Satire in the Victorian Novel, by Frances Theresa Russell

“But a handsome woman at the head of your table, who knows how to dress and how to sit, and how to get in and out of her carriage—who will not disgrace her lord by her ignorance, or fret him by her coquetry, or disparage him by her talent—how beautiful a thing it is! For my own part I think that Griselda Grantly was born to be the wife of a great English peer.”

It is comforting to know that in the midst of these lofty circles the daughter of the archdeacon did not lose the virtue of humility; for we read in a subsequent narrative:[208]

“But, now and again, since her august marriage, she had laid her coronated head upon one of the old rectory pillows for a night or two, and on such occasions all the Plumsteadians had been loud in praise of her condescension.”

The difference between the novelists just discussed and the remaining half of the list, in the use of irony, is more easily perceived than defined. It can only be suggested by metaphor. Confectionery may be flavored, for instance with citron in lumps or liquid peppermint. It is evident that the former is more visible and detachable, but that the latter affects more pervasively the quality of the product. In the concoctions already mentioned, from Lytton to Trollope, it is easy enough to stick in one’s thumb and pull out a plum. All the plums being pulled out, the character of the remaining portion would not be radically changed. But peppermint cannot be extracted except by a process of chemical dissolution; and if it could, the taste of the whole would be altered. Yet it is not patent to eye or finger, though not wanting in stimulus to other senses. These two ingredients, however, are not mutually exclusive. The permeated may also be sufficiently glomerate to permit of some dissection; only the operation is less fully explanatory of the whole.

For example, we may extract from Peacock his description of the Abbey of Rubygill, situated—[209]

“* * * in a spot which seemed adapted by nature to be the retreat of monastic mortification, being on the banks of a fine trout-stream, and in the midst of woodland coverts, abounding with excellent game.”

“* * * nigh to fathom even that extraordinary depth of brain which always by divine grace furnishes the interior of a head-royal.”

Or the reply of Mr. Cypress to Dr. Folliott’s statement of the Brotherhood of Man:[211]

“Yes, sir, as the hangman is of the thief; the squire of the poacher; the judge of the libeller; the lawyer of his client; the statesman of his colleague; the bubble-blower of the bubble-buyer; the slave-driver of the negro: as these are brethren, so am I and the worthies in question.”

But this would give little idea of Peacock’s prevailing attitude,—a cheerfully sardonic amusement at the state of human affairs, expressed most frequently by means of an ironic juxtaposition of Past and Present.

Less cheerful and more sardonic is the smile with which Butler greets life and its follies. He is classed with Peacock as a romanticist in method, but is more akin to Swift in temper and manner than to any Victorian. The reader’s mind must be kept taut in the constant process of translating the assumed pose into the real meaning. Under the grave disapproval of the Erewhonian treatment of disease or any misfortune, and crime, each being discussed in the terms we apply to the other, lurks the reversed judgment. Nothing short of complete presentation, especially of the chapters on Current Opinions, Some Erewhonian Trials, The Musical Banks, and The Colleges of Unreason, could convey an adequate impression.

A representative sample, however, is found in the retort of the judge who pronounces sentence on the youth “charged with having been swindled out of a large property during his minority by his guardian.” The defendant puts up the plea natural under the circumstances, and is promptly instructed not to talk nonsense:[212]

“People have no right to be young, inexperienced, greatly in awe of their guardians, and without independent professional advice. If by such indiscretions they outrage the moral sense of their friends, they must expect to suffer accordingly.”

