TYPES
For that form of satire which deals with actual individuals,
photographed or caricatured, the designation _personal_ is sufficiently
descriptive. But for that which deals with fictitious individuals,
wherein the models that sat for the portraits have passed through
the imaginative process that makes their portraiture a work of
art, there is no satisfactory name. _Typical_, in distinction from
_individual_ and _institutional_, is tolerably expressive, but a term
to be apologized for. The school of art known as realistic, which was
theoretically adopted by the nineteenth century, repudiates creations
that are “mere types,” and claims for itself the achievement of true
individuals. The sign of individuality is a discordant complexity.
Every man may have his humour but he is not always in it. He may
be ruled by a master passion, but the rule is not a monopolistic
autocracy. Its supremacy is constantly disputed and threatened by mob
rebellion. Civil war is the usual rêgime, and the attainment of a
stabilized government is rare.
Tamburlaine, Volpone, Othello, Tartuffe, Blifil, are not untrue,
but they are only partial truths. We see much, undoubtedly the most
significant and dominating traits, but we cannot see all when the
searchlight is concentrated on a single spot. Agamemnon, Hamlet, Tom
Jones, Jaffeir, swayed, perplexed, inconsistent, at once infinite and
abject, are more nearly full length and complete drawings. Milton’s
Satan becomes humanized when, entering the human abode, he grows
hesitant, half regretful, half eager, a prey to conflicting emotions
and cross purposes.
Yet those desirable factors of art, unity and emphasis, must be
secured, and they can be secured only by throwing the emphasis on some
one feature, thus giving unity to the character. In the field of satire
a classification based on these qualities is the more easily made in
that any given character is usually satirized for some particular
trait, although the problem does not end there. We may construct
encampments for our army of characters--and in Victorian fiction they
come in battalions--and we may label them; but we shall find it less
simple to assign the companies to their own barracks and keep them
there.
The Father of the Marshalsea is a snob. He is also hypocritical and
foolish. Moreover, he is a sentimentalist and an epicurean. Withal he
is not villainous, but more pathetic than execrable. He has no apparent
kinship with the Countess de Saldar, yet she also may be described in
the above terms. The enumeration would not show the difference. Thus
not only does each real character refuse to be known by one name and
one only, but the congregation assembled under any one denomination
shows such diversity as to make the category itself questionable.
Mrs. Mackensie and Mrs. Clennam, Mr. Dombey and Bertie Stanhope, Tom
Tulliver and Sir Willoughby Patterne, are all egoists; but they would
find little congeniality in their mutual egoism.
All that can be done is to indicate the range and the concentration of
the main types. These types will of course represent those elements
in human character which seem to the satirist such deflections from
an ideal as are amenable to comic exposure and perhaps correction. It
does not seem possible to reduce them to fewer than seven or eight
heads, as follows: hypocrisy, folly, snobbishness, sentimentality,
egoism, fanaticism, and vulgarity.
These various fields have their specialists. Hypocrisy, including
sycophancy and deliberate imposture of any kind, belongs to Dickens,
with Thackeray, Trollope, and others following not far behind. He leads
also in depiction of folly and incompetence, though these prevail
widely in Victorian fiction; and Meredith excels in portrayal of mental
incapacity and fallacy in reasoning. It is the latter who comes to the
front with sentimentality and egoism, having but few predecessors.
Thackeray handles snobbishness in all its ramifications of worldliness
and elegant _ennui_. But although he contributes the name, the thing
exists on the pages of Lytton, Disraeli, Trollope, and Dickens.
Fanaticism, bigotry, all sorts of fads, make another common ground
for Peacock and Butler, and crop up in Reade, Brontë, and Kingsley.
Coarse vulgarity is the rarest of all, the Age of Propriety refusing
to transplant this weed from life to literature, but it is admitted by
Dickens, Thackeray, Reade, and Trollope.
Since satire is usually directed against the special thing in which the
satirist feels superior, we may deduce the favorite Victorian virtues
to have been sincerity, wisdom, rationality, refinement, and a sense
of proportion; a large order, but the nineteenth century would scorn a
smaller.
Dickens did not invent the hypocrite, nor did he supply anything new
to the investigation of the nature of this most subtile of all the
beasts of the field. He himself had not the subtlety to search out
causes and discover possible extenuations and values in a thing he
simply and flatly abhorred and saw no excuse for. What he does furnish
is an immense amount of data, with many variations, showing _in
extenso_ this aspect of human nature. At least three dozen of his three
hundred characters exhibit the seamy side of scheming and deceit. From
_Pickwick_, wherein Mr. Winkle, unfrocked as to skates and branded as
a humbug and an impostor because he assumed an accomplishment when he
had it not, to _Edwin Drood_, harboring Luke Honeythunder, professional
philanthropist, who, “Always something in the nature of a Boil upon the
face of society, * * * expanded into an inflammatory Wen in Minor Canon
Corner,” no volume is entirely free from the trail of the serpent.
Most of the humbugs and impostors are, like the philanthropist,
professional. Dodson and Fogg, Sergeant Buzfuz, Mr. Tulkinghorn, turn
their intrigues into legal channels; Mr. Bumble and Mrs. Mann, into
civic; Dr. Blimber and Mrs. Pipchin, into pedagogic. Mr. Merdle tricks
the financial world, though Mr. Casby, operating on a smaller scale,
makes himself much more of a fraud. Mr. Crummles, Mrs. Gamp, Mrs.
Crupp, in their various capacities, abstain from giving their patrons
value received. The Barnacles, parasites clinging to the Ship of State,
pose as public servants and benefactors.
It happens, however, that those who confine their dissembling and
pretense to private life are of the highest hypocritical quality. Mr.
Mantalini expertly bamboozles his wife. Mrs. Sparsit successfully plays
her part for the benefit of Mr. Bounderby. Mr. Pumblechook protests too
much to little Pip, now grown up and prosperous, but carries it off
with an air. Mr. Carker, who “hid himself behind his sleek, hushed,
crouching manner, and his ivory smile,” and who, “sly of manner, sharp
of tooth, soft of foot, watchful of eye, oily of tongue, cruel of
heart, nice of habit, sat with a dainty steadfastness and patience at
his work, as if he were waiting at a mouse’s hole,” finally catches his
mouse, though only to be eluded again.
