Satire in the Victorian novel

by Frances Theresa Russell

A narrative of entire gravity may be a gracious and splendid thing; indeed, pure tragedy is perhaps the highest form of art. But when satire is divorced from fiction it must dispense with fiction’s great contribution, the garment of warm imagination and colorful concreteness; and be content with the severe raiment of bald didacticism and chill abstraction. In truth, satire has always been not only the greater beneficiary but the more dependent partner, though what it has in turn supplied is of unquestionable value. It is like an entertaining but unequipaged traveler, always asking for a ride. Even when it apparently had an establishment of its own and was recognized as a literary genre, it was not independent with the independence of the lyric, the drama, or the treatise, but was constantly borrowing furniture from them all.

Hence when satire invaded Victorian fiction,—or was adopted by it,—the conjunction brought its benefits to both. The former profited qualitatively from the antidote furnished by creative construction to destructive censure, and quantitatively by the improvement resulting from diminution,—that subordination which is the secret of success with all seasoning, trimming, and such accessories. The latter gained, not so much by the mere infusion of pleasantry, for that refreshing element has a deplorable tendency to degenerate into ill bred pertness, as by the toning up of the criticism inseparable from the realistic novel, and by the pungent and dramatic turn given to its didacticism. “Som mirthe or som doctryne” has ever been the demand of the Englishman, and he has relished them best in that happy unison supplied by satire.

Hence also the combination was but a new and more consequential celebration of an old, traditional connection. From the Greek Menippean mixture and the Milesian tale the line extends, with innumerable ramifications into fabliaux, burlesques, allegories, letters, and characters, in prose and verse, to the perfected eighteenth-century product, whence the increasingly perfected product of the nineteenth century immediately is derived.

Like all such associations, this one is neither accidental on the one hand nor consciously intentional on the other, but is the result of many forces and influences set in operation by circumstances, and available for great effectiveness if rightly comprehended and wisely used. In this Victorian situation we are confronted with the dual factors: a literary form raised to tremendous prestige by a rich inheritance and an especial rapprochement with its own times; and a prevailing temper of humorous criticism which could not fail to thrive under the double stimulus of a fermenting environment about which there were endless things to be said, and a general liberation from external control which allowed these seething utterances free and full play of expression.

Thus have all things worked together for the good of the Victorian novel. It was fortunate alike in its endowment, its alliances, and its surroundings. A period of such upheaval, such introspection, such anxious responsibility, and withal such zest of life, all diffused through a democratic atmosphere, could best be interpreted by a form of literature which, besides being in itself thoroughly democratic, gives large scope for the author’s comments and conclusions.

The drama is an excellent reflector, but necessarily impersonal; a dilemma that is dodged rather than solved by the Shavian device of Prefaces. The lyric, on the contrary, is too personal to be representative. And concentrated exposition is admittedly strong meat for the intellectual babes who constitute the vast majority, or even, as a steady diet, for children of a larger growth. This does not mean, of course, that the novel is a childish product or plaything; but that its union of the dramatic and didactic, the emotional and rational, the picturesque and significant, the merry and sad, together with its absolutely unrestricted range in material, makes it ideal as a popular type in the best sense of the word.

A critic of the time half ironically remarks,—[71]

“The future historians of literature * * * will no doubt analyze the spirit of the age and explain how the novelists, more or less unconsciously, reflected the dominant ideas which were agitating the social organism. * * * The novelists were occupied in constructing a most elaborate panorama of the manners and customs of their own times with a minuteness and psychological analysis not known to their predecessors. Their work is, of course, an implicit criticism of life.”

With all the encouragement bestowed upon them the Victorian novelists could indeed do no less than live up to their opportunities. Not ad astra per aspera lay their destiny. Nothing more was asked of them than to refrain from burying their talents, and to this admonition they were zealously obedient.

The writers themselves supply striking inductive data as to the general diffusion both of fiction and satire. A list of the dozen most prominent Victorian novelists shows that no one of them was wholly devoid of interest in public affairs, and none was entirely lacking in the satiric touch. On the other hand, every one of them saw more on his horizon than current events, and all were something more than mere critics or humorists or even both.