Chapter II The Realistic
Realism in Victorian fiction, as we need only to be reminded, means not strictly that which is, but liberally that which might be. Its field is nominally the Actual but it encroaches unhesitatingly on the domain of the Probable, laps over into the Improbable, and barely halts at the Impossible. These expansive habits make it not incompatible with the Romantic, which indeed, in its soberer aspects, is a constant factor in the English novel up to and including this period.
Romanticism is reduced to a minimum by Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen, Mrs. Gaskell, and Anthony Trollope,118 but the majority of our novelists have not been thus content to present life in its everyday garb, neat and prosperous enough, it may be, but neutral, inane, diffuse, inconclusive. They have insisted in the name of decorum and dignity on the dress costume and company manners which in civilized society are a prerequisite to public appearance and conspicuous position. Life is still life and not an impostor, even when robed in its best with some artifice of color and ornament and some evidence of decisive purposefulness in mien and bearing.
But however romantic in effect, the nineteenth-century novel was realistic in intent, and we may in a measure take the will for the deed. Of this devotion to reality we have several testimonies, from such important witnesses as Trollope, Dickens, Thackeray; but two are of especial interest as they come from two of the most undeniable romanticists, Lytton and Brontë.
In her Preface to the belated edition of The Professor, Charlotte Brontë declared her own preference for a depiction of a normal and unadorned existence to be thwarted by the lack of editorial enthusiasm. After stating the condition of things she adds—
“* * * the publishers in general scarcely approved of this system, but would have liked something more imaginative and poetical—something more consonant with a highly wrought fancy, with a taste for pathos, with sentiments more tender, elevated, unworldly. Indeed, until an author has tried to dispose of a manuscript of this kind he can never know what stores of romance and sensibility lie hidden in breasts he would not have suspected of casketing such treasures.”
An accurate description of Victorianism is contained in this ironic indictment, and perhaps also an explanation of the romantic trend of its realism on the ground of the law of supply and demand as well as that of natural propensity.
Lytton prided himself prodigiously on his true rendering of life, though of his two dozen novels, The Caxtons alone approaches the realistic type, and pictures in one of his heroes119 a phase at least of his artistic ideal:
“The humblest alley in a crowded town had something poetical for him; he was ever ready to mix in a crowd, if it were only gathered round a barrel-organ or a dog fight, and listen to all that was said, and notice all that was done. And this I take to be the true poetical temperament essential to every artist who aspires to be something more than a scene-painter.”
That the satirical element in this romantico-realistic form of fiction should be characterized by humor, exposure, and comparative rarity, instead of wit, exaggeration, and ubiquity, is inevitable, since the former qualities accord not only with realism but with one another.
Humor is the comic sense which is amused by things as they are, whereas wit either creates the absurdity or ferrets it out of obscurity. Hence the former is allied to the actual more than to the fanciful, and uses the method of simple disclosure rather than caricature. While therefore the imaginative energy of wit is dynamic, that of humor is more quiescent, being sufficiently exercised by its function of interpretation, of showing wherein lurks the spirit of the laughable, however grave and solemn the appearance to the unseeing eye.
Where the quality of the satire is of this realistic order, the quantity must necessarily be restricted and more or less incidental rather than dominant; subdued, not rampant. For the true satirical humorist, seeing life steadily and whole, observes that while certain parts of it are unquestionably absurd, whether flauntingly or subtly so, these ludicrous shreds and patches, absolutely integral and ineradicable as they are, are nevertheless only a portion and not so large a one, of the stupendous whole.
Neither that astigmatic visualizer, the cynic, who regards life itself as a huge joke on its victims, nor that myopic spectator, the misanthrope, who conceives humanity as an unmitigated jest on creation, was a Victorian favorite. Both are blind to certain phenomena,—beauty, power, exquisite delicacy, tremendous strength,—which also exist, which even the pessimist grants to be compensatory, and which, when genuine, are utterly beyond the reach of any ridicule that pretends to sanity or justice. Such then,—humorously truthful and suitably proportioned,—is the general character of the satiric stratum which runs, widening and narrowing, through the great vein of Victorian fiction.
In the legitimate novel there are two main devices of revealing the ludicrous; the direct, whereby the author in his own reflections and comments points it out; and the dramatic, whereby he shows it by means of incident and character. The latter method is again subdivisible into two modes, by the use of the two contrasting types of actors, humorous and humorists. The first are allowed to betray themselves, their very unconsciousness adding to the piquancy of the situation. For this the favorite technical tool is the dramatic monologue. The second are the witty protagonists. They stand in loco scriptoris and express that detection of absurdity for which the humorless humorous furnish the occasion.120
When we consult our original list, we find the two extremes have been cut off, as Peacock and Butler belong entirely to the other department. The remaining eleven have produced about one hundred twenty novels in the stricter sense, not including short stories, tales, sketches, or burlesques. It must be noted that this restriction rules out some items important as literature, and in certain cases as satire,—Cranford, Pickwick, Peg Woffington, Scenes from Clerical Life.
Of the grand total, approximately one-quarter is eliminated as being essentially and thoroughly serious. Here again are found some notable names,—Last Days of Pompeii, Mary Barton, Henry Esmond, Tale of Two Cities, The Cloister and the Hearth, Jane Eyre, Hypatia. Three-fourths is a large majority, from which one might deduce that the novel of this period was prevailingly satirical. But the other extreme, those so strongly saturated as to deserve the name of satires, are far fewer than the unsatirical. Vanity Fair, Martin Chuzzlewit, The Egoist, possibly Barchester Towers, and Beauchamp’s Career, practically exhaust the list. This leaves about four score of novels in which the spirit of satire exists, manifesting itself showily, coyly, in wide range and diversity.
When an author uses the direct method for the conveyance of satirical ideas, he becomes for the nonce a didactic, though humor-flavored, philosopher. Over against the artistic liabilities incurred,—interruption of the narrative, intrusion of more or less irrelevant matter, may be placed the intellectual assets,—presentation of opinions and conclusions, and frank expression of personality.
