THE TRAGIC COMEDIANS
A STUDY IN A WELL-KNOWN STORY
By George Meredith
1892
BOOK 1.
The word 'fantastical' is accentuated in our tongue to so scornful an
utterance that the constant good service it does would make it seem an
appointed instrument for reviewers of books of imaginative matter
distasteful to those expository pens. Upon examination, claimants to the
epithet will be found outside of books and of poets, in many quarters,
Nature being one of the prominent, if not the foremost. Wherever she can
get to drink her fill of sunlight she pushes forth fantastically. As for
that wandering ship of the drunken pilot, the mutinous crew and the angry
captain, called Human Nature, 'fantastical' fits it no less completely
than a continental baby's skull-cap the stormy infant.
Our sympathies, one may fancy, will be broader, our critical acumen
shrewder, if we at once accept the thing as a part of us and worthy of
study.
The pair of tragic comedians of whom there will be question pass under
this word as under their banner and motto. Their acts are incredible:
they drank sunlight and drove their bark in a manner to eclipse
historical couples upon our planet. Yet they do belong to history,
they breathed the stouter air than fiction's, the last chapter of them
is written in red blood, and the man pouring out that last chapter, was
of a mighty nature not unheroical, a man of the active grappling modern
brain which wrestles with facts, to keep the world alive, and can create
them, to set it spinning.
A Faust-like legend might spring from him: he had a devil. He was the
leader of a host, the hope of a party, venerated by his followers, well
hated by his enemies, respected by the intellectual chiefs of his time,
in the pride of his manhood and his labours when he fell. And why this
man should have come to his end through love, and the woman who loved him
have laid her hand in the hand of the slayer, is the problem we have to
study, nothing inventing, in the spirit and flesh of both. To ask if it
was love is useless. Love may be celestial fire before it enters into
the systems of mortals. It will then take the character of its place of
abode, and we have to look not so much for the pure thing as for the
passion. Did it move them, hurry them, animating the giants and gnomes
of one, the elves and sprites of the other, and putting animal nature out
of its fashionable front rank? The bare railway-line of their story
tells of a passion honest enough to entitle it to be related. Nor is
there anything invented, because an addition of fictitious incidents
could never tell us how she came to do this, he to do that; or how the
comic in their natures led by interplay to the tragic issue. They are
real creatures, exquisitely fantastical, strangely exposed to the world
by a lurid catastrophe, who teach us, that fiction, if it can imagine
events and persons more agreeable to the taste it has educated, can read
us no such furrowing lesson in life.
THE TRAGIC COMEDIANS
CHAPTER I
An unresisted lady-killer is probably less aware that he roams the
pastures in pursuit of a coquette, than is the diligent Arachne that her
web is for the devouring lion. At an early age Clotilde von Rudiger was
dissatisfied with her conquests, though they were already numerous in her
seventeenth year, for she began precociously, having at her dawn a lively
fancy, a womanly person, and singular attractions of colour, eyes, and
style. She belonged by birth to the small aristocracy of her native
land. Nature had disposed her to coquettry, which is a pastime counting
among the arts of fence, and often innocent, often serviceable, though
sometimes dangerous, in the centres of polished barbarism known as
aristocratic societies, where nature is not absent, but on the contrary
very extravagant, tropical, by reason of her idle hours for the imbibing
of copious draughts of sunlight. The young lady of charming countenance
and sprightly manners is too much besought to choose for her choice to
be decided; the numbers beseeching prevent her from choosing instantly,
after the fashion of holiday schoolboys crowding a buffet of pastry.
These are not coquettish, they clutch what is handy: and little so is
the starved damsel of the sequestered village, whose one object of the
worldly picturesque is the passing curate; her heart is his for a nod.
But to be desired ardently of trooping hosts is an incentive to taste to
try for yourself. Men (the jury of householders empanelled to deliver
verdicts upon the ways of women) can almost understand that. And as it
happens, tasting before you have sounded the sense of your taste will
frequently mislead by a step or two difficult to retrieve: the young
coquette must then be cruel, as necessarily we kick the waters to escape
drowning: and she is not in all cases dealing with simple blocks or limp
festoons, she comes upon veteran tricksters that have a knowledge of her
sex, capable of outfencing her nascent individuality. The more
imagination she has, for a source of strength in the future days, the
more is she a prey to the enemy in her time of ignorance.