Later a thorough exposition of this legal philosophy is given in a long judicial oration preceding the doom of a prisoner found guilty of pulmonary consumption. A few excerpts show the trend of the argument.[213]

“It is all very well for you to say that you came of unhealthy parents, and had a severe accident in your childhood which permanently undermined your constitution; excuses such as these are the ordinary refuge of the criminal; but they cannot for one moment be listened to by the ear of justice. * * * There is no question of how you came to be wicked, but only this—namely, are you wicked or not? * * * It is intolerable that an example of such terrible enormity should be allowed to go at large unpunished. Your presence in the society of respectable people would lead the less able-bodied to think more lightly of all forms of illness; * * * A time of universal dephysicalization would ensue; medicine vendors of all kinds would abound in our streets and advertise in all our newspapers. * * * If you tell me that you had no hand in your parentage and education, * * * I answer that whether your being in a consumption is your fault or no, it is a fault in you, and it is my duty to see that against such faults as this the commonwealth shall be protected. You may say that it is your misfortune to be criminal; I answer that it is your crime to be unfortunate.”

This is a fit successor to the marvelous “Let no man” conclusion to the Modest Proposal.

Another unomittable instance is the account of a religious reformation. The visitor hints to a Musical Bank manager that the popular reliance on that currency was rather perfunctory, and that the other financial system, ostensibly flouted, was the real repository of coin and confidence.[214]

“He said that it had been more or less true till lately, but that now they had put fresh stained glass windows into all the banks in the country, and repaired the buildings, and enlarged the organs; the presidents, moreover, had taken to riding in omnibuses and talking nicely to people in the streets, and to remembering the ages of their children, and giving them things when they were naughty, so that all would henceforth go smoothly.

“‘But haven’t you done anything to the money itself?’ said I, timidly.

“‘It is not necessary,’ he rejoined; ‘not in the least necessary, I assure you.’”

One citation also from Butler’s novel is irresistible, particularly as it reminds one of Trollope’s practical admonition to young men contemplating matrimony. This is on the subject of domestic discipline.[215]

“To parents who wish to lead a quiet life I would say: Tell your children that they are very naughty—much naughtier than most children. Point to the young people of some acquaintances as models of perfection and impress your own children with a deep sense of their own inferiority. You carry so many more guns than they do that they cannot fight you. This is called moral influence, and it will enable you to bounce them as much as you please. * * * Say that you have their highest interests at stake whenever you are out of temper and wish to make yourself unpleasant by way of balm to your soul. Harp much upon these highest interests.”

Thackeray is placed in the group of dyed-in-the-wool ironists mainly because he does not belong in the other. One somehow acquires the impression that ironic sayings will be plentiful as blackberries; but when one actually goes berrying, he finds the crop strangely vanished. Lacking the grave, dry, imperturbable manner and the consistently preserved attitude, he cannot avoid the temptation of relapsing into the literal and giving self-conscious explanations, as in Barry Lyndon, and Catherine. This produces something of the effect of Lydgate’s ironic titles,—So as the Crabbe goeth forward, and As Straight as a Ram’s Horn,—followed by perfectly serious moralizing. Probably nothing would astonish or distress Thackeray more than to have his humor rated as the humor of Lytton, Reade, or Kingsley; nor would this indeed be quite fair to him. Yet his lack of real spontaneity classifies him with them rather than with Dickens or Trollope, and his lack of finish and subtlety prevents him from being ranked with Peacock, Eliot, Meredith or Butler. His ironic phrasing has too often the flat, shallow sound of the man determined to be clever. Such, for instance, is the comment on the plutocratic Miss Crawley:[216]

“She had a balance at the banker’s which would have made her beloved anywhere. * * * What a dignity it gives an old lady, that balance at the banker’s!”

“I, for my part, have known a five pound note to interpose and knock up a half century’s attachment between two brethren; and can’t but admire, as I think what a fine and durable thing Love is among worldly people.”

“I admire that admiration which the genteel world sometimes extends to the commonalty. There is no more agreeable object in life than to see May Fair folks condescending.”

“Praise everybody, I say to such; never be squeamish, but speak out your compliment both point blank to a man’s face, and behind his back, when you know there is a reasonable chance of his hearing it again.”

