Page:Satire in the Victorian novel (IA satireinvictoria00russrich).pdf/151



the deepness of the wound. But irony tests its own by the amount of generous light and air it has set flowing through an idea or a personality, and the broad significance it has revealed in neglected things."

The only pertinent reply to such eloquence is one that may seem impertinent, namely, to refer the special pleader to a useful principle in argument greatly favored by a certain canny Greek dialectician, and quaintly restated in the eighteenth century:

"If once it was expected by the Public that Authors should strictly define their Subjects, it would instantly cheque an Innundation of Scribbling. The desultory Manner of Writing would be absolutely exploded; and Accuracy and Precision would be necessarily introduced upon every Subject. * * * If Definitions had been constantly expected from Authors there would not have appeared one hundredth Part of the present Books, and yet every Subject had been better ascertained."

Irony, it is true, is defined by the essayist as "the science of comparative experience," but this attempt to fit a philosophic giant to the bed of his smaller ironic brother meets with the usual Procrustian result. As for the tribute to irony, a far more impressive one is paid in the almost casual utterance of Lamb, who makes it the climax of his enumeration of the blessings vouchsafed to mortality,—"and irony itself—do these things go out with life?"

In Victorian fiction the presence of this element is found very much as it is in life, unobstrusive but easily detectable. What Saintsbury says of Jane Austen would apply in varying degrees to her successors: