CONCLUSIONS
CHAPTER I
RELATIONSHIPS
To call a man a satirist or a satirical writer is to say something
about him, certainly. It is, however, a piece of information which can
be nothing more than a curiosity of literature so long as it remains an
isolated fact. Although we are for the time being interested in a group
of novelists primarily as satirists, we cannot even understand them as
such, much less come to any fuller comprehension, unless we also view
the satirists as novelists, as artists, as human beings.
These relationships extend on the internal side, so to speak, into such
matters as quantity, quality, and range; and on the external, into the
larger realms of the two satiric factors--criticism and humor--and
thence into the neighboring domains of pessimism and tragedy, comedy
and wit, realism and romanticism, emotion and intellect, and idealism.
In none of these things, of course, can we do more than indicate
briefly the effect they may have upon satire, or satire upon them.
Those who have furnished the largest amount of
satire,--proportionately, as it happens, both to their own total
production, and to the satiric production of others,--are Peacock,
Dickens, Butler, and Meredith. But when it comes to quality,--tested by
subtlety of wit, self-command, justice as to objects, and moderation of
amount,--the only one to remain on the preëminent list is Meredith.
At the other extreme we find the same overlapping as to quantity
and quality. The smallest satiric amounts come from Brontë, Reade,
and Gaskell, but, while the first two are correspondingly inferior
in quality, the last is promoted several degrees up the qualitative
scale, by reason of her lack of flourish, and the deft sureness of her
touch. The low place she leaves vacant belongs by desert to Kingsley,
who, like Brontë and Reade, never learned to solve the satirist’s
problem,--to trifle without being trivial. Frivolity, to be sure, was
never a besetting sin of the Victorians, but in their earnestness they
were prone to the opposite fault, and are occasionally caught beating a
big satiric drum when softer notes would be more effective. Neither are
any on the entire list guilty of downright insincerity, but the less
successful ones are sometimes betrayed by partisan zeal, acrimonious
temper, or unsound judgment, into more or less injustice. This is true
to some extent of Peacock, Dickens, and Thackeray, as well as of those
just mentioned.
In range of interest Dickens easily leads, followed by Meredith and
Trollope. From _Oliver Twist_ to _Edwin Drood_, this satirist spreads
his attacks over more ground, and lays about him in more different
directions than does any one else. With the exception of the Church,
no possible word of importance is omitted from his satiric lexicon.
His tastes in the ridiculous are catholic, and scarcely a satirizible
subject languishes under his neglect. The other writers are more or
less specialists in their chosen fields.
As to the effect on the satiric product of a versatile mind, a prolific
pen, or preoccupation with other affairs, no deduction seems possible.
Lytton, Kingsley, and Butler were versatile and prolific both, to a
degree. Thackeray and Trollope were prolific within a more limited
range. Those most exclusively novelists were Disraeli, Dickens, and
Brontë, but those to produce the most novels were Trollope, Lytton,
Dickens, and Meredith. Lytton and Disraeli had more outside interests
and underwent more varieties of social and political experience than
any of their successors, though Trollope and Kingsley had occupations
and avocations outside those of literature.
All these internal relationships have some significance but much less
than the external ones. They deal primarily with accomplishments,
which have their value chiefly as emanating from character and so
defining it, whereas the various elements of which character itself is
composed are in the nature of vital statistics in the life spiritual.
Of these elements those most closely related to satire are naturally
its constituents, though they may exist independently of it. Although
satire is a form of criticism, it does not follow that those writers
who are most consistently satirical have the most widely or deeply
critical attitude toward life in general. Such fundamental criticism
branches out into two philosophies: the hopeless, or pessimistic,
shading off into flippant cynicism or bitter misanthropy; and the
hopeful, or unsentimentally optimistic, which is the basis of all
dynamic idealism. For whithersoever the idealist may tend, he certainly
cannot start from a point of uncritical satisfaction with things
as they are. Locke may have made some errors regarding the human
understanding, but he was eminently correct in identifying the stimulus
to action, not with a vision of fulfilled desire, but with the sting
that bids nor sit nor stand but go. We must be driven out before we
can be led on, but the driving process once being inaugurated, we make
it more dignified and endurable by conceiving a goal upon which our
endeavors may be focussed.
To the philosophy of pessimism no Victorian novelist was addicted.
The phase of it current in the period just preceding was met by a
prolonged, skeptical, British chuckle, beginning with our first
novelist, who represents, indeed, in his own history the reaction from
pensive melancholy to humorous common sense. Peacock is speaking of
being unhappy, and adds:[404]
“To have a reason for being so would be exceedingly commonplace:
to be so without any is the province of genius: the art of
being miserable for misery’s sake, has been brought to great
perfection in our days; and the ancient Odyssey, which held
forth a shining example of the endurance of real misfortune,
will give place to a modern one, setting out a more instructive
picture of querulous impatience under imaginary evils.”
Lytton shared the fondness of Dickens and Thackeray for pathos, but
none of them went further into the anatomy of melancholy than some such
comment as,--“Dig but deep enough, and under all earth runs water,
under all life runs grief.”[405]
* * * * *
Thackeray muses on the theme of aspiration in a whimsically pensive
vein. Between the questions and the exclamation of the following
excerpt are several instances of disappointment, related in his jocular
mock-sympathetic tone:[406]
“Succeeding? What is the great use of succeeding? Failing?
Where is the great harm? * * * Psha! These things appear
as naught--when Time passes--Time the consoler--Time the
anodyne--Time the grey calm satirist, whose sad smile seems to
say, Look, O man, at the vanity of the objects you pursue, and
of yourself who pursue them.”
In the essay _Of Adversity_ Bacon says,--“We see in needleworks and
embroideries it is more pleasing to have a lively work upon a sad and
solemn ground, than to have a dark and melancholy work upon a lightsome
ground.” In so far as this can be granted, and applied to the novel,
it would explain why George Eliot is more pleasing than Thackeray,
for that is just the difference between them. Athwart the brilliant
background of Vanity Fair fall the sinister shadows of the sordid
little Puppets of the Show,--“the bullies, the bucks, the knaves,
the quacks, the yokels, the tinselled dancers, the poor old rouged
tumblers, and the light-fingered folk operating on the pockets of the
rest.” Behind Hayslope, Raveloe, and Middlemarch, the Floss and the
Arno, hangs the curtain of Destiny, somber with pain, drudgery, sin and
its wages. Yet over it plays a light shed around the characters as they
appear upon the stage. It shines from Mrs. Poyser’s kitchen and Mr.
Irwine’s study, from the parlors of the sisters _née_ Dodson and the
Garth family, from Celia Chettam’s nursery, the bar at the Rainbow, and
the shops of Florence. Together these actors weave a pattern of mirth
and amusement,--the incorrigible human defiance of the ache of life and
the agony of death.
Dickens, (upon whose Hogarthian gloom Taine lays great stress),
Reade, and Kingsley are as critical of society in the larger sense as
Thackeray is in the smaller, and as Eliot and Trollope are of human
nature. Meredith has no illusions about any of these things, and Butler
comes nearer than any to an unqualified pessimism. But even he does
not attain it. They all escape through the avenue of satire, sometimes
reinforced by action,--both being efficacious means of getting
melancholia out of the system. Nowhere does Browning speak more as a
Britisher than when he declares rage to be the right thing in the main,
and acquiescence the vain and futile.
Pessimism, to be consistent, would express itself in terms of tragedy.
Out of approximately one hundred Victorian novels of the realistic
type,--for romantic tragedy cannot be taken as an index of the
writer’s philosophy,--less than ten per cent can be classified as
tragic in outcome; and in none of these is the catastrophe inclusive,
overwhelming, or a perversion of justice. Of these the largest
proportion belongs to Eliot and Meredith, but _The Mill on the Floss_
is the solitary complete tragedy. _Rhoda Fleming_ and _Middlemarch_
are almost as truly tales of comic tragedians as _Romola_, _Richard
Feverel_, and _An Amazing Marriage_ are of tragic comedians. On the
other hand, tragedy of this mitigated sort is not inconsistent with
idealism, which in turn is the constructive side of criticism. While
it is too much, as Lytton reminds us in _Kenelm Chillingly_, to expect
both critical and constructive ability to be conspicuous in the same
individual, nevertheless the criticism which is content to note a
deflection from an ideal without even a tacit recognition of the
ideal deflected from, is mere childish fretting over the personally
irritating. Of this there is little in the nineteenth century. The
Victorians may have had some of the unpardonable disregard for reality
of which they have been accused,[407] but they never could be accused
of a disregard for ideality. None of the novelists, indeed, announced
an ecstatic premonition of some far-off, divine event toward which
the whole creation moves; but they would all have asserted, even if
under their breath,--_Eppur si muove_. This assertion is none the less
emphatic and possibly the more artistic, by being made indirectly,
through dramatic presentation of characters. Harley L’Estrange,
Egremont, Mr. Hale, Mrs. Brandon, Mark Tapley, Sidney Carton, Mr. Eden,
Jane Eyre, Alton Locke, Mr. Harding, Dinah Morris, Dorothea Brooke,
Austin Feverel, Vittoria, Beauchamp,--these all testify in their
various ways, by noble aspiration, generous self-effacement, sensitive
response to duty, devotion to principle, courage in daring and in
endurance, to the existence of a something in the human soul that is
stemming the tide of its selfishness, cowardice, and cruelty, and may
in time work out a salvation for the race.
A recognition of ideality does not imply, however, a lack of proper
concern for reality, or the reverse. To make the two diametrical
opposites is to confuse issues. As Meredith says,--“Between realism
and idealism there is no natural conflict. This completes that.” He
adds the caution that only the great can be truly idealistic, and
concludes,--“One may find as much amusement in a kaleidoscope as in a
merely idealistic writer.”[408] The direct counterpart to realism is
romanticism; and the Victorians did not scruple to make free use of
this alliance with the improbable, whenever the actual would fail to
secure the desired dramatic effect. Coincidences abound,--convenient
returns of the absent and departures of the troublesome, discoveries
of kinship and inheritance of fortunes, narrow escapes and astonishing
reunions. Yet there is also some conscious defense of the practice.
Lytton has one of his characters, confessing her disappointment in the
fiction of the time (the early thirties), conclude,--[409]
“These novelists make the last mistake you would suppose them
guilty of, they have not enough _romance_ in them to paint
the truths of society. * * * By the way, how few know what
natural romance is: so that you feel the ideas in a book or play
are true and faithful to the characters they are ascribed to,
why mind whether the incidents are probable?”
Trollope reinforces the idea:[410]
“No novel is worth anything, for the purpose either of tragedy
or comedy, unless the reader can sympathise with the characters
whose names he finds upon the pages. * * * If there be such
truth, I do not know that a novel can be too sensational.”
And Meredith expresses on at least two occasions his opinion of the
value of realism. An embittered authoress determined to make her next
novel a reflex of her bitterness. Considering that type, she--[411]
“* * * mused on their soundings and probings of poor humanity,
which the world accepts as the very bottom-truth if their dredge
brings up sheer refuse of the abominable. The world imagines
those to be at our nature’s depths who are impudent enough to
expose its muddy shallows. * * * it may count on popularity, a
great repute for penetration. It is true of its kind, though the
dredging of nature is the miry form of art. When it flourishes
we may be assured we have been over-enamelling the higher forms.”
