CHAPTER I
RELATIONSHIPS
To call a man a satirist or a satirical writer is to say something about him, certainly. It is, however, a piece of information which can be nothing more than a curiosity of literature so long as it remains an isolated fact. Although we are for the time being interested in a group of novelists primarily as satirists, we cannot even understand them as such, much less come to any fuller comprehension, unless we also view the satirists as novelists, as artists, as human beings.
These relationships extend on the internal side, so to speak, into such matters as quantity, quality, and range; and on the external, into the larger realms of the two satiric factors--criticism and humor--and thence into the neighboring domains of pessimism and tragedy, comedy and wit, realism and romanticism, emotion and intellect, and idealism. In none of these things, of course, can we do more than indicate briefly the effect they may have upon satire, or satire upon them.
Those who have furnished the largest amount of satire,--proportionately, as it happens, both to their own total production, and to the satiric production of others,--are Peacock, Dickens, Butler, and Meredith. But when it comes to quality,--tested by subtlety of wit, self-command, justice as to objects, and moderation of amount,--the only one to remain on the preëminent list is Meredith.
At the other extreme we find the same overlapping as to quantity and quality. The smallest satiric amounts come from Brontë, Reade, and Gaskell, but, while the first two are correspondingly inferior in quality, the last is promoted several degrees up the qualitative scale, by reason of her lack of flourish, and the deft sureness of her touch. The low place she leaves vacant belongs by desert to Kingsley, who, like Brontë and Reade, never learned to solve the satirist’s problem,--to trifle without being trivial. Frivolity, to be sure, was never a besetting sin of the Victorians, but in their earnestness they were prone to the opposite fault, and are occasionally caught beating a big satiric drum when softer notes would be more effective. Neither are any on the entire list guilty of downright insincerity, but the less successful ones are sometimes betrayed by partisan zeal, acrimonious temper, or unsound judgment, into more or less injustice. This is true to some extent of Peacock, Dickens, and Thackeray, as well as of those just mentioned.
In range of interest Dickens easily leads, followed by Meredith and Trollope. From _Oliver Twist_ to _Edwin Drood_, this satirist spreads his attacks over more ground, and lays about him in more different directions than does any one else. With the exception of the Church, no possible word of importance is omitted from his satiric lexicon. His tastes in the ridiculous are catholic, and scarcely a satirizible subject languishes under his neglect. The other writers are more or less specialists in their chosen fields.
As to the effect on the satiric product of a versatile mind, a prolific pen, or preoccupation with other affairs, no deduction seems possible. Lytton, Kingsley, and Butler were versatile and prolific both, to a degree. Thackeray and Trollope were prolific within a more limited range. Those most exclusively novelists were Disraeli, Dickens, and Brontë, but those to produce the most novels were Trollope, Lytton, Dickens, and Meredith. Lytton and Disraeli had more outside interests and underwent more varieties of social and political experience than any of their successors, though Trollope and Kingsley had occupations and avocations outside those of literature.
All these internal relationships have some significance but much less than the external ones. They deal primarily with accomplishments, which have their value chiefly as emanating from character and so defining it, whereas the various elements of which character itself is composed are in the nature of vital statistics in the life spiritual. Of these elements those most closely related to satire are naturally its constituents, though they may exist independently of it. Although satire is a form of criticism, it does not follow that those writers who are most consistently satirical have the most widely or deeply critical attitude toward life in general. Such fundamental criticism branches out into two philosophies: the hopeless, or pessimistic, shading off into flippant cynicism or bitter misanthropy; and the hopeful, or unsentimentally optimistic, which is the basis of all dynamic idealism. For whithersoever the idealist may tend, he certainly cannot start from a point of uncritical satisfaction with things as they are. Locke may have made some errors regarding the human understanding, but he was eminently correct in identifying the stimulus to action, not with a vision of fulfilled desire, but with the sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go. We must be driven out before we can be led on, but the driving process once being inaugurated, we make it more dignified and endurable by conceiving a goal upon which our endeavors may be focussed.
To the philosophy of pessimism no Victorian novelist was addicted. The phase of it current in the period just preceding was met by a prolonged, skeptical, British chuckle, beginning with our first novelist, who represents, indeed, in his own history the reaction from pensive melancholy to humorous common sense. Peacock is speaking of being unhappy, and adds:[404]
“To have a reason for being so would be exceedingly commonplace: to be so without any is the province of genius: the art of being miserable for misery’s sake, has been brought to great perfection in our days; and the ancient Odyssey, which held forth a shining example of the endurance of real misfortune, will give place to a modern one, setting out a more instructive picture of querulous impatience under imaginary evils.”
