite of the

whole family, no magic wand can give her the real enchantment of a

caste that survives the stroke of twelve. She may act as the drudge

to fetch and carry our theories, or the playmate to amuse our idle

hours, but she must be kept in her place, and her place is with neither

the esthetic aristocracy of poetry nor the didactic patricianism of

philosophy and criticism. She has, indeed, recently been fitted with a

golden slipper, but her Prince hails from the Kingdom of Dollars, and

his rank is recorded in Bradstreet instead of the Peerage.

The indifferent or repellent nature of a subject, even though triple

distilled, has nothing to do, however, with its value as a topic

for investigation. I present this study neither as apologist nor

enthusiast. If we expand Browning’s “development of a soul” to include

the mental as well as the spiritual stages, as the poet himself did

in actual practice, we must agree with him that “little else is worth

study.” So persistent and insistent in the mind of man has been, and

still is, the satiric mood, so devoted has he been from immemorial

ages to the habit of story-telling (and seldom for the mere sake of

the story), so voluminous and emphatic did he become in the nineteenth

century, that no complete account of him can be rendered up until, amid

the infinite variety of his aspects, he has been viewed as a Victorian

satirist, using as his medium the English novel.

Whatever the result of this observation may be, the process has been

one of continual delight, tempered by despair; for one enters as it

were a room of tremendous size not only full of curious and challenging

objects (over-furnished perhaps), but supplied also with numerous

doors opening into other apartments, and these ask an amount of time

and attention which only the span of a Methuselah could place at one’s

disposal.

It must be admitted, though, that it is a happier lot to stand before

open doors, even in dismay at the illimitable vistas, than to confront

closed doors or none at all. And I wish in this connection to offer

my tribute of appreciation and admiration to one who has prëeminently

the scholar’s talisman of Open Sesame into the many and rich realms

of literature. It was my good fortune to prepare this study under the

direction of Professor Ashley H. Thorndike, of Columbia University,

by whose benignly severe criticism so many students have profited, by

whose sure taste and searching wisdom so many have been guided. To

him, to his colleagues in the English Department, and to the other

officers of the University who helped to make my term of residence the

satisfaction it has been, it is a pleasure to express my gratitude. To

my Stanford colleague, Miss Elisabeth Lee Buckingham, I am indebted for

the drudgery of copy-reading, both in manuscript and in proof, and for

many valuable suggestions.

F. T. R.

CONTENTS

_PART I_

PREMISES

CHAPTER I

THE SATIRIC SPIRIT

PAGE

Various interpretations because of various manifestations.

Chief constituents, criticism and humor. Relation of these in

the formula. Testimony of satirists as to the presence of

humor, criticism being taken for granted. The satiric motive;

temperamental cause and ethical intent. Testimony as to both.

Symposium on the discrepancy between prospectus and

performance. The realizable ideal. Objects: empiric data on

vice, folly, and deception. Reason for universal criticism

and ridicule of deception. Criteria of good satire.

Difficulties, limitations, and real function 1

CHAPTER II

THE CONFLUENCE

Relationship between satire and fiction. Ancient but incomplete

and uneven alliance. Union in the nineteenth century. The

Victorian novelists. Their chronology and background.

Classification as satirists. Testimony of the novelists

themselves as to satire 41

_PART II_

METHODS

CHAPTER I

THE ROMANTIC

Possible methodic categories. Reason for present choice.

Proportion of the romantic or fantastic type. Peacock and

Butler. Lytton and Disraeli. Thackeray and Meredith.

Characteristics of this form of satire: wit, invention,

exaggeration, and concentration 59

CHAPTER II

THE REALISTIC

Character of Victorian realism. Nature of realistic satire.

Subdivisions, based on authors’ methods and devices. The direct

or didactic satirists: Lytton, Thackeray, Dickens, Meredith.

Satire in plot or situation: _Martin Chuzzlewit_, _Vanity Fair_,

_The Egoist_. Minor episodes. Satire expressed by witty

characters, of various types 84

CHAPTER III

THE IRONIC

Verbal and philosophic irony. Banter and sarcasm. The Irony

of Fate. Relation of irony to satire. Differing opinions.

Distribution of irony among the novelists. Direct or verbal:

present in varying degrees in practically all. Crystallized

and pervasive forms. Irony in circumstance: Trollope, Eliot,

and Meredith. Subdivisions: dramatic irony; the reversed wheel

of fortune, the granted desire; the lost opportunity.

Meredithian irony directed against the ironic interpretation

of life 121

_PART III_

OBJECTS

CHAPTER I

INDIVIDUALS

Personalities the original and primitive element in satire.

Effect of this influence upon the satiric product, and of this

in turn upon the attitude toward satire. Citations. In fiction

no hard and fast line between real and imaginary characters.

Lack of personal satire among the novelists. Its prevalence

limited to the earlier writers: Peacock, Lytton, Disraeli, and

Thackeray before 1850 167

CHAPTER II

INSTITUTIONS

Victorian attitude toward established institutions. Satire

directed against the following: Society, including the home,

woman, marriage; the State, including politics, sociology, law,

charities and corrections, war; the Church, treated both by

partisans on the inside, and pagans on the outside; the School,

signifying education, from the fireside to the college;

Literature and the Press; the English as a nation. Lack of

complementary reconstruction 179

CHAPTER III

TYPES

Impossibility of maintaining fixed classes. Unity and emphasis

secured by artificial devices. Several human traits temptingly

vulnerable, though all some form of deceit. Hypocrisy the

specialty of Dickens, Folly, of Dickens and Meredith,

Snobbishness, of Thackeray, Sentimentality and Egoism, of

Meredith. Scattered fire against vulgarity, fanaticism, and

other targets. Combination and interplay of traits in one

character exemplified by Trollope’s Lady Carbury 229

_PART IV_

CONCLUSIONS

CHAPTER I

RELATIONSHIPS

The various novelists compared as to respective quality,

quantity, and range of satirical element. Discussion of the

merging of satire into cynicism, tragedy, and idealism on the

critical side, and into comedy, wit, and philosophic humor, on

the humorous. Relation to intellect and emotion. Relative

ranking of satirists influenced by these considerations 269

CHAPTER II

THE VICTORIAN CONTRIBUTION

The cumulative inheritance. Recent change in form from heroic

couplet to prose fiction. Progressive change in substance from

hypocritical to sentimental side of deceit. Seen in

institutions as well as in types of character. Science and

democracy the most influential factors. Scientific search for

causes of failure. Democratic sense of social responsibility.

Satire directed against self-deceived inefficiency mistaken for

success. Satiric method concentrated on exposure of motives.

Satiric manner less assertive and more casual and urbane.

Recognition of the paradox in ridicule. Reduction of it to

minor rôle, though staged with more finesse and effectiveness.

Stress shifted from the critical element to the ironically

humorous 288

Bibliographical note 317

Index 329

PART I

PREMISES

Satire in the Victorian Novel

CHAPTER I

THE SATIRIC SPIRIT

“Are ye satirical, sir?” inquired the Ettrick Shepherd, warily

suspicious of the cryptic eulogy just pronounced by his companion on

the minds and manners of the English shopocracy.

“I should be ashamed of myself if I were, James,” was the grieved reply.

We know very well, however, that Christopher North was not ashamed

of himself, at least not with the true contrition that leads to

reformation. On the contrary, we fear that he cherished and cultivated

quite shamelessly his gift of caustic wit. In any case, whether the

disavowal came from ironic whim or from a concession to the popular

attitude toward satire, it illustrates the first difficulty confronting

the student of this indeterminate subject.

To recognize the satirical at sight, to know whether a man is telling

the truth, either when he claims to be a satirist or when he disclaims

the charge, is something of an accomplishment. For the complex and

Protean nature of satire, _varium et mutabile semper_, has naturally

led to much disagreement not only as to its existence in certain cases,

but as to its justification in general. To its eulogist, usually

the satirist himself, satire is an instrument of discipline with a

divine commission,--a Scourge of God. To its apologist, usually the

detached observer, it is a more or less dubious means to a more or less

necessary end. To its disparager, usually the satirized, it is a wanton

mischief-maker, superfluous and intolerable. The personal resentment of

this last may be fortified by the convenient logic which identifies the

agent with the cause. “People who really dread the daring, original,

impulsive character which is the foundation of the satirical,” says

Hannay in one of his lectures on Satire, “ingenuously blame the

satirist for the state of things which he attacks.”

These varieties of attitude toward satire arise not only from

varieties in temperament and satirical experience, but from the

diverse manifestations of satire itself. Take, for instance, those

characters in literature which seem to be an incarnation of the satiric

spirit. Thersites is the dealer in personalities, scoffing and gibing

at the élite with the licensed audacity of the court fool. Reynard

is the satirical rogue who not only perceives the weaknesses of his

fellow citizens but turns them to his own advantage. Alceste is the

misanthrope, “critic,” as Meredith says, “of everybody save himself,”

but lifting his strictures out of the merely personal by attaching them

to a general interpretation of life. The Hebrew _Adversary_ is the

cynic with a scientific zest for experiment. He impugns motives, fleers

at fair appearances, prides himself on his superior penetration, and

questions the price for which a prosperous Job serves God. His loss of

the wager through actual test of his theory has been taken as proof

that such suspicions are unwarranted, and that the trust of the Divine

Idealist in human nature was justified. This conclusion, however, must

be qualified by the admission that the inductive process was conducted

on limited data, and that if Eliphaz, Bildad, or Zophar had been chosen

for the trial, the result might have been different. As it was, the

final silence of the quenched satirist, and his absence from the happy

ending may be construed as a sign of defeat in one instance that by no

means invalidated his general attitude of doubt and interrogation.

Of all these embodiments, however, the most perfect representation

of the satiric spirit is a product of English genius. The melancholy

Jaques has abundant slings and arrows of his own wherewith to retaliate

for those of outrageous fortune, but he never fails to wing them with

laconic wit and imperturbable humor. He expressly denies being guilty

of personalities.

“What woman in the city do I name,

When that I say the city-woman bears

The cost of princes on unworthy shoulders?”

He snubs with careless aplomb the too oratorical Orlando, and cannily

avoids the too loquacious Duke. “I think of as many matters as he,” he

observes, “but I give heaven thanks, and make no boast of them.” He

reviews the career of man, and sees him proceeding with pretentious

futility through his seven sad ages to an inglorious conclusion. And

yet this philosopher admits his very pessimism to be something of a

pose, and turns his humor reflexively against himself. All satirists

have a fondness for sucking melancholy out of a song as a weasel

sucks eggs; all are prone to rail at the first born of Egypt simply

because they cannot sleep, but few have the honesty to acknowledge it.

Meanwhile, although this courtier claims motley as his only wear, his

companions perceive the genuineness of his humanity and the value of

his protests.

“Thus most invectively he pierceth through

The body of the country, city, court,

Yea, and of this our life.”

And thus have diverse manifestations of the satiric spirit appeared

from time to time. Few seem to be visible just at present, but we may

be sure that the Spirit of Satire has not deserted our planet. Still

is he busy walking up and down in the earth and going to and fro in

it. Still does he probe and mock, sometimes with penetrative wisdom,

sometimes in prejudice and error, but always as a challenge not to be

ignored.

Satire has not only embodied itself in certain characters of

literature, but has made and maintained for itself an important place

in that realm. This place may be divided into two fairly distinct

areas. The narrower one is known as formal satire, and has always been

expressed in verse: the Latin hexameter, the Italian _terza rima_, the

French Alexandrine, the English heroic couplet. The larger and less

definite section is formed by surcharging with the satiric tone some

other literary type. Such a combination is found in the Aristophanic

comedy, the dialogues of Lucian, the romances of Rabelais, Cervantes,

and Swift. Such also are _The Rape of the Lock_, _Don Juan_, _The

Bigelow Papers_, _Man and Superman_, and countless others. In addition

to these there is a third estate, the largest and most heterogeneous,

consisting of writings mainly serious, with a more or less pronounced

satiric flavor.

Any study, therefore, which tries to deal with satire as a mode rather

than a form will profit by using the adjective instead of the noun.

Without fully accepting the erasure of the old literary boundaries

advocated by Croce, Spingarn, and the modern school, we may say that

in this particular field at least, the substitution of the descriptive

_satiric_ for the categoric _satire_ shows that discretion which is

the better part of valor. Still, since to avoid the responsibility

of deciding whether or not a given production is a satire, by the

non-committal device of calling it satiric, is only to beg the question

so far as a definition is concerned, it is advisable to produce some

identifying label. Stated in brief, satire is humorous criticism of

human foibles and faults, or of life itself, directed especially

against deception, and expressed with sufficient art to be accounted as

literature.

When we say, however, that satire is a union of those two intangible,

subjective elements, criticism and humor, we do not assume the equation

fully to be expressed by the formula--Antagonism plus Amusement equals

Satire. For neither is all criticism humorous nor all humor critical.

The relation is that of two circles, not coincident but overlapping.

[Illustration]

Confusion has arisen because, while the boundaries of the two separate

circles are fairly distinct in our minds, the circumference made by

their conjunction is merged in their respective planes. Accordingly,

the term satire is sometimes used to denote humorless criticism,--which

is really invective, denunciation, any sort of reprehension; and

sometimes uncritical humor,--which is mere facetiousness and

jocularity. Not every prophet, preacher, or pedagogue is a satirist,

nor yet every merry clown, or exuberant youth, or mild worldly-wise man

enjoying the blunders of innocent naïveté.

Professor Dewey reminds us that the ideal state of mind is “a nice

balance between the playful and the serious.” But in the satiric

circle a nice balance would be found only at the center. Wherever there

are boundaries, there are always some sections of the enclosure nearer

the margin than others. Thus, although satire is a compound, it does

not follow that its fractions stand in a constant uniform ratio. On the

contrary, the proportion ranges all the way from a minimum of humor in

a Juvenal or a Johnson to a minimum of criticism in a Horace, a Gay,

or a Lamb. Either quality may reach the vanishing point, but when it

passes it, the remaining one cannot alone create satire, any more than

oxygen or hydrogen can be transformed into water.

Nor can either quality be defined in other than psychological terms.

The critical sense is rooted in the instincts of attraction and

repulsion, the reaction of an organism to any new stimulus being

_pro_ or _con_ according to the preëstablished harmony or antagonism

between them. As each human being grows to maturity by responding to

experience, he acquires his individual set of opinions and ideals,

largely borrowed from the habits and conventions of his groups, ethnic,

social, and what not, with a small residue of his own originality.

Equipped with this outfit of criteria he looks upon life and finds it

complete or wanting, tests his fellow men and approves or condemns,

examines all created things and calls them good or bad. But he is so

constituted that his acquiescence is likely to be somewhat passive,

and his protests active, his commendation grudging and qualified,

his condemmation sweeping and thorough. Says an eighteenth century

satirist,--[1]

“Broad is the road, nor difficult to find,

Which to the house of Satire leads mankind;

Narrow and unfrequented are the ways,

Scarce found out in an age, which lead to praise.”

The humorous sense is likewise an essence and an index of disposition.

The inadequacy of most definitions of the ludicrous, from Aristotle’s

“innocuous, unexpected incongruity,” to Bergson’s “mechanical

inelasticity,” lies in their concentration on the objective side of

it,--the stimulus to mirth,--whereas the subjective,--the mirthful

person,--deserves the emphasis. Laughter throws a far more illuminating

ray on the laugher than the laughed at, for it indicates not only taste

and mood but the trend of one’s philosophy. In betraying a man’s idea

of the incongruous, it implies his conception of the congruous, and

reveals his whole coördination of life. We may, it is true, define

humor by saying that intellectually it is a contemplation of life from

the angle of amusement, and emotionally, a joyous effervescence over

the absurdities in life ever present to the discerning eye; but we can

never quite capture it, any more than pleasure or tragedy. We can,

however, use these abstractions as refracted definers of character, by

noting what sort of a man it is who regards such and such things as

amusing, or delightful, or unendurable. For not only as a man thinks,

but also as he laughs and exults and censures and suffers, so is he.

That satire is woven from double strands, the blue of rebuke and the

red of wit,--becoming thereby in a chromatic sense the purple patch of

literature,--is testified to by satiric theory as well as practice. The

critical element may of course be taken for granted, but since it has

been sometimes over-emphasized at the expense of the humorous, some

testimony as to the latter must be given.

It is to Horace that we are indebted not only for the first finished

formal satire, but for the first attempt at an analysis of the then

newest literary type. He sketches the history of satire as an exposure

of crime, but insists that this mission may be performed with courtesy

and the light touch, since even weighty matters are sometimes settled

more effectively by a jest than by grim asperity.

“_Ridiculum acri_

_Fortius et melius magnas plerumque secat res._”[2]

It is interesting to note that his own consistent practice in this

matter is acknowledged by his successor Persius, who says of him,

“Sportive and pleasant round the heart he played,

And wrapt in jests the censure he conveyed.”[3]

When Jonson reintroduced the Aristophanic vehicle of comedy to carry

his satire, though fashioned in a different style, he also re-voiced

the Horatian satiric philosophy, promising realism,--such characters

and actions as comedy would choose,

“When she would show an image of the times,

And sport with human follies, not with crimes.

Except we make ’hem such, by loving still

Our popular errors, when we know they’re ill.

I mean such errors, as you’ll all confess,

By laughing at them, they deserve no less:”[4]

A writer of the Restoration Period carries on the tradition:

“Some did all folly with just sharpness blame,

Whilst others laughed and scorned them into shame.

But of these two, the last succeeded best,

As men aim rightest when they shoot in jest.”[5]

The spokesman of the eighteenth century on this point is Young.

“No man can converse much in the world but, at what he meets

with, he must either be insensible, or grieve, or be angry, or

smile. Some passion (if we are not impassive) must be moved;

for the general conduct of mankind is by no means a thing

indifferent to a reasonable and virtuous man. Now, to smile at

it, and turn it into ridicule, I think most eligible; as it

hurts ourselves least, and gives Vice and Folly the greatest

offense.

“Laughing at the misconduct of the world will, in a great

measure, ease us of any more disagreeable passion about it.

One passion is more effectually driven out by another than by

reason.”[6]

And about the same time our first satirical novelist was avowing his

own creed and performance:

“If nature hath given me any talents at ridiculing vice and

imposture, I shall not be indolent, nor afraid of exerting

them.”[7]

Again: “I have employed all the wit and humour of which I am

master in the following history; wherein I have endeavoured to

laugh mankind out of their favorite follies and vices.”[8]

The self-conscious nineteenth century is full of comments on this

topic, as on all others, but two or three representative ones will

suffice as examples.

It is not really the great Greek satirist but his modern interpreter

who utters this explanatory sentiment:

“Now, earnestness seems never earnest more

Than when it dons for garb--indifference;

So, there’s much laughing: but, compensative,

When frowning follows laughter, then indeed

Scout innuendo, sarcasm, irony!”[9]

Finally, turning to the encyclopedia for a modern official

pronouncement, we find humor again cited as a _sine qua non_.[10]

“Satire in its literary aspect may be defined as the expression

in adequate terms of the sense of amusement or disgust excited

by the ridiculous or unseemly, provided that humor is a

distinctly recognisable element, and that the utterance is

invested with literary form. Without humor, satire is invective;

without literary form, it is mere clownish jesting. * * * This

feeling of disgust or contempt may be diverted from the failings

of man individual to the feebleness and imperfection of man

universal, and the composition may still be a satire; but if the

element of scorn or sarcasm were entirely eliminated it would

become a sermon.”

The matter of ingredients is more easily disposed of, however, than

that of causation. It is obviously easier to scrutinize a finished

product and see what it is made of than to go back to its origin and

discover why it was made. For the latter process leads us to the

domain of motives, that shadowy realm where the real is often made to

hide behind the assumed or at least the instinctive kept down by the

acquired. In this mental kingdom many an impulsive little prince has

been smothered by a deliberative, ambitious usurper who felt a call to

rule.

In the province of satire the real internal stimulus is temperament. If

a man has a critical disposition, he is bound to criticise. If he has

a keen sense of humor, he will be alive to the absurd. If he possesses

both, he is a natural-born satirist and cannot escape his manifest

destiny,--so long as he is not inarticulate. But the declared motives

are for the most part ethical and altruistic, a lineage much more

presentable and worthy of high command.

This human tendency to justify its instinctive behavior by _ex post

facto_ morality has produced an impressive symposium on the thesis

that satire has a definite purpose and moreover a noble one. Thus while

the satirist admits his malice aforethought, he protests that the

malicious suffers a sea change into the beneficent, for that he must be

cruel only to be kind. The modest and honest confession of Horace[11]

that he wrote satire because he had to write something and was not

equal to epic, was soon supplanted by the Juvenalian declaration of

_saeva indignatio_, and it is from this perennial spring that a

steady flow of eulogy has irrigated the history of satire.

A representative of the Elizabethan group is Marston:[12]

“I would show to be

_Tribunus plebis_, ’gainst the villainy

Of those same Proteans, whose hypocrisy

Doth still abuse our fond credulity.”

Milton manages here as elsewhere to sound a clarion note over the clash

of seventeenth century partisanship:[13]

“A taste for delicate satire cannot be general until refinement

of manners is general likewise; till we are enlightened enough

to comprehend that the legitimate object of satire is not to

humble an individual, but to improve the species. * * * For a

satire as it is born out of a tragedy so it ought to resemble

its parentage, to strike high, to adventure dangerously at the

most eminent vices among the greatest persons.”

Defoe[14] echoes Dryden,[15] both speaking with reasonable consistency;

and even Pope[16] tries to make out a case for himself. But the

completest paean is from the pen of John Brown.[17] His poetic analysis

begins at the beginning:

“In every breast there burns an active flame,

The love of glory, or the dread of shame:

The passion one, though various it appear,

As brighten’d into hope, or dimm’d by fear.

Thus heav’n in pity wakes the friendly flame,

To urge mankind on deeds that merit fame:

But man, vain man, in folly only wise,

Rejects the manna sent him from the skies:”

The climax of this human error is perverted ambition and a snobbish

idea of excellence:

“The daemon _Shame_ paints strong the ridicule,

And whispers close, ‘the world will call you fool!’

Hence Satire’s pow’r: ’tis her corrective part

To calm the wild disorders of the heart.

She points the arduous heights where glory lies,

And teaches mad ambition to be wise:

In the dark bosom wakes the fair desire,

Draws good from ill, a brighter flame from fire;

Strips black Oppression of her gay disguise,

And bids the hag in native horror rise;

Strikes tow’ring pride and lawless rapine dead,

And plants the wreath on Virtue’s awful head.

Nor boasts the Muse a vain imagin’d pow’r,

Though oft she mourns those ills she cannot cure,

The worthy court her, and the worthless fear;

Who shun her piercing eye, that eye revere.

Her awful voice the vain and vile obey,

And every foe to wisdom feels her sway.

Smarts, pedants, as she smiles, no more are vain;

Desponding fops resign the _clouded cane_:

Hush’d at her voice, pert Folly’s self is still,

And Dulness wonders while she drops her quill.”

The author’s optimism mounts even to the disparagement of Force,

Policy, Religion, Mercy, and Justice, in comparison with this puissant

and impeccable goddess, in whose presence the wicked never cease from

trembling,--especially stricken when she draws

“Her magic quill, that like Ithuriel’s spear

Reveals the cloven hoof, or lengthen’d ear;

Drags the vile whisperer from his dark abode,

’Till all the daemon starts up from the toad.”

Feeling perhaps that after all his client’s status is a trifle dubious,

her advocate continues with a caution and a climax:

“Who combats Virtue’s foe is Virtue’s friend;

Then judge of Satire’s merit by her end:

To guilt alone her vengeance stands confin’d,

The object of her love is all mankind.”

The sober eighteenth century brings us back to reality with a

characteristic comment by the best satirist of the period, who admires

his favorite predecessors, “not indeed for that wit and humour

alone which they all so eminently possessed, but because they all

endeavoured, with the utmost force of their wit and humour, to expose

and extirpate those follies and vices which chiefly prevailed in their

several countries.”[18]

But Gifford, akin in spirit to the satirist he translated, goes to the

extreme in taking the satiric office seriously:

“To raise a laugh at vice * * * is not the legitimate office

of Satire, which is to hold up the vicious as objects of

reprobation and scorn, for the example of others, who may be

deterred by their sufferings.”[19]

De Quincey carries the tradition over into the nineteenth century

by reminding us that “the satirist has a reformative as well as a

punitive duty to discharge.” Meredith[20] agrees that “the satirist

is a moral agent, often a social scavenger, working on a storage of

bile.” Symonds[21] affirms that “Without an appeal to conscience the

satirist has no _locus standi_.” Browning has Balaustion say to

Aristophanes:

“Good Genius! Glory of the poet, glow

O’ the humorist who castigates his kind,

Suave summer-lightning lambency which plays

On stag-horned tree, misshapen crag askew,

Then vanishes with unvindictive smile

After a moment’s laying black earth bare,

Splendor of wit that springs a thunderball--

Satire--to burn and purify the world,

True aim, fair purpose; just wit justly strikes

Injustice,--right, as rightly quells the wrong,

Finds out in knaves’, fools’, cowards’ armory

The tricky tinselled place fire flashes through,

No damage else, sagacious of true ore.”

And Dawson[22] brings satiric utilitarianism into the present century:

“It is quite beside the mark to say that we do not like satire.

It is equally beside the mark to say that we have never known

such a world as this. The thing to be remembered is that in all

ages the satirist of manners has been of the utmost service to

society in exposing its follies and lashing its vices. It is the

work of a great satirist to apply the caustic to the ulcers of

society; and if we are to let our dislike of satire overrule our

judgment, we shall not only record our votes against a Juvenal

and a Swift, but equally against the whole line of Hebrew

prophets.”

All these citations refer more or less directly to the cause--the

reason or motive for satirical utterance--but have some bearing on the

effect--the tangible result of it,--since the two are to a certain

extent inseparable. They are, however, also distinct, and particularly

so in this case; as cause is a psychological and hidden thing, and

effect is more external and visible. In turning from the first to the

second we pass from deductive argument to inductive. The logic of the

former is an Idol of the Tribe, particularly of the British tribe,

unable to rest until everything has been drafted under the ethic flag

and brought into the moral fold. We pass also from spacious promise to

rather cramped and meager performance. Satiric intent looms as large as

the imposing first appearance of the giant of Destiny, in Maeterlinck’s

_Betrothal_; satiric accomplishment shrinks to the size of his

exit as the babe in arms. And while the assertion of inexorability

and omnipotence is continued bravely to the end, albeit in a voice of

quavering _diminuendo_, a counter voice is also heard, repudiating

extravagant claims.

Both attitudes are expressed in turn by an eighteenth century satirist.

In his _Epistle to William Hogarth_ Churchill exclaims,

“Can Satire want a subject, where Disdain,

By virtue fired, may point her sharpest strain?

Where, clothed in thunder, Truth may roll along,

And Candour justify the rage of song?”

But in _The Candidate_, he announces reform of his former practices, in

a series of rhetorical “Enoughs,” coming to a climax in--

“Enough of Satire--in less hardened times

Great was her force, and mighty were her rhymes.”

In his own degenerate days, however,--

“Satire throws by her arrows on the ground,

And if she cannot cure, she will not wound.

Come, Panegyric,” * * *

In _The Author_ he asks, “Lives there a man whom Satire cannot reach?”

And the author of _English Bards and Scotch Reviewers_ declares that

vice and folly will--

“More darkly sin, by Satire kept in awe,

And shrink from ridicule, though not from law.”

But Marston and Defoe, already quoted on the other side, have their

dubious moments. Says the former,[23]

“Now, Satire, cease to rub our galled skins,

And to unmask the world’s detested sins;

Thou shalt as soon draw Nilus river dry

As cleanse the world from foul impiety.”

And the latter[24] would be sanguine if he could:

“If my countrymen would take the hint and grow better-natured

from my ill-natured poem, as some call it, I would say this of

it, that though it is far from the best satire that ever was

written, it would do the most good that ever satire did.”

Gifford[25] also, though a believer in the mission of satire, admits

that “to laugh at fools is superfluous, and at the vicious unwise.”

