‘EVAN HARRINGTON,’ ‘THE ADVENTURES OF HARRY RICHMOND,’ ‘SANDRA
BELLONI,’ AND ‘BEAUCHAMP’S CAREER.’
The atmosphere of ‘Evan Harrington’ is neither that of sombre passion
nor poignant pain. It has none of the lyrical outbursts that thrill us
in ‘Richard Feverel,’ and we are spared in it any violent shaking of
the soul. We are allowed to view life more temperately, and follow the
fortunes of the characters with an undisturbed exercise of philosophic
calm and judgment. A delicious humour colours it throughout, and we are
back upon the old sea of metaphors that the writer had nearly drifted
from in the simple, undecorated strength of ‘Rhoda Fleming.’ We are
tossed about upon its topmost sprays, that sometimes drench us and
leave us in wonder whether the author will suddenly get serious and,
to use one of his own figures, announce that the curtain has fallen
upon this particular part of his performance, and expect us to cry,
‘What an exciting game it has been!’ Could anything be more boisterous
than the description of the great Mel, the tailor of Lymport? There is
a Homeric exaggeration about him that fascinates while it bewilders.
Was ever such a man drawn since the days of mythological heroes? Great
ladies loved him; he dressed himself up as a footman, and thought
nothing of setting a house on fire for the privilege of carrying in his
arms a titled beauty. He was the guest and boon fellow of lords, and
he measured them; he was a tailor, and he kept horses; he had gallant
adventures, was preposterously handsome and big and glorious; he shook
hands with his customers, and was never known to have sent in a bill.
The writer remarks: ‘Such a personage comes but once in a generation,
and when he goes, men miss the man as well as their money.’
We do not make the acquaintance of the great Mel, but his spirit
haunts the scenes of his turbulent career, and we learn of him
through fabulous reports and a family of handsome and distinguished
daughters, and one son, Evan. All inherit their father’s physical
and natural superiority. They pass, as to the manner born, into the
upper sphere, and comport themselves in that select circle with
dignity and ease. Behind them in the town of Lymport the tailor’s
shop, with the name of Harrington upon the door, exists, carried on
by the great man’s widow as a means of liquidating his debts. It is
the successes and disturbances, the intrigues and exposure of this
superior family--born for greatness but not to it--that the book
records; and never was genius more untiringly and extravagantly used
than in the combined efforts of these three lovely ladies and their
brother to conceal the family origin and pass for people of blood.
The partial success that crowns their efforts is but an inadequate
return for such an expenditure of brain in well-conceived and audacious
contrivances. People born with a soul above buttons cannot be blamed
for every laudable effort to find their way into their natural
element! Imagine a single rose-bush bearing flowers of exceptional
beauty in a cabbage-garden, and you will have the incongruous effect
of the tailor’s daughter, the Countess de Saldar, in a middle-class
drawing-room. Grand manners and aristocratic habits were hers, not
by right of breeding or blood, but simply by right of nature. So we
sympathize with her in all her graceful and unapproachable intriguing
to maintain herself in a society to which she had won entrance by her
own unaided genius.
Contrast the genial spirit in which the writer records the adventures
and difficulties of this splendid charlatan with the spirit in which
Thackeray has painted us his wonderful Becky Sharpe--the broad,
half-smiling approval of the more modern satirist, with the ferocity
of hate of his great predecessor. Not only does Mr. Meredith admire
the woman’s genius for intrigue, but he brings sympathy and affection
to the task of making her intelligible to us. So far from seeking to
make her odious to us, as Thackeray deliberately does in the portrayal
of Rebecca, he leaves it impossible for us to judge her more harshly
than he himself does. Wherever she is, we know that we cannot be dull,
and we are amused and captivated enough to be willing to dispense
with the chill atmosphere of perfect morality and candour. He does
not pursue her with a relentless exposure of her inmost vices. He
preaches no moral after the fashion of the English novelist, and he
takes his intriguing heroine as he finds her--an excellent study in
which he delights. She is no vulgar hypocrite, like Becky, under
the mask of a fine lady. Born in the sphere to which she feels she
justly belongs, she would simply have been a great lady with uncommon
diplomatic abilities and with a genius in the shading and splitting
of social niceties. Forced to play the part of adventuress, she plays
it grandly, and never shabbily. All her marvellous capacities are
directed to the concealment of the family shame and to the maintaining
of her sisters and brother in the eminence to which they have risen.
