CHAPTER II

INSTITUTIONS

Since institutions are satirized by those who take an interest in

public affairs, without being too well satisfied with the way they are

managed, we may expect to find them conspicuously under indictment

at this time. The Victorians were notably a public-spirited group,

and left no cranny unpenetrated by their critical searchlight; for

it was the lamp they used, and not the hammer. The two most striking

features of nineteenth century public satire are its ubiquity and its

moderation. In all departments it was zealous for reform; in none did

it see the need of sweeping abolishment. It emanated from a generation

poised waveringly between acquiescence and iconoclasm, but avoiding

both extremes. Awake to the blindness and blundering of the past, it

was still too rooted in piety and tradition to visualize a future

radically different. Strong remedies, falling short of the drastic and

destructive, seemed about the right prescription. Dudley Sowerby is

Victorianism incarnate:[265]

“* * * he had been educated in his family to believe, that the

laws governing human institutions are divine--until History

has altered them. They are altered, to present a fresh bulwark

against the infidel.”

The Victorians deplored, for instance, the domestic disaster that

inevitably follows the mercenary marriage encouraged by Society, but

they no more questioned the marriage ceremony than they would any

law of nature. _Getting Married_ does not merely happen to be

post-Victorian; it could not have been otherwise.

They were also intensely partisan both as to Church and State,

according to the immemorial human habit; but none of them, not even

Disraeli or George Eliot, would refuse an amen to the invocation of

Charlotte Brontë:[266]

“Britain would miss her church, if that church fell. God save

it! God also reform it!”

Their Constitutional Monarchy was a broken reed, worse than useless,

yet _Anarchy_ was a fearful word, second only to _Atheism_ in horrific

import. As to the prevailing system of education, it was derided as

a failure and set down as naught; but we hear of no youth abjuring

college because it wasted his time and money.

Beyond these negative statements, however, the Victorians cannot be

described _en masse_, for individuality comes into play, both in

emphasis of interest and manner of attack. Nor is there throughout the

strictly Victorian period, any discernible evolution of ideas. From

Peacock to Kingsley the various novelists are to be distinguished only

by local color and personality. But the two whose lives actually extend

into the twentieth century are separated sharply in this matter from

their predecessors, and serve as links between their time and ours.

This omits only George Eliot, who belongs to the second group, although

she uses her modern scientific data seriously and not satirically.

With Meredith and Butler she forms a trio which faces resolutely with

the Course of Empire, while the others are more or less half-heartedly

saying their prayers toward the Orient.

As to the institutions themselves, started early in the human

stage through gregariousness and mutual dependence, and gradually

increased until now it is no longer possible for two or three to meet

together without organizing and equipping themselves with officers

and constitutions, any sort of classification must be as tentative,

interpenetrating, and unsatisfactory as are most topical outlines. But

a possible listing of satirized groups or provinces may be made under

half a dozen headings: Society, State, Church, School, Art, and Ideals.

By Society is meant that powerful but intangible influence that has a

name but no local habitation. It is in effect a federation of homes,

organized on the caste system. Known as “fashionable,” or “polite,”

its chief concern is with the lighter side of man’s life; with his

recreation if a worker, or his amusement if a drone. In view of the

fact that it is particularly the feminine domain, with the corollary

that Woman’s Place is in the Home, She, as a satirized class, belongs

here as appropriately as anywhere.

The State includes such ramifications as politics, law, charities and

corrections, labor and capital, and warfare. It is in this connection

that satire may be defined, as by Myers, as “essentially a weapon of

the weak against the strong, of a minority against a majority;” and

by Besant in the same terms, the latter adding, “Satire began when

man began to be oppressed.” This statement occurs in his _French

Humourists_, and it is interesting to note the confirmation implied

in Lenient’s description of France suffering under oppression:

“_Esclave, elle tremble et obéit, mais se venge par la satire de ceux

qui lui font peur_.”

The Church, when allied with the State, assumed dominion not only over

it but over the Home as well. This last, indeed, was raised to the high

estate of an Institution by the joint ministrations of the other two.

By imposing Marriage upon it, they were enabled to lead it, often more

firmly than gently, between them; State grasping the right hand of Home

to insure legalization, and Church the left, to produce sanctification.

More recently Church and School have exchanged places in relation

to State, as education has become a public concern, and religion a

private. Art and Ideals, like Society, are not palpably crystallized,

but are useful designations. The main subject criticised in Art is that

branch to which the critics themselves belong, Literature. When Ideals

or Ideas are ridiculed, it is naturally as fallacious reasoning or

erroneous judgment. Attacks on civilization in general and the English

species of it in particular, may also be put here for want of a better

place.

According to the satirists, Society is at fault chiefly for its

worship of Mammon, its hollowness, and snobbish vanity. These lead to

artificial relationships, the most disastrous of which is the marriage

of convenience, which usurps the higher dominion of sentiment and

romance.

Peacock is interested not only in this matrimonial bargaining but in

the accompanying insistence on a decent disguise. Mr. Sarcastic is

pointing out the astonishing results to be secured by a practice of

absolute frankness in speech. Among other instances, he cites the shock

he gave Miss Pennylove by declaring to her,--[267]

“When my daughter becomes of marriageable age, I shall

commission Christie to put her up to auction, the highest bidder

to be the buyer, * * *”

In spite of the lady’s utter amazement and indignation, she afterwards

rejects manhood and love in favor of senility and wealth; whereby her

critic concludes,--

“How the dignity and delicacy of such a person could have been

affected, if the preliminary negotiation with her hobbling

Strephon had been conducted through the instrumentality of

honest Christie’s hammer, I cannot possibly imagine.”

This is evidently not to be construed into a satire against women, for

Peacock follows the lead of Defoe in the chivalrous justice which, so

far from ridiculing women, pointed out on the contrary the absurdity

of the conditions that had made them seem absurd. In the same story he

describes Sir Henry as--[268]

“* * * one of those who maintained the heretical notion that

women are, or at least may be, rational beings; though, from the

great pains usually taken in what is called education to make

them otherwise, there are unfortunately very few examples to

warrant the truth of the theory.”

In another connection he observes that the repression of feminine

activity shows--[269]

“* * * the usual logic of tyranny, which first places its

extinguisher on the flame, and then argues that it cannot burn.”

As to the mercenary marriage, further satire is contributed by

Thackeray, whose plaints over the matches made every day in Vanity

Fair are well known; by Dickens and Brontë in short, glancing shafts;

and by Trollope, who makes it the main or secondary theme of half a

dozen novels. On the more intricate subject of the Eternal Feminine,

the contributions come from Lytton, Brontë, (not, however, from Mrs.

Gaskell or George Eliot), Trollope, and Meredith. The first three agree

on the bane of enforced idleness, which breeds frivolity and inane

restlessness. Caroline Helstone reflects bitterly on the helplessness

of her position:[270]

“I observe that to such grievances as society cannot readily

cure, it usually forbids utterance, on pain of its scorn: this

scorn being only a sort of tinselled cloak to its deformed

weakness. People hate to be reminded of ills they are unwilling

or unable to remedy: such reminder, in forcing on them a

sense of their own incapacity, or a more painful sense of an

obligation to make some unpleasant effort, troubles their

ease and shakes their self-complacency. Old maids, like the

homeless and unemployed poor, should not ask for a place and an

occupation in the world: the demand disturbs the happy and rich:

it disturbs parents.”

She envies Solomon’s model woman, who had to arise early to go about

her own business; and Violet Effingham exclaims,--[271]

“‘I wish I could be something, if it were only a stick in

waiting, or a door-keeper. It is so good to be something!’

“‘A man should try to be something,’ said Phineas.

“‘And a woman must be content to be nothing,--unless Mr. Mill

can pull us through!’”

By the late seventies, Mr. Mill, with reinforcements, had done

something toward pulling us through; so that Meredith was able to

satirize masculine desire to stave off the threatened feminism, and

failure to appreciate the value of equality in comradeship.

In his ideal for his first betrothed, Constantia Durham, Sir Willoughby

is as much Man as Egoist:[272]

“He wished for her to have come to him out of an egg shell,

somewhat more astonished at things than a chicken, but as

completely enclosed before he tapped the shell, and seeing him

with her sex’s eyes first of all men.”

In another of the late novels, the two abstractions, society and woman,

are fused in one description as,--[273]

“* * * the terrible aggregate social woman, of man’s creation,

hated by him, dreaded, scorned, satirized, and nevertheless,

upheld, esteemed, applauded: a mark of civilization, on to which

our human society must hold as long as we have nothing humaner.

