Page:Satire in the Victorian novel (IA satireinvictoria00russrich).pdf/88

 *tional citizen. They are "Headlong," "Nightmare," "Crochet." They harbor all sorts of whimsies and fads. Those assembled dine, drink, and talk. Between meals they have a few adventures, not recounted for their own sake, but that of the additional talk they will bring forth. Though the repartee of these dramatized Imaginary Conversations is always at concert pitch, it harmonizes with the whimsically theatrical setting; and the toute ensemble edifies while it sparkles, like a set of fireworks displaying maxims of intellectual wit as they explode.

The characters themselves wear their very names as satiric labels. Mr. Feathernest, Mr. Dross, Mrs. Pinmoney, the Honorable Mr. Listless, Sir Oliver Oilcake, the Reverends Gaster, Grovelgrub, Vorax, are ticketed after the fashion inherited from the Morality Plays, a device that distills a quaint mediæval odor on the nineteenth-century air, and persists only in some of Trollope's minor characters.

Of all these people exploiting all their "humours" Peacock is the ever amused spectator. He speaks ironically through the voice of the artlessly ambitious Squire Crochet:

"The sentimental against the rational, the intuitive against the inductive, the ornamental against the useful, the intense against the tranquil, the romantic against the classical; these are great and interesting controversies, which I should like, before I die, to see satisfactorily settled."

It is because of this effect of inconsequent raillery, doubtless, that Peacock appears to lack humanity, and*