Page:Satire in the Victorian novel (IA satireinvictoria00russrich).pdf/252

 Milton's Satan becomes humanized when, entering the human abode, he grows hesitant, half regretful, half eager, a prey to conflicting emotions and cross purposes.

Yet those desirable factors of art, unity and emphasis, must be secured, and they can be secured only by throwing the emphasis on some one feature, thus giving unity to the character. In the field of satire a classification based on these qualities is the more easily made in that any given character is usually satirized for some particular trait, although the problem does not end there. We may construct encampments for our army of characters—and in Victorian fiction they come in battalions—and we may label them; but we shall find it less simple to assign the companies to their own barracks and keep them there.

The Father of the Marshalsea is a snob. He is also hypocritical and foolish. Moreover, he is a sentimentalist and an epicurean. Withal he is not villainous, but more pathetic than execrable. He has no apparent kinship with the Countess de Saldar, yet she also may be described in the above terms. The enumeration would not show the difference. Thus not only does each real character refuse to be known by one name and one only, but the congregation assembled under any one denomination shows such diversity as to make the category itself questionable. Mrs. Mackensie and Mrs. Clennam, Mr. Dombey and Bertie Stanhope, Tom Tulliver and Sir Willoughby Patterne, are all egoists; but they would find little congeniality in their mutual egoism.

All that can be done is to indicate the range and the concentration of the main types. These types will of course represent those elements in human character which seem to the satirist such deflections from an ideal as are amenable to comic exposure and perhaps correction. It does