“He murmured something in praise of the institution of marriage—when celebrated impressively, it seemed.
“‘Tony calls the social world the “theater of appetites,” as we have it at present,’ she said; ‘and the world at a wedding is, one may reckon, in the second act in the hungry tragi-comedy.’
“‘Yes, there’s the breakfast,’ Sir Lukin assented. Mrs. Fryar-Gunnett was much more intelligible to him; in fact, quite so, as to her speech.”
Folly is more ludicrous in the young man than in the maid, on account of his greater conspicuousness in affairs, and the greater things expected of him,—any failure divulging the discrepancy between fact and fancy which is the basis of humor. It is also true that he stands a better chance of having his foolishness shaken out of him in his more exposed and strenuous life. Both these conditions are implied in a reflection made by one of Trollope’s characters. Isabel Boncassen, the frank American beauty, looks upon the young man as a type:[368]
“Young men are pretty much the same everywhere, I guess. They never have their wits about them. They never mean what they say, because they don’t understand the use of words. They are generally half impudent and half timid. When in love they do not at all understand what has befallen them. What they want they try to compass as a cow does when it stands stretching out its head toward a stack of hay which it cannot reach. Indeed, there is no such thing as a young man, for a man is not really a man till he is middle-aged. But take them at their worst, they are a deal too good for us, for they become men some day, whereas we must only be women to the end.”
Dickens is again a contributor of portraits, though not of the best, and is joined this time by Thackeray, Trollope, and Meredith.
Tom Gradgrind, product of a system, and Edmund Sparkler, product of a lack of system, deserve mention, as does Edward Dorrit, though sketched without color. Rawdon Crawley and Joseph Sedley, no longer in first flush of youth, are consistent exponents of gullible good nature and ponderous vacuity. But the two prizes of undeviating stupidity are Sir Felix Carbury and Algernon Blancove.
Sir Felix is a spoiled darling and an excrescence on the face of the earth. His accomplishments are set forth in a description of his state of enforced solitude consequent upon his latest exhibition of monumental inefficiency:[369]
“He had so spent his life hitherto that he did not know how to get through a day in which no excitement was provided for him. He never read. Thinking was altogether beyond him. And he had never done a day’s work in his life. He could lie in bed. He could eat and drink. He could smoke and sit idle. He could play cards; and could amuse himself with women,—the lower the culture of the women, the better the amusement. Beyond these things the world had nothing for him.”
The complacent fool would be matter for pure mirth if he could live for himself alone; but unfortunately his worthless existence is as adequate as any for the promotion of disaster to others. Sir Felix is comparatively harmless, for his wreckage is reparable, but Algernon is made a deus ex machina, and lets his commission go by default. Those who trusted him learn that “He that sendeth a message by the hand of a fool cutteth off his own feet, and drinketh in damage.” Or, as his own author says:[370]