Meredith's Ridiculous Egoist

 

     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).  A longer passage from the “Prelude” which generally sketches the narrative’s progress raises the author’s rhetorical standard high over everyday usage such that the exuberance of his language becomes the point far more than any strictures on proper behavior.

 

     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 reader encounters the imps of comedy, central to the book’s themes however far distant from commonsensical concepts.

 

     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. 

Wharton’s Undine

     “Undine.” The reader is given pause at the very first word of Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country. The name of the leading lady seems unlikely indeed for the child of vulgar Kansas parents, though throughout the nineteenth century the legendary Undine had been the subject of numerous paintings and poems, particularly popular among the pre-Raphaelites. [1]
     Despite links to ancient water nymphs such as naiads and nereids and the Latin name from unda (wave), the figure of Undine is not ancient, but is original with Paracelsus. He posited “spiritual” beings associated with each of the four elements invisible to the ordinary observer. Water is the realm of the undine who can acquire a soul only by attracting a human lover. Thus she is associated with promiscuous self-interested sexual activity and sometimes conflated with malicious seductresses such as sirens.
     Wharton identifies her character Undine Spragg, as “a variation on the eternal feminine.” The obvious application of this universally distributed negative archetype of woman to Undine arises from her willingness to use her extraordinary beauty cynically in pursuit of her own selfish ends, thus ruining her husband Ralph, battering her next husband, and failing to satisfy Elmer who was her first and last.
     Undine is entirely unredeemed by the book’s end. When reminded of his one-time step-father in France Paul bursts into uncontrollable sobs, and Elmer consoles him by saying, “Is it because your mother hadn’t time for you? Well, she’s like that, you know, and you and I just have to lump it.” Though his arms are “firm and friendly,” Elmer cannot help thinking in terms of money. He thoughtlessly refers to the Marquis’ poverty which had allowed him to buy the family tapestries and then comforts the crying child by assuring him “you’ll be the richest boy in America.”
     In comfort and security, Undine remains unsatisfied. “She had everything she wanted, but she still felt, at times, as though there were other things she might want if she knew about them.” By the novel’s last lines, the vague discontent has coalesced about the wish to be the wife of an ambassador. She is a classic addict, who always lusts for more.
     If the nouveaux riches of her day seemed conscienceless and impossibly vulgar, one can only imagine what she would make of today’s America, led by Donald Trump, an utterly tasteless and ignorant buffoon whose idea of beauty is a golden toilet when it is not his own face. In the novel the descent from a version of higher culture to the mass commodified version is signified by the explanation of Undine’s out-of-the-way name – it is the brand of hair product marketed by her father, the foundation of the family fortune. The reader imagines her seeking through marriage to rid herself of her surname, so abrupt and unmusical.
     Thus Undine is, like many modern versions of myths, bathetic, an epigone, ironic in its suggestions of true art, beauty, and intellectual pursuits. Virtually all the characters are narrowly self-interested, without real values. The artist Popple is no less commercially focused than the Wall Street speculators; Mrs. Heeny is a mere appendage of her wealthy clients. Even de Chelles, the genuine aristocrat possessing the attitudes of his class by birthright, who is tender with his unfortunate stepson, seems hidebound, as much out of step with humane considerations as the others if less venal. And he, too, is broken by the modern age, forced at last to sell his Louis XV tapestries.
     The closest approach to an exception is Ralph Marvell, who regularly tries to act with integrity, but who is, in spite of America’s youth, as much an etiolated representative of an order whose time has passed as the marquis. His utter unfitness for work, complicated by vague aesthetic tendencies, may seem attractive enough, especially because he has such a generous heart, but his suicide indicates his crippling neuroses. It is as though wholesome decency has itself rotted.
     Still, Undine is in some respects, no less charged with powerful energy than the sirens who sang to Odysseus. Her sexual allure is all but irresistible. The men she selects she gets, no less than if she had been Circe. The results of her machinations are as severe as if they had been divine visitations: Ralph’s suicide and Paul’s depression foremost. Wharton seems to insist on the seriousness of her characters’ affairs in spite of their short and narrow sight. Aphrodite, or Kama, or whoever among the myriad goddesses is indeed manifested in Undine Spragg of Apex, Kansas.
     Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country strikes me as Gustave Flaubert in the process of becoming Henry James, though Wharton lacked the stylistic mastery of either. While Flaubert set about to transform, as though alchemically, the banality of Emma Bovary into the pure gold of fine art, and James in the end anticipated Proust in his detailing the velleities of highly self-conscious characters, Wharton renders Undine Spragg as simultaneously powerful and unconscious, mired in her commonness. While she shares Emma Bovary’s ambitious restlessness as well as her shallow selfishness -- Flaubert described his characters as “completely commonplace” mediocrities -- he then rendered this consideration irrelevant by his ascent to an ideal of form and the perfection of le mot juste. [2] Lacking that lofty refuge Wharton‘s novel retains its satiric focus on the monstrous development of American capitalism, a process which, despite being slowed by the New Deal and the civil rights struggle, has since continued apace.
     Yet Wharton was anything but a radical. A true reactionary in her harking back to an imagined earlier era, she resembles Trollope in her implied belief in the righteousness of an order of nobility whose time has passed. She sees not only the faults of the new and tasteless ruling class; she sees as well the faults of Mrs. Astor’s New York 400 and the European nobility. In the morass of competing egotisms she suggests that life is livable with a certain unthinking observation of the rules ornamented with a sheen of art. It may be a makeshift strategy, but it represents one way of coping with the predicament of retaining some humanity in a society governed by cash in which water spirits have become gold-diggers.


1. Artists who represented her include Eduard Steinbrück, John William Waterhouse, Henri Fantin-Latour, and Arthur Rackham. Poets who used the Undine story include Aloysius Bertrand, Henry Van Dyke, Antoinette de Coursey Patterson, and Kenneth Slessor.

2. Letter to Louise Colet, September 19, 1852.