Since institutions are satirized by those who take an interest in public affairs, without being too well satisfied with the way they are managed, we may expect to find them conspicuously under indictment at this time. The Victorians were notably a public-spirited group, and left no cranny unpenetrated by their critical searchlight; for it was the lamp they used, and not the hammer. The two most striking features of nineteenth century public satire are its ubiquity and its moderation. In all departments it was zealous for reform; in none did it see the need of sweeping abolishment. It emanated from a generation poised waveringly between acquiescence and iconoclasm, but avoiding both extremes. Awake to the blindness and blundering of the past, it was still too rooted in piety and tradition to visualize a future radically different. Strong remedies, falling short of the drastic and destructive, seemed about the right prescription. Dudley Sowerby is Victorianism incarnate:[265]

The Victorians deplored, for instance, the domestic disaster that inevitably follows the mercenary marriage encouraged by Society, but they no more questioned the marriage ceremony than they would any law of nature. Getting Married does not merely happen to be post-Victorian; it could not have been otherwise.

They were also intensely partisan both as to Church and State, according to the immemorial human habit; but none of them, not even Disraeli or George Eliot, would refuse an amen to the invocation of Charlotte Brontë:[266]

Their Constitutional Monarchy was a broken reed, worse than useless, yet Anarchy was a fearful word, second only to Atheism in horrific import. As to the prevailing system of education, it was derided as a failure and set down as naught; but we hear of no youth abjuring college because it wasted his time and money.

Beyond these negative statements, however, the Victorians cannot be described en masse, for individuality comes into play, both in emphasis of interest and manner of attack. Nor is there throughout the strictly Victorian period, any discernible evolution of ideas. From Peacock to Kingsley the various novelists are to be distinguished only by local color and personality. But the two whose lives actually extend into the twentieth century are separated sharply in this matter from their predecessors, and serve as links between their time and ours. This omits only George Eliot, who belongs to the second group, although she uses her modern scientific data seriously and not satirically. With Meredith and Butler she forms a trio which faces resolutely with the Course of Empire, while the others are more or less half-heartedly saying their prayers toward the Orient.

As to the institutions themselves, started early in the human stage through gregariousness and mutual dependence, and gradually increased until now it is no longer possible for two or three to meet together without organizing and equipping themselves with officers and constitutions, any sort of classification must be as tentative, interpenetrating, and unsatisfactory as are most topical outlines. But a possible listing of satirized groups or provinces may be made under half a dozen headings: Society, State, Church, School, Art, and Ideals.

By Society is meant that powerful but intangible influence that has a name but no local habitation. It is in effect a federation of homes, organized on the caste system. Known as “fashionable,” or “polite,” its chief concern is with the lighter side of man’s life; with his recreation if a worker, or his amusement if a drone. In view of the fact that it is particularly the feminine domain, with the corollary that Woman’s Place is in the Home, She, as a satirized class, belongs here as appropriately as anywhere.

The State includes such ramifications as politics, law, charities and corrections, labor and capital, and warfare. It is in this connection that satire may be defined, as by Myers, as “essentially a weapon of the weak against the strong, of a minority against a majority;” and by Besant in the same terms, the latter adding, “Satire began when man began to be oppressed.” This statement occurs in his French Humourists, and it is interesting to note the confirmation implied in Lenient’s description of France suffering under oppression: “Esclave, elle tremble et obéit, mais se venge par la satire de ceux qui lui font peur.”

The Church, when allied with the State, assumed dominion not only over it but over the Home as well. This last, indeed, was raised to the high estate of an Institution by the joint ministrations of the other two. By imposing Marriage upon it, they were enabled to lead it, often more firmly than gently, between them; State grasping the right hand of Home to insure legalization, and Church the left, to produce sanctification.

More recently Church and School have exchanged places in relation to State, as education has become a public concern, and religion a private. Art and Ideals, like Society, are not palpably crystallized, but are useful designations. The main subject criticised in Art is that branch to which the critics themselves belong, Literature. When Ideals or Ideas are ridiculed, it is naturally as fallacious reasoning or erroneous judgment. Attacks on civilization in general and the English species of it in particular, may also be put here for want of a better place.

According to the satirists, Society is at fault chiefly for its worship of Mammon, its hollowness, and snobbish vanity. These lead to artificial relationships, the most disastrous of which is the marriage of convenience, which usurps the higher dominion of sentiment and romance.

