“I am persuaded, not only that this was quite the same to Mr. Micawber as paying the money, but that Traddles himself hardly knew the difference until he had had time to think about it.”
Mrs. Chick, with true Dombian genius, having helped to loosen her sister-in-law’s slender hold upon life, now enjoys the pathos of the situation:[384]
“What a satisfaction it was to Mrs. Chick—a commonplace piece of folly enough, * * * to patronize and be tender to the memory of that lady; in exact pursuance of her conduct to her in her lifetime; and to thoroughly believe herself, and take herself in, and make herself uncommonly comfortable on the strength of her toleration! What a mighty pleasant virtue toleration should be when we are right, to be so very pleasant when we are wrong, and quite unable to demonstrate how we came to be invested with the privilege of exercising it!”
In her capricious cruelty to Lucretia Tox, she pretends to be scandalized at what she had fostered all along, and taunts the dismayed woman for the very thing she had been aiding and abetting:[385]
“‘The scales;’ here Mrs. Chick cast down an imaginary pair, such as are commonly used in grocers’ shops; ‘have fallen from my sight.’ * * * ‘How can I speak to you like that?’ retorted Mrs. Chick, who, in default of having any particular argument to sustain herself upon, relied principally upon such repetitions for her most withering effects. ‘Like that! You may well say like that, indeed!’”
Thackeray is included in this list chiefly on the strength of the Osbornes, Pitt Crawley, and to a less degree, Blanche Armory and Mrs. Bute. Of the first he says, regarding certain declarations of disinterested friendliness and admiration,—“There is little doubt that old Osborne believed all he said, and that the girls were quite in earnest in their protestations of affection for Miss Swartz.” And his thrust at the hoodwinked Pitt’s delighted apprehension that the clever Becky really understood and appreciated him, is a palpable hit. He also arraigns under this head his favorite satirical object,—“the moral world, that has, perhaps, no particular objection to vice, but an insuperable repugnance to hearing vice called by its proper name.” On the other hand, more than any other novelist, he has given us sentimentalists unaware; that is, in such characters as Helen, Laura, and Arthur Pendennis, Lady Castlewood, and Colonel Newcome, he shares their own unawareness of the possession of this foible, though in all these it is of an innocent variety.
George Eliot is keenly alive to this blindness in human nature, particularly as it manifests itself in the pernicious optimism of weak and wilful youth; but as with other mortal failures, it is usually too serious in her eyes for satire. Of all her novels, Felix Holt and Daniel Deronda alone have no character of this type. In the others he appears as Arthur Donnithorne, Stephen Guest, Godfrey Cass, Tito Melema, and Fred Vincy; but rarely is he ridiculed, and then ironically.
Of the bonny young Squire Donnithorne she draws the portrait as he himself would see it:[386]
“* * * candour was one of his favorite virtues; and how can a man’s candour be seen in all its lustre unless he has a few failings to talk of? But he had an agreeable confidence that his faults were all of a generous kind—impetuous, warm-blooded, leonine; never crawling, crafty, reptilian. ‘No! I’m a devil of a fellow for getting myself into a hobble, but I always take care the load shall fall on my own shoulders.’ Unhappily there is no inherent poetic justice in hobbles, and they will sometimes obstinately refuse to inflict their worst consequences on the prime offender, in spite of his loudly-expressed wish. It was entirely owing to this deficiency in the scheme of things that Arthur had ever brought any one into trouble besides himself.”
Even when troublesome consequences threatened both himself and others, he was buoyed up by “a sort of implicit confidence in him that he was really such a good fellow at bottom, Providence would not treat him harshly.”