Lytton shared the fondness of Dickens and Thackeray for pathos, but none of them went further into the anatomy of melancholy than some such comment as,--“Dig but deep enough, and under all earth runs water, under all life runs grief.”[405]
* * * * *
Thackeray muses on the theme of aspiration in a whimsically pensive vein. Between the questions and the exclamation of the following excerpt are several instances of disappointment, related in his jocular mock-sympathetic tone:[406]
“Succeeding? What is the great use of succeeding? Failing? Where is the great harm? * * * Psha! These things appear as naught--when Time passes--Time the consoler--Time the anodyne--Time the grey calm satirist, whose sad smile seems to say, Look, O man, at the vanity of the objects you pursue, and of yourself who pursue them.”
In the essay _Of Adversity_ Bacon says,--“We see in needleworks and embroideries it is more pleasing to have a lively work upon a sad and solemn ground, than to have a dark and melancholy work upon a lightsome ground.” In so far as this can be granted, and applied to the novel, it would explain why George Eliot is more pleasing than Thackeray, for that is just the difference between them. Athwart the brilliant background of Vanity Fair fall the sinister shadows of the sordid little Puppets of the Show,--“the bullies, the bucks, the knaves, the quacks, the yokels, the tinselled dancers, the poor old rouged tumblers, and the light-fingered folk operating on the pockets of the rest.” Behind Hayslope, Raveloe, and Middlemarch, the Floss and the Arno, hangs the curtain of Destiny, somber with pain, drudgery, sin and its wages. Yet over it plays a light shed around the characters as they appear upon the stage. It shines from Mrs. Poyser’s kitchen and Mr. Irwine’s study, from the parlors of the sisters _née_ Dodson and the Garth family, from Celia Chettam’s nursery, the bar at the Rainbow, and the shops of Florence. Together these actors weave a pattern of mirth and amusement,--the incorrigible human defiance of the ache of life and the agony of death.
Dickens, (upon whose Hogarthian gloom Taine lays great stress), Reade, and Kingsley are as critical of society in the larger sense as Thackeray is in the smaller, and as Eliot and Trollope are of human nature. Meredith has no illusions about any of these things, and Butler comes nearer than any to an unqualified pessimism. But even he does not attain it. They all escape through the avenue of satire, sometimes reinforced by action,--both being efficacious means of getting melancholia out of the system. Nowhere does Browning speak more as a Britisher than when he declares rage to be the right thing in the main, and acquiescence the vain and futile.
Pessimism, to be consistent, would express itself in terms of tragedy. Out of approximately one hundred Victorian novels of the realistic type,--for romantic tragedy cannot be taken as an index of the writer’s philosophy,--less than ten per cent can be classified as tragic in outcome; and in none of these is the catastrophe inclusive, overwhelming, or a perversion of justice. Of these the largest proportion belongs to Eliot and Meredith, but _The Mill on the Floss_ is the solitary complete tragedy. _Rhoda Fleming_ and _Middlemarch_ are almost as truly tales of comic tragedians as _Romola_, _Richard Feverel_, and _An Amazing Marriage_ are of tragic comedians. On the other hand, tragedy of this mitigated sort is not inconsistent with idealism, which in turn is the constructive side of criticism. While it is too much, as Lytton reminds us in _Kenelm Chillingly_, to expect both critical and constructive ability to be conspicuous in the same individual, nevertheless the criticism which is content to note a deflection from an ideal without even a tacit recognition of the ideal deflected from, is mere childish fretting over the personally irritating. Of this there is little in the nineteenth century. The Victorians may have had some of the unpardonable disregard for reality of which they have been accused,[407] but they never could be accused of a disregard for ideality. None of the novelists, indeed, announced an ecstatic premonition of some far-off, divine event toward which the whole creation moves; but they would all have asserted, even if under their breath,--_Eppur si muove_. This assertion is none the less emphatic and possibly the more artistic, by being made indirectly, through dramatic presentation of characters. Harley L’Estrange, Egremont, Mr. Hale, Mrs. Brandon, Mark Tapley, Sidney Carton, Mr. Eden, Jane Eyre, Alton Locke, Mr. Harding, Dinah Morris, Dorothea Brooke, Austin Feverel, Vittoria, Beauchamp,--these all testify in their various ways, by noble aspiration, generous self-effacement, sensitive response to duty, devotion to principle, courage in daring and in endurance, to the existence of a something in the human soul that is stemming the tide of its selfishness, cowardice, and cruelty, and may in time work out a salvation for the race.