Peacock is interested not only in this matrimonial bargaining but in the accompanying insistence on a decent disguise. Mr. Sarcastic is pointing out the astonishing results to be secured by a practice of absolute frankness in speech. Among other instances, he cites the shock he gave Miss Pennylove by declaring to her,—[267]

In spite of the lady’s utter amazement and indignation, she afterwards rejects manhood and love in favor of senility and wealth; whereby her critic concludes,—

This is evidently not to be construed into a satire against women, for Peacock follows the lead of Defoe in the chivalrous justice which, so far from ridiculing women, pointed out on the contrary the absurdity of the conditions that had made them seem absurd. In the same story he describes Sir Henry as—[268]

In another connection he observes that the repression of feminine activity shows—[269]

As to the mercenary marriage, further satire is contributed by Thackeray, whose plaints over the matches made every day in Vanity Fair are well known; by Dickens and Brontë in short, glancing shafts; and by Trollope, who makes it the main or secondary theme of half a dozen novels. On the more intricate subject of the Eternal Feminine, the contributions come from Lytton, Brontë, (not, however, from Mrs. Gaskell or George Eliot), Trollope, and Meredith. The first three agree on the bane of enforced idleness, which breeds frivolity and inane restlessness. Caroline Helstone reflects bitterly on the helplessness of her position:[270]

She envies Solomon’s model woman, who had to arise early to go about her own business; and Violet Effingham exclaims,—[271]

By the late seventies, Mr. Mill, with reinforcements, had done something toward pulling us through; so that Meredith was able to satirize masculine desire to stave off the threatened feminism, and failure to appreciate the value of equality in comradeship.

In his ideal for his first betrothed, Constantia Durham, Sir Willoughby is as much Man as Egoist:[272]

In another of the late novels, the two abstractions, society and woman, are fused in one description as,—[273]

This is discrimination; the general dearth of which is lamented by Lady Dunstane:[274]

And Lætitia, after listening to a long Patterne discourse on feminine traits and limitations, laconically sums up the whole matter in a compact epigram:[275]

After this, decidedly flat and puerile falls the witticism of Kingsley, spoken by Bracebridge in reply to Lancelot’s impatient question why women would “make such fools of themselves with clergymen”:[276]

Thackeray also is guilty of the generalization not at his time discovered to be fallacious:[277]

The generosity of “Little Sister” in condoning young Firmin’s unwise passiveness is based on “that admirable injustice which belongs to all good women, and for which let us be daily thankful.” At this point the undevout votary burns considerable medieval incense at the feminine shrine,—not caring much if a little smoke should blow into his idols’ eyes:[278]

The apologist errs, however, in supposing that any ladies,—real or fictitious, his own characters or others’,—are angry at his accusation of injustice. Helen Pendennis, Amelia Sedley, even Ethel Newcome and Lady Castelwood, would be flattered; Becky Sharp and Beatrix Esmond would not care. And as for Caroline Helstone, Violet Effingham, Diana Warwick, Sandra Belloni, they are too far away to be disturbed by either smoke or aroma.

For half our novelists, the woman question as such did not exist, and about the same number show little or no interest in the world of fashion, though the two lists coincide only in part. Lytton, Thackeray, Trollope, Meredith, and in a small way, Kingsley, have grudges against society in addition to its treatment of women and women’s influence on it; while Disraeli, Dickens, and Butler have some general gibes at social follies.

From first to last in his near-half-century of writing, Lytton, himself to the manner born, loved to prick the social bubble. In youth he says:[279]

Mr. Howard de Howard, rebuking a drawing room smart set, speaks for himself and his class:[280]

When young Chillingly absconds for a taste of real life, he leaves a letter for his father in which he promises a safe return, and adds,—[281]

In his first adventure, masquerading as a yeoman, he is quizzed by Uncle Bovill on topics for the intelligent,—politics, agriculture, finance. To maintain his incognito, he affects ignorance; and is astonished at the triumphant deduction,—[282]

Disraeli, whose career paralleled Lytton’s in several ways, takes the same tone toward his own social environment, but his deeper political earnestness led him to criticise that environment in the wider as well as narrower social sense. In his first real novel we find the latter by itself, in such touches as this:[283]

Again it appears in this account of the hero:[284]

The house-party of the Dacres, a family of taste and high standards, is described negatively:[285]

But from Popanilla through the Trilogy the inanity and pretense of this social circle is made more pointed by contrast with those socially beneath it. Egremont’s experience with the plain people induces this serious indictment of his own set:[286]

Thackeray also speaks from within, and has to his credit his great roster of Snobs, his panoramic Vanity Fair, and his imposing procession of worldly, heartless, noble old dames. Trollope prefers country life, but his Claverings, de Courcys, Luftons, and the Duke of Omnium, show that he has no desire to neglect its aristocracy. Dickens, on the other hand, loved London and its struggling poor, but in the Merdles, the Veneerings, and the Dorrits redivivi, he does what he can with the humors of the struggling rich.