She is a generous schemer, for her family are included in her enormous
ambition. It is not for herself individually, but for the family of the
Harringtons, for their united glory and stable position that she so
unweariedly plots and intrigues and lies. The three daughters of the
great tailor have respectively married a major, a wealthy brewer, and a
Portuguese count. Caroline, the beauty, is unhappy as the major’s wife,
and finally reaches the climax in exaltation by making the conquest
of a duke. Evan now becomes the hope of the family, and it is on his
fortunes, his efforts to appear a gentleman, seconded by his sister’s
(the countess’s) efforts to penetrate into English aristocratic
society, and secure an heiress for her brother, that the story runs.
The heiress in whose pursuit Evan is carried off to Portugal to
learn the management of his mouth, how to dress his shoulders and to
direct his eyes, is Miss Rose Jocelyn, one of Mr. Meredith’s brave
and loyal girls, with a sweet spice of naturalness in her virtues and
in her defects, if she can honestly be said to possess any. In her
train we find Evan returning to England, clad like a wandering don in
sombrero and cloak. Rose’s expressed dislike of tradespeople gives him
a hankering to announce himself as such, which honest intention the
countess resolves to thwart, and is herself thwarted by Providence
in the shape of a brother tailor, who comes aboard the _Jocasta_ to
announce the great Mel’s death, and both ruins and saves the situation
by mention of a shop and a uniform. Evan’s experiences on the road
and in the shop are drawn in Mr. Meredith’s best style, and we are
introduced to one of his oddities, Tom Cogglesby, and also to the
suffering countess in low society. On his way up to London Evan is
engaged in an ugly fight in an inn, where he comports himself as the
only gentleman, and those born to the title as cads--not an uncommon
exchange of _rôles_. He meets Rose, and instead of London he, with his
guide and protectress, the incomparable countess, turns to Beckley
Court, the home of Rose’s parents. Here the countess has a field worthy
her great talents. To keep her footing firm, to guide Evan through the
briars of a false position, and help him to win Rose, whom he honestly
loves--this is no small undertaking with such combined forces against
her. Lady Jocelyn calls her ‘a female euphuist, euphuism in woman being
the popular ideal of a duchess.’
The pronounced comedian in a book where all the characters pertain
more or less to comedy, is Mr. John Raikes. The tricks that are played
on this young man by fortune and by men are innumerable, and there is
perhaps a flavour of Dickens about him in the prolonged burlesque he
plays. His burlesque lovers’ quarrels and the countess’s intrigues fill
the middle of the book, until Evan breaks his neck in a breakneck leap.
Here is an opportunity for the countess, which she uses to some
purpose. Unfortunately, she is felled by a stroke of fate, and her
origin is exposed at a dinner-table with the duke. The little shadow
of tragedy peeps here in the married misery of Caroline, the most
beautiful of the sisters, and beloved of the duke. The fortunes of
hero and heroine are fluctuating, and on the whole better for Evan
than might have been expected. He is known to be a tailor, and yet
the half-engaged lover of a beautiful heiress, and the guest of her
parents. It is true, the widow of the great Mel, bent upon honesty,
imperils the situation, and Evan completes the work by taking upon
himself one of the countess’s crimes, is rejected by Lady Jocelyn, and
leaves Beckley Court under a cloud, only believed in by Juliana, Rose’s
rival. The fifth act finds him in London studying tailordom, offered
the protection of Caroline’s duke. Juliana, the heiress of Beckley,
desperately and vainly in love with him, dies leaving him Beckley
Court and all her possessions. Here is a comical reversal of things,
and an opportunity for clearing away all doubts of him by one sweeping
act of generosity. Rose is engaged to his rival, Laxley, and when her
father hears that Evan renounces the estate, and exclaims, ‘He must
have the soul of a gentleman! There’s nothing he can expect in return,
you know,’ cuttingly retorts, ‘One would think, papa, you had always
been dealing with tradesmen.’ The end may be anticipated: marriage for
Rose and Evan, and the consolations of the Church of Rome for the dear
countess.