A recognition of ideality does not imply, however, a lack of proper concern for reality, or the reverse. To make the two diametrical opposites is to confuse issues. As Meredith says,--“Between realism and idealism there is no natural conflict. This completes that.” He adds the caution that only the great can be truly idealistic, and concludes,--“One may find as much amusement in a kaleidoscope as in a merely idealistic writer.”[408] The direct counterpart to realism is romanticism; and the Victorians did not scruple to make free use of this alliance with the improbable, whenever the actual would fail to secure the desired dramatic effect. Coincidences abound,--convenient returns of the absent and departures of the troublesome, discoveries of kinship and inheritance of fortunes, narrow escapes and astonishing reunions. Yet there is also some conscious defense of the practice. Lytton has one of his characters, confessing her disappointment in the fiction of the time (the early thirties), conclude,--[409]
“These novelists make the last mistake you would suppose them guilty of, they have not enough _romance_ in them to paint the truths of society. * * * By the way, how few know what natural romance is: so that you feel the ideas in a book or play are true and faithful to the characters they are ascribed to, why mind whether the incidents are probable?”
Trollope reinforces the idea:[410]
“No novel is worth anything, for the purpose either of tragedy or comedy, unless the reader can sympathise with the characters whose names he finds upon the pages. * * * If there be such truth, I do not know that a novel can be too sensational.”
And Meredith expresses on at least two occasions his opinion of the value of realism. An embittered authoress determined to make her next novel a reflex of her bitterness. Considering that type, she--[411]
“* * * mused on their soundings and probings of poor humanity, which the world accepts as the very bottom-truth if their dredge brings up sheer refuse of the abominable. The world imagines those to be at our nature’s depths who are impudent enough to expose its muddy shallows. * * * it may count on popularity, a great repute for penetration. It is true of its kind, though the dredging of nature is the miry form of art. When it flourishes we may be assured we have been over-enamelling the higher forms.”
In another volume he is describing the humorist’s idea of it:[412]
“I conceive him to indicate that the realistic method of a conscientious transcription of all the visible, and a repetition of all the audible, is mainly accountable for our present branfulness, and for that prolongation of the vasty and the noisy, out of which, as from an undrained fen, steams the malady of sameness, our modern malady.”
It might seem that a romanticism so prevalent and avowed would not be the best medium for satire, which is supposed to be realistic in the sense that it deals with the actual. But since satire is directed against persons rather than circumstances, it is in no danger so long as the romancing is confined to the situations, and the characters are kept to the plane of reality,--as is the case, with a few easily recognizable exceptions, in the Victorian novel. That the difficulty of truthfulness is one excuse for indulgence in the easier romantic method, is admitted by Eliot:[413]
“The pencil is conscious of a delightful facility in drawing a griffin--the longer the claws and the larger the wings, the better; but that marvellous facility which we mistook for genius is apt to forsake us when we want to draw a real, unexaggerated lion.”
But in Victorian fiction neither griffins nor lions are in much evidence. The total personnel is fairly well symbolized (with the addition of a few more of the nobler brutes than are admitted by Thackeray) in the Overture to _The Newcomes_, wherein the “farrago of old fables” pictures a crow, a frog, an ox, a wolf, a fox, an owl, and a few lambs, but only the skin of a lion,--and that serving as cloak for a donkey. The romantico-realistic solution, therefore, forms probably the most satisfactory base for the dissolving of the critical-humorous acid and the precipitation of satire. It secures a maximum of pungency with a minimum of flatness, and is perfectly safe to take.
As satire ramifies on the critical side into pessimism, tragedy, idealism, and the cognate matters of romanticism and realism, so it extends on the humorous into the comic, the witty, and the philosophic amusement known as a sense of humor.
