“Self-deception will probably cease with the first blast of the archangel’s trumpet; but what human heart will part with it till then?”
Thackeray[82] emphasizes it in his description of that little world in which he had an almost unholy interest:
“Vanity Fair is a very vain, wicked, foolish place, full of all sorts of humbugs and falsenesses and pretensions. And while the moralist * * * professes to wear neither gown nor bands, but only the very same long-eared livery in which his congregation is arrayed; yet, look you, one is bound to speak the truth as far as one knows it, whether one mounts a cap and bells or a shovel hat; and a deal of disagreeable matter must come out in the course of such an undertaking.”
Later[83] he takes it out on Becky and her kind:
“Such people there are living and flourishing in the world—Faithless, Hopeless, Charityless; let us have at them, dear friends, with might and main. Some there are, and very successful, too, mere quacks and fools; and it was to combat and expose such as these, no doubt, that laughter was made.”
Dickens[84] puts it more abstractly:
“Lest there should be any well-intentioned persons who do not perceive the difference between religion and the cant of religion, piety and the pretense of piety, a humble reverence for the great truths of Scripture and an audacious and offensive obtrusion of its letter and not its spirit in the commonest dissensions and meanest affairs of life, to the extraordinary confusion of ignorant minds, let them understand that it is always the latter, and never the former, which is satirized here. Further, that the latter is here satirized as being, according to all experience, inconsistent with the former, impossible of union with it, and one of the most evil and mischievous falsehoods existent in society.”
The theme of The Tragic Comedians is that “The laughter of the gods is the lightning of death’s irony over mortals. Can they have,” adds Meredith, “a finer subject than a giant gone fool?” But it is in the Ode to the Comic Spirit rather than in stray observations in the novels or even in the Essay on Comedy that the Meredithian satiric philosophy is most pithily set forth. For in the myth of Momus and the Olympians, the mirthful satirist and the self-satisfied divinities who paid a heavy price for their resentment of his incandescent frankness, we have a symbol of what satire might do if permitted, and if not permitted, what penalties may descend. The Comic Spirit is apostrophized as the “Sword of Common Sense,” whose service and sport it is
“This shifty heart of ours to hunt.”
Since man is a deceiver and a self-deceiver,