Much more subtle and hence much more intellectually satisfying is the trap in which another amorous gentleman, the Reverend Mr. Slope, is caught by another clever lady, Signora Neroni.[144]
“Mr. Slope was madly in love, but hardly knew it. The signora spitted him, as a boy does a cockchafer on a cork, that she might enjoy the energetic agony of his gyrations. And she knew very well what she was doing.”
In their memorable interview the accomplished Phoedria led this poor Cymochles into a fearful, tangled web, there to struggle and flounder until she released him with mocking scorn, having illustrated perfectly Meredith’s remark about another and more famous egoist:[145]
“A lover pretending too much by one foot’s length of pretense, will have that foot caught in her trap.”
Even then, however, fate had not done her worst, for the cockchafer was literally to be slapped in the face by the more direct and active Eleanor Bold. The comment on this latter scene may be cited as an example of the mock-heroic vein occasionally used in the service of satire from Swift and Fielding on.[146]
“But how shall I sing the divine wrath of Mr. Slope, or how invoke the tragic muse to describe the rage which swelled the celestial bosom of the bishop’s chaplain? Such an undertaking by no means befits the low-heeled buskin of modern fiction. The painter put a veil over Agamemnon’s face when called on to depict the father’s grief at the early doom of his devoted daughter. The god, when he resolved to punish the rebellious winds, abstained from mouthing empty threats. We will not attempt to tell with what mighty surgings of the inner heart Mr. Slope swore to revenge himself on the woman who had disgraced him, nor will we vainly strive to depict his deep agony of soul.
“There he is, however, alone in the garden-walk, and we must contrive to bring him out of it. * * * He stood motionless, undecided, glaring with his eyes, thinking of the pains and penalties of Hades, and meditating how he might best devote his enemy to the infernal gods with all the passion of his accustomed eloquence. He longed in his heart to be preaching at her. ’Twas thus that he was ordinarily avenged of sinning mortal men and women. Could he at once have ascended his Sunday rostrum and fulminated at her such denunciations as his spirit delighted in, his bosom would have been greatly eased.”
The routing of this clergyman is balanced by the triumph of another, in a later volume of the series, though in an entirely different cause.[147] None of our novelists has given us a more delectable scene than the one which marked the culmination of those triangular interviews with which Bishop Proudie’s study was so familiar. Here Mrs. Proudie, that mighty Amazon, is brought low, and that, through a dastardly blow of fate, by a foe unworthy of her steel, albeit she had not considered him unworthy of her persecution. She is now made to endure two kinds of anguish, both new and both terrible. The first is being ignored. The second is being talked back to and then left before she can reply. It is a glorious moment for all but the defeated when one weary badgered opponent thunders at her, “Peace, Woman!” and adds that she would better be minding her distaff; and another weary badgered opponent, her sleek and pampered husband, jumps from his chair at the sound, not in anger at the unchivalrous Mr. Crawley but in admiration of his incredible courage and astounding victory.
Of these various roads open to the writer of satirical intent, those just indicated, by direct reflection and by dramatic scenes, are in the nature of by-ways. They are for the most part occasional and incidental; valuable chiefly as securing the piquant and diversified effect necessary to the literature that aims to amuse, even when the amusement itself is secondary in the real design.
The main highway is that of character. By the kind of characters he can create and by his attitude toward them shall the novelist be known. There are the idealized, the respected, the beloved, the censured, the anathematized. The group selected for our especial concern in this study is formed of those pilloried by the rebuke humorous. Such, however,—the comic and therefore the ridiculed,—are objects of satire and accordingly more suitably considered in the following section. It is the opposite class that constitutes a factor in satiric method. This phase of the discussion will therefore be confined to the wits, those who may be called satirists in their own right, and so used by the author as a dramatic means to his satiric end.