Of those who launch their satire on the comic current, Dickens is again first. He is, as Taine remarks, the most railing and the most jocose of English authors. Speaking of his sportiveness, the French critic adds that “he is not the more happy for all that,” and uses him to point the double moral: that “English wit consists in saying very jocular things in a solemn manner,” and “The chief element of the English character is its want of happiness.”[414] This last may account for the fact that none of the novelists is abreast of Dickens in fun-making. Indeed, the only others to deserve mention are Lytton, Trollope, and Thackeray, and the last in his extra-novel productions. Those, on the other hand, who are most endowed with wit are Meredith, Butler, and Peacock, with George Eliot not quite to be omitted. More important than comicality or wit is the sense of humor, for while they are largely in the nature of devices whereby the object is made _ex post facto_ ludicrous to others, it is the quality which enables the critic himself to perceive the absurdity, and is thus the _sine qua non_ of his being a satirist at all. It is Meredith who excels here, and this excellence, combined with his gift of wit and his restrained use of the comic, lifts him to a position of superiority on the humorous as well as the critical side. George Eliot also has the sense of proportion which is the basis of humor, and so, to a less degree, have Trollope and Mrs. Gaskell. At the other extreme stand Reade, Kingsley, and Charlotte Brontë, with very little perspective or artistic detachment. The unfortunate thing about them is that they did not dare be as serious in expression as they were in temperament. Their humor does not bubble up from a natural spring but is manipulated through an artificial fountain, with varying effects of spontaneity. Lytton, Disraeli, and Thackeray had some youthful smartness of this sort to outgrow, and to a large extent they did it. But these others never did; and Reade especially has moments of a truculent pertness and shrill sarcasm that do an injustice to the really fine spirit of his work.
That there are more of these fitful gleams and partial visions than of an inclusive view of the cosmos, is not astonishing. The wide, clear outlook requires not only an infinite radius but a lens of powerful magnitude. To train a small telescope on a remote object achieves nothing. None of the novelists evinces the cosmic perspective that reports back in terms of a universe. That, indeed, is the function of the seer,--poet, prophet, or philosopher. But if only these see life in all its panoramic vastness, there are others who at least splash at a ten-league canvas, and insist on having real figures to draw from, whether saint or sinner. These have no use for the trivial and frivolous, yet they know better than to scorn the small and unpretentious. They delight in spaciousness, but are not enamored with mere bulk or nebulous vagueness. Such are our satiric novelists at their best, those among them ranking highest whose philosophical humor is greatest in proportion to their love of the comic, and who are granted sufficient wit to transmute their perception of the absurd into effective expression.
The value of a sense of humor lies largely in a certain duality about it, in that it springs from the intellectual side of one’s nature and is reinforced by the emotional. It thus brings into play both of the supplementary factors, and in so doing tests them both. To have a sense of humor is an intellectual asset, but the enjoyment of it, which is inseparable from its possession, is an emotional state. This combination, as well as the order of procedure, affects the quality of the resulting satire. The best satirists are those most fully developed in head and heart, with the proviso that they keep the latter subordinate to the former, by making reason the final tribunal, and awarding the decision to intellectual judgment rather than emotional prejudice.
Among our novelists the greatest in other things is greatest in this also. The most generous endowment along both lines, and the nicest balance between them is Meredith’s. With him are again associated Eliot and Butler. Nor is it by accident that we find the lowest extreme of the list still occupied by the same representatives. The test of course is one of control. It is not that Reade, Kingsley, and Charlotte Brontë are deficient in intellection. They do considerable thinking and sometimes reach conclusions that are rational and true. But when truth and rationality do dominate, it is by a happy good fortune rather than the inevitability that marks the ratiocination of a capable mind. This last cannot guarantee infallibility, to be sure, but the errors are reduced to a minimum, and moreover left open to correction. This is the case with Meredith, Eliot, and Butler, in whom a warm and sincere emotion is directed by the light of reason.
It might seem at first sight that Butler ran more to head than heart; but in this as in other things he was like Swift, having the faculty of stating in cold logic what he had conceived in hot wrath. In such a temperament the feelings are more likely to be turned against those responsible for misery than toward the victims, thus producing a negative effect, with the positive side left to our inference. The only one whose work is entirely unemotional is Peacock, and even he waxes warm over the exploitation of the helpless, and the crimes committed in the name of Progress. Aside from this he shines with a hard mental brilliance,--which, be it said, does not insure soundness of viewpoint, as no one on the whole list can surpass him in prejudice and injustice.
