CHAPTER III
TYPES
For that form of satire which deals with actual individuals, photographed or caricatured, the designation personal is sufficiently descriptive. But for that which deals with fictitious individuals, wherein the models that sat for the portraits have passed through the imaginative process that makes their portraiture a work of art, there is no satisfactory name. Typical, in distinction from individual and institutional, is tolerably expressive, but a term to be apologized for. The school of art known as realistic, which was theoretically adopted by the nineteenth century, repudiates creations that are “mere types,” and claims for itself the achievement of true individuals. The sign of individuality is a discordant complexity. Every man may have his humour but he is not always in it. He may be ruled by a master passion, but the rule is not a monopolistic autocracy. Its supremacy is constantly disputed and threatened by mob rebellion. Civil war is the usual rêgime, and the attainment of a stabilized government is rare.
Tamburlaine, Volpone, Othello, Tartuffe, Blifil, are not untrue, but they are only partial truths. We see much, undoubtedly the most significant and dominating traits, but we cannot see all when the searchlight is concentrated on a single spot. Agamemnon, Hamlet, Tom Jones, Jaffeir, swayed, perplexed, inconsistent, at once infinite and abject, are more nearly full length and complete drawings. Milton’s Satan becomes humanized when, entering the human abode, he grows hesitant, half regretful, half eager, a prey to conflicting emotions and cross purposes.
Yet those desirable factors of art, unity and emphasis, must be secured, and they can be secured only by throwing the emphasis on some one feature, thus giving unity to the character. In the field of satire a classification based on these qualities is the more easily made in that any given character is usually satirized for some particular trait, although the problem does not end there. We may construct encampments for our army of characters—and in Victorian fiction they come in battalions—and we may label them; but we shall find it less simple to assign the companies to their own barracks and keep them there.
The Father of the Marshalsea is a snob. He is also hypocritical and foolish. Moreover, he is a sentimentalist and an epicurean. Withal he is not villainous, but more pathetic than execrable. He has no apparent kinship with the Countess de Saldar, yet she also may be described in the above terms. The enumeration would not show the difference. Thus not only does each real character refuse to be known by one name and one only, but the congregation assembled under any one denomination shows such diversity as to make the category itself questionable. Mrs. Mackensie and Mrs. Clennam, Mr. Dombey and Bertie Stanhope, Tom Tulliver and Sir Willoughby Patterne, are all egoists; but they would find little congeniality in their mutual egoism.
All that can be done is to indicate the range and the concentration of the main types. These types will of course represent those elements in human character which seem to the satirist such deflections from an ideal as are amenable to comic exposure and perhaps correction. It does not seem possible to reduce them to fewer than seven or eight heads, as follows: hypocrisy, folly, snobbishness, sentimentality, egoism, fanaticism, and vulgarity.
These various fields have their specialists. Hypocrisy, including sycophancy and deliberate imposture of any kind, belongs to Dickens, with Thackeray, Trollope, and others following not far behind. He leads also in depiction of folly and incompetence, though these prevail widely in Victorian fiction; and Meredith excels in portrayal of mental incapacity and fallacy in reasoning. It is the latter who comes to the front with sentimentality and egoism, having but few predecessors. Thackeray handles snobbishness in all its ramifications of worldliness and elegant ennui. But although he contributes the name, the thing exists on the pages of Lytton, Disraeli, Trollope, and Dickens. Fanaticism, bigotry, all sorts of fads, make another common ground for Peacock and Butler, and crop up in Reade, Brontë, and Kingsley. Coarse vulgarity is the rarest of all, the Age of Propriety refusing to transplant this weed from life to literature, but it is admitted by Dickens, Thackeray, Reade, and Trollope.
Since satire is usually directed against the special thing in which the satirist feels superior, we may deduce the favorite Victorian virtues to have been sincerity, wisdom, rationality, refinement, and a sense of proportion; a large order, but the nineteenth century would scorn a smaller.