Cowper[26] allows minor accomplishments:

“Yet what can satire, whether grave or gay?

It may correct a foible, may chastise

The freaks of fashion, regulate the dress,

Retrench a sword-blade, or displace a patch;

But where are its sublimer trophies found?

What vice has it subdu’d? whose heart reclaim’d

By rigour, or whom laugh’d into reform?

Alas! Leviathan is not so tam’d;

Laugh’d at, he laughs again; and, stricken hard,

Turns to the strike his adamantine scales,

That fear no discipline of human hands.”

Young[27] grants it a fighting chance:

“But it is possible that satire may not do much good; men may

rise in their affections to their follies, as they do to their

friends, when they are abused by others. It is much to be feared

that misconduct will never be chased out of the world by satire;

all, therefore, that is to be said for it is, that misconduct

will _certainly_ never be chased out of the world by

satire, if no satires are written. Nor is that term unapplicable

to graver compositions. Ethics, Heathen and Christian, and the

scriptures themselves, are, in a great measure, a satire on the

weakness and iniquity of men; and some part of that satire is in

verse, too. * * * Nay, historians themselves may be considered

as satirists and satirists most severe; since such are most

human actions, that to relate is to expose them.”

The distrust of the moderns is adequately voiced by Sidgwick:[28]

“Satire is the weapon of the man at odds with the world and at

ease with himself. The dissatisfied man--a Juvenal, a Swift,

a youthful Thackeray--belabors the world with vociferous

indignation, like the wind on the traveller’s back, the beating

makes it hug its cloaking sins the tighter. Wrong runs no danger

from such chastisement. * * * Satire is harmless as a moral

weapon. It is an old-fashioned fowling piece, fit for a man of

wit, intelligence, and a certain limited imagination. It runs no

risk of having no quarry; the world to it is one vast covert of

lawful game. It goes a-travelling with wit, because both are in

search of the unworthy.”

Two comments on Aristophanes illustrate the _pro_ and _con_

of satiric accomplishment. Cope, in the Preface to his translation,

remarks:

“He felt it his duty to do all he could to counteract the

increasing influence of Euripides upon the rising generation,

and knowing the power of ridicule, he employs this weapon

constantly and mercilessly; but he is careful not to injure his

own cause by exaggerated caricature, which might have created

sympathy for the object of his censure.”

But White, while warning us against regarding the dramatist as either

“a mere moralist or a mere jester,” judges by record:[29]

“If Aristophanes was working for reform, as a long line of

learned interpreters of the poet have maintained, the result was

lamentably disappointing; he succeeded in effecting not a single

change. He wings the shafts of his incomparable wit at all

the popular leaders of the day--Cleon, Hyperbolus, Peisander,

Cleophon, Agyrrhius, in succession, and is reluctant to unstring

his bow even when they are dead. But he drove no one of them

from power.”

Yet after due deduction has been made, Satire has left to it an asset

of considerable net value; an influence that may be subjective if not

objective, general if not specific, and artistic if not rampantly

ethical. As an instrument of self criticism, whereby a man may be

saved from making a solemn pompous fool of himself, as an antitoxin to

vanity, a solvent of sentimentality, a betrayer of hypocrisy, satire

may find all the mission it needs to be respectable; and if it can also

acquire a degree of grace and comeliness, it may be listed among the

muses.

Now this spirit of humorous criticism, sprung from innate prejudice,

nurtured by penetrating observation, enlisted at least nominally under

the banner of righteousness, and out for conquest, obviously must have

something to conquer;--whether he is a soldier fighting an enemy alien,

or a roving knight, bound to offer combat on chivalric grounds, though

aware in his candid heart that the surpassing loveliness of his lady

is a claim gallantly to be maintained rather than an incontrovertible

fact. In either case, whether he uses archery or artillery, he must

have a target; and a student of his tactics must understand what it is,

even better perhaps than he does himself.

Taken individually, the objects of satiric attack are legion, being no

fewer than all such victims of human displeasure as may suitably come

in for jesting rebuke. Our only chance for any sort of synthesis is to

see first if these individuals may be grouped into classes, and next,

if these classes may be generalized under some principle, discovered to

be under some supreme command.

The grouping is indeed easily discernible. Political parties stand out,

social strata, various professions and institutions and movements. But

to look upon these as ridiculed for themselves is to be satisfied with

a superficial view. The fault is not in themselves but in their stars

that they are underlings. What are these evil stars that seem in their

courses to fight against them?

The terms oftenest on the lips of satirists and historians of satire

are Vice and Folly. But these fine large entities are taken at their

face value and given a conventional interpretation. We are not

enlightened as to what vice and folly are, and can define them only as

those things which seem vicious and foolish to their several opponents.

They also are among the baffling subjectivities.

Juvenal’s conclusion that it is hard not to write satire, from the

premise that the number of fools is infinite, is said by Herford to be

“the fundamental axiom of all satire.” But as a matter of fact, it was

Horace who took the fool for his province, while his sterner successor

rather specialized on the knave. From then on there has been as little

endeavor to disentangle the two strands as to define them.

One of the earliest English satirists[30] emphasised the knavery; and

another[31] includes that and folly in the same indictment. Dryden,[32]

inclined to the serious Juvenalian type, discriminates between positive

and negative attitudes, but not between the two stock objects.

Speaking of the narrowed use of the word _satire_ in French and

English, he adds,

“For amongst the Romans it was not only used for those

discourses which decried vice, or exposed folly, but for others

also where virtue was recommended. But in our modern languages

we apply it only to invective poems, * * * for in English,

to say Satire, is to mean reflection, as we use that word in

its worst sense; or as the French call it, more properly,

_medisance_.”

Defoe[33] adds to the two a third, but in a somewhat casual enumeration:

“Speak, Satire; for there’s none can tell like thee

Whether ’tis folly, pride, or knavery

That makes this discontented land appear

Less happy now in times of peace than war?”

Swift[34] echoes the old duality:

“His vein, ironically grave,

Exposed the fool, and lash’d the knave.”

And Fielding,[35] though he actually finds good game in folly,

evidently considers vice the prime object:

“But while I hold the pen, it will be a maxim with me, that vice

can never be too great to be lashed, nor virtue too obscure to

be commended; in other words, that satire can never rise too

high, nor panegyric stoop too low.”

He also makes the same point in a historical review:[36]

“In ancient Greece, the infant muses’ school,

Where Vice first felt the pen of ridicule,

With honest freedom and impartial blows

The Muse attacked each Vice as it arose:

No grandeur could the mighty villain screen

From the just satire of the comic scene.”

Although vice is now too powerful for such censure, he dares the lion

in his den, and comforts the virtuous with reassurances:

“And while these scenes the conscious knave displease,

Who feels within the criminal he sees,

The uncorrupt and good must smile, to find

No mark for satire in his generous mind.”

The nineteenth century is full of straws still blowing in the direction

of Vice and Folly: such as Taine’s[37] “Satire is the sister of

elegy; if the second pleads for the oppressed, the first combats

the oppressors.” And Lionel Johnson[38] comments that Erasmus “had

something in common with Matthew Arnold: a like satiric yet profoundly

felt impatience with intellectual pedantry and social folly.”

We may, however, see satire as opposition, and moreover opposition to

vice and folly, and still be taking for granted that which demands more

probing. For even if it were so simple a crusade as that, no crusade is

as simple as it looks, and this one is particularly open to suspicion.

It is therefore not wholly superfluous to ask why vice and folly are

the favorite satiric goals. Psychologically it would be sufficient to

say that it is because anything a man disapproves of naturally seems to

him foolish if not actually vicious. But socialized man cannot admit

that his reaction to anything is based on mere temperamental prejudice.

Condemnation of vice and folly is of course its own justification, and

humor is its own reward. Unfortunately, however, humorous condemnation

is not always applicable to these offenders against taste and morality.

Folly is sometimes too artless to be censured, and vice is often too

serious to be ridiculed. Evidently then, yet another solution is

needed, a least common denominator that will go into both, even if it

does leave a remainder.

Now it happens that a body of explicit testimony, substantiated by

a review of satiric practice, does indicate the existence of this

unifying bond, this thing which, when present, makes both vice and

folly criticizably absurd; and its generic name is deception.

This fraudulent family has two main branches: the intentional type,

including hypocrisy and humbug; and the unconscious, represented

by sentimentality and other forms of self-befoolment; besides a

half-conscious variety, whence come vanity, snobbishness, superstition,

vulgarity, and other children of perverted ambition and false

reasoning. All these give plenty of scope to the satirist, even when we

subtract some possibilities by the important qualification that not all

that deceives is ludicrous; deception being sometimes too innocent and

even altruistic and sometimes too tragic and cruel.[39]

According to this test, anything which assumes a virtue when it has it

not may draw satiric fire. It is the assumption itself, the pose, that

furnishes the shining mark loved by the satirist.

On this point we again have Horatian testimony:[40]

“_Quid, cum est Lucilius ausus_

_Primus in hunc operis componere carmina morem,_

_Detrahere et pellem, nitidus qua quisque per ora_

_Cederet, introrsum turpis_, * * *”

Gascoigne[41] symbolised by his steel glass that which reflected the

beholders as they were, not flattered as by the plated mirror; and said

his effort was to “sing a verse to make them see themselves.” He also

identified the root of all evil with hypocrisy;--“So that they seem,

and covet not to be.”

Cervantes[42] spoke of his “Herculean labor” as being “nothing more nor

less than to banish mediocrity from the realm of Spanish poetry, and to

sweep from its sacred precincts, which had become as foul as an Augean

stable, all shams, lies, hypocrisies, and vulgar baseness whatsoever.”

But the first to stress this idea with discriminating analysis was,

quite appropriately, the first in his own satirical field:[43]

“The only source of the true Ridiculous (as it appears to me)

is affectation. * * * Now affectation proceeds from one of

these two causes, vanity or hypocrisy; for as vanity puts us

on affecting false characters, in order to purchase applause;

so hypocrisy sets us on an endeavour to avoid censure, by

concealing our vices under an appearance of their opposite

virtues. * * *

“From the discovery of this affectation arises the Ridiculous;

* * * I might observe, that our Ben Jonson, who of all men

understood the Ridiculous the best, hath chiefly used the

hypocritical affectation.”

He remarks that this is more amusing than vanity, from the sharper

contrast with reality, and adds:

“Now, from affectation only, the misfortunes and calamities of

life, or the imperfections of nature, may become the objects of

ridicule. * * *

“The poet carries this very far:

‘None are for being what they are in fault,

But for not being what they would be thought.’”

He concludes:

“Great vices are the proper objects of our detestation, smaller

faults of our pity; but affectation appears to me the only true

source of the Ridiculous.”

Fielding’s comment on Jonson is in turn applied to him by a modern

critic:[44]

“All Fielding’s evil characters, it may be remarked, are

accomplished hypocrites; on pure vanity or silliness he spends

very few of his shafts.”

Taine[45] would find both easy to account for, on racial grounds:

“The first-fruits of English society is hypocrisy. It ripens

here under the double breath of religion and morality; we know

their popularity and sway across the channel. * * * This vice is

therefore English. Mr. Pecksniff is not found in France. * * *

Since Voltaire, Tartuffe is impossible.”

Landor[46] has Lucian say:

“I have ridiculed the puppets of all features, all colours, all

sizes, by which an impudent and audacious set of impostors have

been gaining an easy livelihood these two thousand years. * * *

“The falsehood that the tongue commits is slight in comparison

with what is conceived by the heart, and executed by the whole

man, throughout life.”

Meredith’s portrait of The Comic Spirit is applicable to satire,

for throughout the essay he gives to the term comic the connotation

generally allowed to the term satiric:

“Men’s future upon earth does not attract it; their honesty

and shapeliness in the present does; and whenever they wax out

of proportion, overblown, affected, pretentious, bombastical,

hypocritical, pedantic, fantastically delicate; whenever it

sees them self-deceived or hoodwinked, given to run riot in

idolatries, drifting into vanities, congregating in absurdities,

planning short-sightedly, plotting dementedly; whenever they are

at variance with their professions, * * * whenever they offend

sound reason, fair justice; are false in humility or mined with

conceit, * * * they are detected and ridiculed.”

Meredith[47] also reiterates the distinction made by Swift and Fielding

in regard to misfortune:

“Poverty, says the satirist, has nothing harder in itself than

that it makes men ridiculous. But poverty is never ridiculous to

Comic perception until it attempts to make its rags conceal its

bareness in a forlorn attempt at decency, or foolishly to rival

ostentation.”

And he remarks of Molière:

“He strips Folly to the skin, displays the imposture of the

creature, and is content to offer her better clothing.”

Of the two forms of affectation, Fielding chooses hypocrisy as better

satirical game, but Bergson[48] votes for the other:

“In this respect it might be said that the specific remedy for

vanity is laughter, and that the one failing that is essentially

laughable is vanity.”

Fuess[49] makes for the last great poetic satirist the familiar

conventional claim:

“Byron is attacking not virtue, but false sentiment, false

idealism, and false faith. His satiric spirit is engaged in * *

* tearing down what is sham and pretence and fraud.”

Previté-Orton[50] applies the test to politics:

“Finally, there is another service political satires render,

which is peculiarly necessary to a government based on

discussion. One of the greatest evils in such a state is

the presence of mere words and phrases, and of the vague

Pecksniffian virtues. Now to satire cant and humbug are

proper game. It brings fine professions down to fact, points

the contrast between the commonplace reality and its tinsel

dress, and by the dread of ridicule raises the standard of

plain-dealing. Other means of criticism as well act as a check

on more opprobrious faults in public life. But satire is the

best agent to keep us free from taking words for substance.”

Apparently, then, we may conclude that deception in some form is, so

far as any one thing can be, the basic object of satire, or at least is

so considered by those who reflect upon it. But we must admit here as

elsewhere that to recognise a phenomenon is easier than to account for

it.

Not that it is difficult to account for the deception itself. No

instinct is more fundamental and irresistible than that of concealment.

The primary fear of molestation or harm in which it originates becomes,

in a social state of sophistication and artifice, fear of exposure.

With increased development, such complex and opposing factors as pride

and shame, avarice and generosity, ostentation and modesty, lead us

to hide things. We hide all sorts of things, good and bad; faults,

virtues, deficiencies, accomplishments, hoardings, and charities. We

hide from ourselves as well as from others. The left hand is as a rule

not on terms of confiding intimacy with the right, whether it is

scattering seeds of kindness or getting into mischief. In the mental

realm the same trick of camouflage prevails. Out of spiritual cowardice

we conceal from ourselves the disturbing facts of life, and purchase

optimism at the easy price of sentimentalism.

But just why this ubiquitous habit should be the peculiar province of

the satirist, is another psychological problem; and as such, is best

reached through a psychological solution. Why is there about deception

something inherently repugnant and at the same time automatically

amusing? Why is our incorrigible human predilection for belonging

to the Great Order of Shams equalled only by our incorrigible human

predilection for joyous exposure of others? The game seems to be mutual

and perpetual, and the honors about even.

The repugnance undoubtedly comes less from a noble devotion to truth

than from the dislike we all have of being deceived. Nothing do we

discover with more exasperation, and admit with more reluctance than

the fact that we have been fooled or hoodwinked. It is an experience

that fosters present irritation and future distrust; but one which,

from its very nature, demands the retort ironic rather than the lofty

indignation accorded to an open injury. Most emphatically “We all hate

fustian and affectation,” and any knavish trickery, especially in

others.

The amusement arises from the triumph of frustrating this attempt at

deceptive concealment, intensified by the pleasure in perceiving an

incongruity--in this case, between the assumed and the actual--which

is the essence of humor.[51] The zest lies in the endless sport of

hide and seek, veiling and unveiling, blowing bubbles and pricking

them, which is exhilarating through the play of wits and the fun of

outwitting.[52]

This would perhaps be a sufficient account were it not for a certain

left-handed yet inseparable connection of the psychology of the

question with its ethics. Whether or not an intruder, the latter has

entered in and firmly entrenched herself. When therefore she maintains

that her satiric discontent is divine, she must be given a respectful

hearing; though after it we seem unable to concede more than the

possibility.

A lively enthusiasm for showing up the ingenuous sentimentalist or

the crafty hypocrite may or may not argue a freedom on the exposer’s

part from these or other modes of hiding or distorting the truth; or

a disinterested love for truth itself. It does go without saying that

real respect and admiration for honesty and sincerity is a fundamental

human trait, as witness the glowing encomiums bestowed on those

guileless virtues, and it might follow that our unmoral impulses are

half consciously focussed through a moral function. We must have a sin

offering; and deceit is in the most eligible. Thus the satirist may,

deliberately or unthinkingly, read deception into his disapproved,

in order to have an excuse for laughter, just as he may read vice

and folly into his disliked, in order to condemn. Nevertheless it

is possible to enjoy the process of unmasking without making it a

corollary that masking is wrong and therefore deserving of exposure.

Some observers are more impressed with the resemblances among the

members of the great human family, and some more sensitive to the

differences. When a consciousness of this variance is dissolved in a

humorous solution, it precipitates a satire. The satirist is not always

a victorious Saint George, and the satirized a downed and disgraced

Dragon. Still, if the Saint could be secularized to the extent of a

mocking light in his eye, and a taunting finger pointing at a removed

disguise under which the Dragon had been masquerading, we might take

the picture as a symbol of an ideal relationship between them, both

ethically and artistically.

For there is an ideal in this as in all things that have variation and

flexibility; and, as in them all, the question of quality is the most

important one. Without some sort of criterion we can form no judgments

as to value. The points we have been considering,--what satire is made

of, why and how made, against what directed, and in what effective, all

lead to the final one,--what is the highest type?

The trend of testimony seems to converge on three requirements for

that satire which would disarm criticism while indulging in it: purity

of purpose, kindliness of temper, and discrimination as to objects of

ridicule.

The first is not to be confused with the reformatory motive.

It means simply freedom from the very affectation censured in

others. What it rules out is not so much the railing to gratify

one’s spleen, as the pose of altruism while doing it; the grieved

this-hurts-me-more-than-it-does-you attitude so particularly annoying

to the castigated. It also discounts the selfish vanity which courts

applause for wit, regardless of the means by which it is won.

On this point Horace[53] again heads the list. He denies the

accusation that the satirist is spiteful, and continues:

“_Liberius si_

_Dixero quid, si forte jocosius, hoc mihi juris_

_Cum venia dabis._”

From the nature of English satire up to the eighteenth century, we do

not expect, nor do we find, much interest in this phase of it. Then

comes Young,[54] reviving the Horatian caution:

“Who, for the poor renown of being smart,

Would leave a sting within a brother’s heart?”

And Cowper[55] completes the portrait:

“Unless a love of virtue light the flame,

Satire is, more than those he brands, to blame;

He hides behind a magisterial air

His own offenses, and strips others bare;

Affects, indeed, a most humane concern,

That men, if gently tutor’d, will not learn;

That mulish folly, not to be reclaimed

By softer methods, must be made ashamed;”

De Quincey[56] uses Pope as a horrible example of this failing,

contrasting him with the indignant Juvenal:

“Pope, having no such internal principle of wrath boiling in his

breast, * * * was unavoidably a hypocrite of the first magnitude

when he affected (or sometimes really conceited himself) to be

in a dreadful passion with offenders as a body. It provokes

fits of laughter * * * to watch him in the process of brewing

the storm that spontaneously will not come; whistling, like a

mariner, for a wind to fill his satiric sails; and pumping up

into his face hideous grimaces in order to appear convulsed with

histrionic rage. * * * As it is, the short puffs of anger, the

uneasy snorts of fury in Pope’s satires, give one painfully the

feeling of a locomotive-engine with unsound lungs.”

Whether these strictures are just or not, the principle back of them is

sound; and more pithily summed up by Landor’s[57] “Nobody but an honest

man has a right to scoff at anything.”

Browning[58] carries the idea a step farther, and sounds a warning to

dwellers in glass houses:

“Have you essayed attacking ignorance,

Convicting folly, by their opposites,

Knowledge and wisdom? Not by yours for ours,

Fresh ignorance and folly, new for old,

Greater for less, your crime for our mistake!”

The demand for kindliness of temper may seem paradoxical, but for

that very reason it is the more insistent. Being under suspicion of

unkindness, vindictive spite, retaliation, satire must either admit the

charge or prove the contrary, for the real paradox lies in the highest

moral claim being made for the literary _genre_ of the greatest

immoral possibilities.

However, until the modern humanitarian cult came in, it seemed content

to admit the charge. After Horace, with a few isolated exceptions, as

Swift[59] and Cowper,[60] satire seemed rather to cherish malice and

glory in rudeness, often mistaking peevish scolding for noble scorn.

Its keynote was “A flash of that satiric rage,” or, according to Hall,

“The Satire should be like the porcupine,

That shoots sharp quills out in each angry line.”

Byron was the last example of both the professional, concentrated form

and the truculent mood. Tennyson[61] voices the new spirit of his

century:

“I loathe it: he had never kindly heart,

Nor ever cared to better his own kind,

Who first wrote satire, with no pity in it.”

Birrell,[62] less caustic than De Quincey about Pope, still uses him as

an instance of how not to do it:

“Dr. Johnson is more to my mind as a sheer satirist than Pope,

for in satire character tells more than in any other form of

verse. We want a personality behind--a strong, gloomy, brooding

personality; soured and savage, if you will * * * but spiteful

never.”

Even the traits of gloom and savagery might be dispensed with, and room

made for an infusion of sweetness and light. This is implied in the

condition laid down by Lionel Johnson:[63]

“To tilt at superstition, to shoot at folly, is seldom a

grateful or a gratifying pursuit, if there be no depth of

purpose in it, nothing but pleasure in the consciousness of

destructive power, no feeling of sympathetic pity, no tenderness

somewhere in the heart, no cordiality sweetening the work of

overthrow.”

And Garnett[64] concludes:

“Satirists have met with much ignorant and invidious

depreciation, as though a talent for ridicule was necessarily

the index of an unkindly nature. The truth is just the reverse.”

Discrimination as to objects of satire has reference not to their

nature, as foolish, vicious, deceitful, but to their legitimacy as

objects. It is a matter of taste and justice on the part of the

satirist.

The first definite reproof of heedlessness on this score is given in

the memorial tribute to Pope:[65]

“Dart not on Folly an indignant eye:

Whoe’er discharged artillery on a fly?

Deride not Vice: absurd the thought and vain,

To bind the tyger in so weak a chain.

* * * * *

The Muse’s labour then success shall crown,

When Folly feels her smile, and Vice her frown.

* * * * *

Let SATIRE then her proper object know,

And ere she strikes, be sure she strikes a foe.

Nor fondly deem the real fool confest,

Because blind _Ridicule_ conceives a jest.”

Another critic[66] of that time utters a similar caution:

“A satire should expose nothing but what is corrigible, and make

a due discrimination between those who are, and those who are

not the proper objects of it.”

The best modern expression[67] of this idea happens to be an

interpretation of a pioneer satirist. And it is distinctly modern

in its recognition that while the real object of satire must be an

abstraction,--the sin not the sinner--it must, to be artistic, have

a concrete embodiment,--the sinner rather than the sin. The Greek

dramatist explains:

“Yet spiteless in a sort, considered well,

Since I pursued my warfare till each wound

Went through the mere man, reached the principle

Worth purging from Athenai. Lamachos?

No, I attacked war’s representative;

Kleon? No, flattery of the populace;

Sokrates? No, but that pernicious seed

Of sophists whereby hopeful youth is taught

To jabber argument, chop logic, pore

On sun and moon, and worship Whirligig.”

But while the good satirist must have these assets, it does not follow

that the possession of them will guarantee good satire. It can only

be said that without them he cannot be ranked high, though, having

them, he may not be ranked at all. It may be difficult for a Juvenal

not to write satire, but it is difficult for anyone to produce a fine

example of this, as of any other form of art. No more than any art is

it exempt from a recognition of truth[68] and even beauty, though its

connection with them is the paradoxical one of drawing attention to

their opposites. It is a truism that many things are best understood

and appreciated by a portrayal of contrasts. In this case it is a

perception of the congruous that is particularly concerned, and it is

implied in the satirist’s keen sense of the incongruous.

The satirist has not only these normal obligations, but some peculiar

dangers. He is in as perilous a position as Sir Guyon in his voyage

to the realm of Acrasia: threatened by the didacticism that besets

the critic, the vulgarity and rudeness that prey upon the jester, the

prejudice and injustice that warp the opponent, the smugness that

undermines the reformer. Moreover, he has his hampering limitations. He

is forever confined to the middle plane of life, shut out alike from

its sublime heights and tragic depths.

Added to this restriction in range is another in quantity. The nature

of satire makes it better adapted for the trimming than the whole

cloth. Its rôle in the _dramatis personæ_ of literature is

restricted to the minor parts, but this subordination in place does

not mean a negligible rank. The untrimmed garment, the all-star cast,

these are not desirable even when possible. For the accessory there

is also an ideal whose attainment is quite as important as though it

pertained to the main substance. In the case of satire such a standard

would call for censure that is candid and just, wit that is spontaneous

and refined, both actuated by sincere motives, and directed against

certain failings of humanity rather than against the human individuals

themselves, though these must body forth the abstractions otherwise

intangible,--the combination producing an effect essentially truthful

and artistic. That all this can come only from one who is more than a

mere satirist is axiomatic, and indeed so fundamentally true that it

might be said that the more of a satirist a man is in quantity, the

less is his chance for fine quality.

The modern author has conquered these requirements and obstacles, not

by taking arms against his sea of troubles, but by the less intrepid

and more diplomatic method of disowning his title. The satirist is

obsolete, but the satiric writer, or even better, the writer with a

satiric touch, is more in evidence than ever. It is perhaps too much

of a challenge to say that Shakespeare is a greater satirist than

Aristophanes, Jonson, or Molière; but no one would deny the superior

quality of his smaller amount. The aroma of his delicate spice and

lemon extract has not only lasted longer than their pepper and vinegar,

but is better relished by the modern palate. The nineteenth century

had no Shakespeare to “stoop from the height of a serene intelligence

to sport with satire,” but its best satire came from those who took it

least seriously and insinuated it with least pomp and circumstance. And

so far from being the most conspicuous in the satiric field, these who

are greatest in this matter are also greatest and best known for other

than satiric gifts and accomplishments.

While these humorous critics would be more content than their

forerunners with the early dictum that satire was “invented for the

purging of our minds,”[69] rather than for the practical consequences

sometimes claimed for it, yet they would not adopt the succeeding

phrase of the definition,--“in which human vices, ignorance and errors,

* * * are severely reprehended;” for they would qualify more carefully

the objects, and abstain from severity in their reprehension.

This dividing line among objects would make, however, a scientific

rather than an ethical bisection. The “stolidly conscientious

performance” of confining the practice of satire to a moral issue,

does indeed, as Dr. Alden points out,[70] argue a “deficiency in wit”

that marks the Anglo-Saxon mind. But as the Englishman became more

cosmopolitan, he learned to disguise such of his innate solemnity

as he could not shed. That he has absorbed more completely the more

easily assimilated Hebrew and Roman traits, has not prevented him from

acquiring some also from the Greek and the French. The Victorian is

naturally a multiplex compound, and in him we see all these elements in

various stages of conflict and combination.

CHAPTER II

THE CONFLUENCE

Our present study is concerned with the union of two ancient streams of

literature as they come together on the fertile plain of the nineteenth

century. This marriage of a satiric Medway and a fictional Thames is

a happy English event, though by no means the first alliance between

these historic families. In their long careers they are found sometimes

entirely separate, but very often united. The latter course works for

a decided mutual advantage, with a preponderance of gain accruing to

satire, as fiction can live without satire far better than satire

without fiction.

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.

Thus have all things worked together for the good of the Victorian

novel. It was fortunate alike in its endowment, its alliances, and

its surroundings. A period of such upheaval, such introspection, such

anxious responsibility, and withal such zest of life, all diffused

through a democratic atmosphere, could best be interpreted by a form of

literature which, besides being in itself thoroughly democratic, gives

large scope for the author’s comments and conclusions.