She exhibits virtue, with face of waxen angel, with paw of

desert beast, and blood of victims on it.”

This is discrimination; the general dearth of which is lamented by Lady

Dunstane:[274]

“The English notion of women seems to be that we are born white

sheep or black; circumstances have nothing to do with our

colour. They dread to grant distinctions, and to judge of us

discerningly is beyond them.”

And Lætitia, after listening to a long Patterne discourse on feminine

traits and limitations, laconically sums up the whole matter in a

compact epigram:[275]

“‘The generic woman appears to have an extraordinary faculty for

swallowing the individual.’”

After this, decidedly flat and puerile falls the witticism of Kingsley,

spoken by Bracebridge in reply to Lancelot’s impatient question why

women would “make such fools of themselves with clergymen”:[276]

“They are quite right. They always like the strong men--the

fighters and the workers. In Voltaire’s time they all ran after

the philosophers. In the middle ages, books tell us, they

worshipped the knights errant. They are always on the winning

side, the cunning little beauties. In the war-time, when the

soldiers had to play the world’s game, the ladies all caught the

red-coat fever; now, in these talking and thinking days (and be

hanged to them for bores), they have the black-coat fever for

the same reason.”

Thackeray also is guilty of the generalization not at his time

discovered to be fallacious:[277]

“Women won’t see matters-of-fact in a matter-of-fact point of

view, and justice, unless it is tinged with a little romance,

gets no respect from them.”

The generosity of “Little Sister” in condoning young Firmin’s unwise

passiveness is based on “that admirable injustice which belongs to all

good women, and for which let us be daily thankful.” At this point the

undevout votary burns considerable medieval incense at the feminine

shrine,--not caring much if a little smoke should blow into his idols’

eyes:[278]

“I know, dear ladies, that you are angry at this statement.

But, even at the risk of displeasing _you_, we must tell

the truth. You would wish to represent yourselves as equitable,

logical, and strictly just. * * * Women equitable, logical, and

strictly just! Mercy upon us! If they were, population would

cease, the world would be a howling wilderness.”

The apologist errs, however, in supposing that any ladies,--real or

fictitious, his own characters or others’,--are angry at his accusation

of injustice. Helen Pendennis, Amelia Sedley, even Ethel Newcome and

Lady Castelwood, would be flattered; Becky Sharp and Beatrix Esmond

would not care. And as for Caroline Helstone, Violet Effingham, Diana

Warwick, Sandra Belloni, they are too far away to be disturbed by

either smoke or aroma.

For half our novelists, the woman question as such did not exist,

and about the same number show little or no interest in the world of

fashion, though the two lists coincide only in part. Lytton, Thackeray,

Trollope, Meredith, and in a small way, Kingsley, have grudges against

society in addition to its treatment of women and women’s influence

on it; while Disraeli, Dickens, and Butler have some general gibes at

social follies.

From first to last in his near-half-century of writing, Lytton, himself

to the manner born, loved to prick the social bubble. In youth he

says:[279]

“The English of the fashionable world make business an

enjoyment, and enjoyment a business: they are born without a

smile; they rove about public places like so many easterly

winds--cold, sharp, and cutting; * * * while they have

neglected all the graces and charities of artifice, they have

adopted all its falsehood and deceit.”

Mr. Howard de Howard, rebuking a drawing room smart set, speaks for

himself and his class:[280]

“Gentlemen, I have sate by in silence and heard my king derided,

and my God blasphemed; but now when you attack the aristocracy,

I can no longer refrain from noticing so obviously intentional

an insult. _You have become personal._”

When young Chillingly absconds for a taste of real life, he leaves

a letter for his father in which he promises a safe return, and

adds,--[281]

“I will then take my place in polite society, call upon you

to pay all expenses, and fib on my own account to any extent

required by that world of fiction which is peopled by illusions

and governed by shams.”

In his first adventure, masquerading as a yeoman, he is quizzed by

Uncle Bovill on topics for the intelligent,--politics, agriculture,

finance. To maintain his incognito, he affects ignorance; and is

astonished at the triumphant deduction,--[282]

“Just as I thought, sir; you know nothing of these matters--you

are a gentleman born and bred--your clothes can’t disguise you,

sir.”

Disraeli, whose career paralleled Lytton’s in several ways, takes the

same tone toward his own social environment, but his deeper political

earnestness led him to criticise that environment in the wider as well

as narrower social sense. In his first real novel we find the latter by

itself, in such touches as this:[283]

“Always in the best set, never flirting with the wrong man, and

never speaking to the wrong woman, all agreed that the Ladies

Saint Maurice had fairly won their coronets.”

Again it appears in this account of the hero:[284]

“The banquet was over: the Duke of Saint James passed his

examination with unqualified approval; and having been stamped

at the Mint of Fashion as a sovereign of the brightest die,

he was flung forth, like the rest of his golden brethren, to

corrupt the society of which he was the brightest ornament.”

The house-party of the Dacres, a family of taste and high standards, is

described negatively:[285]

“* * * no duke who is a gourmand, no earl who is a jockey, no

manœuvering mother, no flirting daughters, no gambling sons, for

your entertainment, * * * As for buffoons and artists, to amuse

a vacant hour or sketch a vacant face, we must frankly tell you

at once that there is not one.”

But from _Popanilla_ through the Trilogy the inanity and pretense

of this social circle is made more pointed by contrast with those

socially beneath it. Egremont’s experience with the plain people

induces this serious indictment of his own set:[286]

“It is not merely that it is deficient in warmth and depth

and breadth; that it is always discussing persons instead

of principles, * * * it is not merely that it has neither

imagination, nor fancy, nor sentiment, nor feeling, nor

knowledge, to recommend it, but * * * it is in short, trivial,

uninteresting, stupid, really vulgar.”

Thackeray also speaks from within, and has to his credit his great

roster of Snobs, his panoramic Vanity Fair, and his imposing

procession of worldly, heartless, noble old dames. Trollope prefers

country life, but his Claverings, de Courcys, Luftons, and the Duke of

Omnium, show that he has no desire to neglect its aristocracy. Dickens,

on the other hand, loved London and its struggling poor, but in the

Merdles, the Veneerings, and the Dorrits _redivivi_, he does what he

can with the humors of the struggling rich.

To Meredith the exasperating thing about polite society was its

impoliteness,--its delight in gossip and scandal, its petty but

venomous persecutions, and the false courtesy that takes refuge in

conventionality. This impression apparently deepened with time, for

it is glimpsed only in _Evan Harrington_ and _Sandra Belloni_, of the

earlier books, but is entirely absent from none of the last half dozen.

Butler, preoccupied with other subjects, takes time for only one good

shot at this, but that one is so good that it forms a fitting climax.

He mentions casually an Erewhonian custom, which may be taken as

symbolic of that country’s social behavior and philosophy:[287]

“When any one dies, the friends of the family * * * send little

boxes filled with artificial tears, and with the name of the

sender painted neatly upon the outside of the lid. The tears

vary in number from two to fifteen or sixteen, according to the

degree of intimacy or relationship; and people sometimes find

it a nice point of etiquette to know the exact number which

they ought to send. Strange as it may appear, this attention is

highly valued, and its omission by those from whom it might be

expected is keenly felt. These tears were formerly stuck with

adhesive plaster to the cheeks of the bereaved, and were worn in

public for a few months after the death of a relative; they were

then banished to the hat or bonnet, and are now no longer worn.”

Whether the last clause may be viewed as a hopeful augury for the

future, the author does not state.

The step from the society of the drawing room to society at large, or

mankind, is a refreshing passage from indoors, where everything is

artificial, even the tears of bereavement, to the fresh air of common

interest. The weather may not always be serene nor the atmosphere

invigorating, but at least there is a wide horizon and a perspective of

some scope. It is evident that the Victorians enjoyed these excursions

into the masculine domain of Government, for not one of the list

forbade his mind to roam into its boundaries, and not one is wholly

silent as to the impressions gained by this adventuring. Here the

resemblance ends. Interest in public problems and The People varies

from a minimum in Thackeray and George Eliot to a maximum in Peacock,

Disraeli, and Butler. There is also great diversity in both breadth and

intensity. Lytton, Dickens, Trollope, have several irons in the fire.

