Page:Satire in the Victorian novel (IA satireinvictoria00russrich).pdf/155



game-bagging, poacher-shooting, trespasser-pounding, footpath-stopping, common-enclosing, rack-renting, and all the other liberal pursuits and pastimes which make a country gentleman an ornament to the world, and a blessing to the poor; he could not find in these valuable and amiable occupations, and in a corresponding range of ideas, nearly commensurate with that of the great king Nebuchadnezzer, when he was turned out to grass; he could not find in this great variety of useful action, and vast field of comprehensive thought, modes of filling up his time that accorded with his Caledonian instinct."

This in turn is quite equaled by Kenelm's coming-of-age speech, though his indictment of the genus squire is couched in unironical satire. Not that the youth was unacquainted with the uses of irony. At the age of nine he had had occasion to send a letter to a schoolmate, conveying his conviction of that lad's lack of intelligence. He had heard his father remark that a certain neighbor was an ass, and that he was going to write and tell him so. He made inquiries into the matter of phrasing such information. He received the following reply,—by which he profited most effectively in his own correspondence:

"But you can not learn too early this fact, that irony is to the high-bred what billingsgate is to the vulgar; and when one gentleman thinks another gentleman is an ass, he does not say it point-blank—he implies it in the politest terms he can invent."

This principle is applied on a national scale in the discourse of the intruder among the Vrilya, whose situation resembles that of Gulliver eulogizing to the king of the Brobdingnagians the Institutions of England, except that Lytton does not blunt his irony by relapsing into plain terms, as Swift does in the "pernicious race of little odious vermin." The visitor waxes eloquent about America: