Page:Satire in the Victorian novel (IA satireinvictoria00russrich).pdf/111

 not only to portray life but to exhibit this or that deduction about life.

In the eighteenth century this tendency took definite shape and substance, for then it became notably true that the division between narrative and essay was not coincident with a division between narrators and essayists. Swift, Addison, Defoe, Fielding, Sterne, were both. And it was their mantle and not that of romance writers, Gothic or Historical, that best fitted Victorian shoulders. Of the many testimonies to this, direct and indirect, the following from a characteristic Victorian pen may be cited as evidence:

"The reader of a novel—who had doubtless taken the volume up simply for amusement, and who would probably lay it down did he suspect that instruction, like a snake-in-the-grass, like physic beneath the sugar, was to be imposed upon him—requires from his author chiefly this, that he shall be amused by a narrative in which elevated sentiment prevails, and gratified by being made to feel that the elevated sentiments described are exactly his own."

He then goes on to show that this morality is best served by realism, in spite of the superior attractions of heroes and villains:

"But for one Harry Esmond, there are fifty Ralph Newtons—five hundred and fifty of them; and the very youth whose bosom glows with admiration as he reads of Harry—who exults in the idea that as Harry did, so would he have done—lives as Ralph lived, is less noble, less persistent, less of a man even than was Ralph Newton.

"It is the test of a novel-writer's art that he conceals his snake-in-the-grass; but the reader may be sure that it is always