The direct satire on Pitt Crawley as an undergraduate is given an ironic fillip by another sting in the tail:[220]

“But though he had a fine flux of words, and delivered his little voice with great pomposity and pleasure to himself, and never advanced any sentiment or opinion which was not perfectly trite and stale, and supported by a Latin quotation; yet he failed somehow, in spite of a mediocrity which ought to have insured any man a success.”

Another successful bit,—this time the device of catching an unwary character in an ironic trap,—is the account of Penn’s linguistic proficiency. His friend Strong compliments him on speaking French like Chateaubriand,—[221]

“‘I’ve been accustomed to it from my youth upwards,’ said Pen; and Strong had the grace not to laugh for five minutes, when he exploded into fits of hilarity which Pen has never, perhaps, understood up to this day.”

In her preface to the second edition of Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë said that Thackeray resembled Fielding “as an eagle does a vulture;” and also compared the former to a Hebrew prophet. Putting aside the injustice to Fielding (happily atoned for by the author of Middlemarch, thereby restoring the average in feminine criticism) one is moved to reply that if any Victorian shoulders received the mantle of Elijah they were undoubtedly the firm-muscled ones of George Eliot. Hers is the union of native, smoldering wit and tremendous moral earnestness that marked the ancient Semitic race and reappeared in the modern Saxon. The downright seriousness which constitutes her main mood is tinctured but lightly with the ironic tone, but its pungency is well distributed. Its appearance is characterized by brevity and frequency. There are no long passages of sustained irony; and no very long ones wholly devoid of it. It usually occurs in quiet, unostentatious phrases, as in the description of the Raveloe philosophy, or of that superior family whose daughters bloomed into the Mesdames Deane, Glegg, Pullet, and Tulliver.

The cogitative Mr. Glegg, for instance, had a truly scientific attitude toward the captious temper that enlivened his home,—[222]

“* * * it is certain that an acquiescent mild wife would have left his meditations comparatively jejune and barren of mystery.”

Mrs. Waule, on the other hand, was an acquiescent mild soul, and accepted domestic frankness as in the order of nature,—[223]

“Indeed, she herself was accustomed to think that entire freedom from the necessity of behaving agreeably was included in the Almighty’s intentions about families.”

From this banter we pass to a bitter sarcasm that covers a burning social sympathy in the account of the Florentine banquet, where none could eat the tough, expensive peacock, but all gloried in the extravagance of having it to play with,—[224]

“And it would have been rashness to speak slightingly of peacock’s flesh, or any other venerable institution at a time when Fra Girolamo was teaching the disturbing doctrine that it was not the duty of the rich to be luxurious for the sake of the poor.”

Irony is applied to two young men, with totally different purposes; in one case it is directed against the youth himself; in the other, against an anticipated criticism of his conduct.

Fred Vincy belongs to the class of which Algernon Blancove is the most brilliant representative, and from which Evan Harrington made an early escape. He is persuaded that he “wouldn’t have been such a bad fellow if he had been rich.” But his destiny induces in him “a streak of misanthropic bitterness.”[225]

“To be born the son of a Middlemarch manufacturer, and the inevitable heir to nothing in particular, while such men as

Mainwaring and Vyan—certainly life was a poor business, when a spirited young fellow, with a good appetite for the best of everything, had so poor an outlook.”

Of contrasting caliber is Adam Bede, whose vision is turned outward and even upward, instead of altogether inward; and whose survey causes a feeling of modesty rather than injured conceit.[226]

“Adam, I confess, was very susceptible to the influence of rank, and quite ready to give an extra amount of respect to every one who had more advantages than himself, not being a philosopher, or a proletaire with democratic ideas, but simply a stout-limbed clever carpenter with a large fund of reverence in his nature, which inclined him to admit all established claims unless he saw very clear grounds for questioning them.”

