CHAPTER II

INSTITUTIONS

Since institutions are satirized by those who take an interest in public affairs, without being too well satisfied with the way they are managed, we may expect to find them conspicuously under indictment at this time. The Victorians were notably a public-spirited group, and left no cranny unpenetrated by their critical searchlight; for it was the lamp they used, and not the hammer. The two most striking features of nineteenth century public satire are its ubiquity and its moderation. In all departments it was zealous for reform; in none did it see the need of sweeping abolishment. It emanated from a generation poised waveringly between acquiescence and iconoclasm, but avoiding both extremes. Awake to the blindness and blundering of the past, it was still too rooted in piety and tradition to visualize a future radically different. Strong remedies, falling short of the drastic and destructive, seemed about the right prescription. Dudley Sowerby is Victorianism incarnate:[265]

“* * * he had been educated in his family to believe, that the laws governing human institutions are divine--until History has altered them. They are altered, to present a fresh bulwark against the infidel.”

The Victorians deplored, for instance, the domestic disaster that inevitably follows the mercenary marriage encouraged by Society, but they no more questioned the marriage ceremony than they would any law of nature. _Getting Married_ does not merely happen to be post-Victorian; it could not have been otherwise.

They were also intensely partisan both as to Church and State, according to the immemorial human habit; but none of them, not even Disraeli or George Eliot, would refuse an amen to the invocation of Charlotte Brontë:[266]

“Britain would miss her church, if that church fell. God save it! God also reform it!”

Their Constitutional Monarchy was a broken reed, worse than useless, yet _Anarchy_ was a fearful word, second only to _Atheism_ in horrific import. As to the prevailing system of education, it was derided as a failure and set down as naught; but we hear of no youth abjuring college because it wasted his time and money.

Beyond these negative statements, however, the Victorians cannot be described _en masse_, for individuality comes into play, both in emphasis of interest and manner of attack. Nor is there throughout the strictly Victorian period, any discernible evolution of ideas. From Peacock to Kingsley the various novelists are to be distinguished only by local color and personality. But the two whose lives actually extend into the twentieth century are separated sharply in this matter from their predecessors, and serve as links between their time and ours. This omits only George Eliot, who belongs to the second group, although she uses her modern scientific data seriously and not satirically. With Meredith and Butler she forms a trio which faces resolutely with the Course of Empire, while the others are more or less half-heartedly saying their prayers toward the Orient.

As to the institutions themselves, started early in the human stage through gregariousness and mutual dependence, and gradually increased until now it is no longer possible for two or three to meet together without organizing and equipping themselves with officers and constitutions, any sort of classification must be as tentative, interpenetrating, and unsatisfactory as are most topical outlines. But a possible listing of satirized groups or provinces may be made under half a dozen headings: Society, State, Church, School, Art, and Ideals.

By Society is meant that powerful but intangible influence that has a name but no local habitation. It is in effect a federation of homes, organized on the caste system. Known as “fashionable,” or “polite,” its chief concern is with the lighter side of man’s life; with his recreation if a worker, or his amusement if a drone. In view of the fact that it is particularly the feminine domain, with the corollary that Woman’s Place is in the Home, She, as a satirized class, belongs here as appropriately as anywhere.

The State includes such ramifications as politics, law, charities and corrections, labor and capital, and warfare. It is in this connection that satire may be defined, as by Myers, as “essentially a weapon of the weak against the strong, of a minority against a majority;” and by Besant in the same terms, the latter adding, “Satire began when man began to be oppressed.” This statement occurs in his _French Humourists_, and it is interesting to note the confirmation implied in Lenient’s description of France suffering under oppression: “_Esclave, elle tremble et obéit, mais se venge par la satire de ceux qui lui font peur_.”

The Church, when allied with the State, assumed dominion not only over it but over the Home as well. This last, indeed, was raised to the high estate of an Institution by the joint ministrations of the other two. By imposing Marriage upon it, they were enabled to lead it, often more firmly than gently, between them; State grasping the right hand of Home to insure legalization, and Church the left, to produce sanctification.

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.”

As to the mercenary marriage, further satire is contributed by Thackeray, whose plaints over the matches made every day in Vanity Fair are well known; by Dickens and Brontë in short, glancing shafts; and by Trollope, who makes it the main or secondary theme of half a dozen novels. On the more intricate subject of the Eternal Feminine, the contributions come from Lytton, Brontë, (not, however, from Mrs. Gaskell or George Eliot), Trollope, and Meredith. The first three agree on the bane of enforced idleness, which breeds frivolity and inane restlessness. Caroline Helstone reflects bitterly on the helplessness of her position:[270]

“I observe that to such grievances as society cannot readily cure, it usually forbids utterance, on pain of its scorn: this scorn being only a sort of tinselled cloak to its deformed weakness. People hate to be reminded of ills they are unwilling or unable to remedy: such reminder, in forcing on them a sense of their own incapacity, or a more painful sense of an obligation to make some unpleasant effort, troubles their ease and shakes their self-complacency. Old maids, like the homeless and unemployed poor, should not ask for a place and an occupation in the world: the demand disturbs the happy and rich: it disturbs parents.”

She envies Solomon’s model woman, who had to arise early to go about her own business; and Violet Effingham exclaims,--[271]

“‘I wish I could be something, if it were only a stick in waiting, or a door-keeper. It is so good to be something!’

“‘A man should try to be something,’ said Phineas.

“‘And a woman must be content to be nothing,--unless Mr. Mill can pull us through!’”

By the late seventies, Mr. Mill, with reinforcements, had done something toward pulling us through; so that Meredith was able to satirize masculine desire to stave off the threatened feminism, and failure to appreciate the value of equality in comradeship.

In his ideal for his first betrothed, Constantia Durham, Sir Willoughby is as much Man as Egoist:[272]

“He wished for her to have come to him out of an egg shell, somewhat more astonished at things than a chicken, but as completely enclosed before he tapped the shell, and seeing him with her sex’s eyes first of all men.”

In another of the late novels, the two abstractions, society and woman, are fused in one description as,--[273]

“* * * the terrible aggregate social woman, of man’s creation, hated by him, dreaded, scorned, satirized, and nevertheless, upheld, esteemed, applauded: a mark of civilization, on to which our human society must hold as long as we have nothing humaner. She exhibits virtue, with face of waxen angel, with paw of desert beast, and blood of victims on it.”

This is discrimination; the general dearth of which is lamented by Lady Dunstane:[274]

“The English notion of women seems to be that we are born white sheep or black; circumstances have nothing to do with our colour. They dread to grant distinctions, and to judge of us discerningly is beyond them.”

And Lætitia, after listening to a long Patterne discourse on feminine traits and limitations, laconically sums up the whole matter in a compact epigram:[275]

“‘The generic woman appears to have an extraordinary faculty for swallowing the individual.’”

After this, decidedly flat and puerile falls the witticism of Kingsley, spoken by Bracebridge in reply to Lancelot’s impatient question why women would “make such fools of themselves with clergymen”:[276]

“They are quite right. They always like the strong men--the fighters and the workers. In Voltaire’s time they all ran after the philosophers. In the middle ages, books tell us, they worshipped the knights errant. They are always on the winning side, the cunning little beauties. In the war-time, when the soldiers had to play the world’s game, the ladies all caught the red-coat fever; now, in these talking and thinking days (and be hanged to them for bores), they have the black-coat fever for the same reason.”

Thackeray also is guilty of the generalization not at his time discovered to be fallacious:[277]

“Women won’t see matters-of-fact in a matter-of-fact point of view, and justice, unless it is tinged with a little romance, gets no respect from them.”

The generosity of “Little Sister” in condoning young Firmin’s unwise passiveness is based on “that admirable injustice which belongs to all good women, and for which let us be daily thankful.” At this point the undevout votary burns considerable medieval incense at the feminine shrine,--not caring much if a little smoke should blow into his idols’ eyes:[278]

“I know, dear ladies, that you are angry at this statement. But, even at the risk of displeasing _you_, we must tell the truth. You would wish to represent yourselves as equitable, logical, and strictly just. * * * Women equitable, logical, and strictly just! Mercy upon us! If they were, population would cease, the world would be a howling wilderness.”