Dickens did not invent the hypocrite, nor did he supply anything new to the investigation of the nature of this most subtile of all the beasts of the field. He himself had not the subtlety to search out causes and discover possible extenuations and values in a thing he simply and flatly abhorred and saw no excuse for. What he does furnish is an immense amount of data, with many variations, showing in extenso this aspect of human nature. At least three dozen of his three hundred characters exhibit the seamy side of scheming and deceit. From Pickwick, wherein Mr. Winkle, unfrocked as to skates and branded as a humbug and an impostor because he assumed an accomplishment when he had it not, to Edwin Drood, harboring Luke Honeythunder, professional philanthropist, who, “Always something in the nature of a Boil upon the face of society, * * * expanded into an inflammatory Wen in Minor Canon Corner,” no volume is entirely free from the trail of the serpent.
Most of the humbugs and impostors are, like the philanthropist, professional. Dodson and Fogg, Sergeant Buzfuz, Mr. Tulkinghorn, turn their intrigues into legal channels; Mr. Bumble and Mrs. Mann, into civic; Dr. Blimber and Mrs. Pipchin, into pedagogic. Mr. Merdle tricks the financial world, though Mr. Casby, operating on a smaller scale, makes himself much more of a fraud. Mr. Crummles, Mrs. Gamp, Mrs. Crupp, in their various capacities, abstain from giving their patrons value received. The Barnacles, parasites clinging to the Ship of State, pose as public servants and benefactors.
It happens, however, that those who confine their dissembling and pretense to private life are of the highest hypocritical quality. Mr. Mantalini expertly bamboozles his wife. Mrs. Sparsit successfully plays her part for the benefit of Mr. Bounderby. Mr. Pumblechook protests too much to little Pip, now grown up and prosperous, but carries it off with an air. Mr. Carker, who “hid himself behind his sleek, hushed, crouching manner, and his ivory smile,” and who, “sly of manner, sharp of tooth, soft of foot, watchful of eye, oily of tongue, cruel of heart, nice of habit, sat with a dainty steadfastness and patience at his work, as if he were waiting at a mouse’s hole,” finally catches his mouse, though only to be eluded again.
A perfect modern instance of the bubble pricked by the ancient Socratic method is that of Mr. Curdle, eminent dramatic critic. He has been talking big about the Unities of the Drama. Nicholas innocently asks what they might be. He is informed:[356]
“Mr. Curdle coughed and considered. ‘The unities, sir,’ he said, ‘are a completeness—a kind of universal dovetailedness with regard to place and time—a sort of a general oneness, if I may be allowed to use so strong an expression. I take those to be the dramatic unities, so far as I have been enabled to bestow attention upon them, and I have read much upon the subject and thought much. I find, running through the performances of this child,’ said Mr. Curdle, turning to the Phenomenon, ‘a unity of feeling, a breadth, a light and shade, a warmth of colouring, a tone, a harmony, a glow, an artistical development of original conceptions, which I look for, in vain, among older performers. I don’t know whether I make myself understood?’
“‘Perfectly,’ replied Nicholas.
“‘Just so,’ said Mr. Curdle, pulling up his neckcloth. ‘That is my definition of the unities of the drama.’”
The great trio, Pecksniff, Bagstock, and Heep, occur in the three successive novels of the six years ending with the mid-century. Pecksniff is the most gratuitous offender, for he encases himself in piety and benevolence, and inserts his falseness into every word, every deed, every relation of life. Heep’s specious humility is as unrelaxed and vigilant, but it is more of a means to an end and not, like Pecksniff’s, an end in itself. He fawns and flatters and cheats for the benefits to be derived from such policies. Thus slippery are the steps of Uriah’s ladder. He has, moreover, a word of self-defense which forces his educational training to share the responsibility. When he is reminded by Copperfield that greed and cunning always overreach themselves, he retorts by implicating the school where he was taught “from nine o’clock to eleven, that labour was a curse; and from eleven o’clock to one, that it was a blessing and a cheerfulness and a dignity,” and so on. Major Bagstock resembles Heep in being servile in manner instead of pompously patronizing; but while Chesterton may be right in calling him a more subtle hypocrite than Pecksniff,[357] it is also true that the Major’s hypocrisy is not quite his whole existence, as it is of both Pecksniff and Heep. He is at least a gourmand in addition, if nothing more.
Before Dickens, in our period, the only character to exemplify this trait, aside from Peacock’s Feathernest, is Lytton’s Robert Beaufort, in Night and Morning. The author remarks in a later preface that this character might be rated as a forerunner to Pecksniff; but he is in reality more of the Blifil type, his brother Philip acting as his Tom Jones.