In another volume he is describing the humorist’s idea of it:[412]
“I conceive him to indicate that the realistic method of a
conscientious transcription of all the visible, and a repetition
of all the audible, is mainly accountable for our present
branfulness, and for that prolongation of the vasty and the
noisy, out of which, as from an undrained fen, steams the malady
of sameness, our modern malady.”
It might seem that a romanticism so prevalent and avowed would not
be the best medium for satire, which is supposed to be realistic in
the sense that it deals with the actual. But since satire is directed
against persons rather than circumstances, it is in no danger so long
as the romancing is confined to the situations, and the characters
are kept to the plane of reality,--as is the case, with a few easily
recognizable exceptions, in the Victorian novel. That the difficulty
of truthfulness is one excuse for indulgence in the easier romantic
method, is admitted by Eliot:[413]
“The pencil is conscious of a delightful facility in drawing
a griffin--the longer the claws and the larger the wings, the
better; but that marvellous facility which we mistook for genius
is apt to forsake us when we want to draw a real, unexaggerated
lion.”
But in Victorian fiction neither griffins nor lions are in much
evidence. The total personnel is fairly well symbolized (with the
addition of a few more of the nobler brutes than are admitted by
Thackeray) in the Overture to _The Newcomes_, wherein the “farrago
of old fables” pictures a crow, a frog, an ox, a wolf, a fox, an
owl, and a few lambs, but only the skin of a lion,--and that serving
as cloak for a donkey. The romantico-realistic solution, therefore,
forms probably the most satisfactory base for the dissolving of the
critical-humorous acid and the precipitation of satire. It secures a
maximum of pungency with a minimum of flatness, and is perfectly safe
to take.
As satire ramifies on the critical side into pessimism, tragedy,
idealism, and the cognate matters of romanticism and realism, so it
extends on the humorous into the comic, the witty, and the philosophic
amusement known as a sense of humor.
Of those who launch their satire on the comic current, Dickens is again
first. He is, as Taine remarks, the most railing and the most jocose of
English authors. Speaking of his sportiveness, the French critic adds
that “he is not the more happy for all that,” and uses him to point the
double moral: that “English wit consists in saying very jocular things
in a solemn manner,” and “The chief element of the English character is
its want of happiness.”[414] This last may account for the fact that
none of the novelists is abreast of Dickens in fun-making. Indeed, the
only others to deserve mention are Lytton, Trollope, and Thackeray,
and the last in his extra-novel productions. Those, on the other hand,
who are most endowed with wit are Meredith, Butler, and Peacock, with
George Eliot not quite to be omitted. More important than comicality or
wit is the sense of humor, for while they are largely in the nature of
devices whereby the object is made _ex post facto_ ludicrous to
others, it is the quality which enables the critic himself to perceive
the absurdity, and is thus the _sine qua non_ of his being a
satirist at all. It is Meredith who excels here, and this excellence,
combined with his gift of wit and his restrained use of the comic,
lifts him to a position of superiority on the humorous as well as the
critical side. George Eliot also has the sense of proportion which is
the basis of humor, and so, to a less degree, have Trollope and Mrs.
Gaskell. At the other extreme stand Reade, Kingsley, and Charlotte
Brontë, with very little perspective or artistic detachment. The
unfortunate thing about them is that they did not dare be as serious
in expression as they were in temperament. Their humor does not bubble
up from a natural spring but is manipulated through an artificial
fountain, with varying effects of spontaneity. Lytton, Disraeli, and
Thackeray had some youthful smartness of this sort to outgrow, and
to a large extent they did it. But these others never did; and Reade
especially has moments of a truculent pertness and shrill sarcasm that
do an injustice to the really fine spirit of his work.
That there are more of these fitful gleams and partial visions than of
an inclusive view of the cosmos, is not astonishing. The wide, clear
outlook requires not only an infinite radius but a lens of powerful
magnitude. To train a small telescope on a remote object achieves
nothing. None of the novelists evinces the cosmic perspective that
reports back in terms of a universe. That, indeed, is the function
of the seer,--poet, prophet, or philosopher. But if only these see
life in all its panoramic vastness, there are others who at least
splash at a ten-league canvas, and insist on having real figures
to draw from, whether saint or sinner. These have no use for the
trivial and frivolous, yet they know better than to scorn the small
and unpretentious. They delight in spaciousness, but are not enamored
with mere bulk or nebulous vagueness. Such are our satiric novelists
at their best, those among them ranking highest whose philosophical
humor is greatest in proportion to their love of the comic, and who are
granted sufficient wit to transmute their perception of the absurd into
effective expression.
The value of a sense of humor lies largely in a certain duality about
it, in that it springs from the intellectual side of one’s nature
and is reinforced by the emotional. It thus brings into play both of
the supplementary factors, and in so doing tests them both. To have
a sense of humor is an intellectual asset, but the enjoyment of it,
which is inseparable from its possession, is an emotional state. This
combination, as well as the order of procedure, affects the quality
of the resulting satire. The best satirists are those most fully
developed in head and heart, with the proviso that they keep the latter
subordinate to the former, by making reason the final tribunal, and
awarding the decision to intellectual judgment rather than emotional
prejudice.
Among our novelists the greatest in other things is greatest in this
also. The most generous endowment along both lines, and the nicest
balance between them is Meredith’s. With him are again associated Eliot
and Butler. Nor is it by accident that we find the lowest extreme
of the list still occupied by the same representatives. The test of
course is one of control. It is not that Reade, Kingsley, and Charlotte
Brontë are deficient in intellection. They do considerable thinking and
sometimes reach conclusions that are rational and true. But when truth
and rationality do dominate, it is by a happy good fortune rather than
the inevitability that marks the ratiocination of a capable mind. This
last cannot guarantee infallibility, to be sure, but the errors are
reduced to a minimum, and moreover left open to correction. This is
the case with Meredith, Eliot, and Butler, in whom a warm and sincere
emotion is directed by the light of reason.
It might seem at first sight that Butler ran more to head than heart;
but in this as in other things he was like Swift, having the faculty
of stating in cold logic what he had conceived in hot wrath. In such
a temperament the feelings are more likely to be turned against those
responsible for misery than toward the victims, thus producing a
negative effect, with the positive side left to our inference. The only
one whose work is entirely unemotional is Peacock, and even he waxes
warm over the exploitation of the helpless, and the crimes committed
in the name of Progress. Aside from this he shines with a hard mental
brilliance,--which, be it said, does not insure soundness of viewpoint,
as no one on the whole list can surpass him in prejudice and injustice.
George Eliot, admitted by all to have a better intellectual equipment
than any of her predecessors, admired above others by Meredith because
her fiction was “the fruit of a well-trained mind,” herself says, “Our
good depends on the quality and breadth of our emotion.”[415] And
again, “There is no escaping the fact that want of sympathy condemns
us to a corresponding stupidity.”[416] This realization that mental
inertness itself is the result of callous or defective emotion,
and that these two elements are not only inseparable but mutually
dependent, is one secret of the fine quality of her satire.[417]
It is the sheen on the surface of a deep current of sympathetic
comprehension. Never does she forget or cease to commiserate the great
predicament of the human race, condemned to make bricks without straw,
under a hard taskmaster, with little prospect of reward to encourage
perseverance or satisfy an outraged sense of justice. Yet she is able
to apply a few satiric goads,--not to the taskmaster, for he directs
from behind the veil and is not subject to human aspersions, nor to the
weak or the blundering, but to the shirkers, the selfish, and those who
demand more wage than a fair return for work done as well as possible
under the circumstances.
In 1902 Meredith wrote to his daughter-in-law:[418]
“You have a liking for little phrases; I send you three:--Love
is the renunciation of self. Passion is noble strength on fire.
Fortitude is the one thing for which we may pray, because
without it we are unable to bear the Truth.”
Here we have in juxtaposition, quite unconsciously no doubt, his
_obiter dicta_ on emotion and intellect. In many places he had already
dramatized them. His egoists--Sir Austin, Sir Willoughby, Wilfred
Pole[419]--are satirized because they conceived love as self-assertion
instead of renunciation; his epicures and snobs--Adrian Harley, Edward
Blancove, Ferdinand Laxley--because their passion was neither noble
nor truly strong; his sentimentalists of every description, because
they neither realized that Truth is the highest thing a man may keep,
nor, whether high or not, would they purchase it at the price of a
disturbance to their equanimity. They might pray for the truth to be
pleasant, but never for fortitude to endure it if it were otherwise.
The apparent pessimism underlying the implication that the Truth is
such as to demand courage for facing it, is counterbalanced by Diana’s
exclamation, “Who can really _think_, and not think hopefully?”
None of Meredith’s novels lacks an intellectual theme, and it was this
that he himself regarded as most important. In the very last one he
says:[420]
“But the melancholy, the pathos of it, * * * have been
sacrificed in the vain effort to render events as consequent to
your understanding as a piece of logic, through an exposure of
character!”
At the same time he surpasses all others in the treatment of love.
Contemporary readers, who had had to be content with David and Dora,
Pen and Laura, Rochester and Jane, Adam and Dinah, were vouchsafed
a revelation,--which, however, they apparently did not at once
appreciate,--in Richard and Lucy, Evan and Rose, Redworth and Diana,
Dartrey and Nesta. To them all Meredith would say approvingly what he
said warningly to a more unfortunate cavalier,--“You may love, and
warmly love, so long as you are honest. Do not offend reason.”[421] And
in them all he illustrates the higher hedonism voiced by Lady Dunstane
to her Tony, though from the negative side,--“The mistake of the world
is to think happiness possible to the senses.”[422]
In addition to these, Meredith gives us pictures of other than the
purely romantic devotion. There is the brooding tenderness of maturity
for childhood and youth: of Sir Austin, Lady Blandish, Wentworth,
and Mrs. Berry, for Richard and later, Lucy; of Clara Middleton for
Crossjay; of Rosamund for Beauchamp. This relationship is enhanced by
a more intimate comradeship in the case of Lady Jocelyn and Rose, of
Natalia Radnor and Nesta, and, in a happy-go-lucky fashion, of Roy
Richmond and Harry. Nesta and Rose illustrate respectively Meredith’s
genuine and exquisite sentiment, and the omnipresent common sense which
preserved it from sentimentality. When Nesta felt the first chill of
the shadow on her life,--[423]
“She sent forth her flights of stories in elucidation of the
hidden; and they were like white bird after bird winging to
covert beneath a thundercloud; until her breast ached for the
voice of the thunder: harsh facts: sure as she was of never
losing her filial hold of the beloved.”
When Rose determined to appeal their case to her mother, she said to
Evan,--[424]
“You know she is called a philosopher; nobody knows how
deep-hearted she is, though. My mother is true as steel. * *
* When I say kindness, I don’t mean any ‘Oh, my child,’ and
tears and kisses and maundering, you know. You mustn’t mind her
thinking me a little fool.”
