Realism in Victorian fiction, as we need only to be reminded, means not strictly that which is, but liberally that which might be. Its field is nominally the Actual but it encroaches unhesitatingly on the domain of the Probable, laps over into the Improbable, and barely halts at the Impossible. These expansive habits make it not incompatible with the Romantic, which indeed, in its soberer aspects, is a constant factor in the English novel up to and including this period.

Romanticism is reduced to a minimum by Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen, Mrs. Gaskell, and Anthony Trollope,[118] but the majority of our novelists have not been thus content to present life in its everyday garb, neat and prosperous enough, it may be, but neutral, inane, diffuse, inconclusive. They have insisted in the name of decorum and dignity on the dress costume and company manners which in civilized society are a prerequisite to public appearance and conspicuous position. Life is still life and not an impostor, even when robed in its best with some artifice of color and ornament and some evidence of decisive purposefulness in mien and bearing.

But however romantic in effect, the nineteenth-century novel was realistic in intent, and we may in a measure take the will for the deed. Of this devotion to reality we have several testimonies, from such important witnesses as Trollope, Dickens, Thackeray; but two are of especial interest as they come from two of the most undeniable romanticists, Lytton and Brontë.

In her Preface to the belated edition of The Professor, Charlotte Brontë declared her own preference for a depiction of a normal and unadorned existence to be thwarted by the lack of editorial enthusiasm. After stating the condition of things she adds—

An accurate description of Victorianism is contained in this ironic indictment, and perhaps also an explanation of the romantic trend of its realism on the ground of the law of supply and demand as well as that of natural propensity.

Lytton prided himself prodigiously on his true rendering of life, though of his two dozen novels, The Caxtons alone approaches the realistic type, and pictures in one of his heroes[119] a phase at least of his artistic ideal:

That the satirical element in this romantico-realistic form of fiction should be characterized by humor, exposure, and comparative rarity, instead of wit, exaggeration, and ubiquity, is inevitable, since the former qualities accord not only with realism but with one another.

Humor is the comic sense which is amused by things as they are, whereas wit either creates the absurdity or ferrets it out of obscurity. Hence the former is allied to the actual more than to the fanciful, and uses the method of simple disclosure rather than caricature. While therefore the imaginative energy of wit is dynamic, that of humor is more quiescent, being sufficiently exercised by its function of interpretation, of showing wherein lurks the spirit of the laughable, however grave and solemn the appearance to the unseeing eye.

Where the quality of the satire is of this realistic order, the quantity must necessarily be restricted and more or less incidental rather than dominant; subdued, not rampant. For the true satirical humorist, seeing life steadily and whole, observes that while certain parts of it are unquestionably absurd, whether flauntingly or subtly so, these ludicrous shreds and patches, absolutely integral and ineradicable as they are, are nevertheless only a portion and not so large a one, of the stupendous whole.

Neither that astigmatic visualizer, the cynic, who regards life itself as a huge joke on its victims, nor that myopic spectator, the misanthrope, who conceives humanity as an unmitigated jest on creation, was a Victorian favorite. Both are blind to certain phenomena,—beauty, power, exquisite delicacy, tremendous strength,—which also exist, which even the pessimist grants to be compensatory, and which, when genuine, are utterly beyond the reach of any ridicule that pretends to sanity or justice. Such then,—humorously truthful and suitably proportioned,—is the general character of the satiric stratum which runs, widening and narrowing, through the great vein of Victorian fiction.

In the legitimate novel there are two main devices of revealing the ludicrous; the direct, whereby the author in his own reflections and comments points it out; and the dramatic, whereby he shows it by means of incident and character. The latter method is again subdivisible into two modes, by the use of the two contrasting types of actors, humorous and humorists. The first are allowed to betray themselves, their very unconsciousness adding to the piquancy of the situation. For this the favorite technical tool is the dramatic monologue. The second are the witty protagonists. They stand in loco scriptoris and express that detection of absurdity for which the humorless humorous furnish the occasion.[120]

When we consult our original list, we find the two extremes have been cut off, as Peacock and Butler belong entirely to the other department. The remaining eleven have produced about one hundred twenty novels in the stricter sense, not including short stories, tales, sketches, or burlesques. It must be noted that this restriction rules out some items important as literature, and in certain cases as satire,—Cranford, Pickwick, Peg Woffington, Scenes from Clerical Life.

