Reader may
wish to have a look at my piece on “Meredith’s Poetic Novel: Diana of the
Crossways” at https://williamseaton.blogspot.com/2025/09/merediths-poetic-novel-diana-of.html.
Page references in parentheses refer to
the Penguin English Library edition edited by George Woodcock.
The fiction of
George Meredith is distinguished from that of other Victorian novelists by a
number of factors. He stands practically
alone in his feminism and he can be compared only to late Henry James and perhaps
the George Eliot of Middlemarch in his portrayal of the gossamer threads
of motive that precipitate our acts (and velleities as well). He was a great practitioner and theoretician
of comedy. Yet surely Meredith’s most
striking characteristic is his mannered style which can occasionally oblige even
a seasoned reader to scan a page a second time.
He is capable of passages which are often delightfully witty, syntactically
complex, and sometimes of staggering beauty in which style is clearly the
governing principle guiding the content which must be content simply to tag
along.
Oscar Wilde
skewered the downside of Meredith’s remarkable prose in “The Decay of Lying.”
His style is chaos illumined by
flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language:
as a novelist he can do everything, except tell a story: as an artist he is
everything, except articulate. Somebody in Shakespeare−−Touchstone, I think−−
talks about a man who is always breaking his shins over his own wit, and it
seems to me that this might serve as the basis for a criticism of Meredith's
method. But whatever he is, he is not a realist.
In his
influential theoretical essay in “An Essay on Comedy and the Uses of the Comic
Spirit,” Meredith argues that comedy, as opposed to humor and satire, encourages
moral behavior and aims at reforming human folly. No carnival license for him, instead “comedy
is the fountain of sound sense.” In his
view “it is the first condition of sanity to believe” that “our civilization is
founded in common-sense” (a term more problematic than Meredith allowed) and it
is the violations of these norms in his view that gives rise to “the contrasts
the Comic Spirit perceives,” which provides the comic writer the work of
correcting these deviations. (In a writer so modern in many ways, it is a bit startling to find moralism stern enough
to find Restoration comedy “beyond blushing” and full of “cynical
licentiousness.”)
But his heart
seldom seems seldom centered on the censorious correction of human error. What sustains a novel by Meredith is his
talent for striking figures of speech, his playful wit, and his elegant if
somewhat elaborate style. Even on the
theme of the nature of comedy, in the novel the topic is organized about
Meredith’s fanciful imps that crouch about their figure of fun mocking, hardly
a notion compatible with common sense.
The witticisms of
the formidable Mrs. Montstuart Jenkinson such as her characterization of Vernon
as “a Phoebus Apollo turned fasting friar” or of Laetitia “here she comes with
a romantic tale on her eyelashes” (like those of Meredith’s Diana) are surely
to be appreciated for their cleverness alone (42).
Concerning pathos, no ship can now set sail without pathos; and we are
not totally deficient of pathos; which is, I do not accurately know what, if
not the ballast, reducible to moisture by patent process, on board our modern
vessel; for it can hardly be the cargo, and the general water supply has other
uses; and ships well charged with it seem to sail the stiffest:—there is a
touch of pathos. The Egoist surely inspires pity. He who would desire to clothe
himself at everybody's expense, and is of that desire condemned to strip
himself stark naked, he, if pathos ever had a form, might be taken for the
actual person. Only he is not allowed to rush at you, roll you over and squeeze
your body for the briny drops. There is the innovation.
Here Meredith
opens with a ship as a metaphor for his story and water as ballast identified
with pathos. It is surely inaccurate to
claim that every narrative must have pathos.
While a Chaplin movie may well include a good deal there will be none at
all in with the Three Stooges. Yet few would notice to dubious claim as the ingenious figures of speech carry the reader along like a
tide. “It can hardly be the cargo,” i.
e. The Egoist is fundamentally comic rather than sentimental or
melodramatic. The image shifts then to
clothing; the egoist derives his self-worth from the opinions of others,
“clothing himself” at others’ expense, yet finding himself so embarrassed
(“naked”) that he will serve as a personification of pity.
