Satire in the Victorian Novel, by Frances Theresa Russell

“* * * half-witted, half-responsible creatures, missent to jail by shallow judges contentedly executing those shallow laws they ought to modify and stigmatise until civilization shall come and correct them.”

The Bench and Bar are tempting game for those who enjoy the absurdity of legal tricks and manners. Disraeli pursues it in the Camelopard Court, in Popanilla; Dickens in Pickwick, Old Curiosity Shop, Bleak House, Our Mutual Friend, not to mention the Circumlocution and Prerogative Offices; Trollope in Orley Farm; and Butler in Erewhon.

Furnival, attorney for the defence, makes an eloquent and persuasive appeal in behalf of Lady Mason:[309]

“And yet as he sat down he knew that she had been guilty! * * * and knowing that, he had been able to speak as though her innocence were a thing of course. That those witnesses had spoken truth he also knew, and yet he had been able to hold them up to the execration of all around them as though they had committed the worst of crimes from the foulest of motives! And more than this, stranger than this, worse than this,—when the legal world knew—as the legal world soon did know—that all this had been so, the legal world found no fault with Mr. Furnival, conceiving that he had done his duty by his client in a manner becoming an English barrister and an English gentleman.”

Contempt for chicanery and injustice, scorn for downright oppression and exploitation, are notes often sounded. Much more rare is an expression of sympathy for aspiring but baffled mediocrity, with its converse satire for those at fault. The most striking example is given by Trollope. An introductory chapter, with a title and a refrain of Væ Victis! is devoted to this subject:[310]

“There is sympathy for the hungry man, but there is no sympathy for the unsuccessful man who is not hungry. If a fellow-mortal be ragged, humanity will subscribe to mend his clothes; but humanity will subscribe nothing to mend his ragged hopes so long as his outside coat shall be whole and decent.”

This indictment is hung on the peg of the competitive examination, a device satirized also by Peacock and Dickens, for being a pretentious failure. Trollope concludes a sarcastic exhortation to all to persevere in the mad scramble for capricious rewards, with this reflection:[311]

“There is something very painful in these races which we English are always running to one who has tenderness enough to think of the nine beaten horses instead of the one who has conquered.”

When the tale of twentieth century satire shall be told, considerable space will have to be devoted to Militarism versus Pacifism. But the Victorians lived, if not in piping times of peace, at least in a time reasonably peaceful, for their island heard little but echoes of the European cannon; a condition which tended to keep men’s minds at home and occupied with internal affairs. The satirists therefore have little to say about war. Peacock unveils the policy of launching a foreign war in order to smother discontent over domestic troubles. In such stories as Shirley, Silas Marner, and others located in or soon after the Napoleonic Era, are scattered parenthetical remarks; as for instance the opening scene of An Amazing Marriage, “when crowned heads were running over Europe, crying out for charity’s sake to be amused after their tiresome work of slaughter; and you know what a dread they have of moping.” In Disraeli’s Ixion, Mars is not popular in Olympian circles, being despised as “a brute, more a bully than a hero. Not at all in the best set.” Accordingly, since, as we are reminded by Phillips in his Modern Europe, “the British lion, turned ruminant, had been browsing in the pleasant pastures of peace to the melodious piping of Bright and Cobden,” and since it had, when required, the less melodious taunting of Carlyle, it needed at this time no Aristophanes or Swift to mock at the madness of militarism.

In organized religion we see a paradoxical and yet natural enough operation of mortal psychology. In its primitive origin it sprang from two opposite sources, human innocence and human craft. In his innocence man believed that his immortal life must put on mortality, become incarnate in architecture, creed, ritual, before it could be lived. And in his craft he discovered that the incorruptible could be made to put on corruption,—to the great advantage of an entirely terrestrial ambition. These two factors, conjoined with the ubiquitous impulse to socialize feelings and thoughts as well as actions, have succeeded in so clothing and housing the wistful spirit which for itself asks no more than an assurance of some divinity dwelling without or within us, that its elaborate trappings and conspicuous paraphernalia have become shining marks for those who see the possible absurdity in this materializing of the spiritual.

Until recently, however, few shafts have penetrated to the heart of the discrepancy. Most of them have been aimed at the broad and inviting surface of obvious inconsistencies: indulgence in material luxury on the part of an institution founded to further the spiritual life; dominance of authority in a realm that should be free; flourishing of bigotry, greed, cruelty, hypocrisy, in the exclusive garden of all the virtues; unlovely partisan disputes and recriminations in connection with the one thing that best can symbolize the brotherhood of man.

