Satire in the Victorian novel

by Frances Theresa Russell

According to the old duality of satirized objects,—Vice and Folly, identified with the deceiver and the deceived,—the two classes just discussed would exhaust the list. But these signify folly in its narrowest and most literal sense, a plain lack of brains and a general incapacity. In its wider sense it includes misuse as well as want of intelligence. These mortals, as Puck discovered, are indeed all fools, at times and on certain points. The number may not be infinite, but Lydgate discovered sixty-three kinds; and Barclay augmented the list to nearly one hundred. Perfect wisdom would cast out not only ignorance, but also frivolity, sentimentality, vanity, all sorts of false standards and all manner of fallacies. Therefore snobs, romanticists, egoists, fanatics, merely exemplify folly in its varieties and ramifications.

The snob is defined by his great expositor as “one who meanly admires mean things.” A modern scholar calls vulgarity “satisfaction with anything inferior when a superior is attainable.”[375] These definitions together indicate why snobbishness and vulgarity are allied, though not identical. There is, however, this difference, that satisfaction implies in itself a passive acquiescence, whereas admiration leads naturally to imitation, and if possible, appropriation, of the thing approved. Of course, satisfaction on a different plane results from a feeling of attainment and possession; but it then becomes pride or vanity, which in turn may or may not be of the snobbish sort.

In popular apprehension, indeed, snobbishness and vulgarity are rated as more opposite than allied. The snob is thought of as either belonging to the polite world or trying to secure an entrance to its polished circles. If he occupies the former position, he boasts of his refinement, and from his eminence contemplates with scorn or at best an affable condescension, the mob below. To this class belong such members as Lytton’s and Disraeli’s aristocrats; such diverse types in Dickens as Sir John Chester, the Monseigneur in Tale of Two Cities, Mrs. General, and Mrs. Gowan; Thackeray’s Marquis of Steyne, Major Pendennis, and the Misses Pinkerton; Trollope’s de Courcys and the Chaldicote circle; Meredith’s Everard Romfrey and Ferdinand Laxley.

But if the snob is engaged in climbing up instead of looking down, he is likely to have some common clay still clinging to his shoes, as well as to be dishevelled by the exertions of the ascent. Such insignia of vulgarity are worn by a numerous clan, including the politician Rigby, the money-lender Baron Levy;[376] the Veneerings and Dorrits, and those patriotic American snobs whom Martin Chuzzlewit found so insufferably vulgar; Barry Lyndon, Mr. Osborne, and Becky Sharp; Mr. Slope, Mr. Crosbie, and the great Melmotte.

On the other hand, the frankly vulgar is reckoned among the plebeians. As there is a snobbishness free from coarseness, so there is a vulgarity unembellished even by pseudo-culture. In this ugly and gross scum of the earth no novelist really delights except the creator of Mrs. Gamp, Quilp, Squeers, and Fagin and his crew, though Thackeray is able to depict Sir Pitt Crawley; Trollope, the Scathards; and Meredith, Sedgett.

The compound of snobbishness and vulgarity has the additional complexity of ramifying into hypocrisy on one side and sentimentality on the other. The first conjunction is made because of the incitement to that fawning, flattering servility that more than anything else rouses satiric disgust. The second occurs when the flattering unction is laid to one’s own soul instead of being paid to the possessions of others. The first is obvious and its examples are legion. The second is more subtle and obscure, though perhaps almost as prevalent. It consists in an inaccurate orientation, a supposition that one has arrived at a goal, when the case is otherwise. Such unwarranted complacency cheers the lot of Mrs. Kirkpatrick, Mrs. Hobson Newcome, Mrs. Proudie, and the Countess de Saldar.

This, however, is only one phase of sentimentality. It also may exist independently, or otherwise combined than with snobbishness or vulgarity. It is a term somewhat ambiguous because of a recently changed connotation.

In the eighteenth century it was “sensibility,” and regarded as a virtue until Jane Austen exhibited it in Marianne Dashwood and her mother. At that time it was thought of as excess of feeling or sentiment cherished for its own sake, without much regard for the worthiness of its object. Marianne, disappointed in the vanished romance she had built up chiefly from imaginative material, “would have thought herself very inexcusable had she been able to sleep at all the first night after parting from Willoughby. She would have been ashamed to look her family in the face the next morning, had she not risen from her bed in more need of repose than when she lay down in it.”[377]

If Meredith, three-quarters of a century later, had been relating the sad fortunes of a self-deceived young lady, he would have stressed in his account of her character, the cause of the trouble, that is, the process of constructing a Spanish castle with a flimsy foundation in fact, rather than the effect, namely, the emotional orgy which celebrated its inevitable but astonishing collapse. He would have seen that preliminary process as possible because of the disregard for facts which is the real mark of the sentimentalist.[378] This later interpretation is not a contradiction of the earlier one, but a shifting of emphasis. The common factor in the two definitions is feeling, ranging all the way from simple preference or inclination to strong emotion. But whereas formerly this element was accepted without further analysis, it came later to be accounted for in its relation to the intellect. Emotion is an excellent driver but an untrustworthy leader. It is when it assumes leadership, when action is not only impelled but guided by feeling, that the ensuing motion is in danger of being erratic, unprogressive, perhaps calamitous. This more or less wilful blindness, which is the essence of sentimentality, is of course a very natural human trait. Since it is the function of emotion to supply heat, and of intellect to furnish light, and since warmth is as a rule more grateful than illumination, particularly if the prospect does not please, we are much more likely to be warmed in our passage through life than illumined. To refuse to see the disagreeable is as instinctive as to seek the delightful. Nor could one be regarded as more of a fault than the other until the love of truth for its own sake became an ideal, accompanying the dominance of the scientific spirit.

This accounts for the fact that, while Meredith did not invent the sentimentalist any more than Dickens the hypocrite or Thackeray the snob, he is the first to take a deep and conscious interest in this species; being especially fitted for it by his own incisive, highly rationalized nature as well as by the spirit of his time. His predecessors in this field are Peacock, Gaskell, Dickens, Thackeray, and Eliot, although the last is rather a contemporary.