The apologist errs, however, in supposing that any ladies,--real or fictitious, his own characters or others’,--are angry at his accusation of injustice. Helen Pendennis, Amelia Sedley, even Ethel Newcome and Lady Castelwood, would be flattered; Becky Sharp and Beatrix Esmond would not care. And as for Caroline Helstone, Violet Effingham, Diana Warwick, Sandra Belloni, they are too far away to be disturbed by either smoke or aroma.

For half our novelists, the woman question as such did not exist, and about the same number show little or no interest in the world of fashion, though the two lists coincide only in part. Lytton, Thackeray, Trollope, Meredith, and in a small way, Kingsley, have grudges against society in addition to its treatment of women and women’s influence on it; while Disraeli, Dickens, and Butler have some general gibes at social follies.

From first to last in his near-half-century of writing, Lytton, himself to the manner born, loved to prick the social bubble. In youth he says:[279]

“The English of the fashionable world make business an enjoyment, and enjoyment a business: they are born without a smile; they rove about public places like so many easterly winds--cold, sharp, and cutting; * * * while they have neglected all the graces and charities of artifice, they have adopted all its falsehood and deceit.”

Mr. Howard de Howard, rebuking a drawing room smart set, speaks for himself and his class:[280]

“Gentlemen, I have sate by in silence and heard my king derided, and my God blasphemed; but now when you attack the aristocracy, I can no longer refrain from noticing so obviously intentional an insult. _You have become personal._”

When young Chillingly absconds for a taste of real life, he leaves a letter for his father in which he promises a safe return, and adds,--[281]

“I will then take my place in polite society, call upon you to pay all expenses, and fib on my own account to any extent required by that world of fiction which is peopled by illusions and governed by shams.”

In his first adventure, masquerading as a yeoman, he is quizzed by Uncle Bovill on topics for the intelligent,--politics, agriculture, finance. To maintain his incognito, he affects ignorance; and is astonished at the triumphant deduction,--[282]

“Just as I thought, sir; you know nothing of these matters--you are a gentleman born and bred--your clothes can’t disguise you, sir.”

Disraeli, whose career paralleled Lytton’s in several ways, takes the same tone toward his own social environment, but his deeper political earnestness led him to criticise that environment in the wider as well as narrower social sense. In his first real novel we find the latter by itself, in such touches as this:[283]

“Always in the best set, never flirting with the wrong man, and never speaking to the wrong woman, all agreed that the Ladies Saint Maurice had fairly won their coronets.”

Again it appears in this account of the hero:[284]

“The banquet was over: the Duke of Saint James passed his examination with unqualified approval; and having been stamped at the Mint of Fashion as a sovereign of the brightest die, he was flung forth, like the rest of his golden brethren, to corrupt the society of which he was the brightest ornament.”

The house-party of the Dacres, a family of taste and high standards, is described negatively:[285]

“* * * no duke who is a gourmand, no earl who is a jockey, no manœuvering mother, no flirting daughters, no gambling sons, for your entertainment, * * * As for buffoons and artists, to amuse a vacant hour or sketch a vacant face, we must frankly tell you at once that there is not one.”

But from _Popanilla_ through the Trilogy the inanity and pretense of this social circle is made more pointed by contrast with those socially beneath it. Egremont’s experience with the plain people induces this serious indictment of his own set:[286]

“It is not merely that it is deficient in warmth and depth and breadth; that it is always discussing persons instead of principles, * * * it is not merely that it has neither imagination, nor fancy, nor sentiment, nor feeling, nor knowledge, to recommend it, but * * * it is in short, trivial, uninteresting, stupid, really vulgar.”

Thackeray also speaks from within, and has to his credit his great roster of Snobs, his panoramic Vanity Fair, and his imposing procession of worldly, heartless, noble old dames. Trollope prefers country life, but his Claverings, de Courcys, Luftons, and the Duke of Omnium, show that he has no desire to neglect its aristocracy. Dickens, on the other hand, loved London and its struggling poor, but in the Merdles, the Veneerings, and the Dorrits _redivivi_, he does what he can with the humors of the struggling rich.

To Meredith the exasperating thing about polite society was its impoliteness,--its delight in gossip and scandal, its petty but venomous persecutions, and the false courtesy that takes refuge in conventionality. This impression apparently deepened with time, for it is glimpsed only in _Evan Harrington_ and _Sandra Belloni_, of the earlier books, but is entirely absent from none of the last half dozen.

Butler, preoccupied with other subjects, takes time for only one good shot at this, but that one is so good that it forms a fitting climax. He mentions casually an Erewhonian custom, which may be taken as symbolic of that country’s social behavior and philosophy:[287]

“When any one dies, the friends of the family * * * send little boxes filled with artificial tears, and with the name of the sender painted neatly upon the outside of the lid. The tears vary in number from two to fifteen or sixteen, according to the degree of intimacy or relationship; and people sometimes find it a nice point of etiquette to know the exact number which they ought to send. Strange as it may appear, this attention is highly valued, and its omission by those from whom it might be expected is keenly felt. These tears were formerly stuck with adhesive plaster to the cheeks of the bereaved, and were worn in public for a few months after the death of a relative; they were then banished to the hat or bonnet, and are now no longer worn.”

Whether the last clause may be viewed as a hopeful augury for the future, the author does not state.

The step from the society of the drawing room to society at large, or mankind, is a refreshing passage from indoors, where everything is artificial, even the tears of bereavement, to the fresh air of common interest. The weather may not always be serene nor the atmosphere invigorating, but at least there is a wide horizon and a perspective of some scope. It is evident that the Victorians enjoyed these excursions into the masculine domain of Government, for not one of the list forbade his mind to roam into its boundaries, and not one is wholly silent as to the impressions gained by this adventuring. Here the resemblance ends. Interest in public problems and The People varies from a minimum in Thackeray and George Eliot to a maximum in Peacock, Disraeli, and Butler. There is also great diversity in both breadth and intensity. Lytton, Dickens, Trollope, have several irons in the fire. Gaskell, Brontë, Reade, Kingsley, have but one or two, but the heat is none the less fervent. In some cases, indeed, it is too fervent to give off the sparkle of ridicule, and thus falls without our province. And in some cases, while it is meant seriously as propaganda, it cannot be taken seriously as literature; for the artist is not expected to speak with the tongue of statesmen and economists, and conversely, as Dowden reminds us, “a political manifesto in three volumes is not a work of art.”[288]

Neither of these strictures applies to Peacock, who launches the subject for us in a pungent description of the good old days of Celtic antiquity:[289]

“Political science they had none. * * * Still they went to work politically much as we do. The powerful took all they could get from their subjects and neighbors; and called something or other sacred and glorious when they wanted the people to fight for them. They repressed disaffection by force, when it showed itself in an overt act; but they encouraged freedom of speech, when it was, like Hamlet’s reading, ‘words, words, words.’”

In the same story, the episode of the decaying embankment, with its parody of Lord Canning’s Defense of the British Constitution, and the satire on the game laws, set the pace for the subsequent thrusts at Toryism and the country squires, particularly Meredith’s, whom he naturally influenced. Demagogic bamboozlement of the public is punctured again in the speech of Mr. Paperstamp:[290]

“We shall make out a very good case; but you must not forget to call the present public distress an awful dispensation; a little pious cant goes a great way towards turning the thoughts of men from the dangerous and Jacobinical propensity of looking into moral and political causes for moral and political effects.”

It is in _Melincourt_ also that the campaign of Mr. Oran Hautton in the Borough of Onevote starts the satiric ball rolling into election camps,--later pushed along by the authors of _Pelham_, _The Newcomes_, _Doctor Thome_, _Felix Holt_, _Middlemarch_, and _Beauchamp’s Career_.

