Satire in the Victorian novel

by Frances Theresa Russell

The superb eulogy of the first statement may be dismissed as a bit of rhetoric, but the doom pronounced in its corollary, is based on a double confusion; first between the ironist and the humorist, and second between the satirist and the misanthrope. In a recent discussion the same fallacy is promulgated at greater length:[173]

“The satirist is the aggressive lawyer, fastening upon particular people and particular qualities. But irony is no more personal than the sun that sends his flaming darts into the world. The satirist is a purely practical man, with a business instinct, bent on the main chance and the definite object. He is often brutal, and always overbearing; the ironist, never. Irony may wound from the very fineness and delicacy of the attack, but the wounding is incidental. The sole purpose of the satirist and the burlesquer is to wound; and they test their success by the deepness of the wound. But irony tests its own by the amount of generous light and air it has set flowing through an idea or a personality, and the broad significance it has revealed in neglected things.”

The only pertinent reply to such eloquence is one that may seem impertinent, namely, to refer the special pleader to a useful principle in argument greatly favored by a certain canny Greek dialectician, and quaintly restated in the eighteenth century:[174]

“If once it was expected by the Public that Authors should strictly define their Subjects, it would instantly cheque an Innundation of Scribbling. The desultory Manner of Writing would be absolutely exploded; and Accuracy and Precision would be necessarily introduced upon every Subject. * * * If Definitions had been constantly expected from Authors there would not have appeared one hundredth Part of the present Books, and yet every Subject had been better ascertained.”

Irony, it is true, is defined by the essayist as “the science of comparative experience,” but this attempt to fit a philosophic giant to the bed of his smaller ironic brother meets with the usual Procrustian result. As for the tribute to irony, a far more impressive one is paid in the almost casual utterance of Lamb, who makes it the climax of his enumeration of the blessings vouchsafed to mortality,—“and irony itself—do these things go out with life?”

In Victorian fiction the presence of this element is found very much as it is in life, unobstrusive but easily detectable. What Saintsbury says of Jane Austen would apply in varying degrees to her successors:[175]

“Precisely to what extent the attractive quality of this art is enhanced by the pervading irony of the treatment would be a very difficult problem to work out. It is scarcely hazardous to say that irony is the very salt of the novel; and that just as you put salt even in a cake, so it is not wise to neglect it wholly even in a romance. Life itself, as soon as it gets beyond mere vegetation, is notoriously full of irony; and no imitation of it which dispenses with the seasoning can be worth much.”

This vital importance of what might be called negative value is suggested by the juvenile’s definition of salt as “what makes your potato taste bad if there isn’t any on it.” It is just this fact, however, that allows the ironic to defy analysis. By itself one spoonful of salt is very much like another. The whole secret is in the combination. Its presence or absence gives one the immediate feeling of the little more and how much it is, the little less and how far away. But to segregate it for scrutiny is to destroy the charm of the savor.

Since such segregation must nevertheless be attempted for the sake of the information it may yield, it seems advisable to keep to the division already noted, and distinguish between verbal and philosophical irony as they exist in the novel. These correspond in a general way to the direct and the dramatic methods used in the larger field of satire.

Of ironic language we find practically none in Reade, very little in Kingsley, Mrs. Gaskell, and Charlotte Brontë, more frequent flashes in Lytton and Disraeli, increasing still more in Dickens and Trollope. In Peacock, Thackeray, Eliot, Meredith, and Butler, it is more pervasive, even when less in quantity, and representative of a consistent attitude.