‘THE EGOIST,’ ‘DIANA OF THE CROSSWAYS,’ ‘TRAGIC COMEDIANS,’ AND
‘SHAVING OF SHAGPAT.’
But however great and individual ‘Richard Feverel’ and the other novels
of George Meredith may be, and however high a place some of us may
accord them in the collection of books that, once read, become our
daily companions--a sort of mental sustenance upon which we speedily
learn to fall back from sheer force of habit--not even ‘Richard’ can be
described as the most individual of Meredith’s works. In it is no hint
given of the peculiar stand this new genius was to take among modern
writers. In it we were not led to scent the great champion, the mighty
swordsman of woman, by his commonplace Lucy and his silent Clare.
‘Richard Feverel’ was like a sun-burst, broken with storm and strife,
flashed upon the insipidity of latter-day fiction and exposing its
perishableness. Of such a writer anything and everything might justly
be expected, but even from him was ‘The Egoist’ a surprise from which
we have not yet had time to recover.
Here this subtle psychologist concerns himself neither with plot
nor passion; neither with tragedy nor romance, nor with any of what
may be called the passional springs of action and will. If ‘Richard
Feverel’ was an original and bewildering canter along the highway of
fiction, ‘The Egoist’ may be described as a breathless charge into the
unknown, a direct and forcible challenge of the unsuspected. Here we
see mercilessly unveiled civilized man, as he thinks and feels, in the
person of a handsome young squire enjoying every advantage of nature,
fortune and birth. Nothing in him courts rejection of our sympathies.
He is not a villain, and he is a polished, perfect gentleman, well
informed, well mannered, well groomed, and exceedingly well mounted
for a more than spirited ride through the plains and over the hills of
experience. Such a man as Sir Willoughby Patterne, of Patterne Hall,
in command of a rent-roll of £20,000, the ordinary novelist, or even
our old friends, the great Immortals, could only conceive as playing
a successful and a triumphant part through life. Why, in fact, should
punishment and humiliation of the lightest nature pursue a youth in
whom no vicious taste, no fixed vice, is pronounced? And who but a
dissector so utterly merciless as Mr. Meredith could find courage to
drive his dissecting-knife straight to the heart of the conventional
system, and qualify the unrevealed disease of this graceful ornament
of county society by the ugly name of egoism? the malady of the Ego?
Who else but this captain of woman could draw us maidens bold enough
to read the man and reject him, in spite of the big social bribes he
carries in his hand? Ah, this is Mr. Meredith’s great and original
note, once he has relieved his youthful soul of the romance of ‘Richard
Feverel.’ Woman is his study, especially young militant womanhood,
and what a study he has made of her! Upon this theme not a single
male writer, living or dead, since Shakespeare, can approach him,
and to it he brings modern subtle penetration added to Shakespeare’s
purely natural instinct. Not only has he caught the bloom and poetry
of womanhood, and made her visible to us to the soul--this were the
achievement of the poet and the artist of very exquisite perceptions;
but he has got at the very root of her nature--quite another thing.
Women reading him gasp at his revelations, such as they would never
dare to make or dream, so completely hedged round are they by the
conventionalities of fiction. When they take to writing stories, they
either set themselves limitations in the portrayal of their female
characters stricter than their brothers, or to hide their own ignorance
of themselves (a mystery for us as much as for men) set off at a
galloping pace into the realms of improbability.
In all fiction there is not another girl so enchanting and healthily
intelligent as Clara Middleton--none described like her. In addition
to the attractions of birth, breeding, and beauty which the writer
thoroughly relishes, are those of sensibilities that can be delicate
without affectation, a delightful wit untainted by smartness, singular
good taste and tact, and honesty of soul. Here is a sparkling young
woman as clear as daylight, as fresh as the morning dew, beautiful to
look upon, as Meredith’s women always are, sweet and bewitching without
any shabby tricks of mind or habit, who at the same time thinks for
herself, a rare virtue in the male novelist’s heroine. She is all
warm blood and variable moods, as befits her age and sex, but never
once untrue to the finest instincts of maidenhood, and unerring in her
judgment. She is not perfect, her accomplishments are not enumerated,
we never find her playing Beethoven or reading the stars, and somehow,
without one word having been said upon the subject, we get the
impression that she is a young woman of intellectual resources, and
qualified to pronounce upon subjects that engage the minds of sages and
artists, while the music of youth runs blithely through her veins, and
her feet are nimble in a race with a school-boy. It is her struggle
with her lover, the Egoist, that completes the interest of the book.