A perfect modern instance of the bubble pricked by the ancient Socratic
method is that of Mr. Curdle, eminent dramatic critic. He has been
talking big about the Unities of the Drama. Nicholas innocently asks
what they might be. He is informed:[356]
“Mr. Curdle coughed and considered. ‘The unities, sir,’ he said,
‘are a completeness--a kind of universal dovetailedness with
regard to place and time--a sort of a general oneness, if I may
be allowed to use so strong an expression. I take those to be
the dramatic unities, so far as I have been enabled to bestow
attention upon them, and I have read much upon the subject and
thought much. I find, running through the performances of this
child,’ said Mr. Curdle, turning to the Phenomenon, ‘a unity of
feeling, a breadth, a light and shade, a warmth of colouring, a
tone, a harmony, a glow, an artistical development of original
conceptions, which I look for, in vain, among older performers.
I don’t know whether I make myself understood?’
“‘Perfectly,’ replied Nicholas.
“‘Just so,’ said Mr. Curdle, pulling up his neckcloth. ‘That is
my definition of the unities of the drama.’”
The great trio, Pecksniff, Bagstock, and Heep, occur in the three
successive novels of the six years ending with the mid-century.
Pecksniff is the most gratuitous offender, for he encases himself in
piety and benevolence, and inserts his falseness into every word,
every deed, every relation of life. Heep’s specious humility is as
unrelaxed and vigilant, but it is more of a means to an end and not,
like Pecksniff’s, an end in itself. He fawns and flatters and cheats
for the benefits to be derived from such policies. Thus slippery are
the steps of Uriah’s ladder. He has, moreover, a word of self-defense
which forces his educational training to share the responsibility.
When he is reminded by Copperfield that greed and cunning always
overreach themselves, he retorts by implicating the school where he was
taught “from nine o’clock to eleven, that labour was a curse; and from
eleven o’clock to one, that it was a blessing and a cheerfulness and a
dignity,” and so on. Major Bagstock resembles Heep in being servile in
manner instead of pompously patronizing; but while Chesterton may be
right in calling him a more subtle hypocrite than Pecksniff,[357] it is
also true that the Major’s hypocrisy is not quite his whole existence,
as it is of both Pecksniff and Heep. He is at least a gourmand in
addition, if nothing more.
Before Dickens, in our period, the only character to exemplify this
trait, aside from Peacock’s Feathernest, is Lytton’s Robert Beaufort,
in _Night and Morning_. The author remarks in a later preface that
this character might be rated as a forerunner to Pecksniff; but he is
in reality more of the Blifil type, his brother Philip acting as his
Tom Jones.
Lytton, however, is inclined to discuss the subject by the way. In one
of his earlier novels he says,--[358]
“Honesty--patriotism--religion--these have had their hypocrites
for life;--but passion permits only momentary dissemblers.”
In a later one he analyzes a dubious citizen:[359]
“But our banker was really a charitable man, and a benevolent
man, and a sincere believer. How, then, was he a hypocrite?
Simply because he professed to be far _more_ charitable, _more_
benevolent, and _more_ pious than he really was. His reputation
had now arrived to that degree of immaculate polish that the
smallest breath, which would not have tarnished the character of
another man, would have fixed an indelible stain upon his.”
The same might be said of another banker, the respectable
Bulstrode, whom George Eliot presents with no satire and an almost
pitiful sympathy.
The wealthy plebeian Avenel is embarrassed by the inopportune arrival
of his rustic sister in the presence of his aristocratic guests. By
a brilliant counter-stroke of a candid and courageous confession, he
stems the tide and wins the day. But in private he is very severe with
the poor culprit, and then admits to himself, “I’m a cursed humbug, * *
* but the world _is_ such a humbug!”[360]
The only Pecksniffian hypocrite outside of Dickens is the Reverend
Brocklehurst, whom Jane Eyre describes as lecturing to the half starved
and shivering girls at the school of which he was trustee, on the
beauty of asceticism and the holiness of economy, while his wife and
daughters sit in state on the platform, curled, bejewelled, opulent in
plumes and velvet.
The cant and manœuvering of the Thackeray and Trollope hypocrites are
necessary as first aid to the ambitious. By means of them Becky Sharp
achieves a husband, Mrs. Mackenzie a son-in-law, Moffit and Crosbie
a patrician father-in-law, and Lady Carbury a literary reputation.
Mr. Slope and the Pateroffs fail but no less bear up beneath their
unsuccess. Melmotte, another Merdle, succumbs, like him, forced to
realize that deceit may strike one with a tragic rebound.
Jermyn and Grandcourt, the latter especially, indulge in deceit out of
pure selfishness, but in neither of them does George Eliot consider
hypocrisy a matter for even satirical mirth. In lighter vein she does
indeed show up the _poseur_ in low life. Mr. Dowlas, oracle of _The
Rainbow_, laying down the law about ghosts, is too frightened by the
apparition of Silas Marner to speak. Having recovered and feeling “that
he had not been quite on a par with himself and the occasion,” he
intrigues to get appointed as deputy constable, and consents to serve,
after “duly rehearsing a small ceremony known in high ecclesiastical
life as _nolo episcopari_.” Mr. Scales, discoursing largely on
excommunication, is another caught in the Socratic trap by being asked
for definition of the term. He is no less ready than Mr. Curdle, though
more sententious:[361]
“Well, it’s a law term--speaking in a figurative sort of
way--meaning that a Radical was no gentleman.”
It is George Eliot who sees the necessity of the mask that most are
content simply to tear away or disfigure. Although she speaks through a
worldly wise character, she sounds no note of dissent:[362]
“‘I’ll tell you what, Dan,’ said Sir Hugo, ‘a man who sets his
face against every sort of humbug is simply a three-cornered
impracticable fellow. There’s a bad style of humbug, but there
is also a good style--one that oils the wheels and makes
progress possible.’”
This is recognized also by Lytton, who quotes “an anonymous writer of
1722:”[363]
“Deceit is the strong but subtile chain which runs through all
the members of a society, and links them together; trick or be
tricked, is the alternative; ’tis the way of the world, and
without it intercourse would drop.”
Trollope subscribes with qualification, by having the archdeacon say,
on the death of Mrs. Proudie,--[364]
“The proverb of _De Mortuis_ is founded on humbug. Humbug
out of doors is necessary.”
At the extreme opposite from the hypocrites, shrewd, knowing, wise at
least in their own conceit, stand the incompetent, victims of folly;
satirized not for ignorance but for bland unconsciousness of it,
usually accompanied by a hallucination of efficiency. As the hypocrites
shade off into villains, to be rebuked without humor, such as Jasper
Losely, Randal Leslie, Bill Sykes, Sedgett, so the fools merge into the
artless, to be smiled at without rebuke, as Colonel Digby and Colonel
Newcome, Frank Hazeldean, the Vardens, Tom Pinch, Captain Cuttle,
and “poor, excommunicated Miss Tox, who, if she were a fawner and a
toad-eater, was at least an honest and a constant one.”