The distinction must here be made between the official representatives of the Church as such representatives, and as mere human beings. In this discussion therefore clergymen are not cited as cases in point unless they are clearly meant by their authors to be taken as clergy and not as men.

The Chadband of Dickens, for instance, and the Bute Crawley and Charles Honeyman of Thackeray, stand on their own feet, and share the common lot of satirized humanity; neither of these novelists having an arrow from his full quiver for the Church itself. Nor has Mrs. Gaskell, though her North and South hinges on the tragedy of Mr. Dale, an Anglican minister turned Dissenter. George Eliot spares likewise the Institution she had herself outgrown. Her Clerical Lives, her Reverends Irwine and Lyon, such diverse types as the modest Dinah Morris and the dominating Savonarola, are treated sympathetically, as is also the pitiful fanaticism of Lantern Yard. Lytton and Reade too grant the consent implied in silence. But other half speak out, briefly or at length.

Peacock is most impressed with the uselessness of an institution which seems to exist for the gratification of its dignitaries. The candid Mr. Sarcastic, after horrifying Miss Pennylove on the question of auctioning off brides, proceeds in his frank career:[312]

“I irreparably offended the Reverend Dr. Vorax by telling him, that having a nephew, whom I wished to shine in the church, I was on the lookout for a luminous butler, and a cook of solid capacity, under whose joint tuition he might graduate. ‘Who knows,’ said I, ‘but he may immortalize himself at the University, by giving his name to a pudding?’”

In his medieval tale he takes up the Church as an institution, with his favorite, backhanded, historical thrust. The Saxons, it seems, had attacked the Bangor monastery and killed twelve hundred monks:[313]

“This was the first overt act in which the Saxons set forth their new sense of a religion of peace. It is alleged, indeed, that these twelve hundred monks supported themselves by the labour of their own hands. If they did so, it was, no doubt, a gross heresy; but whether it deserved the castigation it received from Saint Augustin’s proselytes, may be a question in polemics. * * * The rabble of Britons must have seen little more than the superficial facts that the lands, revenues, privileges, and so forth, which once belonged to Druids and so forth, now belonged to abbots, bishops, and so forth, who, like their extruded precursors, walked occasionally in a row, chanting unintelligible words, and never speaking in common language but to exhort the people to fight; having, indeed, better notions than their predecessors of building, apparel, and cookery; and a better knowledge of the means of obtaining good wine, and of the final purpose for which it was made.”

“And don’t let us give way to the vulgar prejudice that clergyman are an overpaid and luxurious body of men. * * * From reading the works of some modern writers of repute, you would fancy that a parson’s life was passed in gorging himself with plum-pudding and port wine; and that his Reverence’s fat chaps were always greasy with the crackling of tithe pigs. Caricaturists delight to represent him so: round, short-necked, pimple-faced, apoplectic, bursting out of waistcoat like a black-pudding, a shovel-hatted fuzz-wigged Silenus.”

Whereas, he goes on at length to show, the reverse is the case. Both sides are more or less illustrative of the argument ad hominem.

It is Trollope who really writes of Clerical Snobs. The house-party at Chalicotes shelters a hierarchy. Mr. Robarts arrives,—[315]

“And then the vicar shook hands with Mrs. Proudie, in that deferential manner which is due from a vicar to his bishop’s wife; and Mrs. Proudie returned the greeting with all that smiling condescension which a bishop’s wife should show to a vicar.”

From here the “young, flattered fool of a parson” is persuaded to go to Gatherum Castle and there gets into trouble. Brought to his senses, he meditates ruefully,—[316]

“Why had he come to this horrid place? Had he not everything at home which the heart of man could desire? No; the heart of man can desire deaneries—the heart, that is, of the man vicar; and the heart of the man dean can desire bishoprics; and before the eyes of the man bishop does there not loom the transcendental glory of Lambeth?”