Lytton, however, is inclined to discuss the subject by the way. In one of his earlier novels he says,—[358]
“Honesty—patriotism—religion—these have had their hypocrites for life;—but passion permits only momentary dissemblers.”
In a later one he analyzes a dubious citizen:[359]
“But our banker was really a charitable man, and a benevolent man, and a sincere believer. How, then, was he a hypocrite? Simply because he professed to be far more charitable, more benevolent, and more pious than he really was. His reputation had now arrived to that degree of immaculate polish that the smallest breath, which would not have tarnished the character of another man, would have fixed an indelible stain upon his.”
The same might be said of another banker, the respectable Bulstrode, whom George Eliot presents with no satire and an almost pitiful sympathy.
The wealthy plebeian Avenel is embarrassed by the inopportune arrival of his rustic sister in the presence of his aristocratic guests. By a brilliant counter-stroke of a candid and courageous confession, he stems the tide and wins the day. But in private he is very severe with the poor culprit, and then admits to himself, “I’m a cursed humbug, * * * but the world is such a humbug!”[360]
The only Pecksniffian hypocrite outside of Dickens is the Reverend Brocklehurst, whom Jane Eyre describes as lecturing to the half starved and shivering girls at the school of which he was trustee, on the beauty of asceticism and the holiness of economy, while his wife and daughters sit in state on the platform, curled, bejewelled, opulent in plumes and velvet.
The cant and manœuvering of the Thackeray and Trollope hypocrites are necessary as first aid to the ambitious. By means of them Becky Sharp achieves a husband, Mrs. Mackenzie a son-in-law, Moffit and Crosbie a patrician father-in-law, and Lady Carbury a literary reputation. Mr. Slope and the Pateroffs fail but no less bear up beneath their unsuccess. Melmotte, another Merdle, succumbs, like him, forced to realize that deceit may strike one with a tragic rebound.
Jermyn and Grandcourt, the latter especially, indulge in deceit out of pure selfishness, but in neither of them does George Eliot consider hypocrisy a matter for even satirical mirth. In lighter vein she does indeed show up the poseur in low life. Mr. Dowlas, oracle of The Rainbow, laying down the law about ghosts, is too frightened by the apparition of Silas Marner to speak. Having recovered and feeling “that he had not been quite on a par with himself and the occasion,” he intrigues to get appointed as deputy constable, and consents to serve, after “duly rehearsing a small ceremony known in high ecclesiastical life as nolo episcopari.” Mr. Scales, discoursing largely on excommunication, is another caught in the Socratic trap by being asked for definition of the term. He is no less ready than Mr. Curdle, though more sententious:[361]
“Well, it’s a law term—speaking in a figurative sort of way—meaning that a Radical was no gentleman.”
It is George Eliot who sees the necessity of the mask that most are content simply to tear away or disfigure. Although she speaks through a worldly wise character, she sounds no note of dissent:[362]
“‘I’ll tell you what, Dan,’ said Sir Hugo, ‘a man who sets his face against every sort of humbug is simply a three-cornered impracticable fellow. There’s a bad style of humbug, but there is also a good style—one that oils the wheels and makes progress possible.’”
This is recognized also by Lytton, who quotes “an anonymous writer of 1722:”[363]
“Deceit is the strong but subtile chain which runs through all the members of a society, and links them together; trick or be tricked, is the alternative; ’tis the way of the world, and without it intercourse would drop.”
Trollope subscribes with qualification, by having the archdeacon say, on the death of Mrs. Proudie,—[364]
“The proverb of De Mortuis is founded on humbug. Humbug out of doors is necessary.”
At the extreme opposite from the hypocrites, shrewd, knowing, wise at least in their own conceit, stand the incompetent, victims of folly; satirized not for ignorance but for bland unconsciousness of it, usually accompanied by a hallucination of efficiency. As the hypocrites shade off into villains, to be rebuked without humor, such as Jasper Losely, Randal Leslie, Bill Sykes, Sedgett, so the fools merge into the artless, to be smiled at without rebuke, as Colonel Digby and Colonel Newcome, Frank Hazeldean, the Vardens, Tom Pinch, Captain Cuttle, and “poor, excommunicated Miss Tox, who, if she were a fawner and a toad-eater, was at least an honest and a constant one.”