Of the grand total, approximately one-quarter is eliminated as being essentially and thoroughly serious. Here again are found some notable names,—Last Days of Pompeii, Mary Barton, Henry Esmond, Tale of Two Cities, The Cloister and the Hearth, Jane Eyre, Hypatia. Three-fourths is a large majority, from which one might deduce that the novel of this period was prevailingly satirical. But the other extreme, those so strongly saturated as to deserve the name of satires, are far fewer than the unsatirical. Vanity Fair, Martin Chuzzlewit, The Egoist, possibly Barchester Towers, and Beauchamp’s Career, practically exhaust the list. This leaves about four score of novels in which the spirit of satire exists, manifesting itself showily, coyly, in wide range and diversity.

When an author uses the direct method for the conveyance of satirical ideas, he becomes for the nonce a didactic, though humor-flavored, philosopher. Over against the artistic liabilities incurred,—interruption of the narrative, intrusion of more or less irrelevant matter, may be placed the intellectual assets,—presentation of opinions and conclusions, and frank expression of personality.

Whether approved of or not, this discursive habit must be accepted as an old inheritance. From the beginning, the English novel has been a hybrid, the drama grafted on the treatise. Even the medieval mind, with its insatiable relish for the pageantry of life, had an uneasy feeling that the Merry Tale should not be entirely its own reward, and accordingly found for it a moral justification, whereby pleasure and profit were joined in a most complacent alliance. And ever since, the prevailing purpose has been not only to portray life but to exhibit this or that deduction about life.

In the eighteenth century this tendency took definite shape and substance, for then it became notably true that the division between narrative and essay was not coincident with a division between narrators and essayists. Swift, Addison, Defoe, Fielding, Sterne, were both. And it was their mantle and not that of romance writers, Gothic or Historical, that best fitted Victorian shoulders. Of the many testimonies to this, direct and indirect, the following from a characteristic Victorian pen may be cited as evidence:[121]

He then goes on to show that this morality is best served by realism, in spite of the superior attractions of heroes and villains:[122]

In another volume[123] the same writer confesses,—

Victorianism of course had her own sorrows, patent and unmysterious as they were. At no time could she have been mistaken for Elizabethanism. But she grew gradually in strength and sobriety, and cast a heavier shadow in the afternoon of the century. In its mid-morning Disraeli could compliment his own Young Duke with the subtitle, “a moral tale though gay.” And the chief ambition of the young writers up to the early forties seems to have been to produce tales that were gay though moral.

Of this tendency Lytton is the most conspicuous example. Innately serious and thoroughly sentimental, he nevertheless dared not be as solemn as he could. He must live up to the requirement for ironic wit and the light touch of savior faire, even though, lacking native exuberance and somewhat deficient in taste, he often fell into the slough of facetiousness, or at least lapsed into childish jocularity.

To quote him at his best, however, we take a few excerpts from the last of his trilogy of domestic novels. In the second of the series, My Novel, he had adapted the prefatory device of Tom Jones, using the remarks of the Caxton family as a sort of introductory (or more properly, retrospective) chorus to each book. In What Will He Do with It, the idea is carried out on a smaller scale, in expository paragraphs preliminary to chapters. The following will be sufficient to indicate the tone:

Of the nine remaining names on the list, the real Victorians according to chronology, it happens that two-thirds are almost negative examples of direct satire. Reade, Trollope, and Kingsley take their own moralizing for the most part seriously, as do also the three women, Mrs. Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot. Such instances to the contrary as there are only serve in the usual capacity of exceptions. It is the remaining third, Thackeray, Dickens, and Meredith, who are prominent in this matter as in most others.

Thackeray usually trusts to the metaphorical and allusive to secure a humorous effect. Vanity Fair is itself a symbolic term, elaborated upon in the Introduction and harped upon constantly throughout the story. The account, for instance, of the Sedley sale is prefaced by a description of a similar conclusion to the career of the late Lord Dives, the chapter beginning as follows:[124]

And again:[125]

He delights in whimsical classic comparisons:[126]

Sometimes the classical is mingled in with the Scriptural:[127]

Sometimes we have a scientific simile, as the comment on Becky’s ambition to be presented at Court.[128]

In his later novels Thackeray used in greater proportion the more artistic indirect method, although he could more easily have plucked out his eye and cast it from him than to have performed the same operation on his habit of moralizing, which most frequently took the form of a semi-whimsical but wholly homiletic exhortation to his dear readers to make a personal application of the lessons involved in the story.[129]

Of these later instances, one illustrates the use of literary allusion, neatly combined with the commercial.[130]

Dickens is included with this “didactic” trio, not so much because he belongs with them as because he does not belong with the others. He cannot be classed as a negative example, but his positive contributions are relatively small. His artistic superiority to Thackeray in this respect comes, however, not from a greater knowledge of artistry, and even less from greater care for it, but through the happy accident of a vivid, dramatic temperament. He refrains from much moralizing not, we are sure, because he loves moralizing less but because he loves people and actions more. His overwhelming interest in these, his affection and respect for the doings and sayings of his characters, is too intense to allow of their being interrupted by anything. He is thus something of an artist unaware. He does not work out his own salvation by taking thought or by deliberating over ways and means; but through a fortunate preoccupation, an absorbing engagement with the concrete, he almost unconsciously dispenses with the abstract, or expresses it in terms of the specific.

