Page:Satire in the Victorian novel (IA satireinvictoria00russrich).pdf/119

 Toward the legal profession the attitude of Dickens is never ambiguous, and ever and anon, as in the following instance, he expresses it with concise clarity:

"The one great principle of the English law is, to make business for itself. There is no other principle distinctly, certainly, and consistently maintained through all its narrow turnings. Viewed by this light it becomes a coherent scheme, and not the monstrous maze the laity are apt to think it. Let them but once clearly perceive that its grand principle is to make business for itself at their expense, and surely they will cease to grumble."

No less favored with warmth of feeling is the famous Circumlocution Office, to which much eloquence is devoted in a chapter "containing the whole science of government." There are pages of satirical description, the keynote of which is found in an early paragraph:

"This glorious establishment had been early in the field, when the one sublime principle involving the difficult art of governing a country, was first distinctly revealed to statesmen. It had been foremost to study that bright revelation, and to carry its shining influence through the whole of the official proceedings. Whatever was required to be done, the Circumlocution Office was beforehand with all the public departments in the art of perceiving—."

It is recognized as something of an anomaly that Meredith should have begun publishing fiction along with George Eliot, and fifteen years before Hardy and Butler, for he belongs with the latter as post-Victorian in art and character. He represents at once the maturity of the nineteenth century and the embryonic promise of the twentieth, whose new currents were already meeting and