Then there is the sisterly attachment between Rhoda and Dahlia Fleming
that leads Rhoda’s puritanic nature into a dictatorial fanaticism
as disastrous in its results as Sir Austin’s; there is friendship
masculine between Beauchamp and Dr. Shrapnel; and friendship feminine
between Lady Dunstane and Diana. It is not that Meredith has a monopoly
on the portrayal of human affection. Lytton has to his credit the
Chillinglys[425] and the Caxtons; Gaskell has the Gibsons; Dickens,
Amy Dorrit, and Joe Gargary; Brontë, Caroline Helstone and her mother;
Trollope, Lily Dale and hers; in Barry Lyndon, Thackeray gives us a
base soul redeemed by love for a child, and in Colonel Newcome, Helen
Pendennis, and Amelia Osborne, he presents a rather one-sided devotion,
as does Eliot in Mrs. Transome,--though the latter does not feel called
upon to exclaim, “By Heaven, it is pitiful, the bootless love of women
for children in Vanity Fair!” But it is true that Meredith through the
richness of his well-rounded nature was more able than the others to
lift emotion fearlessly to a height of intensity, preserved there from
any danger of a fall into bathos, because supported by intellect on the
one hand and humor on the other.
Any final alignment must be left flexible, because of the numerous
factors in the test. Writers may excel in one way or another. When,
however, the same author reappears on every count, it begins to look
suspicious, and the suspicion falls most heavily on Meredith. Others
may come to the top twice or even thrice, but he alone is never wholly
submerged, and is nearly always dominant. When Arnold Bennett declared
that “Between Fielding and Meredith no entirely honest novel was
written by anybody in England,” he was merely following the twentieth
century fad of depreciating the nineteenth,--any smart miss of sixteen
being naturally more modern and sophisticated than her middle-aged
mother. But in saying that “The death of George Meredith removes,
not the last of the Victorian novelists, but the first of the modern
school,” he mentions an obvious fact, not really discredited by the
chronological situation. This does not necessarily argue, be it said,
that Meredith casts the forward shadow of coming events. His strong
individuality did not lend itself to imitation, or even a prompt
appreciation. Moreover, he had in him no germ either of _fin de siècle_
decadence or of its flaunting iconoclasm. In his own mountain range he
is simply a preëminent peak, as in theirs were Chaucer, Shakespeare,
Dryden, Johnson.
As to the lower plateaus and the foothills, the only thing of interest
that develops through examining their juxtaposition, is the resultant
effect on Thackeray. While the others stand firmly up to their own
normal height, making no attempt to add a cubit to their stature,
he seems constantly to be taking thought; nor is it thought that
leads to conclusions of much moment. “His depth,” like Lytton’s, “is
fathomable,” but his air is of the most profound and meditative. It
must be this, together with his _Snobs_ and _Vanity Fair_ (to both
of which, acknowledgments are due) that has bewitched his critics
and persuaded his readers into ranking him as the foremost Victorian
satirist. That he is among the elect is undeniable, even to being “more
long-winded than Horace and bitterer than Juvenal,”[426] but to place
him above them in any absolute way is to ignore the greater range
of Dickens, the keener wit of Peacock and Butler, the rarer charm of
Mrs. Gaskell and Trollope, and above all, the superior penetration and
insight of George Eliot and Meredith.
It is not necessary, however, to make all distinctions invidious and
all comparisons odious. Individually and collectively the Victorian
satirists are to be accepted with the ungrudging appreciation they
deserve. The terribly exacting author of _The New Machiavelli_
recognized in their endowment to us nothing but “emasculated thought,”
“a hasty trial experiment, a gigantic experiment of the most slovenly
and wasteful kind,” “a persuasion that whatever is inconvenient or
disagreeable to the English mind could be annihilated by not thinking
about it,”--all resulting in “the clipped and limited literature
that satisfied their souls.” But there is consolation in the
counter-discovery of Professor Sherman (in his _Modern Literature_)
that there was a compensating economy, even in their failure: “Dickens,
Kingsley, Reade, Mrs. Stowe, and the rest,” he reminds us, “they did
not seek to make the world over, but only to accomplish a few, simple
things like abolishing slavery, sweat-shops, Corn Laws, the schools of
Squeers, imprisonment for debt, the red tape of legal procedure, the
belief in pestilence and typhoid as visitations of God--and all that
sort of piddling amelioration.”
For this modest ambition, the Victorians found satire an effective
means, and they proved they could turn it also to more purely artistic
uses. Such as their achievement was, they are doubtless content to
rest in peace upon it, granting without jealousy to their illustrious
successors whatever surpassing results they may be able to accomplish.
CHAPTER II
THE VICTORIAN CONTRIBUTION
By the nineteenth century the general inheritance in ideas and
methods had become so cumulatively rich and various that the chances
for novelty might seem correspondingly meager. But there is always
something new under the sun, and the process of amalgamating that
modicum of newness with the great bulk of the old and established goes
steadily and eternally on--except for abnormal phases of retrogression,
or revolution--forming that ceaseless change in changelessness we call
history. The body of satiric tradition bequeathed to the Victorians
underwent, accordingly, a normal amount of subtraction, addition, and
modification, before being passed on to their successors.
The endowment itself was large and comprehensive, including both
substance and modes, as well as a supplementary current of criticism
and interpretation. In none of these were the Victorians responsible
for a transformation, yet none did they leave _in statu quo_. In
form, however, a great change had recently occurred, operating both
positively and negatively, of which they were just in time to take
advantage. The positive side of it was the development of the satiric
novel in the preceding century, whereby the channel of fiction had
already been accommodated to the satiric stream. This tendency was
reinforced by the negative side, the abandonment of English satire’s
one conventional outlet, the heroic couplet, which naturally diverted
the current still more. The chance that made Byron not only a
brilliant climax to the long line that extended back to Hall and Lodge,
and through them to Juvenal and Horace, but the conclusion as well,
is one of the striking situations in the history of literature. This
transference of the main bulk of satire from the medium of poetry to
that of prose would probably have been accomplished in any case, for
since the Romantic Triumph, poetry had been again devoted to its true
mission as the voice of imagination and spiritual vision, while at
the same time the novel was finding a congenial sphere of action as
a public forum for the discussion of all things from current events
to a philosophy of life. Satire, being presumably a utilitarian
product, would naturally be more suitably allied with fiction, a
branch of Applied Art, than with the Pure Art of poetry. This union is
advantageous for another reason,--the improvement as to proportion.
In verse satire the emphasis is on the satire; in satiric fiction,
the former noun has been relegated to the qualifying function of the
adjective. Since one of the perils of satire is over-emphasis, and
since it can best avoid this peril by combination, the gain in this
arrangement is obvious. As a matter of fact, pure, isolated satire is a
non-existent abstraction, as is illustrated by the very circumstance of
the origin of the name. The _satura lanx_ was a dish of assorted fruit,
and the primitive _saturæ_ which borrowed its name were the impromptu
miscellanies in speech which constituted the social part of the old
Roman Harvest Home. Lucilius and later Horace, wanting a title for
their running commentary on men and manners, found this conveniently
ready. When Juvenal adopted it, he had no notion of restricting the
application:[427]
“_Quicquid agunt homines, votum, timor, ira, voluptas,_
_Gaudia, discursus, nostri est farrago libelli._”
With all these things is the modern novel also concerned, and it too
finds some of them amenable to humorous treatment, and some only to
serious. But so far as change is concerned, it occurs during this
period more in substance than in form. Vice and Folly are still the
nominal targets, whenever these traits seem to be a cause or an effect
of Deceit.[428] But they are somewhat altered in shape, in consequence
of a more subtle analysis of their nature. The great discovery was made
about the deceiver that he is quite as likely as not to be deceiving
himself as well as others,--more than others, indeed, inasmuch as his
very blindness renders him the more transparent. The world, moreover,
growing in suspiciousness and incredulity, is the less easily deceived
and the more able to detect the fraud, which thus reacts like a
boomerang against its perpetrator. In the nineteenth century Pecksniff
really was an archaism; and since Dickens no novelist has portrayed
anything so bald as an unadulterated and unexplained hypocrite.[429]
The evolution in portrayal from the hypocrite to the sentimentalist
is perfectly illustrated by the difference between Pecksniff and
Bulstrode. For the latter we have only a little less sympathy than for
Hawthorne’s Arthur Dimmisdale, in spite of his inferiority in fineness
and ultimate courage. For we are shown the “strange, piteous conflict
in the soul of this unhappy man, who had longed for years to be better
than he was.”[430] Even his prayer after becoming virtually a murderer
is not really a piece of hypocrisy. “Does anyone suppose,” asks Eliot,
“that private prayer is necessarily candid--necessarily goes to the
roots of action?”[431]
George Eliot is, however, even more impressed with the
auto-intoxication of optimism as it manifests itself in what might be
called group psychology; and especially against a disregard of the law
of cause and effect does she turn the shafts of her quiet irony. At the
period when the Raveloe tale opens,--[432]
“It was still that glorious war-time which was felt to be a
peculiar favor of Providence toward the landed interest, and
the fall of prices had not yet come to carry the race of small
squires and yeomen down that road to ruin for which extravagant
habits and bad husbandry were plentifully anointing their
wheels.”
In pursuance of this comfortable philosophy,--
“* * * the rich ate and drank freely, accepting gout and
apoplexy as things that ran mysteriously in respectable
families, and the poor thought that the rich were entirely in
the right of it to lead a jolly life.”
In another story we are introduced to some “pious Dissenting women, who
took life patiently, and thought that salvation depended chiefly on
predestination, and not at all on cleanliness.”[433] In a higher social
class this innocence of the connection between effort and achievement
leads to the fatuous complacency from which Gwendolen Harleth was
aroused by the cruel shock of being told the truth about her musical
abilities:[434]
“She had moved in a society where everything, from low
arithmetic to high art, is of the amateur kind politely supposed
to fall short of perfection only because gentlemen and ladies
are not obliged to do more than they like--otherwise they would
probably give forth abler writings and show themselves more
commanding artists than any the world is at present obliged to
put up with.”
Another busy circle had made two important discoveries: the superiority
of the probable over the actual; and the advantage of a well-chosen
nomenclature, whereby a taste for cruelty may be gratified by the
simple device of calling it kindness. The first was made over the
gossip about Bulstrode:[435]
“Everybody liked better to conjecture how the thing was, than
simply to know it; for conjecture soon became more confident
than knowledge, and had a more liberal allowance for the
incompatible.”
The second developed in a later phase of the same affair:[436]
“To be candid, in Middlemarch phraseology, meant, to use an
early opportunity of letting your friends know that you did not
take a cheerful view of their capacity, their conduct, or their
position; and a robust candour never waited to be asked for its
opinion.”
It was because of this understanding of the limitless possibilities and
universal prevalence of self-deception that Meredith was able to see
the absurdity in egoism, which is the form of the malady induced by
vanity. And this perception, as a modern critic observes, is the source
of the contrast between two well-known egoists,--Sir Charles Grandison
and Sir Willoughby Patterne:[437]
“Both, superficially viewed, are the same type: a male paragon
before whom a bevy of women burn incense. But O the difference!
Grandison is serious to his author, while Meredith, in skinning
Willoughby alive like another Marsyas, is once and for all
making the worship of the ego hateful.”
If one should ask, remembering the necessity for self-assertion in
the exacting requirements of our human destiny, why so indispensable
a thing as egoism should be ridiculous, Meredith has his answer
ready:[438]
“Nay, to be an exalted variety is to come under the calm curious
eye of the comic spirit, and to be probed for what you are.”
It is in “imposing figures” that the malign imps “love to uncover
ridiculousness.” Moreover,--[439]
“They dare not be chuckling while Egoism is valiant, while
sober, while socially valuable, nationally serviceable. They
wait.”