It is true also that he segregates a good deal of his reflection in his Prefaces; but it crops up too often in the course of the narrative to be disregarded. One of the first showings occurs in connection with Mr. Bumble’s relinquishment of the beadle’s costume together with that office, and his pensive cogitations thereupon.[131]

In his next novel, Dickens has a word for those “who pamper their compassion and need high stimulants to rouse it,” and indicates the cause of hysterical zeal on the one hand or dull indifference on the other, equally misplaced:[132]

The romance of the picturesque is one of our weaknesses; that of the mysterious is another. The latter is discussed with reference to the machinations of the Gordon Riot:[133]

Toward the legal profession the attitude of Dickens is never ambiguous, and ever and anon, as in the following instance, he expresses it with concise clarity:[134]

No less favored with warmth of feeling is the famous Circumlocution Office, to which much eloquence is devoted in a chapter “containing the whole science of government.” There are pages of satirical description, the keynote of which is found in an early paragraph:[135]

It is recognized as something of an anomaly that Meredith should have begun publishing fiction along with George Eliot, and fifteen years before Hardy and Butler, for he belongs with the latter as post-Victorian in art and character. He represents at once the maturity of the nineteenth century and the embryonic promise of the twentieth, whose new currents were already meeting and clashing with the old full tide. About him there could be nothing artless or naïve, nothing unconscious or preoccupied. Ripeness of judgment, deliberation in method, are stamped on every line, giving an effect of purposefulness without dogmatism, and profundity without owlishness. Whatever he does is done intentionally,[136] and if some lack of spontaneity is the result, it is amply compensated for by the strength and sureness that come from a man’s command of himself and his material. In so far as he is obscure, involved, compactly sententious, his malice is, like Browning’s, aforethought. Not in ignorance nor indifference does it arise, but from independent choice and a certain scorn of any other procedure.

Accordingly while direct satire is not wanting in his novels, it is restrained in amount and sophisticated in nature. It does not take the shape of facile application of obvious conditions, nor of flamboyant portraiture, but of concentrated analyses of phases of life, from a scientific point of view, rather than ethical, and presented with calm detachment.

Meredith is quite capable of telling pure story, as in Vittoria and Harry Richmond, but he is also capable of putting in some personal seasoning, particularly evinced in the openings of Beauchamp’s Career, and An Amazing Marriage, and throughout The Egoist.

Of these two discursive introductions, the former is more amenable to quotation. It deals with the situation incident to a rumor of French invasion, and personifies Panic as a sleepy old spinster roused into brief hysteria, and lapsing back into comfortable stupor.[137]

At about this juncture the enemy himself stepped in and announced there never had been any need for the dog to bark at all:

All this would seem sufficient, but it appears that the real sting after these preliminary pricks, is in the tail. The picture concludes with the bulky figure of the Tax-Payer looming in the background; he is pointed out with the laconic comment:[138]

The satiric parentheses in The Egoist are naturally concerned not with politics but with individual men and women, chiefly in their relationships to one another. A few instances will serve.

Referring to the selfish folly of the masculine demand for feminine delicacy rather than strength, Meredith says of women:[139]

Again, apropos of that “adoring female’s worship,” destined only for the strong, “who maintain the crown by holding divinely independent of the great emotion they have sown,” he says:[140]

When we turn to plot or situation as a vehicle of satire, we find an almost exact parallel, as to proportionate amount, to the reflective type just discussed. More than half of the novelists on our list have no examples worthy of special mention. A few insert amusing episodes, not especially germane to the main plot. And the three notable instances, where the satiric situation is a feature of importance, where it influences the whole trend of the movement, affects the leading characters, and plays a part in the climax, occur in the three real satires, Martin Chuzzlewit, Vanity Fair, and The Egoist; so that Dickens, Thackeray, and Meredith are again our main theme.