It is Dickens again who contributes the most data to this study, and
particularly to the genus, Silly Dame. Here his amusement over mere
fatuous complacency becomes warmed into scorn when that stupidity
affects the home she has in charge, and lowers into a failure the
very thing that it is most important to raise into success,--such
success not being automatic. Mrs. Nickleby, Mrs. Wilfer, Mrs. Finching,
like Jane Austen’s Mrs. Bennet and Mrs. Palmer, and Susan Ferrier’s
Lady Juliana Douglass, are comparatively harmless, and are indulged
accordingly. But an incapacity that may be picturesque in easy
circumstances deepens into a grave misdemeanor when joined to a small
income. Mrs. Micawber, Mrs. Pocket, Mrs. Pardiggle, and especially Mrs.
Jellyby are domestic pests, at whom we are more exasperated than amused.
Aside from Dickens, the only artist much interested in this stratum
of human nature is the one who has given us Mrs. Tulliver and Mrs.
Vincy and her daughter, but they are not real sources of trouble,
except Rosamund, and her failure is more spiritual than material. Mrs.
Tulliver, a plaintive, hopelessly literal soul, is distressed over her
husband’s metaphoric speech about “a good wagoner with a mole on his
face.” She resents feebly the dogmatizing of the majestic Mrs. Glegg,
but would never go “to the length of quarreling with her any more than
a water-fowl that puts out its leg in a deprecating manner can be said
to quarrel with a boy who throws stones.” Under another metaphor she
is an amiable fish, which, “after running her head against the same
resisting medium for thirteen years, would go at it again today with
undiluted alacrity.”[365]
Out of her saddening experience Rosamund did emerge somewhat wiser, but
with none of the higher wisdom which constitutes character.
“She simply continued to be mild in her temper, inflexible in
her judgment, disposed to admonish her husband, and also to
frustrate him by stratagem.”[366]
The other section of this class most fully recruited is made up of the
foolish young men. It might look as though in the novelist’s world
masculine folly were a malady incident to youth, while on the other
hand, the feminine sort appeared late. For it happens that Lydia and
Kitty Bennet have no real successors. There are indeed plenty of Hetty
Sorrels, Lucy Deanes, Rosa Mackenzies, Amelia Sedleys, Dahlia Flemings;
but their innocence and pathos protect them from satire. And the merely
vapid and vain school girl is apparently too worthless a figure to be
given a place on Victorian pages. So also seems the man whose mental
growth has not kept pace with the years. Mr. Micawber may be taken
as the exception that proves the rule. Sir Lukin Dunstane likewise
shows that one may reach man’s estate and flourish therein on a small
allotment of intelligence. He makes his best record in a gossipy
little conversation with his wife, to whom he is giving an account of
the Dacier-Asper wedding. Emmy had commented on the eloquence of his
report:[367]
“He murmured something in praise of the institution of
marriage--when celebrated impressively, it seemed.
“‘Tony calls the social world the “theater of appetites,” as we
have it at present,’ she said; ‘and the world at a wedding is,
one may reckon, in the second act in the hungry tragi-comedy.’
“‘Yes, there’s the breakfast,’ Sir Lukin assented. Mrs.
Fryar-Gunnett was much more intelligible to him; in fact, quite
so, as to her speech.”
Folly is more ludicrous in the young man than in the maid, on account
of his greater conspicuousness in affairs, and the greater things
expected of him,--any failure divulging the discrepancy between fact
and fancy which is the basis of humor. It is also true that he stands
a better chance of having his foolishness shaken out of him in his more
exposed and strenuous life. Both these conditions are implied in a
reflection made by one of Trollope’s characters. Isabel Boncassen, the
frank American beauty, looks upon the young man as a type:[368]
“Young men are pretty much the same everywhere, I guess. They
never have their wits about them. They never mean what they
say, because they don’t understand the use of words. They are
generally half impudent and half timid. When in love they do not
at all understand what has befallen them. What they want they
try to compass as a cow does when it stands stretching out its
head toward a stack of hay which it cannot reach. Indeed, there
is no such thing as a young man, for a man is not really a man
till he is middle-aged. But take them at their worst, they are a
deal too good for us, for they become men some day, whereas we
must only be women to the end.”
Dickens is again a contributor of portraits, though not of the best,
and is joined this time by Thackeray, Trollope, and Meredith.
Tom Gradgrind, product of a system, and Edmund Sparkler, product of a
lack of system, deserve mention, as does Edward Dorrit, though sketched
without color. Rawdon Crawley and Joseph Sedley, no longer in first
flush of youth, are consistent exponents of gullible good nature and
ponderous vacuity. But the two prizes of undeviating stupidity are Sir
Felix Carbury and Algernon Blancove.
Sir Felix is a spoiled darling and an excrescence on the face of the
earth. His accomplishments are set forth in a description of his
state of enforced solitude consequent upon his latest exhibition of
monumental inefficiency:[369]
“He had so spent his life hitherto that he did not know how
to get through a day in which no excitement was provided for
him. He never read. Thinking was altogether beyond him. And he
had never done a day’s work in his life. He could lie in bed.
He could eat and drink. He could smoke and sit idle. He could
play cards; and could amuse himself with women,--the lower the
culture of the women, the better the amusement. Beyond these
things the world had nothing for him.”
The complacent fool would be matter for pure mirth if he could live
for himself alone; but unfortunately his worthless existence is as
adequate as any for the promotion of disaster to others. Sir Felix is
comparatively harmless, for his wreckage is reparable, but Algernon is
made a _deus ex machina_, and lets his commission go by default. Those
who trusted him learn that “He that sendeth a message by the hand of a
fool cutteth off his own feet, and drinketh in damage.” Or, as his own
author says:[370]
“But, if it is permitted to the fool to create entanglements and
set calamity in motion, to arrest its course is the last thing
the Gods allow of his doing.”
He is, however, a fool of quality in that he has a philosophy of
life, and if he were pent up in his room, he could mitigate tedium
by reverie. One may indulge in anticipations without possessing the
faculty of foresight. His cousin “aspired to become Attorney-General of
these realms,” but he had other views:[371]
“Civilization had tried him and found him wanting; so he
condemned it. Moreover, sitting now all day at a desk, he was
civilization’s drudge. No wonder, then, that his dream was
of prairies, and primeval forests, and Australian wilds. He
believed in his heart that he would be a man new made over
there, and always looked forward to a savage life as to a bath
that would cleanse him, so that it did not much matter his being
unclean for the present.”