Whether approved of or not, this discursive habit must be accepted as an old inheritance. From the beginning, the English novel has been a hybrid, the drama grafted on the treatise. Even the medieval mind, with its insatiable relish for the pageantry of life, had an uneasy feeling that the Merry Tale should not be entirely its own reward, and accordingly found for it a moral justification, whereby pleasure and profit were joined in a most complacent alliance. And ever since, the prevailing purpose has been not only to portray life but to exhibit this or that deduction about life.
In the eighteenth century this tendency took definite shape and substance, for then it became notably true that the division between narrative and essay was not coincident with a division between narrators and essayists. Swift, Addison, Defoe, Fielding, Sterne, were both. And it was their mantle and not that of romance writers, Gothic or Historical, that best fitted Victorian shoulders. Of the many testimonies to this, direct and indirect, the following from a characteristic Victorian pen may be cited as evidence:121
“The reader of a novel—who had doubtless taken the volume up simply for amusement, and who would probably lay it down did he suspect that instruction, like a snake-in-the-grass, like physic beneath the sugar, was to be imposed upon him—requires from his author chiefly this, that he shall be amused by a narrative in which elevated sentiment prevails, and gratified by being made to feel that the elevated sentiments described are exactly his own.”
He then goes on to show that this morality is best served by realism, in spite of the superior attractions of heroes and villains:122
“But for one Harry Esmond, there are fifty Ralph Newtons—five hundred and fifty of them; and the very youth whose bosom glows with admiration as he reads of Harry—who exults in the idea that as Harry did, so would he have done—lives as Ralph lived, is less noble, less persistent, less of a man even than was Ralph Newton.
“It is the test of a novel-writer’s art that he conceals his snake-in-the-grass; but the reader may be sure that it is always there. * * * In writing novels, we novelists preach to you from our pulpits, and are keenly anxious that our sermons shall not be inefficacious. * * * Nevertheless, the faults of a Ralph Newton, and not the vices of a Varney or a Barry Lyndon, are the evils against which men should in these days be taught to guard themselves—which women also should be made to hate. Such is the writer’s apology for his very indifferent hero, Ralph the Heir.”
In another volume123 the same writer confesses,—
“Castles with unknown passages are not compatible with my homely muse. I would as lief have to do with a giant in my book—a real giant, such as Goliath—as with a murdering monk with a scowling eye. The age for such delights is, I think, gone. We may say historically of Mrs. Radcliffe’s time that there were mysterious sorrows in those days. They are now as much out of date as the giants.”
Victorianism of course had her own sorrows, patent and unmysterious as they were. At no time could she have been mistaken for Elizabethanism. But she grew gradually in strength and sobriety, and cast a heavier shadow in the afternoon of the century. In its mid-morning Disraeli could compliment his own Young Duke with the subtitle, “a moral tale though gay.” And the chief ambition of the young writers up to the early forties seems to have been to produce tales that were gay though moral.
Of this tendency Lytton is the most conspicuous example. Innately serious and thoroughly sentimental, he nevertheless dared not be as solemn as he could. He must live up to the requirement for ironic wit and the light touch of savior faire, even though, lacking native exuberance and somewhat deficient in taste, he often fell into the slough of facetiousness, or at least lapsed into childish jocularity.
To quote him at his best, however, we take a few excerpts from the last of his trilogy of domestic novels. In the second of the series, My Novel, he had adapted the prefatory device of Tom Jones, using the remarks of the Caxton family as a sort of introductory (or more properly, retrospective) chorus to each book. In What Will He Do with It, the idea is carried out on a smaller scale, in expository paragraphs preliminary to chapters. The following will be sufficient to indicate the tone:
Book I
Chapter XII
“In which it is shown that a man does this or declines to do that for reasons best known to himself—a reserve which is extremely conducive to the social interests of a community; since the conjecture into the origin and nature of those reasons stimulates the inquiring faculties, and furnishes the staple of modern conversation. And as it is not to be denied that, if their neighbors left them nothing to guess at, three fourths of civilized humankind, male or female, would have nothing to talk about; so we cannot too gratefully encourage that needful curiosity, termed by the inconsiderate tittle-tattle or scandal, which saves the vast majority of our species from being reduced to the degraded condition of dumb animals.”
Chapter XV
“The historian records the attachment to public business which distinguishes the British Legislator—Touching instance of the regret which ever in patriotic bosoms attends the neglect of a public duty.”
Chapter XVII
“* * * It also showeth, for the instruction of Men and States, the connection between democratic opinion and wounded self-love; so that, if some Liberal statesman desire to rouse against an aristocracy the class just below it, he has only to persuade a fine lady to be exceedingly civil ‘to that sort of people.’”
Book IV
Chapter IX
“* * * The aboriginal Man-Eater, or Pocket Cannibal, is susceptible to the refining influences of Civilization. He decorates his lair with the skins of his victims; he adorns his person with the spoils of those whom he devours.”
Of the nine remaining names on the list, the real Victorians according to chronology, it happens that two-thirds are almost negative examples of direct satire. Reade, Trollope, and Kingsley take their own moralizing for the most part seriously, as do also the three women, Mrs. Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot. Such instances to the contrary as there are only serve in the usual capacity of exceptions. It is the remaining third, Thackeray, Dickens, and Meredith, who are prominent in this matter as in most others.
Thackeray usually trusts to the metaphorical and allusive to secure a humorous effect. Vanity Fair is itself a symbolic term, elaborated upon in the Introduction and harped upon constantly throughout the story. The account, for instance, of the Sedley sale is prefaced by a description of a similar conclusion to the career of the late Lord Dives, the chapter beginning as follows:124
“If there is any exhibition in all Vanity Fair which Satire and Sentiment can visit arm in arm together; where you light on the strangest contrasts laughable and tearful; where you may be gentle and pathetic, or savage and cynical with perfect propriety; it is at one of those public assemblies, a crowd of which are advertised every day in the last page of the ‘Times’ newspaper, and over which the late Mr. George Robins used to preside with so much dignity.”
And again:125
“This is a species of dignity in which the high-bred British female reigns supreme. To watch the behavior of a fine lady to other and humbler women, is a very good sport for a philosophical frequenter of Vanity Fair.”