The mixture of affectionate indulgence, shrewd amusement, and fundamental loyalty which made up Trollope’s attitude is recorded in this symbolic portrait:[317]

“As the archdeacon stood up to make his speech, erect in the middle of that little square, he looked like an ecclesiastical statue placed there, as a fitting impersonation of the church militant here on earth; his shovel-hat, large, new, and well-pronounced, a churchman’s hat in every inch, declared the profession as plainly as does the Quaker’s broad brim; his heavy eye-brows, large, open eyes, and full mouth and chin expressed the solidity of his order; the broad chest, amply covered with fine cloth, told how well to do was its estate; one hand ensconced within his pocket evinced the practical hold which our mother church keeps on her temporal possessions; and the other, loose for action, was ready to fight, if need be, in her defense; and, below these, the decorous breeches, and neat black gaiters showing so admirably that well-turned leg, betokened the stability, the decency, the outward beauty and grace of our church establishment.”

It is naturally in the Cathedral Series that clerical matters most abound, but they appear in other volumes, especially The Bertrams. Caroline Waddington, speaking of vicars, makes an empiric induction:[318]

“I judge by what I see. They are generally fond of eating, very cautious about their money, untidy in their own houses, and apt to go to sleep after dinner.”

George Bertram, author of The Romance of Scripture, and The Fallacies of Early History, exponents of the Higher Criticism, over which “there was a comfortable row at Oxford,” discusses religion with his cousin the curate. The attitude of prayer, he says, is beautiful from the communion it symbolizes. But imagine the attitude with no such communion,—[319]

“You will at once run down the whole gamut of humanity from Saint Paul to Pecksniff.”

“If every man and every child is to select, how shall we ever have a creed? and if no creed, how shall we have a church?”

“And if no church, how then parsons? Follow it on, and it comes to that. But, in truth, you require too much, and so you get—nothing.”

“* * * what is all religion but washing black sheep white; making the black a little less black, scraping a spot white here and there?”

Whoever may be meant by Thackeray as “gross caricaturists,” it cannot be Trollope, for even Mr. Slope is less repulsive than the alleged portraiture, and the Epicureans are models of refinement, and treated with a corresponding delicacy. Dr. Stanhope, sinecurist and pastor in absentia, had the appearance of “a benevolent, sleepy old lion.” Like the rector at Clavering, and the Barchester archdeacon (who kept his jolly old volume of Rabelais locked in his study desk, but brought it out in the security of solitude as an antidote for the tedium of sermon-writing), he had a taste for “romances and poetry of the lightest and not always the most moral description.” And like Dr. Grant, in Mansfield Park,—[321]

“He was thoroughly a bon vivant. * * * He had much to forgive in his own family, * * * and had forgiven everything—except inattention to his dinner. * * * That he had religious convictions must be believed; but he rarely obtruded them, even on his children.”

“* * * did not whistle. We believe that they lose the power of doing so on being consecrate; and that in these days we might as easily meet a corrupt judge as a whistling bishop.”

The subject of foreign missions is glanced at in a conversation between Sowerby and Harold Smith; but on the whole it is another neglected topic. Disraeli observes in Sybil that a missionary from Tahiti might be spared for needed work in Wodgate, England. The rest in silence, until Butler, post-Victorian, exposes, with some of his choicest irony, the fallacy that underlies all proselyting logic.

Brontë and Kingsley are openly partisan, with a strain of the crudeness inseparable from antagonistic warmth. They are also on the same side,[323] the broad-church position, opposed to Tractarian principles as much as to Catholicism itself.

The real acid of the first chapter of Shirley, entitled Levitical, and promising only “cold lentils and vinegar without oil,” is not poured upon the heads of the three curates and the rector, failures though they all were as spiritual shepherds, but upon the contemporary situation. In 1812, the author says, there was no Pastoral Aid nor Additional Curates Society to help out rectors:[324]

“The present successors of the apostles, disciples of Dr. Pusey and tools of the Propaganda, were at that time being hatched under cradle-blankets, or undergoing regeneration by nursery-baptism in wash-hand-basins. You could not have guessed by looking at any one of them that the Italian-ironed double frills of its net cap surrounded the brows of a pre-ordained specially sanctified successor of Saint Paul, Saint Peter or Saint John; nor could you have foreseen in the folds of its long nightgown the white surplice in which it was hereafter cruelly to exercise the souls of its parishioners, and strangely to non-plus its old-fashioned vicar by flourishing aloft in a pulpit the shirt-like raiment which had never before waved higher than the reading-desk.”

“Yet even then,” she adds, “the rare but precious plant existed—three rods of Aaron blossomed within a circuit of twenty miles.” Their clerical functions are summed up later by the gardener William:[325]

“They’re allus magnifying their office: it is a pity but their office could magnify them; but it does nought o’ t’ soart.”