Clotilde's younger maiden hours and their love episodes are wrapped in
the mists Diana considerately drops over her adventurous favourites. She
was not under a French mother's rigid supervision. In France the mother
resolves that her daughter shall be guarded from the risks of that
unequal rencounter between foolish innocence and the predatory. Vigilant
foresight is not so much practised where the world is less accurately
comprehended. Young people of Clotilde's upper world everywhere, and the
young women of it especially, are troubled by an idea drawn from what
they inhale and guess at in the spirituous life surrounding them, that
the servants of the devil are the valiant host, this world's elect,
getting and deserving to get the best it can give in return for a little
dashing audacity, a flavour of the Fronde in their conduct; they sin, but
they have the world; and then they repent perhaps, but they have had the
world. The world is the golden apple. Thirst for it is common during
youth: and one would think the French mother worthy of the crown of
wisdom if she were not so scrupulously provident in excluding love from
the calculations on behalf of her girl.
Say (for Diana's mists are impenetrable and freeze curiosity) that
Clotilde was walking with Count Constantine, the brilliant Tartar trained
in Paris, when first she met Prince Marko Romaris, at the Hungarian Baths
on the borders of the Styrian highlands. The scene at all events is
pretty, and weaves a fable out of a variety of floating threads. A
stranger to the Baths, dressed in white and scarlet, sprang from his
carriage into a group of musical gypsies round an inn at the arch of the
chestnut avenue, after pulling up to listen to them for a while. The
music had seized him. He snatched bow and fiddle from one of the ring,
and with a few strokes kindled their faces. Then seating himself, on a
bench he laid the fiddle on his knee, and pinched the strings and flung
up his voice, not ceasing to roll out the spontaneous notes when Clotilde
and her cavalier, and other couples of the party, came nigh; for he was
on the tide of the song, warm in it, and loved it too well to suffer
intruders to break the flow, or to think of them. They were close by
when the last of it rattled (it was a popular song of a fiery tribe) to
its finish: He rose and saluted Clotilde, smiled and jumped back to his
carriage, sending a cry of adieu to the swarthy, lank-locked, leather-
hued circle, of which his dark oriental eyes and skin of burnished walnut
made him look an offshoot, but one of the celestial branch.
He was in her father's reception-room when she reached home: he was
paying a visit of ceremony on behalf of his family to General von
Rudiger; which helped her to remember that he had been expected, and also
that his favourite colours were known to be white and scarlet. In those
very colours, strange to tell, Clotilde was dressed; Prince Marko had
recognized her by miraculous divination, he assured her he could have
staked his life on the guess as he bowed to her. Adieu to Count
Constantine. Fate had interposed the prince opportunely, we have to
suppose, for she received a strong impression of his coming straight from
her invisible guardian; and the stroke was consequently trenchant which
sent the conquering Tartar raving of her fickleness. She struck, like
fate, one blow. She discovered that the prince, in addition to his
beauty and sweet manners and gift of song, was good; she fell in love
with goodness, whereof Count Constantine was not an example: so she set
her face another way, soon discovering that there may be fragility in
goodness. And now first her imagination conceived the hero who was to
subdue her. Could Prince Marko be he, soft as he was, pliable, a docile
infant, burning to please her, enraptured in obeying?--the hero who would
wrestle with her, overcome and hold her bound? Siegfried could not be
dreamed in him, or a Siegfried's baby son-in-arms. She caught a glorious
image of the woman rejecting him and his rival, and it informed her that
she, dissatisfied with an Adonis, and more than a match for a famous
conqueror, was a woman of decisive and independent, perhaps unexampled,
force of character. Her idea of a spiritual superiority that could soar
over those two men, the bad and the good--the bad because of his
vileness, the good because of his frailness--whispered to her of
deserving, possibly of attracting, the best of men: the best, that is, in
the woman's view of us--the strongest, the great eagle of men, lord of
earth and air.
One who will dominate me, she thought.
Now when a young lady of lively intelligence and taking charm has brought
her mind to believe that she possesses force of character, she persuades
the rest of the world easily to agree with her, and so long as her
pretensions are not directly opposed to their habits of thought, her
parents will be the loudest in proclaiming it, fortifying so the maid's
presumption, which is ready to take root in any shadow of subserviency.