Here we have Mr. Meredith purified, polished, complete, without any
break in the unity of his work, or any awkward twist in the even flow
of narrative, based solely upon subtle and most delicate analysis.
The durability of such work is quite as obvious as that of the best
that has already withstood the test of centuries, and when to-day’s
literature comes to be old-fashioned, ‘The Egoist’ will still hold its
place as a lasting monument of psychological diagnosis.
Of the story itself little need be said, as it hangs upon a single
situation unfolded in one act after a short prologue introducing us
to the chief _dramatis personæ_. And can one possibly hope to explain
how this situation is worked and twisted and unfolded--how illuminated
and ransacked to its most hidden depths for the undiscovered clue of
self, for the unrevealed spring which prompts even our everyday ‘yea’
or ‘nay’? To endeavour to do so would be to undertake a task only
second to that of the writing of ‘The Egoist.’ Meredith, I should
imagine, would shrink from it. It is simply an analysis of the Ego. The
universal Ego takes the polished and affable form of a young English
squire, the pink of perfection, and highly commendable to ladies of
fastidious tastes, the eye of whose soul is turned ceaselessly upon
self. There he walks and sits and talks before our newly-illuminated
vision, naked to the soul, each beat of the heart discovered without
its protection of flesh or garment; not one single young man whom we
meet and part with in fiction, but the large pervading personality of
human existence crystallized to one permanent shape--not Sir Willoughby
Patterne, of Patterne Hall, but the soul of selfishness endowed with a
form that might just as well have been yours or mine or our next-door
neighbour’s. This is Meredith’s most absolute triumph of art, to
which he brought all the resources of his scientific knowledge of
humanity--his powerful phraseology and marvellous metaphor.
Other writers have drawn us pictures enough of selfish men and selfish
women. They abound in the literature of all races, selfishness being
one of our commonest defects. But Meredith has given a heart and
soul and mind to the vice; in fine raiment and graceful proportions,
smiled upon by the undiscerning, he makes it tread the boards of our
common experience, with the blood and nerves and muscles of manhood.
This is an achievement of which even a man of such singular genius
as his may be proud. Other writers are happy when they succeed in
drawing a type--in immortalizing a single character; but this one
has done something greater, more unique and more imperishable still.
Into space he enables us to stare, marvelling, at something hitherto
barely suspected, now a tangible form with familiar lineaments and
unforgettable tones of voice, a something that we dimly understand
rises up with us and lies down with us, gives the stamp of meanness to
our best endeavours, and misleads us in our noblest aspirations. Sir
Willoughby is the personality of self that floats subtly round us and
centres all our thoughts. It takes a masculine shape because the course
of the world, both civilized and barbaric, is directed by the wheels
of male selfishness. Feminine selfishness has quite another direction.
It affects the domestic circle, the persons and interests immediately
within its scope. It may bring added discomfort to the immediate
victims, but it leaves the world without merrily indifferent, conscious
of superior strength that can always laugh it down, with a vitality
that cannot be sapped and a confidence in laws that form a barrier
against its encroachments. Not so male egoism. This makes straight
for the whole race of women, mercilessly potent by reason of physical
force, and backed by all the laws, written and unwritten, of its own
making.
It is this crushing exposure of the wide-spread plague, the extension
and mingling of its fibres, the crudity and coarseness of its very
refinement and super-fastidiousness, that gives ‘The Egoist’ a
scientific as well as an artistic value, and commands for it in English
literature a place apart.
As a work of art, it is, indeed, the most complete and perfect thing
that Meredith has done--a flawless masterpiece without any of the
writer’s eccentric deviations and mannerisms. Perhaps oppressively
witty, though much less so than ‘Diana,’ striking none but the
delicately comic chord, and turning to pathos upon the point of a
smiling curl of the lip, it carries us through a few weeks’ comedy at
a pleasant canter to the accompaniment of fanciful humour and polished
irony. If we come upon an occasional odd effect--a queer simile, a bit
of isolated poetry lapsed into prose, a bar of pure melody dropped into
speech--we recognise with pleasure and delight the author of ‘Richard
Feverel,’ and we greet him with a cordial smile. This other writer is
new to us, but not the less welcome--less serious, more polished and
more fanciful; and while less of a poet, he is more of an artist--less
philosophic, he is much more scientific. The play of wit is less
sparkling and more penetrative. It shines, a soft luminous light, with
undiminished radiance throughout the book, lending itself less easily
to quotation, baffling even the memory by the quality of the flying
phrases. Upon all subjects of daily life has he something original to
say, and he can even be poetical and fresh, and compel our senses to
delighted thrills upon the worn-out theme of woman’s dress--a theme
that wrecks other writers and leaves them dismayed by the dulness and
insipidity of their own description. Read those lines in ‘The Egoist,’
upon Clara’s dress in a breeze.