He delights in whimsical classic comparisons:126
“Is this case a rare one? and don’t we see every day in the world many an honest Hercules at the apron-strings of Omphale, and great whiskered Samsons prostrate in Delilah’s lap?”
Sometimes the classical is mingled in with the Scriptural:127
“A good housewife is of necessity a humbug; and Cornelia’s husband was hoodwinked, as Potiphar was—only in a different way.”
Sometimes we have a scientific simile, as the comment on Becky’s ambition to be presented at Court.128
“If she did not wish to lead a virtuous life, at least she desired to enjoy a character for virtue, and we know that no lady in the genteel world can possess this desideratum, until she has put on a train and feathers, and has been presented to her Sovereign at court. From that august interview they come out stamped as honest women. The Lord Chamberlain gives them a certificate of virtue. And as dubious goods or letters are passed through an oven at quarantine, sprinkled with aromatic vinegar, and then pronounced clean—many a lady whose reputation would be doubtful otherwise and liable to give infection, passes through the wholesome ordeal of the Royal Presence, and issues from it free from all taint.”
In his later novels Thackeray used in greater proportion the more artistic indirect method, although he could more easily have plucked out his eye and cast it from him than to have performed the same operation on his habit of moralizing, which most frequently took the form of a semi-whimsical but wholly homiletic exhortation to his dear readers to make a personal application of the lessons involved in the story.129
Of these later instances, one illustrates the use of literary allusion, neatly combined with the commercial.130
“Though, no doubt, in these matters, when Lovelace is tired of Clarissa (or the contrary), it is best for both parties to break at once, * * * yet our self-love, or our pity, or our sense of decency, does not like that sudden bankruptcy. Before we announce to the world that our firm of Lovelace and Co. can’t meet its engagements, we try to make compromises; we have mournful meetings of partners; we delay the putting up of the shutters, and the dreary announcement of the failure. It must come: but we pawn our jewels to keep things going a little longer.”
Dickens is included with this “didactic” trio, not so much because he belongs with them as because he does not belong with the others. He cannot be classed as a negative example, but his positive contributions are relatively small. His artistic superiority to Thackeray in this respect comes, however, not from a greater knowledge of artistry, and even less from greater care for it, but through the happy accident of a vivid, dramatic temperament. He refrains from much moralizing not, we are sure, because he loves moralizing less but because he loves people and actions more. His overwhelming interest in these, his affection and respect for the doings and sayings of his characters, is too intense to allow of their being interrupted by anything. He is thus something of an artist unaware. He does not work out his own salvation by taking thought or by deliberating over ways and means; but through a fortunate preoccupation, an absorbing engagement with the concrete, he almost unconsciously dispenses with the abstract, or expresses it in terms of the specific.
It is true also that he segregates a good deal of his reflection in his Prefaces; but it crops up too often in the course of the narrative to be disregarded. One of the first showings occurs in connection with Mr. Bumble’s relinquishment of the beadle’s costume together with that office, and his pensive cogitations thereupon.131
“There are some promotions in life, which, independent of the more substantial rewards they offer, acquire peculiar value and dignity from the coats and waistcoats connected with them.
A field-marshal has his uniform; a bishop his silk apron; a counsellor his silk gown; a beadle his cocked hat. Strip the bishop of his apron, or the beadle of his hat and lace; what are they? Men. Mere men. Dignity, and even holiness too, sometimes, are more questions of coat and waistcoat than some people imagine.”
In his next novel, Dickens has a word for those “who pamper their compassion and need high stimulants to rouse it,” and indicates the cause of hysterical zeal on the one hand or dull indifference on the other, equally misplaced:132
“In short, charity must have its romance, as the novelist or playwright must have his. A thief in fustian is a vulgar character, scarcely to be thought of by persons of refinement; but dress him in green velvet, with a high-crowned hat, and change the scene of his operations, from a thickly peopled city, to a mountain road, and you shall find in him the very soul of poetry and adventure.”
The romance of the picturesque is one of our weaknesses; that of the mysterious is another. The latter is discussed with reference to the machinations of the Gordon Riot:133
“To surround anything, however monstrous or ridiculous, with an air of mystery, is to invest it with a secret charm, and power of attraction which to the crowd is irresistible. False priests, false prophets, false doctors, false patriots, false prodigies of every kind, veiling their proceeding in mystery, have always addressed themselves at an immense advantage to the popular credulity, and have been, perhaps, more indebted to that resource in gaining and keeping for a time the upper hand of Truth and Common Sense, than to any half dozen items in the whole catalogue of imposture.”
Toward the legal profession the attitude of Dickens is never ambiguous, and ever and anon, as in the following instance, he expresses it with concise clarity:134
“The one great principle of the English law is, to make business for itself. There is no other principle distinctly, certainly, and consistently maintained through all its narrow turnings. Viewed by this light it becomes a coherent scheme, and not the monstrous maze the laity are apt to think it. Let them but once clearly perceive that its grand principle is to make business for itself at their expense, and surely they will cease to grumble.”
No less favored with warmth of feeling is the famous Circumlocution Office, to which much eloquence is devoted in a chapter “containing the whole science of government.” There are pages of satirical description, the keynote of which is found in an early paragraph:135
“This glorious establishment had been early in the field, when the one sublime principle involving the difficult art of governing a country, was first distinctly revealed to statesmen. It had been foremost to study that bright revelation, and to carry its shining influence through the whole of the official proceedings. Whatever was required to be done, the Circumlocution Office was beforehand with all the public departments in the art of perceiving—How Not To Do It.”
It is recognized as something of an anomaly that Meredith should have begun publishing fiction along with George Eliot, and fifteen years before Hardy and Butler, for he belongs with the latter as post-Victorian in art and character. He represents at once the maturity of the nineteenth century and the embryonic promise of the twentieth, whose new currents were already meeting and clashing with the old full tide. About him there could be nothing artless or naïve, nothing unconscious or preoccupied. Ripeness of judgment, deliberation in method, are stamped on every line, giving an effect of purposefulness without dogmatism, and profundity without owlishness. Whatever he does is done intentionally,136 and if some lack of spontaneity is the result, it is amply compensated for by the strength and sureness that come from a man’s command of himself and his material. In so far as he is obscure, involved, compactly sententious, his malice is, like Browning’s, aforethought. Not in ignorance nor indifference does it arise, but from independent choice and a certain scorn of any other procedure.