It is Dickens again who contributes the most data to this study, and particularly to the genus, Silly Dame. Here his amusement over mere fatuous complacency becomes warmed into scorn when that stupidity affects the home she has in charge, and lowers into a failure the very thing that it is most important to raise into success,—such success not being automatic. Mrs. Nickleby, Mrs. Wilfer, Mrs. Finching, like Jane Austen’s Mrs. Bennet and Mrs. Palmer, and Susan Ferrier’s Lady Juliana Douglass, are comparatively harmless, and are indulged accordingly. But an incapacity that may be picturesque in easy circumstances deepens into a grave misdemeanor when joined to a small income. Mrs. Micawber, Mrs. Pocket, Mrs. Pardiggle, and especially Mrs. Jellyby are domestic pests, at whom we are more exasperated than amused.
Aside from Dickens, the only artist much interested in this stratum of human nature is the one who has given us Mrs. Tulliver and Mrs. Vincy and her daughter, but they are not real sources of trouble, except Rosamund, and her failure is more spiritual than material. Mrs. Tulliver, a plaintive, hopelessly literal soul, is distressed over her husband’s metaphoric speech about “a good wagoner with a mole on his face.” She resents feebly the dogmatizing of the majestic Mrs. Glegg, but would never go “to the length of quarreling with her any more than a water-fowl that puts out its leg in a deprecating manner can be said to quarrel with a boy who throws stones.” Under another metaphor she is an amiable fish, which, “after running her head against the same resisting medium for thirteen years, would go at it again today with undiluted alacrity.”[365]
Out of her saddening experience Rosamund did emerge somewhat wiser, but with none of the higher wisdom which constitutes character.
“She simply continued to be mild in her temper, inflexible in her judgment, disposed to admonish her husband, and also to frustrate him by stratagem.”[366]
The other section of this class most fully recruited is made up of the foolish young men. It might look as though in the novelist’s world masculine folly were a malady incident to youth, while on the other hand, the feminine sort appeared late. For it happens that Lydia and Kitty Bennet have no real successors. There are indeed plenty of Hetty Sorrels, Lucy Deanes, Rosa Mackenzies, Amelia Sedleys, Dahlia Flemings; but their innocence and pathos protect them from satire. And the merely vapid and vain school girl is apparently too worthless a figure to be given a place on Victorian pages. So also seems the man whose mental growth has not kept pace with the years. Mr. Micawber may be taken as the exception that proves the rule. Sir Lukin Dunstane likewise shows that one may reach man’s estate and flourish therein on a small allotment of intelligence. He makes his best record in a gossipy little conversation with his wife, to whom he is giving an account of the Dacier-Asper wedding. Emmy had commented on the eloquence of his report:[367]
“He murmured something in praise of the institution of marriage—when celebrated impressively, it seemed.
“‘Tony calls the social world the “theater of appetites,” as we have it at present,’ she said; ‘and the world at a wedding is, one may reckon, in the second act in the hungry tragi-comedy.’
“‘Yes, there’s the breakfast,’ Sir Lukin assented. Mrs. Fryar-Gunnett was much more intelligible to him; in fact, quite so, as to her speech.”
Folly is more ludicrous in the young man than in the maid, on account of his greater conspicuousness in affairs, and the greater things expected of him,—any failure divulging the discrepancy between fact and fancy which is the basis of humor. It is also true that he stands a better chance of having his foolishness shaken out of him in his more exposed and strenuous life. Both these conditions are implied in a reflection made by one of Trollope’s characters. Isabel Boncassen, the frank American beauty, looks upon the young man as a type:[368]
“Young men are pretty much the same everywhere, I guess. They never have their wits about them. They never mean what they say, because they don’t understand the use of words. They are generally half impudent and half timid. When in love they do not at all understand what has befallen them. What they want they try to compass as a cow does when it stands stretching out its head toward a stack of hay which it cannot reach. Indeed, there is no such thing as a young man, for a man is not really a man till he is middle-aged. But take them at their worst, they are a deal too good for us, for they become men some day, whereas we must only be women to the end.”
Dickens is again a contributor of portraits, though not of the best, and is joined this time by Thackeray, Trollope, and Meredith.