The present sorry scheme of things also suffers him to wander the
streets in temporary bankruptcy:[372]
“He continued strolling on, comparing the cramped misty London
aspect of things with his visionary free dream of the glorious
prairies, where his other life was: the forests, the mountains,
the endless expanses; the horses, the flocks, the slipshod ease
of language and attire; and the grog-shops. Aha! There could be
no mistake about him as a gentleman and a scholar out there! Nor
would Nature shut up her pocket and demand innumerable things of
him, as civilization did. This he thought in the vengefulness of
his outraged mind.”
Meredith keeps on the trail of this luckless youth with something of
the relentlessness with which Blifil, Reverend Collins, Mrs. Norris,
and Mrs. Proudie are pursued; but he gives a good Meredithian reason
for it. Twice he takes the trouble to explain him, both times on the
grounds of realism:[373]
“So long as the fool has his being in the world, he will be a
part of every history, nor can I keep him from his place in a
narrative that is made to revolve more or less upon its own
wheels. * * * for the fool is, after his fashion, prudent, and
will never, if he can help it, do himself thorough damage, that
he may learn by it and be wiser.”
Again, an incident is followed by comment. Algernon, being loggy after
a dinner at the Club, fancies himself melancholy and profound:[374]
“‘I must forget myself. I’m under some doom. I see it now.
Nobody cares for me. I don’t know what happiness is. I was born
under a bad star. My fate’s written.’ Following his youthful
wisdom, this wounded hart dragged his slow limbs toward the
halls of brandy and song.
“One learns to have compassion for fools, by studying them: and
the fool, though Nature is wise, is next door to Nature. He is
naked in his simplicity; he can tell us much, and suggest more.
My excuse for dwelling upon him is, that he holds the link of my
story. Where fools are numerous, one of them must be prominent
now and then in a veracious narration.”
According to the old duality of satirized objects,--Vice and Folly,
identified with the deceiver and the deceived,--the two classes just
discussed would exhaust the list. But these signify folly in its
narrowest and most literal sense, a plain lack of brains and a general
incapacity. In its wider sense it includes misuse as well as want of
intelligence. These mortals, as Puck discovered, are indeed all fools,
at times and on certain points. The number may not be infinite, but
Lydgate discovered sixty-three kinds; and Barclay augmented the list to
nearly one hundred. Perfect wisdom would cast out not only ignorance,
but also frivolity, sentimentality, vanity, all sorts of false
standards and all manner of fallacies. Therefore snobs, romanticists,
egoists, fanatics, merely exemplify folly in its varieties and
ramifications.
The snob is defined by his great expositor as “one who meanly
admires mean things.” A modern scholar calls vulgarity “satisfaction
with anything inferior when a superior is attainable.”[375] These
definitions together indicate why snobbishness and vulgarity are
allied, though not identical. There is, however, this difference,
that satisfaction implies in itself a passive acquiescence,
whereas admiration leads naturally to imitation, and if possible,
appropriation, of the thing approved. Of course, satisfaction on a
different plane results from a feeling of attainment and possession;
but it then becomes pride or vanity, which in turn may or may not be of
the snobbish sort.
In popular apprehension, indeed, snobbishness and vulgarity are
rated as more opposite than allied. The snob is thought of as either
belonging to the polite world or trying to secure an entrance to its
polished circles. If he occupies the former position, he boasts of his
refinement, and from his eminence contemplates with scorn or at best an
affable condescension, the mob below. To this class belong such members
as Lytton’s and Disraeli’s aristocrats; such diverse types in Dickens
as Sir John Chester, the Monseigneur in _Tale of Two Cities_,
Mrs. General, and Mrs. Gowan; Thackeray’s Marquis of Steyne, Major
Pendennis, and the Misses Pinkerton; Trollope’s de Courcys and the
Chaldicote circle; Meredith’s Everard Romfrey and Ferdinand Laxley.
But if the snob is engaged in climbing up instead of looking down, he
is likely to have some common clay still clinging to his shoes, as well
as to be dishevelled by the exertions of the ascent. Such insignia of
vulgarity are worn by a numerous clan, including the politician Rigby,
the money-lender Baron Levy;[376] the Veneerings and Dorrits, and those
patriotic American snobs whom Martin Chuzzlewit found so insufferably
vulgar; Barry Lyndon, Mr. Osborne, and Becky Sharp; Mr. Slope, Mr.
Crosbie, and the great Melmotte.
On the other hand, the frankly vulgar is reckoned among the plebeians.
As there is a snobbishness free from coarseness, so there is a
vulgarity unembellished even by pseudo-culture. In this ugly and gross
scum of the earth no novelist really delights except the creator of
Mrs. Gamp, Quilp, Squeers, and Fagin and his crew, though Thackeray is
able to depict Sir Pitt Crawley; Trollope, the Scathards; and Meredith,
Sedgett.
The compound of snobbishness and vulgarity has the additional
complexity of ramifying into hypocrisy on one side and sentimentality
on the other. The first conjunction is made because of the incitement
to that fawning, flattering servility that more than anything else
rouses satiric disgust. The second occurs when the flattering unction
is laid to one’s own soul instead of being paid to the possessions of
others. The first is obvious and its examples are legion. The second
is more subtle and obscure, though perhaps almost as prevalent. It
consists in an inaccurate orientation, a supposition that one has
arrived at a goal, when the case is otherwise. Such unwarranted
complacency cheers the lot of Mrs. Kirkpatrick, Mrs. Hobson Newcome,
Mrs. Proudie, and the Countess de Saldar.
This, however, is only one phase of sentimentality. It also may
exist independently, or otherwise combined than with snobbishness
or vulgarity. It is a term somewhat ambiguous because of a recently
changed connotation.