This turn of the satiric road from the hypocritical to the sentimental
side of deceit marked a passage not only through traits of character,
as already noted, but through the realm of institutions, where it might
at first seem to be more out of place. But there is no reason why
organizations should not be as sentimental as the individuals of which
they are composed. Indeed, so far as crowd psychology is in operation,
they would be strengthened in self-deception by their very numbers.
Whether this is the case or not, it is true that the tendency increased
from Peacock to Butler to see in organized groups the absurdity of a
complacent inefficiency. Not because they were failures did English
institutions come under the rod, but because they flourished under a
mighty delusion of success. Smug incompetence, self-satisfied futility,
these were the gaping incongruities between pretense and performance
that made tempting targets out of Society, Church, School, and State;
and thitherward were trained the big and little guns of the satirists.
There is, of course, an underlying cause of this transference of
interest from the more simple and patent hypocrite to the more
subtle and baffling sentimentalist, individual and collective, and
that is found in the spirit of investigation, analysis, probing
beneath surfaces,--not new, to be sure, but newly operative on a
large scale,--known as Science. Science in the intellectual world,
and democracy in the political are the two forces which began in the
nineteenth century the Conquest of Canaan that now in the twentieth
they are gradually completing.
That these two armies are allies is obvious. The end of democracy is an
elevation of the whole plane of human life,--a leveling up and not the
leveling down so feared by Carlyle and the conservative English opinion
of the time. On the emotional and ethical side it is humanitarian,
but in itself it is a rational utilitarian principle. For this
unquestionably practical end, Pure Science furnishes the justification,
indeed, the initial premises, by showing the biology and psychology of
all relationships, the respective effects of coöperation and antagonism
in the natural world, and kindred factors; while Applied Science
supplies the means to that end by discoveries and inventions bearing on
the amelioration and enhancement of living conditions.
The recognition of such startling innovations would be inevitably
slow, and their adoption still slower. But it is precisely in their
ultimately successful struggle for admission into the life and thought
of the nineteenth century that we trace the evolution of the satire
of the period, for the satiric reaction is merely one of the many
reflections of that struggle.
A humanitarian democracy has turned the old _ex cathedra_ criticism
into the forensic. The satirist has been obliged, as one commentator
observes, to descend from the upper window whence he had been
haranguing the mob below; he might have added, much of the mob itself
has been admitted into the entrance halls at least of the great
Administration Building of modern life. But meanwhile the scientific
method has added reason to emotion, so that while the democratic ideal
was conceived in a rationalized sympathy, the stress has slipped more
and more from the sympathetic to the rational element. None of the
Victorians expressly would have denied the Moral Obligation to be
Intelligent, but George Eliot, Meredith, and Butler were the first to
make a real point of it. For by the latter half of the century the
laboratory had come to be acknowledged as the colleague, if not the
successor, of the pulpit, for implicit sermonizing as well as explicit
instruction. And in the exercise of these functions, while the pulpit
may indulge at times in a decorous ridicule, it is the laboratory that
is the real, spontaneous, unconscious satirist. When the solemn moral
exhortation, _Ought_, was supplanted by the autocratic scientific
command, _Must_--_if_, the expression changed from earnest pleading
to detached humor. For the moralist takes himself, his message, and
his hearers, seriously, but the scientist has the indifferent attitude
that if you refuse to obey, the consequences, serious indeed and not
to be averted or escaped, will come, not in the guise of punishment or
retribution, but through the inexorable operation of law. Accordingly,
if you try to delude yourself into the supposition that you can evade
the orders of nature, the joke is on you.
While, therefore, in Victorian satire the old familiar faces of
Society, State, and Church reappear, they are subjected to a new
treatment, as the result of a new diagnosis.
The School and the Press are the only additions to the time-honored
objects, because of their more recent emergence into the light. The
erection of the School into a public institution, together with the
subsidence of the Church into the sphere of private life, marks indeed
a radical change in viewpoint,--advancing from the assumption that the
State must insure the religion of its citizens, let them be educated
how they might (except that for a long time they had no choice but
to take their secular learning from the hands of the clergy) to the
realization that if those responsible for the general welfare would
provide for a general diffusion of enlightenment, the religious
sentiment might safely be trusted to those whom it concerned, namely,
the individuals themselves. In regard to all these institutions the
old, sharply defined contrast between guilty, satirized protagonist
and indicting, satirical antagonist has disappeared. In its place
is a decided tendency toward the fellow-member, fellow-citizen,
fellow-sinner attitude, which at least has the advantage always held
by the empiric knowledge of the insider over the deductive inference of
the outsider.
In the social field the most notable alteration is in the satire
of woman. From the time of the Greek Simonides and the Hebrew
epigrammatists, feminine foibles have been alluring game for
masculine-made arrows. The shrew, the gossip, the blue-stocking, the
interfering stepmother, the intriguing wife, the extravagant daughter,
the lady of fashion, have been detected with unerring clarity of vision
and pursued with accomplished skill. They have also been taken for
granted. It was not until the modern inquiry into cause and effect was
instituted that the feminine failure was viewed as an effect of which
society was largely the cause, by withholding opportunity on one hand,
and on the other encouraging the very ignorance and inanity it affected
to despise. This discovery led logically to the shifting of the satire
from effect back to cause, and the addition of another item to the list
wherein the concerted action of the social group is held accountable
for any malign influence on its members.
This probing into causes is even more sweepingly operative in
the larger society of mankind and the body politic. The study of
economics and sociology inevitably has switched the old partisan
antagonism into a new opposition based more consciously on theories of
government,--still partisan, to be sure, but less on personal and more
on philosophical grounds. The new element this brings into political
satire is the effort to create a public sense of shame for official
incompetence, since in a democracy (and such, in some form or other,
is almost every modern State) the blame for this incompetence rests
ultimately on the public. Modern critics may echo Isaiah’s scornful
complaint of state officialdom,--“The ancient and the honorable
man, he is the head; and the prophet that teacheth lies, he is the
tail,”--but their remedy would lie not in increased reliance on a
theocracy but in a more adequate popular referendum. John Barton
concludes his impassioned tirade against mill-owners and capitalists
with the argument,--[440]
“Don’t think to come over me with th’ old tale, that the rich
know nothing of the trials of the poor; I say, if they don’t
know, they ought to know. We’re their slaves as long as we can
work; we pile up their fortunes with the sweat of our brows,
and yet we are to live as separate as Dives and Lazarus, with a
great gulf betwixt us: but I know who was best off then.”
On another occasion he adds this explanation,--[441]
“What we all feel sharpest is the want of inclination to try
and help the evils which come like blights at times over the
manufacturing places, while we see the masters can stop work and
not suffer.”
To this serious and personal grief Meredith responds, as it were, in
his more impersonal and ironic manner. Diana represents the view from a
position of equality, and the satire of one’s own class:[442]
“And charity is haunted, like everything we do. Only I say
with my whole strength--yes, I am sure, in spite of the men
professing that they are practical, the rich will not move
without a goad. I have and hold--you shall hunger and covet,
until you are strong enough to force my hand;--that’s the speech
of the wealthy. And they are Christians. In name. Well, I thank
heaven I’m at war with myself.’”
Kingsley is spurred by the subject to a bitter sarcasm:[443]
“The finest of us are animals, after all, and live by eating
and sleeping, and, taken as animals, not so badly off,
either--unless we happen to be Dorsetshire laborers--or
Spitalfield weavers--or colliery children--or marching
soldiers--or, I am afraid, one half of English souls this day.”
Nor is he lacking in a constructive outlook. In connection with a
fling at the “amusingly inconsistent, however well-meant scene in
_Coningsby_,” in which Disraeli illustrates his idea of a beneficent
aristocracy, he has one of his characters meditate that--[444]
“It may suit the Mr. Lyles of this age * * * to make the people
constantly and visibly comprehend that property is their
protector and their friend, but I question whether it will suit
the people themselves, unless they can make property understand
that it owes them something more definite than protection.”
At that time there was not much disposition to believe these ills
could be cured by legislation. On the contrary, the numerous satiric
hits at various governmental departments were aimed not at the general
_laissez faire_ policy of the State, but at its indifferent success in
the matters over which it had already assumed jurisdiction, and its
unwarranted encroachment into others. The reasoning seemed to be that
an institution which had been unfaithful and convicted of inertness,
graft, and stupidity in its limited operations would be unlikely to
be more alert, honest, and intelligent if its burdens were increased.
David Copperfield is shocked to learn from Mr. Spenlow the ways of
the law, and still more so at Mr. Spenlow’s coldness toward the idea
of reform.[445] Henry Little wades through and climbs over all sorts
of official obstacles until “he had done, in sixty days, what a true
inventor will do in twenty-four hours, whenever the various metallic
ages shall be succeeded by the age of reason.”[446] A prison inspector
is finally confronted with actual facts of a horrifying nature:[447]
“How unreal and idle appeared now the twenty years gone in tape
and circumlocution! Away went his life of shadows--his career of
watery polysyllables meandering through the great desert into
the Dead Sea.”
But more subtle and vital than all these errors,--the error indeed at
the root of them all,--is the failure of the State to utilize the fine
material placed at its disposal, potentially if not actually, in the
lives of noble and capable youth. No one before Lytton could have laid
at the door of society the wasted possibilities of a Godolphin. No
one before Meredith could have made the thwarted career of a Beauchamp
a pitiful satire on “his indifferent England,” who appeared, “with
a quiet derision that does not belie her amiable passivity, to have
reduced in Beauchamp’s career the boldest readiness for public action,
and some good stout efforts besides, to the flat result of an optically
discernible influence of our hero’s character in the domestic circle:
perhaps a faintly outlined circle or two beyond it.”[448]
In Society and the State all opposition is necessarily factional,
for none can stand entirely outside. This was true of the Church
also, during its undisputed supremacy, when to be excommunicated was
equivalent to being imprisoned or otherwise put outside the pale. But
by the sixteenth century Skelton could say in _Colyn Clout_,
“For, as farre as I can se,
It is wrong with eche degre;
For the temporalte
Accuseth the spiritualte;
The spirituall agayne
Dothe grudge and complayne
Upon the temporall men:”
By the eighteenth, Voltaire could get a hearing, albeit a hostile and
scandalized one. And by the nineteenth, we have not only Brontë and
Kingsley censuring from within, but Meredith and Butler from without.
So far as there is a new note in the censure, it is in harmony with
the whole strain of the time. For the old crude gibes against the old
crude faults of hypocrisy, sensuality, and greed, is substituted the
criticism that a huge organization fails to utilize the tremendous
power of its equipment, prestige, and authority, in the furtherance of
general progress and the establishment of a genuine kingdom of God here
upon earth. For from the spiritualte as well as the temporalte the new
humanitarian spirit demands recognition and service.
These modifications in form and substance were induced by a
modification, probably unconscious, of the idea of satire itself, and
they in turn reacted on it to strengthen the changing conception.