Gaskell, Brontë, Reade, Kingsley, have but one or two, but the heat is

none the less fervent. In some cases, indeed, it is too fervent to give

off the sparkle of ridicule, and thus falls without our province. And

in some cases, while it is meant seriously as propaganda, it cannot be

taken seriously as literature; for the artist is not expected to speak

with the tongue of statesmen and economists, and conversely, as Dowden

reminds us, “a political manifesto in three volumes is not a work of

art.”[288]

Neither of these strictures applies to Peacock, who launches the

subject for us in a pungent description of the good old days of Celtic

antiquity:[289]

“Political science they had none. * * * Still they went to work

politically much as we do. The powerful took all they could

get from their subjects and neighbors; and called something or

other sacred and glorious when they wanted the people to fight

for them. They repressed disaffection by force, when it showed

itself in an overt act; but they encouraged freedom of speech,

when it was, like Hamlet’s reading, ‘words, words, words.’”

In the same story, the episode of the decaying embankment, with its

parody of Lord Canning’s Defense of the British Constitution, and

the satire on the game laws, set the pace for the subsequent thrusts

at Toryism and the country squires, particularly Meredith’s, whom

he naturally influenced. Demagogic bamboozlement of the public is

punctured again in the speech of Mr. Paperstamp:[290]

“We shall make out a very good case; but you must not forget to

call the present public distress an awful dispensation; a little

pious cant goes a great way towards turning the thoughts of men

from the dangerous and Jacobinical propensity of looking into

moral and political causes for moral and political effects.”

It is in _Melincourt_ also that the campaign of Mr. Oran Hautton in

the Borough of Onevote starts the satiric ball rolling into election

camps,--later pushed along by the authors of _Pelham_, _The Newcomes_,

_Doctor Thome_, _Felix Holt_, _Middlemarch_, and _Beauchamp’s Career_.

Although Lytton started out as a Liberal, he ended as a Conservative,

and furnishes some counter satire against democracy. In _Night and

Morning_ he speaks of men losing their democratic enthusiasm; and in

_The Coming Race_ he gives proof that his is entirely lost. The family

of the narrator are Americans, “rich and aristocratic, therefore

disqualified for public service;” his father, defeated by his tailor

in the race for Congress, decides on the superior beauty of private

life. The Vrilya have a very expressive compound word. _Koom_ means a

profound hollow; _Posh_ is a term of utter contempt; “_Koom-Posh_ is

their name for the government of the many, or the ascendency of the

most ignorant and hollow.”[291] This contempt, distributed impartially

over dishonest demagogue and gullible public, is nothing new. Smollett,

for instance, in his _Adventures of an Atom_, appreciates the art of

oratory:

“Our orator was well acquainted with all the legerdemain of his

own language, as well as with the nature of the beast he had to

rule. He knew when to distract its weak brain with a tumult of

incongruous and contradictory ideas: he knew when to overwhelm

its feeble faculty of thinking, by pouring in a torrent of words

without any ideas annexed.”

The same Adventurer notes that the names of the two political parties

of Japan signify respectively More Fool than Knave, and More Knave than

Fool. It is, of course this aspect of democracy that leads Lowell to

picture it as “Helpless as spilled beans on a dresser.”

Statemanship was Disraeli’s whole existence, and his art a handmaiden

to politics. More than any other nineteenth century novelist he

complemented destructive criticism by a definite constructive policy.

To a contemporary critic, a reforming Tory was a white blackbird; but

our own generation, having witnessed the phenomenon of Progressive

Republicanism, has less difficulty in understanding the paradox. It was

not indifference to the welfare of the masses that induced Disraeli’s

belief in the rule of a selected class, but a distrust of popular

ability and judgment, and a conviction (acknowledged in our own time

as a truth and the real salvation of democracy) that efficiency can

come only from expert knowledge and training. From such a viewpoint

satire would naturally be directed not against the people but against

its incapable and dishonest leadership. Peacock’s scorn of this

exploitation of popular ignorance and helplessness is taken up by

both his nearest successors, expressed, as it happens, in a pair of

portraits of the ward-politician type.

Pelham repudiates Vincent’s proposed new party because of its bad

personnel, men--[292]

“* * * who talk much, who perform nothing--who join ignorance

of every principle of legislation to indifference for every

benefit to the people:--who are full of ‘wise saws’, but

empty of ‘modern instances’--who level upwards, and trample

downwards--and would only value the ability you are pleased to

impute to me, in the exact proportion that a sportsman values

the ferret, that burrows for his pleasure, and destroys for his

interest.”

Montacute draws a more concrete and ironic picture:[293]

“Find a man who, totally destitute of genius, possesses

nevertheless considerable talent; who has official aptitude,

a volubility of routine rhetoric, great perseverance, a love

of affairs, who, embarrassed neither by the principles of the

philosopher nor by the prejudices of the bigot, can assume,

with a cautious facility, the prevalent tone, and disembarrass

himself of it, with a dexterous ambiguity, the moment it ceases

to be predominant: recommending himself to the innovator by his

approbation of change ‘in the abstract,’ and to the conservative

by his prudential and practical respect for that which is

established; such a man, though he be one of an essentially

small mind, though his intellectual qualities be less than

moderate, with feeble powers of thought, no imagination,

contracted sympathies, and a most loose public morality; such a

man is the individual whom kings and parliaments would select to

govern the State or rule the Church.”

It is not to be supposed, however, that the people would choose any

better than kings and parliaments; on the contrary,--[294]

“The Thirty at Athens were at least tyrants. They were

marked men. But the obscure majority, who, under our present

constitution, are destined to govern England, are as secret as a

Venetian conclave. Yet on their dark voices all depends.”

The trend of the succeeding novelists is toward a modified liberalism,

but Meredith is the only one to satirize the reactionary attitude as

such. The others throw the emphasis elsewhere. Besides, even such

humanitarians as Dickens, Gaskell, Reade, and Kingsley, are dubious as

to the remedial power of popular government, and seem inclined toward

Carlyle’s view of Chartism. What Chesterton says of one of them would

not be untrue applied to the rest:[295]

“All his grumblings through this book of _American Notes_, all

his shrieking satire in _Martin Chuzzlewit_, are expressions

of a grave and reasonable fear he had touching the future of

democracy.”

But the humanitarianism itself is sounded in a harmonious chord, whose

overtone is a ridicule, more grim than gay, of the delinquents;--those

who lack the spirit of humanity, yet are the very ones, on the

principle of _noblesse oblige_, in whom it should well up most

abundantly. If they fail through that ignorance and mental limitation

from which not even the aristocracy are always exempt, the blow is

tempered accordingly; but it falls more heavily when the roots of the

evil are the black ones of selfishness and perversity.

Lady Lufton, for instance, is a kind soul, who would have made

an excellent Providence, though scarcely adequate to cope with

the mismanagement of the Providence already installed over human

affairs:[296]

“She liked cheerful, quiet, well-to-do people, who loved their

Church, their country, and their Queen, and who were not too

anxious to make a noise in the world. She desired that all the

farmers round her should be able to pay their rents without

trouble, that all the old women should have warm flannel

petticoats, that the workingmen should be saved from rheumatism

by healthy food and dry houses, that they should all be obedient

to their pastors and masters--temporal as well as spiritual.

That was her idea of loving her country. She desired also that

the copses should be full of pheasants, the stubble-field of

partridges, and the gorse covers of foxes; in that way, also,

she loved her country.”

These are as amiable sentiments for a lady as Victor Radnor’s for a

gentleman. He is introduced as regretting his fall on London Bridge

chiefly because it led to an unpleasant altercation with a member of

the mob.[297]

“* * * he found that enormous beast comprehensible only when it

applauded him; and besides, he wished it warmly well; all that

was good for it; plentiful dinners, country excursions, stout

menagerie bars, music, a dance, and to bed; he was for patting,

stroking, petting the mob, for tossing it sops, never for

irritating it to show an eye-tooth, much less for causing it to

exhibit the grinders.”

Everard Romfrey, of sterner stuff, sees the advantage of tempering

mercy with justice:[298]

“To his mind the game-laws were the corner-stone of Law, and

of a man’s right to hold his own; and so delicately did he

think the country poised, that an attack on them threatened the

structure of justice. The three conjoined Estates were therefore

his head gamekeepers; their duty was to back him against the

poacher, if they would not see the country tumble. * * * No

tenants were forced to take his farms. He dragged no one by

the collar. He gave them liberty to go to Australia, Canada,

the Americas, if they liked. * * * Still there were grumbling

tenants. He swarmed with game, and though he was liberal, his

hares and his birds were immensely destructive: computation

could not fix the damage done by them. Probably the farmers

expected them not to eat. ‘There are two parties to a bargain,’

said Everard, ‘and one gets the worst of it. But if he was never

obliged to make it, where’s his right to complain?’ Men of sense

rarely obtain satisfactory answers; they are provoked to despise

their kind.”