Although Lytton started out as a Liberal, he ended as a Conservative, and furnishes some counter satire against democracy. In _Night and Morning_ he speaks of men losing their democratic enthusiasm; and in _The Coming Race_ he gives proof that his is entirely lost. The family of the narrator are Americans, “rich and aristocratic, therefore disqualified for public service;” his father, defeated by his tailor in the race for Congress, decides on the superior beauty of private life. The Vrilya have a very expressive compound word. _Koom_ means a profound hollow; _Posh_ is a term of utter contempt; “_Koom-Posh_ is their name for the government of the many, or the ascendency of the most ignorant and hollow.”[291] This contempt, distributed impartially over dishonest demagogue and gullible public, is nothing new. Smollett, for instance, in his _Adventures of an Atom_, appreciates the art of oratory:

“Our orator was well acquainted with all the legerdemain of his own language, as well as with the nature of the beast he had to rule. He knew when to distract its weak brain with a tumult of incongruous and contradictory ideas: he knew when to overwhelm its feeble faculty of thinking, by pouring in a torrent of words without any ideas annexed.”

The same Adventurer notes that the names of the two political parties of Japan signify respectively More Fool than Knave, and More Knave than Fool. It is, of course this aspect of democracy that leads Lowell to picture it as “Helpless as spilled beans on a dresser.”

Statemanship was Disraeli’s whole existence, and his art a handmaiden to politics. More than any other nineteenth century novelist he complemented destructive criticism by a definite constructive policy. To a contemporary critic, a reforming Tory was a white blackbird; but our own generation, having witnessed the phenomenon of Progressive Republicanism, has less difficulty in understanding the paradox. It was not indifference to the welfare of the masses that induced Disraeli’s belief in the rule of a selected class, but a distrust of popular ability and judgment, and a conviction (acknowledged in our own time as a truth and the real salvation of democracy) that efficiency can come only from expert knowledge and training. From such a viewpoint satire would naturally be directed not against the people but against its incapable and dishonest leadership. Peacock’s scorn of this exploitation of popular ignorance and helplessness is taken up by both his nearest successors, expressed, as it happens, in a pair of portraits of the ward-politician type.

Pelham repudiates Vincent’s proposed new party because of its bad personnel, men--[292]

“* * * who talk much, who perform nothing--who join ignorance of every principle of legislation to indifference for every benefit to the people:--who are full of ‘wise saws’, but empty of ‘modern instances’--who level upwards, and trample downwards--and would only value the ability you are pleased to impute to me, in the exact proportion that a sportsman values the ferret, that burrows for his pleasure, and destroys for his interest.”

Montacute draws a more concrete and ironic picture:[293]

“Find a man who, totally destitute of genius, possesses nevertheless considerable talent; who has official aptitude, a volubility of routine rhetoric, great perseverance, a love of affairs, who, embarrassed neither by the principles of the philosopher nor by the prejudices of the bigot, can assume, with a cautious facility, the prevalent tone, and disembarrass himself of it, with a dexterous ambiguity, the moment it ceases to be predominant: recommending himself to the innovator by his approbation of change ‘in the abstract,’ and to the conservative by his prudential and practical respect for that which is established; such a man, though he be one of an essentially small mind, though his intellectual qualities be less than moderate, with feeble powers of thought, no imagination, contracted sympathies, and a most loose public morality; such a man is the individual whom kings and parliaments would select to govern the State or rule the Church.”

It is not to be supposed, however, that the people would choose any better than kings and parliaments; on the contrary,--[294]

“The Thirty at Athens were at least tyrants. They were marked men. But the obscure majority, who, under our present constitution, are destined to govern England, are as secret as a Venetian conclave. Yet on their dark voices all depends.”

The trend of the succeeding novelists is toward a modified liberalism, but Meredith is the only one to satirize the reactionary attitude as such. The others throw the emphasis elsewhere. Besides, even such humanitarians as Dickens, Gaskell, Reade, and Kingsley, are dubious as to the remedial power of popular government, and seem inclined toward Carlyle’s view of Chartism. What Chesterton says of one of them would not be untrue applied to the rest:[295]

“All his grumblings through this book of _American Notes_, all his shrieking satire in _Martin Chuzzlewit_, are expressions of a grave and reasonable fear he had touching the future of democracy.”

But the humanitarianism itself is sounded in a harmonious chord, whose overtone is a ridicule, more grim than gay, of the delinquents;--those who lack the spirit of humanity, yet are the very ones, on the principle of _noblesse oblige_, in whom it should well up most abundantly. If they fail through that ignorance and mental limitation from which not even the aristocracy are always exempt, the blow is tempered accordingly; but it falls more heavily when the roots of the evil are the black ones of selfishness and perversity.

Lady Lufton, for instance, is a kind soul, who would have made an excellent Providence, though scarcely adequate to cope with the mismanagement of the Providence already installed over human affairs:[296]

“She liked cheerful, quiet, well-to-do people, who loved their Church, their country, and their Queen, and who were not too anxious to make a noise in the world. She desired that all the farmers round her should be able to pay their rents without trouble, that all the old women should have warm flannel petticoats, that the workingmen should be saved from rheumatism by healthy food and dry houses, that they should all be obedient to their pastors and masters--temporal as well as spiritual. That was her idea of loving her country. She desired also that the copses should be full of pheasants, the stubble-field of partridges, and the gorse covers of foxes; in that way, also, she loved her country.”

These are as amiable sentiments for a lady as Victor Radnor’s for a gentleman. He is introduced as regretting his fall on London Bridge chiefly because it led to an unpleasant altercation with a member of the mob.[297]

“* * * he found that enormous beast comprehensible only when it applauded him; and besides, he wished it warmly well; all that was good for it; plentiful dinners, country excursions, stout menagerie bars, music, a dance, and to bed; he was for patting, stroking, petting the mob, for tossing it sops, never for irritating it to show an eye-tooth, much less for causing it to exhibit the grinders.”

Everard Romfrey, of sterner stuff, sees the advantage of tempering mercy with justice:[298]

“To his mind the game-laws were the corner-stone of Law, and of a man’s right to hold his own; and so delicately did he think the country poised, that an attack on them threatened the structure of justice. The three conjoined Estates were therefore his head gamekeepers; their duty was to back him against the poacher, if they would not see the country tumble. * * * No tenants were forced to take his farms. He dragged no one by the collar. He gave them liberty to go to Australia, Canada, the Americas, if they liked. * * * Still there were grumbling tenants. He swarmed with game, and though he was liberal, his hares and his birds were immensely destructive: computation could not fix the damage done by them. Probably the farmers expected them not to eat. ‘There are two parties to a bargain,’ said Everard, ‘and one gets the worst of it. But if he was never obliged to make it, where’s his right to complain?’ Men of sense rarely obtain satisfactory answers; they are provoked to despise their kind.”

He returns to the argument, deepened in unavoidable pessimism:[299]

“This behavior of corn-law agitators and protectors of poachers was an hypocrisy too horrible for comment. Everard sipped claret.”

The novels which depict the really acute phases of labor and poverty,--_Sybil_, _Mary Barton_, _North and South_, _Shirley_, _Alton Locke_, _Hard Times_, (diagnosed by Macaulay as “sullen socialism”), _Put Yourself in his Place_, _Felix Holt_,--are apt to have John Barton’s kind of laugh, if any, “a low chuckle, that had no mirth in it.” But the author of the first of these puts into another story a pungent little description:[300]

“The Elysians consisted of a few thousand beautified mortals, the only occupation of whose existence was enjoyment; the rest of the population comprised some millions of Gnomes and Sylphs, who did nothing but work, and ensured by their labour the felicity of the superior class.”

It is inevitable that the artist and the humorist should find their most congenial fields in those relationships that are vital, and not too hampered by the technique of more formal and crystallized institutions. Prisons, Asylums, Courts, and the whole legal machinery, offer a less inviting prospect than do political parties and theories, and the contrast between social strata.