The characters, as I have said, are few. Clara, the heroine, described
by Vernon Whitford, that scholar and student of equable temper, as
‘a mountain echo’--an idea that still lingers with us when we have
closed the book as the sum of her sweetness, wholesomeness and natural
charm--and by Mrs. Mountstuart less felicitously as ‘a dainty rogue
in porcelain.’ Here we gather an added something of her exterior, and
_look_ at a mountain echo with the eyes of fashion, just as we see
through the same sharp and unimaginative eyes ‘the sunken brilliancy
of the lean long-walker and scholar in a Phœbus-Apollo turned fasting
friar,’ and the poetess, Lætitia Dale, upon her vivid stroke, ‘coming
with a romantic tale upon her eyelashes.’ This is one of Meredith’s
tricks--the uttering of pointed phrases by the tongues of sharp, clever
women. Sometimes they are far-fetched; always are they too carefully
trimmed and edged, as hasty phrases have not often the felicity of
being edged. In general it is the fault of his characters to talk too
brilliantly, and he forgets that men and women in their commonplace
moods are not habitually metaphorical and literary.
As the essence of self-made man, it may be thought that Sir Willoughby
is meant to represent an unpleasant and an unusual type. Not so at
all. If it had not been for Meredith, he might have gone tranquilly
down to the grave, and not even his worst enemy would have had very
obvious cause to scent the wolf within him. We meet him first upon
his majority--a very fascinating and fastidious young Englishman whom
we gradually understand is the letter ‘I’ vivified and made human,
mentally as well as physically straightened to its erectness, and
as uncompromisingly personal. We heedlessly learn of his dallying
with Lætitia Dale, of the silent and unexacting worship of this soft
rhyming representative of ‘starving women’ who endure their hunger
uncomplainingly, and are too proud to offer themselves for the
sensational pity of a world ever in demand of dramatic situations. We
enjoy a secret satisfaction in his discomfiture when Constantia Durham
leaves him in the lurch and runs off with the more cheerful military
figure, and yet we still hardly realize what manner of man he is when
he in turn plants Lætitia and seeks distraction in three years’ travel.
Meredith makes us understand that he is a youth of spurious niceness,
who objected to his betrothed talking freely about male cousins and
friends, and considered the pursuit of competing admirers a stain upon
her. Cloistral purity was his demand in the market; woman emerging from
an eggshell, ‘somewhat more astonished at things than a chicken ... and
seeing him, with her sex’s eyes, first of all men.’
How much we thank Meredith for showing us the ‘infinite grossness’ of
this demand! And how we relish his quiet laughter at Sir Willoughby’s
loathing of the ‘dust of the world’ touching the privileged object of
his choice. We conclude that Miss Durham was a young person of spirit
and sense when she ran off with Captain Oxford, and heartily wish her
good luck upon her wedding-tour, while Sir Willoughby abroad is holding
an ‘English review of his Maker’s grotesques.’ What a delightful stroke
that is against the British tourist! Thackeray never matched it. If
you would measure it fully, you have but to stand apart and watch the
faces and listen to the criticisms of our fellow-countrymen abroad.
Everything that is not British is grotesque.