The drama is an excellent reflector, but necessarily impersonal;

a dilemma that is dodged rather than solved by the Shavian device

of Prefaces. The lyric, on the contrary, is too personal to be

representative. And concentrated exposition is admittedly strong meat

for the intellectual babes who constitute the vast majority, or even,

as a steady diet, for children of a larger growth. This does not mean,

of course, that the novel is a childish product or plaything; but that

its union of the dramatic and didactic, the emotional and rational,

the picturesque and significant, the merry and sad, together with its

absolutely unrestricted range in material, makes it ideal as a popular

type in the best sense of the word.

A critic of the time half ironically remarks,--[71]

“The future historians of literature * * * will no doubt analyze

the spirit of the age and explain how the novelists, more or

less unconsciously, reflected the dominant ideas which were

agitating the social organism. * * * The novelists were occupied

in constructing a most elaborate panorama of the manners and

customs of their own times with a minuteness and psychological

analysis not known to their predecessors. Their work is, of

course, an implicit criticism of life.”

With all the encouragement bestowed upon them the Victorian novelists

could indeed do no less than live up to their opportunities. Not _ad

astra per aspera_ lay their destiny. Nothing more was asked of them

than to refrain from burying their talents, and to this admonition they

were zealously obedient.

The writers themselves supply striking inductive data as to the

general diffusion both of fiction and satire. A list of the dozen most

prominent Victorian novelists shows that no one of them was wholly

devoid of interest in public affairs, and none was entirely lacking in

the satiric touch. On the other hand, every one of them saw more on

his horizon than current events, and all were something more than mere

critics or humorists or even both.

They were themselves of the Victorian Age. Each one might say _Pars

fui_, if not _magna_. None therefore had a detached point of

view, nor a long perspective. But though their vision was microscopic

rather than telescopic, it was searching and enthusiastic, and the

report it made was honest if not always dispassionate. It could hardly

be otherwise for those who were alive and awake at a time when new

information was creating new ideas, and these in turn were becoming

dynamic in new movements, political, religious, educational, social.

All these things were too tremendous and important to be taken

otherwise than seriously. The dominant feeling was grave and earnest,

as one of its interpreters has said:[72]

“In the Victorian era, which we have found so neglectful of

literary standards, Literature has been of greater social and

ethical stimulus than ever before. * * * It throbs with a new

sympathy for those who toil unceasingly in poverty, and a new

bewilderment upon the realization that the world which is

changing so rapidly is still so full of misery and hopelessness.

* * * But, as the world went, the main impulse and the main

characteristic of Victorian Literature became this great sense

of pity for things as they are and of an imperious duty to make

them better.”

But the sense of pity was sometimes voiced with wit, and one of the

sharpest weapons at the service of duty was the shaft of ridicule. With

nothing to satirize, society would be a paradise. With no satirists,

it would be rather a dull inferno. But it is our human world that is

purgatorial.

Since the purpose of our present study is to discover the proportion

and nature of the satiric element in Victorian fiction, to note its

relation to the rest of the work, and to reach some conclusion as to

the total effect of its presence and use, it might aid in clearness to

subjoin a table of names and dates of the novelists with whom we are

concerned.

_Name_ _Birth_ _Period of Publication_[73] _Death_

Peacock 1785 1816–1861 1866

Lytton 1803 1827–1873 1873

Disraeli 1804 1826–1880 1881

Gaskell 1810 1848–1865 1865

Thackeray 1811 1844–1862 1863

Dickens 1812 1837–1870 1870

Reade 1814 1853–1884 1884

Trollope 1815 1855–1880 1882

Brontë 1816 1847–1853 1855

Kingsley 1819 1848–1871 1875

Eliot 1819 1859–1876 1880

Meredith 1828 1859–1895 1909

Butler 1835 1872–1901 1902

This list, reaching from Scott to Hardy, not inclusive, has been

reckoned as a round dozen, but it actually numbers a baker’s dozen.[74]

The noteworthy thing about it is that it would probably be agreed upon

as the preëminent list on any count; so that those who are excluded

on the score of being too consistently serious or romantic, as Yonge,

Collins, Blackmore, Henry Kingsley, MacDonald, would hardly be included

on the score of quality, although some of them might rival some of the

least among those chosen as members of the satirico-realistic group.

A glance at the preceding table reveals an obvious chronological

division into five parts; although the first and the two last consist

of one man each. The second contains only two names; and their

separation from the main group occurs at the beginning rather than at

the end, for Lytton’s race ran beyond five of those who started later,

and Disraeli’s beyond seven. Of those, only Reade published novels

after 1880.

This main group is one of those remarkable concentrations in which

destiny seems to delight. When the second decade of the century gave

to the world eight great names in this field alone, and some equally

distinguished ones in others, it surely filled its quota toward the

advance of civilization.

Meredith comes enough later than this outpouring of God’s plenty to be

classed by himself chronologically, especially as he must be by the

character of his work also, in spite of the fact that his first novel

belongs to the same prolific year as the first of George Eliot’s.

The middle of the century is thus also the center of a circle of

activity whose radius extends for about two decades on either side,

passing thence into thinner aired intermediate zones,--transition

periods from the eighteenth and to the twentieth centuries, seasons

whose energies are potential, or spent, rather than vigorously kinetic.

But this central period, something more than a generation, and

less than a half century, is dynamic enough. It has frequently

been described, and its activities--Chartism, the Oxford Movement,

Utilitarianism, Positivism, the Industrial Revolution, Christian

Socialism, Darwinism, Pre-Raphaeliteism--are an oft-told tale. It is

only to be remembered that this was the atmosphere breathed by the

majority of our novelists, and these the vital interests which would

concern them in so far as they were concerned with the public affairs

of their time.

A review of the satiric strain in literature gives an interesting clew

both to the fact and the significance of the relation of satire to the

total literary product.

Nor can one be estimated independently of the other. There is, of

course, no such thing as a pure, or mere, satirist. Even a saturated

solution involves two elements. The dissolved substance must have a

medium to be dissolved in. Starting from this point, we may classify

the most conspicuous names according to this relationship.

There are first the completely surcharged. But the important matter is

whether the container is itself large,--Aristophanes, Juvenal, Swift,

Voltaire,--or of smaller mold and less capacity,--Dunbar, Skelton,

Smollett, Churchill, Gifford. To this class come no recruits from the

nineteenth century. _Sæva indignatio_, no longer makes verses,

even when witticized, having been put out of fashion by the autonomic

humor which informs the sophisticated critic that of all incongruous

things the most incongruous and absurd is the satirist who takes

himself seriously.

Next come those whose absolute amount of satire may be equal to that

of the preceding, but whose versatile interests make it relatively

smaller. It is neither of their life a thing apart, nor yet their whole

existence. Such are Horace, Cervantes, Jonson, Dryden, Boileau, Pope,

Fielding, Burns, Byron. This class on a smaller scale is represented by

Gascoigne, Wyatt, Hall, Donne, Lodge, Addison, Goldsmith, Hood, Moore,

Mark Twain. Among these we find about half of our novelists,--Peacock

and Butler, Dickens and Trollope, Thackeray and Meredith.

In the third division satire is measured still more by the law of

diminishing returns. It is composed of those who are never thought of

as satirists, not even as satirical, and yet are very far from being

innocent. Such are the Hebrew Prophets and the author of _Job_,

Euripides, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton (in his prose), Johnson,

Scott, Shelley, Browning. Similar but of lesser magnitude are Erasmus,

More, Defoe, Young, Cowper, Blake, De Quincey. Here are found the other

half of the novelists,--Lytton, Disraeli, Gaskell, Reade, Brontë,

Kingsley. The impression given by these is not so much a solution at

all as of separate and distinguishable particles: of elements native

and yet not integral,--like fish in water. They might be taken away,

and though the total effect would be very much changed, the real

character of the liquid would not.

Quite the opposite of this is the condition of the fourth estate.

Here the process of amalgamation is carried to an extreme, one might

say, paradoxically, to the vanishing point. It resembles the first

class in that the satire is pervasive, and the third in that it is of

relatively small quantity; so small that it hardly seems worth taking

into account, yet it could not be abstracted. If it could, it would

leave a scarcely diminished but almost unrecognizable remainder. It is

not revealed so much as betrayed. It seldom indulges in anything so

bald as overt satire, or so conscious even as covert innuendo. It is

the tone of a personality. It is not Aristotle nor Virgil nor Wyclif

nor Wordsworth nor Tennyson. It is Homer, Plato, Lucretius, Dante,

Langland, Burton, Gibbon, Sterne, Austen, Arnold, Carlyle, Hardy,

Anatole France. Among the Victorian novelists it is George Eliot.

To this matter of quantity there is a fairly definite relation of

quality. The fact that the largest quantity is now a discarded type

indicates that relation to be one of inverse proportion. The second and

third divisions evince hilarity, sarcasm, shoddy flippancy, or profound

wit, according to the temperaments of the writers. Therein lies the

greatest variety. The fourth occupies the great field of irony. It

is the _siccum lumen_, occasionally flashing, usually lambent,

smouldering, gravely glowing.

Amid these differences in kind and degree, the Victorian novelists had

a sort of unity in possessing a certain sense of satire, more or less

consciously realized, and of themselves as satirists. This is not only

discernible in the general air they have of intending to do it, but

is made visible by remarks in the nature of Confessions of a Satirist

voiced by about half their number.

“Let those who cannot nicely and with certainty discern,” says

Charlotte Brontë in _Shirley_, “the difference between the tones of

hypocrisy and those of sincerity, never presume to laugh at all, lest

they have the miserable misfortune to laugh in the wrong place, and

commit impiety when they think they are achieving wit.”

Thackeray,[75] the “cynic”, is the one to reiterate most strongly the

Pauline creed that love of mankind is the root of all good. He remarks

that humor means more than laughter, and adds:

“The humorous writer professes to awaken your love, your

pity, your kindness--your scorn for untruth, pretension,

imposture--your tenderness for the weak, the oppressed, the

unhappy. To the best of his means and ability he comments on all

the ordinary actions and passions of life almost. He takes upon

himself to be the week-day preacher, so to speak. Accordingly,

as he finds, and speaks, and feels the truth best, we regard

him, esteem him--sometimes love him.”

Trollope[76] agrees as to the lay-clerical office:

“I have always thought of myself as a preacher of sermons, and

my pulpit as one which I could make both salutary and agreeable

to my audience.”

Dickens[77] also claims the intent of speaking the truth in love:

“Cervantes laughed Spain’s chivalry away, by showing Spain its

impossible and wild absurdity. It was my attempt, in my humble

and far-distant sphere, to dim the false glitter surrounding

something which really did exist, by showing it in its

unattractive and repulsive truth.”

The greatest unanimity is as to objects. Peacock[78] and Trollope[79]

in conventional imitation of the old school speak of castigating vice,

but they also in other places join the universal chorus against folly,

and folly as an impostor.

Disraeli[80] comes in on this:

“Teach us that pretension is a bore. * * * Catch the fleeting

colors of that sly chameleon, Cant, and show what excessive

trouble we are ever taking to make ourselves miserable and

silly.”

Reade[81] adds a word:

“Self-deception will probably cease with the first blast of the

archangel’s trumpet; but what human heart will part with it till

then?”

Thackeray[82] emphasizes it in his description of that little world in

which he had an almost unholy interest:

“Vanity Fair is a very vain, wicked, foolish place, full of all

sorts of humbugs and falsenesses and pretensions. And while the

moralist * * * professes to wear neither gown nor bands, but

only the very same long-eared livery in which his congregation

is arrayed; yet, look you, one is bound to speak the truth as

far as one knows it, whether one mounts a cap and bells or a

shovel hat; and a deal of disagreeable matter must come out in

the course of such an undertaking.”

Later[83] he takes it out on Becky and her kind:

“Such people there are living and flourishing in the

world--Faithless, Hopeless, Charityless; let us have at them,

dear friends, with might and main. Some there are, and very

successful, too, mere quacks and fools; and it was to combat and

expose such as these, no doubt, that laughter was made.”

Dickens[84] puts it more abstractly:

“Lest there should be any well-intentioned persons who do

not perceive the difference between religion and the cant of

religion, piety and the pretense of piety, a humble reverence

for the great truths of Scripture and an audacious and

offensive obtrusion of its letter and not its spirit in the

commonest dissensions and meanest affairs of life, to the

extraordinary confusion of ignorant minds, let them understand

that it is always the latter, and never the former, which is

satirized here. Further, that the latter is here satirized

as being, according to all experience, inconsistent with the

former, impossible of union with it, and one of the most evil

and mischievous falsehoods existent in society.”

The theme of _The Tragic Comedians_ is that “The laughter of the gods

is the lightning of death’s irony over mortals. Can they have,” adds

Meredith, “a finer subject than a giant gone fool?” But it is in the

_Ode to the Comic Spirit_ rather than in stray observations in the

novels or even in the _Essay on Comedy_ that the Meredithian satiric

philosophy is most pithily set forth. For in the myth of Momus and the

Olympians, the mirthful satirist and the self-satisfied divinities

who paid a heavy price for their resentment of his incandescent

frankness, we have a symbol of what satire might do if permitted, and

if not permitted, what penalties may descend. The Comic Spirit is

apostrophized as the “Sword of Common Sense,” whose service and sport

it is

“This shifty heart of ours to hunt.”

Since man is a deceiver and a self-deceiver,

“Naming his appetites his needs,

Behind a decorative cloak,”

it is obvious that the only cure for his ailment is the simple but

drastic one of removing the cloak. So long indeed as there are masks,

there will be fingers that itch to pluck them off. The time may

come,--we can scarcely affirm that it now is,--when masks shall have

vanished from the faces of a seraphic race. But in the nineteenth

century they were very much in evidence; and quite as palpably in

evidence were the spying eyes and the encroaching fingers of the

nineteenth-century satirists.

PART II

METHODS

CHAPTER I

THE ROMANTIC

The implication behind that sage instruction, “First catch your hare,”

is that after the catching the rest will be easy. But, admitting that

the second step cannot antedate the first, we are still confronted by

the fact that the achievement of the first must be followed by the

second in order to be rendered efficacious. “How serve him up?” is the

next question.

It is the question of method, the problem of ways and means, and a most

important one it is in the case of satire, for it is here that the

element of humor finds its field of operations. In its cause and effect

satire is serious, nominally at least. In the connecting link, the

means reaching from design to end, it must use wit or humor.

A certain object is perceived by a certain observer to be ridiculous.

How is he to make it seem ridiculous to other observers, whose unaided

perception may not equal his? He is able to do it by drawing upon the

common fund of human experience and idea in regard to humor. If the

satirist can subsume his object under one of the universally recognized

categories, he makes it _ipso facto_ absurd. So automatic is this

effect that only the analytic spectator will stop to question the

justice of the classification. Socrates dangling in a basket, Volpone

caught in his own trap, Hudibras gawkily playing the Cavalier, Atticus

monopolizing the throne but fearful of pretenders, Southey routing

infernal legions by the mere offer to read aloud his poem, Ichabod

Crane fleeing when only Brom Bones pursued,--these are ludicrous to the

imagination, whether or not the sentence is ratified by the intellect.

Humoristic devices are so numerous as to call for some classification,

the choice of any one being made at the expense of other possibilities.

The traditional cleavage between the Horatian and the Juvenalian types

is characteristically described by Saintsbury:[85]

“From Horace and Persius downward there have been two satiric

manners:--one that of the easy well-bred or would be well-bred

man of the world who suspends everything on the adunc nose and

occasionally scratches with still more adunc claws, the other

that of the indignant moralist reproving the corruptions of the

times.”

But by the nineteenth century the indignant moralist was considerably

subdued, even in England, and his reproof more likely to be acidulous

than acrid. For this reason some other antithesis would seem more

useful to our present study; and from the fact that our satiric vehicle

is made on the two general models known as romantic and realistic, the

same division appears most workable to apply to the satiric methods

used in fiction. Both terms, however, are too nebulous to be used

without the precaution of stating the sense in which they are at

present used. As to the former, this statement by Stoddard sums up the

situation:[86]

“To give an exact definition of what one means by romanticism,

to give anything more than a vague idea of the notion one

intends to convey when he uses the word romantic, to give a

single definite conception to a reader by the use of the word

romance, is impossible.”

The difficulty about realism is not so much ambiguity as the question

of its very existence. This, however, need not concern us here, as

there is no question of its nonexistence in Victorian fiction. Whether

or not pure unadulterated realism is a myth was to the Victorians a

postulate of no moment, for they had no use for it in any case. No

stage of theirs would ever be set for a _Madame Bovary_ or an

_Old Wives’ Tale_. But while they looked upon their art as akin

to painting rather than photography, they prided themselves on their

fidelity to human character and the great truths of human life. To them

the romantic meant the fantastic and incredible, while the realistic

signified the sane and sober, the possible if not the actual; and in

this sense we use the terms.

To these two divisions, it is necessary to add a third as a sort of

_tertium quid_, for the ironic method is important enough to

deserve some special treatment, although not correlative with the

others. It is conscious indeed of its aristocratic superiority to them,

although it cannot maintain itself independently but must be allied to

one or the other.

Of the dozen names on the roll of Victorian satiric novelists about

half are found in the list of the romantico-satirical. They seem to

come in pairs, and for the sake of symmetry and clearness may be so

grouped. The first pair are the most distinguished contributors to

this section,--Peacock and Butler, standing at the two chronological

extremes. The second pair furnish a medium amount, and are themselves

forerunners to the main group, though their fantastic productions

are forty years apart,--Lytton and Disraeli. The third pair are of

least account here, but are of especial importance in the realistic

field,--Thackeray and Meredith.

Altogether this half dozen men produced nearly two dozen items of

the romantico-satiric order, none of which could be called novels in

the strict sense, yet all of which are worthy of being included in

this list, because of the light they throw on the characteristics of

the romantic method in satire. The largest amount, both actually and

relatively, is supplied by Peacock, for his seven tales represent the

bulk of his own output. The smallest is Lytton’s, represented by only

one, and that an aftermath of a prolific and versatile energy. Disraeli

threw off three skits, like Thackeray’s half dozen and Meredith’s two,

in being preliminary to later and more substantial work. Butler’s two,

on the contrary, though forming only a fraction of his stops of various

quills, are the most inevitably associated with his name, the pair

indeed whereby his name is known.

The list covers a period of eighty-five years, though it is prolonged

over a half century only by the interval of thirty years between

_Erewhon_ and its sequel. The rest are fairly compact, except for

Peacock’s Rip Van Winkle sleep between _Crochet Castle_ and _Gryll

Grange_. A dated table is appended for the convenience of a bird’s-eye

view.[87]

Returning now to our first parallel, Peacock and Butler, we find the

parallelism to be rather complete, manifesting itself in character,

destiny, and product.

The destiny of both lay in a mean that was not golden. Their annals

were the long and simple of the fairly well to do. Neither knew the

exhilaration that comes from prosperity and downright good luck;

neither, the depression of bitter struggle or disaster. The current of

Peacock’s progress was retarded by the comparative poverty that, like

Tennyson’s, postponed his marriage; and that of Butler was obstructed

by his family’s opposition to his unpardonable preference for a secular

career. If the son of a clergyman and the grandson of a bishop could

not see his clerical duty and do it, there was no help for it, he must

go to New Zealand. But to banish a youthful radical was only to set him

free; and to allow him a perspective and a fresh viewpoint was to bring

down upon orthodoxy an infinite deal of mischief. “It was the England

that he saw with new eyes,” says his biographer Harris, “after his

return, that awakened his restless, satiric vigour. He reacted to the

English scene as no one else in his century had reacted before.”[88]

By temperament Peacock and Butler were both solitary, pervaded

by a gentle melancholy, and permeated with love of classic lore.

But Peacock’s sadness could take the ironic Jonsonian turn. Quite

appropriately did he choose “Your true melancholy breeds your perfect

fine wit,” as the motto for _Nightmare Abbey_. Butler’s persiflage,

however, covers a more real and permanent pessimism, perhaps because

it is directed against the spectacle of the wilfully blind leading the

born blind, rather than against a lot of “sentimentalists, chasers

after novelty, bilious malcontents.”[89]

As was natural, neither was acclaimed by the populace, and neither

cared. Peacock had little concern for the British public, which might

like him or not, as it pleased; and Butler was content to write for the

coming generation, in whose appreciation he placed a not unjustified

confidence. Both could afford to publish at their own expense and were

willing to do so.

But in spite of their apparent detachment from local affairs, and

preoccupation with the past, perhaps indeed for that very reason, these

two thoughtful scholars were able to observe their environment keenly

and judge it shrewdly. It was the total environment that interested

each one, his own _Zeitgeist_, of which neither approved. Peacock

rebelled against the futile ferment and restless experimenting of

the first half of the century; Butler protested against the torpid

acquiescence and smug complacency of the second.

These attitudes represent the chief contrast between them. Peacock was

a calm soul, caught in a vortex. He could not be expected to like it.

Butler was a speculative one, pent in a self-satisfied halcyon. He

could not like that. What each would have been if exchanged in time

with the other, it were idle to guess. But it was no irony of fate that

made it the congenial mission of one to banter his age into calming

down, and of the other to prick his into waking up.

An additional difference, and the main one, is that Butler is the

bigger man in every way more searching and earnest, more constructive,

more versatile, more profound. An additional resemblance is that their

fiction is so entirely in the romantic field[90] that they alone of all

on this list will not come up for consideration when we reach the other.

Peacock’s novels[91] form probably the most monomorphic little group

to be found in literature. His seven fantasies have the strong family

resemblance of the seven vestal maidens in _Gryll Grange_. Six of the

Pleiades appeared in a compact series within a fifteen-year period; and

the apparently lost sister joined the constellation thirty years later

than the latest preceding one.

Two of them, _Maid Marian_ and _The Misfortunes of Elphin_, are in

historic costume, and thus afford a chance for the inverted satire that

comes from a contrast between past and present, not to the advantage of

the latter. The other five are all domiciled in contemporary English

house parties; in Hall, Court, Abbey, Castle, or Grange. These are

not, however, the habitations of the conventional citizen. They are

“Headlong,” “Nightmare,” “Crochet.” They harbor all sorts of whimsies

and fads. Those assembled dine, drink, and talk. Between meals they

have a few adventures, not recounted for their own sake, but that of

the additional talk they will bring forth.[92] Though the repartee of

these dramatized Imaginary Conversations is always at concert pitch,

it harmonizes with the whimsically theatrical setting; and the _toute

ensemble_ edifies while it sparkles, like a set of fireworks displaying

maxims of intellectual wit as they explode.

The characters themselves wear their very names as satiric labels. Mr.

Feathernest, Mr. Dross, Mrs. Pinmoney, the Honorable Mr. Listless, Sir

Oliver Oilcake, the Reverends Gaster, Grovelgrub, Vorax, are ticketed

after the fashion inherited from the Morality Plays, a device that

distills a quaint mediæval odor on the nineteenth-century air, and

persists only in some of Trollope’s minor characters.

Of all these people exploiting all their “humours” Peacock is the

ever amused spectator. He speaks ironically through the voice of the

artlessly ambitious Squire Crochet:[93]

“The sentimental against the rational, the intuitive against

the inductive, the ornamental against the useful, the intense

against the tranquil, the romantic against the classical; these

are great and interesting controversies, which I should like,

before I die, to see satisfactorily settled.”

It is because of this effect of inconsequent raillery, doubtless,

that Peacock appears to lack humanity,[94] and to laugh without

responsibility.[95] But one feels that such criticisms would not have

ruffled the twinkling serenity of his placid spirit; that he would not

have deplored the loss of power nor demurred at the penalty. He was a

born sportsman. The hunting was good. Pleasure to him was in pursuit

more than possession. Having had the fun, he would willingly give away

his bag of game before he went home.

One turns with an especial interest to the belated _Gryll Grange_

to see what change there may be thirty years after, but finds little

more than the natural mellowing influence of time. He is indeed

“satirist to the last,” albeit he is disposed to use “more oil and less

vinegar.”[96]

If Peacock is Horatian, without the Roman’s sense of realism, Butler

is more of a Juvenal, as the latter might have been, perhaps, had he

lived under Victoria instead of Domitian. The wind of invective is now

tempered, not to the shorn lamb, but to the modern prejudice against

the rudeness of tempests unmitigated by sunshine.

Butler’s publications, beginning two years after Peacock’s had

ended,[97] extended through the next half century, _The Way of All

Flesh_ and _Notebooks_ being posthumous. But the three decades

bracketed by the two Erewhons were the fertile ones. Through them

flowed steadily a stream of many currents; satiric, scientific

(mainly controversial), classic, critical, descriptive, expository,

musical, and artistic. Of all these volumes only three can be classed

as fiction, and one of those falls in the other group. Our present

interest centers upon _Erewhon_ and its sequel.

There is no more effective satiric machinery than that of the Foreign

State, or Adventures among Strange People. It may take the form of a

serious though perhaps fantastic conception with incidental satire,

as in _Utopia_, _New Atlantis_, _The Coming Race_, _Modern Utopia_;

or a travesty of these, an inverted pyramid, made grotesque by the

dominating satire, though none the less freighted with serious intent,

as _Gulliver_, _Journey from This World to the Next_, _Erewhon_.

From the fact that _The Coming Race_ and _Erewhon_ may be cited as

examples of the same literary genus, though of different species, comes

the suggestion that the real complement of Butler is Lytton. It does

happen that they furnish the only two instances on our list of the

exercise of this particular kind of creative fancy.[98] Lytton’s tale

pictures a positive ideal, which satirizes our inadequate reality by

acting as a foil to it. Butler’s narrative portrays a supposed reality,

of which the visitor does not approve; and his comments satirize our

accepted reality by a subtle, indirect reflection. Our race placed

beside the “coming” one merely looks small, inferior, incomplete, yet

all it needs is growth. But if the barrier could be leveled between

our country and the one Over the Range, the two would confront each

other and see their own images, not as in a glass darkly but as in a

brilliant yet tricky and distorting mirror. Our actual beliefs and

practices, shorn of the verbal illusions we have spun around them, and

pushed to their logical conclusions, would become the naked _reductio

ad absurdum_ we view in the Erewhonian philosophy of illness, crime,

science, religion, life, and death.[99]

In _Erewhon Revisited_ we see a mental sequence even more interesting

than the dramatic sequel. _Erewhon_ was followed the very next year by

_The Fair Haven_. The former supplies the stage setting, the latter the

central idea, whose combination makes the Revisit a seemingly artless

but really astounding _tour de force_, an uncanny offspring of logic

and fancy.

Given the original situation and the climax that closes the Erewhonian

adventure, given considerable study and meditation on the strange,

enshrouded origin of the religion which possessed the author’s part of

the world, given a speculative dream as to what might have happened in

his fabricated autobiography after the event, given the Butlerian mind,

patient to track and quick to spring, and the result is as inevitable

as a theorem. One scent, and the proficient hound is off, literally hot

on the trail, nor does he halt till Hanky and Panky, the credulous

mob, Sunchildism itself, are fairly run down and given a good fright,

though finally let off with a shaking that leaves them limp.

The dramatic canvas on which this satiric design is drawn is worthy

a Cervantes, a Swift, or a Defoe; a beautiful example of the “grave,

impossible, great lie,” absorbing if not convincing. Butler’s stories,

more than any in this group, show constructive art; length that is

enough and not too much, sufficient swiftness, coherence, and climax.

They are fantastic but not flimsy. The imagination is captivated, as

always, by the introduction to a strange, new land; the intellect is

aroused by the significance of the panorama rapidly unfolding; the imp

of mischief that dwells in all normal human hearts is delighted at the

deft overthrow of certain conventional idols, now shown to be ugly,

inane, and clay from the feet up; and all this through a concrete,

realistic medium that can be visualized and lived in. We share the

excitement of finding and crossing the range, of the capture and

imprisonment of the “foreign devil” who is at least a dare-devil, of

his later success, and astounding elopement. We sympathize with Mr.

Nosnibor, voluntarily fined and flogged; and we feel quite at home in

the Musical Banks and the Law Courts.

In the sequel we renew old acquaintances and make some new ones. We

admire the executive ability of Yram, seconded by that of her able son

George. We participate in the suspense at the Dedication Ceremony, are

relieved after the dinner table council, and finally well satisfied

when the Bridgeport schemers are discomfited but nobody Blue-Pooled.