He returns to the argument, deepened in unavoidable pessimism:[299]

“This behavior of corn-law agitators and protectors of poachers

was an hypocrisy too horrible for comment. Everard sipped

claret.”

The novels which depict the really acute phases of labor and

poverty,--_Sybil_, _Mary Barton_, _North and South_, _Shirley_, _Alton

Locke_, _Hard Times_, (diagnosed by Macaulay as “sullen socialism”),

_Put Yourself in his Place_, _Felix Holt_,--are apt to have John

Barton’s kind of laugh, if any, “a low chuckle, that had no mirth in

it.” But the author of the first of these puts into another story a

pungent little description:[300]

“The Elysians consisted of a few thousand beautified mortals,

the only occupation of whose existence was enjoyment; the rest

of the population comprised some millions of Gnomes and Sylphs,

who did nothing but work, and ensured by their labour the

felicity of the superior class.”

It is inevitable that the artist and the humorist should find their

most congenial fields in those relationships that are vital, and

not too hampered by the technique of more formal and crystallized

institutions. Prisons, Asylums, Courts, and the whole legal machinery,

offer a less inviting prospect than do political parties and theories,

and the contrast between social strata.

Yet the first third of our list,--Peacock, Lytton, Disraeli, and

Dickens,--with the addition of Reade, Trollope, and Butler, did not

shrink from contact with red tape. Dickens and Reade have the monopoly

of the department of Charities and Corrections, though Lytton asserted

the purpose of _Paul Clifford_ to be an indictment against society’s

manufacture and destruction of criminals; and of _Night and Morning_ to

show the injustice and fallacy of its treatment respectively of vice

and crime. In regard to the latter he says, in the Preface:

“Let a child steal an apple in sport, let a starvling steal a

roll in despair, and Law conducts them to the Prison, for evil

communications to mellow them for the gibbet. But let a man

spend one apprenticeship from youth to old age in vice--let

him devote a fortune, perhaps colossal, to the wholesale

demoralization of his kind--and he may be surrounded with the

adulation of the so-called virtuous, and be served upon its knee

by that Lackey--the Modern World!”

Dickens starts his account with the English prison in _Pickwick_, and

closes it in _Little Dorrit_. But it is in _David Copperfield_ that he

stops to point out the whole thing as a stupid error. On the occasion

of a visit to the “immense and solid building, erected at a great

expense,” he reflects,--[301]

“I could not help thinking as we approached the gate, what an

uproar would have been made in the country, if any deluded man

had proposed to spend one half the money it had cost, on the

erection of an industrial school for the young, or a home of

refuge for the deserving old.”

Within, he finds the rêgime of solitary, unemployed confinement,

and the official bait for professions of penitence, fine breeders

of hypocrisy, six years before Reade makes the same point in _Never

too Late to Mend_. But he sees in the exhibitions of No. 27 and No.

28--the Prize Show, the Crowning Glory--Lattimer, and Uriah Heep,

an opportunity for his riotous caricature; while to Reade this

degeneration of character is a wholly serious matter. Indeed, Reade

waxes so wroth over the cruelty, mental and physical, practiced upon

the hopeless victims that the satire itself is as scorching as Swift’s,

though of course of less clear a flame.

Yet the warden Hawes, chief culprit through main responsibility, is

analyzed as after all irresponsible, on psychological and social

grounds:[302]

“Barren of mental resources, too stupid to see, far less read,

the vast romance that lay all around him, every cell a volume;

too mindless to comprehend his own grand situation on a salient

of the State and of human nature, and to discern the sacred

and endless pleasures to be gathered there, this unhappy dolt,

flung into a lofty situation by shallow blockheads, who, like

himself, saw in a jail nothing greater or more than a ‘place of

punishment,’ must still like his prisoners and the rest of us

have some excitement to keep him from going dead. * * * Growth

is the nature * * * even of an unnatural habit. * * * Torture

had grown upon stupid, earnest Hawes; it seasoned that white of

egg, a mindless existence.”

The satisfaction one has in seeing him finally routed and dismissed is

enhanced by the manner of his exit. He is given permission to collect

his belongings before departure:--[303]

“‘I have nothing to take out of the jail, man,’ replied

Hawes rudely, ‘except’--and here he did a bit of pathos and

dignity--‘my zeal for Her Majesty’s service, and my integrity.’

“‘Ah,’ replied Mr. Lacy, quietly, ‘You won’t want any help to

carry them.’”

Next in order comes the “Visiting Injustice,” a purblind creature, who

sees only what the warden points out to him, and comforts a tortured

prisoner with pious exhortations to be patient and submit:[304]

“Item. An occasion for twaddling had come, and this good soul

seized it, and twaddled into a man’s ear who was fainting on the

rack.”

Later a sarcastic contrast is drawn between the dinner the official

enjoys at home and the convict’s gruel he had just ordered diluted.[305]

The first chaplain, well meaning and gentle, is also a failure, through

simple inanity:[306]

“Yet Mr. Jones was not a hypocrite nor a monster; he was only

a commonplace man--a thing moulded by circumstances instead of

moulding them. * * * But at the head of a struggling nation, or

in the command of an army in time of war, or at the head of the

religious department of a jail, fighting against human wolves,

tigers, and foxes, to be commonplace is an iniquity and leads to

crime.”

On the enlightened officialdom that permits all this, Reade is one

with Dickens. When an urgent appeal for investigation is sent to

headquarters, the reply is returned that the inspector would reach that

place in his normal circuit in six weeks:[307]

“‘Six weeks is not long to wait for help in a matter of life

and death,’ thought the eighty-pounders, the clerks who execute

England.”

Most unpardonable of all are such cases as Carter,--[308]

“* * * half-witted, half-responsible creatures, missent to jail

by shallow judges contentedly executing those shallow laws they

ought to modify and stigmatise until civilization shall come and

correct them.”

The Bench and Bar are tempting game for those who enjoy the absurdity

of legal tricks and manners. Disraeli pursues it in the Camelopard

Court, in _Popanilla_; Dickens in _Pickwick_, _Old Curiosity Shop_,

_Bleak House_, _Our Mutual Friend_, not to mention the Circumlocution

and Prerogative Offices; Trollope in _Orley Farm_; and Butler in

_Erewhon_.

Furnival, attorney for the defence, makes an eloquent and persuasive

appeal in behalf of Lady Mason:[309]

“And yet as he sat down he knew that she had been guilty! * *

* and knowing that, he had been able to speak as though her

innocence were a thing of course. That those witnesses had

spoken truth he also knew, and yet he had been able to hold

them up to the execration of all around them as though they

had committed the worst of crimes from the foulest of motives!

And more than this, stranger than this, worse than this,--when

the legal world knew--as the legal world soon did know--that

all this had been so, the legal world found no fault with Mr.

Furnival, conceiving that he had done his duty by his client in

a manner becoming an English barrister and an English gentleman.”

Contempt for chicanery and injustice, scorn for downright oppression

and exploitation, are notes often sounded. Much more rare is an

expression of sympathy for aspiring but baffled mediocrity, with its

converse satire for those at fault. The most striking example is given

by Trollope. An introductory chapter, with a title and a refrain of

_Væ Victis_! is devoted to this subject:[310]

“There is sympathy for the hungry man, but there is no sympathy

for the unsuccessful man who is not hungry. If a fellow-mortal

be ragged, humanity will subscribe to mend his clothes; but

humanity will subscribe nothing to mend his ragged hopes so long

as his outside coat shall be whole and decent.”

This indictment is hung on the peg of the competitive examination, a

device satirized also by Peacock and Dickens, for being a pretentious

failure. Trollope concludes a sarcastic exhortation to all to persevere

in the mad scramble for capricious rewards, with this reflection:[311]

“There is something very painful in these races which we English

are always running to one who has tenderness enough to think of

the nine beaten horses instead of the one who has conquered.”

When the tale of twentieth century satire shall be told, considerable

space will have to be devoted to Militarism versus Pacifism. But the

Victorians lived, if not in piping times of peace, at least in a time

reasonably peaceful, for their island heard little but echoes of the

European cannon; a condition which tended to keep men’s minds at home

and occupied with internal affairs. The satirists therefore have little

to say about war. Peacock unveils the policy of launching a foreign war

in order to smother discontent over domestic troubles. In such stories

as _Shirley_, _Silas Marner_, and others located in or soon after the

Napoleonic Era, are scattered parenthetical remarks; as for instance

the opening scene of _An Amazing Marriage_, “when crowned heads were

running over Europe, crying out for charity’s sake to be amused after

their tiresome work of slaughter; and you know what a dread they have

of moping.” In Disraeli’s _Ixion_, Mars is not popular in Olympian

circles, being despised as “a brute, more a bully than a hero. Not

at all in the best set.” Accordingly, since, as we are reminded by

Phillips in his _Modern Europe_, “the British lion, turned ruminant,

had been browsing in the pleasant pastures of peace to the melodious

piping of Bright and Cobden,” and since it had, when required, the less

melodious taunting of Carlyle, it needed at this time no Aristophanes

or Swift to mock at the madness of militarism.