The autobiographical heroine of Villette recounts her experience of being subjected to persuasive priestly exhortation, and ironically repeats the phrases:[326]

“I half realized myself in that condition also; passed under discipline, moulded, trained, inoculated, and so on.”

“* * * there was a hollowness within, and a flourish around ‘Holy Church’ which tempted me but moderately.”

She discusses at length a Papist pamphlet left on her desk for her perusal:[327]

“The voice of that sly little book was a honeyed voice; its accents were all unction and balm. Here roared no utterance of Rome’s thunders, no blasting of the breath of her displeasure. * * * Far be it from her to threaten or to coerce; her wish was to guide and win. She persecute? Oh dear no! not on any account! * * * It was a canting, sentimental, shallow little book, yet * * * I was amused with the gambols of this unlicked wolf-cub muffled in the fleece, and mimicking the bleat of a guileless lamb. Portions of it reminded me of certain Wesleyan Methodist tracts I had once read when a child; they were flavoured with about the same seasoning of excitation to fanaticism. * * * I smiled then over this dose of maternal tenderness, coming from the ruddy old lady of the Seven Hills; smiled, too, at my own disinclination, not to say disability, to meet their melting favours.”

As her reason is not swayed by the arguments of the “Moloch Church,” neither is her fancy kindled by its ritual:[328]

“Neither full procession nor high mass, nor swarming tapers, nor swinging censers, nor ecclesiastical millinery, nor celestial jewelry, touched my imagination a whit. What I saw struck me as tawdry, not grand; as grossly material, not poetically spiritual.”

Kingsley widens his criticism from the personal to the social point of view. He objects to luxury not so much because it shows up the luxurious as because it takes away even the necessities from those who have not, to add yet more luxuries to those that have. He questions—[329]

“* * * how a really pious and universally respected archbishop, living within a quarter of a mile of one of the worst infernos of destitution, disease, filth, and profligacy—can yet find it in his heart to save £120,000 out of church revenues, and leave it to his family; * * * how Irish bishops can reconcile it to their consciences to leave behind them, one and all, large fortunes * * * taken from the pockets of a Roman Catholic population, whom they have been put there to convert to Protestantism for the last three hundred years—with what success, all the world knows.”

Moreover, because he sees in the church a possible vanguard to civilization, he rebels against its retrogressive and obstructive policy. He laments that the working men do not trust the clergy:[330]

“They suspect them to be mere tubs to the whale—mere substitutes for education, slowly and late adopted, in order to stop the mouths of the importunate. They may misjudge the clergy; but whose fault is it if they do? * * * Every spiritual reform since the time of John Wesley, has had to establish itself in the teeth of insult, calumny, and persecution. Every ecclesiastical reform comes not from within, but from without your body. Everywhere we see the clergy, * * * proclaiming themselves the advocates of Toryism, * * * chosen exclusively from the classes which crush us down; * * * commanding us to swallow down, with faith as passive and implicit as that of a Papist, the very creeds from which their own bad example, and their scandalous neglect, have * * * alienated us; * * * betraying in every tract, in every sermon, an ignorance of the doubts, the feelings, the very language of the masses, which would be ludicrous, were it not accursed before God and man.”

Meredith expresses the same idea, with the difference that he does not speak apologetically from within, but with the unqualified disapproval of the outsider. Jenny Denham, an incisive and thoughtful woman, says,[331]

“My experience of the priest in our country is, that he has abandoned—he’s dead against the only cause that can justify and keep up a Church; the cause of the poor—the people. He is a creature of the moneyed class. I look on him as a pretender.”

In his subtle way Meredith satirizes the Catholic Church by having the Countess de Saldar take refuge in and approve of it. Its great asset is that its democracy includes even tailors. That it is the only true spiritual home for a true gentleman she proves by citing an example. A noble knight does not hesitate at telling a flat falsehood to save a lady, being safe in morality because “his priest was handy.” Her nature is defined as the truly religious, that is, one with need of vicarious strength and a sense of renewed absolution. Another exponent is Constance Asper, in Diana of the Crossways, whose boudoir was filled with expensive Catholic equipments, affording “every invitation to meditate in luxury on an ascetic religiousness.”

