Satire in the Victorian novel

by Frances Theresa Russell

One turns with an especial interest to the belated Gryll Grange to see what change there may be thirty years after, but finds little more than the natural mellowing influence of time. He is indeed “satirist to the last,” albeit he is disposed to use “more oil and less vinegar.”[96]

If Peacock is Horatian, without the Roman’s sense of realism, Butler is more of a Juvenal, as the latter might have been, perhaps, had he lived under Victoria instead of Domitian. The wind of invective is now tempered, not to the shorn lamb, but to the modern prejudice against the rudeness of tempests unmitigated by sunshine.

Butler’s publications, beginning two years after Peacock’s had ended,[97] extended through the next half century, The Way of All Flesh and Notebooks being posthumous. But the three decades bracketed by the two Erewhons were the fertile ones. Through them flowed steadily a stream of many currents; satiric, scientific (mainly controversial), classic, critical, descriptive, expository, musical, and artistic. Of all these volumes only three can be classed as fiction, and one of those falls in the other group. Our present interest centers upon Erewhon and its sequel.

There is no more effective satiric machinery than that of the Foreign State, or Adventures among Strange People. It may take the form of a serious though perhaps fantastic conception with incidental satire, as in Utopia, New Atlantis, The Coming Race, Modern Utopia; or a travesty of these, an inverted pyramid, made grotesque by the dominating satire, though none the less freighted with serious intent, as Gulliver, Journey from This World to the Next, Erewhon.

From the fact that The Coming Race and Erewhon may be cited as examples of the same literary genus, though of different species, comes the suggestion that the real complement of Butler is Lytton. It does happen that they furnish the only two instances on our list of the exercise of this particular kind of creative fancy.[98] Lytton’s tale pictures a positive ideal, which satirizes our inadequate reality by acting as a foil to it. Butler’s narrative portrays a supposed reality, of which the visitor does not approve; and his comments satirize our accepted reality by a subtle, indirect reflection. Our race placed beside the “coming” one merely looks small, inferior, incomplete, yet all it needs is growth. But if the barrier could be leveled between our country and the one Over the Range, the two would confront each other and see their own images, not as in a glass darkly but as in a brilliant yet tricky and distorting mirror. Our actual beliefs and practices, shorn of the verbal illusions we have spun around them, and pushed to their logical conclusions, would become the naked reductio ad absurdum we view in the Erewhonian philosophy of illness, crime, science, religion, life, and death.[99]

In Erewhon Revisited we see a mental sequence even more interesting than the dramatic sequel. Erewhon was followed the very next year by The Fair Haven. The former supplies the stage setting, the latter the central idea, whose combination makes the Revisit a seemingly artless but really astounding tour de force, an uncanny offspring of logic and fancy.

Given the original situation and the climax that closes the Erewhonian adventure, given considerable study and meditation on the strange, enshrouded origin of the religion which possessed the author’s part of the world, given a speculative dream as to what might have happened in his fabricated autobiography after the event, given the Butlerian mind, patient to track and quick to spring, and the result is as inevitable as a theorem. One scent, and the proficient hound is off, literally hot on the trail, nor does he halt till Hanky and Panky, the credulous mob, Sunchildism itself, are fairly run down and given a good fright, though finally let off with a shaking that leaves them limp.

The dramatic canvas on which this satiric design is drawn is worthy a Cervantes, a Swift, or a Defoe; a beautiful example of the “grave, impossible, great lie,” absorbing if not convincing. Butler’s stories, more than any in this group, show constructive art; length that is enough and not too much, sufficient swiftness, coherence, and climax. They are fantastic but not flimsy. The imagination is captivated, as always, by the introduction to a strange, new land; the intellect is aroused by the significance of the panorama rapidly unfolding; the imp of mischief that dwells in all normal human hearts is delighted at the deft overthrow of certain conventional idols, now shown to be ugly, inane, and clay from the feet up; and all this through a concrete, realistic medium that can be visualized and lived in. We share the excitement of finding and crossing the range, of the capture and imprisonment of the “foreign devil” who is at least a dare-devil, of his later success, and astounding elopement. We sympathize with Mr. Nosnibor, voluntarily fined and flogged; and we feel quite at home in the Musical Banks and the Law Courts.

In the sequel we renew old acquaintances and make some new ones. We admire the executive ability of Yram, seconded by that of her able son George. We participate in the suspense at the Dedication Ceremony, are relieved after the dinner table council, and finally well satisfied when the Bridgeport schemers are discomfited but nobody Blue-Pooled.

It is the business of the raconteur, romantic as well as realistic, to beguile his audience into acquiescence even of the incredible. But the romancing satirist has the anomalous task of creating a story good enough to be its own reward and then not allowing it to be. It must have all the air of being an end in itself the while it is being made the means to another end. This adroit manipulation whereby the idea appears subordinate to the plot, although the reverse is the case, is a point in which Butler surpasses the others on our list and ranks with the highest at large.[100]