Satire in the Victorian novel

by Frances Theresa Russell

As satire ramifies on the critical side into pessimism, tragedy, idealism, and the cognate matters of romanticism and realism, so it extends on the humorous into the comic, the witty, and the philosophic amusement known as a sense of humor.

Of those who launch their satire on the comic current, Dickens is again first. He is, as Taine remarks, the most railing and the most jocose of English authors. Speaking of his sportiveness, the French critic adds that “he is not the more happy for all that,” and uses him to point the double moral: that “English wit consists in saying very jocular things in a solemn manner,” and “The chief element of the English character is its want of happiness.”[414] This last may account for the fact that none of the novelists is abreast of Dickens in fun-making. Indeed, the only others to deserve mention are Lytton, Trollope, and Thackeray, and the last in his extra-novel productions. Those, on the other hand, who are most endowed with wit are Meredith, Butler, and Peacock, with George Eliot not quite to be omitted. More important than comicality or wit is the sense of humor, for while they are largely in the nature of devices whereby the object is made ex post facto ludicrous to others, it is the quality which enables the critic himself to perceive the absurdity, and is thus the sine qua non of his being a satirist at all. It is Meredith who excels here, and this excellence, combined with his gift of wit and his restrained use of the comic, lifts him to a position of superiority on the humorous as well as the critical side. George Eliot also has the sense of proportion which is the basis of humor, and so, to a less degree, have Trollope and Mrs. Gaskell. At the other extreme stand Reade, Kingsley, and Charlotte Brontë, with very little perspective or artistic detachment. The unfortunate thing about them is that they did not dare be as serious in expression as they were in temperament. Their humor does not bubble up from a natural spring but is manipulated through an artificial fountain, with varying effects of spontaneity. Lytton, Disraeli, and Thackeray had some youthful smartness of this sort to outgrow, and to a large extent they did it. But these others never did; and Reade especially has moments of a truculent pertness and shrill sarcasm that do an injustice to the really fine spirit of his work.

That there are more of these fitful gleams and partial visions than of an inclusive view of the cosmos, is not astonishing. The wide, clear outlook requires not only an infinite radius but a lens of powerful magnitude. To train a small telescope on a remote object achieves nothing. None of the novelists evinces the cosmic perspective that reports back in terms of a universe. That, indeed, is the function of the seer,—poet, prophet, or philosopher. But if only these see life in all its panoramic vastness, there are others who at least splash at a ten-league canvas, and insist on having real figures to draw from, whether saint or sinner. These have no use for the trivial and frivolous, yet they know better than to scorn the small and unpretentious. They delight in spaciousness, but are not enamored with mere bulk or nebulous vagueness. Such are our satiric novelists at their best, those among them ranking highest whose philosophical humor is greatest in proportion to their love of the comic, and who are granted sufficient wit to transmute their perception of the absurd into effective expression.

The value of a sense of humor lies largely in a certain duality about it, in that it springs from the intellectual side of one’s nature and is reinforced by the emotional. It thus brings into play both of the supplementary factors, and in so doing tests them both. To have a sense of humor is an intellectual asset, but the enjoyment of it, which is inseparable from its possession, is an emotional state. This combination, as well as the order of procedure, affects the quality of the resulting satire. The best satirists are those most fully developed in head and heart, with the proviso that they keep the latter subordinate to the former, by making reason the final tribunal, and awarding the decision to intellectual judgment rather than emotional prejudice.

Among our novelists the greatest in other things is greatest in this also. The most generous endowment along both lines, and the nicest balance between them is Meredith’s. With him are again associated Eliot and Butler. Nor is it by accident that we find the lowest extreme of the list still occupied by the same representatives. The test of course is one of control. It is not that Reade, Kingsley, and Charlotte Brontë are deficient in intellection. They do considerable thinking and sometimes reach conclusions that are rational and true. But when truth and rationality do dominate, it is by a happy good fortune rather than the inevitability that marks the ratiocination of a capable mind. This last cannot guarantee infallibility, to be sure, but the errors are reduced to a minimum, and moreover left open to correction. This is the case with Meredith, Eliot, and Butler, in whom a warm and sincere emotion is directed by the light of reason.

It might seem at first sight that Butler ran more to head than heart; but in this as in other things he was like Swift, having the faculty of stating in cold logic what he had conceived in hot wrath. In such a temperament the feelings are more likely to be turned against those responsible for misery than toward the victims, thus producing a negative effect, with the positive side left to our inference. The only one whose work is entirely unemotional is Peacock, and even he waxes warm over the exploitation of the helpless, and the crimes committed in the name of Progress. Aside from this he shines with a hard mental brilliance,—which, be it said, does not insure soundness of viewpoint, as no one on the whole list can surpass him in prejudice and injustice.

George Eliot, admitted by all to have a better intellectual equipment than any of her predecessors, admired above others by Meredith because her fiction was “the fruit of a well-trained mind,” herself says, “Our good depends on the quality and breadth of our emotion.”[415] And again, “There is no escaping the fact that want of sympathy condemns us to a corresponding stupidity.”[416] This realization that mental inertness itself is the result of callous or defective emotion, and that these two elements are not only inseparable but mutually dependent, is one secret of the fine quality of her satire.[417] It is the sheen on the surface of a deep current of sympathetic comprehension. Never does she forget or cease to commiserate the great predicament of the human race, condemned to make bricks without straw, under a hard taskmaster, with little prospect of reward to encourage perseverance or satisfy an outraged sense of justice. Yet she is able to apply a few satiric goads,—not to the taskmaster, for he directs from behind the veil and is not subject to human aspersions, nor to the weak or the blundering, but to the shirkers, the selfish, and those who demand more wage than a fair return for work done as well as possible under the circumstances.

In 1902 Meredith wrote to his daughter-in-law:[418]

“You have a liking for little phrases; I send you three:—Love is the renunciation of self. Passion is noble strength on fire. Fortitude is the one thing for which we may pray, because without it we are unable to bear the Truth.”

Here we have in juxtaposition, quite unconsciously no doubt, his obiter dicta on emotion and intellect. In many places he had already dramatized them. His egoists—Sir Austin, Sir Willoughby, Wilfred Pole[419]—are satirized because they conceived love as self-assertion instead of renunciation; his epicures and snobs—Adrian Harley, Edward Blancove, Ferdinand Laxley—because their passion was neither noble nor truly strong; his sentimentalists of every description, because they neither realized that Truth is the highest thing a man may keep, nor, whether high or not, would they purchase it at the price of a disturbance to their equanimity. They might pray for the truth to be pleasant, but never for fortitude to endure it if it were otherwise. The apparent pessimism underlying the implication that the Truth is such as to demand courage for facing it, is counterbalanced by Diana’s exclamation, “Who can really think, and not think hopefully?”