"This behavior of corn-law agitators and protectors of poachers was an hypocrisy too horrible for comment. Everard sipped claret."
The novels which depict the really acute phases of labor
and poverty,—Sybil, Mary Barton, North and South, Shirley,
Alton Locke, Hard Times, (diagnosed by Macaulay
as "sullen socialism"), Put Yourself in his Place, Felix
Holt,—are apt to have John Barton's kind of laugh, if any,
"a low chuckle, that had no mirth in it." But the author
of the first of these puts into another story a pungent little
description:[1]
"The Elysians consisted of a few thousand beautified mortals,
the only occupation of whose existence was enjoyment; the rest
of the population comprised some millions of Gnomes and Sylphs,
who did nothing but work, and ensured by their labour the felicity
of the superior class."
It is inevitable that the artist and the humorist should
find their most congenial fields in those relationships that
are vital, and not too hampered by the technique of more
formal and crystallized institutions. Prisons, Asylums,
Courts, and the whole legal machinery, offer a less inviting
prospect than do political parties and theories, and
the contrast between social strata.
Yet the first third of our list,—Peacock, Lytton, Disraeli, and Dickens,—with the addition of Reade, Trollope, and Butler, did not shrink from contact with red tape. Dickens and Reade have the monopoly of the department of Charities and Corrections, though Lytton asserted the purpose of Paul Clifford to be an indictment against so-*
- ↑ The Infernal Marriage, 353. In The Young Duke there is an allusion to "the two thousand Brahmins who constitute the World," and to "the ten or twelve or fifteen millions of Pariahs for whose existence philosophers have hitherto failed to adduce a satisfactory cause." 132.
