young clerks who were sallow, from playing the Corsair and boasting that they were villains."[1]
Nearly a half century after Pelham, we have a reference which strikes indirectly the keynote of satire, made by a genius great enough to admire judiciously (as he elsewhere testifies) another genius.[2]
"Beauchampism, as one confronting him calls it, may be
said to stand for nearly everything which is the obverse of Byronism,
and rarely woos your sympathy, shuns the statuesque
pathetic, or any kind of posturing."
It was Lytton, in turn, who was attacked by Thackeray.
He heads the list of Novels by Eminent Hands, and is
brought up again in the Yellowplush Papers and Epistles
to the Literati.
But here, as everywhere, the complexity of this type obtrudes itself. Most of the preceding illustrations have been concerned with men as authors, that is to say, with certain products of literature; and this puts them out of the personal class. The same thing is true of Trollope's sarcastic allusions to the novels of Disraeli and Dickens, and Kingsley's little flings at Coningsby and Young England generally.
No comment on the whole matter of personal satire could be more to the point or more conclusive than that given informally by Thackeray in a couple of letters concerning his own attack on Lytton,—which he calls by the right name. The first is addressed to Lady Blessington, and accounts for his objection to E. L. B.[3]
- ↑ Quoted in his biography, by the Earl of Lytton, I, 347. The Ettrick Shepherd tries to rally Tickler out of his glumness by the argument,—"Everybody kens ye're a man of genius, without your pretending to be melancholy."
- ↑ Beauchamp's Career, 39.
- ↑ Both are quoted in the Life by the Earl of Lytton, I, 548, 549.
