To the philosophy of pessimism no Victorian novelist was addicted. The phase of it current in the period just preceding was met by a prolonged, skeptical, British chuckle, beginning with our first novelist, who represents, indeed, in his own history the reaction from pensive melancholy to humorous common sense. Peacock is speaking of being unhappy, and adds:[404]
“To have a reason for being so would be exceedingly commonplace: to be so without any is the province of genius: the art of being miserable for misery’s sake, has been brought to great perfection in our days; and the ancient Odyssey, which held forth a shining example of the endurance of real misfortune, will give place to a modern one, setting out a more instructive picture of querulous impatience under imaginary evils.”
Lytton shared the fondness of Dickens and Thackeray for pathos, but none of them went further into the anatomy of melancholy than some such comment as,—“Dig but deep enough, and under all earth runs water, under all life runs grief.”[405]
Thackeray muses on the theme of aspiration in a whimsically pensive vein. Between the questions and the exclamation of the following excerpt are several instances of disappointment, related in his jocular mock-sympathetic tone:[406]
“Succeeding? What is the great use of succeeding? Failing? Where is the great harm? * * * Psha! These things appear as naught—when Time passes—Time the consoler—Time the anodyne—Time the grey calm satirist, whose sad smile seems to say, Look, O man, at the vanity of the objects you pursue, and of yourself who pursue them.”
In the essay Of Adversity Bacon says,—“We see in needleworks and embroideries it is more pleasing to have a lively work upon a sad and solemn ground, than to have a dark and melancholy work upon a lightsome ground.” In so far as this can be granted, and applied to the novel, it would explain why George Eliot is more pleasing than Thackeray, for that is just the difference between them. Athwart the brilliant background of Vanity Fair fall the sinister shadows of the sordid little Puppets of the Show,—“the bullies, the bucks, the knaves, the quacks, the yokels, the tinselled dancers, the poor old rouged tumblers, and the light-fingered folk operating on the pockets of the rest.” Behind Hayslope, Raveloe, and Middlemarch, the Floss and the Arno, hangs the curtain of Destiny, somber with pain, drudgery, sin and its wages. Yet over it plays a light shed around the characters as they appear upon the stage. It shines from Mrs. Poyser’s kitchen and Mr. Irwine’s study, from the parlors of the sisters née Dodson and the Garth family, from Celia Chettam’s nursery, the bar at the Rainbow, and the shops of Florence. Together these actors weave a pattern of mirth and amusement,—the incorrigible human defiance of the ache of life and the agony of death.
Dickens, (upon whose Hogarthian gloom Taine lays great stress), Reade, and Kingsley are as critical of society in the larger sense as Thackeray is in the smaller, and as Eliot and Trollope are of human nature. Meredith has no illusions about any of these things, and Butler comes nearer than any to an unqualified pessimism. But even he does not attain it. They all escape through the avenue of satire, sometimes reinforced by action,—both being efficacious means of getting melancholia out of the system. Nowhere does Browning speak more as a Britisher than when he declares rage to be the right thing in the main, and acquiescence the vain and futile.
Pessimism, to be consistent, would express itself in terms of tragedy. Out of approximately one hundred Victorian novels of the realistic type,—for romantic tragedy cannot be taken as an index of the writer’s philosophy,—less than ten per cent can be classified as tragic in outcome; and in none of these is the catastrophe inclusive, overwhelming, or a perversion of justice. Of these the largest proportion belongs to Eliot and Meredith, but The Mill on the Floss is the solitary complete tragedy. Rhoda Fleming and Middlemarch are almost as truly tales of comic tragedians as Romola, Richard Feverel, and An Amazing Marriage are of tragic comedians. On the other hand, tragedy of this mitigated sort is not inconsistent with idealism, which in turn is the constructive side of criticism. While it is too much, as Lytton reminds us in Kenelm Chillingly, to expect both critical and constructive ability to be conspicuous in the same individual, nevertheless the criticism which is content to note a deflection from an ideal without even a tacit recognition of the ideal deflected from, is mere childish fretting over the personally irritating. Of this there is little in the nineteenth century. The Victorians may have had some of the unpardonable disregard for reality of which they have been accused,[407] but they never could be accused of a disregard for ideality. None of the novelists, indeed, announced an ecstatic premonition of some far-off, divine event toward which the whole creation moves; but they would all have asserted, even if under their breath,—Eppur si muove. This assertion is none the less emphatic and possibly the more artistic, by being made indirectly, through dramatic presentation of characters. Harley L’Estrange, Egremont, Mr. Hale, Mrs. Brandon, Mark Tapley, Sidney Carton, Mr. Eden, Jane Eyre, Alton Locke, Mr. Harding, Dinah Morris, Dorothea Brooke, Austin Feverel, Vittoria, Beauchamp,—these all testify in their various ways, by noble aspiration, generous self-effacement, sensitive response to duty, devotion to principle, courage in daring and in endurance, to the existence of a something in the human soul that is stemming the tide of its selfishness, cowardice, and cruelty, and may in time work out a salvation for the race.
A recognition of ideality does not imply, however, a lack of proper concern for reality, or the reverse. To make the two diametrical opposites is to confuse issues. As Meredith says,—“Between realism and idealism there is no natural conflict. This completes that.” He adds the caution that only the great can be truly idealistic, and concludes,—“One may find as much amusement in a kaleidoscope as in a merely idealistic writer.”[408] The direct counterpart to realism is romanticism; and the Victorians did not scruple to make free use of this alliance with the improbable, whenever the actual would fail to secure the desired dramatic effect. Coincidences abound,—convenient returns of the absent and departures of the troublesome, discoveries of kinship and inheritance of fortunes, narrow escapes and astonishing reunions. Yet there is also some conscious defense of the practice. Lytton has one of his characters, confessing her disappointment in the fiction of the time (the early thirties), conclude,—[409]