Tom Gradgrind, product of a system, and Edmund Sparkler, product of a lack of system, deserve mention, as does Edward Dorrit, though sketched without color. Rawdon Crawley and Joseph Sedley, no longer in first flush of youth, are consistent exponents of gullible good nature and ponderous vacuity. But the two prizes of undeviating stupidity are Sir Felix Carbury and Algernon Blancove.
Sir Felix is a spoiled darling and an excrescence on the face of the earth. His accomplishments are set forth in a description of his state of enforced solitude consequent upon his latest exhibition of monumental inefficiency:[369]
“He had so spent his life hitherto that he did not know how to get through a day in which no excitement was provided for him. He never read. Thinking was altogether beyond him. And he had never done a day’s work in his life. He could lie in bed. He could eat and drink. He could smoke and sit idle. He could play cards; and could amuse himself with women,—the lower the culture of the women, the better the amusement. Beyond these things the world had nothing for him.”
The complacent fool would be matter for pure mirth if he could live for himself alone; but unfortunately his worthless existence is as adequate as any for the promotion of disaster to others. Sir Felix is comparatively harmless, for his wreckage is reparable, but Algernon is made a deus ex machina, and lets his commission go by default. Those who trusted him learn that “He that sendeth a message by the hand of a fool cutteth off his own feet, and drinketh in damage.” Or, as his own author says:[370]
“But, if it is permitted to the fool to create entanglements and set calamity in motion, to arrest its course is the last thing the Gods allow of his doing.”
He is, however, a fool of quality in that he has a philosophy of life, and if he were pent up in his room, he could mitigate tedium by reverie. One may indulge in anticipations without possessing the faculty of foresight. His cousin “aspired to become Attorney-General of these realms,” but he had other views:[371]
“Civilization had tried him and found him wanting; so he condemned it. Moreover, sitting now all day at a desk, he was civilization’s drudge. No wonder, then, that his dream was of prairies, and primeval forests, and Australian wilds. He believed in his heart that he would be a man new made over there, and always looked forward to a savage life as to a bath that would cleanse him, so that it did not much matter his being unclean for the present.”
The present sorry scheme of things also suffers him to wander the streets in temporary bankruptcy:[372]
“He continued strolling on, comparing the cramped misty London aspect of things with his visionary free dream of the glorious prairies, where his other life was: the forests, the mountains, the endless expanses; the horses, the flocks, the slipshod ease of language and attire; and the grog-shops. Aha! There could be no mistake about him as a gentleman and a scholar out there! Nor would Nature shut up her pocket and demand innumerable things of him, as civilization did. This he thought in the vengefulness of his outraged mind.”
Meredith keeps on the trail of this luckless youth with something of the relentlessness with which Blifil, Reverend Collins, Mrs. Norris, and Mrs. Proudie are pursued; but he gives a good Meredithian reason for it. Twice he takes the trouble to explain him, both times on the grounds of realism:[373]
“So long as the fool has his being in the world, he will be a part of every history, nor can I keep him from his place in a narrative that is made to revolve more or less upon its own wheels. * * * for the fool is, after his fashion, prudent, and will never, if he can help it, do himself thorough damage, that he may learn by it and be wiser.”
Again, an incident is followed by comment. Algernon, being loggy after a dinner at the Club, fancies himself melancholy and profound:[374]
“‘I must forget myself. I’m under some doom. I see it now. Nobody cares for me. I don’t know what happiness is. I was born under a bad star. My fate’s written.’ Following his youthful wisdom, this wounded hart dragged his slow limbs toward the halls of brandy and song.
“One learns to have compassion for fools, by studying them: and the fool, though Nature is wise, is next door to Nature. He is naked in his simplicity; he can tell us much, and suggest more. My excuse for dwelling upon him is, that he holds the link of my story. Where fools are numerous, one of them must be prominent now and then in a veracious narration.”
According to the old duality of satirized objects,—Vice and Folly, identified with the deceiver and the deceived,—the two classes just discussed would exhaust the list. But these signify folly in its narrowest and most literal sense, a plain lack of brains and a general incapacity. In its wider sense it includes misuse as well as want of intelligence. These mortals, as Puck discovered, are indeed all fools, at times and on certain points. The number may not be infinite, but Lydgate discovered sixty-three kinds; and Barclay augmented the list to nearly one hundred. Perfect wisdom would cast out not only ignorance, but also frivolity, sentimentality, vanity, all sorts of false standards and all manner of fallacies. Therefore snobs, romanticists, egoists, fanatics, merely exemplify folly in its varieties and ramifications.