The two main elements,--a wider socialization in the point of view,
and a firmer insistence on an understanding of conditions such as
could not be secured under the old artless habit of accepting the
premises,--stand for that union of feeling and intelligence which was
the ideal of the nineteenth century. “Men,” says Meredith, “and the
ideas of men, which are * * * actually the motives of men in a greater
degree than their appetites; these are my theme;”[449] and again,
“The Gods of this world’s contests demand it of us, in relation to
them, that the mind, and not the instincts, shall be at work.”[450]
The corollary of this is that though satire may be “a passion to
sting and tear,” it must do so “on rational grounds.”[451] “Satire,”
says Trollope, “though it may exaggerate the vice it lashes, is not
justified in creating it in order that it may be lashed. Caricature
may too easily become a slander, and satire a libel.”[452] Sympathy
and intelligence have no objection to pungency and forcefulness, but
they have no real need for truculence or unfairness. It is, as Garnett
suggests, the unsophisticated man who regards satire as the offspring
of ill-nature. Such was the intellectual status of Lady Middleton, who
could not feel an affinity for Elinor and Marianne Dashwood:[453]
“Because they neither flattered herself nor her children, she
could not believe them good-natured; and because they were fond
of reading, she fancied them satirical: perhaps without exactly
knowing what it was to be satirical; but that did not signify.
It was censure in common use, and easily given.”
The vague notion that a satirist is something disagreeable will of
course never quite be eradicated, at least not until people learn to
like being ridiculed and criticised. But in manner he is undeniably
growing less disagreeable than has been his wont. Another reason for
this, in addition to the changes already noted, is the increased
activity of that reflexive sense of humor which operates as an
antitoxin to the vanity inherent in all critics. A wholesome fear of
being absurd serves to reduce one’s chances of being that rich anomaly,
a ridiculous satirist. The modern satirist may possess a mind conscious
to itself of right and a conviction that he has a mission to perform.
But he is more prone to conceal or even disclaim these things than
to advertise them. Even Fielding did not proclaim, as he might have
done, that he first adventured. Peacock trusted to his readers to
discover that fools being his theme, satire must be his song. Since
his time, satire, while questioning all things with a new penetration,
has succeeded in taking on an air of unconcern and in realizing that
neither promises nor apologies are necessary. Post-Byronic satire
seldom vaunts itself, and, however superior it may feel, it pretends
that it is not puffed up. A historian describes the change that takes
place between the Age of Elizabeth, when satire “was the pastime of
very young men, who ‘railed on Lady Fortune in good set terms,’” and
the Commonwealth, when the combatants “left Nature and Fortune with
their withers unwrung, and aimed at the joints in the harness of their
enemies.”[454] To the Victorians, satire was neither a pastime nor a
matter for deadly earnestness. Armored antagonists had gone out of
fashion; and Lady Fortune was left to the metaphysicians.
It is, indeed, a matter of curious interest that one object of
satire, life itself, which had drawn fire occasionally all the
way from Aristophanes to Byron, should have been neglected by the
Victorians,--though the neglect may be accounted for by their interest
in the concrete and their generally optimistic outlook. On the other
hand, one of the most philosophic and least optimistic of them
devotes several bow-shots to a sort of counter attack, against those
who consider the universe a fit subject for satire. The Prelude to
_Middlemarch_ identifies the heroine as one of those unfortunate
women of deep souls and shallow circumstances, “who found for
themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of
far-resonant action.” To this the comment is added:[455]
“Some have felt that these blundering lives are due to the
inconvenient indefiniteness with which the Supreme Power has
fashioned the natures of women: if there were one level of
feminine incompetence as strict as the ability to count three
and no more, the social lot of women might be treated with
scientific certitude.”
The fact, however, that “Here and there is born a Saint Theresa,
foundress of nothing,” is not an irony of fate so much as a folly of
society. Later in the story the philosophizing of one of the characters
leads the author to the reflection:
“Some gentlemen have made an amazing figure in literature by
general discontent with the universe as a trap of dulness into
which their great souls have fallen by mistake; but the sense
of a stupendous self and an insignificant world may have its
consolations.”
Nay, the metaphysician himself does not altogether escape. Piero de
Cosimo is accused of being one and repudiates the idea:[456]
“Not I, Messer Greco; a philosopher is the last sort of animal
I should choose to resemble. I find it enough to live, without
spinning lies to account for life. Fowls cackle, asses bray,
women chatter, and philosophers spin false reasons--that’s the
effect the sight of the world brings out of them.”
This perception of the Idol of the Cave, and the whole trend of Eliot’s
argument is evidence that the pragmatic attitude existed some time
before it was so vividly and enduringly defined by Professor James.
Since these various changes bring about no complete break with the
satiric tradition, we may expect to find the connecting links with
both the remote and the immediate past as much in evidence as are
the features of novelty. Peacock’s indebtedness was to the Athenian
comedy, and Lytton’s to the near-contemporary Byron. Mrs. Gaskell had
Jane Austen and Crabbe and the whole gallery of eighteenth-century
village vignettes for her humors of rural life; while her _Mary
Barton_ probably reached back to _Sybil_, as it did forward to
the line of economic novels. Thackeray had a large store to draw on for
his burlesques, as did Lytton and Butler for their pseudo-Utopias.
Nor is there any abrupt termination to satiric affairs as the
Victorians left them at the end of the century. The years stand as
sign posts along the way, and not as barriers across it. The changes
they call our attention to were less patent to those in and by whom
they were working than to us with our perspective. From our moderate
distance we are able to discern not only the evolutionary process but
some of its results.
In a national award the satiric prize would undoubtedly go to the
French, whose genius for satire not only gave them preëminence among
the peoples in that line, but gave their satire precedence over their
other literature. But with this exception, the total effect of satire
in the Victorian novel ranks artistically with the highest at large,
and surpasses some other elements of the fiction itself. For the
nineteenth-century novel is undeniably didactic, and therefore, while
it gains in point, significance, and intellectual interest, it loses in
romantic interest and esthetic purity. It is here that satire becomes
its salvation, for by giving much of the criticism a humorous turn it
counteracts the didactic effect, enhances delight, and, to readers
of a sensitive response, makes a point that would not be sharpened
by increased vehemence. No invective against the Countess de Saldar
could be so illuminating as Lady Jocelyn’s thorough relish of her as a
specimen. It is of a piece with Mr. Bennet’s enjoyment of Collins and
Wickham;[457] with Lamb’s avowal that he would rather lose the legacy
Dorrell cheated him out of than “be without the idea of that specious
old rogue;” and with the dismay of Don Antonio over the restored sanity
of Don Quixote.[458] It is the secret of Trollope’s charm, as Hawthorne
indicated when he described the impression of those “beef and ale”
novels,--
“* * * as if some giant had hewn a great lump out of the earth
and put it under a glass case, with all its inhabitants going
about their daily business, and not suspecting that they were
being made a show of.”
It would have been a saving grace to many of the _dramatis
personæ_ if they could have shared the experience of a romantically
inclined youth who, after building an air castle in which he figured
first as a conquering hero and then as a magnanimous patron, suddenly
“came to:”[459]
“And then he turned upon himself with laughter, discovering a
most wholesome power, barely to be suspected in him yet.”
“What a pity it is,” exclaimed Butler,[460] “that Christian never met
Mr. Common-Sense with his daughter, Good-Humour, and her affianced
husband, Mr. Hate-Cant.” Bunyan doubtless would have replied that he
also approved of these somewhat worldly characters, but that they were
people of less importance in their day than they became thereafter. The
progress of the modern pilgrim is toward a City of Sanitation rather
than Holiness, but sanitation is interpreted so widely as to include
the soul also in the cleansing process. For this work Common-Sense and
Hate-Cant are our efficiency experts; and that Good-Humour should be a
member of their household is inevitable at a time when graciousness is
accounted not a negligible adornment but a fundamental virtue.
To the poise and proportion contributed to satire by the emphasis on
the quality of humor, must be added the justice that comes from a
rationalized sympathy, and from the counter, positive element which
restores the balance pulled down by destructive criticism. A striking
example of both is furnished by Meredith in his explanation of one of
his characters. No pretender has ever been more skillfully pursued or
more thoroughly unmasked than the ambitious daughter of the great Mel.
After such treatment no one before this time could have presented so
fairly the case for the defendant:[461]
“Now the two Generals--Rose Jocelyn and the Countess de
Saldar--had brought matters to this pass; and from the two
tactical extremes: the former by openness and dash; the latter
by subtlety and her own interpretations of the means extended
to her by Providence. I will not be so bold as to state which
of the two I think right. Good and evil work together in this
world. If the Countess had not woven the tangle, and gained
Evan time, Rose would never have seen his blood,--never have
had her spirit hurried out of all shows and forms and habits
of thought, up to the gates of existence, as it were, where she
took him simply as God created him, and clave to him.”
Thackeray and Trollope also apologize for some of the people they
ridicule, but with this characteristic difference, that Thackeray
bespeaks your indulgence for a Pendennis or a Philip on the Horatian
ground,
“_Nam vitiis nemo sine nascitur; optimus ille est_
_Qui minimis urgetur._”
But Trollope conscientiously reminds the reader that his picture of
an Archdeacon Grantly, a George Bertram, even a Mrs. Proudie, is
one-sided; that their dramatic and amusing faults have been allowed to
overshadow their less entertaining but existent virtues; and that to
know all would be, not to forgive all, but to forgive judiciously. His
story of the childish lapse and manly recovery of the vicar Robarts
concludes with the reflection, “A man may be very imperfect and yet
worth a great deal.”[462] This is a clear, cool discrimination far more
difficult to attain than Thackeray’s nebulous implication that though
this man is certainly very imperfect and not worth a great deal yet his
dear womenkind excuse him and we adore them for it.
George Eliot is too stern to do much excusing, but she always gives
due weight to “the terrible coercion of our deeds.” If she insists on
the baleful effect of yielding to temptation, she insists also on an
appreciation of the tempting force. She analyzes the culprit:[463]
“The action which before commission has been seen with that
blended common-sense and fresh untarnished feeling which is the
healthy eye of the soul, is looked at afterwards with the lens
of apologetic ingenuity, through which all things that men call
beautiful and ugly are seen to be made up of textures very much
alike.”
But at the same time she warns his judges:
“Our deeds determine us as much as we determine our deeds; and
until we know what has been or will be the peculiar combination
of outward with inward facts, which constitutes a man’s critical
actions, it will be better not to think ourselves wise about his
character.”
Elsewhere, on the same theme, she indicates her general impression of
the relative amounts of human wisdom and folly:[464]
“And to judge wisely I suppose we must know how things appear to
the unwise; that kind of appearance making the larger part of
the world’s history.”
This is in agreement with the point of the lines written on the
portrait of Beau Nash at Bath, placed between the busts of Newton and
Pope:
“This picture placed these busts between,
Gives satire all its strength:
Wisdom and Wit are little seen,
But Folly at full length.”
But this Victorian painter of Folly, and at least some of her
contemporaries, endeavored to make satire realistic by drawing Wit and
Wisdom on a proportionate scale. It was in recognition of this that
Stevenson said,
“My compliments to George Eliot for her Rosamund Vincy; the ugly
work of satire she has transmuted to the ends of art by the
companion figure of Lydgate; and the satire was much wanted for
the education of young men.”
Victorian literature would not have cared to produce a _Ship of
Fools_,--though a passenger list might easily be culled out from its
fiction,--nor a _Hudibras_, nor a _Dunciad_, nor even a _Tartuffe_, for
George Warrington voiced the general sentiment when he said of that
great drama that it could not be reckoned great in comparison with
_Othello_, because “‘a mere villainous hypocrite should not be chief of
a great piece.’”[465]
This segment of literature may not be more sincere in its claim of
truth-telling, but it shows more art in its method; and it is perhaps
even less flattering to human nature in its assumption that simple
exposure, without exaggeration, is quite enough.