George Eliot, admitted by all to have a better intellectual equipment than any of her predecessors, admired above others by Meredith because her fiction was “the fruit of a well-trained mind,” herself says, “Our good depends on the quality and breadth of our emotion.”[415] And again, “There is no escaping the fact that want of sympathy condemns us to a corresponding stupidity.”[416] This realization that mental inertness itself is the result of callous or defective emotion, and that these two elements are not only inseparable but mutually dependent, is one secret of the fine quality of her satire.[417] It is the sheen on the surface of a deep current of sympathetic comprehension. Never does she forget or cease to commiserate the great predicament of the human race, condemned to make bricks without straw, under a hard taskmaster, with little prospect of reward to encourage perseverance or satisfy an outraged sense of justice. Yet she is able to apply a few satiric goads,--not to the taskmaster, for he directs from behind the veil and is not subject to human aspersions, nor to the weak or the blundering, but to the shirkers, the selfish, and those who demand more wage than a fair return for work done as well as possible under the circumstances.
In 1902 Meredith wrote to his daughter-in-law:[418]
“You have a liking for little phrases; I send you three:--Love is the renunciation of self. Passion is noble strength on fire. Fortitude is the one thing for which we may pray, because without it we are unable to bear the Truth.”
Here we have in juxtaposition, quite unconsciously no doubt, his _obiter dicta_ on emotion and intellect. In many places he had already dramatized them. His egoists--Sir Austin, Sir Willoughby, Wilfred Pole[419]--are satirized because they conceived love as self-assertion instead of renunciation; his epicures and snobs--Adrian Harley, Edward Blancove, Ferdinand Laxley--because their passion was neither noble nor truly strong; his sentimentalists of every description, because they neither realized that Truth is the highest thing a man may keep, nor, whether high or not, would they purchase it at the price of a disturbance to their equanimity. They might pray for the truth to be pleasant, but never for fortitude to endure it if it were otherwise. The apparent pessimism underlying the implication that the Truth is such as to demand courage for facing it, is counterbalanced by Diana’s exclamation, “Who can really _think_, and not think hopefully?”
None of Meredith’s novels lacks an intellectual theme, and it was this that he himself regarded as most important. In the very last one he says:[420]
“But the melancholy, the pathos of it, * * * have been sacrificed in the vain effort to render events as consequent to your understanding as a piece of logic, through an exposure of character!”
At the same time he surpasses all others in the treatment of love. Contemporary readers, who had had to be content with David and Dora, Pen and Laura, Rochester and Jane, Adam and Dinah, were vouchsafed a revelation,--which, however, they apparently did not at once appreciate,--in Richard and Lucy, Evan and Rose, Redworth and Diana, Dartrey and Nesta. To them all Meredith would say approvingly what he said warningly to a more unfortunate cavalier,--“You may love, and warmly love, so long as you are honest. Do not offend reason.”[421] And in them all he illustrates the higher hedonism voiced by Lady Dunstane to her Tony, though from the negative side,--“The mistake of the world is to think happiness possible to the senses.”[422]
In addition to these, Meredith gives us pictures of other than the purely romantic devotion. There is the brooding tenderness of maturity for childhood and youth: of Sir Austin, Lady Blandish, Wentworth, and Mrs. Berry, for Richard and later, Lucy; of Clara Middleton for Crossjay; of Rosamund for Beauchamp. This relationship is enhanced by a more intimate comradeship in the case of Lady Jocelyn and Rose, of Natalia Radnor and Nesta, and, in a happy-go-lucky fashion, of Roy Richmond and Harry. Nesta and Rose illustrate respectively Meredith’s genuine and exquisite sentiment, and the omnipresent common sense which preserved it from sentimentality. When Nesta felt the first chill of the shadow on her life,--[423]
“She sent forth her flights of stories in elucidation of the hidden; and they were like white bird after bird winging to covert beneath a thundercloud; until her breast ached for the voice of the thunder: harsh facts: sure as she was of never losing her filial hold of the beloved.”
When Rose determined to appeal their case to her mother, she said to Evan,--[424]
“You know she is called a philosopher; nobody knows how deep-hearted she is, though. My mother is true as steel. * * * When I say kindness, I don’t mean any ‘Oh, my child,’ and tears and kisses and maundering, you know. You mustn’t mind her thinking me a little fool.”