‘Sandra Belloni’ and ‘Harry Richmond’ are two of Mr. Meredith’s
pictorial and melodious novels. Pictures and song abound in them, and
breathless vivifying races with passion. Writers are not uncommonly
enamoured of their heroines, and while none of his can claim a lack of
sympathy and admiration on Mr. Meredith’s part, there are three that
stand out as rivals for the post of his heart’s beloved. In different
ways, all leading to the one source, like the various roads to Rome, is
he equally the recording lover of Emilia or Sandra, Clara Middleton and
Diana. These are his trio of perfect and bewitching women--not perfect
in the wooden or puppet sense, but perfect with the lovely perfection
of nature steeped, in the case of two, in the unanalyzable social charm
which he so well knows how to make us feel and thrill to. Clara is
the exquisite maiden of upper England, who could never be imaged out
of her social surroundings; Diana brings to breeding an exhilarating
dash of rebellious Irish blood and a purity of body and mind no less
superlative than her younger sister’s; and Emilia, unlike both, is all
passion and flame mounting on the swell of song.
It is a long time since I read this entrancing novel, and here in
Paris, where I write, it is not attainable for reperusal. Hence many
of the names of the characters have escaped my memory, though I can
recall their personalities and actions vividly. I am still impressed
with the acquaintance of a wonderful Greek--a Mr. Pericles, a wandering
millionaire, ready upon hearsay to traverse Europe in the trail of
undiscovered musical genius. Staying at the country house of one vulgar
wealthy merchant, Mr. Pole, he unearths something like it in the voice
of Emilia. The Pole family consists of three of those inimitable,
ambitious, and diplomatic ladies that only Mr. Meredith hitherto has
drawn us. I forget their names. There is a brother, Wilfred Pole, a
cornet, one of those limp and flaccid _jeunes premiers_ novelists and
opera-composers are fond of selecting to sing the sweetest tenor in
duet with the heroines. The hero of the novel, as of the opera, is
usually the heroine’s foil, his unworthiness the shade against which
her splendour and strength shine. There is a dreadful Irish widow,
whose name I certainly remember--Mrs. Chumps. This awful creature
is, like the Irishman of English comedy, purely the result of Saxon
imagination dwelling upon our island without the illumination of
personal knowledge of the race or the country. I have here in Paris met
a Scotchwoman who gravely informed me that she was gathering materials
for an Irish novel, though she admitted she had never been in Ireland,
and her acquaintance of Irish people is exclusively confined to the few
specimens of the race she had had the misfortune to meet with abroad.
I shall be curious to see that novel when it appears, and fancy she
is not the first Britisher to represent us to posterity upon materials
for observation so slight and so misguiding. The only sympathy the
lady mentioned appears to bring to her gigantic task is a partiality
for a liquid as peculiar to the lowlands and highlands of Scotland
as to the mountains and bogs of Ireland. May unlimited quantities of
whisky enlighten her and enliven us! for she is bitten by a mighty
hatred of the nameless Celt. Under such circumstances, barring the
stimulus of mountain distillery, the widow Chumps seems to have been
drawn. Her brogue savours more of the Thames than of the banks of the
Suir. Such an Irish brogue is nowhere to be heard in Ireland. And there
is something curiously alien to that country in her denseness and
want of sensitiveness, for we know that pride and sensitiveness are
the curses of the race. She is an old flame of Pole’s--‘me Pole’ she
perpetually calls him, to the horror of the refined daughters and the
elegant cornet; and as Mr. Pole has squandered her money entrusted
to him, he is obliged to endure her overt tendernesses and force his
children to bow to her. This contest produces several lively scenes,
including the sequel when the widow finds she is betrayed and cheated
and her Pole a bankrupt. Mr. Pericles adds to the liveliness, and also
one Lady Something, who is almost in love with Wilfred, and plays an
ugly trick on him and on Emilia by getting him to declare his passion
for her and his indifference to Emilia within the latter’s hearing.