Yet the first third of our list,--Peacock, Lytton, Disraeli, and Dickens,--with the addition of Reade, Trollope, and Butler, did not shrink from contact with red tape. Dickens and Reade have the monopoly of the department of Charities and Corrections, though Lytton asserted the purpose of _Paul Clifford_ to be an indictment against society’s manufacture and destruction of criminals; and of _Night and Morning_ to show the injustice and fallacy of its treatment respectively of vice and crime. In regard to the latter he says, in the Preface:

“Let a child steal an apple in sport, let a starvling steal a roll in despair, and Law conducts them to the Prison, for evil communications to mellow them for the gibbet. But let a man spend one apprenticeship from youth to old age in vice--let him devote a fortune, perhaps colossal, to the wholesale demoralization of his kind--and he may be surrounded with the adulation of the so-called virtuous, and be served upon its knee by that Lackey--the Modern World!”

Dickens starts his account with the English prison in _Pickwick_, and closes it in _Little Dorrit_. But it is in _David Copperfield_ that he stops to point out the whole thing as a stupid error. On the occasion of a visit to the “immense and solid building, erected at a great expense,” he reflects,--[301]

“I could not help thinking as we approached the gate, what an uproar would have been made in the country, if any deluded man had proposed to spend one half the money it had cost, on the erection of an industrial school for the young, or a home of refuge for the deserving old.”

Within, he finds the rêgime of solitary, unemployed confinement, and the official bait for professions of penitence, fine breeders of hypocrisy, six years before Reade makes the same point in _Never too Late to Mend_. But he sees in the exhibitions of No. 27 and No. 28--the Prize Show, the Crowning Glory--Lattimer, and Uriah Heep, an opportunity for his riotous caricature; while to Reade this degeneration of character is a wholly serious matter. Indeed, Reade waxes so wroth over the cruelty, mental and physical, practiced upon the hopeless victims that the satire itself is as scorching as Swift’s, though of course of less clear a flame.

Yet the warden Hawes, chief culprit through main responsibility, is analyzed as after all irresponsible, on psychological and social grounds:[302]

“Barren of mental resources, too stupid to see, far less read, the vast romance that lay all around him, every cell a volume; too mindless to comprehend his own grand situation on a salient of the State and of human nature, and to discern the sacred and endless pleasures to be gathered there, this unhappy dolt, flung into a lofty situation by shallow blockheads, who, like himself, saw in a jail nothing greater or more than a ‘place of punishment,’ must still like his prisoners and the rest of us have some excitement to keep him from going dead. * * * Growth is the nature * * * even of an unnatural habit. * * * Torture had grown upon stupid, earnest Hawes; it seasoned that white of egg, a mindless existence.”

The satisfaction one has in seeing him finally routed and dismissed is enhanced by the manner of his exit. He is given permission to collect his belongings before departure:--[303]

“‘I have nothing to take out of the jail, man,’ replied Hawes rudely, ‘except’--and here he did a bit of pathos and dignity--‘my zeal for Her Majesty’s service, and my integrity.’

“‘Ah,’ replied Mr. Lacy, quietly, ‘You won’t want any help to carry them.’”

Next in order comes the “Visiting Injustice,” a purblind creature, who sees only what the warden points out to him, and comforts a tortured prisoner with pious exhortations to be patient and submit:[304]

“Item. An occasion for twaddling had come, and this good soul seized it, and twaddled into a man’s ear who was fainting on the rack.”

Later a sarcastic contrast is drawn between the dinner the official enjoys at home and the convict’s gruel he had just ordered diluted.[305]

The first chaplain, well meaning and gentle, is also a failure, through simple inanity:[306]

“Yet Mr. Jones was not a hypocrite nor a monster; he was only a commonplace man--a thing moulded by circumstances instead of moulding them. * * * But at the head of a struggling nation, or in the command of an army in time of war, or at the head of the religious department of a jail, fighting against human wolves, tigers, and foxes, to be commonplace is an iniquity and leads to crime.”

On the enlightened officialdom that permits all this, Reade is one with Dickens. When an urgent appeal for investigation is sent to headquarters, the reply is returned that the inspector would reach that place in his normal circuit in six weeks:[307]

“‘Six weeks is not long to wait for help in a matter of life and death,’ thought the eighty-pounders, the clerks who execute England.”

Most unpardonable of all are such cases as Carter,--[308]

“* * * half-witted, half-responsible creatures, missent to jail by shallow judges contentedly executing those shallow laws they ought to modify and stigmatise until civilization shall come and correct them.”

The Bench and Bar are tempting game for those who enjoy the absurdity of legal tricks and manners. Disraeli pursues it in the Camelopard Court, in _Popanilla_; Dickens in _Pickwick_, _Old Curiosity Shop_, _Bleak House_, _Our Mutual Friend_, not to mention the Circumlocution and Prerogative Offices; Trollope in _Orley Farm_; and Butler in _Erewhon_.

Furnival, attorney for the defence, makes an eloquent and persuasive appeal in behalf of Lady Mason:[309]

“And yet as he sat down he knew that she had been guilty! * * * and knowing that, he had been able to speak as though her innocence were a thing of course. That those witnesses had spoken truth he also knew, and yet he had been able to hold them up to the execration of all around them as though they had committed the worst of crimes from the foulest of motives! And more than this, stranger than this, worse than this,--when the legal world knew--as the legal world soon did know--that all this had been so, the legal world found no fault with Mr. Furnival, conceiving that he had done his duty by his client in a manner becoming an English barrister and an English gentleman.”

Contempt for chicanery and injustice, scorn for downright oppression and exploitation, are notes often sounded. Much more rare is an expression of sympathy for aspiring but baffled mediocrity, with its converse satire for those at fault. The most striking example is given by Trollope. An introductory chapter, with a title and a refrain of _Væ Victis_! is devoted to this subject:[310]

“There is sympathy for the hungry man, but there is no sympathy for the unsuccessful man who is not hungry. If a fellow-mortal be ragged, humanity will subscribe to mend his clothes; but humanity will subscribe nothing to mend his ragged hopes so long as his outside coat shall be whole and decent.”

This indictment is hung on the peg of the competitive examination, a device satirized also by Peacock and Dickens, for being a pretentious failure. Trollope concludes a sarcastic exhortation to all to persevere in the mad scramble for capricious rewards, with this reflection:[311]

“There is something very painful in these races which we English are always running to one who has tenderness enough to think of the nine beaten horses instead of the one who has conquered.”

When the tale of twentieth century satire shall be told, considerable space will have to be devoted to Militarism versus Pacifism. But the Victorians lived, if not in piping times of peace, at least in a time reasonably peaceful, for their island heard little but echoes of the European cannon; a condition which tended to keep men’s minds at home and occupied with internal affairs. The satirists therefore have little to say about war. Peacock unveils the policy of launching a foreign war in order to smother discontent over domestic troubles. In such stories as _Shirley_, _Silas Marner_, and others located in or soon after the Napoleonic Era, are scattered parenthetical remarks; as for instance the opening scene of _An Amazing Marriage_, “when crowned heads were running over Europe, crying out for charity’s sake to be amused after their tiresome work of slaughter; and you know what a dread they have of moping.” In Disraeli’s _Ixion_, Mars is not popular in Olympian circles, being despised as “a brute, more a bully than a hero. Not at all in the best set.” Accordingly, since, as we are reminded by Phillips in his _Modern Europe_, “the British lion, turned ruminant, had been browsing in the pleasant pastures of peace to the melodious piping of Bright and Cobden,” and since it had, when required, the less melodious taunting of Carlyle, it needed at this time no Aristophanes or Swift to mock at the madness of militarism.

In organized religion we see a paradoxical and yet natural enough operation of mortal psychology. In its primitive origin it sprang from two opposite sources, human innocence and human craft. In his innocence man believed that his immortal life must put on mortality, become incarnate in architecture, creed, ritual, before it could be lived. And in his craft he discovered that the incorruptible could be made to put on corruption,--to the great advantage of an entirely terrestrial ambition. These two factors, conjoined with the ubiquitous impulse to socialize feelings and thoughts as well as actions, have succeeded in so clothing and housing the wistful spirit which for itself asks no more than an assurance of some divinity dwelling without or within us, that its elaborate trappings and conspicuous paraphernalia have become shining marks for those who see the possible absurdity in this materializing of the spiritual.