George Eliot was held in high esteem by George Meredith; and the two were indeed akin in outlook, and very much so in the matter of ironic usage, in spite of their wide difference in general style. But the Meredithian solution is at once more saturated and more subtle, combined with greater uniformity of effect. This, however, does not spell monotony, diversity being furnished by range of ideas and breadth of subject-matter. Meredith has one ironic mold, but into it he pours a procession of contents of great variety. The tone, it is unnecessary to say, is undilutedly masculine; so is Eliot’s, except for the presence of an element usually reckoned as feminine, and mentioned, by a curious coincidence, in Meredith’s approving characterization of a French writer. In making out his own preferred list with accompanying reason, he cites Renan, “for a delicate irony scarcely distinguishable from tenderness.”[227] In this quality Meredith was by no means lacking, but his ironic mood was inclined to the caustic and merciless.

One of his devices is to substitute for the old mock-heroic a new mock-syllogistic, more in accord with modern imagination. The great doctrine of Natural Selection is applied to human courtship, as exemplified by one of the Fittest.[228]

“Science thus—or it is better to say, an acquaintance with science—facilitates the cultivation of aristocracy. Consequently a successful pursuit and a wresting of her from a body of competitors, tells you that you are the best man. What is more, it tells the world so.

“Willoughby aired his amiable superlatives in the eye of Miss Middleton; he had a leg.”

Under the seductive opportunity of table talk Sir Willoughby again falls a victim to the inductive method. This time he is airing his opinion of the French, drawing an elaborate analogy from the character of a national sample now officiating in the Patterne kitchen. The general validity of his conclusion is admitted by his modest secretary:[229]

“‘A few trifling errors are of no consequence when you are in the vein of satire,’ said Vernon. ‘Be satisfied with knowing a nation in the person of a cook.’”

But Sir Willoughby still has twin peaks of eminence to surmount: one he achieves when he describes himself to Lætitia as a man of humor; and the other when he warns Clara to beware of marrying an egoist.

Perhaps the two best understudies in egoism are Wilfred Pole and Victor Radnor. Wilfred is satisfied with the talents and charm of his Emilia. And yet[230]

“It was mournful to think that Circumstances had not at the same time created the girl of noble birth, or with an instinct for spiritual elegance. But the world is imperfect.”

Both have lofty conceptions of loyalty and sacrifice. In the case of Wilfred,[231]

“He could pledge himself to eternity, but shrank from being bound to eleven o’clock on the morrow morning.”

“And he tested it to prove it by his readiness to die for her: which is heroically easier than the devotedly living, and has a weight of evidence in our internal Courts for surpassing the latter tedious performance.”

The occasion of the splendid housewarming at Lakelands is made into a text on the perils of feminism. In a crowded hall—[233]

“Chivalry stood. It is a breeched abstraction, sacrificing voluntarily and genially to the Fair, for a restoring of the balance between the sexes, that the division of good things be rather in the fair ones’ favor as they are to think: with the warning to them, that the establishment of their claim for equality puts an end to the priceless privileges of petticoats. Women must be mad, to provoke such a warning; and the majority of them submissively show their good sense.” (“With that innate submissiveness,” speaks up George Eliot, “of the goose, so beautifully corresponding to the strength of the gander.”)

Another evidence of bewildering perversity is equally apposite to the present moment of history. The Austrian Lieutenant Jenna is discoursing on the Italians and the habit of the captured of spending their enforced solitude in writing Memoirs:[234]

“My father said—the stout old Colonel—‘Prisons seem to make these Italians take an interest in themselves.’ ‘Oh!’ says my mother, ‘why can’t they be at peace with us?’ ‘That’s exactly the question,’ says my father, ‘we’re always putting to them.’ And so I say. Why can’t they let us smoke our cigars in peace?”

But England does not lag behind in the matter of the application of the intellect to practical questions. The country squires are excited over the approach of the open game season; moreover,—[235]

“The entire land (signifying all but all of those who occupy the situation of thinkers in it) may be said to have been exhaling the same thought in connection with September. Our England holds possession of a considerable portion of the globe, and it keeps the world in awe to see her bestowing so considerable a portion of intelligence upon her recreations. To prosecute them with her whole heart is an ingenious exhibition of her power.”

