he does not attain it. They all escape through the avenue of satire, sometimes reinforced by action,—both being efficacious means of getting melancholia out of the system. Nowhere does Browning speak more as a Britisher than when he declares rage to be the right thing in the main, and acquiescence the vain and futile.
Pessimism, to be consistent, would express itself in terms of tragedy. Out of approximately one hundred Victorian novels of the realistic type,—for romantic tragedy cannot be taken as an index of the writer's philosophy,—less than ten per cent can be classified as tragic in outcome; and in none of these is the catastrophe inclusive, overwhelming, or a perversion of justice. Of these the largest proportion belongs to Eliot and Meredith, but The Mill on the Floss is the solitary complete tragedy. Rhoda Fleming and Middlemarch are almost as truly tales of comic tragedians as Romola, Richard Feverel, and An Amazing Marriage are of tragic comedians. On the other hand, tragedy of this mitigated sort is not inconsistent with idealism, which in turn is the constructive side of criticism. While it is too much, as Lytton reminds us in Kenelm Chillingly, to expect both critical and constructive ability to be conspicuous in the same individual, nevertheless the criticism which is content to note a deflection from an ideal without even a tacit recognition of the ideal deflected from, is mere childish fretting over the personally irritating. Of this there is little in the nineteenth century. The Victorians may have had some of the unpardonable disregard for reality of which they have been accused,[1] but they never could be accused of a disregard for ideality. None of the novelists,
- ↑ "Of this national disease, this indifference to reality, the main bulk of nineteenth century English fiction has died already or must soon be dead." Gosse: Eng. Lit. in the Nineteenth Cent. 221.