Until recently, however, few shafts have penetrated to the heart of the discrepancy. Most of them have been aimed at the broad and inviting surface of obvious inconsistencies: indulgence in material luxury on the part of an institution founded to further the spiritual life; dominance of authority in a realm that should be free; flourishing of bigotry, greed, cruelty, hypocrisy, in the exclusive garden of all the virtues; unlovely partisan disputes and recriminations in connection with the one thing that best can symbolize the brotherhood of man.

The distinction must here be made between the official representatives of the Church as such representatives, and as mere human beings. In this discussion therefore clergymen are not cited as cases in point unless they are clearly meant by their authors to be taken as clergy and not as men.

The Chadband of Dickens, for instance, and the Bute Crawley and Charles Honeyman of Thackeray, stand on their own feet, and share the common lot of satirized humanity; neither of these novelists having an arrow from his full quiver for the Church itself. Nor has Mrs. Gaskell, though her _North and South_ hinges on the tragedy of Mr. Dale, an Anglican minister turned Dissenter. George Eliot spares likewise the Institution she had herself outgrown. Her Clerical Lives, her Reverends Irwine and Lyon, such diverse types as the modest Dinah Morris and the dominating Savonarola, are treated sympathetically, as is also the pitiful fanaticism of Lantern Yard. Lytton and Reade too grant the consent implied in silence. But other half speak out, briefly or at length.

Peacock is most impressed with the uselessness of an institution which seems to exist for the gratification of its dignitaries. The candid Mr. Sarcastic, after horrifying Miss Pennylove on the question of auctioning off brides, proceeds in his frank career:[312]

“I irreparably offended the Reverend Dr. Vorax by telling him, that having a nephew, whom I wished to shine in the church, I was on the lookout for a luminous butler, and a cook of solid capacity, under whose joint tuition he might graduate. ‘Who knows,’ said I, ‘but he may immortalize himself at the University, by giving his name to a pudding?’”

In his medieval tale he takes up the Church as an institution, with his favorite, backhanded, historical thrust. The Saxons, it seems, had attacked the Bangor monastery and killed twelve hundred monks:[313]

“This was the first overt act in which the Saxons set forth their new sense of a religion of peace. It is alleged, indeed, that these twelve hundred monks supported themselves by the labour of their own hands. If they did so, it was, no doubt, a gross heresy; but whether it deserved the castigation it received from Saint Augustin’s proselytes, may be a question in polemics. * * * The rabble of Britons must have seen little more than the superficial facts that the lands, revenues, privileges, and so forth, which once belonged to Druids and so forth, now belonged to abbots, bishops, and so forth, who, like their extruded precursors, walked occasionally in a row, chanting unintelligible words, and never speaking in common language but to exhort the people to fight; having, indeed, better notions than their predecessors of building, apparel, and cookery; and a better knowledge of the means of obtaining good wine, and of the final purpose for which it was made.”

To such as this we have Thackeray’s counter-blast, with admonition,--[314]

“And don’t let us give way to the vulgar prejudice that clergyman are an overpaid and luxurious body of men. * * * From reading the works of some modern writers of repute, you would fancy that a parson’s life was passed in gorging himself with plum-pudding and port wine; and that his Reverence’s fat chaps were always greasy with the crackling of tithe pigs. Caricaturists delight to represent him so: round, short-necked, pimple-faced, apoplectic, bursting out of waistcoat like a black-pudding, a shovel-hatted fuzz-wigged Silenus.”

Whereas, he goes on at length to show, the reverse is the case. Both sides are more or less illustrative of the _argument ad hominem_.

It is Trollope who really writes of Clerical Snobs. The house-party at Chalicotes shelters a hierarchy. Mr. Robarts arrives,--[315]

“And then the vicar shook hands with Mrs. Proudie, in that deferential manner which is due from a vicar to his bishop’s wife; and Mrs. Proudie returned the greeting with all that smiling condescension which a bishop’s wife should show to a vicar.”

From here the “young, flattered fool of a parson” is persuaded to go to Gatherum Castle and there gets into trouble. Brought to his senses, he meditates ruefully,--[316]

“Why had he come to this horrid place? Had he not everything at home which the heart of man could desire? No; the heart of man can desire deaneries--the heart, that is, of the man vicar; and the heart of the man dean can desire bishoprics; and before the eyes of the man bishop does there not loom the transcendental glory of Lambeth?”

The mixture of affectionate indulgence, shrewd amusement, and fundamental loyalty which made up Trollope’s attitude is recorded in this symbolic portrait:[317]

“As the archdeacon stood up to make his speech, erect in the middle of that little square, he looked like an ecclesiastical statue placed there, as a fitting impersonation of the church militant here on earth; his shovel-hat, large, new, and well-pronounced, a churchman’s hat in every inch, declared the profession as plainly as does the Quaker’s broad brim; his heavy eye-brows, large, open eyes, and full mouth and chin expressed the solidity of his order; the broad chest, amply covered with fine cloth, told how well to do was its estate; one hand ensconced within his pocket evinced the practical hold which our mother church keeps on her temporal possessions; and the other, loose for action, was ready to fight, if need be, in her defense; and, below these, the decorous breeches, and neat black gaiters showing so admirably that well-turned leg, betokened the stability, the decency, the outward beauty and grace of our church establishment.”

It is naturally in the Cathedral Series that clerical matters most abound, but they appear in other volumes, especially _The Bertrams_. Caroline Waddington, speaking of vicars, makes an empiric induction:[318]

“I judge by what I see. They are generally fond of eating, very cautious about their money, untidy in their own houses, and apt to go to sleep after dinner.”

George Bertram, author of _The Romance of Scripture_, and _The Fallacies of Early History_, exponents of the Higher Criticism, over which “there was a comfortable row at Oxford,” discusses religion with his cousin the curate. The attitude of prayer, he says, is beautiful from the communion it symbolizes. But imagine the attitude with no such communion,--[319]

“You will at once run down the whole gamut of humanity from Saint Paul to Pecksniff.”

As to the practicability of freedom of thought, the churchman argues,--

“If every man and every child is to select, how shall we ever have a creed? and if no creed, how shall we have a church?”

And the layman concludes for him,--

“And if no church, how then parsons? Follow it on, and it comes to that. But, in truth, you require too much, and so you get--nothing.”

An ingenuous young girl in another story inquires,--[320]

“* * * what is all religion but washing black sheep white; making the black a little less black, scraping a spot white here and there?”

Whoever may be meant by Thackeray as “gross caricaturists,” it cannot be Trollope, for even Mr. Slope is less repulsive than the alleged portraiture, and the Epicureans are models of refinement, and treated with a corresponding delicacy. Dr. Stanhope, sinecurist and pastor _in absentia_, had the appearance of “a benevolent, sleepy old lion.” Like the rector at Clavering, and the Barchester archdeacon (who kept his jolly old volume of Rabelais locked in his study desk, but brought it out in the security of solitude as an antidote for the tedium of sermon-writing), he had a taste for “romances and poetry of the lightest and not always the most moral description.” And like Dr. Grant, in _Mansfield Park_,--[321]

“He was thoroughly a _bon vivant_. * * * He had much to forgive in his own family, * * * and had forgiven everything--except inattention to his dinner. * * * That he had religious convictions must be believed; but he rarely obtruded them, even on his children.”

The dignified bishop, on hearing a startling piece of news,--[322]

“* * * did not whistle. We believe that they lose the power of doing so on being consecrate; and that in these days we might as easily meet a corrupt judge as a whistling bishop.”

The subject of foreign missions is glanced at in a conversation between Sowerby and Harold Smith; but on the whole it is another neglected topic. Disraeli observes in _Sybil_ that a missionary from Tahiti might be spared for needed work in Wodgate, England. The rest in silence, until Butler, post-Victorian, exposes, with some of his choicest irony, the fallacy that underlies all proselyting logic.