Accordingly while direct satire is not wanting in his novels, it is restrained in amount and sophisticated in nature. It does not take the shape of facile application of obvious conditions, nor of flamboyant portraiture, but of concentrated analyses of phases of life, from a scientific point of view, rather than ethical, and presented with calm detachment.
Meredith is quite capable of telling pure story, as in Vittoria and Harry Richmond, but he is also capable of putting in some personal seasoning, particularly evinced in the openings of Beauchamp’s Career, and An Amazing Marriage, and throughout The Egoist.
Of these two discursive introductions, the former is more amenable to quotation. It deals with the situation incident to a rumor of French invasion, and personifies Panic as a sleepy old spinster roused into brief hysteria, and lapsing back into comfortable stupor.137
“This being apprehended, by the aid of our own shortness of figures and the agitated images of the red-breeched only waiting the signal to jump and be at us, there ensued a curious exhibition that would be termed, in simple language, writing to the newspapers, for it took the outward form of letters: in reality, it was the deliberate saddling of our ancient nightmare of Invasion, putting the postillion on her, and trotting her along the highroad with a winding horn to rouse old Panic. * * * She did a little mischief by dropping on the stock-markets; in other respects she was harmless, and, inasmuch as she established a subject for conversation, useful.
“Then, lest she should have been taken too seriously, the Press, which had kindled, proceeded to extinguish her with the formidable engines called leading articles, which fling fire or water, as the occasion may require. * * *
“Then the people, rather ashamed, abused the Press for unreasonably disturbing them. The Press attacked old Panic and stripped her naked. Panic, with a desolate scream, arraigned the Parliamentary Opposition for having inflated her to serve base party purposes. The Opposition challenged the allegations of Government, * * * and proclaimed itself the watch-dog of the country.”
At about this juncture the enemy himself stepped in and announced there never had been any need for the dog to bark at all:
“So, then, Panic, or what remained of her, was put to bed again. The Opposition retired into its kennel growling. The People coughed like a man of two minds, doubting whether he has been divinely inspired or has cut a ridiculous figure. The Press interpreted the cough as a warning to Government; and Government launched a big ship with hurrahs, and ordered the recruiting-sergeant to be seen conspicuously.”
All this would seem sufficient, but it appears that the real sting after these preliminary pricks, is in the tail. The picture concludes with the bulky figure of the Tax-Payer looming in the background; he is pointed out with the laconic comment:138
“Will you not own that the working of the system for scaring him and bleeding him is very ingenious? But whether the ingenuity comes of native sagacity, as it is averred by some, or whether it shows an instinct laboring to supply the deficiencies of stupidity, according to others, I cannot express an opinion.”
The satiric parentheses in The Egoist are naturally concerned not with politics but with individual men and women, chiefly in their relationships to one another. A few instances will serve.
Referring to the selfish folly of the masculine demand for feminine delicacy rather than strength, Meredith says of women:139
“Are they not of a nature warriors, like men?—men’s mates to bear them heroes instead of puppets? But the devouring male Egoist prefers them as inanimate overwrought polished pure-metal precious vessels, fresh from the hands of the artificer, for him to walk away with hugging, call all his own, drink of, and fill and drink of, and forget that he stole them.”
Again, apropos of that “adoring female’s worship,” destined only for the strong, “who maintain the crown by holding divinely independent of the great emotion they have sown,” he says:140
“In the one hundred and fourth chapter of the thirteenth volume of the Book of Egoism, it is written: Possession without obligation to the object possessed approaches felicity.”
When we turn to plot or situation as a vehicle of satire, we find an almost exact parallel, as to proportionate amount, to the reflective type just discussed. More than half of the novelists on our list have no examples worthy of special mention. A few insert amusing episodes, not especially germane to the main plot. And the three notable instances, where the satiric situation is a feature of importance, where it influences the whole trend of the movement, affects the leading characters, and plays a part in the climax, occur in the three real satires, Martin Chuzzlewit, Vanity Fair, and The Egoist; so that Dickens, Thackeray, and Meredith are again our main theme.
Situation or action is of course merely the dramatization of character, and not to be distinguished from it except as actual expression is distinguished from the capacity for it. Individuals speak for themselves instead of being spoken for, although they often convey more than they mean to, and much that they would not. Since this form of art has its own medium in the drama, it is there that we look for the most perfect and concentrated expression, and expect to find it in the novel only in the latter’s dramatic moments, which may be few and far between. But as the dénouement of the drama usually turns on some phase of poetic justice, either in its tragic or its comic aspect, so also does this dramatic element in fiction. Satire in situation is therefore concerned with the comedy of poetic justice, and is successful in so far as that sense is appealed to and satisfied.
In their respective stories, Pecksniff, Becky Sharp, and Sir Willoughby Patterne are the people of most importance, if not the heroes; and in each case the climax of the career is a ludicrous anticlimax, with circumstances appropriate in every instance to the character.
The unveiling of Pecksniff is a public and demonstrative affair, in accordance with the public and demonstrative nature of his previous life, and also, one may add, with the Dickensian theory of the fitness of humorous retribution. In spite of the crude melodrama of the scene, there is fundamental truth in the most important item in it, the behavior of the one toward whom all eyes are turned in hostile contempt. He needed no loyal, anxious mother to beg him to “be ’umble,” for his humility was not as the Heeps’. It was a superior article, self-possessed and patronizing, not servile and ingratiating, and it was therefore impregnable. Uriah might be discomfited when his mask was publicly torn away, but the Pecksniffian duplicity was no mere flimsy detachable mask. It was the very skin of his face; indeed, it was more than skin deep; it was the stuff of his soul. He could therefore be imperturbable, though felled to the floor, a dignified martyr, grieved but gracious under calumny, unquelled by those who had assembled to do him dishonor.