The snob is defined by his great expositor as “one who meanly admires mean things.” A modern scholar calls vulgarity “satisfaction with anything inferior when a superior is attainable.”[375] These definitions together indicate why snobbishness and vulgarity are allied, though not identical. There is, however, this difference, that satisfaction implies in itself a passive acquiescence, whereas admiration leads naturally to imitation, and if possible, appropriation, of the thing approved. Of course, satisfaction on a different plane results from a feeling of attainment and possession; but it then becomes pride or vanity, which in turn may or may not be of the snobbish sort.
In popular apprehension, indeed, snobbishness and vulgarity are rated as more opposite than allied. The snob is thought of as either belonging to the polite world or trying to secure an entrance to its polished circles. If he occupies the former position, he boasts of his refinement, and from his eminence contemplates with scorn or at best an affable condescension, the mob below. To this class belong such members as Lytton’s and Disraeli’s aristocrats; such diverse types in Dickens as Sir John Chester, the Monseigneur in Tale of Two Cities, Mrs. General, and Mrs. Gowan; Thackeray’s Marquis of Steyne, Major Pendennis, and the Misses Pinkerton; Trollope’s de Courcys and the Chaldicote circle; Meredith’s Everard Romfrey and Ferdinand Laxley.
But if the snob is engaged in climbing up instead of looking down, he is likely to have some common clay still clinging to his shoes, as well as to be dishevelled by the exertions of the ascent. Such insignia of vulgarity are worn by a numerous clan, including the politician Rigby, the money-lender Baron Levy;[376] the Veneerings and Dorrits, and those patriotic American snobs whom Martin Chuzzlewit found so insufferably vulgar; Barry Lyndon, Mr. Osborne, and Becky Sharp; Mr. Slope, Mr. Crosbie, and the great Melmotte.
On the other hand, the frankly vulgar is reckoned among the plebeians. As there is a snobbishness free from coarseness, so there is a vulgarity unembellished even by pseudo-culture. In this ugly and gross scum of the earth no novelist really delights except the creator of Mrs. Gamp, Quilp, Squeers, and Fagin and his crew, though Thackeray is able to depict Sir Pitt Crawley; Trollope, the Scathards; and Meredith, Sedgett.
The compound of snobbishness and vulgarity has the additional complexity of ramifying into hypocrisy on one side and sentimentality on the other. The first conjunction is made because of the incitement to that fawning, flattering servility that more than anything else rouses satiric disgust. The second occurs when the flattering unction is laid to one’s own soul instead of being paid to the possessions of others. The first is obvious and its examples are legion. The second is more subtle and obscure, though perhaps almost as prevalent. It consists in an inaccurate orientation, a supposition that one has arrived at a goal, when the case is otherwise. Such unwarranted complacency cheers the lot of Mrs. Kirkpatrick, Mrs. Hobson Newcome, Mrs. Proudie, and the Countess de Saldar.
This, however, is only one phase of sentimentality. It also may exist independently, or otherwise combined than with snobbishness or vulgarity. It is a term somewhat ambiguous because of a recently changed connotation.