The curtain drops on the degradation of the gallant cornet and the
sorrowful enlightenment of Emilia. There is also a tragic figure of an
organist and impoverished baronet, who loves one of the ladies of the
Pole establishment, and commits suicide because she, loving him, must
marry for her family, and several lively social youths and maidens and
matrons, who act chorus, wittily, epigrammatically, and sprightlily, as
Mr. Meredith’s chorus ever does. Then there are Italian politics--a
favourite theme with the writer--an attractive Welsh brother and
sister, and several unforgettable love-scenes; notably, one great
passionate love-scene at Wilming Weir by moonlight, worthy to rank
with those matchless chapters in ‘Richard Feverel.’ The lover himself
is weaker and more pitiable than the average young gentleman elected
by the novelist to pipe fluted sentimentalities to the sweet thrilling
note of the heroine; a man--or a make-believe of man, which is by far
the commoner article, for true and real men are rarer than true and
real women, rare as these be--who could doubt the delicacy of Sandra’s
passionate cry, ‘My lover!’ and who ‘could pledge himself to eternity,
but shrank from being bound to eleven o’clock on the morrow morning.’
Writers are sometimes compunctious for the abasement to which they have
submitted their heroines, and spare them the wedding-ring. Sandra does
not marry Wilfred, and we hear of ‘the mellowed depth, the soft human
warmth, which marriage had lent to her voice,’ afterwards in Italy.
I forget whom she married, but I daresay it was her Welsh lover, the
noble Italian enthusiast, blessed with a noble sister.
‘Harry Richmond’ is truly a delightful novel, and, next to ‘Richard
Feverel,’ ought to be the most popular of George Meredith’s books.
It is all wild adventure, bubbling, bursting fun and lyrical
outbursts. Impossible to catch and analyse its charm. It is a book
written to weave a spell about youth and sober age. Its exuberance is
unparalleled; not the exuberance of Dickens or Lever, but a quaint and
original exuberance of the metaphysician and the poet taken suddenly
to football and nonsense verses. He brings a relish quite other than
that of the habitual jester, fetches from his chest wilder shouts of
laughter, flings his ball, and tosses off his verses with a sincerity
and ardour not known to those to whom such things are in the ordinary
way of life. Or, at least, we are at liberty to imagine he would,
for few of us have had the privilege of observing such a mixture as
metaphysician and poet at play. Who can ever forget the inimitable
and arch-impostor, Harry’s father, Richmond Roy--his captivating
personality, his eccentricities, his feats, and his comet-like passage
across the sky of our imagination? His life is a splendid comedy,
though occasionally the comic muse drops us into farce as broad as any
to be found in the early English dramatists. We are not even allowed
to preserve a decorous gravity at the recital and exposure of his woes
and misfortunes. Molière himself never devised a broader farce than his
_rôle_ in the German prince’s court and his expulsion therefrom. And
Shakespeare himself, had he written nineteenth-century prose, could
never have given us a lovelier picture of a little German princess and
her English boy-lover, with all the proper scenic effects and landscape
beauty. And what, pray, are the rough, swearing old grandfather and
Julia’s husband if they be not English to the backbone, brutally,
faithfully English, like Squire Western and a host of that school?
They are imaged to us pure eighteenth-century--barbaric, powerful, big
drinkers, and men of mighty physique, with whom there is no temporizing
upon the domestic hearth nor elsewhere. This is not comedy, but life.
