Satire in the Victorian novel

by Frances Theresa Russell

If one should ask, remembering the necessity for self-assertion in the exacting requirements of our human destiny, why so indispensable a thing as egoism should be ridiculous, Meredith has his answer ready:[438]

“Nay, to be an exalted variety is to come under the calm curious eye of the comic spirit, and to be probed for what you are.”

It is in “imposing figures” that the malign imps “love to uncover ridiculousness.” Moreover,—[439]

“They dare not be chuckling while Egoism is valiant, while sober, while socially valuable, nationally serviceable. They wait.”

This turn of the satiric road from the hypocritical to the sentimental side of deceit marked a passage not only through traits of character, as already noted, but through the realm of institutions, where it might at first seem to be more out of place. But there is no reason why organizations should not be as sentimental as the individuals of which they are composed. Indeed, so far as crowd psychology is in operation, they would be strengthened in self-deception by their very numbers. Whether this is the case or not, it is true that the tendency increased from Peacock to Butler to see in organized groups the absurdity of a complacent inefficiency. Not because they were failures did English institutions come under the rod, but because they flourished under a mighty delusion of success. Smug incompetence, self-satisfied futility, these were the gaping incongruities between pretense and performance that made tempting targets out of Society, Church, School, and State; and thitherward were trained the big and little guns of the satirists.

There is, of course, an underlying cause of this transference of interest from the more simple and patent hypocrite to the more subtle and baffling sentimentalist, individual and collective, and that is found in the spirit of investigation, analysis, probing beneath surfaces,—not new, to be sure, but newly operative on a large scale,—known as Science. Science in the intellectual world, and democracy in the political are the two forces which began in the nineteenth century the Conquest of Canaan that now in the twentieth they are gradually completing.

That these two armies are allies is obvious. The end of democracy is an elevation of the whole plane of human life,—a leveling up and not the leveling down so feared by Carlyle and the conservative English opinion of the time. On the emotional and ethical side it is humanitarian, but in itself it is a rational utilitarian principle. For this unquestionably practical end, Pure Science furnishes the justification, indeed, the initial premises, by showing the biology and psychology of all relationships, the respective effects of coöperation and antagonism in the natural world, and kindred factors; while Applied Science supplies the means to that end by discoveries and inventions bearing on the amelioration and enhancement of living conditions.

The recognition of such startling innovations would be inevitably slow, and their adoption still slower. But it is precisely in their ultimately successful struggle for admission into the life and thought of the nineteenth century that we trace the evolution of the satire of the period, for the satiric reaction is merely one of the many reflections of that struggle.

A humanitarian democracy has turned the old ex cathedra criticism into the forensic. The satirist has been obliged, as one commentator observes, to descend from the upper window whence he had been haranguing the mob below; he might have added, much of the mob itself has been admitted into the entrance halls at least of the great Administration Building of modern life. But meanwhile the scientific method has added reason to emotion, so that while the democratic ideal was conceived in a rationalized sympathy, the stress has slipped more and more from the sympathetic to the rational element. None of the Victorians expressly would have denied the Moral Obligation to be Intelligent, but George Eliot, Meredith, and Butler were the first to make a real point of it. For by the latter half of the century the laboratory had come to be acknowledged as the colleague, if not the successor, of the pulpit, for implicit sermonizing as well as explicit instruction. And in the exercise of these functions, while the pulpit may indulge at times in a decorous ridicule, it is the laboratory that is the real, spontaneous, unconscious satirist. When the solemn moral exhortation, Ought, was supplanted by the autocratic scientific command, Must—if, the expression changed from earnest pleading to detached humor. For the moralist takes himself, his message, and his hearers, seriously, but the scientist has the indifferent attitude that if you refuse to obey, the consequences, serious indeed and not to be averted or escaped, will come, not in the guise of punishment or retribution, but through the inexorable operation of law. Accordingly, if you try to delude yourself into the supposition that you can evade the orders of nature, the joke is on you.

While, therefore, in Victorian satire the old familiar faces of Society, State, and Church reappear, they are subjected to a new treatment, as the result of a new diagnosis.