Butler was not content to view the Church from his external position with the silence of George Eliot or the casual comments of Meredith. The intensity of his iconoclasm demanded full expression,—kept, however, from crudeness by his ironic finish, and from injustice by his fundamental reasonableness. In Erewhon his chief point is the perfunctory character of established religion. The Erewhonians have two distinct economic currencies, one of which is supposed to be the system, and is patronized by all who wished to be considered respectable. Yet its funds have no direct value in the community, whose actual business is conducted on the other commercial system. The Musical Banks excel in architecture, and keep up a routine of receiving and paying checks. But their patrons are for the most part ladies and some students from the College of Unreason. Mrs. Nosnibor, a staunch shareholder, deplores this apparent lack of public interest, and remarks that it is “indeed melancholy to see what little heed people paid to the most precious of all institutions.” Her guest observes,—[332]

“I could say nothing in reply, but I have ever been of opinion that the greater part of mankind do approximately know where they get that which does them good.”

The Musical Bankers not only protest too much as to the ascendancy of their institution, but consistently depreciate the other:[333]

“Even those who to my certain knowledge kept only just enough money at the Musical Banks to swear by, would call the other banks (where their securities really lay) cold, deadening, paralyzing, and the like.”

“Few people would speak quite openly and freely before them, which struck me as a very bad sign. * * * The less thoughtful of them did not seem particularly unhappy, but many were plainly sick at heart, though perhaps they hardly knew it, and would not have owned to being so. Some few were opponents of the whole system; but these were liable to be dismissed from their employment at any moment, and this rendered them very careful, for a man who had once been a cashier at a Musical Bank was out of the field for other employment, and was generally unfitted for it by reason of that course of treatment which was commonly called his education.”

Erewhon Revisited deals more specifically with the miraculous and doctrinal side of Christianity, mirrored in the account of the origin of Sunchildism and its connection with the old Musical Banks. The two main characters are Hanky and Panky, Professors respectively of Worldly and Unworldly Wisdom. They are carefully distinguished:[335]

“Panky was the greater humbug of the two, for he would humbug even himself—a thing, by the way, not very hard to do; and yet he was the less successful humbug; * * * Hanky was the mere common, superficial, perfunctory Professor, who, being a Professor, would of course profess, but would not lie more than was in the bond. * * * Panky, on the other hand, was hardly human; he had thrown himself so earnestly into his work, that he had become a living lie. If he had had to play the part of Othello he would have blacked himself all over, and very likely have smothered his Desdemona in good earnest. Hanky would hardly have blacked himself behind the ears, and his Desdemona would have been quite safe.”

The School is another favorite satirical topic. The only novelists who refrain from depicting the shortcomings of the educational system are Disraeli, Reade, Mrs. Gaskell, and George Eliot. On the public side, Meredith might be added, as the theme of Richard Feverel, though educational, is made an individual matter.

The adverse opinion handed down on the methods and results of the prevailing system is more unanimous than is the case with other subjects. On the main indictments, inefficiency and cruelty in the lower schools, and inefficiency and carelessness in the higher, there is no minority report. On the whole, the Victorians were innocent of the partisanship that arose later over the great question of Culture versus Efficiency as an educational ideal. The primary stages might be allowed a modicum of the practical, though Gradgrind’s “facts” are failures, and Squeers stands in solitary glory as an advocate of applied arts and manual training. Mr. Tulliver is in line with his Zeitgeist in fondly supposing the best thing he can do for Tom is to send him to an expensive private school, to learn Latin along with the son of Lawyer Wakem. An education was tacitly defined as that which makes a gentleman of you. And though no one would dissent from Thackeray’s dictum that “all the world is improving except the gentlemen,” neither would any one suppose that the definition might be modified or expanded.

A number realize that education begins at home. The close father and son relationship satirized in the case of Sir Austin and Richard because it was too close and inflexible, is presented as a beautiful ideal in those of Pisistratus and Mr. Caxton, Kenelm and Squire Chillingly, Clive and Colonel Newcome, and the Duke of Omnium and his sons.[336]

In David Copperfield’s recollections of the metallic Murdstone, Arthur Clennam’s of his childhood’s Sabbath and Alton Locke’s of his mother’s fearful bigotry, we get glimpses into the pathos of the old Puritan discipline. These are too sad for satire. Butler, no less sad, is also angry enough to brand it with his caustic wit. Theobald and Christina Pontifex are texts for a satiric sermon on parental incompetence, no less disastrous although “All was done in love, anxiety, timidity, stupidity, and impatience.” After the scene in which Theobald, having punished little Ernest severely and quite wantonly, rang the bell for prayers, “red-handed as he was,” his visitor reflects that perhaps it was fortunate for his host—[337]

“* * * that our prayers were seldom marked by any very encouraging degree of response, for if I had thought there was the slightest chance of my being heard I should have prayed that some one might ere long treat him as he had treated Ernest.”

