“I admire that admiration which the genteel world sometimes extends to the commonalty. There is no more agreeable object in life than to see May Fair folks condescending.”
When he gravely admonishes, it is as follows:[219]
“Praise everybody, I say to such; never be squeamish, but speak out your compliment both point blank to a man’s face, and behind his back, when you know there is a reasonable chance of his hearing it again.”
The direct satire on Pitt Crawley as an undergraduate is given an ironic fillip by another sting in the tail:[220]
“But though he had a fine flux of words, and delivered his little voice with great pomposity and pleasure to himself, and never advanced any sentiment or opinion which was not perfectly trite and stale, and supported by a Latin quotation; yet he failed somehow, in spite of a mediocrity which ought to have insured any man a success.”
Another successful bit,—this time the device of catching an unwary character in an ironic trap,—is the account of Penn’s linguistic proficiency. His friend Strong compliments him on speaking French like Chateaubriand,—[221]
“‘I’ve been accustomed to it from my youth upwards,’ said Pen; and Strong had the grace not to laugh for five minutes, when he exploded into fits of hilarity which Pen has never, perhaps, understood up to this day.”
In her preface to the second edition of Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë said that Thackeray resembled Fielding “as an eagle does a vulture;” and also compared the former to a Hebrew prophet. Putting aside the injustice to Fielding (happily atoned for by the author of Middlemarch, thereby restoring the average in feminine criticism) one is moved to reply that if any Victorian shoulders received the mantle of Elijah they were undoubtedly the firm-muscled ones of George Eliot. Hers is the union of native, smoldering wit and tremendous moral earnestness that marked the ancient Semitic race and reappeared in the modern Saxon. The downright seriousness which constitutes her main mood is tinctured but lightly with the ironic tone, but its pungency is well distributed. Its appearance is characterized by brevity and frequency. There are no long passages of sustained irony; and no very long ones wholly devoid of it. It usually occurs in quiet, unostentatious phrases, as in the description of the Raveloe philosophy, or of that superior family whose daughters bloomed into the Mesdames Deane, Glegg, Pullet, and Tulliver.
The cogitative Mr. Glegg, for instance, had a truly scientific attitude toward the captious temper that enlivened his home,—[222]
“* * * it is certain that an acquiescent mild wife would have left his meditations comparatively jejune and barren of mystery.”