Brontë and Kingsley are openly partisan, with a strain of the crudeness inseparable from antagonistic warmth. They are also on the same side,[323] the broad-church position, opposed to Tractarian principles as much as to Catholicism itself.

The real acid of the first chapter of _Shirley_, entitled _Levitical_, and promising only “cold lentils and vinegar without oil,” is not poured upon the heads of the three curates and the rector, failures though they all were as spiritual shepherds, but upon the contemporary situation. In 1812, the author says, there was no Pastoral Aid nor Additional Curates Society to help out rectors:[324]

“The present successors of the apostles, disciples of Dr. Pusey and tools of the Propaganda, were at that time being hatched under cradle-blankets, or undergoing regeneration by nursery-baptism in wash-hand-basins. You could not have guessed by looking at any one of them that the Italian-ironed double frills of its net cap surrounded the brows of a pre-ordained specially sanctified successor of Saint Paul, Saint Peter or Saint John; nor could you have foreseen in the folds of its long nightgown the white surplice in which it was hereafter cruelly to exercise the souls of its parishioners, and strangely to non-plus its old-fashioned vicar by flourishing aloft in a pulpit the shirt-like raiment which had never before waved higher than the reading-desk.”

“Yet even then,” she adds, “the rare but precious plant existed--three rods of Aaron blossomed within a circuit of twenty miles.” Their clerical functions are summed up later by the gardener William:[325]

“They’re allus magnifying their office: it is a pity but their office could magnify them; but it does nought o’ t’ soart.”

The autobiographical heroine of _Villette_ recounts her experience of being subjected to persuasive priestly exhortation, and ironically repeats the phrases:[326]

“I half realized myself in that condition also; passed under discipline, moulded, trained, inoculated, and so on.”

She is enabled to resist, because,

“* * * there was a hollowness within, and a flourish around ‘Holy Church’ which tempted me but moderately.”

She discusses at length a Papist pamphlet left on her desk for her perusal:[327]

“The voice of that sly little book was a honeyed voice; its accents were all unction and balm. Here roared no utterance of Rome’s thunders, no blasting of the breath of her displeasure. * * * Far be it from her to threaten or to coerce; her wish was to guide and win. _She_ persecute? Oh dear no! not on any account! * * * It was a canting, sentimental, shallow little book, yet * * * I was amused with the gambols of this unlicked wolf-cub muffled in the fleece, and mimicking the bleat of a guileless lamb. Portions of it reminded me of certain Wesleyan Methodist tracts I had once read when a child; they were flavoured with about the same seasoning of excitation to fanaticism. * * * I smiled then over this dose of maternal tenderness, coming from the ruddy old lady of the Seven Hills; smiled, too, at my own disinclination, not to say disability, to meet their melting favours.”

As her reason is not swayed by the arguments of the “Moloch Church,” neither is her fancy kindled by its ritual:[328]

“Neither full procession nor high mass, nor swarming tapers, nor swinging censers, nor ecclesiastical millinery, nor celestial jewelry, touched my imagination a whit. What I saw struck me as tawdry, not grand; as grossly material, not poetically spiritual.”

Kingsley widens his criticism from the personal to the social point of view. He objects to luxury not so much because it shows up the luxurious as because it takes away even the necessities from those who have not, to add yet more luxuries to those that have. He questions--[329]

“* * * how a really pious and universally respected archbishop, living within a quarter of a mile of one of the worst _infernos_ of destitution, disease, filth, and profligacy--can yet find it in his heart to save £120,000 out of church revenues, and leave it to his family; * * * how Irish bishops can reconcile it to their consciences to leave behind them, one and all, large fortunes * * * taken from the pockets of a Roman Catholic population, whom they have been put there to convert to Protestantism for the last three hundred years--with what success, all the world knows.”

Moreover, because he sees in the church a possible vanguard to civilization, he rebels against its retrogressive and obstructive policy. He laments that the working men do not trust the clergy:[330]

“They suspect them to be mere tubs to the whale--mere substitutes for education, slowly and late adopted, in order to stop the mouths of the importunate. They may misjudge the clergy; but whose fault is it if they do? * * * Every spiritual reform since the time of John Wesley, has had to establish itself in the teeth of insult, calumny, and persecution. Every ecclesiastical reform comes not from within, but from without your body. Everywhere we see the clergy, * * * proclaiming themselves the advocates of Toryism, * * * chosen exclusively from the classes which crush us down; * * * commanding us to swallow down, with faith as passive and implicit as that of a Papist, the very creeds from which their own bad example, and their scandalous neglect, have * * * alienated us; * * * betraying in every tract, in every sermon, an ignorance of the doubts, the feelings, the very language of the masses, which would be ludicrous, were it not accursed before God and man.”

Meredith expresses the same idea, with the difference that he does not speak apologetically from within, but with the unqualified disapproval of the outsider. Jenny Denham, an incisive and thoughtful woman, says,[331]

“My experience of the priest in our country is, that he has abandoned--he’s dead against the only cause that can justify and keep up a Church; the cause of the poor--the people. He is a creature of the moneyed class. I look on him as a pretender.”

In his subtle way Meredith satirizes the Catholic Church by having the Countess de Saldar take refuge in and approve of it. Its great asset is that its democracy includes even tailors. That it is the only true spiritual home for a true gentleman she proves by citing an example. A noble knight does not hesitate at telling a flat falsehood to save a lady, being safe in morality because “his priest was handy.” Her nature is defined as the truly religious, that is, one with need of vicarious strength and a sense of renewed absolution. Another exponent is Constance Asper, in _Diana of the Crossways_, whose boudoir was filled with expensive Catholic equipments, affording “every invitation to meditate in luxury on an ascetic religiousness.”

Butler was not content to view the Church from his external position with the silence of George Eliot or the casual comments of Meredith. The intensity of his iconoclasm demanded full expression,--kept, however, from crudeness by his ironic finish, and from injustice by his fundamental reasonableness. In _Erewhon_ his chief point is the perfunctory character of established religion. The Erewhonians have two distinct economic currencies, one of which is supposed to be _the_ system, and is patronized by all who wished to be considered respectable. Yet its funds have no direct value in the community, whose actual business is conducted on the other commercial system. The Musical Banks excel in architecture, and keep up a routine of receiving and paying checks. But their patrons are for the most part ladies and some students from the College of Unreason. Mrs. Nosnibor, a staunch shareholder, deplores this apparent lack of public interest, and remarks that it is “indeed melancholy to see what little heed people paid to the most precious of all institutions.” Her guest observes,--[332]

“I could say nothing in reply, but I have ever been of opinion that the greater part of mankind do approximately know where they get that which does them good.”

The Musical Bankers not only protest too much as to the ascendancy of their institution, but consistently depreciate the other:[333]

“Even those who to my certain knowledge kept only just enough money at the Musical Banks to swear by, would call the other banks (where their securities really lay) cold, deadening, paralyzing, and the like.”

As to the cashiers and managers,--[334]

“Few people would speak quite openly and freely before them, which struck me as a very bad sign. * * * The less thoughtful of them did not seem particularly unhappy, but many were plainly sick at heart, though perhaps they hardly knew it, and would not have owned to being so. Some few were opponents of the whole system; but these were liable to be dismissed from their employment at any moment, and this rendered them very careful, for a man who had once been a cashier at a Musical Bank was out of the field for other employment, and was generally unfitted for it by reason of that course of treatment which was commonly called his education.”

_Erewhon Revisited_ deals more specifically with the miraculous and doctrinal side of Christianity, mirrored in the account of the origin of Sunchildism and its connection with the old Musical Banks. The two main characters are Hanky and Panky, Professors respectively of Worldly and Unworldly Wisdom. They are carefully distinguished:[335]

“Panky was the greater humbug of the two, for he would humbug even himself--a thing, by the way, not very hard to do; and yet he was the less successful humbug; * * * Hanky was the mere common, superficial, perfunctory Professor, who, being a Professor, would of course profess, but would not lie more than was in the bond. * * * Panky, on the other hand, was hardly human; he had thrown himself so earnestly into his work, that he had become a living lie. If he had had to play the part of Othello he would have blacked himself all over, and very likely have smothered his Desdemona in good earnest. Hanky would hardly have blacked himself behind the ears, and his Desdemona would have been quite safe.”