It is the business of the _raconteur_, romantic as well as realistic,

to beguile his audience into acquiescence even of the incredible. But

the romancing satirist has the anomalous task of creating a story good

enough to be its own reward and then not allowing it to be. It must

have all the air of being an end in itself the while it is being made

the means to another end. This adroit manipulation whereby the idea

appears subordinate to the plot, although the reverse is the case, is a

point in which Butler surpasses the others on our list and ranks with

the highest at large.[100]

But the idea itself was a premature blossom, and the winds of March,

though late Victorian, were ruthless. About that time, however, it was

the much more massive figure of Ibsen that happened to stand in the

main current of the blasts, and Butler was merely blown aside and left

until Shaw and the Twentieth Century came along and picked him up. One

of his recent biographers has a serious time trying to establish him as

the laws of chronology would dictate, and finally decides it cannot be

done:[101]

“How is it possible to fit a man like Butler, * * * into any

system, * * * how are we to classify one who, above all others,

belonged to no school, was traceable, it may fairly be said, to

no influence at all _direct_ in character, looking back to, and

fitting in with, none of those particular habits of thought at

any rate in the age just preceding and merging into his own? On

an external view, of course, it might be maintained that Butler

harmonized with the solid, scientific background of Victorian

thought--harmonized with it, yet was not of it. Again * * * one

might quite easily say that Samuel Butler stood outside the

Victorian system. And this would be the truest description of

him.”

The parallel noted above between the next two on the list, Lytton and

Disraeli, is more applicable to their work in the realistic field than

in this, for the reason already stated, that Lytton’s one contribution,

_The Coming Race_, is more akin to Butler’s, both in date and design.

Accident rather than enterprise led to the discovery of Lytton’s

Utopian people, the Vrilya, for they inhabit the concave inner surface

of our own planet, and are to be reached only through a subterranean

chasm leading down from the depths of a mine. The citizens of this

highly cultivated nation regard the English intruder as a primitive

barbarian, and despise him for his ignorance and his crude, carnivorous

habits. Deciding, however, to spare his life and risk his presence

until proved contaminating and pernicious, they proceed to educate him

by means of the Vril Trance, a sort of telepathic radio-activity. The

process is mutual, except that they accomplish more,--“partly because

my language was much simpler than theirs, comprising far less of

complex ideas; and partly because their organization was, by hereditary

culture, much more ductile, and more readily capable of acquiring

knowledge than mine.”[102]

Being adopted, the invader is treated with indulgent condescension,

nicknamed _Tish_, a froglet, (in allusion to the Great Batrachian

Theory, that humans sprang from frogs, or, according to one branch

of the school, degenerated from them), and allowed to roam around

with a child, who is about his equal in intellect. All goes well

until the politely tolerated guest has the temerity to fall in love

with a native maiden. This means death, by the painless Vril method

(a marvelous application of electricity), in order to prevent the

disgrace of so uneugenic an alliance; and the calamity is averted only

by the skill and resourcefulness of the lady herself, who manages to

return the unwelcome wooer to his native outer clime. This is made

possible through the use of wings, another invention of this advanced

people.[103]

The story has considerable picturesqueness, nor does it fail in

point. The _Modern Utopia_ of Wells is anticipated in the emphasis on

sanitation and material welfare. As in _Looking Backward_, crime is

eliminated through the elimination of poverty and disease. The dramatic

conclusion is that this underground people are to be the coming race,

against whom we must be prepared if we would not by them be conquered

and exterminated. The philosophical conclusion, however, is the old

paradox, the inescapable dilemma of stagnant perfection.[104]

Disraeli’s _Popanilla_ was a _jeu d’esprit_ of his youth, and develops

an opposite situation from that of the preceding. Instead of the

Britisher abroad, he pictures the foreigner in England, thus affording

us a chance to see ourselves as others see us.[105]

The mechanism by which this new scrutiny is brought to bear upon our

old establishments is well worn and familiar, but has some novelty in

the application. A sailor’s chest is washed ashore on a remote island,

and found by one of the aborigines, Popanilla, who becomes inoculated

with ambition through perusal of some documents discovered therein. He

immediately organizes a proselyting campaign, but encounters too much

opposition from a recalcitrant public to make much headway. The people

are well content with their present peaceful existence, and quite

averse to receiving the serpent of aspiration in their idyllic though

socially sophisticated Garden of Eden. They are provokingly obtuse even

to the argument that “they might reasonably expect to be the terror

and astonishment of the universe, and to be able to annoy every nation

of any consequence.”[106] Finally to settle the trouble caused by the

convert’s tactless propaganda, which has had the lamentable effect of

inducing the young men to desert society for politics, the king orders

the disturber of the peace to be set adrift, and bids him farewell with

this encouraging prophecy:[107]

“As the axiom of your school seems to be that everything can

be made perfect at once, without time, without experience,

without practice, and without preparation, I have no doubt, with

the aid of a treatise or two, you will make a consummate naval

commander, although you have never been at sea in the whole

course of your life.”

This is not exactly the destiny of the involuntary voyager, but his

luck is good. In due time he lands on the shores of Vraibleusia, and

forthwith meets Mr. Skindeep, an instantaneous guide and friend, if not

a philosopher, whom he accompanies with implicit trust, “for, having

now known him nearly half a day, his confidence in his honour and

integrity was naturally unbounded.”[108]

As Popanilla becomes introduced to the best people of Hubbadub, the

capital, the resources of his own country arouse interest, and an

expedition of vast commercial enterprise is headed for the Isle of

Fantaisie. Failure to find it precipitates a panic and leads to the

imprisonment of its representative, for exciting hopes under false

pretenses. However, a happy ending is secured by a legal _coup d’état_,

and a solution of all problems announced by Mr. Flummery Flam, who has

discovered that “it was the great object of a nation not to be the most

powerful, or the richest, or the best, or the wisest, but to be the

most Flummery-Flammistical.”[109]

In Disraeli’s two little classical burlesques, published five years

after _Popanilla_, still another device is used. There is neither an

Englishman in Italy, nor an Italian in England, but the ancient stage

of Greek mythology is made the background for a thinly disguised modern

satiric drama. Familiar characters and incidents are seen masquerading

in equally familiar costumes and scenes, but the former are local and

current, and the latter revived from a far past.

There is none of Browning’s seriousness in Disraeli’s interpretation

of Ixion. His story is utilized because it offers tempting chances for

saucy, allusive comment on mundane affairs. A journey through space

inevitably suggests the humor of proportion; but Ixion and Mercury give

us not the grave irony of Byron’s Cain and Lucifer, nor the rollicking

yet pensive mirth of Mark Twain’s Captain Stormfield. They are content

with clever jocularity.

For instance, as they graze a certain star, Ixion inquires who live

there. “Some low people who are trying to shine into notice,” is the

haughty reply. “’Tis a parvenu planet, and only sprung into space

within this century. We do not visit them.”[110]

During his brief but splendid sojourn on Olympus the guest is postured

as a complacent, insolent, Barry Lyndon sort of rascal, who makes

himself perfectly at home in the divine dining and drawing rooms (which

are, of course, conducted according to the British code of etiquette),

fulfills Cupid’s prediction that he will write in Minerva’s album,

though he does manage to escape her “Platonic man-trap,” carries on his

intrigue with the Queen of Heaven in the Don Juan manner, and meets

his detection and punishment with supercilious assurance and a final

triumphant taunt.

The Infernal Marriage of Proserpine to Pluto introduces a disturbing

element into the _ancien régime_ of Hades. The new and influential

bride stirs up a terrible political turmoil by interfering in

the matter of Orpheus and Eurydice, and the consequence is quite

disastrous. The conservative Fates and Furies are so incensed that

they neglect their disciplinary duties, whereby the radical Sisyphus,

Tantalus, and Ixion obtain a respite from torture and a dangerous

opportunity to talk politics. The phrases “Ministry Out,” “Formation

of New Cabinet,” are bandied about. Finally a change of scene is

prescribed for the Queen. Her departure is celebrated by an elaborate

banquet and a magnificent procession,[111] and we left to infer that

the future belongs to the reactionaries.

We, however, follow the fortunes of Proserpine, who dwells for a

season in Elysium, after a visit _en route_ to the dethroned Saturn,

who discusses with her The Spirit of the Age. Elysian society is of

course the English of Disraeli’s set; gay, graceful, complacent, and

malicious. The finest gentleman there is Achilles; the worst cad is

Æneas, who would fain make up with the now popular Dido, but being

repulsed, must content himself with becoming head of the Elysian saints

and president of a society to induce Gnomes[112] to drink only water.

In form these last two productions belong to the general division of

burlesque. There are also touches of travesty in Peacock.[113] But

the main instances of this type of the grotesque are found in the

two writers who filled in this line the interval between the last of

Disraeli’s, in 1833, and the last of Peacock’s, in 1861. During the

forties and first half of the fifties stood Thackeray, monopolist of

parody and caricature. Immediately following came the two contributions

of Meredith to satiric persiflage. In both cases this fantastic stuff

formed the preliminary to the real work, being merely the romantic

avenue by which two of the greatest realistic satirists came into their

own kingdom.

It happens, therefore, that though the quantity of this early product

is sizable enough, its rank is comparatively low. It is overshadowed

by the others on the list because in it the fun and nonsense is

predominant and the critical element so slight as to be negligible; and

it is overshadowed still more by the more mature genius of the authors

themselves.

It is natural that the burlesque should have been a favorite satiric

mode from Aristophanes to Rostand and Shaw. The wit it requires is

imitative rather than creative, and its appeal is instantaneous.

It is also natural that it should manifest itself at the beginning of

a writer’s career, and form a prelude to greater achievement. This is

the case for good and sufficient psychological reasons. In youth the

exuberant and undisciplined spirit, not yet checked by the reins of

reality, riots in the glory of extravagance; the inventive faculty

is awake but unfurnished by experience with material for original

creation; the critical scent is keen but unpracticed, and impatient

of sober, qualified judgment.[114] Such a condition is prime for

the production of a _Love’s Labour’s Lost_, a _Joseph Andrews_, a

_Northanger Abbey_, a _Pickwick_, a _Barry Lyndon_, a _Shaving of

Shagpat_; to be followed by _Twelfth Night_, _Tom Jones_, _Emma_,

_David Copperfield_, _Vanity Fair_, _The Egoist_.

Thackeray’s apprenticeship at this desk was rather unduly prolonged,

covering about half the period of his literary activity; and its output

is difficult to segregate on account of the ambiguous description of

much of his early work. But from the large mass of sketches, essays,

skits, stories, perhaps half a dozen may be selected as being fairly

within the limits of satirico-romance.

Two of them, the _Hoggarty Diamond_ and the _Yellowplush Papers_, are

on the border line, included here only because too exaggerated and

irresponsible to be otherwise classed. The same might be said of _Barry

Lyndon_, which is not far from being a real novel. Yet perhaps none

of these are more “grotesque” than some phases of legitimate fiction.

Much of their humor comes from the dramatic monologue device. Five are

roughly definable as burlesques: three--_Catherine_, _A Legend of the

Rhine_, and _The Rose and the Ring_, of types; the other two, _Novels

by Eminent Hands_, and _Rebecca and Rowena_, of individuals; yet here

again, classification is misleading, as these latter are versus the

_forms_ of certain productions rather than their _authors_.

Meredith’s _Farina_ is an interesting companion piece to Thackeray’s

Rhine Legend, both having a Teutonic and chivalric background, and

one might perhaps find a closer parallel there than in the one chosen

by Moffat, who traces “reminiscences of Peacock in the fantastic

element which occasionally crops up,” in Meredith, and points out

that the idea underlying _Farina_ and _Maid Marian_ is “substantially

the same--an attempt to reproduce with gentle satire, the medieval

romance of sentiment and gay adventure.” It is true, however, that _A

Legend of the Rhine_ differs from both these in its mocking parade of

anachronisms and telescoped chronology. It was “many, many hundred

thousand years ago” that Thackeray’s German knight was pricking o’er

the plain, but it was in the time of Richard the Lion-Hearted, and “on

the cold and rainy evening of Thursday, the twenty-sixth of October.”

In addition to his full armor he was equipped with an oiled silk

umbrella and a bag with a brazen padlock.

On a subsequent adventure he halts at a wayside shrine covered with

“odoriferous cactuses and silvery magnolias,” and recites “a censer, an

ave, and a couple of acolytes before it.” A victim of his mighty lance

wishes for a notary-public to take down his dying deposition. And a

lost champion is advertised for in the _Allgemeine Zeitung_.

_The Shaving of Shagpat_ out-Herods Herod in Arabian Nightism, and

is not devoid of satiric pith, but we are expressly forbidden by the

author himself to allegorize his geyser of ebullient mirth. The humor

is Rabelaisian--or American--in its pure love of size; it floats in a

gigantic, inflated balloon, to which a small basket of mental cargo is

attached. In this, however, is wrapped up the very important secret

that continuous laughter releases one from enchantment and restores

one’s true form.

The romantic satirist must have, like any other compound, certain more

or less inconsistent traits. There must be the inventive wit of romance

plus the shrewd logic of satire. Yet this rare combination does not

insure the best satiric results. Indeed the contrary is more likely to

be the case, as the union at best is somewhat adventitious.

Then, too, there must be a degree of exaggeration, with the strain on

our credulity so evenly distributed that it is not felt. The sound

sense that satire calls for[115] must maintain her operations, the

while she is masquerading as arrant nonsense.

Finally there is the dilemma encountered by the dramatist,--the

necessity of concentrating high lights as life never does, yet

preserving sufficient effect of dullness and vapid inanity to simulate

reality as we know it.

The various kinds of artifice employed in this artificial process

are all found in the examples on our list. Remoteness of time lends

illusion to _Maid Marian_, _Legend of the Rhine_, _Farina_; remoteness

of place, to _The Coming Race_, and the _Erewhons_; non-human

characters, to _Melincourt_, _Ixion_, _The Shaving of Shagpat_;

anomalous situations, to _Misfortunes of Elphin_ and _Popanilla_. Some

are able to combine them all, notably Lytton and Butler.[116] Some, on

the other hand, manage to create a maximum impression with a minimum

use of the spectacular.

Peacock, for instance, never leaves England nor gives us any but

English characters, quiet if not actually subdued, and usually

unexceptionable in behavior. Disraeli is really as circumscribed. He

apparently transports us to Heaven, Hades, some unsuspected isle in the

far seas, but he actually conveys all these to the isle where he was

born. Thackeray and even Meredith keep strictly to _terra firma_.

If it were desirable to make comparisons with a view to determining

whether any particular ingredient made for success in this sort, we

might observe the connection between originality and exaggeration

in their relation to effectiveness. Evidence from the data seems to

indicate that satiric value, estimated by weight and pertinence of

ideas, is in direct proportion to the amount of inventive wit; but in

irregular or even inverse ratio to extravaganza or caricature.

For example, the general order of both satiric and constructive

excellence, is approximately as follows,--listed in an ascending

series: Meredith, Thackeray, Lytton, Disraeli, Peacock, Butler. But to

reach a climax of pure fantasy we would pass from Thackeray through

Peacock, Disraeli, Butler, and Lytton, to Meredith. Exaggeration does

not seem, therefore, to inhere in satire though it may enhance it.

The chief advantage of the fantastic is that it gives unfettered play

to whatever fancy the mind is endowed with; and it enlists a naturally

too serious Criticism under the brilliant banner of Wit. That its

attractions are many is proved by its distinguished history; for

enrolled among the members of this versatile society are such names

as _Reynard the Fox_, _Romance of the Rose_, _Piers Plowman_, _Don

Quixote_, _Dunciad_, _Gulliver_, _Don Juan_.

Few on our list deserve comparison with these; none perhaps except

_Erewhon_. Peacock’s name might have a place, not for any one tale

but for the _toute ensemble_. What one of Disraeli’s biographers[117]

says of _Popanilla_, that it is “a work of the same kind as Swift’s

_Gulliver’s Travels_” is true enough, but would be more to the point

if the Travels had been confined to Laputa.

Not only are our modern instances comparatively light in quality, but

restricted in range. The fable, for example, is not represented at

all, nor the allegory, though both forms have had a sort of revival

in even more recent times. These deficiencies, if such they are, are

easily accounted for by the fact that in the nineteenth century realism

(in the liberal sense) was having its day, that it had taken especial

possession of the Victorian novel, particularly in its satiric aspect,

so that such scattered fantasies as we have may be regarded as the

crumbs from an opulent table.

The marks of the satiric extravaganza are wit, invention, and

exaggeration. In a general way the opposites of these may be called

respectively humor, interpretation, and exposure; and it may be

premised that these last will be found the characteristics of satiric

realism.

Another contrast that may be anticipated is that when romance is used

as a satiric vehicle it is built expressly for that purpose and carries

its passenger in solitary state; while realism is a public carry-all,

in which this fare is allowed a place along with the others.

Whether further generalization as to relative effectiveness is possible

is a question that must be deferred until after the discussion of the

complementary type.

CHAPTER II

THE REALISTIC

Realism in Victorian fiction, as we need only to be reminded, means not

strictly that which is, but liberally that which might be. Its field is

nominally the Actual but it encroaches unhesitatingly on the domain of

the Probable, laps over into the Improbable, and barely halts at the

Impossible. These expansive habits make it not incompatible with the

Romantic, which indeed, in its soberer aspects, is a constant factor in

the English novel up to and including this period.

Romanticism is reduced to a minimum by Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen,

Mrs. Gaskell, and Anthony Trollope,[118] but the majority of our

novelists have not been thus content to present life in its everyday

garb, neat and prosperous enough, it may be, but neutral, inane,

diffuse, inconclusive. They have insisted in the name of decorum and

dignity on the dress costume and company manners which in civilized

society are a prerequisite to public appearance and conspicuous

position. Life is still life and not an impostor, even when robed in

its best with some artifice of color and ornament and some evidence of

decisive purposefulness in mien and bearing.

But however romantic in effect, the nineteenth-century novel was

realistic in intent, and we may in a measure take the will for the

deed. Of this devotion to reality we have several testimonies, from

such important witnesses as Trollope, Dickens, Thackeray; but two are

of especial interest as they come from two of the most undeniable

romanticists, Lytton and Brontë.

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.

Neither that astigmatic visualizer, the cynic, who regards life

itself as a huge joke on its victims, nor that myopic spectator, the

misanthrope, who conceives humanity as an unmitigated jest on creation,

was a Victorian favorite. Both are blind to certain phenomena,--beauty,

power, exquisite delicacy, tremendous strength,--which also exist,

which even the pessimist grants to be compensatory, and which, when

genuine, are utterly beyond the reach of any ridicule that pretends

to sanity or justice. Such then,--humorously truthful and suitably

proportioned,--is the general character of the satiric stratum which

runs, widening and narrowing, through the great vein of Victorian

fiction.

In the legitimate novel there are two main devices of revealing the

ludicrous; the direct, whereby the author in his own reflections and

comments points it out; and the dramatic, whereby he shows it by means

of incident and character. The latter method is again subdivisible into

two modes, by the use of the two contrasting types of actors, humorous

and humorists. The first are allowed to betray themselves, their very

unconsciousness adding to the piquancy of the situation. For this the

favorite technical tool is the dramatic monologue. The second are the

witty protagonists. They stand _in loco scriptoris_ and express

that detection of absurdity for which the humorless humorous furnish

the occasion.[120]

When we consult our original list, we find the two extremes have

been cut off, as Peacock and Butler belong entirely to the other

department. The remaining eleven have produced about one hundred

twenty novels in the stricter sense, not including short stories,

tales, sketches, or burlesques. It must be noted that this restriction

rules out some items important as literature, and in certain cases

as satire,--_Cranford_, _Pickwick_, _Peg Woffington_, _Scenes from

Clerical Life_.

Of the grand total, approximately one-quarter is eliminated as being

essentially and thoroughly serious. Here again are found some notable

names,--_Last Days of Pompeii_, _Mary Barton_, _Henry Esmond_, _Tale

of Two Cities_, _The Cloister and the Hearth_, _Jane Eyre_, _Hypatia_.

Three-fourths is a large majority, from which one might deduce that the

novel of this period was prevailingly satirical. But the other extreme,

those so strongly saturated as to deserve the name of satires, are

far fewer than the unsatirical. _Vanity Fair_, _Martin Chuzzlewit_,

_The Egoist_, possibly _Barchester Towers_, and _Beauchamp’s Career_,

practically exhaust the list. This leaves about four score of novels in

which the spirit of satire exists, manifesting itself showily, coyly,

in wide range and diversity.

When an author uses the direct method for the conveyance of

satirical ideas, he becomes for the nonce a didactic, though

humor-flavored, philosopher. Over against the artistic liabilities

incurred,--interruption of the narrative, intrusion of more or less

irrelevant matter, may be placed the intellectual assets,--presentation

of opinions and conclusions, and frank expression of personality.

Whether approved of or not, this discursive habit must be accepted as

an old inheritance. From the beginning, the English novel has been a

hybrid, the drama grafted on the treatise. Even the medieval mind,

with its insatiable relish for the pageantry of life, had an uneasy

feeling that the Merry Tale should not be entirely its own reward, and

accordingly found for it a moral justification, whereby pleasure and

profit were joined in a most complacent alliance. And ever since, the

prevailing purpose has been not only to portray life but to exhibit

this or that deduction about life.

In the eighteenth century this tendency took definite shape and

substance, for then it became notably true that the division between

narrative and essay was not coincident with a division between

narrators and essayists. Swift, Addison, Defoe, Fielding, Sterne,

were both. And it was their mantle and not that of romance writers,

Gothic or Historical, that best fitted Victorian shoulders. Of the

many testimonies to this, direct and indirect, the following from a

characteristic Victorian pen may be cited as evidence:[121]

“The reader of a novel--who had doubtless taken the volume up

simply for amusement, and who would probably lay it down did he

suspect that instruction, like a snake-in-the-grass, like physic

beneath the sugar, was to be imposed upon him--requires from his

author chiefly this, that he shall be amused by a narrative in

which elevated sentiment prevails, and gratified by being made

to feel that the elevated sentiments described are exactly his

own.”

He then goes on to show that this morality is best served by realism,

in spite of the superior attractions of heroes and villains:[122]

“But for one Harry Esmond, there are fifty Ralph Newtons--five

hundred and fifty of them; and the very youth whose bosom glows

with admiration as he reads of Harry--who exults in the idea

that as Harry did, so would he have done--lives as Ralph lived,

is less noble, less persistent, less of a man even than was

Ralph Newton.

“It is the test of a novel-writer’s art that he conceals his

snake-in-the-grass; but the reader may be sure that it is

always there. * * * In writing novels, we novelists preach to

you from our pulpits, and are keenly anxious that our sermons

shall not be inefficacious. * * * Nevertheless, the faults of a

Ralph Newton, and not the vices of a Varney or a Barry Lyndon,

are the evils against which men should in these days be taught

to guard themselves--which women also should be made to hate.

Such is the writer’s apology for his very indifferent hero,

Ralph the Heir.”

In another volume[123] the same writer confesses,--

“Castles with unknown passages are not compatible with my homely

muse. I would as lief have to do with a giant in my book--a real

giant, such as Goliath--as with a murdering monk with a scowling

eye. The age for such delights is, I think, gone. We may say

historically of Mrs. Radcliffe’s time that there were mysterious

sorrows in those days. They are now as much out of date as the

giants.”

Victorianism of course had her own sorrows, patent and unmysterious as

they were. At no time could she have been mistaken for Elizabethanism.

But she grew gradually in strength and sobriety, and cast a heavier

shadow in the afternoon of the century. In its mid-morning Disraeli

could compliment his own _Young Duke_ with the subtitle, “a moral tale

though gay.” And the chief ambition of the young writers up to the

early forties seems to have been to produce tales that were gay though

moral.

Of this tendency Lytton is the most conspicuous example. Innately

serious and thoroughly sentimental, he nevertheless dared not be as

solemn as he could. He must live up to the requirement for ironic wit

and the light touch of _savior faire_, even though, lacking native

exuberance and somewhat deficient in taste, he often fell into the

slough of facetiousness, or at least lapsed into childish jocularity.

To quote him at his best, however, we take a few excerpts from the

last of his trilogy of domestic novels. In the second of the series,

_My Novel_, he had adapted the prefatory device of _Tom Jones_, using

the remarks of the Caxton family as a sort of introductory (or more

properly, retrospective) chorus to each book. In _What Will He Do

with It_, the idea is carried out on a smaller scale, in expository

paragraphs preliminary to chapters. The following will be sufficient to

indicate the tone:

Book I

Chapter XII

“In which it is shown that a man does this or declines to do

that for reasons best known to himself--a reserve which is

extremely conducive to the social interests of a community;

since the conjecture into the origin and nature of those reasons

stimulates the inquiring faculties, and furnishes the staple

of modern conversation. And as it is not to be denied that, if

their neighbors left them nothing to guess at, three fourths

of civilized humankind, male or female, would have nothing to

talk about; so we cannot too gratefully encourage that needful

curiosity, termed by the inconsiderate tittle-tattle or scandal,

which saves the vast majority of our species from being reduced

to the degraded condition of dumb animals.”

Chapter XV

“The historian records the attachment to public business which

distinguishes the British Legislator--Touching instance of the

regret which ever in patriotic bosoms attends the neglect of a

public duty.”

Chapter XVII

“* * * It also showeth, for the instruction of Men and States,

the connection between democratic opinion and wounded

self-love; so that, if some Liberal statesman desire to rouse

against an aristocracy the class just below it, he has only to

persuade a fine lady to be exceedingly civil ‘to that sort of

people.’”

Book IV

Chapter IX

“* * * The aboriginal Man-Eater, or Pocket Cannibal, is

susceptible to the refining influences of Civilization. He

decorates his lair with the skins of his victims; he adorns his

person with the spoils of those whom he devours.”

Of the nine remaining names on the list, the real Victorians according

to chronology, it happens that two-thirds are almost negative examples

of direct satire. Reade, Trollope, and Kingsley take their own

moralizing for the most part seriously, as do also the three women,

Mrs. Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot. Such instances to the

contrary as there are only serve in the usual capacity of exceptions.

It is the remaining third, Thackeray, Dickens, and Meredith, who are

prominent in this matter as in most others.

Thackeray usually trusts to the metaphorical and allusive to secure

a humorous effect. Vanity Fair is itself a symbolic term, elaborated

upon in the Introduction and harped upon constantly throughout the

story. The account, for instance, of the Sedley sale is prefaced by

a description of a similar conclusion to the career of the late Lord

Dives, the chapter beginning as follows:[124]

“If there is any exhibition in all Vanity Fair which Satire

and Sentiment can visit arm in arm together; where you light

on the strangest contrasts laughable and tearful; where you

may be gentle and pathetic, or savage and cynical with perfect

propriety; it is at one of those public assemblies, a crowd of

which are advertised every day in the last page of the ‘Times’

newspaper, and over which the late Mr. George Robins used to

preside with so much dignity.”

And again:[125]

“This is a species of dignity in which the high-bred British

female reigns supreme. To watch the behavior of a fine lady

to other and humbler women, is a very good sport for a

philosophical frequenter of Vanity Fair.”

He delights in whimsical classic comparisons:[126]

“Is this case a rare one? and don’t we see every day in the

world many an honest Hercules at the apron-strings of Omphale,

and great whiskered Samsons prostrate in Delilah’s lap?”

Sometimes the classical is mingled in with the Scriptural:[127]

“A good housewife is of necessity a humbug; and Cornelia’s

husband was hoodwinked, as Potiphar was--only in a different

way.”

Sometimes we have a scientific simile, as the comment on Becky’s

ambition to be presented at Court.[128]

“If she did not wish to lead a virtuous life, at least she

desired to enjoy a character for virtue, and we know that no

lady in the genteel world can possess this desideratum, until

she has put on a train and feathers, and has been presented to

her Sovereign at court. From that august interview they come

out stamped as honest women. The Lord Chamberlain gives them

a certificate of virtue. And as dubious goods or letters are

passed through an oven at quarantine, sprinkled with aromatic

vinegar, and then pronounced clean--many a lady whose reputation

would be doubtful otherwise and liable to give infection, passes

through the wholesome ordeal of the Royal Presence, and issues

from it free from all taint.”