In the eighteenth century it was “sensibility,” and regarded as a virtue until Jane Austen exhibited it in Marianne Dashwood and her mother. At that time it was thought of as excess of feeling or sentiment cherished for its own sake, without much regard for the worthiness of its object. Marianne, disappointed in the vanished romance she had built up chiefly from imaginative material, “would have thought herself very inexcusable had she been able to sleep at all the first night after parting from Willoughby. She would have been ashamed to look her family in the face the next morning, had she not risen from her bed in more need of repose than when she lay down in it.”[377]
If Meredith, three-quarters of a century later, had been relating the sad fortunes of a self-deceived young lady, he would have stressed in his account of her character, the cause of the trouble, that is, the process of constructing a Spanish castle with a flimsy foundation in fact, rather than the effect, namely, the emotional orgy which celebrated its inevitable but astonishing collapse. He would have seen that preliminary process as possible because of the disregard for facts which is the real mark of the sentimentalist.[378] This later interpretation is not a contradiction of the earlier one, but a shifting of emphasis. The common factor in the two definitions is feeling, ranging all the way from simple preference or inclination to strong emotion. But whereas formerly this element was accepted without further analysis, it came later to be accounted for in its relation to the intellect. Emotion is an excellent driver but an untrustworthy leader. It is when it assumes leadership, when action is not only impelled but guided by feeling, that the ensuing motion is in danger of being erratic, unprogressive, perhaps calamitous. This more or less wilful blindness, which is the essence of sentimentality, is of course a very natural human trait. Since it is the function of emotion to supply heat, and of intellect to furnish light, and since warmth is as a rule more grateful than illumination, particularly if the prospect does not please, we are much more likely to be warmed in our passage through life than illumined. To refuse to see the disagreeable is as instinctive as to seek the delightful. Nor could one be regarded as more of a fault than the other until the love of truth for its own sake became an ideal, accompanying the dominance of the scientific spirit.
This accounts for the fact that, while Meredith did not invent the sentimentalist any more than Dickens the hypocrite or Thackeray the snob, he is the first to take a deep and conscious interest in this species; being especially fitted for it by his own incisive, highly rationalized nature as well as by the spirit of his time. His predecessors in this field are Peacock, Gaskell, Dickens, Thackeray, and Eliot, although the last is rather a contemporary.
From Squire Headlong, the would-be savant, to Mr. Falconer, the would-be Platonist and devotee of Saint Cecilia, Peacock traces a vein of rather innocuous sentimentality, but of Miss Damaretta Pinmoney he gives a definite account, followed by several examples:[379]
“She had cultivated a great deal of theoretical romance—in taste, not in feeling—an important distinction—which enabled her to be most liberally sentimental in words, without at all influencing her actions.”
Mrs. Shaw represents those who so appreciate the value of romantic affliction that, lacking a grief, they manufacture a grievance to cover the deficiencies of a too roseate existence. On a certain melancholy occasion to be sure she orders “those extra delicacies of the season which are always supposed to be efficacious against immoderate grief at farewell dinners.” But her usual manner—[380]
“* * * had always something plaintive in it, arising from the long habit of considering herself a victim to an uncongenial marriage. Now that, the General being gone, she had every good of life, with as few drawbacks as possible, she had been rather perplexed to find an anxiety, if not a sorrow. She had, however, of late settled upon her own health as a source of apprehension; she had a nervous little cough whenever she thought about it; and some complaisant doctor ordered her just what she desired,—a winter in Italy.”
It is Mrs. Kirkpatrick, however, who takes the prize in “pink sentimentalism,” and holds it until the arrival of the Countess de Saldar, and the Pole sisters. Behind the “sweet perpetuity of her smile” is carried on an equally perpetual manœvering, which ministers, under the auspices of refinement and the proprieties, to a small and selfish tyranny. If by any chance she is detected or foiled, she is deeply wounded, for if she hates anything, “it is the slightest concealment and reserve.” Moreover, she never thinks of herself, and is “really the most forgiving person in the world, in forgiving slights.” She is overcome by the spring weather,—[381]
“Primavera, I think the Italians call it. * * * It makes me sigh perpetually; but then I am so sensitive. Dear Lady Cumnor used to say I was like a thermometer.”
But it is in her association with Lady Harriet that her sincerity and candor shine forth. Apprised, on one occasion, of the intention of that personage—an aristocrat in character as well as social station—to honor her with a morning call, she dispatches to a neighbor her stepdaughter Molly, of whose friendship with Lady Harriet she is jealous, and keeps at home her own daughter Cynthia, to prepare the especially delicious luncheon to which the guest is to be invited as an impromptu bit of pot-luck. During this visit Lady Harriet brings up the question of white lies, confessing to an occasional indulgence, and asking her hostess if she never yielded to the temptation. She is answered:[382]
“I should have been miserable if I ever had. I should have died of self-reproach. ‘The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,’ has always seemed to me such a fine passage. But then I have so much that is unbending in my nature.”
Dickens and Thackeray, like Lytton, Reade, and Kingsley, have too much of this trait in their own temperaments to be able to view it with complete detachment, but they present a few samples. Besides Mrs. Wititterly, Harold Skimpole, and the ever illustrative Mr. Dorrit, Dickens is most successful with Mr. and Mrs. Micawber, and Mrs. Chick.
