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.”
To such as this we have Thackeray’s counter-blast, with admonition,—[314]