In his later novels Thackeray used in greater proportion the more

artistic indirect method, although he could more easily have plucked

out his eye and cast it from him than to have performed the same

operation on his habit of moralizing, which most frequently took the

form of a semi-whimsical but wholly homiletic exhortation to his dear

readers to make a personal application of the lessons involved in the

story.[129]

Of these later instances, one illustrates the use of literary allusion,

neatly combined with the commercial.[130]

“Though, no doubt, in these matters, when Lovelace is tired

of Clarissa (or the contrary), it is best for both parties to

break at once, * * * yet our self-love, or our pity, or our

sense of decency, does not like that sudden bankruptcy. Before

we announce to the world that our firm of Lovelace and Co.

can’t meet its engagements, we try to make compromises; we have

mournful meetings of partners; we delay the putting up of the

shutters, and the dreary announcement of the failure. It must

come: but we pawn our jewels to keep things going a little

longer.”

Dickens is included with this “didactic” trio, not so much because he

belongs with them as because he does not belong with the others. He

cannot be classed as a negative example, but his positive contributions

are relatively small. His artistic superiority to Thackeray in this

respect comes, however, not from a greater knowledge of artistry, and

even less from greater care for it, but through the happy accident of a

vivid, dramatic temperament. He refrains from much moralizing not, we

are sure, because he loves moralizing less but because he loves people

and actions more. His overwhelming interest in these, his affection and

respect for the doings and sayings of his characters, is too intense

to allow of their being interrupted by anything. He is thus something

of an artist unaware. He does not work out his own salvation by taking

thought or by deliberating over ways and means; but through a fortunate

preoccupation, an absorbing engagement with the concrete, he almost

unconsciously dispenses with the abstract, or expresses it in terms of

the specific.

It is true also that he segregates a good deal of his reflection in

his Prefaces; but it crops up too often in the course of the narrative

to be disregarded. One of the first showings occurs in connection with

Mr. Bumble’s relinquishment of the beadle’s costume together with that

office, and his pensive cogitations thereupon.[131]

“There are some promotions in life, which, independent of the

more substantial rewards they offer, acquire peculiar value and

dignity from the coats and waistcoats connected with them.

A field-marshal has his uniform; a bishop his silk apron; a

counsellor his silk gown; a beadle his cocked hat. Strip the

bishop of his apron, or the beadle of his hat and lace; what are

they? Men. Mere men. Dignity, and even holiness too, sometimes,

are more questions of coat and waistcoat than some people

imagine.”

In his next novel, Dickens has a word for those “who pamper their

compassion and need high stimulants to rouse it,” and indicates the

cause of hysterical zeal on the one hand or dull indifference on the

other, equally misplaced:[132]

“In short, charity must have its romance, as the novelist

or playwright must have his. A thief in fustian is a vulgar

character, scarcely to be thought of by persons of refinement;

but dress him in green velvet, with a high-crowned hat, and

change the scene of his operations, from a thickly peopled city,

to a mountain road, and you shall find in him the very soul of

poetry and adventure.”

The romance of the picturesque is one of our weaknesses; that of the

mysterious is another. The latter is discussed with reference to the

machinations of the Gordon Riot:[133]

“To surround anything, however monstrous or ridiculous, with

an air of mystery, is to invest it with a secret charm, and

power of attraction which to the crowd is irresistible. False

priests, false prophets, false doctors, false patriots, false

prodigies of every kind, veiling their proceeding in mystery,

have always addressed themselves at an immense advantage to the

popular credulity, and have been, perhaps, more indebted to

that resource in gaining and keeping for a time the upper hand

of Truth and Common Sense, than to any half dozen items in the

whole catalogue of imposture.”

Toward the legal profession the attitude of Dickens is never ambiguous,

and ever and anon, as in the following instance, he expresses it with

concise clarity:[134]

“The one great principle of the English law is, to make business

for itself. There is no other principle distinctly, certainly,

and consistently maintained through all its narrow turnings.

Viewed by this light it becomes a coherent scheme, and not the

monstrous maze the laity are apt to think it. Let them but once

clearly perceive that its grand principle is to make business

for itself at their expense, and surely they will cease to

grumble.”

No less favored with warmth of feeling is the famous Circumlocution

Office, to which much eloquence is devoted in a chapter “containing the

whole science of government.” There are pages of satirical description,

the keynote of which is found in an early paragraph:[135]

“This glorious establishment had been early in the field,

when the one sublime principle involving the difficult art

of governing a country, was first distinctly revealed to

statesmen. It had been foremost to study that bright revelation,

and to carry its shining influence through the whole of the

official proceedings. Whatever was required to be done, the

Circumlocution Office was beforehand with all the public

departments in the art of perceiving--HOW NOT TO DO IT.”

It is recognized as something of an anomaly that Meredith should

have begun publishing fiction along with George Eliot, and fifteen

years before Hardy and Butler, for he belongs with the latter as

post-Victorian in art and character. He represents at once the maturity

of the nineteenth century and the embryonic promise of the twentieth,

whose new currents were already meeting and clashing with the old

full tide. About him there could be nothing artless or naïve, nothing

unconscious or preoccupied. Ripeness of judgment, deliberation in

method, are stamped on every line, giving an effect of purposefulness

without dogmatism, and profundity without owlishness. Whatever he does

is done intentionally,[136] and if some lack of spontaneity is the

result, it is amply compensated for by the strength and sureness that

come from a man’s command of himself and his material. In so far as

he is obscure, involved, compactly sententious, his malice is, like

Browning’s, aforethought. Not in ignorance nor indifference does it

arise, but from independent choice and a certain scorn of any other

procedure.

Accordingly while direct satire is not wanting in his novels, it is

restrained in amount and sophisticated in nature. It does not take the

shape of facile application of obvious conditions, nor of flamboyant

portraiture, but of concentrated analyses of phases of life, from a

scientific point of view, rather than ethical, and presented with calm

detachment.

Meredith is quite capable of telling pure story, as in _Vittoria_ and

_Harry Richmond_, but he is also capable of putting in some personal

seasoning, particularly evinced in the openings of _Beauchamp’s

Career_, and _An Amazing Marriage_, and throughout _The Egoist_.

Of these two discursive introductions, the former is more amenable to

quotation. It deals with the situation incident to a rumor of French

invasion, and personifies Panic as a sleepy old spinster roused into

brief hysteria, and lapsing back into comfortable stupor.[137]

“This being apprehended, by the aid of our own shortness of

figures and the agitated images of the red-breeched only

waiting the signal to jump and be at us, there ensued a curious

exhibition that would be termed, in simple language, writing

to the newspapers, for it took the outward form of letters: in

reality, it was the deliberate saddling of our ancient nightmare

of Invasion, putting the postillion on her, and trotting her

along the highroad with a winding horn to rouse old Panic. * *

* She did a little mischief by dropping on the stock-markets;

in other respects she was harmless, and, inasmuch as she

established a subject for conversation, useful.

“Then, lest she should have been taken too seriously, the

Press, which had kindled, proceeded to extinguish her with the

formidable engines called leading articles, which fling fire or

water, as the occasion may require. * * *

“Then the people, rather ashamed, abused the Press for

unreasonably disturbing them. The Press attacked old Panic and

stripped her naked. Panic, with a desolate scream, arraigned

the Parliamentary Opposition for having inflated her to serve

base party purposes. The Opposition challenged the allegations

of Government, * * * and proclaimed itself the watch-dog of the

country.”

At about this juncture the enemy himself stepped in and announced there

never had been any need for the dog to bark at all:

“So, then, Panic, or what remained of her, was put to bed

again. The Opposition retired into its kennel growling. The

People coughed like a man of two minds, doubting whether he

has been divinely inspired or has cut a ridiculous figure. The

Press interpreted the cough as a warning to Government; and

Government launched a big ship with hurrahs, and ordered the

recruiting-sergeant to be seen conspicuously.”

All this would seem sufficient, but it appears that the real sting

after these preliminary pricks, is in the tail. The picture concludes

with the bulky figure of the Tax-Payer looming in the background; he is

pointed out with the laconic comment:[138]

“Will you not own that the working of the system for scaring him

and bleeding him is very ingenious? But whether the ingenuity

comes of native sagacity, as it is averred by some, or whether

it shows an instinct laboring to supply the deficiencies of

stupidity, according to others, I cannot express an opinion.”

The satiric parentheses in _The Egoist_ are naturally concerned not

with politics but with individual men and women, chiefly in their

relationships to one another. A few instances will serve.

Referring to the selfish folly of the masculine demand for feminine

delicacy rather than strength, Meredith says of women:[139]

“Are they not of a nature warriors, like men?--men’s mates to

bear them heroes instead of puppets? But the devouring male

Egoist prefers them as inanimate overwrought polished pure-metal

precious vessels, fresh from the hands of the artificer, for him

to walk away with hugging, call all his own, drink of, and fill

and drink of, and forget that he stole them.”

Again, apropos of that “adoring female’s worship,” destined only for

the strong, “who maintain the crown by holding divinely independent of

the great emotion they have sown,” he says:[140]

“In the one hundred and fourth chapter of the thirteenth volume

of the Book of Egoism, it is written: _Possession without

obligation to the object possessed approaches felicity_.”

When we turn to plot or situation as a vehicle of satire, we find an

almost exact parallel, as to proportionate amount, to the reflective

type just discussed. More than half of the novelists on our list have

no examples worthy of special mention. A few insert amusing episodes,

not especially germane to the main plot. And the three notable

instances, where the satiric situation is a feature of importance,

where it influences the whole trend of the movement, affects the

leading characters, and plays a part in the climax, occur in the three

real satires, _Martin Chuzzlewit_, _Vanity Fair_, and _The Egoist_; so

that Dickens, Thackeray, and Meredith are again our main theme.

Situation or action is of course merely the dramatization of character,

and not to be distinguished from it except as actual expression

is distinguished from the capacity for it. Individuals speak for

themselves instead of being spoken for, although they often convey more

than they mean to, and much that they would not. Since this form of

art has its own medium in the drama, it is there that we look for the

most perfect and concentrated expression, and expect to find it in the

novel only in the latter’s dramatic moments, which may be few and far

between. But as the _dénouement_ of the drama usually turns on

some phase of poetic justice, either in its tragic or its comic aspect,

so also does this dramatic element in fiction. Satire in situation

is therefore concerned with the comedy of poetic justice, and is

successful in so far as that sense is appealed to and satisfied.

In their respective stories, Pecksniff, Becky Sharp, and Sir Willoughby

Patterne are the people of most importance, if not the heroes; and in

each case the climax of the career is a ludicrous anticlimax, with

circumstances appropriate in every instance to the character.

The unveiling of Pecksniff is a public and demonstrative affair, in

accordance with the public and demonstrative nature of his previous

life, and also, one may add, with the Dickensian theory of the fitness

of humorous retribution. In spite of the crude melodrama of the

scene, there is fundamental truth in the most important item in it,

the behavior of the one toward whom all eyes are turned in hostile

contempt. He needed no loyal, anxious mother to beg him to “be ’umble,”

for his humility was not as the Heeps’. It was a superior article,

self-possessed and patronizing, not servile and ingratiating, and it

was therefore impregnable. Uriah might be discomfited when his mask was

publicly torn away, but the Pecksniffian duplicity was no mere flimsy

detachable mask. It was the very skin of his face; indeed, it was more

than skin deep; it was the stuff of his soul. He could therefore be

imperturbable, though felled to the floor, a dignified martyr, grieved

but gracious under calumny, unquelled by those who had assembled to do

him dishonor.

This impressiveness serves Pecksniff, as her wit serves Becky,

to mitigate the absurdity which threatens him. It is not in this

heightened moment that his comicality is apparent; it is in the

retrospective picture we get of him through the revelation of Martin

Chuzzlewit, whereby he is seen not only as the biter bit, but as the

calf, the bland, assured, shrewd yet unsuspecting calf, that, being

given plenty of rope, promptly hanged himself.

In the downfall of Becky there is less of the comic and more of

the tragic, though Thackeray does not choose to invest her with

enough dignity for tragedy. She is less absurd than Pecksniff or Sir

Willoughby for several reasons. She is more human and has the claim of

normal humanity on our sympathy; she is the product of circumstances,

clearly shown to be largely responsible for her failure both in

aspiration and achievement, whereas theirs is gratuitous and without

excuse; and she is herself too much of a jester to be patronized by the

ridicule of others. She too can keep up appearances to the last, not

by reinforcing her hypocrisy but by being able to dispense with it,

when it no longer serves, and to mock at it along with everything else.

The only real joke she is the victim of comes comparatively early,

when she discovers she might become Lady Crawley were she not already

daughter-in-law of the coveted and forfeited title.

This theme of a vaulting ambition o’erleaping itself is a favorite with

Thackeray, and he did some good apprentice work on it in _The Fatal

Boots_, and _Yellowplush Memoirs_. In the former the unwelcome wedding

present comes as a delightful bit of comic nemesis. But the outcome of

the latter, with an accomplished swindler outwitted by his own father,

and a helpless woman ruthlessly sacrificed, savors too much of tragedy

to be amusing.

Sir Willoughby is only an egoist, not a hypocrite nor a sycophant; and

being a gentleman can suffer naught but a gentlemanly humiliation. Such

a one is not to be knocked down and taunted in the presence of his

little world; he is merely made a subject of gossip and speculation:

nor is he to be reduced to sordid material scheming; his intrigues

are all on the spiritual plane. A destiny that seemed kind but proved

cruel created him the central sun to his own solar system. His only

sin was the desire to maintain that position by exerting a strong but

legitimate centripetal force upon his satellites: if any centrifugal

force should become stronger, they must simply drop off into space.

His mate he conceived of as the fairest star of all, gladly answering

an imperious summons to disregard even the laws of gravitation, to

surrender even the personality of a satellite, to rush headlong to

a union that secured enlargement of the sun by the quenching and

absorption of the star. And for this, his only punishment was the

refusal, incredible, presumptuous, on the part of a succession of

chosen stars to surrender, to rush, to be absorbed. His utmost penalty

was the decree that he must be content with the indifferent attendance

of a weary moon whose own light had grown cold and who avowed an

allegiance at the most, dutiful, quite disillusioned, and granted

because of a pressure that amounted to compulsion.

Externally his situation is prosperous and respectable. He remains an

aristocrat of wealth and station, “the humour of whom,” as his own

author says,[141] “scarcely dimples the surface and is distinguishable

but by very penetrative, very wicked imps, whose fits of roaring below

at some generally imperceptible stroke of his quality, have first made

the mild literary angels aware of something comic in him,” and whose

figure therefore never becomes palpably absurd. Only by the “detective

vision” of the imps is he seen poised on the pinnacle of absurdity,

while the Pecksniffs and Becky Sharps of the world cluster around its

base.

The poetic justice of this comedy in narrative is perfect because the

pit the victim falls into is one of his own digging and the digging

is of his own volition (popularly speaking, without reference to the

metaphysics of determinism). From the first moment of Sir Willoughby’s

philandering with Lætitia Dale to the last unlucky turning of the

key in young Crossjay’s room, all was spontaneous, a long list of

self-indulgences that turned into self-avengers. It was not essential

that he should play upon the sentimental romanticism of his adoring

feminine neighbor; nor that he should protest so emphatically to Clara

that he never could by any possibility bring himself to marry Lætitia;

nor that he should himself provide a witness to his overcoming of

that boasted impossibility,--and make the sacrifice for nothing after

all,--when the absence of a witness would have saved the day for him.

But having done all these things he had to pay the price, though it

rendered him bankrupt in vanity, and for him that was bankruptcy indeed.

Yet for all that he is food for mirth, one must yield to a lurking

sympathy for the unhappy Patterne. A wound is a wound and may cause

exquisite pain, even if inflicted only on self-love. A Pecksniff and

a Becky are invulnerable; he is protected from pelting rain by his

own oiliness, she by her inimitable faculty for borrowing umbrellas.

Lætitia was indeed finally secured as Sir Willoughby’s umbrella, but

not before he had been alarmingly threatened if not actually soaked.

If we measured our laughter by the real feelings of its object instead

of our conception of the frivolity or sacredness of those feelings,

we should undoubtedly find it much diminished. We could not enjoy the

predicament of Sir Willoughby or Sir John Falstaff or Malvolio or any

of the notable company of the Mighty Fallen. Whereas we do enjoy them

with unrestrained relish on the supposition that their fall is not that

of a Cæsar or a Napoleon. Yet these also were egoists, and those would

fain have been conquering heroes. Meredith testifies to this in his

preliminary analysis:[142]

“The Egoist surely inspires pity. He who would desire to clothe

himself at everybody’s expense, and is of that desire condemned

to strip himself stark naked, he, if pathos ever had a form,

might be taken for the actual person.”

In addition to these instances where the continual and final absurdity

of the situation is made the _motif_ of the novel, there are

several cases of minor episodes, quite as suggestive though on a

smaller scale.

Dickens is, as might be supposed, the most fertile in these scenes of

comic retribution. Aside from Pecksniff and Uriah Heep, he is most

successful with the Lammles, Mr. Dorrit, and Silas Wegg.

The Veneering Dinner, which introduces _Our Mutual Friend_, is

only an understudy to the Veneering Breakfast, which celebrates the

marriage of two of the Veneerings’ oldest friends.

“But, there is another time to come, and it comes in about a

fortnight, and it comes to Mr. and Mrs. Lammle on the sands at

Shanklin, in the Isle of Wight.

“Mr. and Mrs. Lammle have walked for some time on the Shanklin

sands, and one may see by their foot-prints that they have not

walked arm-in-arm, and that they have not walked in a straight

track, and that they have walked in a moody humour; for, the

lady has prodded little spirting holes in the damp sand before

her with her parasol, and the gentleman has trailed his stick

after him. As if he were of the Mephistopheles family indeed,

and had walked with a drooping tail.”[143]

It is not an angelic council that follows, though it has the virtues of

candor, contrition, and a judicious conclusion, proposed by the Belial

of the conference, to make the best of a bad bargain by forming a union

of intrigue against the world in general and the diabolical Veneerings

in particular. Thus mutual in greed, in gullibility, in consequent

remorse, and in unholy alliance, this pair of frauds form the real

mutuality of Dickens’ Vanity Fair.

Silas Wegg and William Dorrit stand at the two extremes, for one is

farcical and the other tragic, yet they meet on a common ground, the

comedy of exposure. The farcical villain may be dismissed with the

comment that his dramatic exit, though richly done, bears some marks

of the childishness and vulgarity that his author could not always

avoid. The tragic comedian, on the other hand, stands before us in

an unconscious self-betrayal no less impressive and startling in its

way than that of the sleep-walking Lady Macbeth. Nowhere in English

literature, indeed, is there a picture more awful in its simple

inevitability than the eloquent speech addressed to the guests at

Mrs. Merdle’s dinner table by the affable, patronizing Father of the

Marshalsea.

Such ironic penalizings as these are satires of circumstances, sport

which beguiles the ennuied Immortals. Immeasurably lower in the scale

is the practical joke indulged in by mortals; yet in such deeds we

may reckon Mistresses Ford and Page, Sir Toby and Maria, as human

deputies acting for a requiting destiny. Perhaps our best example of

this obvious but joyous kind of satire is one found in almost the first

novel of almost the first name on our list, Lytton’s _Pelham_. It

is the Parisian incident of the amorous M. Margot and the clever Mrs.

Green, wherein the conceit and credulity of the former is played upon

by the shrewd and merry malice of the latter, until he finds himself

distressingly suspended in a basket from her lofty window late in a

chilly night, to the great amusement of divers spectators previously

invited there for that purpose.

Much more subtle and hence much more intellectually satisfying is the

trap in which another amorous gentleman, the Reverend Mr. Slope, is

caught by another clever lady, Signora Neroni.[144]

“Mr. Slope was madly in love, but hardly knew it. The signora

spitted him, as a boy does a cockchafer on a cork, that she

might enjoy the energetic agony of his gyrations. And she knew

very well what she was doing.”

In their memorable interview the accomplished Phoedria led this poor

Cymochles into a fearful, tangled web, there to struggle and flounder

until she released him with mocking scorn, having illustrated perfectly

Meredith’s remark about another and more famous egoist:[145]

“A lover pretending too much by one foot’s length of pretense,

will have that foot caught in her trap.”

Even then, however, fate had not done her worst, for the cockchafer

was literally to be slapped in the face by the more direct and active

Eleanor Bold. The comment on this latter scene may be cited as an

example of the mock-heroic vein occasionally used in the service of

satire from Swift and Fielding on.[146]

“But how shall I sing the divine wrath of Mr. Slope, or how

invoke the tragic muse to describe the rage which swelled the

celestial bosom of the bishop’s chaplain? Such an undertaking

by no means befits the low-heeled buskin of modern fiction.

The painter put a veil over Agamemnon’s face when called on

to depict the father’s grief at the early doom of his devoted

daughter. The god, when he resolved to punish the rebellious

winds, abstained from mouthing empty threats. We will not

attempt to tell with what mighty surgings of the inner heart Mr.

Slope swore to revenge himself on the woman who had disgraced

him, nor will we vainly strive to depict his deep agony of soul.

“There he is, however, alone in the garden-walk, and we must

contrive to bring him out of it. * * * He stood motionless,

undecided, glaring with his eyes, thinking of the pains and

penalties of Hades, and meditating how he might best devote

his enemy to the infernal gods with all the passion of his

accustomed eloquence. He longed in his heart to be preaching at

her. ’Twas thus that he was ordinarily avenged of sinning mortal

men and women. Could he at once have ascended his Sunday rostrum

and fulminated at her such denunciations as his spirit delighted

in, his bosom would have been greatly eased.”

The routing of this clergyman is balanced by the triumph of another,

in a later volume of the series, though in an entirely different

cause.[147] None of our novelists has given us a more delectable

scene than the one which marked the culmination of those triangular

interviews with which Bishop Proudie’s study was so familiar. Here

Mrs. Proudie, that mighty Amazon, is brought low, and that, through

a dastardly blow of fate, by a foe unworthy of her steel, albeit she

had not considered him unworthy of her persecution. She is now made

to endure two kinds of anguish, both new and both terrible. The first

is being ignored. The second is being talked back to and then left

before she can reply. It is a glorious moment for all but the defeated

when one weary badgered opponent thunders at her, “Peace, Woman!” and

adds that she would better be minding her distaff; and another weary

badgered opponent, her sleek and pampered husband, jumps from his chair

at the sound, not in anger at the unchivalrous Mr. Crawley but in

admiration of his incredible courage and astounding victory.

Of these various roads open to the writer of satirical intent, those

just indicated, by direct reflection and by dramatic scenes, are in

the nature of by-ways. They are for the most part occasional and

incidental; valuable chiefly as securing the piquant and diversified

effect necessary to the literature that aims to amuse, even when the

amusement itself is secondary in the real design.

The main highway is that of character. By the kind of characters he can

create and by his attitude toward them shall the novelist be known.

There are the idealized, the respected, the beloved, the censured,

the anathematized. The group selected for our especial concern in

this study is formed of those pilloried by the rebuke humorous. Such,

however,--the comic and therefore the ridiculed,--are objects of satire

and accordingly more suitably considered in the following section. It

is the opposite class that constitutes a factor in satiric method. This

phase of the discussion will therefore be confined to the wits, those

who may be called satirists in their own right, and so used by the

author as a dramatic means to his satiric end.

Wit is the diamond of the intellectual world, precious on account

of its rarity, its brilliancy, and the sense of infinite time,

matter, and compression that have gone into its transformation from

common charcoal. Brevity is indeed an element of it; but its soul is

perception, a vision at once quick and penetrating, the radio-activity

of the mind.

Being such, it has the infrequence that marks all excellence, both in

life and its mirrored reflection. There is much of an unsatiric and

subintellectual order, the kind that comes from ingenuity and cunning,

and takes the shape of pranks and jests for the fun of them; manifest

in Diccon, Autolycus, and the Court Fools,--though these last often

have much meat in them. Then there is the clever befooling for a

purpose, as seen in Portia, getting her own ring by a subterfuge; or

Kate Hardcastle, stooping to conquer. There is also the bitter temper

which animates a Katherina, checkmated only by a Petruchio; this

produces too a Thersites to be the cheese and digestion of Achilles;

and Cleopatra, gibing at “the married woman.”

Wit, however, is something more than merriment or malice; and short

is the list of its worthy examples. Lysistrata is not only a vigorous

feminist but pungent on the theme. Pertelote and the Wife of Bath

illumine masculine superstition and conservatism. Benedict and Beatrice

sparkle by mutual concussion. The melancholy Jaques and the melancholy

Dane are the finest of satiric philosophers. Subtle the Alchemist

enjoys with a huge private relish the gullibility he exploits. Fra

Lippo Lippi graces with gayety the professional pretense and policy he

exposes. These compose a distinctive and exclusive company, and few

there are who may be added unto them.

Within the novel the proportion is almost as small. The most noteworthy

prototypes to Victorian fiction are Matthew Bramble and, in a girlish

fashion, Evelina. (Lady Emily, in Susan Ferrier’s _Marriage_,

might be included). But these, through the thin guise of letters, are

Smollett and Burney as completely as Gulliver and Shandy are Swift

and Sterne through the thinner guise of the dramatic monologue. More

objective are Jane Austen’s Mr. Bennet and his daughter Elizabeth. The

former particularly is a satiric soloist acting as Greek chorus to the

follies of his wife, daughters, and certain young men.

This delightful relationship between father and daughter, a sort

of satiric defensive alliance against the besieging army of silly

exactions and vexations, finds a clear if fainter echo in that of

Dr. Gibson and Molly (in Mrs. Gaskell’s _Wives and Daughters_),

who plan in the temporary absence of the elegant stepmother to do

“everything that is unrefined and ungenteel.”

The exponents of satiric wit in the Victorian novel may be thrown for

convenience into three or four divisions.

There is the native or rustic type, whose shrewd observations are

condensed into homely but poignant epigrams. That such characters have

always existed is evident from the existence of a whole literature

of proverbial philosophy, of anonymous origin, like ballads and

fabliaux. Conspicuous in the van of the few who have been lifted from

this obscure anonymity is the redoubtable Mrs. Poyser. It is no valid

discount to George Eliot’s achievement to say she produced only one

Mrs. Poyser. Indeed, it might add something to her luster to note that

no other novelist has produced even one.

The only other deserving of mention is a countryman in Lytton’s _What

Will He Do with It_, chosen in this case also because he illustrates

the generic class of stage-drivers, whose brightest light is the

American Yuba Bill. This one is described in the chapter heading[148]

as “a charioteer, to whom an experience of British Laws suggests

an ingenious mode of arresting the progress of Roman Papacy.” He

discourses to his passenger:[149]

“My wife’s grandfather was put into Chancery just as he was

growing up, and never grew afterwards--never got out o’ it.

Nout ever does. There’s our church warden comes to me with a

petition to sign agin the Pope. Says I, ‘that old Pope is always

in trouble--what’s he bin doin’ now?’ Says he, ‘Spreading! He’s

agot into Parlyment, and now he’s got a colledge, and we pays

for it. I doesn’t know how to stop him.’ Says I, ‘Put the Pope

into Chancery along with wife’s grandfather, and he’ll never

spread agin.’”

The urban counterpart of this type is the child of the city streets, of

which we have specimens in the sophisticated gamins, the Artful Dodger

and Dick Swiveller. In this Dickens has a monopoly, such as it is.