Nor did it ever expect its satire to prove revolutionary. Peacock,
first on the list, confessed, through one of his characters, of having
been cured of a passion for reforming the world, “by the conviction of
the inefficacy of moral theory with respect to producing a practical
change in the mass of mankind.” He adds,--[466]
“Custom is the pillar round which opinion twines, and interest
is the tie that binds it. It is not by reason that practical
change can be effected, but by making a puncture to the quick in
the feelings of personal hope and personal fear.”
The fear of being ridiculous is of course one of those which may be
punctured to the quick, and thereby a practical change effected. It is
also true that, the human constitution and capacity being what they
are, constant criticism is necessary. It is the spur, the brake,
the corrective, to inform us when we are going too slow, too fast,
or in the wrong direction. It is not by nature an agreeable thing,
and there are times when it should not be made so. But if there are
deeds and characters beyond the reach of humor, it is equally true,
conversely, as Meredith says:[467] “There are questions as well as
persons that only the Comic can fitly touch.” The paradox arises in
the fact that while criticism is essentially scientific, satire is a
branch of esthetics, which nevertheless has practical proclivities.
These it does no harm to exercise, providing it wreaks no violence
on its character as an art. But the effect of satire must not be
confused with its quality. It cannot be said that he satirizes best
who reforms most,--the harvest of reform from satiric seed being
granted. Concerning a pitchfork or muckrake there is no question of
art: concerning a statue there is no question of utility: but satire is
like a silver spoon, which partakes of both qualities, and is estimated
sometimes according to one, sometimes the other, and sometimes a
compromise between the two.
“_C’est une étrange entreprise_,” exclaimed Molière, “_que celle
de faire rire les honnêtes gens_.” The strangeness of it becomes
more striking when we remember that the laughter of the race is
directed against itself and at the very things over which it is most
sensitive,--its own inept follies and poor flimsy pretenses. But it is
unendurable only in the form of the “grinning sneer” of Blifil. Even
ridicule may be welcome if it comes from the genial Allworthy, whose
“smiles at folly were indeed such as we may suppose the angels bestow
on the absurdities of mankind.” Not all satirists are so benign, but
such benignity is not incompatible with the finest satire. Meredith
himself, after writing a dozen novels permeated with the most pungent
satire, said in the last one that “if we bring reason to scan our laugh
at pure humanity, it is we who are in place of the ridiculous, for
doing what reason disavows.”[468]
It may be that as we reason more we laugh less; and that brings the
question whether it were wiser to check the reasoning or quench the
laughter. Since, however, laughter is likely to improve in quality as
it diminishes in quantity, we may be content to abjure the witticism
at which “the fool lifteth up his voice with laughter,” and substitute
the reflective wit over which “the clever man will scarce smile
quietly.” Such was the mild aspiration of the humorous Victorians; but
though mild, the spirit was ubiquitous. It gave tone to the pessimism
of Thompson and temper to the optimism of Stevenson; it colored
darkly the defiant pages of Carlyle and tinged lightly the protesting
paragraphs of Arnold; it lent an edge to the sentiment of Tennyson and
humanized the philosophy of Browning. It even dignified the comicality
of _Punch_, for Douglas Jerrold, at least, was far from being
an irresponsible jester. His gruesome _Dish of Glory_, with its
ironical advice to the French to eat the Algerians as fast as they
conquer them, will bear comparison with _The Modest Proposal_.
The dedication of volume eight also illustrates the new effect of
self-turned irony:
“As young Aurora, with her blaze of light,
Into the shade throws all the pride of night,
And pales presumptuous stars, who vainly think
That every eye is on them as they blink:
So _Punch_, the light and glory of the time,
His wit and wisdom brilliant as sublime,
Scares into shades Cant’s hypocritic throng,
Abashes Folly, and exposes wrong.”
This may sound like an echo from the Elizabethans and the Augustans;
but the difference wherewith the Victorians wear their rue is as
important as it is subtle. The two great influences of their time,
Science and Democracy, operating upon their life and literature,
made them at once sensitive to the reasons for man’s shortcomings,
and sensible of the absurd position of the avowed castigator--who,
moreover, by his very situation as a sharp-shooter renders himself in
turn the more conspicuous target.
Man’s record here below gives little cause, it is true, for
congratulation; so discounted are his astonishing successes by
his disheartening, hopeless failures. Colossal in blunder as in
achievement, stupendous in fanaticism as in imagination, nevertheless
he may maintain, on the authority of a deterministic philosophy, that
he has literally done the best he could. His very faculty of deception
is often but an adoption of that protective coloring recognized as
one of Nature’s most admirable devices. The human race is indeed
provocative, but who that understands can have the heart to yield
to the provocation? Even the most accomplished satirist of his time
concluded that he would stick to sober philosophy,--[469]
“And irony and satire off me throw.
They crack a childish whip, drive puny herds,
Where numbers crave their sustenance in words.”
But though a knowledge of mortal psychology does have a tendency to
take the starch out of satire, it does not thereby destroy the fabric
but only leaves it the more diaphanous. It no longer rustles and
crackles but flows instead with the sweeter liquefaction of Julia’s
silk. This gentle diffusion of her presence is a less obtrusive rôle
than satire has hitherto enjoyed but is none the less essential, and
in any case it is all that can be allowed by a scientific, democratic
society, too well informed to deal only with surfaces, too preoccupied
with its own business and desires, such as they are, to worry much
about the fiasco others make of theirs, too polite to scold even with
wit, and too truly humorous to tolerate the superior pose.
In proportion however, as the individual is spared, the burden of
responsibility is shifted to the collected shoulders of the society he
has bound himself into. Logically, of course, the collection is no more
guilty than its constituents, but it has the advantage of being quite
as vulnerable and capable of improvement, and yet not endowed with
personal feelings to be wounded or personal ability to retaliate.
So far as there is a definite Victorian contribution to the garner of
satire, it lies in this democratization of objects and rationalization
of methods. How great an impulse the Victorians gave to the era of
agnosticism and revaluation of all ideals whose inception so troubled
the waters of their reluctant souls, we never can know. What Shaw,
Ibsen, Maeterlinck, Rostand, even Wells and Nietzsche, would have been
without Peacock, Disraeli, Carlyle, Dickens, George Eliot, Huxley,
Meredith, and Butler, is a question that admits of a wide solution.
But it is assuredly as foolish to disdain the offerings of a past
generation, however erring, ignorant, and prejudiced we may consider it
in the light of our own emancipation and advancement, as to suppose
that we shall count for more than our due modicum in the centuries to
come.
However that may be, we have as yet invented nothing to surpass the
general Victorian satiric philosophy,--that the wisest reaction to
life is a high seriousness graced with humor, and the most acceptable
attitude toward one’s fellow creatures is a compassionate comprehension
of our common tragedy, redeemed from emotionalism by an ironic
appreciation of the human comedy.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Since the bibliography of this subject is necessarily too extensive
to be cited in full, the following list includes only those volumes
of especial importance, particularly in the field of satire. For
convenience the list is classified according to the main divisions of
the material.
I
ON SATIRE
Alden, R. M.: _The Rise of Formal Satire in England under
Classical Influence_. Univ. of Penn. Pub., Phil. Series, VII,
2, 1902.
Bergson, Henri: _Laughter_. (Translated by Brereton and
Rothwell.) Macmillan, 1912.
Brown, John: _An Essay on Satire_. In Dodsley’s Collection
of Poems.
Buckingham, Duke of: _An Essay on Satire_. In the
Scott-Saintsbury edition of Dryden, XV.
Dryden, John: _Essay on Satire_. Above, XIII.
Flögel, Karl. _Geschichte des Grotesk Komischen in
Litterature_, (reprinted.) 1886.
Garnett, Richard: Article on Satire in the Encyclopedia
Britannica.
Hannay, James: _Satire and Satirists_. Redfield, 1856.
Henderson, E. F.: _Symbol and Satire in the French
Revolution_. Putnam, 1912.
Lenient, C.: _La Satire en France au Moyen Age_. Hachette,
1859.
Lenient, C.: _La Satire en France au XV et XVI Siècles_.
Hachette, 1866.
Meredith, George: _Essay on Comedy_. Scribner.
Morris, Corbyn: _An Essay towards fixing the True Standards of
Wit, Humour, Raillery, Satire, and Ridicule_. London, 1743.
Neff, T. L.: _La Satire des Femmes dans la Poesie Lyrique
Français du Moyen Age_. Paris, 1900.
Previté-Orton, C. W.: _Political Satire in English Poetry_.
Cambridge University Press, 1910.
Schneegans, H.: _Geschichte der Grotesken Satire_.
Strassburg, 1984.
Tucker, S. M.: _Verse-Satire in England before the
Renaissance_. Columbia University Press, 1908.
Comments on satire of a more incidental and yet interesting nature are
found in prefaces and translations, in essays on kindred topics, and in
general histories of literature. (In some cases it is hard to decide to
which group a given citation should be assigned. A few are practically
interchangeable.)
Ball, A. P.: _The Satire of Seneca_. Columbia University
Press, 1902.
Besant, Sir Walter: _The French Humourists from the Twelfth to
the Nineteenth Centuries_. Bentley, 1873.
Boileau, Nicolas: A short prose treatise published with the
_Satires_.
Bourne, Randolph: _The Life of Irony_. Atlantic Monthly,
III, 357.
Cannan, Gilbert: _Satire_. (Short monograph.) Doran.
Chesterton, G. K.: _Pope and the Art of Satire_. In
_Varied Types_. Dodd, Mead, 1908.
Fuess, C. M.: _Lord Byron as a Satirist in Verse_. Columbia
University Press, 1912.
Headlam, Cecil: _Selections from the British Satirists_.
Robinson, 1897.
Jackson, Thomas: _The Use of Irony_. Introductory Essay to
_A Narrative of the Fire of London_, by Peter Maritzburg.
London, 1869.
L’Estrange, A. G.: _History of English Humour_. London,
1877.
Matthews, Brander: _On American Satire in Verse_. Harper’s
Magazine, CIV, 294.
Myres, Ernest: _English Satire in the Nineteenth Century_.
Living Age, 1882.
Paley, F. A.: _Fragments of the Greek Comic Poets_.
Macmillan, 1892.
Smeaton, W. H.: _English Satires_. London, 1899.
Stokes, F. G. (editor): _Epistolæ Obscurorum Vivorum_.
Chatto and Windus, 1909.
Symonds, J. A.: _The Renaissance in Italy_. (Vol. V, Chap.
XIV.) Holt, 1888.
Taine, H. A: _History of English Literature_. Chapter on
Thackeray.
Ullman, B. L.: _Horace on the Nature of Satire_.
Transactions of the American Philological Association, 1917.
Van Laun, H.: _History of French Literature_. Introduction,
and Book IV, Chap. I. Putman, 1876.
Wright, Thomas: _Anglo-Saxon Satirical Poets and
Epigrammatists of the Twelfth Century_. London, 1872.
Wright, Thomas: _A History of Caricature and Grotesque in
Literature and Art_, 1865.
The satirists themselves who have been sufficiently self-conscious of
their art to discuss it more or less include, on the Continent, Horace,
Juvenal, Lucian, Cervantes, and Boileau; and in England, Barclay,
Skelton, Gascoigne, Marston, Jonson, Defoe, Swift, Pope, Young,
Johnson, Fielding, Churchill, Cowper, Wolcott, Gifford, Byron, Peacock,
Thackeray, Dickens, Trollope, and Meredith.