The School is another favorite satirical topic. The only novelists who refrain from depicting the shortcomings of the educational system are Disraeli, Reade, Mrs. Gaskell, and George Eliot. On the public side, Meredith might be added, as the theme of _Richard Feverel_, though educational, is made an individual matter.

The adverse opinion handed down on the methods and results of the prevailing system is more unanimous than is the case with other subjects. On the main indictments, inefficiency and cruelty in the lower schools, and inefficiency and carelessness in the higher, there is no minority report. On the whole, the Victorians were innocent of the partisanship that arose later over the great question of Culture versus Efficiency as an educational ideal. The primary stages might be allowed a modicum of the practical, though Gradgrind’s “facts” are failures, and Squeers stands in solitary glory as an advocate of applied arts and manual training. Mr. Tulliver is in line with his _Zeitgeist_ in fondly supposing the best thing he can do for Tom is to send him to an expensive private school, to learn Latin along with the son of Lawyer Wakem. An education was tacitly defined as that which makes a gentleman of you. And though no one would dissent from Thackeray’s dictum that “all the world is improving except the gentlemen,” neither would any one suppose that the definition might be modified or expanded.

A number realize that education begins at home. The close father and son relationship satirized in the case of Sir Austin and Richard because it was too close and inflexible, is presented as a beautiful ideal in those of Pisistratus and Mr. Caxton, Kenelm and Squire Chillingly, Clive and Colonel Newcome, and the Duke of Omnium and his sons.[336]

* * * * *

In David Copperfield’s recollections of the metallic Murdstone, Arthur Clennam’s of his childhood’s Sabbath and Alton Locke’s of his mother’s fearful bigotry, we get glimpses into the pathos of the old Puritan discipline. These are too sad for satire. Butler, no less sad, is also angry enough to brand it with his caustic wit. Theobald and Christina Pontifex are texts for a satiric sermon on parental incompetence, no less disastrous although “All was done in love, anxiety, timidity, stupidity, and impatience.” After the scene in which Theobald, having punished little Ernest severely and quite wantonly, rang the bell for prayers, “red-handed as he was,” his visitor reflects that perhaps it was fortunate for his host--[337]

“* * * that our prayers were seldom marked by any very encouraging degree of response, for if I had thought there was the slightest chance of my being heard I should have prayed that some one might ere long treat him as he had treated Ernest.”

The keynote of this most Christian system is unconsciously hit upon by the bewildered little lad himself, who later concludes,--[338]

“* * * that he had duties towards everybody, lying in wait for him upon every side, but that nobody had any duties towards him.”

Formal education naturally falls into the school and college divisions. We have the former presented dramatically by Brontë in _Jane Eyre_ (and more impressionistically in _Villette_), by Thackeray in _The Fatal Boots_ and _Vanity Fair_, by Butler in _The Way of All Flesh_, and by the zealous specialist in that field. It has been counted up that Dickens deals with twenty-eight schools and mentions a dozen others.[339] The most important are in _Nicholas Nickleby_, _Dombey and Son_, _David Copperfield_, and _Hard Times_.

Major Bagstock is contemplating young Rob, a product of that school where they never taught honor, but were “particularly strong in the engendering of hypocrisy,” and deduces that “it never pays to educate that sort of people.” Whereupon--[340]

“The simple father was beginning to submit that he hoped his son, the quondam Grinder, huffed and cuffed, and flogged and badged, and taught, as parrots are, by a brute jobbed into his place of schoolmaster with as much fitness for it as a hound, might not have been educated on quite a right plan in some undiscovered respect, when Mr. Dombey, angrily repeating ‘The usual return!’ led the major away.”

Young David Copperfield profits little by losing Murdstone and gaining Creakle. The aspect of this pleasant pedagogue so fascinates the gaze of the boys that they cannot keep to their books. When a culprit is called before the tribunal,--[341]

“Mr. Creakle cuts a joke before he beats him, and we laugh at it,--miserable little dogs, we laugh, with our visages as white as ashes, and our hearts sinking into our boots. * * * Miserable little propitiators of a remorseless Idol, how abject we were to him! What a launch in life I think it now, on looking back, to be so mean and servile to a man of such parts and pretensions!”

From this infant purgatory the step to the college seems a long one, for that is by comparison an Elysium, however inane and frivolous. Those whose satiric arrows speed thither are Peacock, Lytton, Trollope, Kingsley, and Butler. Thackeray should be mentioned for his two chapters on University Snobs, and the preceding one on Clerical Snobs, in which he describes the colleges as the last strongholds of Feudalism; concluding--[342]

“Why is the poor College servitor to wear that name and that badge still? Because Universities are the last places into which Reform penetrates. But now that she can go to College and back for five shillings, let her travel down thither.”

Squire Headlong inquires in vain at Oxford for “men of taste and philosophers.” Scythrop and Sir Telegraph were both cured at college of their love for learning. Desmond describes the university system as a “deep-laid conspiracy against the human understanding, * * * a ridiculous and mischievous farce.” But Dr. Folliott refused to succumb. Alluding to some one who cannot quote Greek, he adds,--[343]

“But I think he must have finished his education at some very rigid college, where a quotation, or any other overt act showing acquaintance with classical literature, was visited with a severe penalty. For my part, I made it my boast that I was not to be so subdued. I could not be abated of a single quotation by all the bumpers in which I was fined.”

The same critic says elsewhere of the curriculum:[344]

“Everything for everybody, science for all, schools for all, rhetoric for all, law for all, physic for all, words for all, and sense for none.”

Pelham testifies that at Eton he was never taught a syllable of English literature, laws, or history; and was laughed at for reading Pope out of school. On his graduation from Cambridge, a place that “reeked with vulgarity,” he is congratulated by his tutor for having been passably decent. Whereupon he observes,--[345]

“Thus closed my academical career. He who does not allow that it passed creditably to my teachers, profitably to myself, and beneficially to the world, is a narrow-minded and illiterate man, who knows nothing of the advantages of modern education.”

Trollope in _The Bertrams_, and Kingsley in _Yeast and Alton Locke_, have a few words for the subject, but add no new idea, except that Alton voices the disgust of the students themselves with their Alma Mater. It is this same young neophyte who is advised by Dean Winnstay to go to some such college as St. Mark’s, which “might, by its strong Church principles, give the best antidote to any little remaining taint of sans-culottism.”

In Butler’s Erewhonian Colleges of Unreason the leading subject is Hypothetics, and the most honored Chairs are those of Inconsistency and Evasion, both required courses. Genius and originality are resolutely discouraged, it being a man’s business “to think as his neighbors do, for Heaven help him if he thinks good what they count bad.” These Erewhonian professors, by the way, might have adduced as evidence the well-known, horrified exclamation of Mary Shelley at the suggestion that her son be sent where he would be taught to think for himself. By refusing to “think like other people,” a man may become a poet and even a beautiful, ineffectual angel, but he cannot lead a comfortable nor a really effectual life. The problem as to who may safely be intrusted to lead public opinion, and who are safest as followers, is an intricate one, but it is certainly true that a sane and modest agnosticism is not necessarily synonymous with “the art of sitting gracefully on a fence,” which Butler concludes was brought to its greatest perfection in the Colleges of Unreason.

On the subjects of Literature and the Press too much has been said to be ignored, but not much of any great consequence. Trollope took Journalism as a satiric province, with some little aid from Meredith. He also takes a shot, not too well aimed, at the current humanitarian fiction which purposes to set the world right in shilling numbers. He adds,--[346]

“Of all such reformers, Mr. Sentiment is the most powerful. It is incredible the number of evil practices he has put down. It is to be feared he will soon lack subjects, and that when he has made the working classes comfortable, and got bitter beer put into proper sized pint bottles, there will be nothing left for him to do. Mr. Sentiment is certainly a very powerful man, and perhaps not the less so that his good poor people are so very good; his hard rich people so very hard, and the genuinely honest so very honest. * * * Divine peeresses are no longer interesting, though possessed of every virtue; but a pattern peasant or an immaculate manufacturing hero may talk as much twaddle as one of Mrs. Ratcliffe’s heroines, and still be listened to.”

