Whether the last clause may be viewed as a hopeful augury for the future, the author does not state.
The step from the society of the drawing room to society at large, or mankind, is a refreshing passage from indoors, where everything is artificial, even the tears of bereavement, to the fresh air of common interest. The weather may not always be serene nor the atmosphere invigorating, but at least there is a wide horizon and a perspective of some scope. It is evident that the Victorians enjoyed these excursions into the masculine domain of Government, for not one of the list forbade his mind to roam into its boundaries, and not one is wholly silent as to the impressions gained by this adventuring. Here the resemblance ends. Interest in public problems and The People varies from a minimum in Thackeray and George Eliot to a maximum in Peacock, Disraeli, and Butler. There is also great diversity in both breadth and intensity. Lytton, Dickens, Trollope, have several irons in the fire. Gaskell, Brontë, Reade, Kingsley, have but one or two, but the heat is none the less fervent. In some cases, indeed, it is too fervent to give off the sparkle of ridicule, and thus falls without our province. And in some cases, while it is meant seriously as propaganda, it cannot be taken seriously as literature; for the artist is not expected to speak with the tongue of statesmen and economists, and conversely, as Dowden reminds us, "a political manifesto in three volumes is not a work of art."[1]
- ↑ Concluding his contrast between Alton Locke and Disraeli's Trilogy, in Transcripts and Studies, 193. In this connection another contrast, between Disraeli and Mrs. Ward, is interesting, because it turns on the effect of humor. "Her presentment of the lighter side of English political life is accurate, and in its way interesting and historically valuable, but it is wholly wanting in that brilliant satiric touch which has made Disraeli's novels live as literature when their political significance has utterly passed away." Traill, in The New Fiction, 44.