Coming up from the ranks, we reach the intellectual aristocrat, whose

culture enables him to add polish to his satiric pith and point. It

happens that the two most representative characters of this type are

furnished by the two authors who stand at chronological extremes,

though the volumes in which they occur are only three years apart.[150]

Kenelm Chillingly is the melancholy Victorian. After the initial lapse

into a bit of grotesque caricature in the account of his babyhood,--a

thing that would have been avoided by a writer of more restrained

taste,--the author paints his portrait with skill, distinction, and

truth. His Coming of Age speech to the assembled tenants and guests on

that joyful occasion is truly startling, but far from incredible. The

audacious youngster, with his grave, serene, matter of fact pessimism,

exposes in a searching analysis the discrepancy between the supposed

reality they were felicitating themselves and him upon and an ideal

which is quite beyond their comprehension. Yet it is an unquestionably

practical ideal, and it breaks like a slow, cold, somber light through

the shallow sentiment that had been screening some disconcerting depths.

It is true, he says, that the Chillinglys come from a remote race, but

length of tenure has meant only so much more inanity.[151]

“They were born to eat as long as they could eat, and when they

could eat no longer they died. Not that in this respect they

were a whit less insignificant than the generality of their

fellow creatures.”

He reminds his gaping, rural audience that man merely represents a

stage in the course of evolution.[152]

“The probability is that, some day or other, we shall be

exterminated by a new development of species.”

He goes on ruthlessly to assert that, contrary to the popular belief,

his father was not a good landlord, because he was too indulgent to

the individual and too heedless of national welfare, ignoring the

highest duty of the employer, maximum production through competitive

examination. As to his own college record:[153]

“Some of the most useless persons--especially narrow-minded and

bigoted--have acquired far higher honours at the university than

have fallen to my lot.”

And then, after a brilliant Schopenhauerish conclusion, he drinks to

their very good healths.

Thus launched, the meditative young man continues in a career of ironic

candor, although he learns later the wisdom of being candid only with

oneself at times, and less communicative to others; as for instance

when he soliloquizes on a request by farmer Saunderson:[154]

“One can’t wonder why every small man thinks it so pleasant to

let down a big one, when a father asks a stranger to let down

his own son for even fancying that he is not small beer. It

is upon that principle in human nature that criticism wisely

relinquishes its pretensions as an analytical science, and

becomes a lucrative profession. It relies on the pleasure its

readers find in letting a man down.”

Dr. Shrapnel is a sad and tragic figure, bowed by an altruistic grief

at the state of human affairs, yet over his clouded sky play some sharp

lightning flashes; witness his vivid simile describing the Tories, thus

reported:[155]

“He compares them to geese claiming possession of the whole

common, and hissing at every foot of ground they have to yield.

They’re always having to retire and always hissing. ‘Retreat and

menace,’ that’s the motto for them.”

There are a few characters remaining who cannot be omitted from this

group of witty satirists, who do not quite belong to any of the above

classes, and who do have a common bond, though only the artificial one

of femininity. They must therefore be mentioned as Women; Mrs. Poyser

being summoned for a second enrollment, and Mrs. Cadwallader added.

It is true that their animadversions are largely directed against

some faults in the prevailing system of courtship, marriage, and a

masculine-managed universe, but not exclusively so, nor are they the

only critics of those subjects.

Two others besides George Eliot have made a single but notable

contribution to this list, Thackeray and Charlotte Brontë. Rebecca

Sharp is too well known to need more than appreciative mention. Shirley

Keeldar is interesting as being what the author’s “sister Emily

might have been.” She is a spicily sweet, lovable character, clearly

presented both in action and in such touches of description as,[156]

“* * * ever ready to satirize her own or any other person’s

enthusiasm, she would have given a farm of her best land for a

chance of rendering good service.”

She converses with her friend Caroline about literature:[157]

“Milton was great; but was he good? His brain was right; how was

his heart? * * * Milton tried to see the first woman; but, Cary,

he saw her not. * * * It was his cook that he saw; or it was

Mrs. Gill, * * * preparing a cold collation for the rectors. * *

* I would beg to remind him that the first men of the earth were

Titans, and that Eve was their mother.”

In a spirited speech to Uncle Sympson, who craved to get rid of the

exasperating minx by disposing of her in respectable matrimony, she

baits and badgers him until his feeble intellect is nearly shattered,

ideas outraged, temper twisted beyond repair. No Victorian young niece

should say to an elderly conventional guardian:[158]

“Your god, sir, is the World. * * * Your great Bel, your

fish-tailed Dagon. * * * See him busied at the work he likes

best--making marriages. He binds the young to the old, the

strong to the imbecile. He stretches out the arm of Mezentius

and fetters the dead to the living.”

The novelist most admittedly generous to women is Meredith, and we have

him to thank for Margaret Lovell, Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson, Diana

Warwick, and Clara Middleton, with Mrs. Berry as a sort of compromise

between Mrs. Poyser and Mrs. Tulliver. Yet they do not any more than

live up to their boasted reputations, as dainty rogues in porcelain,

famous epigrammatists, the quoted astonishment of drawing-rooms.[159]

The real Victorian Shakespeare in the matter of women is Trollope. Not

entirely unworthy of the sisterhood of Beatrice, Viola, and Portia, are

Miss Dunstable, Lily Dale, Lucy Robarts, and Violet Effingham; Madeline

Stanhope might be added as a village Cleopatra.

Lily Dale is plaintively sympathetic on the subject of the sorrows of

men through the vexations of their amusements:[160]

“Women must amuse themselves, except for an annual treat or

two. But the catering for men’s sport is never ending, and is

always paramount to everything else. And yet the pet game of the

day never goes off properly. In partridge time, the partridges

are wild and won’t come to be killed. In hunting time, the

foxes won’t run straight,--the wretches. They show no spirit,

and will take to ground to save their brushes. Then comes a

nipping frost, and skating is proclaimed; but the ice is always

rough, and the woodcocks have deserted the country. And as for

salmon,--when the summer comes round I do really believe that

they suffer a great deal about the salmon. I am sure they never

catch any. So they go back to their clubs and their cards, and

abuse their cooks and blackball their friends.”

As to the adorable, captivating kind, she is not too sanguine:[161]

“The Apollos of the world * * * who are so full of feeling, so

soft-natured, so kind, who never say a cross word, who never get

out of bed on the wrong side in the morning,--it so often turns

out that they won’t wash.”

Of Lucy Robarts Trollope himself speaks with justifiable pride, and

says he does not see “how any character could be more natural than

she.” She is indeed a sunny, breezy, English maid, endowed with charm,

enterprise, and a resourcefulness that could outwit with dignity the

titled dowager who did not want to be her mother-in-law. But her chief

distinction, in which she is more unusual than “natural,” is the

possession of that kind of humor defined by Howells as “the cry of

pain of a well-bred man.” When her pride is wounded, her love baffled,

her happiness apparently shipwrecked, her course of action made most

difficult, she is able to say to her sister:[162]

“Fanny, you have no idea what an absolute fool I am, what an

unutterable ass. The soft words of which I tell you were of the

kind which he speaks to you when he asks you how the cow gets

on which he sent you from Ireland, or to Mark about Ponto’s

shoulder. * * *

“He is no hero. There is nothing on earth wonderful about him. I

never heard him say a single word of wisdom, or utter a thought

that was akin to poetry. He devotes all his energies to riding

after a fox or killing poor birds, and I never heard of his

doing a single great action in my life. And yet * * *”

In tears and breathless excitement she admits the strength and reality

of her love, and continues with the diagnosis:

“I’ll tell you what he has: he has fine straight legs, and a

smooth forehead, and a good-humoured eye, and white teeth. Was

it possible to see such a catalogue of perfections, and not fall

down, stricken to the very bone? But it was not that that did it

all, Fanny. I could have stood against that, I think I could, at

least. It was his title that killed me. I had never spoken to a

lord before.”

But she is also obliged to acknowledge that she has done some injustice

to her own romance and to the sincerity of Lord Lufton:[163]

“Well, it was not a dream. Here, standing here, on this very

spot--on that flower of the carpet--he begged me a dozen times

to be his wife. I wonder whether you and Mark would let me cut

it out and keep it.”

No solution to her matrimonial problem being offered, she suggests

one:[164]

“‘And what shall I do next?’ said Lucy, still speaking in a tone

that was half tragic and half jeering.

“‘Do?’ said Mrs. Robarts.

“‘Yes, something must be done. If I were a man I could go to

Switzerland, of course; or, as the case is a bad one, perhaps

as far as Hungary. What is it that girls do? they don’t die

now-a-days, I believe. * * * I have got a piece of sackcloth,

and I mean to wear that, when I have made it up.’”

We are relieved to hear later that no such drastic action was

necessary, as she became Lady Lufton and was able to be happy without

overworking her sense of humor.

These instances may serve to indicate the general method and effect of

so-called realism applied to satiric intent, so long as allowance is

made for the unreal and distorted nature of all incomplete and isolated

cases, butchered to make an analytic holiday.

CHAPTER III

THE IRONIC

The science of Esthetics is a tribute to our zeal in attempting to

define the indefinable word beauty. Nearly as elusive of categoric

bondage is _irony_; but for its capture no formal scientific crusade

has as yet been organized. It is, however, whether in spite of its

vagueness or because of it, a term of great and increasing popularity.

No phrase is at present more of a general favorite than “The Irony

of Fate,” no exclamation more frequent than “How ironic!” In this

expressive and impressive utterance there is as much individual

variation of meaning as in “How beautiful!” And it coexists with as

much possibility of a standardized conception. What the latter may be,

it is the business of the student of the subject to try to determine.

The etymology and early usage of the word are familiar enough.

Generically, to the ancient Greeks, irony meant dissimulation in

speech; specifically, that form of dissimulation used by Socrates for

the confusion of his dialectic opponent, consisting on the part of the

wise man of an assumption of ignorance which longed for enlightenment.

On this bated hook were caught the unwary who pretended to wisdom

the while they had it not, lured by flattering inquiry to a fatal

communicativeness.

In its present status the term has two fairly distinct divisions,

characterized by Bishop Thirwall, in his essay on the Irony of

Sophocles, as the _verbal_ and the _practical_. The former is the

rhetorical device whereby a certain idea or circumstance is implied by

its statement in terms to the contrary or to the opposite effect. The

latter is the contrast between the real and apparent state of things,

or between the expected and the eventual, commonly described as the

Irony of Fate. A third form, the kind known as dramatic irony, might

be mentioned, though it is really a subdivision of cosmic irony.[165]

For the actor makes his blunders and gets into his predicaments through

ignorance; and this discrepancy between his notion of things and their

actuality adds zest to the enjoyment of the spectator, who is in the

secret. So the great unseen Spectator is conceived to observe the stage

of the world, and derive the amusement of superior knowledge from that

“Which, for the Pastime of Eternity,

He doth himself contrive, enact, behold.”

Among these varieties, and between all of them and the original

meaning, there must be enough common ground to account for the

persistence of the terminology through the centuries, allowing for

the divergence natural to a slow and half conscious evolution. This

common ground of denotation is of course dissimulation, whether in the

restricted field of knowledge, or the complete reversal of statement

and intention, or the specious show of things whereby we are deluded

into an erroneous supposition or a false sense of security. But this

simple matter of deception is enveloped in an atmosphere of connotation

that is charged with complication and subtlety.

The ironic habit of speech is a sign of a mind imaginative and averse

to the obvious. Its indulgence indicates a love of concealment,

from æsthetic motives, and a corresponding abhorrence of flat, naïve

exposure. The ironist has taken the veil of covertness to protect

himself from the garish overt day.[166] Its reception, on the other

hand, is an equally sure indicator of disposition. For it is beloved

of its own kin, deep answering unto deep, and distrusted by the alien

with a repulsion as strong as that of the subtle for the simple. To

understand or not to understand the ironic is an acid test of the

literal mind. An apposite reference to this fact is found in a comment

on one of our novelists.[167]

“Some simple-minded people are revolted, even in literature,

by the ironical method; and tell the humourist, with an air of

moral disapproval, that they never know whether he is in jest or

in earnest. To such matter-of-fact persons Mr. Disraeli’s novels

must be a standing offense, for it is his most characteristic

peculiarity that the passage from one phase to the other is

imperceptible.”

Another reason for the prejudice against ironic language may be that it

is popularly supposed to emanate from a caustic soul, with leanings

toward cynicism; an error due to a narrow identification of irony with

its extreme right wing,--sarcasm, which is indeed, as its etymology

would signify, a flesh-tearing, or at least heart-rending, performance,

belonging, as Bishop Hall would say, to the toothed division of satire.

But on the extreme left sits banter, entirely amiable and even

affectionate. “You scamp, you rascal, you young villain!” is a favorite

way of expressing parental pride and tenderness. Reticent youth

apostrophizes his cherished friend as an “old fraud.” “Philosophic

irony,” says Anatole France, “is indulgent and gentle.”[168] And

Symonds[169] describes Ariosto as watching “the doings of humanity

with a genial half smile, an all pervasive irony that had no sting

in it.” Ranging thus from the playful to the ferocious, irony is at

its best when not too near either margin, having in itself more point

than banter and more polish than sarcasm. “They are all,” says another

critic,[170] “with others of the family, in the regular service of

Satire.”

The metaphor of service may be allowed, in that satire, being the

largest and most general type, includes the others. The relationship

may be stated more literally by saying that irony is the form of

humorous criticism which is expressed through innuendo, partly because

of preference for verbal inversion, and partly in recognition of the

topsy-turvydom of life. All irony is therefore satirical, though not

all satire is ironical. The ironist conveys his own point of view by

stating another’s, condemning by appearing to approve, or _vice

versa_. Boisterousness and didacticism are foreign to irony and not

to be feared so long as it is dominant. Perfection in its employment

indicates that complete self-control which is supposed to be a

patrician trait.

This does not mean, however, that ironic usage or attitude has been

confined to the upper social stratum as its special prerogative.

Nietzsche may indeed exclaim, “We should look upon the needs of the

masses with ironic compassion: they want something which we have

got--Ah!” But these compassionated masses have themselves been capable

of the retort ironic, and have had also their spokesmen, from Lucian

to Galsworthy. In _The Cock_, Lucian gives an ironic enumeration of

the dangers and troubles of the rich and powerful, and displays the

advantage of being poor and obscure. In _The Ferry_, Mycellus, the

cobbler, voices an ironic lament on leaving life, and parodies the

regrets of the wealthy:[171]

“Oh, dear, dear! My shoe-soles! Oh! My old boots! Oh! What

will become of my rotten sandals? Alas, poor wretch that I am,

I shall no longer go without food from early morning until

evening, nor in winter time walk barefoot and half naked, my

teeth chattering from the cold. Ah, me! Who, forsooth, is going

to have my shoemaker’s knife and my awl?”

As manner of speech is but a reflection of manner of thought, it is

evident that the ironist is not sufficiently accounted for as a devotee

of a certain verbal device. This, on the contrary, is only an external

manifestation of something more subjective and permanent,--a mood or

an attitude which may enlarge into a definite interpretation of life.

Of this interpretation the keynote is that Fate is ironical. In its

unmitigated form this philosophy declares that there is a deviltry

that misshapes our ends, construct them how we will. It is more often

found, however, in a modified creed which admits that the presence of

this perverse element in existence does not prove that all life is of

the same piece; that the mad pranks are those of destiny’s underlings,

dressed in a little brief authority, and not perpetrated by the ruler

of the universe.

Such speculations lead into the realm of religion, and religion has

had to provide a place in its pantheon for this spirit of disastrous

caprice. There it lurks under various guises. Baal may fall asleep or

go on a journey at a time most inauspicious for his followers. The

behavior of the Olympians quite justifies the debate between Timocles

and Damis, reported by Lucian, as to the theocratic mismanagement

of the world. Setebos slays and saves with an eye single to the

bewilderment of the human puppets. The presiding goddess in The House

of Fame rewards and punishes with a similar unaccountability. “The

gods,” says Smollett[172] “not yet tired with sporting with the farce

of human government, were still resolved to show by what inconsiderable

springs a mighty empire may be moved.” Sport is a need also of the

President of the Immortals, and where so agreeably found as in

undermining the patient structure of poor little Tess, and bringing it

to the ground with a splendid crash?

The essence of an ironic circumstance lies in its apparently wanton

thwarting by a narrow margin of a normal sequence in itself logical and

desirable, or in an imposition of calamity on the same exasperating

terms. Either it frustrates not merely what might have been but

what almost was, or it brings to pass the disaster that was almost

averted. It might come under the simpler caption of bad luck, except

that not all bad luck is ironic; only a particular brand of it. Irony

is the obverse side of that happy concatenation of events which we

approvingly designate as Providential. The favoring and therefore the

rational and commendable happening is an act of special providence.

The contrary comes from the malicious mischief of the Aristophanes of

Heaven.

In literature the ironic temper has acquitted itself with distinguished

success. Among its contributions one recalls _The Dinner of

Trimalchio_, _The Golden Ass_ (and the medieval Burnellus), _Letters

of Obscure Men_, _Praise of Folly_, _Gargantua_, _Don Quixote_, _The

Gull’s Hornbook_, _Knight of the Burning Pestle_, _A Modest Proposal_,

_The Shortest Way with Dissenters_, _Candide_, _Jonathan Wild_, _Murder

as a Fine Art_, _Castle Rackrent_, _Northanger Abbey_, _The Fair

Haven_. A glance at the list shows the versatile nature of irony both

as to form and idea, though its history taken as a whole has shown

more predilection for the romantic than for the realistic method. It

is an ingredient in all burlesque and caricature, and is on the other

hand least necessary to an explicit presentation of reality, however

full this last may be of implicit irony. Its consistent practice is

to deceive, and this can more easily be accomplished through fantasy

and symbolism. When, however, it is accomplished by more demure and

disarming means, the deception is more thorough just because of taking

the reader unaware. One is on guard against any form of the symbolic,

knowing that some suspicious thing is therein concealed. But who would

think of questioning a collection of letters, an essay or a treatise?

Yet these are the culprits guilty of ruthlessly hoodwinking the

trusting literal mind.

Ulrich von Hutten’s _Epistolæ_ were edited by Maittaire, and the

edition reviewed by Steele (whom we should not expect to be caught

napping), both taking them seriously. Defoe’s pilloried renown is

well known. Butler’s work “in Defense of the Miraculous Element in Our

Lord’s Ministry upon Earth,” was solemnly greeted by the reviewers as a

champion of orthodoxy, and sent by Canon Ainger to a friend he wished

to convert. Swift and De Quincey have been condemned for abuse of

children and encouragement of crime.

Misunderstanding of this sort is a triumph for irony, a test of

success. But there are also signs of a misapprehension of the ironic

disposition, especially as related to the satiric. Of this conception

two modern critics afford examples. In the Introduction to his

_Defoe_, Masefield remarks,--

“An ironical writer has always nobility of soul; a satirist has

seldom any quality save greater baseness than his subject. An

ironical writer knows the good; a satirist need only know the

evil.”

The superb eulogy of the first statement may be dismissed as a bit

of rhetoric, but the doom pronounced in its corollary, is based on

a double confusion; first between the ironist and the humorist, and

second between the satirist and the misanthrope. In a recent discussion

the same fallacy is promulgated at greater length:[173]

“The satirist is the aggressive lawyer, fastening upon

particular people and particular qualities. But irony is no more

personal than the sun that sends his flaming darts into the

world. The satirist is a purely practical man, with a business

instinct, bent on the main chance and the definite object. He is

often brutal, and always overbearing; the ironist, never. Irony

may wound from the very fineness and delicacy of the attack, but

the wounding is incidental. The sole purpose of the satirist and

the burlesquer is to wound; and they test their success by the

deepness of the wound. But irony tests its own by the amount of

generous light and air it has set flowing through an idea or

a personality, and the broad significance it has revealed in

neglected things.”

The only pertinent reply to such eloquence is one that may seem

impertinent, namely, to refer the special pleader to a useful principle

in argument greatly favored by a certain canny Greek dialectician, and

quaintly restated in the eighteenth century:[174]

“If once it was expected by the Public that Authors should

strictly _define_ their Subjects, it would instantly cheque

an Innundation of Scribbling. The _desultory_ Manner of

Writing would be absolutely exploded; and Accuracy and Precision

would be necessarily introduced upon every Subject. * * * If

Definitions had been constantly expected from Authors there

would not have appeared one hundredth Part of the present Books,

and yet every Subject had been better ascertained.”

Irony, it is true, is defined by the essayist as “the science of

comparative experience,” but this attempt to fit a philosophic giant to

the bed of his smaller ironic brother meets with the usual Procrustian

result. As for the tribute to irony, a far more impressive one is paid

in the almost casual utterance of Lamb, who makes it the climax of his

enumeration of the blessings vouchsafed to mortality,--“and _irony

itself_--do these things go out with life?”

In Victorian fiction the presence of this element is found very much as

it is in life, unobstrusive but easily detectable. What Saintsbury says

of Jane Austen would apply in varying degrees to her successors:[175]

“Precisely to what extent the attractive quality of this art is

enhanced by the pervading irony of the treatment would be a very

difficult problem to work out. It is scarcely hazardous to say

that irony is the very salt of the novel; and that just as you

put salt even in a cake, so it is not wise to neglect it wholly

even in a romance. Life itself, as soon as it gets beyond mere

vegetation, is notoriously full of irony; and no imitation of it

which dispenses with the seasoning can be worth much.”

This vital importance of what might be called negative value is

suggested by the juvenile’s definition of salt as “what makes your

potato taste bad if there isn’t any on it.” It is just this fact,

however, that allows the ironic to defy analysis. By itself one

spoonful of salt is very much like another. The whole secret is in the

combination. Its presence or absence gives one the immediate feeling of

the little more and how much it is, the little less and how far away.

But to segregate it for scrutiny is to destroy the charm of the savor.

Since such segregation must nevertheless be attempted for the

sake of the information it may yield, it seems advisable to keep

to the division already noted, and distinguish between verbal and

philosophical irony as they exist in the novel. These correspond in a

general way to the direct and the dramatic methods used in the larger

field of satire.

Of ironic language we find practically none in Reade, very little in

Kingsley, Mrs. Gaskell, and Charlotte Brontë, more frequent flashes in

Lytton and Disraeli, increasing still more in Dickens and Trollope. In

Peacock, Thackeray, Eliot, Meredith, and Butler, it is more pervasive,

even when less in quantity, and representative of a consistent attitude.

As Mrs. Kirkpatrick-Gibson is Mrs. Gaskell’s favorite game, she

constantly exposes her to ironic self-betrayal, and finally allows

her disciplined husband the luxury of an ironic retort,--not in the

lady’s presence, of course, but by way of reply to his daughter Molly’s

anticipation of an orgy of freedom in her absence.[176]

“The doctor’s eyes twinkled, but the rest of his face was

perfectly grave. ‘I’m not going to be corrupted. With toil and

labour I’ve reached a very fair height of refinement. I won’t be

pulled down again.’”

Kingsley and Brontë are both incapable of this quiet banter, and can

produce from their earnest souls only an awkward and angry sarcasm.

The Misses Sympson and the Misses Nunnely are asking whether Shirley’s

expressive manner of singing can be proper.[177]

“Was it proper? * * * Decidedly not: it was strange, it was

unusual. What was _strange_ must be _wrong_; what was

_unusual_ must be _improper_. Shirley was judged.”

Alton Locke says of his own aspiration,[178]

“No doubt it was very self-willed and ambitious of me to do that

which rich men’s sons are flogged for not doing, and rewarded

with all manner of prizes, scholarships, fellowships, for doing.”

But in the midst of his bitterness he stops to remark,

“I really do not mean to be flippant or sneering. I have seen

the evil of it as much as any man, in myself and in my own

class.”

The description in _Yeast_ of the fight between the squire’s retainers

and the London poachers, which results in the death of faithful old

Harry Verney, concludes with this comment,--characteristic in that it

breathes the spirit of irony but lacks its complete form.[179]

“And all the while the broad still moon stared down on them grim

and cold, as if with a saturnine sneer at the whole humbug; and

the silly birds about whom all this butchery went on, slept

quietly over their heads, every one with his head under his

wing. Oh! if the pheasants had but understanding, how they would

split their sides with chuckling and crowing at the follies

which civilized Christian men perpetrate for their precious

sake!”

That Lytton should gain in poise and subtlety in the forty-five years

intervening between _Pelham_ and _Kenelm Chillingly_ is to be expected,

although the progression is by no means a steady one. Some of his most

absurd sarcastic moralizing is found in _My Novel_, about midway in

time,--particularly on the March of Enlightenment, with a smart sketch

of half a dozen typical Marchers; and on liberal notions generally. And

in the youthful volume are some very good touches, as this concerning

his country uncle:[180]

“He was, as people justly observed, rather an odd man: built

schools for peasants, forgave poachers, and diminished his

farmers’ rents; indeed, on account of these and similar

eccentricities, he was thought a fool by some, and a madman by

others.”

This pales perceptibly, however, by the side of Peacock’s firm and

vivid treatment of the same subject, embodied in Squire Crochet:[181]

“He could not become, like a true-born English squire, part

and parcel of the barley-giving earth; he could not find

in game-bagging, poacher-shooting, trespasser-pounding,

footpath-stopping, common-enclosing, rack-renting, and all

the other liberal pursuits and pastimes which make a country

gentleman an ornament to the world, and a blessing to the poor;

he could not find in these valuable and amiable occupations,

and in a corresponding range of ideas, nearly commensurate with

that of the great king Nebuchadnezzer, when he was turned out to

grass; he could not find in this great variety of useful action,

and vast field of comprehensive thought, modes of filling up his

time that accorded with his Caledonian instinct.”

This in turn is quite equaled by Kenelm’s coming-of-age speech, though

his indictment of the genus squire is couched in unironical satire. Not

that the youth was unacquainted with the uses of irony. At the age of

nine he had had occasion to send a letter to a schoolmate, conveying

his conviction of that lad’s lack of intelligence. He had heard his

father remark that a certain neighbor was an ass, and that he was

going to write and tell him so. He made inquiries into the matter of

phrasing such information. He received the following reply,--by which

he profited most effectively in his own correspondence:[182]

“But you can not learn too early this fact, that irony is to

the high-bred what billingsgate is to the vulgar; and when one

gentleman thinks another gentleman is an ass, he does not say it

point-blank--he implies it in the politest terms he can invent.”

This principle is applied on a national scale in the discourse of the

intruder among the Vrilya, whose situation resembles that of Gulliver

eulogizing to the king of the Brobdingnagians the Institutions of

England, except that Lytton does not blunt his irony by relapsing into

plain terms, as Swift does in the “pernicious race of little odious

vermin.” The visitor waxes eloquent about America:[183]

“Naturally desiring to represent in the most favorable colors

the world from which I came, I touched but slightly, though

indulgently, on the antiquated and decaying institutions of

Europe, in order to expatiate on the present grandeur and

prospective pre-eminence of that glorious American Republic,

in which Europe enviously sees its model and tremblingly

foresees its doom. Selecting for an example of the social life

of the United States that city in which progress advances at

the fastest rate, I indulged in an animated description of the

moral habits of New York. Mortified to see, by the faces of my

listeners, that I did not make the favorable impression I had

anticipated, I elevated my theme; dwelling on the excellence of

democratic institutions, their promotion of tranquil happiness

by the government of party, and the mode in which they diffused

such happiness throughout the community by preferring, for the

exercise of power and the acquisition of honors, the lowest

citizens in point of property, education, and character.”

This is the ironic version of Matthew Arnold’s polished dubiety about

majorities in _Numbers_; and of the robustious satire of Dickens. If we

feel that Lytton excels the latter in pithy conciseness and allusive

point, we have to remember that he was at this time more than twice the

age of Dickens when _Martin Chuzzlewit_ was written, and that in the

intervening quarter century some improving changes had taken place in

their common object of satire.

Disraeli’s irony is less tangible and quotable. His favorite method is

to hint at the implication in a burlesque comparison; as in the opening

sentence of _The Young Duke_:[184]

“George Augustus Frederick, Duke of Saint James, completed

his twenty-first year, an event which created almost as great

a sensation among the aristocracy of England as the Norman

Conquest.”

Later his toilette is described in terms of a campaign, concluding,[185]

“He assumes the look, the air that befit the occasion: cordial,

but dignified; sublime, but sweet. He descends like a deity from

Olympus to a banquet of illustrious mortals.”