In organized religion we see a paradoxical and yet natural enough

operation of mortal psychology. In its primitive origin it sprang from

two opposite sources, human innocence and human craft. In his innocence

man believed that his immortal life must put on mortality, become

incarnate in architecture, creed, ritual, before it could be lived.

And in his craft he discovered that the incorruptible could be made to

put on corruption,--to the great advantage of an entirely terrestrial

ambition. These two factors, conjoined with the ubiquitous impulse to

socialize feelings and thoughts as well as actions, have succeeded in

so clothing and housing the wistful spirit which for itself asks no

more than an assurance of some divinity dwelling without or within

us, that its elaborate trappings and conspicuous paraphernalia have

become shining marks for those who see the possible absurdity in this

materializing of the spiritual.

Until recently, however, few shafts have penetrated to the heart of the

discrepancy. Most of them have been aimed at the broad and inviting

surface of obvious inconsistencies: indulgence in material luxury on

the part of an institution founded to further the spiritual life;

dominance of authority in a realm that should be free; flourishing of

bigotry, greed, cruelty, hypocrisy, in the exclusive garden of all the

virtues; unlovely partisan disputes and recriminations in connection

with the one thing that best can symbolize the brotherhood of man.

The distinction must here be made between the official representatives

of the Church as such representatives, and as mere human beings. In

this discussion therefore clergymen are not cited as cases in point

unless they are clearly meant by their authors to be taken as clergy

and not as men.

The Chadband of Dickens, for instance, and the Bute Crawley and Charles

Honeyman of Thackeray, stand on their own feet, and share the common

lot of satirized humanity; neither of these novelists having an arrow

from his full quiver for the Church itself. Nor has Mrs. Gaskell,

though her _North and South_ hinges on the tragedy of Mr. Dale, an

Anglican minister turned Dissenter. George Eliot spares likewise the

Institution she had herself outgrown. Her Clerical Lives, her Reverends

Irwine and Lyon, such diverse types as the modest Dinah Morris and the

dominating Savonarola, are treated sympathetically, as is also the

pitiful fanaticism of Lantern Yard. Lytton and Reade too grant the

consent implied in silence. But other half speak out, briefly or at

length.

Peacock is most impressed with the uselessness of an institution which

seems to exist for the gratification of its dignitaries. The candid

Mr. Sarcastic, after horrifying Miss Pennylove on the question of

auctioning off brides, proceeds in his frank career:[312]

“I irreparably offended the Reverend Dr. Vorax by telling him,

that having a nephew, whom I wished to shine in the church,

I was on the lookout for a luminous butler, and a cook of

solid capacity, under whose joint tuition he might graduate.

‘Who knows,’ said I, ‘but he may immortalize himself at the

University, by giving his name to a pudding?’”

In his medieval tale he takes up the Church as an institution, with

his favorite, backhanded, historical thrust. The Saxons, it seems, had

attacked the Bangor monastery and killed twelve hundred monks:[313]

“This was the first overt act in which the Saxons set forth

their new sense of a religion of peace. It is alleged, indeed,

that these twelve hundred monks supported themselves by the

labour of their own hands. If they did so, it was, no doubt,

a gross heresy; but whether it deserved the castigation it

received from Saint Augustin’s proselytes, may be a question in

polemics. * * * The rabble of Britons must have seen little more

than the superficial facts that the lands, revenues, privileges,

and so forth, which once belonged to Druids and so forth, now

belonged to abbots, bishops, and so forth, who, like their

extruded precursors, walked occasionally in a row, chanting

unintelligible words, and never speaking in common language but

to exhort the people to fight; having, indeed, better notions

than their predecessors of building, apparel, and cookery; and a

better knowledge of the means of obtaining good wine, and of the

final purpose for which it was made.”

To such as this we have Thackeray’s counter-blast, with

admonition,--[314]

“And don’t let us give way to the vulgar prejudice that

clergyman are an overpaid and luxurious body of men. * * *

From reading the works of some modern writers of repute, you

would fancy that a parson’s life was passed in gorging himself

with plum-pudding and port wine; and that his Reverence’s fat

chaps were always greasy with the crackling of tithe pigs.

Caricaturists delight to represent him so: round, short-necked,

pimple-faced, apoplectic, bursting out of waistcoat like a

black-pudding, a shovel-hatted fuzz-wigged Silenus.”

Whereas, he goes on at length to show, the reverse is the case. Both

sides are more or less illustrative of the _argument ad hominem_.

It is Trollope who really writes of Clerical Snobs. The house-party at

Chalicotes shelters a hierarchy. Mr. Robarts arrives,--[315]

“And then the vicar shook hands with Mrs. Proudie, in that

deferential manner which is due from a vicar to his bishop’s

wife; and Mrs. Proudie returned the greeting with all that

smiling condescension which a bishop’s wife should show to a

vicar.”

From here the “young, flattered fool of a parson” is persuaded to go to

Gatherum Castle and there gets into trouble. Brought to his senses, he

meditates ruefully,--[316]

“Why had he come to this horrid place? Had he not everything at

home which the heart of man could desire? No; the heart of man

can desire deaneries--the heart, that is, of the man vicar; and

the heart of the man dean can desire bishoprics; and before the

eyes of the man bishop does there not loom the transcendental

glory of Lambeth?”

The mixture of affectionate indulgence, shrewd amusement, and

fundamental loyalty which made up Trollope’s attitude is recorded in

this symbolic portrait:[317]

“As the archdeacon stood up to make his speech, erect in the

middle of that little square, he looked like an ecclesiastical

statue placed there, as a fitting impersonation of the church

militant here on earth; his shovel-hat, large, new, and

well-pronounced, a churchman’s hat in every inch, declared the

profession as plainly as does the Quaker’s broad brim; his heavy

eye-brows, large, open eyes, and full mouth and chin expressed

the solidity of his order; the broad chest, amply covered

with fine cloth, told how well to do was its estate; one hand

ensconced within his pocket evinced the practical hold which

our mother church keeps on her temporal possessions; and the

other, loose for action, was ready to fight, if need be, in her

defense; and, below these, the decorous breeches, and neat black

gaiters showing so admirably that well-turned leg, betokened

the stability, the decency, the outward beauty and grace of our

church establishment.”

It is naturally in the Cathedral Series that clerical matters

most abound, but they appear in other volumes, especially _The

Bertrams_. Caroline Waddington, speaking of vicars, makes an empiric

induction:[318]

“I judge by what I see. They are generally fond of eating, very

cautious about their money, untidy in their own houses, and apt

to go to sleep after dinner.”

George Bertram, author of _The Romance of Scripture_, and _The

Fallacies of Early History_, exponents of the Higher Criticism, over

which “there was a comfortable row at Oxford,” discusses religion with

his cousin the curate. The attitude of prayer, he says, is beautiful

from the communion it symbolizes. But imagine the attitude with no such

communion,--[319]

“You will at once run down the whole gamut of humanity from

Saint Paul to Pecksniff.”

As to the practicability of freedom of thought, the churchman argues,--

“If every man and every child is to select, how shall we ever

have a creed? and if no creed, how shall we have a church?”

And the layman concludes for him,--

“And if no church, how then parsons? Follow it on, and it

comes to that. But, in truth, you require too much, and so you

get--nothing.”

An ingenuous young girl in another story inquires,--[320]

“* * * what is all religion but washing black sheep white;

making the black a little less black, scraping a spot white here

and there?”

Whoever may be meant by Thackeray as “gross caricaturists,” it cannot

be Trollope, for even Mr. Slope is less repulsive than the alleged

portraiture, and the Epicureans are models of refinement, and treated

with a corresponding delicacy. Dr. Stanhope, sinecurist and pastor

_in absentia_, had the appearance of “a benevolent, sleepy old lion.”

Like the rector at Clavering, and the Barchester archdeacon (who

kept his jolly old volume of Rabelais locked in his study desk, but

brought it out in the security of solitude as an antidote for the

tedium of sermon-writing), he had a taste for “romances and poetry of

the lightest and not always the most moral description.” And like Dr.

