Page:Satire in the Victorian novel (IA satireinvictoria00russrich).pdf/110

 out some items important as literature, and in certain cases as satire,—Cranford, Pickwick, Peg Woffington, Scenes from Clerical Life.

Of the grand total, approximately one-quarter is eliminated as being essentially and thoroughly serious. Here again are found some notable names,—Last Days of Pompeii, Mary Barton, Henry Esmond, Tale of Two Cities, ''The Cloister and the Hearth, Jane Eyre, Hypatia''. Three-fourths is a large majority, from which one might deduce that the novel of this period was prevailingly satirical. But the other extreme, those so strongly saturated as to deserve the name of satires, are far fewer than the unsatirical. Vanity Fair, Martin Chuzzlewit, The Egoist, possibly ''Barchester Towers, and Beauchamp's Career'', practically exhaust the list. This leaves about four score of novels in which the spirit of satire exists, manifesting itself showily, coyly, in wide range and diversity.

When an author uses the direct method for the conveyance of satirical ideas, he becomes for the nonce a didactic, though humor-flavored, philosopher. Over against the artistic liabilities incurred,—interruption of the narrative, intrusion of more or less irrelevant matter, may be placed the intellectual assets,—presentation of opinions and conclusions, and frank expression of personality.

Whether approved of or not, this discursive habit must be accepted as an old inheritance. From the beginning, the English novel has been a hybrid, the drama grafted on the treatise. Even the medieval mind, with its insatiable relish for the pageantry of life, had an uneasy feeling that the Merry Tale should not be entirely its own reward, and accordingly found for it a moral justification, whereby pleasure and profit were joined in a most complacent alliance. And ever since, the prevailing purpose has been