_Tancred_ is introduced by an epic of the _chefs_. Prevost is

discoursing to Leander (who will take no engagements but with crowned

heads), of their profession and of Adrien, a neophyte:[186]

“‘It is something to have served under Napoleon,’ added Prevost,

with the grand air of the Imperial kitchen. ‘Had it not been for

Waterloo, I should have had the cross. But the Bourbons and the

cooks of the Empire never could understand each other. * * *

“‘He is too young. I took him to Hellingsley, and he lost his

head on the third day. I entrusted the souffles to him, and, but

for the most desperate personal exertions all would have been

lost. It was an affair of the bridge of Areola. * * * Ah! _mon

Dieu!_ those are moments!’”

Later the same functionary is scandalized at the diners’ neglect of his

colleague (shown in the failure to present him with tokens of esteem)

when he had surpassed himself in a superb dinner:[187]

“How can he compose when he is not appreciated? Had he

been appreciated he would today not only have repeated the

_escalopes a la Bellamont_, but perhaps even invented

what might have outdone it. * * * These things in themselves

are nothing; but they prove to a man of genius that he is

understood. Had Leander been in the Imperial kitchen, or even

with the emperor of Russia, he would have been decorated!”

It transpires, however, that the artist’s wounded feelings were soothed

by a belated acknowledgment, accompanied by a tactful hint that he

suffered in a good cause, and that as an esthetic missionary he should

be lenient to the social delinquencies of the barbarians he ministered

unto:[188]

“Was it nothing, by this development of taste, to assist in

supporting that aristocratic influence which he wished to

cherish, and which can alone encourage art?”

It is not to be supposed that this indicates the range of Disraeli’s

ideas, merely the subject on which he chiefly expends his ironic

persiflage. A representative example of his more serious sarcasm is

found in the second volume of his Young England Trilogy, the one most

alive with social sympathy:[189]

“Infanticide is practised as extensively and as legally in

England as it is on the banks of the Ganges; a circumstance

which apparently has not yet engaged the attention of the

Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts.”

In Dickens and Trollope irony is a substantial though not exactly an

integral element; more substantial in the former than the latter. We

find ironic comment both direct, by the writer, and indirect, through

ironic characters; and the still more indirect, in the betraying

speech that relates facts true in a different sense from that meant by

the speaker, thus conveying a reverse effect from the one intended.

A text for the first kind is furnished by Noah Claypole, the sordid

bully and snob, prompt to retaliate on one still lower in the scale of

circumstance than himself:[190]

“This affords charming food for contemplation. It shows us

what a charming thing human nature may be made to be; and how

impartially the same amiable qualities are developed in the

finest lord and the dirtiest charity-boy.”

Another is the Chuzzlewit Family, introduced by a long prologue of

ironic symbolism. Specifically there is the eulogy of the head of the

present branch of it:[191]

“Some people likened him to a direction post, which is always

telling the way to a place, and never goes there: but these were

his enemies; the shadows cast by his brightness; that was all.”

Later in his illustrious career, he is upheld in his holy horror at the

mercenary diplomacy of a landlady. Mr. Pecksniff rebukes,--

“Oh, Baal, Baal! Oh my friend, Mrs. Todgers! To barter away

that precious jewel, self-esteem, and cringe to any mortal

creature--for eighteen shillings a week!”

And Dickens echoes,[192]

“Eighteen shillings a week! Just, most just, they censure,

upright Pecksniff! Had it been for the sake of a ribbon, star,

or garter; sleeves of lawn, a great man’s smile, a seat in

parliament, a tap upon the shoulder from a courtly sword; a

place, a party, or a thriving lie, or eighteen thousand pounds,

or even eighteen hundred,--but to worship the golden calf for

eighteen shillings a week! Oh pitiful, pitiful!”

Two more characteristic instances may be cited. The first is concerning

the failure of the firm of Dombey and Son.[193]

“The world was very busy now, forsooth, and had a deal to say.

It was an innocently credulous and a much ill-used world. It was

a world in which there was no other sort of bankruptcy whatever.

There were no conspicuous people in it, trading far and wide

on rotten banks of religion, patriotism, virtue, honor. There

was no amount worth mentioning of mere paper in circulation, on

which anybody lived pretty handsomely, promising to pay great

sums of goodness with no effects. There were no shortcomings

anywhere, in anything but money. The world was very angry

indeed; and the people especially who, in a worse world, might

have been supposed to be bankrupt traders themselves in shows

and pretenses, were observed to be mightily indignant.”

The second is anent the Whelp, Tom Gradgrind.[194]

“It was very remarkable that a young gentleman who had been

brought up under the continuous system of unnatural restraint,

should be a hypocrite; but it was certainly the case with Tom.

It was very strange that a young gentleman who had never been

left to his own guidance for five consecutive minutes, should

be incapable at last of governing himself; but so it was with

Tom. It was altogether unaccountable that a young gentleman

whose imagination had been strangled in his cradle, should be

still inconvenienced by its ghost in the form of grovelling

sensualities; but such a monster, beyond all doubt, was Tom.”

In character we have a range from the vulgar, vigorous sarcasm of

Mr. Panks[195] to the languid patrician banter of Sir John Chester,

exercised on the uncomprehending Sim Tappertit and Gabriel Varden.

There are also ironic touches in the two heroes, Martin Chuzzlewit and

David Copperfield.

The most delightful pictures of those who entertain irony unaware are

Mr. Bumble, Mr. Squeers, Mr. Turveydrop, Mrs. Skewton, Mrs. Nickleby,

and Mrs. Pardiggle.

Entrenched in wisdom, these philosophers all enunciate profound truths

about life.

The beadle discovers the illimitable vistas of human desires, together

with the unreasonable expectation of having them gratified. He laments

the ingratitude of the pauper who, in antiparochial weather, having

been granted bread and cheese, has the audacity to ask for a bit of

fuel.[196]

“That’s the way with these people, ma’am; give ’em a apron full

of coals today, and they’ll come back for another, the day after

tomorrow, as brazen as alabaster.”

The pedagogue learns that parental prejudice sometimes extends to

an extravagant pampering of offspring, even carried so far as an

absurd opposition to wholesome discipline. Summoned to London on some

bothering law business for what was called the neglect of a boy, he

explains to the sympathetic Ralph Nickleby that the lad had as good

grazing as there was to be had.[197]

“When a boy gets weak and ill and don’t relish his meals, we

give him a change of diet--turn him out, for an hour or so

every day, into a neighbor’s turnip-field, or sometimes, if

it’s a delicate case, a turnip-field and a piece of carrots

alternately, and let him eat as many as he likes. There an’t

better land in the county than this perwerse lad grazed on, and

yet he goes and catches cold and indigestion and what not, and

then his friends brings a lawsuit against _me_!”

The Professor of Deportment, not subject to these sordid contacts,

inhales a more rarified atmosphere, and recognizes the value of a

_succes d’estime_, sufficient to compensate for neglect on the part of

a stupid public.[198]

“It may not be for me to say that I have been called, for some

years now, Gentleman Turveydrop; or that His Royal Highness,

the Prince Regent, did me the honour to inquire, on my removing

my hat as he drove out of the Pavilion at Brighton (that fine

building), ‘Who is he? Who the devil is he? Why don’t I know

him? Why hasn’t he thirty thousand a year?’ But these are

little matters of anecdote--the general property, ma’am,--still

repeated, occasionally, among the upper classes.”

The contributions of the ladies seem to be along psychological rather

than social or sociological lines. Mrs. Nickleby is plaintively aware

of the thistle-ball nature of the masculine mind, fixed by no friendly

star, though the star was not wanting. She discerns on the part of her

son a certain inattentiveness to her remarks.[199]

“But that was always the way with your poor dear papa,--just his

way--always wandering, never able to fix his thoughts on any

one subject for two minutes together. I think I see him now! *

* * looking at me while I was talking to him about his affairs,

just as if his ideas were in a state of perfect conglomeration!

Anybody who had come in upon us suddenly would have supposed

I was confusing and distracting him instead of making things

plainer; upon my word they would.”

Mrs. Skewton and Mrs. Pardiggle have solved the secret of a happy

life, but by different ways. The former perceives it to spring from

scholarship vivified by enthusiasm for the fascinating perspectives of

history.[200]

“Those darling bygone times, Mr. Carker, * * * with their

delicious fortresses, and their dear old dungeons, and their

delightful places of torture, and their romantic vengeances,

and their picturesque assaults and sieges, and everything that

makes life truly charming! How dreadfully we have degenerated. *

* * We have no faith in the dear old barons, who were the most

delightful creatures--or in the dear old priests, who were the

most warlike of men--or even in the days of that inestimable

Queen Bess, which were so extremely golden! Dear creature! She

was all heart! And that charming father of hers! I hope you dote

on Henry the Eighth!”

The latter, on the other hand, lives in the present, is attuned to the

_carpe diem_ idea, and realizes the joy of self-expression and the

exhilaration of labor.[201]

“I freely admit, I am a woman of business. I love hard work; I

enjoy hard work. The excitement does me good. I am so accustomed

and inured to hard work, that I don’t know what fatigue is. * *

* This gives me a great advantage when I am making my rounds.

If I find a person unwilling to hear what I have to say, I

tell that person directly, ‘I am incapable of fatigue, my good

friend, I am never tired, and I mean to go on till I have done.’

It answers admirably!”

In contrast to the various methods of Dickens, Trollope practically

confines himself to direct comment. His favorite topics are politics

and society. As to the former, radical iconoclasm is described in the

person of Mr. Turnbull.[202]

“Having nothing to construct, he could always deal with

generalities. Being free from responsibility, he was not called

upon either to study details or to master even great facts. * *

* Mr. Monk had once told Phineas Finn how great were the charms

of that inaccuracy which was permitted to the Opposition.”

The always useful ironic device of simply delineating one’s objects

with brushes and colors of their own, of presenting them as they see

themselves, is used in one episode both on an institution and an

individual. The Press reacts to the appointment of a scoundrel to the

Cabinet.[203]

“The _Jupiter_, with withering scorn, had asked whether vice

of every kind was to be considered, in these days of Queen

Victoria, as a passport to the cabinet. Adverse members of both

Houses had arrayed themselves in a pure panoply of morality, and

thundered forth their sarcasms with the indignant virtue and

keen discontent of political Juvenals.”

Nevertheless, the new incumbent enjoys his emoluments.[204]

“Now, as he stood smiling on the hearthrug of his official

fireplace, it was quite pleasant to see the kind, patronizing

smile which lighted up his features. He delighted to stand

there, with his hands in his trousers pocket, the great man of

the place, conscious of his lordship, and feeling himself every

inch a minister.”

With reference to what was then a new policy of administration, he

employs ironic exhortation.[205]

“Let every place in which a man can hold up his head be the

reward of some antagonistic struggle, of some grand competitive

examination. Let us get rid of the fault of past ages. With

us, let the race be ever to the swift, and victory always to

the strong. And let us always be racing, so that the swift and

strong shall ever be known among us. But what, then, for those

who are not swift, not strong? _Væ victis_! Let them go to

the wall. They can hew wood, probably; or, at any rate, draw

water.”

The thing in society which Trollope apparently finds most open to

ironic treatment is the commercializing of marriage. In one place this

takes the form of sage advice.[206]

“There is no doubt but that the privilege of matrimony offers

opportunities to money loving young men which ought not to be

lightly abused. Too many young men marry without giving any

consideration to the matter whatever. * * * A man can be young

but once, and, except in cases of a special interposition of

Providence, can marry but once. The chance, once thrown away,

may be said to be irrecoverable. * * * Half that trouble, half

that care, a tithe of that circumspection would, in early youth,

have probably secured to them the enduring comforts of a wife’s

wealth. * * * There is no road to wealth so easy and respectable

as that of matrimony; that is, of course, provided that the

aspirant declines the slow course of honest work.”

However, in default of golden attractions, a wife may have other

assets. Griselda Grantly had neither houses nor land, neither title nor

position. But Lord Dumbello had all these, and needed only a lay figure

for lovely clothes to grace his establishment; the more icily regular

and splendidly null, the better.[207]

“But a handsome woman at the head of your table, who knows

how to dress and how to sit, and how to get in and out of her

carriage--who will not disgrace her lord by her ignorance, or

fret him by her coquetry, or disparage him by her talent--how

beautiful a thing it is! For my own part I think that Griselda

Grantly was born to be the wife of a great English peer.”

It is comforting to know that in the midst of these lofty circles the

daughter of the archdeacon did not lose the virtue of humility; for we

read in a subsequent narrative:[208]

“But, now and again, since her august marriage, she had laid her

coronated head upon one of the old rectory pillows for a night

or two, and on such occasions all the Plumsteadians had been

loud in praise of her condescension.”

The difference between the novelists just discussed and the remaining

half of the list, in the use of irony, is more easily perceived than

defined. It can only be suggested by metaphor. Confectionery may be

flavored, for instance with citron in lumps or liquid peppermint.

It is evident that the former is more visible and detachable, but

that the latter affects more pervasively the quality of the product.

In the concoctions already mentioned, from Lytton to Trollope, it

is easy enough to stick in one’s thumb and pull out a plum. All the

plums being pulled out, the character of the remaining portion would

not be radically changed. But peppermint cannot be extracted except

by a process of chemical dissolution; and if it could, the taste of

the whole would be altered. Yet it is not patent to eye or finger,

though not wanting in stimulus to other senses. These two ingredients,

however, are not mutually exclusive. The permeated may also be

sufficiently glomerate to permit of some dissection; only the operation

is less fully explanatory of the whole.

For example, we may extract from Peacock his description of the Abbey

of Rubygill, situated--[209]

“* * * in a spot which seemed adapted by nature to be the

retreat of monastic mortification, being on the banks of a fine

trout-stream, and in the midst of woodland coverts, abounding

with excellent game.”

Or of the sword of Matilda, which went--[210]

“* * * nigh to fathom even that extraordinary depth of brain

which always by divine grace furnishes the interior of a

head-royal.”

Or the reply of Mr. Cypress to Dr. Folliott’s statement of the

Brotherhood of Man:[211]

“Yes, sir, as the hangman is of the thief; the squire of the

poacher; the judge of the libeller; the lawyer of his client;

the statesman of his colleague; the bubble-blower of the

bubble-buyer; the slave-driver of the negro: as these are

brethren, so am I and the worthies in question.”

But this would give little idea of Peacock’s prevailing attitude,--a

cheerfully sardonic amusement at the state of human affairs, expressed

most frequently by means of an ironic juxtaposition of Past and Present.

Less cheerful and more sardonic is the smile with which Butler greets

life and its follies. He is classed with Peacock as a romanticist in

method, but is more akin to Swift in temper and manner than to any

Victorian. The reader’s mind must be kept taut in the constant process

of translating the assumed pose into the real meaning. Under the grave

disapproval of the Erewhonian treatment of disease or any misfortune,

and crime, each being discussed in the terms we apply to the other,

lurks the reversed judgment. Nothing short of complete presentation,

especially of the chapters on Current Opinions, Some Erewhonian

Trials, The Musical Banks, and The Colleges of Unreason, could convey

an adequate impression.

A representative sample, however, is found in the retort of the judge

who pronounces sentence on the youth “charged with having been swindled

out of a large property during his minority by his guardian.” The

defendant puts up the plea natural under the circumstances, and is

promptly instructed not to talk nonsense:[212]

“People have no right to be young, inexperienced, greatly in awe

of their guardians, and without independent professional advice.

If by such indiscretions they outrage the moral sense of their

friends, they must expect to suffer accordingly.”

Later a thorough exposition of this legal philosophy is given in a

long judicial oration preceding the doom of a prisoner found guilty

of pulmonary consumption. A few excerpts show the trend of the

argument.[213]

“It is all very well for you to say that you came of unhealthy

parents, and had a severe accident in your childhood which

permanently undermined your constitution; excuses such as these

are the ordinary refuge of the criminal; but they cannot for one

moment be listened to by the ear of justice. * * * There is no

question of how you came to be wicked, but only this--namely,

are you wicked or not? * * * It is intolerable that an example

of such terrible enormity should be allowed to go at large

unpunished. Your presence in the society of respectable people

would lead the less able-bodied to think more lightly of all

forms of illness; * * * A time of universal dephysicalization

would ensue; medicine vendors of all kinds would abound in our

streets and advertise in all our newspapers. * * * If you tell

me that you had no hand in your parentage and education, * * * I

answer that whether your being in a consumption is your fault or

no, it is a fault in you, and it is my duty to see that against

such faults as this the commonwealth shall be protected. You may

say that it is your misfortune to be criminal; I answer that it

is your crime to be unfortunate.”

This is a fit successor to the marvelous “Let no man” conclusion to the

_Modest Proposal_.

Another unomittable instance is the account of a religious reformation.

The visitor hints to a Musical Bank manager that the popular reliance

on that currency was rather perfunctory, and that the other financial

system, ostensibly flouted, was the real repository of coin and

confidence.[214]

“He said that it had been more or less true till lately, but

that now they had put fresh stained glass windows into all the

banks in the country, and repaired the buildings, and enlarged

the organs; the presidents, moreover, had taken to riding in

omnibuses and talking nicely to people in the streets, and to

remembering the ages of their children, and giving them things

when they were naughty, so that all would henceforth go smoothly.

“‘But haven’t you done anything to the money itself?’ said I,

timidly.

“‘It is not necessary,’ he rejoined; ‘not in the least

necessary, I assure you.’”

One citation also from Butler’s novel is irresistible, particularly

as it reminds one of Trollope’s practical admonition to young

men contemplating matrimony. This is on the subject of domestic

discipline.[215]

“To parents who wish to lead a quiet life I would say: Tell your

children that they are very naughty--much naughtier than most

children. Point to the young people of some acquaintances as

models of perfection and impress your own children with a deep

sense of their own inferiority. You carry so many more guns

than they do that they cannot fight you. This is called moral

influence, and it will enable you to bounce them as much as

you please. * * * Say that you have their highest interests at

stake whenever you are out of temper and wish to make yourself

unpleasant by way of balm to your soul. Harp much upon these

highest interests.”

Thackeray is placed in the group of dyed-in-the-wool ironists mainly

because he does not belong in the other. One somehow acquires the

impression that ironic sayings will be plentiful as blackberries; but

when one actually goes berrying, he finds the crop strangely vanished.

Lacking the grave, dry, imperturbable manner and the consistently

preserved attitude, he cannot avoid the temptation of relapsing into

the literal and giving self-conscious explanations, as in _Barry

Lyndon_, and _Catherine_. This produces something of the effect of

Lydgate’s ironic titles,--_So as the Crabbe goeth forward_, and _As

Straight as a Ram’s Horn_,--followed by perfectly serious moralizing.

Probably nothing would astonish or distress Thackeray more than to have

his humor rated as the humor of Lytton, Reade, or Kingsley; nor would

this indeed be quite fair to him. Yet his lack of real spontaneity

classifies him with them rather than with Dickens or Trollope, and

his lack of finish and subtlety prevents him from being ranked with

Peacock, Eliot, Meredith or Butler. His ironic phrasing has too often

the flat, shallow sound of the man determined to be clever. Such, for

instance, is the comment on the plutocratic Miss Crawley:[216]

“She had a balance at the banker’s which would have made her

beloved anywhere. * * * What a dignity it gives an old lady,

that balance at the banker’s!”

Such also is this demolishing assault upon worldliness:[217]

“I, for my part, have known a five pound note to interpose and

knock up a half century’s attachment between two brethren; and

can’t but admire, as I think what a fine and durable thing Love

is among worldly people.”

And this upon a shoddy _noblesse oblige_:[218]

“I admire that admiration which the genteel world sometimes

extends to the commonalty. There is no more agreeable object in

life than to see May Fair folks condescending.”

When he gravely admonishes, it is as follows:[219]

“Praise everybody, I say to such; never be squeamish, but speak

out your compliment both point blank to a man’s face, and behind

his back, when you know there is a reasonable chance of his

hearing it again.”

The direct satire on Pitt Crawley as an undergraduate is given an

ironic fillip by another sting in the tail:[220]

“But though he had a fine flux of words, and delivered his

little voice with great pomposity and pleasure to himself, and

never advanced any sentiment or opinion which was not perfectly

trite and stale, and supported by a Latin quotation; yet he

failed somehow, in spite of a mediocrity which ought to have

insured any man a success.”

Another successful bit,--this time the device of catching an unwary

character in an ironic trap,--is the account of Penn’s linguistic

proficiency. His friend Strong compliments him on speaking French like

Chateaubriand,--[221]

“‘I’ve been accustomed to it from my youth upwards,’ said Pen;

and Strong had the grace not to laugh for five minutes, when he

exploded into fits of hilarity which Pen has never, perhaps,

understood up to this day.”

In her preface to the second edition of _Jane Eyre_, Charlotte

Brontë said that Thackeray resembled Fielding “as an eagle does a

vulture;” and also compared the former to a Hebrew prophet. Putting

aside the injustice to Fielding (happily atoned for by the author of

_Middlemarch_, thereby restoring the average in feminine criticism)

one is moved to reply that if any Victorian shoulders received the

mantle of Elijah they were undoubtedly the firm-muscled ones of George

Eliot. Hers is the union of native, smoldering wit and tremendous moral

earnestness that marked the ancient Semitic race and reappeared in the

modern Saxon. The downright seriousness which constitutes her main mood

is tinctured but lightly with the ironic tone, but its pungency is well

distributed. Its appearance is characterized by brevity and frequency.

There are no long passages of sustained irony; and no very long ones

wholly devoid of it. It usually occurs in quiet, unostentatious

phrases, as in the description of the Raveloe philosophy, or of that

superior family whose daughters bloomed into the Mesdames Deane, Glegg,

Pullet, and Tulliver.

The cogitative Mr. Glegg, for instance, had a truly scientific attitude

toward the captious temper that enlivened his home,--[222]

“* * * it is certain that an acquiescent mild wife would have

left his meditations comparatively jejune and barren of mystery.”

Mrs. Waule, on the other hand, was an acquiescent mild soul, and

accepted domestic frankness as in the order of nature,--[223]

“Indeed, she herself was accustomed to think that entire freedom

from the necessity of behaving agreeably was included in the

Almighty’s intentions about families.”

From this banter we pass to a bitter sarcasm that covers a burning

social sympathy in the account of the Florentine banquet, where

none could eat the tough, expensive peacock, but all gloried in the

extravagance of having it to play with,--[224]

“And it would have been rashness to speak slightingly of

peacock’s flesh, or any other venerable institution at a time

when Fra Girolamo was teaching the disturbing doctrine that it

was not the duty of the rich to be luxurious for the sake of the

poor.”

Irony is applied to two young men, with totally different purposes;

in one case it is directed against the youth himself; in the other,

against an anticipated criticism of his conduct.

Fred Vincy belongs to the class of which Algernon Blancove is the most

brilliant representative, and from which Evan Harrington made an early

escape. He is persuaded that he “wouldn’t have been such a bad fellow

if he had been rich.” But his destiny induces in him “a streak of

misanthropic bitterness.”[225]

“To be born the son of a Middlemarch manufacturer, and the

inevitable heir to nothing in particular, while such men as

Mainwaring and Vyan--certainly life was a poor business, when

a spirited young fellow, with a good appetite for the best of

everything, had so poor an outlook.”

Of contrasting caliber is Adam Bede, whose vision is turned outward and

even upward, instead of altogether inward; and whose survey causes a

feeling of modesty rather than injured conceit.[226]

“Adam, I confess, was very susceptible to the influence of rank,

and quite ready to give an extra amount of respect to every one

who had more advantages than himself, not being a philosopher,

or a proletaire with democratic ideas, but simply a stout-limbed

clever carpenter with a large fund of reverence in his nature,

which inclined him to admit all established claims unless he saw

very clear grounds for questioning them.”

George Eliot was held in high esteem by George Meredith; and the

two were indeed akin in outlook, and very much so in the matter of

ironic usage, in spite of their wide difference in general style. But

the Meredithian solution is at once more saturated and more subtle,

combined with greater uniformity of effect. This, however, does not

spell monotony, diversity being furnished by range of ideas and breadth

of subject-matter. Meredith has one ironic mold, but into it he pours a

procession of contents of great variety. The tone, it is unnecessary to

say, is undilutedly masculine; so is Eliot’s, except for the presence

of an element usually reckoned as feminine, and mentioned, by a curious

coincidence, in Meredith’s approving characterization of a French

writer. In making out his own preferred list with accompanying reason,

he cites Renan, “for a delicate irony scarcely distinguishable from

tenderness.”[227] In this quality Meredith was by no means lacking,

but his ironic mood was inclined to the caustic and merciless.

One of his devices is to substitute for the old mock-heroic a new

mock-syllogistic, more in accord with modern imagination. The great

doctrine of Natural Selection is applied to human courtship, as

exemplified by one of the Fittest.[228]

“Science thus--or it is better to say, an acquaintance

with science--facilitates the cultivation of aristocracy.

Consequently a successful pursuit and a wresting of her from a

body of competitors, tells you that you are the best man. What

is more, it tells the world so.

“Willoughby aired his amiable superlatives in the eye of Miss

Middleton; he had a leg.”

Under the seductive opportunity of table talk Sir Willoughby again

falls a victim to the inductive method. This time he is airing his

opinion of the French, drawing an elaborate analogy from the character

of a national sample now officiating in the Patterne kitchen.

The general validity of his conclusion is admitted by his modest

secretary:[229]

“‘A few trifling errors are of no consequence when you are in

the vein of satire,’ said Vernon. ‘Be satisfied with knowing a

nation in the person of a cook.’”

But Sir Willoughby still has twin peaks of eminence to surmount: one he

achieves when he describes himself to Lætitia as a man of humor; and

the other when he warns Clara to beware of marrying an egoist.

Perhaps the two best understudies in egoism are Wilfred Pole and Victor

Radnor. Wilfred is satisfied with the talents and charm of his Emilia.

And yet[230]

“It was mournful to think that Circumstances had not at the same

time created the girl of noble birth, or with an instinct for

spiritual elegance. But the world is imperfect.”

Both have lofty conceptions of loyalty and sacrifice. In the case of

Wilfred,[231]

“He could pledge himself to eternity, but shrank from being

bound to eleven o’clock on the morrow morning.”

Victor is convinced of his love for Nataly,[232]

“And he tested it to prove it by his readiness to die for her:

which is heroically easier than the devotedly living, and has

a weight of evidence in our internal Courts for surpassing the

latter tedious performance.”

The occasion of the splendid housewarming at Lakelands is made into a

text on the perils of feminism. In a crowded hall--[233]

“Chivalry stood. It is a breeched abstraction, sacrificing

voluntarily and genially to the Fair, for a restoring of the

balance between the sexes, that the division of good things

be rather in the fair ones’ favor as they are to think: with

the warning to them, that the establishment of their claim for

equality puts an end to the priceless privileges of petticoats.

Women must be mad, to provoke such a warning; and the majority

of them submissively show their good sense.” (“With that innate

submissiveness,” speaks up George Eliot, “of the goose, so

beautifully corresponding to the strength of the gander.”)

Another evidence of bewildering perversity is equally apposite to the

present moment of history. The Austrian Lieutenant Jenna is discoursing

on the Italians and the habit of the captured of spending their

enforced solitude in writing Memoirs:[234]

“My father said--the stout old Colonel--‘Prisons seem to make

these Italians take an interest in themselves.’ ‘Oh!’ says my

mother, ‘why can’t they be at peace with us?’ ‘That’s exactly

the question,’ says my father, ‘we’re always putting to them.’

And so I say. Why can’t they let us smoke our cigars in peace?”

But England does not lag behind in the matter of the application of the

intellect to practical questions. The country squires are excited over

the approach of the open game season; moreover,--[235]

“The entire land (signifying all but all of those who occupy the

situation of thinkers in it) may be said to have been exhaling

the same thought in connection with September. Our England holds

possession of a considerable portion of the globe, and it keeps

the world in awe to see her bestowing so considerable a portion

of intelligence upon her recreations. To prosecute them with her

whole heart is an ingenious exhibition of her power.”

It is naturally the fate of the active to suffer from Philistine

misapprehension, particularly when the activity is racial:[236]

“Foreigners pertinaciously misunderstand us. They have the

barbarous habit of judging by results. Let us know ourselves

better. It is melancholy to contemplate the intrigues, and vile

designs, and vengeances of other nations; and still more so,

after we have written so many pages of intelligible history, to

see them attributed to us. Will it never be perceived that we do

not sow the thing that happens?”