As the Creator is just as responsible for foreign countries and foreign
races as for Great Britain, these criticisms, as Meredith wittily
points out, comprise a review of His grotesques. It is in such light
and inimitable pen-strokes, to be found on every page, that he shows
us the man made bare to the very heart. All his social virtues are
ruthlessly traced to the meanest source: his wish for cloistral purity
in woman, his regarding the presence of competing admiration as a soil,
to its true Oriental origin, the monster egoism of his prayer that even
beyond death his bride should be his alone, and of his desire to shape
her character to the feminine of his own, without any consideration
for her natural and healthy preference to be herself. All young men
who think it part of the poetry of love to wish to see the unhappy
maiden of their choice reduced to ashes or incense, and transmuted by
love until they literally become ‘the man they are to marry,’ cannot
do better than study the Egoist, and see for themselves the manner
of man they are. The study will fill them with a sense of horror of
themselves and of the accepted notion of the infinity of love which
Clara, listening gravely, conceived as ‘a narrow dwelling where a voice
droned and ceased not.’ In her sharp apprenticeship as the betrothed
of this amiable young squire she learned to become an attentive
listener. Little else was expected of her. But it was the destiny of
this intelligent and impulsive girl to give Sir Willoughby many a rude
lesson in the sex she represented, that left Constantia’s elopement and
free talk of male cousins and friends in the shade as minor offences
against taste and cloistral reserve. After the preliminary descriptive
pages, the book is completely given up to Clara’s struggle for freedom
and her lover’s desperate efforts to retain her, fearful of ridicule
and the ignominy of a second jilting. She rashly compromises herself
with a brilliant Irishman, while unconsciously her heart is given
to the Phœbus-Apollo turned fasting friar to whom Sir Willoughby,
meditating revenge, intends to hand her over upon granting her the
freedom she claims, rejoicing privately in the fact that his own choice
had irredeemably spotted her for another. There is something pathetic
in the poor Egoist’s delusion, and while we heartily despise him, we
are against our judgment forced to pity him when in the strife his true
character is exposed even to his life-long silent worshipper, Lætitia,
and we see the unhappy gentleman upon his knees to that discarded
devotee imploring her to marry him, so that the county should not say
that he had been despised and rejected by three women, one of them poor
and his inferior. His misfortune and abasement are contemptible in
their cause, and contemptibly borne, nevertheless the something in us
which responds to this terrible monster within him begets the pity of
brotherhood. Degraded, shrunken, stripped of the glory of success, we
see in him a monstrous image of ourselves, of all mankind, so that we
are afraid to turn from him and wring hands with the wretch in a kind
of shamed sympathy. We readily admit the pure comedy of this sublime
absurdity in human form reduced to such shabby dimensions and exposed
for the ridicule of posterity, but we cannot laugh very joyously at the
exposure. There is too much truth in it for the comic muse, and the
pathos is too apparent.
As Sir Willoughby is Meredith’s typical analysis of the male’s
character, so is Diana Warwick his chief type of woman, and just so
ruthlessly as he is drawn is she drawn mercifully--too mercifully,
perhaps, for she is painted in all the glowing colours of love. Mr.
Meredith is not the analyzer of Diana; he is her ardent lover. He
adores her unscrutinizingly, as it behoves the true lover to adore his
lady. He paints her very faults upon worshipping knees, and does not
think it necessary to apologize for her or urge one word of excuse
or deprecation when, following fact, she stoops to a shabby breach
of confidence worthy the lowest new journalist. She is Diana to him
in all her moods, a bewildering and adorable creature, and as such
he expects the reader to swallow her thankfully, rejoicing in her as
he does, wondering at the stupidity and evilness of the world that
condemns her, censuring the meanness of the recreant lover who deserts
her upon discovery of her unexplainable betrayal of his confidences.
If his lady chooses to start out at midnight, fresh from a love-scene
in which she has learnt from her lover a great political secret, to
sell it for a very substantial sum to a London editor, Mr. Meredith
simply follows her as an admiring recorder, and finds it sufficient
explanation to tell us pityingly that she was a child in this world’s
affairs, that she was as ignorant as a child in business matters, and
had no idea of the gravity of her action. This last plea we accept
willingly, for impulsive women like Diana rarely have any notion of the
weight of actions, and never can measure their consequences; but for a
simpleton in worldly affairs she showed a pretty accurate knowledge of
the value of her secret and of its market price, and for a lady to sell
secret information learnt in a love-scene seems to us an unmistakable
fall which, however much we may deplore, we hold ourselves exempt from
admiring, or even condoning, as Diana’s apologist desires us to do.