Situation or action is of course merely the dramatization of character, and not to be distinguished from it except as actual expression is distinguished from the capacity for it. Individuals speak for themselves instead of being spoken for, although they often convey more than they mean to, and much that they would not. Since this form of art has its own medium in the drama, it is there that we look for the most perfect and concentrated expression, and expect to find it in the novel only in the latter’s dramatic moments, which may be few and far between. But as the dénouement of the drama usually turns on some phase of poetic justice, either in its tragic or its comic aspect, so also does this dramatic element in fiction. Satire in situation is therefore concerned with the comedy of poetic justice, and is successful in so far as that sense is appealed to and satisfied.

In their respective stories, Pecksniff, Becky Sharp, and Sir Willoughby Patterne are the people of most importance, if not the heroes; and in each case the climax of the career is a ludicrous anticlimax, with circumstances appropriate in every instance to the character.

The unveiling of Pecksniff is a public and demonstrative affair, in accordance with the public and demonstrative nature of his previous life, and also, one may add, with the Dickensian theory of the fitness of humorous retribution. In spite of the crude melodrama of the scene, there is fundamental truth in the most important item in it, the behavior of the one toward whom all eyes are turned in hostile contempt. He needed no loyal, anxious mother to beg him to “be ’umble,” for his humility was not as the Heeps’. It was a superior article, self-possessed and patronizing, not servile and ingratiating, and it was therefore impregnable. Uriah might be discomfited when his mask was publicly torn away, but the Pecksniffian duplicity was no mere flimsy detachable mask. It was the very skin of his face; indeed, it was more than skin deep; it was the stuff of his soul. He could therefore be imperturbable, though felled to the floor, a dignified martyr, grieved but gracious under calumny, unquelled by those who had assembled to do him dishonor.

This impressiveness serves Pecksniff, as her wit serves Becky, to mitigate the absurdity which threatens him. It is not in this heightened moment that his comicality is apparent; it is in the retrospective picture we get of him through the revelation of Martin Chuzzlewit, whereby he is seen not only as the biter bit, but as the calf, the bland, assured, shrewd yet unsuspecting calf, that, being given plenty of rope, promptly hanged himself.

In the downfall of Becky there is less of the comic and more of the tragic, though Thackeray does not choose to invest her with enough dignity for tragedy. She is less absurd than Pecksniff or Sir Willoughby for several reasons. She is more human and has the claim of normal humanity on our sympathy; she is the product of circumstances, clearly shown to be largely responsible for her failure both in aspiration and achievement, whereas theirs is gratuitous and without excuse; and she is herself too much of a jester to be patronized by the ridicule of others. She too can keep up appearances to the last, not by reinforcing her hypocrisy but by being able to dispense with it, when it no longer serves, and to mock at it along with everything else. The only real joke she is the victim of comes comparatively early, when she discovers she might become Lady Crawley were she not already daughter-in-law of the coveted and forfeited title.

This theme of a vaulting ambition o’erleaping itself is a favorite with Thackeray, and he did some good apprentice work on it in The Fatal Boots, and Yellowplush Memoirs. In the former the unwelcome wedding present comes as a delightful bit of comic nemesis. But the outcome of the latter, with an accomplished swindler outwitted by his own father, and a helpless woman ruthlessly sacrificed, savors too much of tragedy to be amusing.

Sir Willoughby is only an egoist, not a hypocrite nor a sycophant; and being a gentleman can suffer naught but a gentlemanly humiliation. Such a one is not to be knocked down and taunted in the presence of his little world; he is merely made a subject of gossip and speculation: nor is he to be reduced to sordid material scheming; his intrigues are all on the spiritual plane. A destiny that seemed kind but proved cruel created him the central sun to his own solar system. His only sin was the desire to maintain that position by exerting a strong but legitimate centripetal force upon his satellites: if any centrifugal force should become stronger, they must simply drop off into space. His mate he conceived of as the fairest star of all, gladly answering an imperious summons to disregard even the laws of gravitation, to surrender even the personality of a satellite, to rush headlong to a union that secured enlargement of the sun by the quenching and absorption of the star. And for this, his only punishment was the refusal, incredible, presumptuous, on the part of a succession of chosen stars to surrender, to rush, to be absorbed. His utmost penalty was the decree that he must be content with the indifferent attendance of a weary moon whose own light had grown cold and who avowed an allegiance at the most, dutiful, quite disillusioned, and granted because of a pressure that amounted to compulsion.

Externally his situation is prosperous and respectable. He remains an aristocrat of wealth and station, “the humour of whom,” as his own author says,[141] “scarcely dimples the surface and is distinguishable but by very penetrative, very wicked imps, whose fits of roaring below at some generally imperceptible stroke of his quality, have first made the mild literary angels aware of something comic in him,” and whose figure therefore never becomes palpably absurd. Only by the “detective vision” of the imps is he seen poised on the pinnacle of absurdity, while the Pecksniffs and Becky Sharps of the world cluster around its base.