This impressiveness serves Pecksniff, as her wit serves Becky, to mitigate the absurdity which threatens him. It is not in this heightened moment that his comicality is apparent; it is in the retrospective picture we get of him through the revelation of Martin Chuzzlewit, whereby he is seen not only as the biter bit, but as the calf, the bland, assured, shrewd yet unsuspecting calf, that, being given plenty of rope, promptly hanged himself.
In the downfall of Becky there is less of the comic and more of the tragic, though Thackeray does not choose to invest her with enough dignity for tragedy. She is less absurd than Pecksniff or Sir Willoughby for several reasons. She is more human and has the claim of normal humanity on our sympathy; she is the product of circumstances, clearly shown to be largely responsible for her failure both in aspiration and achievement, whereas theirs is gratuitous and without excuse; and she is herself too much of a jester to be patronized by the ridicule of others. She too can keep up appearances to the last, not by reinforcing her hypocrisy but by being able to dispense with it, when it no longer serves, and to mock at it along with everything else. The only real joke she is the victim of comes comparatively early, when she discovers she might become Lady Crawley were she not already daughter-in-law of the coveted and forfeited title.
This theme of a vaulting ambition o’erleaping itself is a favorite with Thackeray, and he did some good apprentice work on it in The Fatal Boots, and Yellowplush Memoirs. In the former the unwelcome wedding present comes as a delightful bit of comic nemesis. But the outcome of the latter, with an accomplished swindler outwitted by his own father, and a helpless woman ruthlessly sacrificed, savors too much of tragedy to be amusing.
Sir Willoughby is only an egoist, not a hypocrite nor a sycophant; and being a gentleman can suffer naught but a gentlemanly humiliation. Such a one is not to be knocked down and taunted in the presence of his little world; he is merely made a subject of gossip and speculation: nor is he to be reduced to sordid material scheming; his intrigues are all on the spiritual plane. A destiny that seemed kind but proved cruel created him the central sun to his own solar system. His only sin was the desire to maintain that position by exerting a strong but legitimate centripetal force upon his satellites: if any centrifugal force should become stronger, they must simply drop off into space. His mate he conceived of as the fairest star of all, gladly answering an imperious summons to disregard even the laws of gravitation, to surrender even the personality of a satellite, to rush headlong to a union that secured enlargement of the sun by the quenching and absorption of the star. And for this, his only punishment was the refusal, incredible, presumptuous, on the part of a succession of chosen stars to surrender, to rush, to be absorbed. His utmost penalty was the decree that he must be content with the indifferent attendance of a weary moon whose own light had grown cold and who avowed an allegiance at the most, dutiful, quite disillusioned, and granted because of a pressure that amounted to compulsion.
Externally his situation is prosperous and respectable. He remains an aristocrat of wealth and station, “the humour of whom,” as his own author says,141 “scarcely dimples the surface and is distinguishable but by very penetrative, very wicked imps, whose fits of roaring below at some generally imperceptible stroke of his quality, have first made the mild literary angels aware of something comic in him,” and whose figure therefore never becomes palpably absurd. Only by the “detective vision” of the imps is he seen poised on the pinnacle of absurdity, while the Pecksniffs and Becky Sharps of the world cluster around its base.
The poetic justice of this comedy in narrative is perfect because the pit the victim falls into is one of his own digging and the digging is of his own volition (popularly speaking, without reference to the metaphysics of determinism). From the first moment of Sir Willoughby’s philandering with Lætitia Dale to the last unlucky turning of the key in young Crossjay’s room, all was spontaneous, a long list of self-indulgences that turned into self-avengers. It was not essential that he should play upon the sentimental romanticism of his adoring feminine neighbor; nor that he should protest so emphatically to Clara that he never could by any possibility bring himself to marry Lætitia; nor that he should himself provide a witness to his overcoming of that boasted impossibility,—and make the sacrifice for nothing after all,—when the absence of a witness would have saved the day for him. But having done all these things he had to pay the price, though it rendered him bankrupt in vanity, and for him that was bankruptcy indeed.
Yet for all that he is food for mirth, one must yield to a lurking sympathy for the unhappy Patterne. A wound is a wound and may cause exquisite pain, even if inflicted only on self-love. A Pecksniff and a Becky are invulnerable; he is protected from pelting rain by his own oiliness, she by her inimitable faculty for borrowing umbrellas. Lætitia was indeed finally secured as Sir Willoughby’s umbrella, but not before he had been alarmingly threatened if not actually soaked.
If we measured our laughter by the real feelings of its object instead of our conception of the frivolity or sacredness of those feelings, we should undoubtedly find it much diminished. We could not enjoy the predicament of Sir Willoughby or Sir John Falstaff or Malvolio or any of the notable company of the Mighty Fallen. Whereas we do enjoy them with unrestrained relish on the supposition that their fall is not that of a Cæsar or a Napoleon. Yet these also were egoists, and those would fain have been conquering heroes. Meredith testifies to this in his preliminary analysis:142
“The Egoist surely inspires pity. He who would desire to clothe himself at everybody’s expense, and is of that desire condemned to strip himself stark naked, he, if pathos ever had a form, might be taken for the actual person.”
In addition to these instances where the continual and final absurdity of the situation is made the motif of the novel, there are several cases of minor episodes, quite as suggestive though on a smaller scale.
Dickens is, as might be supposed, the most fertile in these scenes of comic retribution. Aside from Pecksniff and Uriah Heep, he is most successful with the Lammles, Mr. Dorrit, and Silas Wegg.
The Veneering Dinner, which introduces Our Mutual Friend, is only an understudy to the Veneering Breakfast, which celebrates the marriage of two of the Veneerings’ oldest friends.
“But, there is another time to come, and it comes in about a fortnight, and it comes to Mr. and Mrs. Lammle on the sands at Shanklin, in the Isle of Wight.
