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]
“All his grumblings through this book of American Notes, all his shrieking satire in Martin Chuzzlewit, are expressions of a grave and reasonable fear he had touching the future of democracy.”
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]
“She liked cheerful, quiet, well-to-do people, who loved their Church, their country, and their Queen, and who were not too anxious to make a noise in the world. She desired that all the farmers round her should be able to pay their rents without trouble, that all the old women should have warm flannel petticoats, that the workingmen should be saved from rheumatism by healthy food and dry houses, that they should all be obedient to their pastors and masters—temporal as well as spiritual. That was her idea of loving her country. She desired also that the copses should be full of pheasants, the stubble-field of partridges, and the gorse covers of foxes; in that way, also, she loved her country.”
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]
“* * * he found that enormous beast comprehensible only when it applauded him; and besides, he wished it warmly well; all that was good for it; plentiful dinners, country excursions, stout menagerie bars, music, a dance, and to bed; he was for patting, stroking, petting the mob, for tossing it sops, never for irritating it to show an eye-tooth, much less for causing it to exhibit the grinders.”
Everard Romfrey, of sterner stuff, sees the advantage of tempering mercy with justice:[298]
“To his mind the game-laws were the corner-stone of Law, and of a man’s right to hold his own; and so delicately did he think the country poised, that an attack on them threatened the structure of justice. The three conjoined Estates were therefore his head gamekeepers; their duty was to back him against the poacher, if they would not see the country tumble. * * * No tenants were forced to take his farms. He dragged no one by the collar. He gave them liberty to go to Australia, Canada, the Americas, if they liked. * * * Still there were grumbling tenants. He swarmed with game, and though he was liberal, his hares and his birds were immensely destructive: computation could not fix the damage done by them. Probably the farmers expected them not to eat. ‘There are two parties to a bargain,’ said Everard, ‘and one gets the worst of it. But if he was never obliged to make it, where’s his right to complain?’ Men of sense rarely obtain satisfactory answers; they are provoked to despise their kind.”
He returns to the argument, deepened in unavoidable pessimism:[299]