"'I've been accustomed to it from my youth upwards,' said Pen; and Strong had the grace not to laugh for five minutes, when he exploded into fits of hilarity which Pen has never, perhaps, understood up to this day."
In her preface to the second edition of Jane Eyre, Charlotte
Brontë said that Thackeray resembled Fielding "as
an eagle does a vulture;" and also compared the former to
a Hebrew prophet. Putting aside the injustice to Fielding
(happily atoned for by the author of Middlemarch,
thereby restoring the average in feminine criticism) one
is moved to reply that if any Victorian shoulders received
the mantle of Elijah they were undoubtedly the firm-muscled
ones of George Eliot. Hers is the union of native,
smoldering wit and tremendous moral earnestness
that marked the ancient Semitic race and reappeared in the
modern Saxon. The downright seriousness which constitutes
her main mood is tinctured but lightly with the ironic
tone, but its pungency is well distributed. Its appearance
is characterized by brevity and frequency. There
are no long passages of sustained irony; and no very long
ones wholly devoid of it. It usually occurs in quiet, unostentatious
phrases, as in the description of the Raveloe
philosophy, or of that superior family whose daughters
bloomed into the Mesdames Deane, Glegg, Pullet, and
Tulliver.
The cogitative Mr. Glegg, for instance, had a truly scientific attitude toward the captious temper that enlivened his home,—[1]
"* * * it is certain that an acquiescent mild wife would
have left his meditations comparatively jejune and barren of
mystery."
- ↑ Mill on the Floss, I, 189.