English, too, are the scenes of Harry’s boyhood, his life in the farm
and in school, where he makes the acquaintance of Walter Heriot,
in love with Julia, the schoolmaster’s daughter, and his life-long
boy-friend; and afterwards the little wild gipsy girl, whom Heriot
betrays. All these pictures, vivid and humorous, carry us irresistibly.
Afterwards we touch a new chord when the religious sea-captain carries
off the lads for the good of their souls, and one fine morning we
find them straying through a lovely German forest, where they meet
the little German princess--divinest and most witching of serious
little maids--and Harry’s father. The story is like real life, too
complicated, varying, and plotless for a brief summary. Light and air
and warm life-blood quiver and flow through the chapters. With the
writer, we are mounted upon a winged steed, and carried breathlessly
through space. The characters are too numerous for naming, and yet
all have their distinct and special parts. If they are minor at all,
it is simply as the constant succession of faces through our personal
experiences are minor--that is, to us--but not, we feel, in the part
they individually play. We understand acutely that they are not there
solely to please their creator, and do his bidding like puppets. They
are not introduced to teach a moral or propound a theory, or even
consciously to act as chorus. They are men and women, rustics, clowns,
and society men and women, who have their distinct tastes, their
distinct utterances, and their distinct capacities. The epigrammatist
is never absent, and we are always delighted to meet him or her.
Of course, an English commoner, however wealthy, cannot marry the
daughter of an hereditary prince of Germany, and after many adventures,
heart-sorrows, and joys, the countless intrigues of his father, a duel
with an Austrian prince (his rival), and the single kiss of blessedness
bestowed on him as upon Herr Teufelsdroch, poor Harry returns to
England in the pursuance of an equally breezy career, made up of wind
and wave, of storm and soft English sunshine. His father’s personality
tops him, and lends the element of the grotesque to the gravity of his
adventures. We cannot take him seriously with such a background.
But Mr. Meredith does not wish us to laugh unrestrainedly, and so
he presents us with a figure of exquisite unblemished pathos in
Harry’s sweet Aunt Dorothy, a lady we can never remember without an
odd sensation about the throat. The glamour of purity that makes
no parade of coldness, of divine unselfishness, of uncomplaining,
scarcely-felt suffering envelopes her like a veil of glory, through
which we rather define than perfectly see her. She passes through the
book a beautiful ghost of pale womanhood, shedding beneficent rays upon
her path. As a girl, finding her lover beloved of a weaker sister, she
pleads with him for her, and makes an altar of her happiness for the
younger one. When the sister dies, after unhappy wedded experiences,
leaving a little boy, Dorothy is the boy’s mother and the father’s
secret benefactor. She never marries, and all her money is devoted to
the anonymous discharge of the arch-impostor’s debts, which, in this
spurious offshoot of royalty, we may imagine were royal enough. The
scene in which this fact is revealed is, for fiction, of superhuman
strength--not the restrained sense of modern art, but the battle-axe
strength of mediæval times. Harry marries the squire’s heiress, his
cousin Janet, and deserves repose for the rest of his days.
Mr. Meredith has written one dull book. ‘Beauchamp’s Career’ would be
almost unreadable, other than patiently read as an exhaustive political
treatise, if it were not for Mr. Romfrey and the face of Renée, that
brings the soft radiancy of a dream to bear upon its intolerable
dulness. Would not this charming description make amends for much?
‘A brunette of the fine lineaments of the good blood of France. She
chattered snatches of Venetian caught from the gondoliers; she was like
a delicate cup of crystal brimming with the beauty of the place.... Her
features had the soft irregularities which run to rarities of beauty,
as the ripple rocks the light; mouth, eyes, brows, nostrils, and bloomy
cheeks played into one another liquidly; thought flew, tongue followed,
and the flash of meaning quivered over them like night-lightning. Or
oftener, to speak truth, tongue flew, thought followed: her age was but
newly seventeen, and she was French.’