The keynote of this most Christian system is unconsciously hit upon by the bewildered little lad himself, who later concludes,—[338]

“* * * that he had duties towards everybody, lying in wait for him upon every side, but that nobody had any duties towards him.”

Formal education naturally falls into the school and college divisions. We have the former presented dramatically by Brontë in Jane Eyre (and more impressionistically in Villette), by Thackeray in The Fatal Boots and Vanity Fair, by Butler in The Way of All Flesh, and by the zealous specialist in that field. It has been counted up that Dickens deals with twenty-eight schools and mentions a dozen others.[339] The most important are in Nicholas Nickleby, Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, and Hard Times.

Major Bagstock is contemplating young Rob, a product of that school where they never taught honor, but were “particularly strong in the engendering of hypocrisy,” and deduces that “it never pays to educate that sort of people.” Whereupon—[340]

“The simple father was beginning to submit that he hoped his son, the quondam Grinder, huffed and cuffed, and flogged and badged, and taught, as parrots are, by a brute jobbed into his place of schoolmaster with as much fitness for it as a hound, might not have been educated on quite a right plan in some undiscovered respect, when Mr. Dombey, angrily repeating ‘The usual return!’ led the major away.”

Young David Copperfield profits little by losing Murdstone and gaining Creakle. The aspect of this pleasant pedagogue so fascinates the gaze of the boys that they cannot keep to their books. When a culprit is called before the tribunal,—[341]

“Mr. Creakle cuts a joke before he beats him, and we laugh at it,—miserable little dogs, we laugh, with our visages as white as ashes, and our hearts sinking into our boots. * * * Miserable little propitiators of a remorseless Idol, how abject we were to him! What a launch in life I think it now, on looking back, to be so mean and servile to a man of such parts and pretensions!”

From this infant purgatory the step to the college seems a long one, for that is by comparison an Elysium, however inane and frivolous. Those whose satiric arrows speed thither are Peacock, Lytton, Trollope, Kingsley, and Butler. Thackeray should be mentioned for his two chapters on University Snobs, and the preceding one on Clerical Snobs, in which he describes the colleges as the last strongholds of Feudalism; concluding—[342]

“Why is the poor College servitor to wear that name and that badge still? Because Universities are the last places into which Reform penetrates. But now that she can go to College and back for five shillings, let her travel down thither.”

Squire Headlong inquires in vain at Oxford for “men of taste and philosophers.” Scythrop and Sir Telegraph were both cured at college of their love for learning. Desmond describes the university system as a “deep-laid conspiracy against the human understanding, * * * a ridiculous and mischievous farce.” But Dr. Folliott refused to succumb. Alluding to some one who cannot quote Greek, he adds,—[343]

“But I think he must have finished his education at some very rigid college, where a quotation, or any other overt act showing acquaintance with classical literature, was visited with a severe penalty. For my part, I made it my boast that I was not to be so subdued. I could not be abated of a single quotation by all the bumpers in which I was fined.”

“Everything for everybody, science for all, schools for all, rhetoric for all, law for all, physic for all, words for all, and sense for none.”

Pelham testifies that at Eton he was never taught a syllable of English literature, laws, or history; and was laughed at for reading Pope out of school. On his graduation from Cambridge, a place that “reeked with vulgarity,” he is congratulated by his tutor for having been passably decent. Whereupon he observes,—[345]

“Thus closed my academical career. He who does not allow that it passed creditably to my teachers, profitably to myself, and beneficially to the world, is a narrow-minded and illiterate man, who knows nothing of the advantages of modern education.”

Trollope in The Bertrams, and Kingsley in Yeast and Alton Locke, have a few words for the subject, but add no new idea, except that Alton voices the disgust of the students themselves with their Alma Mater. It is this same young neophyte who is advised by Dean Winnstay to go to some such college as St. Mark’s, which “might, by its strong Church principles, give the best antidote to any little remaining taint of sans-culottism.”

