More recently Church and School have exchanged places in relation to State, as education has become a public concern, and religion a private. Art and Ideals, like Society, are not palpably crystallized, but are useful designations. The main subject criticised in Art is that branch to which the critics themselves belong, Literature. When Ideals or Ideas are ridiculed, it is naturally as fallacious reasoning or erroneous judgment. Attacks on civilization in general and the English species of it in particular, may also be put here for want of a better place.
According to the satirists, Society is at fault chiefly for its worship of Mammon, its hollowness, and snobbish vanity. These lead to artificial relationships, the most disastrous of which is the marriage of convenience, which usurps the higher dominion of sentiment and romance.
Peacock is interested not only in this matrimonial bargaining but in the accompanying insistence on a decent disguise. Mr. Sarcastic is pointing out the astonishing results to be secured by a practice of absolute frankness in speech. Among other instances, he cites the shock he gave Miss Pennylove by declaring to her,—[267]
“When my daughter becomes of marriageable age, I shall commission Christie to put her up to auction, the highest bidder to be the buyer, * * *”
In spite of the lady’s utter amazement and indignation, she afterwards rejects manhood and love in favor of senility and wealth; whereby her critic concludes,—
“How the dignity and delicacy of such a person could have been affected, if the preliminary negotiation with her hobbling Strephon had been conducted through the instrumentality of honest Christie’s hammer, I cannot possibly imagine.”
This is evidently not to be construed into a satire against women, for Peacock follows the lead of Defoe in the chivalrous justice which, so far from ridiculing women, pointed out on the contrary the absurdity of the conditions that had made them seem absurd. In the same story he describes Sir Henry as—[268]
“* * * one of those who maintained the heretical notion that women are, or at least may be, rational beings; though, from the great pains usually taken in what is called education to make them otherwise, there are unfortunately very few examples to warrant the truth of the theory.”
In another connection he observes that the repression of feminine activity shows—[269]
“* * * the usual logic of tyranny, which first places its extinguisher on the flame, and then argues that it cannot burn.”