Beauchamp himself is an impossible fellow, too wearisomely in earnest,
of a single note, which he twangs in a monotonous variety of tones
from morning until night. We fancy at the start, after the ominous
prologue, that we are fronting a humorous adventure when we find him
a sailor lad, addressing his challenge to the gentlemen of the French
guard. But unhappily we are not shown the French guardsmen reading his
missive, and the episode falls flat. We feel we have been deceived,
and resent the deception. To make up for it, we give our sympathies,
such as they are, to the uncle, a mixture of twelfth-century baron and
unintelligible Whig. He relieves us of the monotony of Beauchamp’s
lance-breaking with society, and his extraordinary conduct in his heart
affairs. No sympathy is due to a man who could go prating politics
through drawing-rooms and missing two such women as Renée and Cecilia
Halkett to fall upon Jenny Denham. Indeed, there are some chapters
in the book that provoke a sigh in the bosom of the conscientious
readers for the useful art of skipping. Noticeably those dealing with
that unmitigated old bore, Dr. Shrapnel, and his everlasting letters.
Mr. Romfrey suggested that his speechifying nephew should be sent into
his element over in Ireland. But no Irish speech-maker of the most
pronounced stage in the disease could ever match Beauchamp by reason
of the latter’s want of humour. Irish orators off the Parliamentary
stage and the public platform are ready to laugh at themselves and at
each other, whereas Beauchamp is in deadly earnest from six o’clock
in the morning until twelve o’clock at night. Surely it can have been
nothing else but sheer weariness that forced the writer to pitch his
hero unexpectedly into the Channel, and bring his career to an untimely
end. Never was catastrophe more inexplicable, and from the artistic
point of view less justifiable, than Beauchamp’s death. We wake as
from a prolonged nightmare with a gasp. Having failed to understand
why he was there at all, we fail still less to comprehend why he is
knocked into eternity in a single last page, and instead of being
touched, we are simply astounded. Of a truth, the drawback to the book
is its politics incessantly harped upon. The subject, treated in the
high colours of Dumas, of the plumed and sabred days, carries a scent
of intrigue and romance to interest us; or the song and chapters of
revolt, conspiracy and revolution have our hearts for a nod. What
should we have done had we waded through all this truly English stuff
of Whiggery, Toryism and Radicalism, without the sweet refreshment of
those Venetian days--the night on the Adriatic, and the lovely morning
at sea under the Alps? Or canvassing with this tiresome hero without
the society of that amiable and amusing idiot, Lord Palmet, whose mind
runs to women, and who murmurs before a virtuous voter in a local
institute, ‘Capital place for an appointment with a woman’? This is
the key of his mind and his moods, but it is refreshing after the dance
young Mr. Beauchamp has led us, and promises to lead us, to the end
sans intermission.
He is not returned for Parliament, happily for the country, and again
we are rewarded for our trials and patient endurance of them by another
glimpse, all too brief, of Renée in her Norman home at Tourdestelle.
This is a delightful break, but the inconsequence of Mr. Meredith’s
characters! None of them seem to know their own mind, neither the
men nor the women. At one moment we find Beauchamp wanting to run
away with Renée, and Renée holding back. At another Renée running off
to Beauchamp, and Beauchamp virtuously holding back. Again, Cecilia
awaits his proposal, and he is inexplicably silent, though pushed to
claim her by inclination, interest and friends; when he makes up his
mind to propose, she is off to Italy, engaged to a man she does not
love, knowing the man she loves was to arrive the day of her departure
to claim her. Do some people act in this way out of such a novel?
We are constantly expecting Beauchamp to wreck society and create a
revolution. Yet at the end his uncle, the quaint, twelfth-century
baron, says: ‘He hasn’t marched to London with a couple of hundred
thousand men, and he escapes what Stukely calls his nation’s scourge,
in the shape of a statue turned out by an English chisel. No, we
haven’t had much public excitement out of him. But one thing he did do:
he _got me down on my knees_.’ He married Jenny Denham and left a son
behind him. This is all he did besides.