Page:Satire in the Victorian novel (IA satireinvictoria00russrich).pdf/249

 *ists did not take this positive turn. English genius has on the whole contributed its share to the anthology of Utopian vision, even to the furnishing of the name, but the nineteenth century, preëminent in criticism and speculation, venting more talk about it than all the other centuries put together, has to its credit in this line, aside from Erewhon and The Coming Race, only Morris's ''News from Nowhere'', and that is too naïve in its simplification of human nature and too absurd in its glorification of medievalism to be taken seriously. More carefully thought out as an Ideal State, more searching in its seriousness, more pertinent in its satire, and more constructive in its conclusion, than any of these, is the American product, Bellamy's Looking Backward.

The Victorians did their looking backward literally from their own present instead of an imagined future. And since in so doing they did for the most part but cast their eye on prospects drear, and since they shrank from a future they could only guess and fear if they thought about it at all, they wisely and practically spent themselves on the present. And because of this acceptance of the present and all its institutions as a whole, they could couch their lances only against this or that detail, not against the challenge of civilization itself.

The following instances show a characteristic difference in their resemblance. "In England, poverty is a crime," exclaims Lytton in the nineteenth century. The observation is ironic, the tone scornful, and the object of the ironic scorn is the snobbishness of those who from the heights of wealth look down upon and despise the poor. The rebuke is intended for the alien attitude toward that portion of society which we may expect, according to Biblical authority, always to have with us. Poverty itself is a mys