THE DUEL OF WIT
Some years ago a story was told me concerning a certain eminent man in
England. This man came from the common people; he possesses one of the
finest minds in England, and he is the champion of all things generous
and free in letters and life. The lady who told me the story, herself a
well-known novelist, was writing about the particular section of society
from which this man sprung, and in which he had lived his boyhood; she
needed an item of local color, and asked him how such people pronounce a
certain word. The man flushed, and demanded: “How should I know?” I
thought this story one of the most awful I had ever heard; and the lady
novelist was shocked when she saw how I took it, for she had not meant
to tell anything so serious about her friend. She tried to explain to
me, it wasn’t really so bad as it seemed; the pressure of caste feeling
is so strong in England that a man is irresistibly driven to cover up
his humiliating past.
I tell the incident as preliminary to a discussion of George Meredith.
Here was a devoted servant of the muses, a master of his craft, who won
a quite unique position among his contemporaries. The public knew him
not; to the end of his life his books had little sale, and he was
compelled to support himself by odd jobs of journalism and publisher’s
reading. But to the inner circle of letters his name became a kind of
secret password; he was the choice and precious one, the poet’s poet and
the novelist’s novelist, and the little country nook where he dwelt was
a shrine to which the distinguished pilgrims traveled from England and
America and the Continent.
But over this great writer’s life there hung a dark shadow; a tragic
secret, hidden from the world, dimly guessed only by a few of the inner
circle. What had been the master’s early life? He never spoke of it.
Where had he spent his childhood? No one knew. Where had he been born?
The government was collecting some kind of census, and put the question
to its great novelist, and he lied; he invented an imaginary birthplace.
So he lived safe from scandal, and only after his death was the dreadful
truth revealed. His grandfather had been a tailor to naval officers! His
father likewise had been a tailor, and failing in business, had gone to
South Africa and become a tailor there. His son had nothing to do with
him and never spoke of him.
What there is so especially dreadful about a tailor you will have to ask
some Englishman to explain to you. I personally have known tailors who
were exceedingly kind and generous men; I have known tailors who were
students and thinkers and devoted workers in the Socialist movement. All
that a tailor may be; I suppose he may even be a saint. There is only
one thing which he can never by any possibility be, and that is an
English gentleman.
And George Meredith aspired to be an English gentleman; he wrote about
English gentlemen in all the infinite subtleties of their relationship
to other English gentlemen, and more especially to English ladies. He
wished to be, not an interloper and observer, tolerated because of his
cleverness with the pen; he wished to be an authentic member of the
caste, so secure that he might exercise that most cherished of all the
privileges of the caste--to ridicule other members who fall away from
the perfect caste ideal.
Do you think that I am making too much of this frailty of George
Meredith? I answer that it is the key to the understanding of everything
he wrote. Stop and think what it means that a man who possessed one of
the great intellects of his time, who had all the wisdom of all the ages
at his command, should be so bowed down with awe before the spirit of
caste that he was willing to lie about himself. I do not mean merely
that such a man’s whole life would become a pose; that he would pretend
to be abnormally spiritual and ascetic, when as a matter of fact he was
strongly attracted to lark-pies; that he would study his features, and
observing that he had a refined and sensitive profile, would place
himself at the window in such a position that his adorers would gaze
upon this profile during the course of their visit. What I mean is that
this man would have a caste-ridden mind; the subtleties of caste
distinction, the minute details of appearance and conduct and thought by
which caste superiority is manifested and maintained--this is the stuff
out of which the man’s novels would be made, and the theme upon which
his superfine intellect would be concentrated.
And so it is in the Meredithian universe. The dark, grim, vaguely
shadowed Nemesis of the Greeks is gone; Jehovah with his thunders has
been laid away with the other rubbish in the garret; what is left, to
dominate the lives of men and women, to blast their hopes and lure them
to ruin and despair, is social convention. And all such convention may
be boiled down into one formula: thou shalt not break into a caste
higher than that to which you were born. You may have money, and try it;
you may pretend to have money, and try it; but in both cases alike you
will fail. Meredith gives us masterpieces in the way of impostors trying
to break in; he is even willing, under the veil of art, to use his own
tragic life-story, and in “Evan Harrington” he tells about a tailor’s
son who tries to break in. He turned such blasts of ridicule upon the
poor tailor family and the poor tailor state of being, that Meredith’s
tailor father down in South Africa was shriveled up with shame, and
could not thereafter endure to hear his son’s novels discussed.
