satire seldom vaunts itself, and, however superior it may feel, it pretends that it is not puffed up. A historian describes the change that takes place between the Age of Elizabeth, when satire "was the pastime of very young men, who 'railed on Lady Fortune in good set terms,'" and the Commonwealth, when the combatants "left Nature and Fortune with their withers unwrung, and aimed at the joints in the harness of their enemies."[1] To the Victorians, satire was neither a pastime nor a matter for deadly earnestness. Armored antagonists had gone out of fashion; and Lady Fortune was left to the metaphysicians.
It is, indeed, a matter of curious interest that one object of satire, life itself, which had drawn fire occasionally all the way from Aristophanes to Bryon, should have been neglected by the Victorians,—though the neglect may be accounted for by their interest in the concrete and their generally optimistic outlook. On the other hand, one of the most philosophic and least optimistic of them devotes several bow-shots to a sort of counter attack, against those who consider the universe a fit subject for satire. The Prelude to Middlemarch identifies the heroine as one of those unfortunate women of deep souls and shallow circumstances, "who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action." To this the comment is added:[2]
"Some have felt that these blundering lives are due to the inconvenient
indefiniteness with which the Supreme Power has
- ↑ Raleigh: The English Novel, 112.
- ↑ Middlemarch, I, 174. Cf. the taunt of the practical young Radical to Esther Lyon, on her choice of literature: "* * * gentlemen like your Rénés, who have no particular talent for the finite, but a general sense that the infinite is the right thing for them." Felix Holt, II, 34.