To Meredith the exasperating thing about polite society was its impoliteness,—its delight in gossip and scandal, its petty but venomous persecutions, and the false courtesy that takes refuge in conventionality. This impression apparently deepened with time, for it is glimpsed only in Evan Harrington and Sandra Belloni, of the earlier books, but is entirely absent from none of the last half dozen.

Butler, preoccupied with other subjects, takes time for only one good shot at this, but that one is so good that it forms a fitting climax. He mentions casually an Erewhonian custom, which may be taken as symbolic of that country’s social behavior and philosophy:[287]

Whether the last clause may be viewed as a hopeful augury for the future, the author does not state.

The step from the society of the drawing room to society at large, or mankind, is a refreshing passage from indoors, where everything is artificial, even the tears of bereavement, to the fresh air of common interest. The weather may not always be serene nor the atmosphere invigorating, but at least there is a wide horizon and a perspective of some scope. It is evident that the Victorians enjoyed these excursions into the masculine domain of Government, for not one of the list forbade his mind to roam into its boundaries, and not one is wholly silent as to the impressions gained by this adventuring. Here the resemblance ends. Interest in public problems and The People varies from a minimum in Thackeray and George Eliot to a maximum in Peacock, Disraeli, and Butler. There is also great diversity in both breadth and intensity. Lytton, Dickens, Trollope, have several irons in the fire. Gaskell, Brontë, Reade, Kingsley, have but one or two, but the heat is none the less fervent. In some cases, indeed, it is too fervent to give off the sparkle of ridicule, and thus falls without our province. And in some cases, while it is meant seriously as propaganda, it cannot be taken seriously as literature; for the artist is not expected to speak with the tongue of statesmen and economists, and conversely, as Dowden reminds us, “a political manifesto in three volumes is not a work of art.”[288]

Neither of these strictures applies to Peacock, who launches the subject for us in a pungent description of the good old days of Celtic antiquity:[289]

In the same story, the episode of the decaying embankment, with its parody of Lord Canning’s Defense of the British Constitution, and the satire on the game laws, set the pace for the subsequent thrusts at Toryism and the country squires, particularly Meredith’s, whom he naturally influenced. Demagogic bamboozlement of the public is punctured again in the speech of Mr. Paperstamp:[290]

It is in Melincourt also that the campaign of Mr. Oran Hautton in the Borough of Onevote starts the satiric ball rolling into election camps,—later pushed along by the authors of Pelham, The Newcomes, Doctor Thome, Felix Holt, Middlemarch, and Beauchamp’s Career.

Although Lytton started out as a Liberal, he ended as a Conservative, and furnishes some counter satire against democracy. In Night and Morning he speaks of men losing their democratic enthusiasm; and in The Coming Race he gives proof that his is entirely lost. The family of the narrator are Americans, “rich and aristocratic, therefore disqualified for public service;” his father, defeated by his tailor in the race for Congress, decides on the superior beauty of private life. The Vrilya have a very expressive compound word. Koom means a profound hollow; Posh is a term of utter contempt; “Koom-Posh is their name for the government of the many, or the ascendency of the most ignorant and hollow.”[291] This contempt, distributed impartially over dishonest demagogue and gullible public, is nothing new. Smollett, for instance, in his Adventures of an Atom, appreciates the art of oratory:

The same Adventurer notes that the names of the two political parties of Japan signify respectively More Fool than Knave, and More Knave than Fool. It is, of course this aspect of democracy that leads Lowell to picture it as “Helpless as spilled beans on a dresser.”

Statemanship was Disraeli’s whole existence, and his art a handmaiden to politics. More than any other nineteenth century novelist he complemented destructive criticism by a definite constructive policy. To a contemporary critic, a reforming Tory was a white blackbird; but our own generation, having witnessed the phenomenon of Progressive Republicanism, has less difficulty in understanding the paradox. It was not indifference to the welfare of the masses that induced Disraeli’s belief in the rule of a selected class, but a distrust of popular ability and judgment, and a conviction (acknowledged in our own time as a truth and the real salvation of democracy) that efficiency can come only from expert knowledge and training. From such a viewpoint satire would naturally be directed not against the people but against its incapable and dishonest leadership. Peacock’s scorn of this exploitation of popular ignorance and helplessness is taken up by both his nearest successors, expressed, as it happens, in a pair of portraits of the ward-politician type.