“Mr. and Mrs. Lammle have walked for some time on the Shanklin sands, and one may see by their foot-prints that they have not walked arm-in-arm, and that they have not walked in a straight track, and that they have walked in a moody humour; for, the lady has prodded little spirting holes in the damp sand before her with her parasol, and the gentleman has trailed his stick after him. As if he were of the Mephistopheles family indeed, and had walked with a drooping tail.”143
It is not an angelic council that follows, though it has the virtues of candor, contrition, and a judicious conclusion, proposed by the Belial of the conference, to make the best of a bad bargain by forming a union of intrigue against the world in general and the diabolical Veneerings in particular. Thus mutual in greed, in gullibility, in consequent remorse, and in unholy alliance, this pair of frauds form the real mutuality of Dickens’ Vanity Fair.
Silas Wegg and William Dorrit stand at the two extremes, for one is farcical and the other tragic, yet they meet on a common ground, the comedy of exposure. The farcical villain may be dismissed with the comment that his dramatic exit, though richly done, bears some marks of the childishness and vulgarity that his author could not always avoid. The tragic comedian, on the other hand, stands before us in an unconscious self-betrayal no less impressive and startling in its way than that of the sleep-walking Lady Macbeth. Nowhere in English literature, indeed, is there a picture more awful in its simple inevitability than the eloquent speech addressed to the guests at Mrs. Merdle’s dinner table by the affable, patronizing Father of the Marshalsea.
Such ironic penalizings as these are satires of circumstances, sport which beguiles the ennuied Immortals. Immeasurably lower in the scale is the practical joke indulged in by mortals; yet in such deeds we may reckon Mistresses Ford and Page, Sir Toby and Maria, as human deputies acting for a requiting destiny. Perhaps our best example of this obvious but joyous kind of satire is one found in almost the first novel of almost the first name on our list, Lytton’s Pelham. It is the Parisian incident of the amorous M. Margot and the clever Mrs. Green, wherein the conceit and credulity of the former is played upon by the shrewd and merry malice of the latter, until he finds himself distressingly suspended in a basket from her lofty window late in a chilly night, to the great amusement of divers spectators previously invited there for that purpose.
Much more subtle and hence much more intellectually satisfying is the trap in which another amorous gentleman, the Reverend Mr. Slope, is caught by another clever lady, Signora Neroni.144
“Mr. Slope was madly in love, but hardly knew it. The signora spitted him, as a boy does a cockchafer on a cork, that she might enjoy the energetic agony of his gyrations. And she knew very well what she was doing.”
In their memorable interview the accomplished Phoedria led this poor Cymochles into a fearful, tangled web, there to struggle and flounder until she released him with mocking scorn, having illustrated perfectly Meredith’s remark about another and more famous egoist:145
“A lover pretending too much by one foot’s length of pretense, will have that foot caught in her trap.”
Even then, however, fate had not done her worst, for the cockchafer was literally to be slapped in the face by the more direct and active Eleanor Bold. The comment on this latter scene may be cited as an example of the mock-heroic vein occasionally used in the service of satire from Swift and Fielding on.146
“But how shall I sing the divine wrath of Mr. Slope, or how invoke the tragic muse to describe the rage which swelled the celestial bosom of the bishop’s chaplain? Such an undertaking by no means befits the low-heeled buskin of modern fiction. The painter put a veil over Agamemnon’s face when called on to depict the father’s grief at the early doom of his devoted daughter. The god, when he resolved to punish the rebellious winds, abstained from mouthing empty threats. We will not attempt to tell with what mighty surgings of the inner heart Mr. Slope swore to revenge himself on the woman who had disgraced him, nor will we vainly strive to depict his deep agony of soul.
“There he is, however, alone in the garden-walk, and we must contrive to bring him out of it. * * * He stood motionless, undecided, glaring with his eyes, thinking of the pains and penalties of Hades, and meditating how he might best devote his enemy to the infernal gods with all the passion of his accustomed eloquence. He longed in his heart to be preaching at her. ’Twas thus that he was ordinarily avenged of sinning mortal men and women. Could he at once have ascended his Sunday rostrum and fulminated at her such denunciations as his spirit delighted in, his bosom would have been greatly eased.”
The routing of this clergyman is balanced by the triumph of another, in a later volume of the series, though in an entirely different cause.147 None of our novelists has given us a more delectable scene than the one which marked the culmination of those triangular interviews with which Bishop Proudie’s study was so familiar. Here Mrs. Proudie, that mighty Amazon, is brought low, and that, through a dastardly blow of fate, by a foe unworthy of her steel, albeit she had not considered him unworthy of her persecution. She is now made to endure two kinds of anguish, both new and both terrible. The first is being ignored. The second is being talked back to and then left before she can reply. It is a glorious moment for all but the defeated when one weary badgered opponent thunders at her, “Peace, Woman!” and adds that she would better be minding her distaff; and another weary badgered opponent, her sleek and pampered husband, jumps from his chair at the sound, not in anger at the unchivalrous Mr. Crawley but in admiration of his incredible courage and astounding victory.
Of these various roads open to the writer of satirical intent, those just indicated, by direct reflection and by dramatic scenes, are in the nature of by-ways. They are for the most part occasional and incidental; valuable chiefly as securing the piquant and diversified effect necessary to the literature that aims to amuse, even when the amusement itself is secondary in the real design.
The main highway is that of character. By the kind of characters he can create and by his attitude toward them shall the novelist be known. There are the idealized, the respected, the beloved, the censured, the anathematized. The group selected for our especial concern in this study is formed of those pilloried by the rebuke humorous. Such, however,—the comic and therefore the ridiculed,—are objects of satire and accordingly more suitably considered in the following section. It is the opposite class that constitutes a factor in satiric method. This phase of the discussion will therefore be confined to the wits, those who may be called satirists in their own right, and so used by the author as a dramatic means to his satiric end.
Wit is the diamond of the intellectual world, precious on account of its rarity, its brilliancy, and the sense of infinite time, matter, and compression that have gone into its transformation from common charcoal. Brevity is indeed an element of it; but its soul is perception, a vision at once quick and penetrating, the radio-activity of the mind.