II
ON THE NOVEL
Brownell, W. C.: _Victorian Prose Masters_. Doubleday,
Page, 1902.
Brownell, W. C.: _The Novelists_. (Warner Classics.)
Doubleday, Page, 1905.
Burton, Richard: _Masters of the English Novel_. Holt, 1909.
Cross, W. L.: _Development of the English Novel_.
Macmillan, 1905.
Dawson, W. J.: _Makers of English Fiction_. Revell, 1905.
Holliday, Carl: _English Fiction_. Century, 1912.
Lord, W. F.: _The Mirror of the Century_. Lane, 1906.
Oliphant, James: _Victorian Novelists_. Blackie, 1899.
Phelps, W. L.: _Advance of the English Novel_. Dodd, Mead,
1916.
Raleigh, Walter: _The English Novel_. Murray, 1911.
Saintsbury, George: _The English Novel_. Dutton, 1913.
Stoddard, F. L.: _Evolution of the English Novel_.
Macmillan, 1909.
On the Nineteenth Century in general some of the most important volumes
are:
Brandes, Georg: _Main Currents in Nineteenth Century
Literature_. London, 1905.
Bryce, James: _Studies in Contemporary Biography_.
Macmillan, 1903.
Chesterton, G. K.: _The Victorian Age in Literature_. Holt,
1914.
Gosse, Edmund: _English Literature in the Nineteenth
Century_. Putnam, 1901.
Harrison, Frederic: _Studies in Early Victorian
Literature_. Longmans, 1906.
Magnus, Laurie: _English Literature in the Nineteenth
Century_. Putnam, 1909.
Saintsbury, George: _History of Nineteenth Century
Literature_. Macmillan, 1899.
Saintsbury, George: _The Later Nineteenth Century_. In
_Periods of European Literature_. Blackwood, 1907.
Walker, Hugh: _Literature of the Victorian Era_. Cambridge
University Press, 1901.
III
ON THE NOVELISTS
Brontë.
Birrell, Augustine: _Life of Charlotte Brontë_. Walter Scott,
1887.
Gaskell, Mrs.: _Life of Charlotte Brontë_. Harper, 1902.
Goldring, Maude: _Charlotte Brontë, the Woman; a Study_.
Scribner, 1916.
Shorter, C. K.: _The Brontës: Life and Letters_. Scribner,
1900.
Butler.
Cannan, Gilbert: _Samuel Butler, a Critical Study_. London,
1915.
Harris, J. E.: _Samuel Butler, Author of Erewhon_. London,
1916.
Dickens.
Chesterton, G. K.: _Charles Dickens, a Critical Study_. Dodd,
Mead, 1906.
Chesterton, G. K.: _Appreciation and Criticism of the Works of
Charles Dickens_. Dent, 1911.
Cooper, F. T.: (Translator from the French of Keine and Lumet,
in the Great Men Series.) Stokes, 1914.
Crotch, W. W.: _The Pageant of Dickens_. Chapman and Hall,
1916.
_The Soul of Dickens_. Chapman and Hall, 1916.
_Charles Dickens, Social Reformer_. Chapman
and Hall, 1916.
Fitzgerald, P. H.: _The Life of Charles Dickens as Revealed in
his Works_. Chatto and Windus, 1905.
Forster, John: _Life of Charles Dickens_. (Now included with
the Gadshill edition). Chapman and Hall, 1904.
Gissing, George: _Charles Dickens, a Critical Study_. Dodd,
Mead, 1898.
Hughes, J. L.: _Dickens as an Educator_. Appleton, 1901.
Marzials, Sir Frank: _Life of Charles Dickens_. Walter Scott,
1887.
Swinburne, C. A.: _Charles Dickens_. London, 1913.
Ward, A. W.: _Charles Dickens_. (Men of Letters.) Harper,
1901.
Disraeli.
Arnot, Robert: _The Earl of Beaconsfield_. Dunn, 1904.
Brandes, Georg: _Lord Beaconsfield, a Study_. Scribner, 1880.
Froude, J. A.: _Lord Beaconsfield_. (Prime Ministers of Queen
Victoria.) London, 1890.
Mill, John: _Disraeli, the Author, Orator, and Statesman_.
London, 1863.
Moneypenny and Buckle: _Life of Benjamin Disraeli_. Macmillan,
1916.
O’Connor, T. P.: _Lord Beaconsfield, a Biography_. Fisher
Unwin, 1905.
Eliot.
Blind, Mathilde: _George Eliot_. (Eminent Women.) Allen, 1884.
Browning, Oscar: _Life of George Eliot_. (Great Writers).
Walter Scott, 1892.
Cooke, G. W.: _George Eliot, a Critical Study_. Houghton,
Mifflin, 1883.
Cross, J. W.: _Life and Letters of George Eliot_. Blackwood,
1885.
Stephen, Leslie: _George Eliot_. (Men of Letters.) Macmillan,
1902.
Thomson, Clara: _George Eliot_. (Westminster Biographies.)
Paul, Trench, 1901.
Gaskell.
Shorter, Clement: _Life of Mrs. Gaskell_. (Men of Letters.)
Macmillan, 1904.
Kingsley.
Kaufman, M.: _Charles Kingsley, Christian Socialist and Social
Reformer_. London, 1892.
Stubbs, C. W.: _Charles Kingsley and the Christian Social
Movement_. (Victorian Era.) London, 1899.
Lytton.
Cooper, Thomas: _Lord Lytton_. (Men of the Time.) Routledge,
1873.
Lytton, Earl of: _Life of Edward Bulwer, first Lord Lytton_.
Macmillan, 1913.
Meredith.
Bailey, E. J.: _The Novels of George Meredith_. Scribner,
1907.
Beach, J. W.: _The Comic Spirit in Meredith_. Longmans, Green,
1911.
Crees, J. H. E.: _George Meredith, a Study_. Oxford University
Press, 1918.
Curle, R. H. P.: _Aspects of George Meredith_. Dutton, 1908.
Hammerton, J. A.: _George Meredith in Anecdote and Criticism_.
London, 1909.
Le Gallienne, Richard: _George Meredith, Some Characteristics_.
Lane, 1915.
Lynch, Hannah: _George Meredith_. London, 1891.
Moffat, James: _A Primer to the Novels of George Meredith_.
London, 1909.
Trevelyan, G. M.: _The Poetry and Philosophy of George
Meredith_. London, 1913.
Peacock.
Freeman, A. M.: _Thomas Love Peacock, a Critical Study_.
Kennerley, 1911.
Paul, H.: _The Novels of Thomas Love Peacock_. London, 1904.
Van Doren, Carl: _Life of Thomas Love Peacock_. Dutton, 1911.
Young, A. B.: _Life and Novels of Thomas Love Peacock_.
Norwich, 1904.
Reade.
Coleman, John: _Charles Reade_. London, 1903.
Thackeray.
Benjamin, L. S.: (Lewis Melville.) _William Makepeace
Thackeray, a Biography_. Lane, 1910.
Benjamin, L. S.: _Some Aspects of Thackeray_. Little, Brown,
1911.
Chesterton and Melville: _Thackeray_. London, 1903.
Jack, A. A.: _Thackeray, a Study_. London, 1895.
Merivale and Marzials: _Life of William Makepeace Thackeray_.
Scott, 1891.
Trollope, Anthony: _William Makepeace Thackeray_. (Men of
Letters.) Macmillan, 1905.
Whibley, Charles: _William Makepeace Thackeray_. (Modern
English Writers.) London, 1904.
Trollope.
Escott, Thomas: _Anthony Trollope_. Lane, 1913.
Nearly half these novelists left collections of letters. Lytton’s and
George Eliot’s were published with their biographies. The others are:
Dickens. Edited by Mamie Dickens and Georgina Hogarth. Latest
edition, Macmillan, 1893.
Meredith. Edited by his son. Scribner, 1912.
Thackeray.
_A Collection of Letters of Thackeray_. (To the Brookfields.)
Scribner, 1887.
_Letters of Thackeray to an American Family._ Smith, Elder,
1904.
_Some Family Letters of William Makepeace Thackeray._
Houghton, Mifflin, 1911.
The only autobiography is Trollope’s. Edited by H. M. Trollope. Harper,
1883.
* * * * *
Two especially noteworthy pieces of editorial Introduction should be
mentioned: Garnett’s for Peacock, and Mrs. Ritchie’s for Thackeray.
Among the many essays and shorter studies are the following:
Brontë, in Gates’s _Studies and Appreciations_; and
Swinburne’s _A Note on Charlotte Brontë_.
Eliot, in Darmstetter’s _English Studies_, Dowden’s
_Studies in Literature_, Morley’s _Critical
Miscellanies_, Myers’ _Modern Essays_, and Sherer’s
_Essays on English Literature_.
Meredith, in Elton’s _Modern Studies_, Henderson’s
_Interpreters of Life and the Modern Spirit_, and Sherman’s
_On Contemporary Literature_. Forman is editor of a volume
_Some Early Appreciations of Meredith_.
Reade, in _Swinburne’s Miscellanies_.
Trollope, in Bradford’s _A Naturalist of Souls_, and Julian
Hawthorne’s _Confessions in Criticism_.
And finally there are certain combinations and groups, such as:
Brontë and Eliot, in Bonnell’s _Charlotte Brontë, George
Eliot, and Jane Austen_.
Brontë, Dickens, Eliot, Thackeray, and Trollope, in Saintsbury’s
_Corrected Impressions_; and Peacock, in his _Essays in
English Literature_.
Brontë, Disraeli, Kingsley, and Eliot, in Stephen’s _Hours
in a Library_; and Trollope, in his _Studies of a
Biographer_.
Dickens and Thackeray, in Bagehot’s _Literary Studies_, and
Field’s _Yesterdays with Authors_.
Dickens, Thackeray, and Eliot, in Clark’s _Study of English
Prose Writers_.
Dickens, Thackeray, and Kingsley, in Lang’s _Essays in
Little_.
Dickens and Lytton, in Home’s _New Spirit of the Age_.
Dickens, in Hutton’s _Criticism on Contemporary Thought and
Thinkers_, and Eliot, in his _Essays on Some Modern Guides
to English Thought_.
Dickens, Disraeli, Gaskell, and Meredith, in More’s _Shelburne
Essays_.
Disraeli and Peacock, in Garnett’s _Essays of an
ex-Librarian_.
Eliot, in Berle’s _George Eliot and Thomas Hardy_.
Eliot and Trollope, in James’s _Partial Portraits_.
The following editions of the novelists are those referred to in the
text.
Brontë.
_Jane Eyre._ Haworth edition. Harper.
_Shirley_ and _Villette_. Dent edition.
Butler.
_Erewhon_ and _Erewhon Revisited_. Dutton.
_The Way of All Flesh. Modern Library_ edition. Boni
and Liveright.
Dickens.
_Pickwick_, _Oliver Twist_, _Nicholas Nickleby_,
_Martin Chuzzlewit_, _Hard Times_, _Little
Dorrit_, _Tale of Two Cities_, _Our Mutual Friend_.
Hearst International edition.
_Great Expectations_, and _Edwin Drood_. The Jefferson
Press.
_Dombey and Son._ Crowell.
_Barnaby Rudge._ Chapman and Hall.
_Disraeli._ Longmans, Green.
Eliot.