Pelham repudiates Vincent’s proposed new party because of its bad personnel, men—[292]

Montacute draws a more concrete and ironic picture:[293]

It is not to be supposed, however, that the people would choose any better than kings and parliaments; on the contrary,—[294]

The trend of the succeeding novelists is toward a modified liberalism, but Meredith is the only one to satirize the reactionary attitude as such. The others throw the emphasis elsewhere. Besides, even such humanitarians as Dickens, Gaskell, Reade, and Kingsley, are dubious as to the remedial power of popular government, and seem inclined toward Carlyle’s view of Chartism. What Chesterton says of one of them would not be untrue applied to the rest:[295]

But the humanitarianism itself is sounded in a harmonious chord, whose overtone is a ridicule, more grim than gay, of the delinquents;—those who lack the spirit of humanity, yet are the very ones, on the principle of noblesse oblige, in whom it should well up most abundantly. If they fail through that ignorance and mental limitation from which not even the aristocracy are always exempt, the blow is tempered accordingly; but it falls more heavily when the roots of the evil are the black ones of selfishness and perversity.

Lady Lufton, for instance, is a kind soul, who would have made an excellent Providence, though scarcely adequate to cope with the mismanagement of the Providence already installed over human affairs:[296]

These are as amiable sentiments for a lady as Victor Radnor’s for a gentleman. He is introduced as regretting his fall on London Bridge chiefly because it led to an unpleasant altercation with a member of the mob.[297]

Everard Romfrey, of sterner stuff, sees the advantage of tempering mercy with justice:[298]

He returns to the argument, deepened in unavoidable pessimism:[299]

The novels which depict the really acute phases of labor and poverty,—Sybil, Mary Barton, North and South, Shirley, Alton Locke, Hard Times, (diagnosed by Macaulay as “sullen socialism”), Put Yourself in his Place, Felix Holt,—are apt to have John Barton’s kind of laugh, if any, “a low chuckle, that had no mirth in it.” But the author of the first of these puts into another story a pungent little description:[300]

It is inevitable that the artist and the humorist should find their most congenial fields in those relationships that are vital, and not too hampered by the technique of more formal and crystallized institutions. Prisons, Asylums, Courts, and the whole legal machinery, offer a less inviting prospect than do political parties and theories, and the contrast between social strata.

Yet the first third of our list,—Peacock, Lytton, Disraeli, and Dickens,—with the addition of Reade, Trollope, and Butler, did not shrink from contact with red tape. Dickens and Reade have the monopoly of the department of Charities and Corrections, though Lytton asserted the purpose of Paul Clifford to be an indictment against society’s manufacture and destruction of criminals; and of Night and Morning to show the injustice and fallacy of its treatment respectively of vice and crime. In regard to the latter he says, in the Preface:

Dickens starts his account with the English prison in Pickwick, and closes it in Little Dorrit. But it is in David Copperfield that he stops to point out the whole thing as a stupid error. On the occasion of a visit to the “immense and solid building, erected at a great expense,” he reflects,—[301]

Within, he finds the rêgime of solitary, unemployed confinement, and the official bait for professions of penitence, fine breeders of hypocrisy, six years before Reade makes the same point in Never too Late to Mend. But he sees in the exhibitions of No. 27 and No. 28—the Prize Show, the Crowning Glory—Lattimer, and Uriah Heep, an opportunity for his riotous caricature; while to Reade this degeneration of character is a wholly serious matter. Indeed, Reade waxes so wroth over the cruelty, mental and physical, practiced upon the hopeless victims that the satire itself is as scorching as Swift’s, though of course of less clear a flame.

Yet the warden Hawes, chief culprit through main responsibility, is analyzed as after all irresponsible, on psychological and social grounds:[302]

The satisfaction one has in seeing him finally routed and dismissed is enhanced by the manner of his exit. He is given permission to collect his belongings before departure:—[303]

Next in order comes the “Visiting Injustice,” a purblind creature, who sees only what the warden points out to him, and comforts a tortured prisoner with pious exhortations to be patient and submit:[304]

Later a sarcastic contrast is drawn between the dinner the official enjoys at home and the convict’s gruel he had just ordered diluted.[305]

The first chaplain, well meaning and gentle, is also a failure, through simple inanity:[306]

On the enlightened officialdom that permits all this, Reade is one with Dickens. When an urgent appeal for investigation is sent to headquarters, the reply is returned that the inspector would reach that place in his normal circuit in six weeks:[307]

Most unpardonable of all are such cases as Carter,—[308]