A favorite theme, especially among the earlier writers, is the pose of pessimism, alien to the self-satisfied optimistic spirit which prevailed with little opposition--except from James Thompson and Matthew Arnold--from Byron to Hardy.

The Honorable Mr. Listless finds the volumes of modern literature “very consolatory and congenial” to his feelings:[347]

“There is, as it were, a delightful north-east wind, an intellectual blight breathing through them; a delicious misanthropy and discontent, that demonstrates the nullity of virtue and energy, and puts me in good humour with myself and sofa.”

Pelham perceives--[348]

“* * * an unaccountable prepossession among all persons, to imagine that whatever seems gloomy must be profound, and whatever is cheerful must be shallow. They have put poor Philosophy into deep mourning, and given her a coffin for a writing desk, and a skull for an inkstand.”

Ganymede anticipates that Apollo’s new poem will be very popular, for “it is all about moonlight and the misery of existence.”[349]

It is in Meredith that we find the greatest point and depth in literary criticism, as in most other things. Under cover of apology for his own method of psychological analysis, he manages to convey his impression of those who tell and who love the story for the story’s sake. He cannot avoid, he explains, the slow start and detailed exposition in which he unfolds the situation, and adds:[350]

“This it is not necessary to do when you are set astride the enchanted horse of the Tale, which leaves the man’s mind at home while he performs the deeds befitting him: he can indeed be rapid. Whether more active, is a question asking for your notions of the governing element in the composition of man, and of his present business here. * * * All ill-fortuned minstrel who has by fateful direction been brought to see with distinctness that man is not as much comprised in external features as the monkey, will be devoted to the task of the fuller portraiture.”

It is Meredith also who says the last word on the English, as English. They are indeed the real objects under all these disguises of their

## activities, but they are not often synthesized and called by name.

Yet--[351]

“An actually satiric man in an English circle, that does not resort to the fist for a reply to him, may almost satiate the excessive fury roused in his mind by an illogical people of a provocative prosperity, * * * They give him so many opportunities.”

He seizes one of them by symbolizing England in the Duvidney sisters; composed of such, it becomes--[352]

“* * * a vast body of passives and negatives, living by precept, according to rules of precedent, and supposing themselves to be righteously guided because of their continuing undisturbed. * * * mixed with an ancient Hebrew fear of offense to an inscrutable Lord, eccentrically appeasable through the dreary iteration of the litany of sinfulness. * * * Satirists in their fervours might be near it to grasp it, if they could be moved to moral distinctness, mental intention, with a preference of strong plain speech over the crack of their whips.”

He had already decided, in _Beauchamp’s Career_, that “It is not too much to say that a domination of the Intellect in England would at once and entirely alter the face of the country.” Reade agrees with this opinion, only he says bluntly that one is “an ass * * * to have brains in a country where brains are a crime.” This national stupidity and sentimentality are made impregnable by national complacency. Lytton remarks on the egotistic nature of British patriotism:[353]

“The vanity of the Frenchman consists (as I have somewhere read) in belonging to so great a country; but the vanity of the Englishman exults in the thought that so great a country belongs to himself.”

These criticisms are all from within. Disraeli is able to contribute one from without. He describes the British through his Jewish Besso:[354]

“There is not a race so proud, so wilful, so rash and so obstinate. They live in a misty clime, on raw meats, and wines of fire. They laugh at their fathers, and never say a prayer. They pass their days in the chase, gaming, and all violent courses. They have all the power of the State, and all its wealth; and when they can wring no more from their peasants, they plunder the kings of India.”

Nevertheless they all, even the Hebrew within their parliamentary halls, believed in the English character and the civilization it was blunderingly working out. The most incorrigible satirist of that civilization was Peacock (who often, we suspect, gets carried away by his own eloquence), and in his fervent summary of almost all our public failures, he hints in the very phrasing, although ironically, at the possibility of these failures being transformed into successes. Sir Telegraph Paxarett, accused of extravagance, retorts with a conditional promise of retrenchment:[355]

“When ecclesiastical dignitaries imitate the temperance and humility of the founder of that religion by which they feed and flourish; when the man in place acts on the principles which he professed while he was out; when borough electors will not sell their suffrage, nor their representatives their votes; when poets are not to be hired for the maintenance of any opinion; when learned divines can afford to have a conscience; when universities are not one hundred years in knowledge behind all the rest of the world; when young ladies speak as they think, and when those who shudder at a tale of the horror of slavery will deprive their own palates of a sweet taste, for the purpose of contributing all in their power to its extinction:--why then, Forester, I will lay down my barouche.”

Satire, being frankly a destructive process, makes no pretense of supplementing its iconoclasm by reconstruction. But such implication of reform as may lurk in the criticism that paves the way may be looked for more assuredly than elsewhere in attacks on institutions. Such criticism is neither lowered by the recrimination that puts satire of individuals below the normal satiric level, nor elevated by the artistic detachment that lifts satire of human nature above it. For it is not in the too small lump of the solitary specimen that the leaven can best work, nor yet in the too large mass of the whole human race. It is in the unit between these two extremes, the body politic or social or religious or educational, that it may best perform its fermenting ministrations.

Even so, however, the idealism of the Victorian novelists did not take this positive turn. English genius has on the whole contributed its share to the anthology of Utopian vision, even to the furnishing of the name, but the nineteenth century, preëminent in criticism and speculation, venting more talk about it than all the other centuries put together, has to its credit in this line, aside from _Erewhon_ and _The Coming Race_, only Morris’s _News from Nowhere_, and that is too naïve in its simplification of human nature and too absurd in its glorification of medievalism to be taken seriously. More carefully thought out as an Ideal State, more searching in its seriousness, more pertinent in its satire, and more constructive in its conclusion, than any of these, is the American product, Bellamy’s _Looking Backward_.

The Victorians did their looking backward literally from their own present instead of an imagined future. And since in so doing they did for the most part but cast their eye on prospects drear, and since they shrank from a future they could only guess and fear if they thought about it at all, they wisely and practically spent themselves on the present. And because of this acceptance of the present and all its institutions as a whole, they could couch their lances only against this or that detail, not against the challenge of civilization itself.

The following instances show a characteristic difference in their resemblance. “In England, poverty is a crime,” exclaims Lytton in the nineteenth century. The observation is ironic, the tone scornful, and the object of the ironic scorn is the snobbishness of those who from the heights of wealth look down upon and despise the poor. The rebuke is intended for the alien attitude toward that portion of society which we may expect, according to Biblical authority, always to have with us. Poverty itself is a mysterious dispensation, having indeed many discernible compensations, and ever mitigable by applied morality.

“Poverty is the only crime,” echoes Bernard Shaw in the twentieth century. His assertion is meant literally, the tone is decisive, and the indictment is lodged against society at large for being so stupid and inefficient as to permit such a canker, pernicious but curable, to infect its body.

To remedy the supercilious attitude toward the poor is still to leave poverty intact and in permanent possession of the field. To remedy the criminal carelessness which tolerates its presence is to abolish the thing itself.

But even if the twentieth century has stated the problem, it has not yet solved it. And while neither the statement nor the solution of the nineteenth is reckoned adequate today, still the Victorians did accomplish something if not much, and all we can say for ourselves is that we have not accomplished much, if something. Moreover, to flatter ourselves that we are the first to discover the social onus of poverty and other ills, is to ignore the contributions not only of the novelists but of Carlyle, Ruskin, Morris, and Henry George. When the remaining four-fifths of our century shall have been added to history, we may perhaps applaud ourselves. At present it will do us no harm to render unto Victorianism the acknowledgment that is its due.

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