As an Irishwoman I cannot but be grateful to this big Saxon giant
for his generous advocacy of a famous country-woman whom posterity
persists in holding spotted. He has taken her up in the teeth of
British opinion, and being deeply enamoured of the splendid creature,
he is not satisfied in proceeding to whitewash her, which would have
been a simple enough task, but he has clothed her in soft cloud and
fine radiance, he has all but sketched her wings, and shown her
standing tip-toe on hard, solid earth with glance strained ethereally
upward. Not by any means an angel, but a young goddess, half woman,
a creature of exquisite freshness, originality, bewildering wit and
soaring intellect, as lovely as Aurora, and as cold, purer still, and
more remote from the contamination of gross masculine admiration, than
Diana. Her mind flies upon barbed phrases. Her commonest words take
the shape of pointed, illuminated arrows. She is the beautiful Egeria
of a young minister of state, the immaterial soul of a polished old
statesman, by whom she almost loses her social head, and is only saved
from the block by the stout defence of her devoted friends. She is
sunshine in a delicate and not happy lady’s life, carrying a whiff of
Irish mirth and wit with her delightful presence into the stately and
decorous gloom of English town and country existence, a mental draught
of champagne wherever she goes, all impulse and brightness and warmth
of heart. And how this masterful knight of hers, turned biographer,
lashes those who were stupid and wicked enough to misjudge her! For
every tear, every painful contraction of brow, they forced her to in
life, are they punished by his unsparing pen. He uses it in her defence
like a true crusader’s sword. He reviews her enemies in an almost
passionate anger, names them, notes every conventional trick and fault,
lays bare the tiniest spot upon which to point his dreadful lamp of
ridicule, and then proceeds to shiver their self-respect to atoms, to
disperse their highly-prized, respectable prejudices, and leaves them
divested of all but heavy British stupidity, that prevents them from
seizing the charm and comprehending the personality of this brilliant
young star shot from the Sister Isle into their astonished midst. Her
freshness is the eternally vernal freshness of the shamrock, her faults
and impulses the voice of a generous race seeking expression through
her ardent soul. He makes her enemies his enemies. He wears her colours
nobly, gallantly, as behoves a gentleman in whom the mediæval strain
still runs. He carries her gloriously through the divorce courts,
leaving her wooden Saxon husband, of narrow, official soul, utterly
abased and shrunken, instead of triumphant in her fall. We behold her
after this crucial ordeal clearer, whiter, more radiant than ever;
nearer to the immortal Diana she images by reason of her new freedom;
clear-eyed as a maiden returned to the forest-mists of unsullied
imagination; and behind her in the mire lies the crushed marital form,
unutterably mean and shabby and foolish with his absurd ‘Yah, yah,’ on
his lips.
In the case of her English husband and her recreant English lover, her
defender has no worse fault to urge against them than the stiff-necked
prejudices of race. Both we see like respectable carriage-horses in
harnessed strife with a young war-steed ready for dangerous speed and
nerve-upsetting tricks--a potent, self-willed young creature, sniffing
menacingly at conventionality, audacious from excess of purity,
perilously poised upon every incalculable impulse, and in spite of a
powerful intellect, scatter-brained upon all the ugly brinks in her
career. No wonder the unhappy Saxon gentlemen allied to this wild and
too lovely Hibernian lost their heads and turned tail when it came to
a choice of swallowing her whole and entire and following meekly in
her wake, the obedient satellites Mr. Meredith thinks they ought to
have been, with heart filled with gratitude, and eyes full of love and
admiration.
That they did not do so is their lasting shame and reproach, and he
reviles them as starched officials and stiff-necked Britons. Whereas
another and a less partial biographer would mildly commend them to
our pity, because of their undeniable sufferings at the expense of a
female engine that ran them down and left them in fragments upon her
path, he is only content in piecing the fragments in order the more
powerfully to hold the feeble creatures up to our ridicule. If it had
not been for that fatal newspaper episode, we should have been more
than disposed to share his ardent sympathy, and range ourselves as
warmly as he upon his heroine’s side. But the newspaper episode is
an exceedingly big camel to be asked to swallow without as much as
a wry face, above all to swallow and preserve intact our ideal of a
persecuted, disinterested, and very noble woman. Though not the most
artificial of his books, the atmosphere of ‘Diana’ carries a heavier
scent of the midnight oil than even that garishly brilliant study of
a pair of tragic comedians. There are dialogues in ‘Diana’ that only
stop short of requiring a key--noticeably one after-supper scene when
the air is charged with electricity, and wit oppressively polished
flies hither and thither, broken confusedly upon rainbow sparkles of
thought. Though we are sick of commonplace chatter, the intensity of
self-consciousness and prolonged mental effort involved in such a game
of battledore and shuttlecock, such a desperate intellectual race
for the prize for barbed phrases and skilfully-managed metaphor, are
surely exhausting. Diana and her numerous satellites seem never in the
course of their lives to have enjoyed five minutes’ naturalness, and
never to have known the luxury of mental dressing-gown and night-cap.