It is naturally the fate of the active to suffer from Philistine misapprehension, particularly when the activity is racial:[236]

“Foreigners pertinaciously misunderstand us. They have the barbarous habit of judging by results. Let us know ourselves better. It is melancholy to contemplate the intrigues, and vile designs, and vengeances of other nations; and still more so, after we have written so many pages of intelligible history, to see them attributed to us. Will it never be perceived that we do not sow the thing that happens?”

This rhetorical irony, which we have found so widely distributed, is a sign of temperament at the most, and at the least only of habit,—a mannerism of style. Philosophical irony, a sense of the irony of life, is an indicator of character and the whole interpretation of experience. The two kinds may or may not coincide. It happens, for instance, that the two great ironists who inclose the Victorian period like a pair of chronological brackets, illustrate them separately. Jane Austen is habitually ironic in speech, but no novel of hers manifests an idea of the irony of fate. Her situations are too simple, too blandly logical, to be devised by a Destiny either impishly malicious or cruelly malignant. But Thomas Hardy takes all his reasonable logic and bland simplicity out in language. He seldom introduces the caustic reflection. There is little of the acrid in the flavor of his style. It is all poured into the story. The conditions he portrays convey their own poignancy, and tell their own tale of gratuitous failure and superfluous sacrifice.

Of this sharp impression of life as consisting of the nearly-achieved or barely-failed, there are indications here and there in mid-century fiction, but no thoroughgoing exponent, because none of that unqualified pessimism which acknowledges irrationality as the presiding genius of the world. It is natural that in Disraeli, Brontë, Kingsley, circumstantial irony should be as snakes in Iceland; and that Lytton, Gaskell, Dickens, Thackeray, Reade, should furnish a pair of white crows apiece. It is interesting though also not astonishing to find that out of about three dozen culled examples, Peacock and Butler not counted because they do not work in the medium of normal circumstance, Meredith leads with nearly one-third the total amount, Eliot being a close second, and Trollope a lagging third. Yet these three are decidedly anti-ironic in general belief; shown both by actual testimony and by implication. The former comes, as would be supposed, from Meredith. Writing to a friend and alluding to the weakness of old age, he says,—[237]

“We who have loved the motion of legs and the sweep of the winds, we come to this. But for myself, I will own that it is the natural order. There is no irony in Nature.”

In his last novel he gives a backhanded thrust at the ironic philosophy in his favorite equivocal fashion:[238]

“We are convinced we have proof of Providence intervening when some terrific event of the number at its disposal accomplishes the thing and no more than the thing desired.”

In the same story the motive and emotion of the bridegroom is thus described:[239]

“A sour relish of the irony in his present position sharpened him to devilish enjoyment of it, as the finest form of loathing: * * * He had cried for Romance—here it was!”

But the author makes it clear that this irony is subjective. The objective complement to it arrives later, and its real name is Nemesis.

“But anyone watching keenly the stealthy convergence of human lots, sees a slow preparation of effects from one life on another, which tells like a calculated irony on the indifference or the frozen stare with which we look at our unintroduced neighbor. Destiny stands by sarcastic with our dramatis personæ folded in her hand.”

That is, our ignorance makes a dramatic irony out of a situation in itself a link in the logical chain of cause and effect.

The implication that to the Victorians life is on the whole rational rather than ironic is made by the fact that the ironic situations are incidental, and the conclusions are based on poetic justice, whether happy or tragic, and not on ironic injustice. It may be worth noting that these various situations seem divisible into three or four classes, and that such division serves to bring some order out of the chaos of their multiplicity.

