“These novelists make the last mistake you would suppose them guilty of, they have not enough romance in them to paint the truths of society. * * * By the way, how few know what natural romance is: so that you feel the ideas in a book or play are true and faithful to the characters they are ascribed to, why mind whether the incidents are probable?”
Trollope reinforces the idea:[410]
“No novel is worth anything, for the purpose either of tragedy or comedy, unless the reader can sympathise with the characters whose names he finds upon the pages. * * * If there be such truth, I do not know that a novel can be too sensational.”
And Meredith expresses on at least two occasions his opinion of the value of realism. An embittered authoress determined to make her next novel a reflex of her bitterness. Considering that type, she—[411]
“* * * mused on their soundings and probings of poor humanity, which the world accepts as the very bottom-truth if their dredge brings up sheer refuse of the abominable. The world imagines those to be at our nature’s depths who are impudent enough to expose its muddy shallows. * * * it may count on popularity, a great repute for penetration. It is true of its kind, though the dredging of nature is the miry form of art. When it flourishes we may be assured we have been over-enamelling the higher forms.”
In another volume he is describing the humorist’s idea of it:[412]
“I conceive him to indicate that the realistic method of a conscientious transcription of all the visible, and a repetition of all the audible, is mainly accountable for our present branfulness, and for that prolongation of the vasty and the noisy, out of which, as from an undrained fen, steams the malady of sameness, our modern malady.”
It might seem that a romanticism so prevalent and avowed would not be the best medium for satire, which is supposed to be realistic in the sense that it deals with the actual. But since satire is directed against persons rather than circumstances, it is in no danger so long as the romancing is confined to the situations, and the characters are kept to the plane of reality,—as is the case, with a few easily recognizable exceptions, in the Victorian novel. That the difficulty of truthfulness is one excuse for indulgence in the easier romantic method, is admitted by Eliot:[413]
“The pencil is conscious of a delightful facility in drawing a griffin—the longer the claws and the larger the wings, the better; but that marvellous facility which we mistook for genius is apt to forsake us when we want to draw a real, unexaggerated lion.”
But in Victorian fiction neither griffins nor lions are in much evidence. The total personnel is fairly well symbolized (with the addition of a few more of the nobler brutes than are admitted by Thackeray) in the Overture to The Newcomes, wherein the “farrago of old fables” pictures a crow, a frog, an ox, a wolf, a fox, an owl, and a few lambs, but only the skin of a lion,—and that serving as cloak for a donkey. The romantico-realistic solution, therefore, forms probably the most satisfactory base for the dissolving of the critical-humorous acid and the precipitation of satire. It secures a maximum of pungency with a minimum of flatness, and is perfectly safe to take.