Grant, in _Mansfield Park_,--[321]

“He was thoroughly a _bon vivant_. * * * He had much to forgive

in his own family, * * * and had forgiven everything--except

inattention to his dinner. * * * That he had religious

convictions must be believed; but he rarely obtruded them, even

on his children.”

The dignified bishop, on hearing a startling piece of news,--[322]

“* * * did not whistle. We believe that they lose the power of

doing so on being consecrate; and that in these days we might as

easily meet a corrupt judge as a whistling bishop.”

The subject of foreign missions is glanced at in a conversation between

Sowerby and Harold Smith; but on the whole it is another neglected

topic. Disraeli observes in _Sybil_ that a missionary from Tahiti might

be spared for needed work in Wodgate, England. The rest in silence,

until Butler, post-Victorian, exposes, with some of his choicest irony,

the fallacy that underlies all proselyting logic.

Brontë and Kingsley are openly partisan, with a strain of the crudeness

inseparable from antagonistic warmth. They are also on the same

side,[323] the broad-church position, opposed to Tractarian principles

as much as to Catholicism itself.

The real acid of the first chapter of _Shirley_, entitled _Levitical_,

and promising only “cold lentils and vinegar without oil,” is not

poured upon the heads of the three curates and the rector, failures

though they all were as spiritual shepherds, but upon the contemporary

situation. In 1812, the author says, there was no Pastoral Aid nor

Additional Curates Society to help out rectors:[324]

“The present successors of the apostles, disciples of Dr.

Pusey and tools of the Propaganda, were at that time being

hatched under cradle-blankets, or undergoing regeneration by

nursery-baptism in wash-hand-basins. You could not have guessed

by looking at any one of them that the Italian-ironed double

frills of its net cap surrounded the brows of a pre-ordained

specially sanctified successor of Saint Paul, Saint Peter or

Saint John; nor could you have foreseen in the folds of its

long nightgown the white surplice in which it was hereafter

cruelly to exercise the souls of its parishioners, and strangely

to non-plus its old-fashioned vicar by flourishing aloft in

a pulpit the shirt-like raiment which had never before waved

higher than the reading-desk.”

“Yet even then,” she adds, “the rare but precious plant existed--three

rods of Aaron blossomed within a circuit of twenty miles.” Their

clerical functions are summed up later by the gardener William:[325]

“They’re allus magnifying their office: it is a pity but their

office could magnify them; but it does nought o’ t’ soart.”

The autobiographical heroine of _Villette_ recounts her experience

of being subjected to persuasive priestly exhortation, and ironically

repeats the phrases:[326]

“I half realized myself in that condition also; passed under

discipline, moulded, trained, inoculated, and so on.”

She is enabled to resist, because,

“* * * there was a hollowness within, and a flourish around

‘Holy Church’ which tempted me but moderately.”

She discusses at length a Papist pamphlet left on her desk for her

perusal:[327]

“The voice of that sly little book was a honeyed voice; its

accents were all unction and balm. Here roared no utterance of

Rome’s thunders, no blasting of the breath of her displeasure. *

* * Far be it from her to threaten or to coerce; her wish was to

guide and win. _She_ persecute? Oh dear no! not on any account!

* * * It was a canting, sentimental, shallow little book, yet

* * * I was amused with the gambols of this unlicked wolf-cub

muffled in the fleece, and mimicking the bleat of a guileless

lamb. Portions of it reminded me of certain Wesleyan Methodist

tracts I had once read when a child; they were flavoured with

about the same seasoning of excitation to fanaticism. * * * I

smiled then over this dose of maternal tenderness, coming from

the ruddy old lady of the Seven Hills; smiled, too, at my own

disinclination, not to say disability, to meet their melting

favours.”

As her reason is not swayed by the arguments of the “Moloch Church,”

neither is her fancy kindled by its ritual:[328]

“Neither full procession nor high mass, nor swarming tapers, nor

swinging censers, nor ecclesiastical millinery, nor celestial

jewelry, touched my imagination a whit. What I saw struck me

as tawdry, not grand; as grossly material, not poetically

spiritual.”

Kingsley widens his criticism from the personal to the social point

of view. He objects to luxury not so much because it shows up the

luxurious as because it takes away even the necessities from those

who have not, to add yet more luxuries to those that have. He

questions--[329]

“* * * how a really pious and universally respected archbishop,

living within a quarter of a mile of one of the worst _infernos_

of destitution, disease, filth, and profligacy--can yet find

it in his heart to save £120,000 out of church revenues, and

leave it to his family; * * * how Irish bishops can reconcile

it to their consciences to leave behind them, one and all,

large fortunes * * * taken from the pockets of a Roman

Catholic population, whom they have been put there to convert

to Protestantism for the last three hundred years--with what

success, all the world knows.”

Moreover, because he sees in the church a possible vanguard to

civilization, he rebels against its retrogressive and obstructive

policy. He laments that the working men do not trust the clergy:[330]

“They suspect them to be mere tubs to the whale--mere

substitutes for education, slowly and late adopted, in order

to stop the mouths of the importunate. They may misjudge the

clergy; but whose fault is it if they do? * * * Every spiritual

reform since the time of John Wesley, has had to establish

itself in the teeth of insult, calumny, and persecution. Every

ecclesiastical reform comes not from within, but from without

your body. Everywhere we see the clergy, * * * proclaiming

themselves the advocates of Toryism, * * * chosen exclusively

from the classes which crush us down; * * * commanding us to

swallow down, with faith as passive and implicit as that of

a Papist, the very creeds from which their own bad example,

and their scandalous neglect, have * * * alienated us; * * *

betraying in every tract, in every sermon, an ignorance of the

doubts, the feelings, the very language of the masses, which

would be ludicrous, were it not accursed before God and man.”

Meredith expresses the same idea, with the difference that he does not

speak apologetically from within, but with the unqualified disapproval

of the outsider. Jenny Denham, an incisive and thoughtful woman,

says,[331]

“My experience of the priest in our country is, that he has

abandoned--he’s dead against the only cause that can justify and

keep up a Church; the cause of the poor--the people. He is a

creature of the moneyed class. I look on him as a pretender.”

In his subtle way Meredith satirizes the Catholic Church by having the

Countess de Saldar take refuge in and approve of it. Its great asset

is that its democracy includes even tailors. That it is the only true

spiritual home for a true gentleman she proves by citing an example.

A noble knight does not hesitate at telling a flat falsehood to save

a lady, being safe in morality because “his priest was handy.” Her

nature is defined as the truly religious, that is, one with need of

vicarious strength and a sense of renewed absolution. Another exponent

is Constance Asper, in _Diana of the Crossways_, whose boudoir was

filled with expensive Catholic equipments, affording “every invitation

to meditate in luxury on an ascetic religiousness.”

Butler was not content to view the Church from his external position

with the silence of George Eliot or the casual comments of Meredith.

The intensity of his iconoclasm demanded full expression,--kept,

however, from crudeness by his ironic finish, and from injustice by

his fundamental reasonableness. In _Erewhon_ his chief point is

the perfunctory character of established religion. The Erewhonians

have two distinct economic currencies, one of which is supposed to be

_the_ system, and is patronized by all who wished to be considered

respectable. Yet its funds have no direct value in the community,

whose actual business is conducted on the other commercial system.

The Musical Banks excel in architecture, and keep up a routine of

receiving and paying checks. But their patrons are for the most part

ladies and some students from the College of Unreason. Mrs. Nosnibor, a

staunch shareholder, deplores this apparent lack of public interest,

and remarks that it is “indeed melancholy to see what little heed

people paid to the most precious of all institutions.” Her guest

observes,--[332]

“I could say nothing in reply, but I have ever been of opinion

that the greater part of mankind do approximately know where

they get that which does them good.”

The Musical Bankers not only protest too much as to the ascendancy of

their institution, but consistently depreciate the other:[333]

“Even those who to my certain knowledge kept only just enough

money at the Musical Banks to swear by, would call the other

banks (where their securities really lay) cold, deadening,

paralyzing, and the like.”

As to the cashiers and managers,--[334]

“Few people would speak quite openly and freely before them,

which struck me as a very bad sign. * * * The less thoughtful of

them did not seem particularly unhappy, but many were plainly

sick at heart, though perhaps they hardly knew it, and would

not have owned to being so. Some few were opponents of the

whole system; but these were liable to be dismissed from their

employment at any moment, and this rendered them very careful,

for a man who had once been a cashier at a Musical Bank was out

of the field for other employment, and was generally unfitted

for it by reason of that course of treatment which was commonly

called his education.”

