Page:Satire in the Victorian novel (IA satireinvictoria00russrich).pdf/246



be rapid. Whether more active, is a question asking for your notions of the governing element in the composition of man, and of his present business here. * * * All ill-fortuned minstrel who has by fateful direction been brought to see with distinctness that man is not as much comprised in external features as the monkey, will be devoted to the task of the fuller portraiture."

It is Meredith also who says the last word on the English, as English. They are indeed the real objects under all these disguises of their activities, but they are not often synthesized and called by name. Yet—

"An actually satiric man in an English circle, that does not resort to the fist for a reply to him, may almost satiate the excessive fury roused in his mind by an illogical people of a provocative prosperity, * * * They give him so many opportunities."

He seizes one of them by symbolizing England in the Duvidney sisters; composed of such, it becomes—

"* * * a vast body of passives and negatives, living by precept, according to rules of precedent, and supposing themselves to be righteously guided because of their continuing undisturbed. offense to an inscrutable Lord, eccentrically appeasable through the dreary iteration of the litany of sinfulness. * * * Satirists in their fervours might be near it to grasp it, if they could be moved to moral distinctness, mental intention, with a preference of strong plain speech over the crack of their whips."
 * * * mixed with an ancient Hebrew fear of

He had already decided, in Beauchamp's Career, that "It is not too much to say that a domination of the Intellect in England would at once and entirely alter the face of the country." Reade agrees with this opinion,