One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

One of Our Conquerors
England herself; the squat old woman she has become by
reason of her overlapping numbers of the comfortable fundholder
annuitants: a vast body of passives and negatives, living
by precept, according to rules of precedent, and supposing
themselves to be righteously guided because of their continuing
undisturbed. Them he branded, as hypocritical materialists,
and the country for pride in her sweetmeat plethora
of them:—mixed with an ancient Hebrew fear of offence to
an inscrutable Lord, eccentrically appeasable through the
dreary iteration of the litany of sinfulness. He was near a
truth; and he had the heat of it on him.
Satirists in their fervours might be near it to grasp it, if they
could be moved to moral distinctness, mental intention, with
a preference of strong plain speech over the crack of their whips.
Colney could not or would not praise our modern adventurous,
experimental, heroic, tramping active, as opposed to yonder
pursy passives and negatives; he had occasions for flicking
the fellow sharply: and to speak of the Lord as our friend present
with us, palpable to Reason, perceptible to natural piety solely
through the reason, which justifies punishment; that would
have stopped his mouth upon the theme of God-forsaken creatures.
Our satirist is an executioner by profession, a moralist
in excuse, or at the tail of it; though he thinks the position
reversed, when he moralizes angrily to have his angry use of
the scourge condoned. Nevertheless, he fills a serviceable place;
and certainly he is not happy in his business. Colney suffered
as heavily as he struck. If he had been no more than a mime in
the motley of satire, he would have sucked compensation from
the acid of his phrases, for the failure to prick and goad, and
work amendment.
He dramatized to Nataly some of the scene going on at the
Wells: Victor’s petition; his fugue in urgency of it; the brief
reply of Miss Dorothea and her muted echo Miss Virginia.
He was rather their apologist for refusing. But, as when, after
himself listening to their ‘views,’ he had deferentially withdrawn
from the ladies of Moorsedge, and had then beheld
their strangely-hatted lieutenants and the regiments of the
toneless respectable on the pantiles and the mounts, the curse
upon the satirist impelled him to generalize. The quiet good
ladies were multiplied: they were ‘the thousands of their sisters,
petticoated or long-coated or buck-skinned; comfortable
annuitants under clerical shepherding, close upon out-
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