The other section of this class most fully recruited is made up of the foolish young men. It might look as though in the novelist's world masculine folly were a malady incident to youth, while on the other hand, the feminine sort appeared late. For it happens that Lydia and Kitty Bennet have no real successors. There are indeed plenty of Hetty Sorrels, Lucy Deanes, Rosa Mackenzies, Amelia Sedleys, Dahlia Flemings; but their innocence and pathos protect them from satire. And the merely vapid and vain school girl is apparently too worthless a figure to be given a place on Victorian pages. So also seems the man whose mental growth has not kept pace with the years. Mr. Micawber may be taken as the exception that proves the rule. Sir Lukin Dunstane likewise shows that one may reach man's estate and flourish therein on a small allotment of intelligence. He makes his best record in a gossipy little conversation with his wife, to whom he is giving an account of the Dacier-Asper wedding. Emmy had commented on the eloquence of his report:[1]
"He murmured something in praise of the institution of marriage—when
celebrated impressively, it seemed.
"'Tony calls the social world the "theater of appetites," as we have it at present,' she said; 'and the world at a wedding is, one may reckon, in the second act in the hungry tragi-comedy.'
"'Yes, there's the breakfast,' Sir Lukin assented. Mrs. Fryar-Gunnett was much more intelligible to him; in fact, quite so, as to her speech."
Folly is more ludicrous in the young man than in the
maid, on account of his greater conspicuousness in affairs,
and the greater things expected of him,—any failure
divulging the discrepancy between fact and fancy
which is the basis of humor. It is also true that he stands
- ↑ Diana of the Crossways, 407.