_Middlemarch_ and _Mill on the Floss_. Blackwood.
All the others, Scribners’ Standard edition.
Gaskell. Smith, Elder.
Kingsley. Macmillan.
Lytton. Knebworth edition. Routledge and Sons.
Meredith.
_Sandra Belloni_, _Celt and Saxon_, and _One of Our
Conquerors_: Scribner.
All the others, Constable.
Peacock. Aldine edition. Dent.
Reade. Dana Estes.
Trollope.
Cathedral Series and _The Claverings_: Smith, Elder.
Manor House Series. Dodd, Mead.
_The Bertrams._ Harper.
_The Way We Live Now._ Chapman and Hall.
Thackeray. Dana Estes.
INDEX
_Absalom and Achitophel_, 12 n.
_Adam Bede_, 152, 252, 277, 309 f.
Addison, Joseph, 48, 89.
_Adventures of an Atom_, 193.
_Adventures of Philip, The_, 186.
Alden, R. M., 40.
_Alice_, 158.
_Alton Locke_, 131, 191 n., 198, 212 f., 221.
_Amazing Marriage, An_, 98, 157, 203, 274, 283, 309 n., 313.
_Anti-Jacobin, The_, 169.
_Apology for Smectymnuus, An_, 12.
Ariosto, L., 124.
Aristophanes; his comedy, 4, 8;
comments by Cope and White, 19, 48, 78, 204, 304.
_Aristophanes’ Apology_, 10, 15, 34, 37.
Aristotle, 7, 49.
Arnold, Matthew, 49, 134, 177, 223, 313, 315.
Austen, Jane, 49, 84, 112, 123 n., 129, 134 n., 156, 238, 245, 306.
_Author, The_, 17.
_Autobiography_, (Trollope’s), 52 n.
Bacon, Francis, 273.
_Barchester Towers_, 88, 108 f., 209.
Barclay, Alexander, 21 n., 243.
_Barnaby Rudge_, 96.
_Barry Lyndon_, 78, 79, 148.
_Beauchamp’s Career_, 88, 98 f., 115, 155, 160, 174, 192, 197,
213 f., 224, 301, 302.
Bergson, Henri, 7, 28.
_Bertrams, The_, 142, 202 f., 208 f., 221.
_Bigelow Papers, The_, 4, 168.
Birrell, Augustine, 35.
Blackmore, Sir Richard, 46.
Blake, William, 49.
_Bleak House_, 97, 140, 141, 202.
Boileau, N., 48.
_Book of Snobs, The_, 206 f., 219 f., 286.
Bourne, Randolph, 128.
Bright, John, 170, 204.
Brontë, Charlotte, 46, 49, 50, 85, 92, 116, 130, 131, 156, 170,
180, 183 f., 191, 210, 218, 231, 260, 270, 271, 279, 285, 301.
Brown, John, 12 f., 36, 123 n.
Browne, Sir Thomas, 176.
Browning, Robert, 10, 15, 34, 37, 49, 76, 98, 172 n., 313.
Bryce, James, 84 n.
Buckingham, 2nd Duke of, 9.
Burns, Robert, 48.
Burton, Robert, 49.
Butler, Samuel, 46, 48, 61, 62, 63 f., 81, 82, 87, 128, 130, 145,
180, 187, 190, 191, 198, 202, 210, 214, 218, 219, 221, 222, 231,
246 n., 269, 270, 273, 278, 280, 287, 290 n., 294, 295, 301,
306, 307, 315.
Byron, Lord, 11 n., 17, 28, 35, 48, 76, 169, 171, 173, 177, 223,
289, 304, 306.
Cannan, Gilbert, 69 n.
_Candidate, The_, 16.
Carlyle, Thomas, 38 n., 49, 177, 195, 204, 222 n., 228, 236 n.,
294, 313, 315.
_Catherine_, 62 n., 79, 148.
_Caxtons, The_, 25.
Cervantes, 4, 9 n., 25, 48, 51, 67 n., 70, 175 f., 307.
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 286.
Chesterton, G. K., 65 n., 71 n., 195, 246 n.
Churchill, Charles, 6, 16 f., 48.
Claudius, 169.
_Cloister and the Hearth, The_, 88.
_Coffee-House Politician, The_, 23.
Coleridge, S. T., 171 f., 173, 177.
Collins, Wilkie, 46.
_Colloquies of Society_, 173 n.
_Colyn Clout_, 21 n., 301.
_Coming Race, The_, 63 n., 68, 72, 81, 133, 193, 227.
_Coningsby_, 170, 174, 299.
_Covent Garden Journal, The_, 9 n.
Cowper, William, 17 n., 18, 33, 49, 176.
_Cranford_, 88.
Croce, Benedetto, 4.
_Crochet Castle_, 62, 132, 145, 171, 220.
Crotch, W. W., 246 n.
_Daniel Deronda_, 236 f., 251, 253 n., 281, 292, 310.
Dante, 49.
_David Copperfield_, 78, 199, 218, 219, 250, 300.
Dawson, W. J., 15.
Defoe, Daniel, 12, 17, 22, 49, 70, 74 n., 89, 128, 183.
De Quincey, Thomas, 14, 33, 49, 128.
Dewey, John, 5.
Dickens, Charles, 46, 48, 53, 92, 95 f., 130, 157, 170, 174, 183,
187, 190, 191, 195, 198, 199, 202, 203, 205, 218, 222 n., 231,
234, 235, 237, 238, 240, 244, 247, 249, 250, 260, 262, 269, 270,
271, 272, 273, 278, 285, 287, 290, 315.
_Diana of the Crossways_, 161, 185, 214, 239, 276, 284, 298, 302.
_Dinner of Trimalchio, The_, 127.
Disraeli, Benjamin, 45, 47, 49, 51, 52, 61, 62, 72 f., 77, 81, 82,
89, 123, 130, 134, 156, 170, 173, 174, 187, 188, 191, 193 f.,
198, 202, 210, 216, 225, 231, 244, 271, 279, 299, 315.
_Doctor Thorne_, 143, 192.
_Dombey and Son_, 138, 141, 218, 219, 250 f.
Domitian, 67, 169.
_Don Juan_, 4, 76, 82.
_Don Quixote_, 82, 127.
Donne, John, 48.
Dowden, Edward, 191.
Dryden, John, 12, 21 f., 48, 123 n., 286.
_Duke’s Children, The_, 217 n., 240.
Dunbar, William, 48.
_Dunciad, The_, 82, 169.
_Edwin Drood_, 232, 270.
Edgeworth, Maria, 84.
_Egoist, The_, 78, 88, 98, 100, 101, 153, 184 f., 277, 283, 293.
Eliot, George, 46, 47, 49, 92, 116, 130, 152, 157, 170, 177, 180,
183, 191, 205, 216, 235, 236, 247, 251, 253, 256, 257, 261,
273, 274, 277, 278, 280, 281, 285, 287, 291, 295, 309, 315.
_Emma_, 78.
_England and the English_, 225.
_English Bards and Scotch Reviewers_, 17.
_English Humorists, The_, 50.
_English Novel, The_ (Raleigh’s), 26, 304.
_Epistle to William Hogarth_, 16.
_Epistles to the Literati_, 174.
Erasmus, 49.
_Erewhon_, 63 n., 68, 81, 82, 146 f., 190, 202, 214 f., 227.
_Erewhon Revisited_, 63 n., 69, 81, 216, 290 n.
_Essay on Comedy, An_, 14, 27 f., 31 n., 36 n., 160, 293, 312.
_Essay on Satire, (Brown’s)_, 12 f., 36, 123 n. (Dryden’s), 21 n.,
22, 123 n.
_Ettrick Shepherd, The_, 1, 174 n.
Euripides, 48.
_Evan Harrington_, 161, 162, 190, 255, 284, 307, 308 f.
_Every Man in his Humour_, 8.
_Fair Haven, The_, 69.
_Farina_, 63 n., 79, 81.
_Fatal Boots, The_, 103.
_Felix Holt_, 158 n., 170, 192, 198, 236, 251, 291, 304 n.
Ferrier, Susan, 111, 238.
Fielding, Henry, 9, 14, 22 f., 28, 37 n., 48, 51 n., 89, 91, 286,
303.
_Framley Parsonage_, 119 f., 142, 143 f., 196, 207, 309.
France, Anatole, 49, 124, 246 n.
Freeman, A. M., 66 n.
Fuess, C. M., 28.
Galsworthy, John, 125.
Garnett, Richard, 10, 36, 67 n., 303.
Gascoigne, George, 25, 48.
Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn, 45, 49, 84, 92, 130, 157, 183, 191,
195, 205, 216, 247, 270, 279, 285, 287, 306.
Gay, John, 6.
_Getting Married_, 180.
Gibbon, Edward, 49.
Gifford, William, 14, 17, 48, 171.
_Godolphin_, 234, 276.
_Golden Ass, The_, 127.
Goldsmith, Oliver, 48.
_Great Expectations_, 160.
_Great Hoggarty Diamond, The_, 62 n., 79.
_Gryll Grange_, 63 n., 65, 67.
_Gulliver’s Travels_, 68, 82, 89.
Hall, Joseph, 35, 48, 124, 289.
Hannay, James, 2.
_Hard Times_, 138, 198, 218.
Hardy, Thomas, 46, 49, 156, 223.
Harris, J. E., 71 f.
_Harry Richmond_, 98.
Hazlitt, William, 30 n.
Headlam, Cecil, 286.
_Headlong Hall_, 62 n., 171.
Hebrew _Adversary_, The, 2.
Hebrew Prophets, The, 48.
Heinsius, Daniel, 40 n.
Herford, C. H., 21.
_Henry Esmond_, 88.
_Historical Register, The_, 9.
Homer, 49.
Hood, Thomas, 48.
Hook, Theodore, 170.
Horace, 6, 7, 11, 21, 25, 32 f., 48, 60, 286, 289.
Humor, 5, 7, 59, 83, 86, 280.
Hutten, Ulrich von, 127.
Huxley, Thomas, 177, 315.
_Hypatia_, 88.
Ibsen, Henrik, 71.
_Imaginary Conversations_, 27, 34.
_Infernal Marriage, The_, 62 n., 76 f., 198.
_Intriguing Chambermaid, The_, 22.
Irony, 50, 121 f., 129, 163 f.
_Isaiah_, 297.
_Ixion_, 62 n., 76, 81, 173, 203 f., 223.
James, William, 305.
_Jane Eyre_, 88, 218.
Jerrold, Douglas, 313.
_Job_, 2, 48.
Johnson, Lionel, 22, 35, 176.
Johnson, Samuel, 35, 49, 286.
Jonson, Ben, 8, 48, 59, 229.
Jordan, David Starr, 243.
_Joseph Andrews_, 78.
_Journey from this World to the Next, A_, 68.
_Journey to Parnassus, A_, 175 n., 176.
Juvenal, 6, 11, 21, 37, 48, 169, 286, 289.
Kenelm Chillingly, 113 f., 133, 188, 221 n., 274.
Kingsley, Charles, 46, 49, 50 n., 92, 130, 131, 156, 174, 180,
185 f., 187, 191, 195, 210, 212, 215 n., 219, 221, 231, 236 n.,
248 n., 249, 252 n., 260, 270, 271, 273, 279, 287, 298 f., 301.
Kingsley, Henry, 46.
Knight, Charles, 53.
Lamb, Charles, 6, 129, 175.