Page:Satire in the Victorian novel (IA satireinvictoria00russrich).pdf/267

 *zlewit found so insufferably vulgar; Barry Lyndon, Mr. Osborne, and Becky Sharp; Mr. Slope, Mr. Crosbie, and the great Melmotte.

On the other hand, the frankly vulgar is reckoned among the plebeians. As there is a snobbishness free from coarseness, so there is a vulgarity unembellished even by pseudo-culture. In this ugly and gross scum of the earth no novelist really delights except the creator of Mrs. Gamp, Quilp, Squeers, and Fagin and his crew, though Thackeray is able to depict Sir Pitt Crawley; Trollope, the Scathards; and Meredith, Sedgett.

The compound of snobbishness and vulgarity has the additional complexity of ramifying into hypocrisy on one side and sentimentality on the other. The first conjunction is made because of the incitement to that fawning, flattering servility that more than anything else rouses satiric disgust. The second occurs when the flattering unction is laid to one's own soul instead of being paid to the possessions of others. The first is obvious and its examples are legion. The second is more subtle and obscure, though perhaps almost as prevalent. It consists in an inaccurate orientation, a supposition that one has arrived at a goal, when the case is otherwise. Such unwarranted complacency cheers the lot of Mrs. Kirkpatrick, Mrs. Hobson Newcome, Mrs. Proudie, and the Countess de Saldar.

This, however, is only one phase of sentimentality. It also may exist independently, or otherwise combined than with snobbishness or vulgarity. It is a term somewhat ambiguous because of a recently changed connotation.

In the eighteenth century it was "sensibility," and regarded as a virtue until Jane Austen exhibited it in Mari