maintain her operations, the while she is masquerading as arrant nonsense.
Finally there is the dilemma encountered by the dramatist,—the necessity of concentrating high lights as life never does, yet preserving sufficient effect of dullness and vapid inanity to simulate reality as we know it.
The various kinds of artifice employed in this artificial process are all found in the examples on our list. Remoteness of time lends illusion to Maid Marian, Legend of the Rhine, Farina; remoteness of place, to The Coming Race, and the Erewhons; non-human characters, to Melincourt, Ixion, Shaving of Shagpat; anomalous situations, to Misfortunes of Elphin and Popanilla. Some are able to combine them all, notably Lytton and Butler.[1] Some, on the other hand, manage to create a maximum impression with a minimum use of the spectacular.
Peacock, for instance, never leaves England nor gives us any but English characters, quiet if not actually subdued, and usually unexceptionable in behavior. Disraeli is really as circumscribed. He apparently transports us to Heaven, Hades, some unsuspected isle in the far seas, but he actually conveys all these to the isle where he was born. Thackeray and even Meredith keep strictly to terra firma.
If it were desirable to make comparisons with a view
- ↑ In one of Lytton's first volumes is an observation interesting as perhaps the germ from which the plan of The Coming Race was developed. Vincent, the philosopher of the story, remarks. (Pelham, 57): "There are few better satires on a civilized country than the observations of visitors less polished; while, on the contrary, the civilized traveller, in describing the manners of the American barbarians, instead of conveying ridicule upon the visited, points the sarcasm on the visitor; and Tacitus could not have thought of a finer or nobler satire on the Roman luxuries than that insinuated by his treatise on the German simplicity."