There is first the irony already mentioned as dramatic, where ignorance is not bliss. Such is the case in Lytton’s Alice, when Maltravers falls in love with his own unknown daughter, an Œdipean tragedy being averted by timely information. A similar relationship with opposite effect is that of Harold Transome, exasperating with warnings of exposure the slippery scoundrel Jermyn, until he forces the incredible exposure of his own social position. Even more ironic is that behavior which in ignorant zeal precipitates the very calamity it strives to avoid. Thus does Mrs. Tulliver, “a hen taking to reflection on how to prevent Hodge from wringing her neck,” when she adroitly tries to persuade Wakem not to buy the Mill, thereby putting the notion of doing it into his head. Lady Glencora, in Phineas Finn, pleading with Madame Max not to marry the Duke of Omnium, unaware of her already made decision not to do so, very nearly meets with the same kind of gratuitous failure. Of a different order is the use of secret knowledge to extract an advantage from the ignorant adversary who misunderstands the allusions; as Sandra Belloni, arousing Mr. Pole’s enthusiasm for her as a daughter-in-law, good enough for any man indeed,—except his unsuspected self, who was the only one desired. At three fine banquets dramatic irony sits as an unwelcome guest: at Arthur Donnithorne’s birthday feast, where the warm tribute paid him by Adam Bede and Mr. Poyser would have turned to ashes in their mouths had they known the truth; at Mr. Vane’s dinner for Peg Woffington, at which his innocent wife appears just in time to assume all the honors to herself; and at the Jocelyn party, where the daughters of the great Mel have him to digest.

Another sort of irony comes from the reversed wheel of fortune. This is also dramatic, being in fact the keynote of the mediæval idea of tragedy, though all such reversal is not ironic. Authur Clennam in the Marshalsea might be an instance, albeit less perfect than William Dorrit fancying himself there when he was really in the perfectly appointed Merdle dining room. There is a double reversal of expectation that turns Fred Vincy into a passable success, through being cheated out of his legacy, while Dorothea Brooke and Tertius Lydgate are thwarted into comparative failure. Another subdivision is that complete fall in which the victim does, and gladly, the thing he has previously sworn he would in no wise ever do; witness Sir Willoughby in triumph over the winning of the lady with brains, afterward to learn “the nature of that possession in the woman who is our wife.”

Then there is the granted desire; as if mother Fate hearing her children beg for poisoned candy said, Well, take it then, and see how you like it. Lady Mason, in Orley Farm, Mrs. Transome, Sir Richard Feverel, are all devoted parents who are allowed to have their own way in plans for their children, and merely asked to abide by the consequences. The death of Raffles comes most opportunely for Mr. Bulstrode, and seals his doom.

The irony of the lost opportunity is hard to distinguish from just retribution. Philip Beaufort, killed on his way to a belated deed of duty to his family; Trollope’s Claverings and Bertrams; Godfrey Cass, Lord Fleetwood, Edward Blancove, all are made to feel the ironic undercurrent of that water the mill will never grind with, because it has passed.

In addition to these exempla, attention might be called to a trio of ironic titles: Great Expectations, Beauchamp’s Career, and One of Our Conquerers.

Though all the novelists indulge at times in the use of irony, Meredith alone offers a definition. In one place in the Essay on Comedy, he characterizes it as the honeyed sting which leaves the victim in doubt as to having been hurt. In another, he expands the idea:

“Irony is the humour of satire; it may be savage as in Swift, with a moral object, or sedate, as in Gibbon, with a malicious. The foppish irony fretting to be seen, and the irony which leers, that you shall not mistake its intention, are failures in satiric effort pretending to the treasures of ambiguity.”

Some there are who are not quite guiltless of these failures, but Meredith is not one of them. He is unique also, except for the corroboration of George Eliot, in making the ironic interpretation of life in itself an object of satire, in so far as it is brought forward as an excuse for our deficiencies, for then it betrays a certain weakness in our mental processes. For this he has one direct spokesman and two or three dramatic examples. The former is the incisive Redworth, who is exasperated at this vicarious refuge claimed by needy human nature.[241]

“‘Upon my word,’ he burst out, ‘I should like to write a book of Fables, showing how donkeys get into grinding harness, and dogs lose their bones, and fools have their sconces cracked, and all run jabbering of the irony of Fate, to escape the annoyance of tracing the causes. And what are they? Nine times out of ten, plain want of patience, or some debt for indulgence, * * * It’s the seed we sow, individually or collectively.’”