In Butler’s Erewhonian Colleges of Unreason the leading subject is Hypothetics, and the most honored Chairs are those of Inconsistency and Evasion, both required courses. Genius and originality are resolutely discouraged, it being a man’s business “to think as his neighbors do, for Heaven help him if he thinks good what they count bad.” These Erewhonian professors, by the way, might have adduced as evidence the well-known, horrified exclamation of Mary Shelley at the suggestion that her son be sent where he would be taught to think for himself. By refusing to “think like other people,” a man may become a poet and even a beautiful, ineffectual angel, but he cannot lead a comfortable nor a really effectual life. The problem as to who may safely be intrusted to lead public opinion, and who are safest as followers, is an intricate one, but it is certainly true that a sane and modest agnosticism is not necessarily synonymous with “the art of sitting gracefully on a fence,” which Butler concludes was brought to its greatest perfection in the Colleges of Unreason.

On the subjects of Literature and the Press too much has been said to be ignored, but not much of any great consequence. Trollope took Journalism as a satiric province, with some little aid from Meredith. He also takes a shot, not too well aimed, at the current humanitarian fiction which purposes to set the world right in shilling numbers. He adds,—[346]

“Of all such reformers, Mr. Sentiment is the most powerful. It is incredible the number of evil practices he has put down. It is to be feared he will soon lack subjects, and that when he has made the working classes comfortable, and got bitter beer put into proper sized pint bottles, there will be nothing left for him to do. Mr. Sentiment is certainly a very powerful man, and perhaps not the less so that his good poor people are so very good; his hard rich people so very hard, and the genuinely honest so very honest. * * * Divine peeresses are no longer interesting, though possessed of every virtue; but a pattern peasant or an immaculate manufacturing hero may talk as much twaddle as one of Mrs. Ratcliffe’s heroines, and still be listened to.”

A favorite theme, especially among the earlier writers, is the pose of pessimism, alien to the self-satisfied optimistic spirit which prevailed with little opposition—except from James Thompson and Matthew Arnold—from Byron to Hardy.

The Honorable Mr. Listless finds the volumes of modern literature “very consolatory and congenial” to his feelings:[347]

“There is, as it were, a delightful north-east wind, an intellectual blight breathing through them; a delicious misanthropy and discontent, that demonstrates the nullity of virtue and energy, and puts me in good humour with myself and sofa.”

“* * * an unaccountable prepossession among all persons, to imagine that whatever seems gloomy must be profound, and whatever is cheerful must be shallow. They have put poor Philosophy into deep mourning, and given her a coffin for a writing desk, and a skull for an inkstand.”

Ganymede anticipates that Apollo’s new poem will be very popular, for “it is all about moonlight and the misery of existence.”[349]

It is in Meredith that we find the greatest point and depth in literary criticism, as in most other things. Under cover of apology for his own method of psychological analysis, he manages to convey his impression of those who tell and who love the story for the story’s sake. He cannot avoid, he explains, the slow start and detailed exposition in which he unfolds the situation, and adds:[350]

“This it is not necessary to do when you are set astride the enchanted horse of the Tale, which leaves the man’s mind at home while he performs the deeds befitting him: he can indeed be rapid. Whether more active, is a question asking for your notions of the governing element in the composition of man, and of his present business here. * * * All ill-fortuned minstrel who has by fateful direction been brought to see with distinctness that man is not as much comprised in external features as the monkey, will be devoted to the task of the fuller portraiture.”

It is Meredith also who says the last word on the English, as English. They are indeed the real objects under all these disguises of their activities, but they are not often synthesized and called by name. Yet—[351]

“An actually satiric man in an English circle, that does not resort to the fist for a reply to him, may almost satiate the excessive fury roused in his mind by an illogical people of a provocative prosperity, * * * They give him so many opportunities.”

He seizes one of them by symbolizing England in the Duvidney sisters; composed of such, it becomes—[352]

“* * * a vast body of passives and negatives, living by precept, according to rules of precedent, and supposing themselves to be righteously guided because of their continuing undisturbed. * * * mixed with an ancient Hebrew fear of offense to an inscrutable Lord, eccentrically appeasable through the dreary iteration of the litany of sinfulness. * * * Satirists in their fervours might be near it to grasp it, if they could be moved to moral distinctness, mental intention, with a preference of strong plain speech over the crack of their whips.”

He had already decided, in Beauchamp’s Career, that “It is not too much to say that a domination of the Intellect in England would at once and entirely alter the face of the country.” Reade agrees with this opinion, only he says bluntly that one is “an ass * * * to have brains in a country where brains are a crime.” This national stupidity and sentimentality are made impregnable by national complacency. Lytton remarks on the egotistic nature of British patriotism:[353]