Likewise, women fail to break into the sacred caste. They have beauty,
they have wit, but nothing avails. The creator of “Diana of the
Crossways” lays himself out to convince us that this heroine is the most
brilliant conversationalist that ever graced a London dinner-table. But
she had to have money, and so she sells a government secret to a great
newspaper, and being discovered, is thrown out. And if Diana failed,
with all her worldly gifts, what hope for poor Lucy Feverel, who had
nothing but country graces, natural loveliness of body, and sweetness
and kindness and unselfishness of spirit? The “ordeal” of Richard
Feverel lies in the fact that being a son of a rigid English gentleman,
rigidly trained according to an ideal system, he falls in love with a
country flower, and instead of seducing her according to the custom of
the caste, he marries her. So, of course, the pair of them are trampled.
The defenders of Meredith will say that he does not desire such a state
of affairs; he merely portrays it, because it exists. My answer to that
is the familiar one, that art is propaganda. If George Meredith had
believed in overthrowing the caste system in England he could surely
have found ways to convey that fact to us. He might have begun with his
own life; he might have taken his stand on a pedestal and said: “I, who
know myself to be a highly intellectual novelist, am the son and
grandson of tailors, and be pleased to make what you can of that.” If
Meredith had realized vitally and vividly the anti-social nature of the
caste system, and especially how that system is the very negation and
death of art--surely he would have found space in his many novels for at
least one character who has a little success in the effort to hold his
head up against the power of snobbery. Remember, this was a time in
which Alfred Harmsworth, gutter-journalist, became an earl, and Keir
Hardie, pit-boy, became a labor hero. But Meredith’s caste-bound
characters fail, and fail without any hint that they might have
succeeded.
I do not wish to be unjust to this brilliant novelist, who was a modern
man in many ways. He was entirely free from that religiosity which
blighted Tennyson’s mind. He was clear-sighted about love, seeing that
it is a thing of flesh and spirit, and must be both, or neither. Also he
stood valiantly for the rights of ladies to be educated, and to have
their talents recognized, and to dispose of their own personalities. In
his old age he advanced the proposition that all marriages should be for
a term of years, and that at the end of the term the parties should be
free to remarry or not, as they wished. That this most sensible idea did
not raise more of a storm was because most persons in Britain took it
for granted that the novelist must be joking.
But as a rule what we get from Meredith is not social criticism in its
broad sense, but merely caste criticism, the self-discipline of the
privileged orders. Meredith’s greatest novel is “The Egoist,” a quite
amazing study of one of these superior males, a creature who has been
brought up from infancy to regard his sublime self as the purpose for
which his own family exists, and one of a small group of select persons
for whom the British Empire, and therefore the world exist. Meredith
lays him bare for us in every turn and movement of his being, and we
loathe him heartily, and sympathize with the series of females with whom
he dallies in courtship.
Meredith is one of those super-sophisticated novelists who are unwilling
to allow us to be interested in a course of events. The intellect in him
has eaten up and sterilized the emotions. In reading him we are
tormented by a feeling that his story and his characters would be
delightful if only he would give them a chance; but he has such a
brilliant style, he has so many ideas to convey to us, and so much
shining wit and corruscating metaphor to display. It is like an exhibit
of fireworks, which can be most ravishing for a few minutes; you catch
your breath, and think you have never seen anything more lovely. But
after an hour or so you decide that fireworks lack variety.
This infinitely subtle and delicate, witty and charming personality
invites us to sit with him as gods upon Olympus, to look down upon the
tragic fate of mortals, and find pleasure in the irony of their
failures. As in the case of Corneille, we are concerned with the strife
and clash of aristocratic egotisms; we take part in deadly intrigues,
and in duels without mercy. But times have changed, and now no blood is
shed, no corpses cover the ground; it is a duel of wit, with a
death-blow in a phrase or the lifting of an eye-brow. Watching the
conflict, we find ourselves asking, precisely as we asked with
Corneille: What have we to do with these puppets? How do they concern
us? What reality is there, what permanence to the conventions which
dominate their puppet minds? What real wisdom is there behind their
volleys of cleverness? So we realize that we are still in the Victorian
age; and Victoria and boredom are two words for one thing.