When Mr. Micawber, stimulated by the prospect of something being about to turn up, presents poor Traddles, with great éclat and ceremony, his personal note for the exact amount of his indebtedness, David, a witness, reflects:[383]
“I am persuaded, not only that this was quite the same to Mr. Micawber as paying the money, but that Traddles himself hardly knew the difference until he had had time to think about it.”
Mrs. Chick, with true Dombian genius, having helped to loosen her sister-in-law’s slender hold upon life, now enjoys the pathos of the situation:[384]
“What a satisfaction it was to Mrs. Chick—a commonplace piece of folly enough, * * * to patronize and be tender to the memory of that lady; in exact pursuance of her conduct to her in her lifetime; and to thoroughly believe herself, and take herself in, and make herself uncommonly comfortable on the strength of her toleration! What a mighty pleasant virtue toleration should be when we are right, to be so very pleasant when we are wrong, and quite unable to demonstrate how we came to be invested with the privilege of exercising it!”
In her capricious cruelty to Lucretia Tox, she pretends to be scandalized at what she had fostered all along, and taunts the dismayed woman for the very thing she had been aiding and abetting:[385]
“‘The scales;’ here Mrs. Chick cast down an imaginary pair, such as are commonly used in grocers’ shops; ‘have fallen from my sight.’ * * * ‘How can I speak to you like that?’ retorted Mrs. Chick, who, in default of having any particular argument to sustain herself upon, relied principally upon such repetitions for her most withering effects. ‘Like that! You may well say like that, indeed!’”
Thackeray is included in this list chiefly on the strength of the Osbornes, Pitt Crawley, and to a less degree, Blanche Armory and Mrs. Bute. Of the first he says, regarding certain declarations of disinterested friendliness and admiration,—“There is little doubt that old Osborne believed all he said, and that the girls were quite in earnest in their protestations of affection for Miss Swartz.” And his thrust at the hoodwinked Pitt’s delighted apprehension that the clever Becky really understood and appreciated him, is a palpable hit. He also arraigns under this head his favorite satirical object,—“the moral world, that has, perhaps, no particular objection to vice, but an insuperable repugnance to hearing vice called by its proper name.” On the other hand, more than any other novelist, he has given us sentimentalists unaware; that is, in such characters as Helen, Laura, and Arthur Pendennis, Lady Castlewood, and Colonel Newcome, he shares their own unawareness of the possession of this foible, though in all these it is of an innocent variety.
George Eliot is keenly alive to this blindness in human nature, particularly as it manifests itself in the pernicious optimism of weak and wilful youth; but as with other mortal failures, it is usually too serious in her eyes for satire. Of all her novels, Felix Holt and Daniel Deronda alone have no character of this type. In the others he appears as Arthur Donnithorne, Stephen Guest, Godfrey Cass, Tito Melema, and Fred Vincy; but rarely is he ridiculed, and then ironically.
Of the bonny young Squire Donnithorne she draws the portrait as he himself would see it:[386]
“* * * candour was one of his favorite virtues; and how can a man’s candour be seen in all its lustre unless he has a few failings to talk of? But he had an agreeable confidence that his faults were all of a generous kind—impetuous, warm-blooded, leonine; never crawling, crafty, reptilian. ‘No! I’m a devil of a fellow for getting myself into a hobble, but I always take care the load shall fall on my own shoulders.’ Unhappily there is no inherent poetic justice in hobbles, and they will sometimes obstinately refuse to inflict their worst consequences on the prime offender, in spite of his loudly-expressed wish. It was entirely owing to this deficiency in the scheme of things that Arthur had ever brought any one into trouble besides himself.”
Even when troublesome consequences threatened both himself and others, he was buoyed up by “a sort of implicit confidence in him that he was really such a good fellow at bottom, Providence would not treat him harshly.”
Tito Melema also leaned heavily on the law of compensation:[387]
“It was not difficult for him to smile pleadingly on those whom he had injured, and offer to do them much kindness: and no quickness of intellect could tell him exactly the taste of that honey on the lips of the injured.”
Godfrey Cass, having little to say for himself, is drawn with much sympathy, the responsibility being thrown upon his self-excusing father:[388]