_Erewhon Revisited_ deals more specifically with the miraculous and

doctrinal side of Christianity, mirrored in the account of the origin

of Sunchildism and its connection with the old Musical Banks. The two

main characters are Hanky and Panky, Professors respectively of Worldly

and Unworldly Wisdom. They are carefully distinguished:[335]

“Panky was the greater humbug of the two, for he would humbug

even himself--a thing, by the way, not very hard to do; and

yet he was the less successful humbug; * * * Hanky was the

mere common, superficial, perfunctory Professor, who, being a

Professor, would of course profess, but would not lie more than

was in the bond. * * * Panky, on the other hand, was hardly

human; he had thrown himself so earnestly into his work, that

he had become a living lie. If he had had to play the part of

Othello he would have blacked himself all over, and very likely

have smothered his Desdemona in good earnest. Hanky would hardly

have blacked himself behind the ears, and his Desdemona would

have been quite safe.”

The School is another favorite satirical topic. The only novelists who

refrain from depicting the shortcomings of the educational system are

Disraeli, Reade, Mrs. Gaskell, and George Eliot. On the public side,

Meredith might be added, as the theme of _Richard Feverel_, though

educational, is made an individual matter.

The adverse opinion handed down on the methods and results of the

prevailing system is more unanimous than is the case with other

subjects. On the main indictments, inefficiency and cruelty in the

lower schools, and inefficiency and carelessness in the higher, there

is no minority report. On the whole, the Victorians were innocent of

the partisanship that arose later over the great question of Culture

versus Efficiency as an educational ideal. The primary stages might

be allowed a modicum of the practical, though Gradgrind’s “facts”

are failures, and Squeers stands in solitary glory as an advocate of

applied arts and manual training. Mr. Tulliver is in line with his

_Zeitgeist_ in fondly supposing the best thing he can do for Tom

is to send him to an expensive private school, to learn Latin along

with the son of Lawyer Wakem. An education was tacitly defined as

that which makes a gentleman of you. And though no one would dissent

from Thackeray’s dictum that “all the world is improving except the

gentlemen,” neither would any one suppose that the definition might be

modified or expanded.

A number realize that education begins at home. The close father and

son relationship satirized in the case of Sir Austin and Richard

because it was too close and inflexible, is presented as a beautiful

ideal in those of Pisistratus and Mr. Caxton, Kenelm and Squire

Chillingly, Clive and Colonel Newcome, and the Duke of Omnium and his

sons.[336]

* * * * *

In David Copperfield’s recollections of the metallic Murdstone, Arthur

Clennam’s of his childhood’s Sabbath and Alton Locke’s of his mother’s

fearful bigotry, we get glimpses into the pathos of the old Puritan

discipline. These are too sad for satire. Butler, no less sad, is also

angry enough to brand it with his caustic wit. Theobald and Christina

Pontifex are texts for a satiric sermon on parental incompetence, no

less disastrous although “All was done in love, anxiety, timidity,

stupidity, and impatience.” After the scene in which Theobald, having

punished little Ernest severely and quite wantonly, rang the bell for

prayers, “red-handed as he was,” his visitor reflects that perhaps it

was fortunate for his host--[337]

“* * * that our prayers were seldom marked by any very

encouraging degree of response, for if I had thought there was

the slightest chance of my being heard I should have prayed that

some one might ere long treat him as he had treated Ernest.”

The keynote of this most Christian system is unconsciously hit upon by

the bewildered little lad himself, who later concludes,--[338]

“* * * that he had duties towards everybody, lying in wait for

him upon every side, but that nobody had any duties towards him.”

Formal education naturally falls into the school and college divisions.

We have the former presented dramatically by Brontë in _Jane Eyre_

(and more impressionistically in _Villette_), by Thackeray in _The

Fatal Boots_ and _Vanity Fair_, by Butler in _The Way of All Flesh_,

and by the zealous specialist in that field. It has been counted up

that Dickens deals with twenty-eight schools and mentions a dozen

others.[339] The most important are in _Nicholas Nickleby_, _Dombey and

Son_, _David Copperfield_, and _Hard Times_.

Major Bagstock is contemplating young Rob, a product of that school

where they never taught honor, but were “particularly strong in the

engendering of hypocrisy,” and deduces that “it never pays to educate

that sort of people.” Whereupon--[340]

“The simple father was beginning to submit that he hoped his

son, the quondam Grinder, huffed and cuffed, and flogged and

badged, and taught, as parrots are, by a brute jobbed into his

place of schoolmaster with as much fitness for it as a hound,

might not have been educated on quite a right plan in some

undiscovered respect, when Mr. Dombey, angrily repeating ‘The

usual return!’ led the major away.”

Young David Copperfield profits little by losing Murdstone and gaining

Creakle. The aspect of this pleasant pedagogue so fascinates the gaze

of the boys that they cannot keep to their books. When a culprit is

called before the tribunal,--[341]

“Mr. Creakle cuts a joke before he beats him, and we laugh at

it,--miserable little dogs, we laugh, with our visages as white

as ashes, and our hearts sinking into our boots. * * * Miserable

little propitiators of a remorseless Idol, how abject we were to

him! What a launch in life I think it now, on looking back, to

be so mean and servile to a man of such parts and pretensions!”

From this infant purgatory the step to the college seems a long one,

for that is by comparison an Elysium, however inane and frivolous.

Those whose satiric arrows speed thither are Peacock, Lytton, Trollope,

Kingsley, and Butler. Thackeray should be mentioned for his two

chapters on University Snobs, and the preceding one on Clerical

Snobs, in which he describes the colleges as the last strongholds of

Feudalism; concluding--[342]

“Why is the poor College servitor to wear that name and that

badge still? Because Universities are the last places into which

Reform penetrates. But now that she can go to College and back

for five shillings, let her travel down thither.”

Squire Headlong inquires in vain at Oxford for “men of taste and

philosophers.” Scythrop and Sir Telegraph were both cured at college

of their love for learning. Desmond describes the university system

as a “deep-laid conspiracy against the human understanding, * * * a

ridiculous and mischievous farce.” But Dr. Folliott refused to succumb.

Alluding to some one who cannot quote Greek, he adds,--[343]

“But I think he must have finished his education at some very

rigid college, where a quotation, or any other overt act showing

acquaintance with classical literature, was visited with a

severe penalty. For my part, I made it my boast that I was not

to be so subdued. I could not be abated of a single quotation by

all the bumpers in which I was fined.”

The same critic says elsewhere of the curriculum:[344]

“Everything for everybody, science for all, schools for all,

rhetoric for all, law for all, physic for all, words for all,

and sense for none.”

Pelham testifies that at Eton he was never taught a syllable of English

literature, laws, or history; and was laughed at for reading Pope out

of school. On his graduation from Cambridge, a place that “reeked with

vulgarity,” he is congratulated by his tutor for having been passably

decent. Whereupon he observes,--[345]

“Thus closed my academical career. He who does not allow that

it passed creditably to my teachers, profitably to myself, and

beneficially to the world, is a narrow-minded and illiterate

man, who knows nothing of the advantages of modern education.”

Trollope in _The Bertrams_, and Kingsley in _Yeast and Alton Locke_,

have a few words for the subject, but add no new idea, except that

Alton voices the disgust of the students themselves with their Alma

Mater. It is this same young neophyte who is advised by Dean Winnstay

to go to some such college as St. Mark’s, which “might, by its strong

Church principles, give the best antidote to any little remaining taint

of sans-culottism.”

In Butler’s Erewhonian Colleges of Unreason the leading subject is

Hypothetics, and the most honored Chairs are those of Inconsistency and

Evasion, both required courses. Genius and originality are resolutely

discouraged, it being a man’s business “to think as his neighbors do,

for Heaven help him if he thinks good what they count bad.” These

Erewhonian professors, by the way, might have adduced as evidence the

well-known, horrified exclamation of Mary Shelley at the suggestion

that her son be sent where he would be taught to think for himself. By

refusing to “think like other people,” a man may become a poet and even

a beautiful, ineffectual angel, but he cannot lead a comfortable nor a

really effectual life. The problem as to who may safely be intrusted to

lead public opinion, and who are safest as followers, is an intricate

one, but it is certainly true that a sane and modest agnosticism is not

necessarily synonymous with “the art of sitting gracefully on a fence,”

which Butler concludes was brought to its greatest perfection in the

Colleges of Unreason.

On the subjects of Literature and the Press too much has been said

to be ignored, but not much of any great consequence. Trollope took

Journalism as a satiric province, with some little aid from Meredith.