Being such, it has the infrequence that marks all excellence, both in life and its mirrored reflection. There is much of an unsatiric and subintellectual order, the kind that comes from ingenuity and cunning, and takes the shape of pranks and jests for the fun of them; manifest in Diccon, Autolycus, and the Court Fools,—though these last often have much meat in them. Then there is the clever befooling for a purpose, as seen in Portia, getting her own ring by a subterfuge; or Kate Hardcastle, stooping to conquer. There is also the bitter temper which animates a Katherina, checkmated only by a Petruchio; this produces too a Thersites to be the cheese and digestion of Achilles; and Cleopatra, gibing at “the married woman.”
Wit, however, is something more than merriment or malice; and short is the list of its worthy examples. Lysistrata is not only a vigorous feminist but pungent on the theme. Pertelote and the Wife of Bath illumine masculine superstition and conservatism. Benedict and Beatrice sparkle by mutual concussion. The melancholy Jaques and the melancholy Dane are the finest of satiric philosophers. Subtle the Alchemist enjoys with a huge private relish the gullibility he exploits. Fra Lippo Lippi graces with gayety the professional pretense and policy he exposes. These compose a distinctive and exclusive company, and few there are who may be added unto them.
Within the novel the proportion is almost as small. The most noteworthy prototypes to Victorian fiction are Matthew Bramble and, in a girlish fashion, Evelina. (Lady Emily, in Susan Ferrier’s Marriage, might be included). But these, through the thin guise of letters, are Smollett and Burney as completely as Gulliver and Shandy are Swift and Sterne through the thinner guise of the dramatic monologue. More objective are Jane Austen’s Mr. Bennet and his daughter Elizabeth. The former particularly is a satiric soloist acting as Greek chorus to the follies of his wife, daughters, and certain young men.
This delightful relationship between father and daughter, a sort of satiric defensive alliance against the besieging army of silly exactions and vexations, finds a clear if fainter echo in that of Dr. Gibson and Molly (in Mrs. Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters), who plan in the temporary absence of the elegant stepmother to do “everything that is unrefined and ungenteel.”
The exponents of satiric wit in the Victorian novel may be thrown for convenience into three or four divisions.
There is the native or rustic type, whose shrewd observations are condensed into homely but poignant epigrams. That such characters have always existed is evident from the existence of a whole literature of proverbial philosophy, of anonymous origin, like ballads and fabliaux. Conspicuous in the van of the few who have been lifted from this obscure anonymity is the redoubtable Mrs. Poyser. It is no valid discount to George Eliot’s achievement to say she produced only one Mrs. Poyser. Indeed, it might add something to her luster to note that no other novelist has produced even one.
The only other deserving of mention is a countryman in Lytton’s What Will He Do with It, chosen in this case also because he illustrates the generic class of stage-drivers, whose brightest light is the American Yuba Bill. This one is described in the chapter heading148 as “a charioteer, to whom an experience of British Laws suggests an ingenious mode of arresting the progress of Roman Papacy.” He discourses to his passenger:149
“My wife’s grandfather was put into Chancery just as he was growing up, and never grew afterwards—never got out o’ it. Nout ever does. There’s our church warden comes to me with a petition to sign agin the Pope. Says I, ‘that old Pope is always in trouble—what’s he bin doin’ now?’ Says he, ‘Spreading! He’s agot into Parlyment, and now he’s got a colledge, and we pays for it. I doesn’t know how to stop him.’ Says I, ‘Put the Pope into Chancery along with wife’s grandfather, and he’ll never spread agin.’”
The urban counterpart of this type is the child of the city streets, of which we have specimens in the sophisticated gamins, the Artful Dodger and Dick Swiveller. In this Dickens has a monopoly, such as it is.
Coming up from the ranks, we reach the intellectual aristocrat, whose culture enables him to add polish to his satiric pith and point. It happens that the two most representative characters of this type are furnished by the two authors who stand at chronological extremes, though the volumes in which they occur are only three years apart.150
Kenelm Chillingly is the melancholy Victorian. After the initial lapse into a bit of grotesque caricature in the account of his babyhood,—a thing that would have been avoided by a writer of more restrained taste,—the author paints his portrait with skill, distinction, and truth. His Coming of Age speech to the assembled tenants and guests on that joyful occasion is truly startling, but far from incredible. The audacious youngster, with his grave, serene, matter of fact pessimism, exposes in a searching analysis the discrepancy between the supposed reality they were felicitating themselves and him upon and an ideal which is quite beyond their comprehension. Yet it is an unquestionably practical ideal, and it breaks like a slow, cold, somber light through the shallow sentiment that had been screening some disconcerting depths.
It is true, he says, that the Chillinglys come from a remote race, but length of tenure has meant only so much more inanity.151
“They were born to eat as long as they could eat, and when they could eat no longer they died. Not that in this respect they were a whit less insignificant than the generality of their fellow creatures.”
He reminds his gaping, rural audience that man merely represents a stage in the course of evolution.152
“The probability is that, some day or other, we shall be exterminated by a new development of species.”
He goes on ruthlessly to assert that, contrary to the popular belief, his father was not a good landlord, because he was too indulgent to the individual and too heedless of national welfare, ignoring the highest duty of the employer, maximum production through competitive examination. As to his own college record:153
“Some of the most useless persons—especially narrow-minded and bigoted—have acquired far higher honours at the university than have fallen to my lot.”
And then, after a brilliant Schopenhauerish conclusion, he drinks to their very good healths.
Thus launched, the meditative young man continues in a career of ironic candor, although he learns later the wisdom of being candid only with oneself at times, and less communicative to others; as for instance when he soliloquizes on a request by farmer Saunderson:154
“One can’t wonder why every small man thinks it so pleasant to let down a big one, when a father asks a stranger to let down his own son for even fancying that he is not small beer. It is upon that principle in human nature that criticism wisely relinquishes its pretensions as an analytical science, and becomes a lucrative profession. It relies on the pleasure its readers find in letting a man down.”
Dr. Shrapnel is a sad and tragic figure, bowed by an altruistic grief at the state of human affairs, yet over his clouded sky play some sharp lightning flashes; witness his vivid simile describing the Tories, thus reported:155
“He compares them to geese claiming possession of the whole common, and hissing at every foot of ground they have to yield. They’re always having to retire and always hissing. ‘Retreat and menace,’ that’s the motto for them.”