In the eighteenth century it was “sensibility,” and regarded as a
virtue until Jane Austen exhibited it in Marianne Dashwood and
her mother. At that time it was thought of as excess of feeling or
sentiment cherished for its own sake, without much regard for the
worthiness of its object. Marianne, disappointed in the vanished
romance she had built up chiefly from imaginative material, “would have
thought herself very inexcusable had she been able to sleep at all the
first night after parting from Willoughby. She would have been ashamed
to look her family in the face the next morning, had she not risen from
her bed in more need of repose than when she lay down in it.”[377]
If Meredith, three-quarters of a century later, had been relating the
sad fortunes of a self-deceived young lady, he would have stressed
in his account of her character, the cause of the trouble, that is,
the process of constructing a Spanish castle with a flimsy foundation
in fact, rather than the effect, namely, the emotional orgy which
celebrated its inevitable but astonishing collapse. He would have
seen that preliminary process as possible because of the disregard
for facts which is the real mark of the sentimentalist.[378] This
later interpretation is not a contradiction of the earlier one, but
a shifting of emphasis. The common factor in the two definitions is
feeling, ranging all the way from simple preference or inclination to
strong emotion. But whereas formerly this element was accepted without
further analysis, it came later to be accounted for in its relation
to the intellect. Emotion is an excellent driver but an untrustworthy
leader. It is when it assumes leadership, when action is not only
impelled but guided by feeling, that the ensuing motion is in danger
of being erratic, unprogressive, perhaps calamitous. This more or less
wilful blindness, which is the essence of sentimentality, is of course
a very natural human trait. Since it is the function of emotion to
supply heat, and of intellect to furnish light, and since warmth is as
a rule more grateful than illumination, particularly if the prospect
does not please, we are much more likely to be warmed in our passage
through life than illumined. To refuse to see the disagreeable is as
instinctive as to seek the delightful. Nor could one be regarded as
more of a fault than the other until the love of truth for its own sake
became an ideal, accompanying the dominance of the scientific spirit.
This accounts for the fact that, while Meredith did not invent the
sentimentalist any more than Dickens the hypocrite or Thackeray
the snob, he is the first to take a deep and conscious interest in
this species; being especially fitted for it by his own incisive,
highly rationalized nature as well as by the spirit of his time. His
predecessors in this field are Peacock, Gaskell, Dickens, Thackeray,
and Eliot, although the last is rather a contemporary.
From Squire Headlong, the would-be savant, to Mr. Falconer, the
would-be Platonist and devotee of Saint Cecilia, Peacock traces a vein
of rather innocuous sentimentality, but of Miss Damaretta Pinmoney he
gives a definite account, followed by several examples:[379]
“She had cultivated a great deal of theoretical romance--in
taste, not in feeling--an important distinction--which enabled
her to be most liberally sentimental in words, without at all
influencing her actions.”
Mrs. Shaw represents those who so appreciate the value of romantic
affliction that, lacking a grief, they manufacture a grievance to cover
the deficiencies of a too roseate existence. On a certain melancholy
occasion to be sure she orders “those extra delicacies of the season
which are always supposed to be efficacious against immoderate grief at
farewell dinners.” But her usual manner--[380]
“* * * had always something plaintive in it, arising from the
long habit of considering herself a victim to an uncongenial
marriage. Now that, the General being gone, she had every good
of life, with as few drawbacks as possible, she had been rather
perplexed to find an anxiety, if not a sorrow. She had, however,
of late settled upon her own health as a source of apprehension;
she had a nervous little cough whenever she thought about
it; and some complaisant doctor ordered her just what she
desired,--a winter in Italy.”
It is Mrs. Kirkpatrick, however, who takes the prize in “pink
sentimentalism,” and holds it until the arrival of the Countess de
Saldar, and the Pole sisters. Behind the “sweet perpetuity of her
smile” is carried on an equally perpetual manœvering, which ministers,
under the auspices of refinement and the proprieties, to a small and
selfish tyranny. If by any chance she is detected or foiled, she
is deeply wounded, for if she hates anything, “it is the slightest
concealment and reserve.” Moreover, she never thinks of herself,
and is “really the most forgiving person in the world, in forgiving
slights.” She is overcome by the spring weather,--[381]
“_Primavera_, I think the Italians call it. * * * It makes
me sigh perpetually; but then I am so sensitive. Dear Lady
Cumnor used to say I was like a thermometer.”
But it is in her association with Lady Harriet that her sincerity
and candor shine forth. Apprised, on one occasion, of the intention
of that personage--an aristocrat in character as well as social
station--to honor her with a morning call, she dispatches to a neighbor
her stepdaughter Molly, of whose friendship with Lady Harriet she is
jealous, and keeps at home her own daughter Cynthia, to prepare the
especially delicious luncheon to which the guest is to be invited as
an impromptu bit of pot-luck. During this visit Lady Harriet brings up
the question of white lies, confessing to an occasional indulgence,
and asking her hostess if she never yielded to the temptation. She is
answered:[382]
“I should have been miserable if I ever had. I should have died
of self-reproach. ‘The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but
the truth,’ has always seemed to me such a fine passage. But
then I have so much that is unbending in my nature.”
Dickens and Thackeray, like Lytton, Reade, and Kingsley, have too much
of this trait in their own temperaments to be able to view it with
complete detachment, but they present a few samples. Besides Mrs.
Wititterly, Harold Skimpole, and the ever illustrative Mr. Dorrit,
Dickens is most successful with Mr. and Mrs. Micawber, and Mrs. Chick.
When Mr. Micawber, stimulated by the prospect of something being
about to turn up, presents poor Traddles, with great _éclat_ and
ceremony, his personal note for the exact amount of his indebtedness,
David, a witness, reflects:[383]
“I am persuaded, not only that this was quite the same to Mr.
Micawber as paying the money, but that Traddles himself hardly
knew the difference until he had had time to think about it.”
Mrs. Chick, with true Dombian genius, having helped to loosen her
sister-in-law’s slender hold upon life, now enjoys the pathos of the
situation:[384]
“What a satisfaction it was to Mrs. Chick--a commonplace piece
of folly enough, * * * to patronize and be tender to the memory
of that lady; in exact pursuance of her conduct to her in her
lifetime; and to thoroughly believe herself, and take herself
in, and make herself uncommonly comfortable on the strength of
her toleration! What a mighty pleasant virtue toleration should
be when we are right, to be so very pleasant when we are wrong,
and quite unable to demonstrate how we came to be invested with
the privilege of exercising it!”
In her capricious cruelty to Lucretia Tox, she pretends to be
scandalized at what she had fostered all along, and taunts the dismayed
woman for the very thing she had been aiding and abetting:[385]
“‘The scales;’ here Mrs. Chick cast down an imaginary pair,
such as are commonly used in grocers’ shops; ‘have fallen from
my sight.’ * * * ‘How can I speak to you like that?’ retorted
Mrs. Chick, who, in default of having any particular argument to
sustain herself upon, relied principally upon such repetitions
for her most withering effects. ‘Like that! You may well say
like that, indeed!’”
