Chapter II: Institutions (1)

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.”