He also takes a shot, not too well aimed, at the current humanitarian

fiction which purposes to set the world right in shilling numbers. He

adds,--[346]

“Of all such reformers, Mr. Sentiment is the most powerful. It

is incredible the number of evil practices he has put down. It

is to be feared he will soon lack subjects, and that when he

has made the working classes comfortable, and got bitter beer

put into proper sized pint bottles, there will be nothing left

for him to do. Mr. Sentiment is certainly a very powerful man,

and perhaps not the less so that his good poor people are so

very good; his hard rich people so very hard, and the genuinely

honest so very honest. * * * Divine peeresses are no longer

interesting, though possessed of every virtue; but a pattern

peasant or an immaculate manufacturing hero may talk as much

twaddle as one of Mrs. Ratcliffe’s heroines, and still be

listened to.”

A favorite theme, especially among the earlier writers, is the pose

of pessimism, alien to the self-satisfied optimistic spirit which

prevailed with little opposition--except from James Thompson and

Matthew Arnold--from Byron to Hardy.

The Honorable Mr. Listless finds the volumes of modern literature “very

consolatory and congenial” to his feelings:[347]

“There is, as it were, a delightful north-east wind, an

intellectual blight breathing through them; a delicious

misanthropy and discontent, that demonstrates the nullity of

virtue and energy, and puts me in good humour with myself and

sofa.”

Pelham perceives--[348]

“* * * an unaccountable prepossession among all persons, to

imagine that whatever seems gloomy must be profound, and

whatever is cheerful must be shallow. They have put poor

Philosophy into deep mourning, and given her a coffin for a

writing desk, and a skull for an inkstand.”

Ganymede anticipates that Apollo’s new poem will be very popular, for

“it is all about moonlight and the misery of existence.”[349]

It is in Meredith that we find the greatest point and depth in literary

criticism, as in most other things. Under cover of apology for his own

method of psychological analysis, he manages to convey his impression

of those who tell and who love the story for the story’s sake. He

cannot avoid, he explains, the slow start and detailed exposition in

which he unfolds the situation, and adds:[350]

“This it is not necessary to do when you are set astride the

enchanted horse of the Tale, which leaves the man’s mind at

home while he performs the deeds befitting him: he can indeed

be rapid. Whether more active, is a question asking for your

notions of the governing element in the composition of man,

and of his present business here. * * * All ill-fortuned

minstrel who has by fateful direction been brought to see with

distinctness that man is not as much comprised in external

features as the monkey, will be devoted to the task of the

fuller portraiture.”

It is Meredith also who says the last word on the English, as English.

They are indeed the real objects under all these disguises of their

activities, but they are not often synthesized and called by name.

Yet--[351]

“An actually satiric man in an English circle, that does not

resort to the fist for a reply to him, may almost satiate

the excessive fury roused in his mind by an illogical people

of a provocative prosperity, * * * They give him so many

opportunities.”

He seizes one of them by symbolizing England in the Duvidney sisters;

composed of such, it becomes--[352]

“* * * a vast body of passives and negatives, living by precept,

according to rules of precedent, and supposing themselves to be

righteously guided because of their continuing undisturbed. * *

* mixed with an ancient Hebrew fear of offense to an inscrutable

Lord, eccentrically appeasable through the dreary iteration of

the litany of sinfulness. * * * Satirists in their fervours

might be near it to grasp it, if they could be moved to moral

distinctness, mental intention, with a preference of strong

plain speech over the crack of their whips.”

He had already decided, in _Beauchamp’s Career_, that “It is not too

much to say that a domination of the Intellect in England would at

once and entirely alter the face of the country.” Reade agrees with

this opinion, only he says bluntly that one is “an ass * * * to have

brains in a country where brains are a crime.” This national stupidity

and sentimentality are made impregnable by national complacency. Lytton

remarks on the egotistic nature of British patriotism:[353]

“The vanity of the Frenchman consists (as I have somewhere

read) in belonging to so great a country; but the vanity of the

Englishman exults in the thought that so great a country belongs

to himself.”

These criticisms are all from within. Disraeli is able to contribute

one from without. He describes the British through his Jewish

Besso:[354]

“There is not a race so proud, so wilful, so rash and so

obstinate. They live in a misty clime, on raw meats, and wines

of fire. They laugh at their fathers, and never say a prayer.

They pass their days in the chase, gaming, and all violent

courses. They have all the power of the State, and all its

wealth; and when they can wring no more from their peasants,

they plunder the kings of India.”

Nevertheless they all, even the Hebrew within their parliamentary

halls, believed in the English character and the civilization it was

blunderingly working out. The most incorrigible satirist of that

civilization was Peacock (who often, we suspect, gets carried away by

his own eloquence), and in his fervent summary of almost all our public

failures, he hints in the very phrasing, although ironically, at the

possibility of these failures being transformed into successes. Sir

Telegraph Paxarett, accused of extravagance, retorts with a conditional

promise of retrenchment:[355]

“When ecclesiastical dignitaries imitate the temperance and

humility of the founder of that religion by which they feed and

flourish; when the man in place acts on the principles which

he professed while he was out; when borough electors will not

sell their suffrage, nor their representatives their votes; when

poets are not to be hired for the maintenance of any opinion;

when learned divines can afford to have a conscience; when

universities are not one hundred years in knowledge behind all

the rest of the world; when young ladies speak as they think,

and when those who shudder at a tale of the horror of slavery

will deprive their own palates of a sweet taste, for the purpose

of contributing all in their power to its extinction:--why then,

Forester, I will lay down my barouche.”

Satire, being frankly a destructive process, makes no pretense of

supplementing its iconoclasm by reconstruction. But such implication of

reform as may lurk in the criticism that paves the way may be looked

for more assuredly than elsewhere in attacks on institutions. Such

criticism is neither lowered by the recrimination that puts satire

of individuals below the normal satiric level, nor elevated by the

artistic detachment that lifts satire of human nature above it. For

it is not in the too small lump of the solitary specimen that the

leaven can best work, nor yet in the too large mass of the whole human

race. It is in the unit between these two extremes, the body politic

or social or religious or educational, that it may best perform its

fermenting ministrations.

Even so, however, the idealism of the Victorian novelists did not

take this positive turn. English genius has on the whole contributed

its share to the anthology of Utopian vision, even to the furnishing

of the name, but the nineteenth century, preëminent in criticism and

speculation, venting more talk about it than all the other centuries

put together, has to its credit in this line, aside from _Erewhon_

and _The Coming Race_, only Morris’s _News from Nowhere_,

and that is too naïve in its simplification of human nature and too

absurd in its glorification of medievalism to be taken seriously.

More carefully thought out as an Ideal State, more searching in its

seriousness, more pertinent in its satire, and more constructive in

its conclusion, than any of these, is the American product, Bellamy’s

_Looking Backward_.

The Victorians did their looking backward literally from their own

present instead of an imagined future. And since in so doing they did

for the most part but cast their eye on prospects drear, and since they

shrank from a future they could only guess and fear if they thought

about it at all, they wisely and practically spent themselves on the

present. And because of this acceptance of the present and all its

institutions as a whole, they could couch their lances only against

this or that detail, not against the challenge of civilization itself.

The following instances show a characteristic difference in their

resemblance. “In England, poverty is a crime,” exclaims Lytton in the

nineteenth century. The observation is ironic, the tone scornful, and

the object of the ironic scorn is the snobbishness of those who from

the heights of wealth look down upon and despise the poor. The rebuke

is intended for the alien attitude toward that portion of society which

we may expect, according to Biblical authority, always to have with

us. Poverty itself is a mysterious dispensation, having indeed many

discernible compensations, and ever mitigable by applied morality.

“Poverty is the only crime,” echoes Bernard Shaw in the twentieth

century. His assertion is meant literally, the tone is decisive, and

the indictment is lodged against society at large for being so stupid

and inefficient as to permit such a canker, pernicious but curable, to

infect its body.

To remedy the supercilious attitude toward the poor is still to leave

poverty intact and in permanent possession of the field. To remedy the

criminal carelessness which tolerates its presence is to abolish the

thing itself.

But even if the twentieth century has stated the problem, it has not

yet solved it. And while neither the statement nor the solution of

the nineteenth is reckoned adequate today, still the Victorians did

accomplish something if not much, and all we can say for ourselves

is that we have not accomplished much, if something. Moreover, to

flatter ourselves that we are the first to discover the social onus of

poverty and other ills, is to ignore the contributions not only of the

novelists but of Carlyle, Ruskin, Morris, and Henry George. When the

remaining four-fifths of our century shall have been added to history,

we may perhaps applaud ourselves. At present it will do us no harm to

render unto Victorianism the acknowledgment that is its due.