Thackeray is included in this list chiefly on the strength of the
Osbornes, Pitt Crawley, and to a less degree, Blanche Armory and
Mrs. Bute. Of the first he says, regarding certain declarations of
disinterested friendliness and admiration,--“There is little doubt
that old Osborne believed all he said, and that the girls were quite
in earnest in their protestations of affection for Miss Swartz.” And
his thrust at the hoodwinked Pitt’s delighted apprehension that the
clever Becky really understood and appreciated him, is a palpable hit.
He also arraigns under this head his favorite satirical object,--“the
moral world, that has, perhaps, no particular objection to vice, but
an insuperable repugnance to hearing vice called by its proper name.”
On the other hand, more than any other novelist, he has given us
sentimentalists unaware; that is, in such characters as Helen, Laura,
and Arthur Pendennis, Lady Castlewood, and Colonel Newcome, he shares
their own unawareness of the possession of this foible, though in all
these it is of an innocent variety.
George Eliot is keenly alive to this blindness in human nature,
particularly as it manifests itself in the pernicious optimism of weak
and wilful youth; but as with other mortal failures, it is usually too
serious in her eyes for satire. Of all her novels, _Felix Holt_ and
_Daniel Deronda_ alone have no character of this type. In the others
he appears as Arthur Donnithorne, Stephen Guest, Godfrey Cass, Tito
Melema, and Fred Vincy; but rarely is he ridiculed, and then ironically.
Of the bonny young Squire Donnithorne she draws the portrait as he
himself would see it:[386]
“* * * candour was one of his favorite virtues; and how can a
man’s candour be seen in all its lustre unless he has a few
failings to talk of? But he had an agreeable confidence that his
faults were all of a generous kind--impetuous, warm-blooded,
leonine; never crawling, crafty, reptilian. ‘No! I’m a devil
of a fellow for getting myself into a hobble, but I always
take care the load shall fall on my own shoulders.’ Unhappily
there is no inherent poetic justice in hobbles, and they will
sometimes obstinately refuse to inflict their worst consequences
on the prime offender, in spite of his loudly-expressed wish. It
was entirely owing to this deficiency in the scheme of things
that Arthur had ever brought any one into trouble besides
himself.”
Even when troublesome consequences threatened both himself and others,
he was buoyed up by “a sort of implicit confidence in him that he was
really such a good fellow at bottom, Providence would not treat him
harshly.”
Tito Melema also leaned heavily on the law of compensation:[387]
“It was not difficult for him to smile pleadingly on those whom
he had injured, and offer to do them much kindness: and no
quickness of intellect could tell him exactly the taste of that
honey on the lips of the injured.”
Godfrey Cass, having little to say for himself, is drawn with much
sympathy, the responsibility being thrown upon his self-excusing
father:[388]
“The Squire’s life was quite as idle as his sons’, but it was
a fiction kept up by himself and his contemporaries in Raveloe
that youth was exclusively the period of folly, and that their
aged wisdom was constantly in a state of endurance mitigated by
sarcasm.”
In addition to these instances, and such casual phrases as, “that
softening influence of the fine arts which makes other peoples’
hardships picturesque,” and “that pleasure of guessing which active
minds notoriously prefer to ready-made knowledge,” George Eliot defines
sentimentality indirectly in the words of Mary Garth, an observant
young woman and something of a humorist in her own right:[389]
“* * * people were so ridiculous with their illusions, carrying
their fools’ caps unawares, thinking their own lies opaque while
everybody elses’ were transparent, making themselves exceptions
to everything, as if when all the world looked yellow under a
lamp they alone were rosy.”
The sentimentalist is rampant in Meredith’s novels, depicted in all his
aspects. The keynote is that the sentimental spirit may be arbitrarily
hospitable, not obliged to keep open house whither all truths may
turn for shelter. “Bear in mind,” he admonishes, “that we are
sentimentalists. The eye is our servant, not our master; and so are
the senses generally. We are not bound to accept more than we choose
from them.”[390]
It is in _Sandra Belloni_ that Meredith is most expository on
the subject, and in connection with the Pole sisters. He says of
them,--[391]
“It may be seen that they were sentimentalists. That is to say,
they supposed that they enjoyed exclusive possession of the Nice
Feelings, and exclusively comprehended the Fine Shades.” They
had “that extraordinary sense of superiority to mankind which
was the crown of their complacent brows. Eclipsed as they may
be in the gross appreciation of the world by other people, who
excel in this or that accomplishment, persons that nourish Nice
Feelings and are intimate with the Fine Shades carry their own
test of intrinsic value.”
Here, however, the sentimental fallacy is shown to be the reverse side
of the refusal to see what is, and to consist in the assertion of what
is not. This is a logical corollary, since merely to disregard the
unpleasant is a passive state until reinforced by the active process of
manufacturing the desirable. Actually to manufacture the desirable is a
constructive work, and the occupation of the enterprising idealist. The
sentimentalist manufactures only in fancy, and, being a sentimentalist,
does not know the difference. His imagination, that marvelous power of
visualizing the absent or non-existent, is perverted by being turned
inward and forced to rest content with its hollow fabrication, instead
of being directed outward upon a plastic world waiting its formative
touch. As the urge to an ideal of excellence is the most hopeful
quality of human nature, so the satisfied repose on the fictitious
supposition of such excellence is the most hopeless. Being, as Meredith
adds, “a perfectly natural growth of a fat soil,” it lacks the stimulus
of a rebuff that turns earth’s smoothness rough, and perceives no
necessity for striving or daring.
On this assertive side sentimentality is related to egoism. But the
relation is difficult to express, for egoism is another complexity that
baffles analysis. Self-respect and attention to one’s own affairs are
basic and indispensable virtues; while conversely, altruism is often
but egoism in disguise and of all things the most sentimental. We
may conclude, however, that it is egoism pushed to its two extremes,
vanity on the one side and selfishness on the other, that is the
satirizible sort. It is to the vanity wing that sentimentality is more
closely connected, as the assumption it makes is usually that of our
own superiority in possession and attainment, our own sincerity of
motive, and our own immunity from ordinary consequences. Such is the
attitude of the sentimental egoists, of which Meredith gives us a full
complement.
The Countess de Saldar is abused by the exposure of her schemes, but
resolute:[392]
“Still to be sweet, still to smile and to amuse,--still to give
her zealous attention to the business of the diplomatist’s
Election, still to go through her church service devoutly,
required heroism; she was equal to it, for she had remarkable
courage; but it was hard to feel no longer at one with
Providence.”
Wilfred Pole, by Wilming Weir in the moonlight, vows his love for
Emilia:[393]
“Having said it, he was screwed up to feel it as nearly as
possible, such virtue is there in uttered words.”
