Page:Satire in the Victorian novel (IA satireinvictoria00russrich).pdf/178



"Foreigners pertinaciously misunderstand us. They have the barbarous habit of judging by results. Let us know ourselves better. It is melancholy to contemplate the intrigues, and vile designs, and vengeances of other nations; and still more so, after we have written so many pages of intelligible history, to see them attributed to us. Will it never be perceived that we do not sow the thing that happens?"

This rhetorical irony, which we have found so widely distributed, is a sign of temperament at the most, and at the least only of habit,—a mannerism of style. Philosophical irony, a sense of the irony of life, is an indicator of character and the whole interpretation of experience. The two kinds may or may not coincide. It happens, for instance, that the two great ironists who inclose the Victorian period like a pair of chronological brackets, illustrate them separately. Jane Austen is habitually ironic in speech, but no novel of hers manifests an idea of the irony of fate. Her situations are too simple, too blandly logical, to be devised by a Destiny either impishly malicious or cruelly malignant. But Thomas Hardy takes all his reasonable logic and bland simplicity out in language. He seldom introduces the caustic reflection. There is little of the acrid in the flavor of his style. It is all poured into the story. The conditions he portrays convey their own poignancy, and tell their own tale of gratuitous failure and superfluous sacrifice.

Of this sharp impression of life as consisting of the nearly-achieved or barely-failed, there are indications here and there in mid-century fiction, but no thoroughgoing exponent, because none of that unqualified pessimism which acknowledges irrationality as the presiding genius of the world. It is natural that in Disraeli, Brontë, Kingsley, circumstantial irony should be as snakes in Iceland;