The poetic justice of this comedy in narrative is perfect because the pit the victim falls into is one of his own digging and the digging is of his own volition (popularly speaking, without reference to the metaphysics of determinism). From the first moment of Sir Willoughby’s philandering with Lætitia Dale to the last unlucky turning of the key in young Crossjay’s room, all was spontaneous, a long list of self-indulgences that turned into self-avengers. It was not essential that he should play upon the sentimental romanticism of his adoring feminine neighbor; nor that he should protest so emphatically to Clara that he never could by any possibility bring himself to marry Lætitia; nor that he should himself provide a witness to his overcoming of that boasted impossibility,—and make the sacrifice for nothing after all,—when the absence of a witness would have saved the day for him. But having done all these things he had to pay the price, though it rendered him bankrupt in vanity, and for him that was bankruptcy indeed.

Yet for all that he is food for mirth, one must yield to a lurking sympathy for the unhappy Patterne. A wound is a wound and may cause exquisite pain, even if inflicted only on self-love. A Pecksniff and a Becky are invulnerable; he is protected from pelting rain by his own oiliness, she by her inimitable faculty for borrowing umbrellas. Lætitia was indeed finally secured as Sir Willoughby’s umbrella, but not before he had been alarmingly threatened if not actually soaked.

If we measured our laughter by the real feelings of its object instead of our conception of the frivolity or sacredness of those feelings, we should undoubtedly find it much diminished. We could not enjoy the predicament of Sir Willoughby or Sir John Falstaff or Malvolio or any of the notable company of the Mighty Fallen. Whereas we do enjoy them with unrestrained relish on the supposition that their fall is not that of a Cæsar or a Napoleon. Yet these also were egoists, and those would fain have been conquering heroes. Meredith testifies to this in his preliminary analysis:[142]

In addition to these instances where the continual and final absurdity of the situation is made the motif of the novel, there are several cases of minor episodes, quite as suggestive though on a smaller scale.

Dickens is, as might be supposed, the most fertile in these scenes of comic retribution. Aside from Pecksniff and Uriah Heep, he is most successful with the Lammles, Mr. Dorrit, and Silas Wegg.

The Veneering Dinner, which introduces Our Mutual Friend, is only an understudy to the Veneering Breakfast, which celebrates the marriage of two of the Veneerings’ oldest friends.

It is not an angelic council that follows, though it has the virtues of candor, contrition, and a judicious conclusion, proposed by the Belial of the conference, to make the best of a bad bargain by forming a union of intrigue against the world in general and the diabolical Veneerings in particular. Thus mutual in greed, in gullibility, in consequent remorse, and in unholy alliance, this pair of frauds form the real mutuality of Dickens’ Vanity Fair.

Silas Wegg and William Dorrit stand at the two extremes, for one is farcical and the other tragic, yet they meet on a common ground, the comedy of exposure. The farcical villain may be dismissed with the comment that his dramatic exit, though richly done, bears some marks of the childishness and vulgarity that his author could not always avoid. The tragic comedian, on the other hand, stands before us in an unconscious self-betrayal no less impressive and startling in its way than that of the sleep-walking Lady Macbeth. Nowhere in English literature, indeed, is there a picture more awful in its simple inevitability than the eloquent speech addressed to the guests at Mrs. Merdle’s dinner table by the affable, patronizing Father of the Marshalsea.

Such ironic penalizings as these are satires of circumstances, sport which beguiles the ennuied Immortals. Immeasurably lower in the scale is the practical joke indulged in by mortals; yet in such deeds we may reckon Mistresses Ford and Page, Sir Toby and Maria, as human deputies acting for a requiting destiny. Perhaps our best example of this obvious but joyous kind of satire is one found in almost the first novel of almost the first name on our list, Lytton’s Pelham. It is the Parisian incident of the amorous M. Margot and the clever Mrs. Green, wherein the conceit and credulity of the former is played upon by the shrewd and merry malice of the latter, until he finds himself distressingly suspended in a basket from her lofty window late in a chilly night, to the great amusement of divers spectators previously invited there for that purpose.

Much more subtle and hence much more intellectually satisfying is the trap in which another amorous gentleman, the Reverend Mr. Slope, is caught by another clever lady, Signora Neroni.[144]

In their memorable interview the accomplished Phoedria led this poor Cymochles into a fearful, tangled web, there to struggle and flounder until she released him with mocking scorn, having illustrated perfectly Meredith’s remark about another and more famous egoist:[145]