Satire in the Victorian novel

by Frances Theresa Russell

As for herself, she expects ruthless severity, but trusts that her work has some merits. In any case, no amount of editorial flagellating can discount her personal admiration for this particular editor. Truly, she is all things to all men,—a policy, however, for which she might claim a certain Scriptural precedent of high authority.

PART IV
CONCLUSIONS

CHAPTER I
RELATIONSHIPS

To call a man a satirist or a satirical writer is to say something about him, certainly. It is, however, a piece of information which can be nothing more than a curiosity of literature so long as it remains an isolated fact. Although we are for the time being interested in a group of novelists primarily as satirists, we cannot even understand them as such, much less come to any fuller comprehension, unless we also view the satirists as novelists, as artists, as human beings.

These relationships extend on the internal side, so to speak, into such matters as quantity, quality, and range; and on the external, into the larger realms of the two satiric factors—criticism and humor—and thence into the neighboring domains of pessimism and tragedy, comedy and wit, realism and romanticism, emotion and intellect, and idealism. In none of these things, of course, can we do more than indicate briefly the effect they may have upon satire, or satire upon them.

Those who have furnished the largest amount of satire,—proportionately, as it happens, both to their own total production, and to the satiric production of others,—are Peacock, Dickens, Butler, and Meredith. But when it comes to quality,—tested by subtlety of wit, self-command, justice as to objects, and moderation of amount,—the only one to remain on the preëminent list is Meredith.

At the other extreme we find the same overlapping as to quantity and quality. The smallest satiric amounts come from Brontë, Reade, and Gaskell, but, while the first two are correspondingly inferior in quality, the last is promoted several degrees up the qualitative scale, by reason of her lack of flourish, and the deft sureness of her touch. The low place she leaves vacant belongs by desert to Kingsley, who, like Brontë and Reade, never learned to solve the satirist’s problem,—to trifle without being trivial. Frivolity, to be sure, was never a besetting sin of the Victorians, but in their earnestness they were prone to the opposite fault, and are occasionally caught beating a big satiric drum when softer notes would be more effective. Neither are any on the entire list guilty of downright insincerity, but the less successful ones are sometimes betrayed by partisan zeal, acrimonious temper, or unsound judgment, into more or less injustice. This is true to some extent of Peacock, Dickens, and Thackeray, as well as of those just mentioned.

In range of interest Dickens easily leads, followed by Meredith and Trollope. From Oliver Twist to Edwin Drood, this satirist spreads his attacks over more ground, and lays about him in more different directions than does any one else. With the exception of the Church, no possible word of importance is omitted from his satiric lexicon. His tastes in the ridiculous are catholic, and scarcely a satirizible subject languishes under his neglect. The other writers are more or less specialists in their chosen fields.

As to the effect on the satiric product of a versatile mind, a prolific pen, or preoccupation with other affairs, no deduction seems possible. Lytton, Kingsley, and Butler were versatile and prolific both, to a degree. Thackeray and Trollope were prolific within a more limited range. Those most exclusively novelists were Disraeli, Dickens, and Brontë, but those to produce the most novels were Trollope, Lytton, Dickens, and Meredith. Lytton and Disraeli had more outside interests and underwent more varieties of social and political experience than any of their successors, though Trollope and Kingsley had occupations and avocations outside those of literature.

All these internal relationships have some significance but much less than the external ones. They deal primarily with accomplishments, which have their value chiefly as emanating from character and so defining it, whereas the various elements of which character itself is composed are in the nature of vital statistics in the life spiritual. Of these elements those most closely related to satire are naturally its constituents, though they may exist independently of it. Although satire is a form of criticism, it does not follow that those writers who are most consistently satirical have the most widely or deeply critical attitude toward life in general. Such fundamental criticism branches out into two philosophies: the hopeless, or pessimistic, shading off into flippant cynicism or bitter misanthropy; and the hopeful, or unsentimentally optimistic, which is the basis of all dynamic idealism. For whithersoever the idealist may tend, he certainly cannot start from a point of uncritical satisfaction with things as they are. Locke may have made some errors regarding the human understanding, but he was eminently correct in identifying the stimulus to action, not with a vision of fulfilled desire, but with the sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go. We must be driven out before we can be led on, but the driving process once being inaugurated, we make it more dignified and endurable by conceiving a goal upon which our endeavors may be focussed.