Edward Blancove is visited by the facile compunction that attacks
Arthur Donnithorne and others of the kind:[394]
“He closed, as it were, a black volume, and opened a new and
bright one. Young men easily fancy that they may do this,
and that when the black volume is shut the tide is stopped.
Saying ‘I was a fool,’ they believe they have put an end to the
foolishness.”
Outside of Eliot and Meredith, the best examples of the youthful
sentimental egoist are Thackeray’s George Osborne, and Trollope’s
Crosbie. The latter argues himself into a state of innocence over his
desertion of Lily Dale by soliloquizing that he did not deserve her,
could not make her happy, and was bound to tell the truth, which,
however painful, was always best.[395]
A word might be vouchsafed for this trait in low life, usually brushed
lightly by the novelist. Dale of Allington is a great man in the market
town, “laying down the law as to barley and oxen among men who usually
knew more about barley and oxen than he did.” Squire Cass, a person of
some importance, “had a tenant or two, who complained of the game to
him quite as if he had been a lord.” Craig looks to Mrs. Poyser “like
a cock as thinks the sun’s rose o’ purpose to hear him crow.”[396] And
Robert Armstrong says of Master Gammon,--“There’s nothing to do, which
is his busiest occupation, when he’s not interrupted at it.”
Then there are the unsentimental egoists, attached to the selfish and
domineering wing of egoism. They are less amenable to satire, being
less deceptive by nature, and more prone to tyranny and cruelty,
thereby deserving rebuke without humor. This class is represented by
Paul Dombey, Barnes Newcome, Tom Tulliver, and others from the author
of the last. This is another favorite type with Eliot, the self-willed
sharing honors with the self-indulgent. Grandcourt “meant to be master
of a woman who would have liked to master him, and who perhaps would
have been capable of mastering another man.” Tito Melema “felt that
Romola was a more unforgiving woman than he had imagined; her love was
not that sweet, clinging instinct, stronger than all judgments, which,
he began to see now, made the great charm of a wife.” Harold Transome,
who “had a padded yoke ready for the neck of every man, woman, and
child that depended on him,” makes the alarming discovery about Esther
that a lightning “shot out of her now and then, which seemed the
sign of a dangerous judgment; as if she inwardly saw something more
admirable than Harold Transome. Now, to be perfectly charming, a woman
should not see this.” Meredith portrays this irresponsible selfishness
in Roy Richmond, Lord Ormont, and Lord Fleetwood; and defines it in Sir
Austin’s _Pilgrim’s Scrip_, which says that sentimentalists “are they
who seek to enjoy without incurring the Immense Debtorship for a thing
done.”[397]
Another and more passive type of the egoist is the epicurean. He
asks only to have his tastes gratified, and, being devoted to
material comfort, demands little of the world but material supplies.
Epicurianism is marked by an indulgent good-humor so long as it is
itself indulged, and when not gratified sinks into nothing worse
than peevishness. Though it may be a deplorable trait, it is not a
ridiculous one in itself, and is therefore satirized only when in
conjunction with something that produces an incongruity. The constant
stream of satire directed against the epicurean clergy, for instance,
is due to the sense of an incompatibility between a profession which
inculcates simplicity at least, if not actual asceticism, and a régime
of sensuous indulgence. Those who are legitimately worldly, as for
example the patrician triad depicted by Thackeray,--Miss Crawley,
the Countess of Kew, and Madam Bernstein,--may not be admirable, but
neither are they absurd.
In Adrian Harley we have the egoistic epicure in all his plump
perfection. Meredith hastens, however, to exculpate the founder of the
hedonistic philosophy:[398]
“Adrian was an epicurean; one whom Epicurus would have scourged
out of his garden, certainly; an epicurean of our modern
notions.”
The combination in him of cynic, self-pamperer, and Sir Oracle forms
a type which Meredith especially delights to dishonor, because its
own smugness puts a splash of color, as it were, on the bull’s-eye
and renders it more conspicuous. Not only is the epicure pierced
with many an ironic shaft, but the Wise Youth is made the veritable
error incarnate of the Feverel tragedy. For it was his Fabian policy,
dictated and obeyed, that knotted still more the sad tangle, just as
it was Austin Wentworth’s simple manly directness that proved the knot
could be cut easily by prompt and silent action. Indeed, in these two
characters we see exemplified throughout the story the false Florimell
of vanity and the true Florimell of pride,--the pride that is too proud
to do an unworthy or debasing deed, and the vanity that can counterfeit
successfully until confronted by the genuine reality.
Egoism within bounds is a perfectly sane and rational thing, but to
keep it within bounds is exceedingly difficult. When given over to an
irrational rule it grows into fanaticism. For the fanatic owes his
monomania to the force of a strong personality, which engenders the
unmitigated assurance of being right, plus the perverted reasoning that
characterizes the sentimentalist. He is always foolish, but seldom a
hypocrite, as his deception usually extends to himself. His selfishness
is of the opposite sort from the epicure’s. What he seeks is not a soft
berth and personal acquisitions, but a chance to impose his opinions on
a misguided world, and to dominate over converts or subjects. In his
milder moods he only dreams of happy schemes and far-reaching reforms,
but when charged with energy his proselyting zeal tends to make him
tyrannical.
In some form or other he appears on the pages of almost every Victorian
novelist. That the faddist is a favorite subject with Peacock is well
known. Lytton gives a delightful contribution in the Uncle Jack of _The
Caxtons_, whose “bewitching enthusiasm and convincing calculation” led
him into alluring speculations that invariably proved disastrous to the
members of his family. Not financial but missionary and philanthropic
zeal animate the souls immortalized by Dickens,--Mrs. Jellyby and Mrs.
Pardiggle, Reverend Honeythunder, and the Snagsbys. Brontë and Kingsley
specialize in the religious bigot. The former satirizes the Jesuit in
_Villette_, but not St. John Rivers, who is drawn seriously. The latter
gives a vivid picture in his Mrs. Locke and the Calvinistic preachers,
and another, of the opposite type, done with more partisanship and
less sympathy, in the vicar and Argemone in _Yeast_. Trollope is more
interested in the sociological zealot. He introduces him as the author,
Mr. Popular Sentiment; the “Barchester Brutus,” Mr. John Bold; the
demagogue, Ontario Moggs, son of a capitalist, and advocate of labor
unions; and some characters in the Parliamentary Series. A sample from
a harangue of Moggs will serve to illustrate the fair-mindedness that
accompanies Trollope’s love of parody. He quotes and then comments:[399]
“‘Gentlemen, were it not for strikes, this would be a country
in which no free man could live. By the aid of strikes we will
make it the Paradise of the labourer, and Elysium of industry,
an Eden of artisans.’ There was much more of it, but the reader
might be fatigued were the full flood of Mr. Moggs’s oratory to
be let loose upon him. And through it all there was a germ of
truth, and a strong dash of true, noble feeling; but the speaker
had omitted as yet to learn how much thought must be given to a
germ of truth before it can be made to produce fruit for the
multitude. And then, in speaking, grand words come so easily,
while thoughts--even little thoughts--flow so slowly!”
