Page:Satire in the Victorian novel (IA satireinvictoria00russrich).pdf/112



there. * * * In writing novels, we novelists preach to you from our pulpits, and are keenly anxious that our sermons shall not be inefficacious. * * * Nevertheless, the faults of a Ralph Newton, and not the vices of a Varney or a Barry Lyndon, are the evils against which men should in these days be taught to guard themselves—which women also should be made to hate. Such is the writer's apology for his very indifferent hero, Ralph the Heir."

In another volume the same writer confesses,—

"Castles with unknown passages are not compatible with my homely muse. I would as lief have to do with a giant in my book—a real giant, such as Goliath—as with a murdering monk with a scowling eye. The age for such delights is, I think, gone. We may say historically of Mrs. Radcliffe's time that there were mysterious sorrows in those days. They are now as much out of date as the giants."

Victorianism of course had her own sorrows, patent and unmysterious as they were. At no time could she have been mistaken for Elizabethanism. But she grew gradually in strength and sobriety, and cast a heavier shadow in the afternoon of the century. In its mid-morning Disraeli could compliment his own Young Duke with the sub-*title, "a moral tale though gay." And the chief ambition of the young writers up to the early forties seems to have been to produce tales that were gay though moral.

Of this tendency Lytton is the most conspicuous example. Innately serious and thoroughly sentimental, he nevertheless dared not be as solemn as he could. He must live up to the requirement for ironic wit and the light touch of savoir faire, even though, lacking native exuberance and somewhat deficient in taste, he often fell into