Satire in the Victorian novel

by Frances Theresa Russell

These criticisms are all from within. Disraeli is able to contribute one from without. He describes the British through his Jewish Besso:[354]

“There is not a race so proud, so wilful, so rash and so obstinate. They live in a misty clime, on raw meats, and wines of fire. They laugh at their fathers, and never say a prayer. They pass their days in the chase, gaming, and all violent courses. They have all the power of the State, and all its wealth; and when they can wring no more from their peasants, they plunder the kings of India.”

Nevertheless they all, even the Hebrew within their parliamentary halls, believed in the English character and the civilization it was blunderingly working out. The most incorrigible satirist of that civilization was Peacock (who often, we suspect, gets carried away by his own eloquence), and in his fervent summary of almost all our public failures, he hints in the very phrasing, although ironically, at the possibility of these failures being transformed into successes. Sir Telegraph Paxarett, accused of extravagance, retorts with a conditional promise of retrenchment:[355]

“When ecclesiastical dignitaries imitate the temperance and humility of the founder of that religion by which they feed and flourish; when the man in place acts on the principles which he professed while he was out; when borough electors will not sell their suffrage, nor their representatives their votes; when poets are not to be hired for the maintenance of any opinion; when learned divines can afford to have a conscience; when universities are not one hundred years in knowledge behind all the rest of the world; when young ladies speak as they think, and when those who shudder at a tale of the horror of slavery will deprive their own palates of a sweet taste, for the purpose of contributing all in their power to its extinction:—why then, Forester, I will lay down my barouche.”

Satire, being frankly a destructive process, makes no pretense of supplementing its iconoclasm by reconstruction. But such implication of reform as may lurk in the criticism that paves the way may be looked for more assuredly than elsewhere in attacks on institutions. Such criticism is neither lowered by the recrimination that puts satire of individuals below the normal satiric level, nor elevated by the artistic detachment that lifts satire of human nature above it. For it is not in the too small lump of the solitary specimen that the leaven can best work, nor yet in the too large mass of the whole human race. It is in the unit between these two extremes, the body politic or social or religious or educational, that it may best perform its fermenting ministrations.

Even so, however, the idealism of the Victorian novelists did not take this positive turn. English genius has on the whole contributed its share to the anthology of Utopian vision, even to the furnishing of the name, but the nineteenth century, preëminent in criticism and speculation, venting more talk about it than all the other centuries put together, has to its credit in this line, aside from Erewhon and The Coming Race, only Morris’s News from Nowhere, and that is too naïve in its simplification of human nature and too absurd in its glorification of medievalism to be taken seriously. More carefully thought out as an Ideal State, more searching in its seriousness, more pertinent in its satire, and more constructive in its conclusion, than any of these, is the American product, Bellamy’s Looking Backward.

The Victorians did their looking backward literally from their own present instead of an imagined future. And since in so doing they did for the most part but cast their eye on prospects drear, and since they shrank from a future they could only guess and fear if they thought about it at all, they wisely and practically spent themselves on the present. And because of this acceptance of the present and all its institutions as a whole, they could couch their lances only against this or that detail, not against the challenge of civilization itself.

The following instances show a characteristic difference in their resemblance. “In England, poverty is a crime,” exclaims Lytton in the nineteenth century. The observation is ironic, the tone scornful, and the object of the ironic scorn is the snobbishness of those who from the heights of wealth look down upon and despise the poor. The rebuke is intended for the alien attitude toward that portion of society which we may expect, according to Biblical authority, always to have with us. Poverty itself is a mysterious dispensation, having indeed many discernible compensations, and ever mitigable by applied morality.

“Poverty is the only crime,” echoes Bernard Shaw in the twentieth century. His assertion is meant literally, the tone is decisive, and the indictment is lodged against society at large for being so stupid and inefficient as to permit such a canker, pernicious but curable, to infect its body.

To remedy the supercilious attitude toward the poor is still to leave poverty intact and in permanent possession of the field. To remedy the criminal carelessness which tolerates its presence is to abolish the thing itself.