There are a few characters remaining who cannot be omitted from this group of witty satirists, who do not quite belong to any of the above classes, and who do have a common bond, though only the artificial one of femininity. They must therefore be mentioned as Women; Mrs. Poyser being summoned for a second enrollment, and Mrs. Cadwallader added. It is true that their animadversions are largely directed against some faults in the prevailing system of courtship, marriage, and a masculine-managed universe, but not exclusively so, nor are they the only critics of those subjects.
Two others besides George Eliot have made a single but notable contribution to this list, Thackeray and Charlotte Brontë. Rebecca Sharp is too well known to need more than appreciative mention. Shirley Keeldar is interesting as being what the author’s “sister Emily might have been.” She is a spicily sweet, lovable character, clearly presented both in action and in such touches of description as,156
“* * * ever ready to satirize her own or any other person’s enthusiasm, she would have given a farm of her best land for a chance of rendering good service.”
She converses with her friend Caroline about literature:157
“Milton was great; but was he good? His brain was right; how was his heart? * * * Milton tried to see the first woman; but, Cary, he saw her not. * * * It was his cook that he saw; or it was Mrs. Gill, * * * preparing a cold collation for the rectors. * * * I would beg to remind him that the first men of the earth were Titans, and that Eve was their mother.”
In a spirited speech to Uncle Sympson, who craved to get rid of the exasperating minx by disposing of her in respectable matrimony, she baits and badgers him until his feeble intellect is nearly shattered, ideas outraged, temper twisted beyond repair. No Victorian young niece should say to an elderly conventional guardian:158
“Your god, sir, is the World. * * * Your great Bel, your fish-tailed Dagon. * * * See him busied at the work he likes best—making marriages. He binds the young to the old, the strong to the imbecile. He stretches out the arm of Mezentius and fetters the dead to the living.”
The novelist most admittedly generous to women is Meredith, and we have him to thank for Margaret Lovell, Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson, Diana Warwick, and Clara Middleton, with Mrs. Berry as a sort of compromise between Mrs. Poyser and Mrs. Tulliver. Yet they do not any more than live up to their boasted reputations, as dainty rogues in porcelain, famous epigrammatists, the quoted astonishment of drawing-rooms.159
The real Victorian Shakespeare in the matter of women is Trollope. Not entirely unworthy of the sisterhood of Beatrice, Viola, and Portia, are Miss Dunstable, Lily Dale, Lucy Robarts, and Violet Effingham; Madeline Stanhope might be added as a village Cleopatra.
Lily Dale is plaintively sympathetic on the subject of the sorrows of men through the vexations of their amusements:160
“Women must amuse themselves, except for an annual treat or two. But the catering for men’s sport is never ending, and is always paramount to everything else. And yet the pet game of the day never goes off properly. In partridge time, the partridges are wild and won’t come to be killed. In hunting time, the foxes won’t run straight,—the wretches. They show no spirit, and will take to ground to save their brushes. Then comes a nipping frost, and skating is proclaimed; but the ice is always rough, and the woodcocks have deserted the country. And as for salmon,—when the summer comes round I do really believe that they suffer a great deal about the salmon. I am sure they never catch any. So they go back to their clubs and their cards, and abuse their cooks and blackball their friends.”
As to the adorable, captivating kind, she is not too sanguine:161
“The Apollos of the world * * * who are so full of feeling, so soft-natured, so kind, who never say a cross word, who never get out of bed on the wrong side in the morning,—it so often turns out that they won’t wash.”
Of Lucy Robarts Trollope himself speaks with justifiable pride, and says he does not see “how any character could be more natural than she.” She is indeed a sunny, breezy, English maid, endowed with charm, enterprise, and a resourcefulness that could outwit with dignity the titled dowager who did not want to be her mother-in-law. But her chief distinction, in which she is more unusual than “natural,” is the possession of that kind of humor defined by Howells as “the cry of pain of a well-bred man.” When her pride is wounded, her love baffled, her happiness apparently shipwrecked, her course of action made most difficult, she is able to say to her sister:162
“Fanny, you have no idea what an absolute fool I am, what an unutterable ass. The soft words of which I tell you were of the kind which he speaks to you when he asks you how the cow gets on which he sent you from Ireland, or to Mark about Ponto’s shoulder. * * *
“He is no hero. There is nothing on earth wonderful about him. I never heard him say a single word of wisdom, or utter a thought that was akin to poetry. He devotes all his energies to riding after a fox or killing poor birds, and I never heard of his doing a single great action in my life. And yet * * *”
In tears and breathless excitement she admits the strength and reality of her love, and continues with the diagnosis:
“I’ll tell you what he has: he has fine straight legs, and a smooth forehead, and a good-humoured eye, and white teeth. Was it possible to see such a catalogue of perfections, and not fall down, stricken to the very bone? But it was not that that did it all, Fanny. I could have stood against that, I think I could, at least. It was his title that killed me. I had never spoken to a lord before.”
But she is also obliged to acknowledge that she has done some injustice to her own romance and to the sincerity of Lord Lufton:163
“Well, it was not a dream. Here, standing here, on this very spot—on that flower of the carpet—he begged me a dozen times to be his wife. I wonder whether you and Mark would let me cut it out and keep it.”
No solution to her matrimonial problem being offered, she suggests one:164
“‘And what shall I do next?’ said Lucy, still speaking in a tone that was half tragic and half jeering.
“‘Do?’ said Mrs. Robarts.
“‘Yes, something must be done. If I were a man I could go to Switzerland, of course; or, as the case is a bad one, perhaps as far as Hungary. What is it that girls do? they don’t die now-a-days, I believe. * * * I have got a piece of sackcloth, and I mean to wear that, when I have made it up.’”
We are relieved to hear later that no such drastic action was necessary, as she became Lady Lufton and was able to be happy without overworking her sense of humor.
These instances may serve to indicate the general method and effect of so-called realism applied to satiric intent, so long as allowance is made for the unreal and distorted nature of all incomplete and isolated cases, butchered to make an analytic holiday.