Mrs. Proudie herself is above all a politician, and justifies her
existence by turning her religious bigotry into the channel of
ecclesiastical polity, a procedure that well might cause the gentle
bishop to quake:[400]
“When Mrs. Proudie began to talk about the souls of the people
he always shook in his shoes. She had an eloquent way of raising
her voice over the word souls that was qualified to make any
ordinary man shake in his shoes.”
She rejoices in an opportunity to condone with a member of the Clerical
Opposition over a disappointment she has done her best to bring upon
it:[401]
“‘For, after all, Mrs. Arabin, what are the things of this
world?--dust beneath our feet, ashes between our teeth, grass
cut for the oven, vanity, vexation, and nothing more!’--well
pleased with which variety of Christian metaphors, Mrs. Proudie
walked on, still muttering, however, something about worms and
grubs, by which she intended to signify her own species and the
Dumbello and Grantly sects of it in particular.”
George Eliot’s zealots,--Dinah Morris, Savonarola, Felix Holt, Daniel
Deronda, are not ridiculed, except for some sarcastic repartee put into
the mouths of Mrs. Poyser and Esther Lyon. Nor is the pseudo-scholar
Casaubon, though he is described as having a soul that “went on
fluttering in the swampy ground where it was hatched, thinking of its
wings and never flying,” and on a certain occasion, as slipping “again
into the library, to chew a cud of erudite mistake about Cush and
Mizraim.”
Of all fanatics, those who are obsessed by an educational theory are
perhaps the most dangerous, as they impose their systems on flexible
youth, the result being often an orchard of lamentably bent twigs. Two
exponents of opposite divisions of this type are Gradgrind, who aimed
at the elimination of the imagination, and Feverel, who proposed to
circumvent the element of original sin in human composition, by the
policy of watchful waiting and absolute dictation. Both come to grief
through the failure of facts to support their philosophies; but Dickens
in his optimism makes Gradgrind a wiser man through being a sadder,
while Meredith in his realism keeps Feverel blandly unconscious and
untaught by a lesson that would have pierced any heart protected by a
less impervious pericardium.
All the materials that go into the warp and woof of human nature are
thus seen to be so commingled and interwoven that even the degree of
separation necessary for examination is almost impossible. And when
this dissection is after a fashion accomplished, it is the less useful,
in that the same strand is discovered to change its color and texture
from one section to another. Deception is here a vice and there a
virtue. Folly is here amusing and there horrifying. Egoism is here
absorbent and there encroaching. There are sentimental epicures and
unsentimental epicures and ascetic sentimentalists. There are vulgar
snobs and refined snobs and a vulgarity that is not snobbish. All of
these are criticizably absurd at times, and yet the same things may at
others be admirable or pathetic or tragic. Frequently the sublime and
the ridiculous advance on the one step that separates them, and merge
their diverse identities.
A peculiarly good illustration of the qualified nature of human
traits, in view of which we are wise to discard nouns in favor of
adjectives for identifying purposes, is furnished by Trollope’s Lady
Carbury. She is hypocritical in her wire-pulling intrigues, but not
a hypocrite, for her pretenses are not utterly hollow; her sincerity
is about on the average level, and her industry much above it. She is
sentimentally foolish in her maternal devotion to a son who has no
possible claim on toleration, much less on a patient and sacrificing
indulgence, but not a fool, for her cleverness is indisputable. She is
as tyrannic to her daughter as lenient to her son, but not a selfish
egoist, for she refuses to take advantage of Mr. Broune’s offer of
marriage, especially tempting to her harassed soul, on the altruistic
grounds that she and her family would be more of a burden than a
comfort to Mr. Broune. She is not a vulgar snob, but her respect for
aristocratic connections is not always marked by refinement of method
in her pursuit of them. Much of all this is unconsciously betrayed in
the series of three letters to editors and critics, bespeaking their
good offices for her new book, _Criminal Queens_. The epistles are
tactfully adjusted to their respective recipients. To Mr. Broune, of
_The Morning Breakfast Table_, she is intimately confiding and begs
frankly for a lift, while pointing out the attractive features of her
volume:[402]
“The sketch of Semiramis is at any rate spirited, though I had
to twist it about a little to bring her in guilty. Cleopatra,
of course, I have taken from Shakespeare: what a wench she was!
I could not quite make Julia a queen; but it was impossible
to pass over so piquant a character. * * * Marie Antoinette I
have not quite acquitted. It would be uninteresting,--perhaps
untrue. I have accused her lovingly, and have kissed when I have
scourged. I trust the British public will not be angry because
I do not whitewash Caroline, especially as I go along with them
altogether in abusing her husband.”
To Mr. Booker, of _The Literary Chronicle_, she is gently menacing,
reminding him that she has engaged to review his _New Tale of a Tub_
for _The Morning Breakfast Table_;[403]
“Indeed, I am about it now, and am taking great pains with it.
If there is anything you wish to have specially said as to your
view of the Protestantism of the time, let me know. I should
like you to say a word as to the accuracy of my historical
details, which I know you can safely do.”
To Mr. Alf, of _The Evening Pulpit_, of whom she has reason to be
afraid, her candor assumes a more impersonal and business-like air.
She alludes to a recent caustic criticism in the _Pulpit_ of some poor
poetic wretch who well deserved it:
“I have no patience with the pretensions of would-be poets who
contrive by toadying and underground influences to get their
volumes placed on every drawing-room table. * * * Is it not
singular how some men contrive to obtain the reputation of
popular authorship without adding a word to the literature of
their country worthy of note? It is accomplished by unflagging
assiduity in the system of puffing. To puff and to get one’s
self puffed have become different branches of a new profession.
Alas, me! I wish I might find a class open in which lessons
could be taken by such a poor tyro as myself.”
As for herself, she expects ruthless severity, but trusts that her work
has some merits. In any case, no amount of editorial flagellating can
discount her personal admiration for this particular editor. Truly, she
is all things to all men,--a policy, however, for which she might claim
a certain Scriptural precedent of high authority.