Then there is the sisterly attachment between Rhoda and Dahlia Fleming that leads Rhoda’s puritanic nature into a dictatorial fanaticism as disastrous in its results as Sir Austin’s; there is friendship masculine between Beauchamp and Dr. Shrapnel; and friendship feminine between Lady Dunstane and Diana. It is not that Meredith has a monopoly on the portrayal of human affection. Lytton has to his credit the Chillinglys[425] and the Caxtons; Gaskell has the Gibsons; Dickens, Amy Dorrit, and Joe Gargary; Brontë, Caroline Helstone and her mother; Trollope, Lily Dale and hers; in Barry Lyndon, Thackeray gives us a base soul redeemed by love for a child, and in Colonel Newcome, Helen Pendennis, and Amelia Osborne, he presents a rather one-sided devotion, as does Eliot in Mrs. Transome,--though the latter does not feel called upon to exclaim, “By Heaven, it is pitiful, the bootless love of women for children in Vanity Fair!” But it is true that Meredith through the richness of his well-rounded nature was more able than the others to lift emotion fearlessly to a height of intensity, preserved there from any danger of a fall into bathos, because supported by intellect on the one hand and humor on the other.
Any final alignment must be left flexible, because of the numerous factors in the test. Writers may excel in one way or another. When, however, the same author reappears on every count, it begins to look suspicious, and the suspicion falls most heavily on Meredith. Others may come to the top twice or even thrice, but he alone is never wholly submerged, and is nearly always dominant. When Arnold Bennett declared that “Between Fielding and Meredith no entirely honest novel was written by anybody in England,” he was merely following the twentieth century fad of depreciating the nineteenth,--any smart miss of sixteen being naturally more modern and sophisticated than her middle-aged mother. But in saying that “The death of George Meredith removes, not the last of the Victorian novelists, but the first of the modern school,” he mentions an obvious fact, not really discredited by the chronological situation. This does not necessarily argue, be it said, that Meredith casts the forward shadow of coming events. His strong individuality did not lend itself to imitation, or even a prompt appreciation. Moreover, he had in him no germ either of _fin de siècle_ decadence or of its flaunting iconoclasm. In his own mountain range he is simply a preëminent peak, as in theirs were Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dryden, Johnson.
As to the lower plateaus and the foothills, the only thing of interest that develops through examining their juxtaposition, is the resultant effect on Thackeray. While the others stand firmly up to their own normal height, making no attempt to add a cubit to their stature, he seems constantly to be taking thought; nor is it thought that leads to conclusions of much moment. “His depth,” like Lytton’s, “is fathomable,” but his air is of the most profound and meditative. It must be this, together with his _Snobs_ and _Vanity Fair_ (to both of which, acknowledgments are due) that has bewitched his critics and persuaded his readers into ranking him as the foremost Victorian satirist. That he is among the elect is undeniable, even to being “more long-winded than Horace and bitterer than Juvenal,”[426] but to place him above them in any absolute way is to ignore the greater range of Dickens, the keener wit of Peacock and Butler, the rarer charm of Mrs. Gaskell and Trollope, and above all, the superior penetration and insight of George Eliot and Meredith.
It is not necessary, however, to make all distinctions invidious and all comparisons odious. Individually and collectively the Victorian satirists are to be accepted with the ungrudging appreciation they deserve. The terribly exacting author of _The New Machiavelli_ recognized in their endowment to us nothing but “emasculated thought,” “a hasty trial experiment, a gigantic experiment of the most slovenly and wasteful kind,” “a persuasion that whatever is inconvenient or disagreeable to the English mind could be annihilated by not thinking about it,”--all resulting in “the clipped and limited literature that satisfied their souls.” But there is consolation in the counter-discovery of Professor Sherman (in his _Modern Literature_) that there was a compensating economy, even in their failure: “Dickens, Kingsley, Reade, Mrs. Stowe, and the rest,” he reminds us, “they did not seek to make the world over, but only to accomplish a few, simple things like abolishing slavery, sweat-shops, Corn Laws, the schools of Squeers, imprisonment for debt, the red tape of legal procedure, the belief in pestilence and typhoid as visitations of God--and all that sort of piddling amelioration.”
For this modest ambition, the Victorians found satire an effective means, and they proved they could turn it also to more purely artistic uses. Such as their achievement was, they are doubtless content to rest in peace upon it, granting without jealousy to their illustrious successors whatever surpassing results they may be able to accomplish.
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