Chief of the latter—the dramatic examples—is a youth who, just returning from his father’s funeral, with bitter prospects ahead, encounters a being more wretched than himself, a forsaken young woman shelterless, and desperately ill.[242]

“Evan had just been accusing the heavens of conspiring to disgrace him. Those patient heavens had listened, as is their wont. They had viewed and not been disordered by his mental frenzies. It is certainly hard that they do not come down to us, and condescend to tell us what they mean, and be dumb-foundered by the perspicuity of our arguments—the argument, for instance, that they have not fashioned us for the science of the shears, and do yet impel us to wield them.”

A little later in the same story is a bit of “eloquent and consoling philosophy” on a happy juxtaposition of the meat and the eaters.[243]

“A thing has come to pass which we feel to be right! The machinery of the world, then, is not entirely dislocated: there is harmony, on one point, among the mysterious powers who have to do with us.”

Another deeply meditative young man is Algernon Blancove. On the very point of turning over a new leaf, he has the misfortune to lose a wager of a thousand pounds,—which he did not have in the first place.[244]

“A rage of emotions drowned every emotion in his head, and when he got one clear from the mass, it took the form of a bitter sneer at Providence, for cutting off his last chance of reforming his conduct and becoming good. What would he not have accomplished, that was brilliant, and beautiful, and soothing, but for this dead set against him!”

With a gentler touch Clotilde is pictured, on hearing of the disaster to Alvin, as venting the “laugh of the tragic comedian.”[245]

“She laughed. The world is upside down—a world without light, or pointing finger, or affection for special favorites, and therefore bereft of all mysterious and attractive wisdom, a crazy world, a corpse of a world—if this be true!”

One more angle has Meredith from which to view this subject, and this shows up the absurdity of the opposite type,—the superior philosopher who disdains to apply the ironic explanation to his own affairs, but prides himself on his detached, Olympian, ironic view of the cosmos. This spirit is incarnate in the wise youth, Adrian Harley.[246]

“He had no intimates except Gibbon and Horace, and the society of these fine aristocrats of literature helped him to accept humanity as it had been, and was; a supreme ironic procession, with laughter of Gods in the background. Why not laughter of mortals also?”

From the tranquillity of this calm eminence he observes the mortal excitement produced by the news of Richard’s marriage.[247]

“When one has attained that felicitous point of wisdom from which one sees all mankind to be fools, the diminutive objects may make what new moves they please, one does not marvel at them; their sedateness is as comical as their frolic, and their frenzies more comical still.”

Whether or not there is such an actuality as an Ironic Fate, upon whom mortals may blame their failures, or against whom they are doomed to strive in vain, is as speculative a question as any in metaphysics. The ironist is as dogmatic as the theist; and he no doubt gets as much satisfaction from his denial of a rationally ordered universe, as the other does from his assertion of it. To be able to fling back a jest into the face of the Sphinx is undeniably a poor equivalent for guessing her riddle, but it at least helps to take the edge off her inscrutability.

In his La Satire en France, Lenient makes irony the opposite of enthusiasm, and emphasizes the fact and the necessity of their perennial alternation, like the recurrence of day and night. It would indeed be a fearful world whose passive, indifferent night was succeeded by no bright, clear, active day. But it would also be a wearisome world whose glare never merged into the refreshing season of dusky shadows, quiet half-tones, and twinkling stars. It is well that they are reciprocal and that “sous ces noms divers reproduèra l’eternelle antethèse qui s’agite au fond de toute sociêtê.”