(Whether the of means directed against or produced by, the verdict is undoubtedly valid.)
[100] One’s astonishment that it was Meredith who had the honor of rejecting the manuscript of Erewhon, submitted to Chapman and Hall, is exceeded only by the astonishment at the reason given,—that it was a philosophical treatise, not likely to interest the general public. One would hardly accuse this critic of a conservative reluctance to expose the public to iconoclastic bacilli, though he had not yet become the author of Beauchamp’s Career, nor would one suppose his “public” to be composed entirely of tired business men and sentimental school girls. There remain the two cruxes in the history of satire: failure of the satirist Thackeray to appreciate the satirist Swift, and of the satirist Meredith to appreciate the satirist Butler. If they prove anything it is the diversity among satirists.
[101] Harris: Samuel Butler, Author of Erewhon, 13.
Cf. Chesterton’s whimsical remark that “the best definition of the Victorian Age is that Francis Thompson stood outside it.”
[102] The Coming Race, 47.
[103] Women were the wooers and choosers in this feministic community, but the problem of feminism was apparently solved by the practice of voluntary relinquishment of wings, by the feminine wearers, after marriage, and a strict devotion to the domestic life.
[104] “And where a society attains to a moral standard in which there are no crimes and no sorrows from which tragedy can extract its aliment of pity and sorrow, no salient vices or follies on which comedy can lavish its mirthful satire, it has lost its chance of producing a Shakespeare, a Molière, or a Mrs. Beecher Stowe.” The Coming Race, 230.
[105] After the manner of Defoe’s Turkish Merchant: the Conduct of Christians Made the Sport of Infidels, and others of this type.
[106] Popanilla, 380. The ensuing debate is made the peg for some vivacious burlesque on Parliamentary speeches.
[107] Ibid., 385.