Her father was a gouty general of infantry in the diplomatic service,
disinclined to unnecessary disputes, out of consideration for his
vehement irritability when roused. Her mother had been one of the
beauties of her set, and was preserving an attenuated reign, through the
conversational arts, to save herself from fading into the wall. Her
brothers and sisters were not of an age to contest her lead. The temper
of the period was revolutionary in society by reflection of the state of
politics, and juniors were sturdy democrats, letting their elders know
that they had come to their inheritance, while the elders, confused by
the impudent topsy-turvy, put on the gaping mask (not unfamiliar to
history) of the disestablished conservative, whose astounded state
paralyzes his wrath.
Clotilde maintained a decent measure in the liberty she claimed, and it
was exercised in wildness of dialogue rather than in capricious
behaviour. If her flowing tongue was imperfectly controlled, it was
because she discoursed by preference to men upon our various affairs and
tangles, and they encouraged her with the tickled wonder which bids the
bold advance yet farther into bogland. Becoming the renowned original of
her society, wherever it might be, in Germany, Italy, Southern France,
she grew chillily sensible of the solitude decreed for their heritage to
our loftiest souls. Her Indian Bacchus, as a learned professor supplied
Prince Marko's title for her, was a pet, not a companion. She to him was
what she sought for in another. As much as she pitied herself for not
lighting on the predestined man, she pitied him for having met the woman,
so that her tenderness for both inspired many signs of warm affection,
not very unlike the thing it moaned secretly the not being. For she
could not but distinguish a more poignant sorrow in the seeing of the
object we yearn to vainly than in vainly yearning to one unseen.
Dressed, to delight him, in Prince Marko's colours, the care she bestowed
on her dressing was for the one absent, the shrouded comer: so she
pleased the prince to be pleasing to her soul's lord, and this, owing to
an appearance of satisfactory deception that it bore, led to her thinking
guiltily. We may ask it: an eagle is expected, and how is he to declare
his eagleship save by breaking through our mean conventional systems,
tearing links asunder, taking his own in the teeth of vulgar ordinances?
Clotilde's imagination drew on her reading for the knots it tied and
untied, and its ideas of grandeur. Her reading was an interfusion of
philosophy skimmed, and realistic romances deep-sounded. She tried hard,
but could get no other terrible tangle for her hero's exhibition of
flaming azure divineness than the vile one of the wedded woman. Further
thinking of it, she revived and recovered; she despised the complication,
yet without perceiving how else he was to manifest himself legitimately
in a dull modern world. The rescuing her from death would be a poor
imitation of worn-out heroes. His publication of a trumpeting book fell
appallingly flat in her survey. Deeds of gallantry done as an officer in
war (defending his country too) distinguished the soldier, but failed to
add the eagle feather to the man. She had a mind of considerable soaring
scope, and eclectic: it analyzed a Napoleon, and declined the position of
his empress. The man must be a gentleman. Poets, princes, warriors,
potentates, marched before her speculative fancy unselected.
So far, as far as she can be portrayed introductorily, she is not without
exemplars in the sex. Young women have been known to turn from us
altogether, never to turn back, so poor and shrunken, or so fleshly-bulgy
have we all appeared in the fairy jacket they wove for the right one of
us to wear becomingly. But the busy great world was round Clotilde while
she was malleable, though she might be losing her fresh ideas of the
hammer and the block, and that is a world of much solicitation to induce
a vivid girl to merge an ideal in a living image. Supposing, when she
has accomplished it, that men justify her choice, the living will retain
the colours of the ideal. We have it on record that he may seem an
eagle.
'You talk curiously like Alvan, do you know,' a gentleman of her country
said to her as they were descending the rock of Capri, one day. He said
it musingly.
He belonged to a circle beneath her own: the learned and artistic. She
had not heard of this Alvan, or had forgotten him; but professing
universal knowledge, especially of celebrities, besides having an envious
eye for that particular circle, which can pretend to be the choicest of
all, she was unwilling to betray her ignorance, and she dimpled her
cheek, as one who had often heard the thing said to her before. She
smiled musingly.