This rhetorical irony, which we have found so widely distributed, is

a sign of temperament at the most, and at the least only of habit,--a

mannerism of style. Philosophical irony, a sense of the irony of

life, is an indicator of character and the whole interpretation of

experience. The two kinds may or may not coincide. It happens, for

instance, that the two great ironists who inclose the Victorian period

like a pair of chronological brackets, illustrate them separately. Jane

Austen is habitually ironic in speech, but no novel of hers manifests

an idea of the irony of fate. Her situations are too simple, too

blandly logical, to be devised by a Destiny either impishly malicious

or cruelly malignant. But Thomas Hardy takes all his reasonable logic

and bland simplicity out in language. He seldom introduces the caustic

reflection. There is little of the acrid in the flavor of his style.

It is all poured into the story. The conditions he portrays convey

their own poignancy, and tell their own tale of gratuitous failure and

superfluous sacrifice.

Of this sharp impression of life as consisting of the nearly-achieved

or barely-failed, there are indications here and there in mid-century

fiction, but no thoroughgoing exponent, because none of that

unqualified pessimism which acknowledges irrationality as the presiding

genius of the world. It is natural that in Disraeli, Brontë, Kingsley,

circumstantial irony should be as snakes in Iceland; and that Lytton,

Gaskell, Dickens, Thackeray, Reade, should furnish a pair of white

crows apiece. It is interesting though also not astonishing to find

that out of about three dozen culled examples, Peacock and Butler not

counted because they do not work in the medium of normal circumstance,

Meredith leads with nearly one-third the total amount, Eliot being

a close second, and Trollope a lagging third. Yet these three are

decidedly anti-ironic in general belief; shown both by actual testimony

and by implication. The former comes, as would be supposed, from

Meredith. Writing to a friend and alluding to the weakness of old age,

he says,--[237]

“We who have loved the motion of legs and the sweep of the

winds, we come to this. But for myself, I will own that it is

the natural order. There is no irony in Nature.”

In his last novel he gives a backhanded thrust at the ironic philosophy

in his favorite equivocal fashion:[238]

“We are convinced we have proof of Providence intervening when

some terrific event of the number at its disposal accomplishes

the thing and no more than the thing desired.”

In the same story the motive and emotion of the bridegroom is thus

described:[239]

“A sour relish of the irony in his present position sharpened

him to devilish enjoyment of it, as the finest form of loathing:

* * * He had cried for Romance--here it was!”

But the author makes it clear that this irony is subjective. The

objective complement to it arrives later, and its real name is Nemesis.

Subjective also is it in the one account we have from George Eliot:[240]

“But anyone watching keenly the stealthy convergence of human

lots, sees a slow preparation of effects from one life on

another, which tells like a calculated irony on the indifference

or the frozen stare with which we look at our unintroduced

neighbor. Destiny stands by sarcastic with our _dramatis

personæ_ folded in her hand.”

That is, our ignorance makes a dramatic irony out of a situation in

itself a link in the logical chain of cause and effect.

The implication that to the Victorians life is on the whole rational

rather than ironic is made by the fact that the ironic situations are

incidental, and the conclusions are based on poetic justice, whether

happy or tragic, and not on ironic injustice. It may be worth noting

that these various situations seem divisible into three or four

classes, and that such division serves to bring some order out of the

chaos of their multiplicity.

There is first the irony already mentioned as dramatic, where ignorance

is not bliss. Such is the case in Lytton’s _Alice_, when Maltravers

falls in love with his own unknown daughter, an Œdipean tragedy being

averted by timely information. A similar relationship with opposite

effect is that of Harold Transome, exasperating with warnings of

exposure the slippery scoundrel Jermyn, until he forces the incredible

exposure of his own social position. Even more ironic is that behavior

which in ignorant zeal precipitates the very calamity it strives to

avoid. Thus does Mrs. Tulliver, “a hen taking to reflection on how

to prevent Hodge from wringing her neck,” when she adroitly tries to

persuade Wakem not to buy the Mill, thereby putting the notion of doing

it into his head. Lady Glencora, in _Phineas Finn_, pleading with

Madame Max not to marry the Duke of Omnium, unaware of her already

made decision not to do so, very nearly meets with the same kind of

gratuitous failure. Of a different order is the use of secret knowledge

to extract an advantage from the ignorant adversary who misunderstands

the allusions; as Sandra Belloni, arousing Mr. Pole’s enthusiasm for

her as a daughter-in-law, good enough for any man indeed,--except his

unsuspected self, who was the only one desired. At three fine banquets

dramatic irony sits as an unwelcome guest: at Arthur Donnithorne’s

birthday feast, where the warm tribute paid him by Adam Bede and Mr.

Poyser would have turned to ashes in their mouths had they known the

truth; at Mr. Vane’s dinner for Peg Woffington, at which his innocent

wife appears just in time to assume all the honors to herself; and at

the Jocelyn party, where the daughters of the great Mel have him to

digest.

Another sort of irony comes from the reversed wheel of fortune. This

is also dramatic, being in fact the keynote of the mediæval idea of

tragedy, though all such reversal is not ironic. Authur Clennam in

the Marshalsea might be an instance, albeit less perfect than William

Dorrit fancying himself there when he was really in the perfectly

appointed Merdle dining room. There is a double reversal of expectation

that turns Fred Vincy into a passable success, through being cheated

out of his legacy, while Dorothea Brooke and Tertius Lydgate are

thwarted into comparative failure. Another subdivision is that

complete fall in which the victim does, and gladly, the thing he has

previously sworn he would in no wise ever do; witness Sir Willoughby in

triumph over the winning of the lady with brains, afterward to learn

“the nature of that possession in the woman who is our wife.”

Then there is the granted desire; as if mother Fate hearing her

children beg for poisoned candy said, Well, take it then, and see how

you like it. Lady Mason, in _Orley Farm_, Mrs. Transome, Sir Richard

Feverel, are all devoted parents who are allowed to have their own

way in plans for their children, and merely asked to abide by the

consequences. The death of Raffles comes most opportunely for Mr.

Bulstrode, and seals his doom.

The irony of the lost opportunity is hard to distinguish from just

retribution. Philip Beaufort, killed on his way to a belated deed of

duty to his family; Trollope’s Claverings and Bertrams; Godfrey Cass,

Lord Fleetwood, Edward Blancove, all are made to feel the ironic

undercurrent of that water the mill will never grind with, because it

has passed.

In addition to these _exempla_, attention might be called to a trio of

ironic titles: _Great Expectations_, _Beauchamp’s Career_, and _One of

Our Conquerers_.

Though all the novelists indulge at times in the use of irony, Meredith

alone offers a definition. In one place in the _Essay on Comedy_,

he characterizes it as the honeyed sting which leaves the victim in

doubt as to having been hurt. In another, he expands the idea:

“Irony is the humour of satire; it may be savage as in Swift,

with a moral object, or sedate, as in Gibbon, with a malicious.

The foppish irony fretting to be seen, and the irony which

leers, that you shall not mistake its intention, are failures in

satiric effort pretending to the treasures of ambiguity.”

Some there are who are not quite guiltless of these failures, but

Meredith is not one of them. He is unique also, except for the

corroboration of George Eliot, in making the ironic interpretation of

life in itself an object of satire, in so far as it is brought forward

as an excuse for our deficiencies, for then it betrays a certain

weakness in our mental processes. For this he has one direct spokesman

and two or three dramatic examples. The former is the incisive

Redworth, who is exasperated at this vicarious refuge claimed by needy

human nature.[241]

“‘Upon my word,’ he burst out, ‘I should like to write a book of

Fables, showing how donkeys get into grinding harness, and dogs

lose their bones, and fools have their sconces cracked, and all

run jabbering of the irony of Fate, to escape the annoyance of

tracing the causes. And what are they? Nine times out of ten,

plain want of patience, or some debt for indulgence, * * * It’s

the seed we sow, individually or collectively.’”

Chief of the latter--the dramatic examples--is a youth who, just

returning from his father’s funeral, with bitter prospects ahead,

encounters a being more wretched than himself, a forsaken young woman

shelterless, and desperately ill.[242]

“Evan had just been accusing the heavens of conspiring to

disgrace him. Those patient heavens had listened, as is their

wont. They had viewed and not been disordered by his mental

frenzies. It is certainly hard that they do not come down to us,

and condescend to tell us what they mean, and be dumb-foundered

by the perspicuity of our arguments--the argument, for instance,

that they have not fashioned us for the science of the shears,

and do yet impel us to wield them.”

A little later in the same story is a bit of “eloquent and consoling

philosophy” on a happy juxtaposition of the meat and the eaters.[243]

“A thing has come to pass which we feel to be right! The

machinery of the world, then, is not entirely dislocated: there

is harmony, on one point, among the mysterious powers who have

to do with us.”

Another deeply meditative young man is Algernon Blancove. On the very

point of turning over a new leaf, he has the misfortune to lose a wager

of a thousand pounds,--which he did not have in the first place.[244]

“A rage of emotions drowned every emotion in his head, and

when he got one clear from the mass, it took the form of a

bitter sneer at Providence, for cutting off his last chance of

reforming his conduct and becoming good. What would he not have

accomplished, that was brilliant, and beautiful, and soothing,

but for this dead set against him!”

With a gentler touch Clotilde is pictured, on hearing of the disaster

to Alvin, as venting the “laugh of the tragic comedian.”[245]

“She laughed. The world is upside down--a world without light,

or pointing finger, or affection for special favorites, and

therefore bereft of all mysterious and attractive wisdom, a

crazy world, a corpse of a world--if this be true!”

One more angle has Meredith from which to view this subject, and this

shows up the absurdity of the opposite type,--the superior philosopher

who disdains to apply the ironic explanation to his own affairs, but

prides himself on his detached, Olympian, ironic view of the cosmos.

This spirit is incarnate in the wise youth, Adrian Harley.[246]

“He had no intimates except Gibbon and Horace, and the society

of these fine aristocrats of literature helped him to accept

humanity as it had been, and was; a supreme ironic procession,

with laughter of Gods in the background. Why not laughter of

mortals also?”

From the tranquillity of this calm eminence he observes the mortal

excitement produced by the news of Richard’s marriage.[247]

“When one has attained that felicitous point of wisdom from

which one sees all mankind to be fools, the diminutive objects

may make what new moves they please, one does not marvel at

them; their sedateness is as comical as their frolic, and their

frenzies more comical still.”

Whether or not there is such an actuality as an Ironic Fate, upon whom

mortals may blame their failures, or against whom they are doomed to

strive in vain, is as speculative a question as any in metaphysics.

The ironist is as dogmatic as the theist; and he no doubt gets as much

satisfaction from his denial of a rationally ordered universe, as

the other does from his assertion of it. To be able to fling back a

jest into the face of the Sphinx is undeniably a poor equivalent for

guessing her riddle, but it at least helps to take the edge off her

inscrutability.

In his _La Satire en France_, Lenient makes irony the opposite

of enthusiasm, and emphasizes the fact and the necessity of their

perennial alternation, like the recurrence of day and night. It would

indeed be a fearful world whose passive, indifferent night was

succeeded by no bright, clear, active day. But it would also be a

wearisome world whose glare never merged into the refreshing season

of dusky shadows, quiet half-tones, and twinkling stars. It is well

that they are reciprocal and that “_sous ces noms divers reproduèra

l’eternelle antethèse qui s’agite au fond de toute sociêtê_.”

PART III

OBJECTS

CHAPTER I

INDIVIDUALS

As the target to the missile, so is its object to satire. A target

is in itself a thing of sufficient identity to be amenable to

definition,--even if that can be no more precise than “something aimed

at.” But in the concrete there are targets and targets. So, while the

satirized may be reduced to an abstract entity, as deception or some

other ubiquitous trait of human nature, there exist in fact as many

varieties of the satirized as of satirists. Anything which any one may

criticise, if it be subject to humorous treatment, may be a satirical

object.

But since subdivisions are convenient, we make three for this purpose,

which seem fairly inclusive, though not at all mutually exclusive.

The simplest and narrowest class is that of actual Individuals. The

next is formed by the cohesion of individuals into groups, creating

Institutions. The third is made by the artistic conversion of

individuals into fictitious characters, sufficiently artificial to be

designated as Types,--more or less complex, according to the nature

of their creator, but never entirely simple, if they are fashioned of

human stuff.

Even more than usual, however, is the caution necessary that the

classification is artificial and the classes inseparable. An individual

may, and indeed generally does, represent an idea or an organization

or a certain temperament. Particularly when an object of satire, John

Doe is not viewed as John Doe but as an embodiment of some principle

or kind of conduct disapproved of by his critic. And conversely,

institutions and types, being abstractions, must be made concrete to

get them into workable shape. “The position of the satirist,” says

Lowell, in _The Bigelow Papers_, “is oftentimes one which he would

not have chosen, had the election been left to himself. In attacking

bad principles, he is obliged to select some individual who has made

himself their exponent, and in whom they are impersonate, to the end

that what he says may not, through ambiguity, be dissipated _tenues

in auras_.” Lowell was of course not unaware that the satirist’s

obligation might be met and fulfilled through the method of dramatic

disguise, but it is evident that the author of the _Fable for

Critics_ had his leanings toward the personal type. Yet he confirms

the pious English tradition by adding,--

“Meanwhile let us not forget that the aim of the true satirist

is not to be severe upon persons, but only upon falsehood. * * *

Truth is quite beyond the reach of satire. * * * The danger of

satire is, that continual use may deaden his sensibility to the

force of language.”

The real secret is that our primitive impulses clamor for the

delectable diet of personalities, and must be appeased by a little

judicious indulgence. Under pristine conditions, before we learned to

be apologetic for our instincts, we could enjoy our Fescinnine gibings

without a qualm. As we grew in poise and culture, we began to feel the

need of a finer diet for Cerberus, to gratify his acquired taste. Such

a sop was found in the altruistic motive, inexpensive and immediately

satisfying.

But, since motives are rarely single, there is frequently in this

unconscious pose an admixture of genuine idealism, most often of the

patriotic sort. _La Satire Ménippée_, for instance, was said to

have been worth as much to Henry of Navarre as was the battle of

Ivry; and its real object was the eternal one of good satire. Says a

historian,[248]

“All the mean political rivalries which pretend to work only for

the public good are exposed there; all those men who take God as

a shield to hide their own personal baseness, pass before us.”

So also was the _Anti-Jacobin_ designed as an instrument for the public

weal, though conceived in panic and brought forth in extravagance.

Both these productions, moreover, illustrate the difficulty of

distinguishing between personal and political or some sort of partisan

satire.[249] When Claudius was exposed on his bad eminence by Seneca,

Nero, by Persius, Domitian, by Juvenal, Wolsey, by Skelton, Napoleon

and George the Third, by Byron, and all four Georges, by Thackeray, it

was in every case, not as a mere human Doctor Fell, but as a crafty

tyrant or an incompetent mannikin made absurd by an incongruous

position of power and authority; although at first the personal

interest predominated over the political, the latter increasing with

time.

In any case, what has preserved personal satire in literature has been

the amber, not the flies. Such satiric portraits as are saved from

oblivion,--as those in _Absalom and Achitophel_, _Macflecknoe_, _The

Dunciad_, _The Vision of Judgment_,--are spared, not for their subjects

but for the wit in which they are dressed, irrespective of the justice

or the slander stitched into the costume.

In the field of prose fiction we find a comparatively small amount

of direct personal satire, and that modicum attached to the romantic

or fantastic section rather than the realistic. In the latter the

fusion of fact and fancy is too subtle to result in overt portraiture.

What Dickens says of Squeers is true in some degree of all fictitious

characters. All are drawn from observation, but none remain precisely

as observed, after passing through the crucible of their creator’s

imagination. Of some we chance to know more definitely than of others

that they were “taken from life.” Disraeli, for instance, in his

_Coningsby_, made the Honorable J. W. Croker into the politician Rigby,

Lord George Manners into Henry Sidney, and Lord Hertford into the Duke

of Monmouth. The last achieved his real immortality as the Marquis

of Steyne, and Theodore Hook also had the double honor of being the

original of Disraeli’s Lucian Gay and Thackeray’s Mr. Wagg. Richard

Monckton Milnes became the Vavasour of _Tancred_, John Bright, the Mr.

Turnbull of _Phineas Redux_, and Gerald Massey played the title rôle

in _Felix Holt_. We are aware too that their own families supplied

material to Dickens, Brontë, Eliot, and Meredith,[250] but we could

hardly class Mr. Micawber, Shirley Keeldar (or her friend Caroline

Helstone), Adam Bede, Dinah Morris, or Melchisedek Harrington as

examples of personal satire, even when given satirical treatment.

It is natural, therefore, that the member of our group who stands

preëminent in the line of individual satire is the one who also

heads the list chronologically; that the next are the two Victorian

forerunners; and that the only real Victorian left to complete this

small tale does it by virtue of his early work. After Thackeray’s

burlesques, ending about 1850, the personal species becomes practically

extinct.

Of Peacock’s seven stories, the first three, published during the

second decade of the century, are full of thinly veiled contemporary

personalities. The next two, in the third decade, have at least the

thicker veils of a historical perspective. In _Crochet Castle_

(1831) the early symptoms recur, but in much lighter form; and in

Peacock’s last appearance, thirty years after, they have vanished,

though the staging is current and local.

The characters in the first three and the sixth are a sort of stock

company, who reappear in the different _dramatis personæ_. Shelley

has been identified with Foster of _Headlong Hall_, Scythrop of

_Nightmare Abbey_, and Forester of _Melincourt_, though this last might

also be Lord Monboddo, as Peacock, like Spenser, had no objection

to the economy of duplication. Southey plays the unenviable parts

of Nightshade in _Headlong Hall_, Feathernest in _Melincourt_, and

Sackbut in _Crochet Castle_. In the last story, however, he may be Mr.

Rumblesack Shanstee, since Wordsworth is probably meant in Mr. Wilful

Wontsee. The latter is also Mr. Paperstamp in _Melincourt_. Coleridge

is another of triple incarnation, appearing as Mystic in _Melincourt_.

Flosky in _Nightmare Abbey_, and Skionar in _Crochet Castle_. In

this last volume Byron figures as Cypress, and is probably also the

Honorable Mr. Listless of _Nightmare Abbey_. Either Gifford or Jeffrey

may be intended in Gall, in _Headlong Hall_. In _Melincourt_, Canning

is Mr. Anyside Antijack, and Malthus, Mr. Fax.

Of all these the most purely personal, in the sense that they are

satires on the men as individuals and not as representatives of

a philosophy or an organization, are the hits at Coleridge and

Southey.[251] The former is allowed to speak for himself:[252]

“‘I divide my day,’ said Mr. Mystic, ‘_on a new principle_:

I am always poetical at breakfast, moral at luncheon,

metaphysical at dinner, and political at tea. Now you shall know

my opinion of the hopes of the world. * * *

“Who art thou?--MYSTERY!--I hail thee! Who

art thou?--JARGON!--I love thee! Who art

thou?--SUPERSTITION!--I worship thee! Hail,

transcendental TRIAD!’”

Later while his companions are concerned practically over the

catastrophe of an explosion of gas in his room, he bewails it as--[253]

“* * * an infallible omen of evil--a type and symbol of

an approaching period of public light--when the smoke of

metaphysical mystery, and the vapours of ancient superstition,

which he had done all that in him lay to consolidate in the

spirit of man, would explode at the touch of analytical reason,

leaving nothing but the plain common sense matter-of-fact of

moral and political truth--a day that he earnestly hoped he

might never live to see.”

Mr. Floskey is thus described:[254]

“He had been in his youth an enthusiast for liberty, and had

hailed the dawn of the French Revolution as the promise of a day

that was to banish war and slavery, and every form of vice and

misery, from the face of the earth. Because all this was not

done, he deduced that nothing was done, and from this deduction,

according to his system of logic, he drew a conclusion that

worse than nothing was done, * * *” etc.

And thus he describes his opinion of current literature:[255]

“This rage for novelty is the bane of literature. Except my

works and those of my particular friends, nothing is good that

is not as old as Jeremy Taylor; and, _entre nous_, the best

parts of my friends’ books were either written or suggested by

myself.”

In the _Noctes Ambrosianæ_, Coleridge gets a contemporary thrust for

his conceit and dogmatism, with the conclusion,--

“The author o’ _Christabel_, and _The Auncient Mariner_, had

better just continue to see visions, and to dream dreams--for

he’s no fit for the wakin’ world.”

The most direct attack on Southey is in the comment on Mr.

Feathernest:[256]

“* * * to whom the Marquis had recently given a place in

exchange for his conscience. The poet had, in consequence,

burned his old ‘Odes to Truth and Liberty,’ and published a

volume of Panegyrical Addresses ‘to all the crowned heads in

Europe,’ with the motto, ‘Whatever is at court, is right.’”

In Disraeli’s _Ixion_, Enceladus has been identified as Wellington,

Hyperion as Sir Robert Peel, Jupiter as George the Third, and Apollo

as Byron. Byronism indeed is one of the shining marks loved by the

nineteenth century, a fact that not only labels the British temper, but

illustrates the irony of time’s revenges. The last great satirist of

the old school himself becomes the prime object of satire for the new,

partly through mutual lack of understanding, and partly because Byron,

like some other brilliant wits, lacked a real sense of humor. Both

these reasons enabled Lytton to flatter himself that his _Pelham_ had

“contributed to put an end to the Satanic Mania--to turn the thoughts

and ambitions of young gentlemen without neckcloths, and young clerks

who were sallow, from playing the Corsair and boasting that they were

villains.”[257]

Nearly a half century after _Pelham_, we have a reference which strikes

indirectly the keynote of satire, made by a genius great enough to

admire judiciously (as he elsewhere testifies) another genius.[258]

“Beauchampism, as one confronting him calls it, may be said to

stand for nearly everything which is the obverse of Byronism,

and rarely woos your sympathy, shuns the statuesque pathetic, or

any kind of posturing.”

It was Lytton, in turn, who was attacked by Thackeray. He heads the

list of _Novels by Eminent Hands_, and is brought up again in the

_Yellowplush Papers_ and _Epistles to the Literati_.

But here, as everywhere, the complexity of this type obtrudes itself.

Most of the preceding illustrations have been concerned with men as

authors, that is to say, with certain products of literature; and

this puts them out of the personal class. The same thing is true of

Trollope’s sarcastic allusions to the novels of Disraeli and Dickens,

and Kingsley’s little flings at _Coningsby_ and Young England generally.

No comment on the whole matter of personal satire could be more to the

point or more conclusive than that given informally by Thackeray in a

couple of letters concerning his own attack on Lytton,--which he calls

by the right name. The first is addressed to Lady Blessington, and

accounts for his objection to E. L. B.[259]

“But there are sentiments in his writings which always anger me,

big words which make me furious, and a premeditated fine writing

against which I can’t help rebelling. My antipathy don’t go any

further than this.”

The other is written to Lytton himself, calling his attention to a

paragraph in his Preface to the 1856 edition of his (Thackeray’s)

Works; it is this that really contains the apology:

“There are two performances especially (among the critical and

biographical works of the erudite Mr. Yellowplush) which I am

very sorry to see reproduced, and I ask pardon of the author

of _The Caxtons_ for a lampoon which I know he himself has

forgiven, and which I wish I could recall. * * * I wonder at

the recklessness of the young man who could fancy such satire

was harmless jocularity, and never calculate that it might give

pain.”

This fine utterance, coming at just the right time and from the

right person,--the last of the personal satirists, reformed into the

author of _Vanity Fair_,--might be used as an appropriate epitaph for

individual satire. Since the time when Lamb observed that “Satire does

not look pretty upon a tombstone,” we have not only agreed with him,

but gone enough further to admit that it is no more winsome applied to

the living than to the dead. And if we still for the most part reserve

our eulogy until it can serve as elegy, we are willing to let the dead

past of spiteful, recriminating satire bury its dead.

It would not, as a matter of fact, be quite fair to the past to ignore

its own repudiation of this brackish current that has discolored the

main satiric stream. For it was undoubtedly this element that Cervantes

had in mind when he declared,--[260]

“My humble pen hath never winged its way

Athwart the field satiric, that low plain

Which leads to foul rewards, and quick decay.”

In the bitterly partisan seventeenth century Sir Thomas Browne

might well say, “It is seldom that men who care much for the truth

write satire.” And in the beginning of the next century we find the

confession,--[261]

“Our Satire is nothing but Ribaldry and Billingsgate. Scurrility

passes for wit; and he who can call names in the greatest

variety of phrases, is looked upon to have the shrewdest pen.”

A later eighteenth century view is voiced by Cowper:[262]

“Most satirists are indeed a public scourge;

Their mildest physic is a farrier’s purge;

Their acrid temper turns, as soon as stirr’d,

The milk of their good purpose all to curd.

Their zeal begotten, as their works rehearse,

By lean despair upon an empty purse,

The wild assassins start into the street,

Prepar’d to poignard whomsoe’er they meet.”

It is with reference to this conception, induced by this type of

satire, that a modern critic observes, “It is commonly held by the

unreflecting that your satirist is bitter, your humorist a jester.”[263]

But in the nineteenth century comes a change brought about by two

influences: a finer discrimination, which shrinks from passing snap

judgments on things in the lump; and a more gracious urbanity,

sometimes springing from that humanitarianism which is the Victorian’s

pride, sometimes masquerading under its guise, sometimes even in scorn

of it, but always characterized by tact and taste, if not by a tender

regard for possibly hurt feelings.

Amidst the abundance of indirect testimony to this fact we have two

direct ones, from an earlier and a later novelist. Lytton declared in

_Pelham_ that he “did not wish to be an individual satirist.” And

George Eliot said in one of her letters,--

“We may satirize character and qualities in the abstract without

injury to our moral nature, but persons hardly ever.”

One of her own critics makes an observation on her work which shows the

new idea of satire struggling with the old, that all satire must be

toothed,--in spite of Bishop Hall. In the _milieu_ of Eliot, says Mrs.

Oliphant, “the satirist need be no sharper than the humorist, and may

almost fulfil his office lovingly.”[264]

Whether or not the satirist has any more of an “office” than that of

being an artist, he is at least beginning to have love enough for his

art, if not for humanity, to do his work as graciously as the nature

of it will permit. In Mallock’s _New Republic_, for instance, there is

a sort of Peacockian revival of personalities. But, while the figures

of Carlyle, Arnold, Huxley, Jowett, Pater, Ruskin, Rossetti, and

others, are recognizable through their thin disguises, they are not

drawn with the caricaturistic strokes that distorted those of Southey,

Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley and Byron, a generation or so earlier.

It is, however, from a member of that earlier generation that we get

a vivacious expression of the self-reflexive irony which is for the

satirist literally a _saving_ sense of humor. In his _Lyric Odes to the

Royal Academicians_, Peter Pindar reports a dialogue with Satire, who

urges him to attack certain of his contemporaries:

“‘Not write!’ cried Satire, red as fire with rage:

‘This instant glorious war with dulness wage;

* * * * *

Flay half the Academic imps alive;

Smoke, smoke, the Drones of that stupendous Hive.’”

Later, made compunctious by the fable of the frogs pelted to death with

stones thrown merely in sport, he resolves to reform, but is dissuaded:

“‘Poh, poh!’ cried Satire with a smile,

‘Where is the _glorious freedom_ of our isle,

If not permitted to call names?’

Methought the argument had weight:

‘Satire,’ quoth I, ‘You’re very right;’

So once more forth volcanic Peter flames.”

“Life,” says Hawthorne, “is a mixture of marble and mud.” In this

particular fragment of life as represented in literature, we have

the two in paradoxical combination. Personal satire has the effect

sometimes of being an ugly little gargoyle made of marble, and

sometimes, of a harmonious form done in muddy clay. The ideal union of

matter and manner,--an Apollo in marble,--is not for such an impish

sculptor as satire. Only to the true artist, poetry, is allotted the

task of shaping beauty into rounded perfection.