Yet, as the comedy is sustained, he does not demand your tears (after
the manner of Little Nell), and “there is the innovation.”
This is all very
well, if slightly elaborately stated, but the following paragraph which introduces the
figure of the Egoist is even more distinctly characteristic of Meredith. Here the
You may as well know him out of hand, as a gentleman of our time and
country, of wealth and station; a not flexile figure, do what we may with him;
the humour of whom scarcely dimples the surface and is distinguishable but by
very penetrative, very wicked imps, whose fits of roaring below at some
generally imperceptible stroke of his quality, have first made the mild
literary angels aware of something comic in him, when they were one and all
about to describe the gentleman on the heading of the records baldly (where
brevity is most complimentary) as a gentleman of family and property, an idol
of a decorous island that admires the concrete. Imps have their freakish
wickedness in them to kindle detective vision: malignly do they love to uncover
ridiculousness in imposing figures. Wherever they catch sight of Egoism they
pitch their camps, they circle and squat, and forthwith they trim their
lanterns, confident of the ludicrous to come. So confident that their grip of
an English gentleman, in whom they have spied their game, never relaxes until
he begins insensibly to frolic and antic, unknown to himself, and comes out in
the native steam which is their scent of the chase. Instantly off they scour,
Egoist and imps. They will, it is known of them, dog a great House for
centuries, and be at the birth of all the new heirs in succession, diligently
taking confirmatory notes, to join hands and chime their chorus in one of their
merry rings round the tottering pillar of the House, when his turn arrives; as
if they had (possibly they had) smelt of old date a doomed colossus of Egoism
in that unborn, unconceived inheritor of the stuff of the family. They dare not
be chuckling while Egoism is valiant, while sober, while socially valuable,
nationally serviceable. They wait. (36-37)
The imps practice a kind of “freakish wickedness,” but they
also may bide their time, conceding their object’s prestigious social role and
importance under feudalism. Yet it is
the very artificiality of his aristocratic standing that guarantees he will
prove by the late nineteenth century ridiculous. There is after all, something inherently
absurd in the fact that he has always been highly regarded, purely because of
the accident of his birth. He is certain
eventually therefore to fall prey to fatuous “frolic and antic,” emitting steam
which attracts the imps with their “detective vision.” Like pagan orgiasts they dance in “merry
rings” about the great man, the “colossus,” who has, like Britain’s aristocracy
in Victorian times, outlived his social usefulness and thus become preposterous
and laughable.
Here the reader
finds a rich stew of figures of speech.
The egoist is an “idol,” a “colossus,” while less perceptive readers who
take his pose for his true nature are “angels.”
The imps, meanwhile, are like a besieging army with their camp pitched
all about the egoist as he transforms into a sort of absurd engine puffing steam as
the imps (and the readers) look on amused.
Meredith is as
earnest a Victorian as Matthew Arnold, but he is far more of an aesthete. While he maintained high-minded principles of
moral behavior, social justice, and political idealism, he was fond as well of
playing with words and of building ingenious verbal structures that are more
obviously entertaining than they are improving.
Surely considered only as a reformer or an ethicist he would have little name by this
time; it is as an imaginative and inventive storyteller who can hold the reader’s
interest with his language alone that we read him today. The reader knew Willoughby for an ass when he
first appeared. The novel would have
been excruciatingly prolonged had that demonstration been the point of the
story. Instead Meredith fills more than half
a thousand pages with wit, fascinating figures of speech, and rhetoric by turns
stately and effervescent. One concludes
with a wistful regret in part arising from seeing Laetitia accepting a loveless
marriage and in part for one’s own departure from Patterne Hall after a pleasant stay. Though Meredith may have conceived of comedy ultimately
serving the cause of the betterment of humanity, he, and we as well, will consider
that we have gained something merely by having our fancy tickled.
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