Like the sun, their intellects never sleep, know not even the charm
of drowsiness; and it is frequently a strain upon lazy, easy-going
readers, used to Thackeray and Dickens, to follow the unceasing play of
intellectual pyrotechnics. The most beautiful thing in this remarkable
book--next to Meredith’s generous defence of his heroine,--the
tenderest, most naturally, humanly painted, is the sweet and faithful
friendship between two intellectual women, one a soft-hearted,
delicate Englishwoman with the milder and more clinging sentiments of
her race, and the other our vivid Diana, made up of Irish cloud and
Irish laughter, with her robuster and more ardent temperament. This
is a fresh debt that women owe their mighty champion--the recognition
of their capabilities for mutual friendship, faithful love and
generous admiration, which the cynical male habitually denies them.
Emma Dunstane married, loves her bright Tony, as she fondly calls
Diana, above all the world; and Tony, tossed upon a sea of amatory
difficulties, in turn beloved, rejected, and divorced, faithfully loves
her friend Emma above even her faithless and her faithful lovers, of
which Heaven knows she has choice enough. One of them, Mr. Sullivan
Smith, is a sensational and finely-natured Irishman, too apparently
created after Lever to be of value as a serious study.
The story is well known. A beautiful, witty, young Irishwoman marries
a wooden English official of docketed opinions well phrased. She
is loved by many, notably one other Englishman, Redworth, a fine
contrast with her husband, and Lord Dannisburgh, whose admiration
excites her husband’s jealousy and leads to divorce. Her faithful
friends throughout are Lady Dunstane and Redworth; afterwards Percy
Dacier, at first suspecting and coldly scrutinizing, goes over to her
and finally succumbs. He is a stiff and starched young Englishman,
faultlessly correct and attractive after his fashion, which is the
reverse of a warm one. Diana loves him, but there is a sort of Diana
mist thrown over her love, which shows it as burning a cold clear
light like ineffectual sunbeams upon a glacier. The young minister of
state and she are engaged, and he returns late one night to breathe
a state secret into her ears. This is the blot upon her character,
the irretrievable blot upon her life. When he has kissed her for the
first time--though no word so barbaric and indelicate as ‘kiss’ has
been written in the record by the writer, fastidiously sensitive in
preserving the snowy plumage of his paragon--explaining that he is but
a mortal lover after all, she says the fault was hers that she was
degraded. This is straining at gnats to swallow an enormous camel.
She goes forth from this first embrace to sell his political news
to a leading editor. Fact or fiction, we cannot get the unutterable
ugliness of it out of our minds. But whether Dacier was justified in
throwing her over for the action is for male judges to say. Great and
passionate love, the sort of love such a woman should excite, would, I
imagine, have found a ready road to pardon. Dacier is a cold-blooded
politician, with whom we have not much sympathy, and are not sorry
to see him degraded in his creator’s eyes, and, beside his brilliant
betrayer, shrunken to shabby dimensions. He goes straight off--marries
a pious and virtuous young heiress, and drops out of view. The stricken
lady, reduced to a state of suicidal prostration, about whom the
voices of rumour are for a second time busily and unkindly engaged, is
not without her champions. Mr. Sullivan Smith and Arthur Rhodes meet
on their way to propose for her, and eventually her faithful lover,
Redworth, wins what he gallantly and manfully regards as a prize, and
thus the end is saved from tragedy. We leave Tony too dazzled to know
if her views of life are brighter, and bearing love for a dower to her
husband. Only we continue to wish she had not visited that newspaper
office.
Equally artificial and brilliant, and of a fascinating brevity, is
‘Tragic Comedians.’ Limelight plays blindingly upon the characters,
and Clotilda and Alvan seem to flash before us like a couple of
splendid meteors, to faint and fade in their own exhausted light. We
blink and gaze after them, thrilled, startled, and subdued by their
resplendency, with a keen sense of the theatrical in their portraits
and in their actions. Garish the book is, but most vivid, of a
fascination not to be coldly analyzed, of a charm indescribable. It is
simply the short story of the wooing of a royal lover, of his lady’s
betrayal of his love, and of her marriage with his rival. Never was
a wooing like Alvan’s, never such a lover. That is why we doubt the
reality, and dream of the footlights. We listen to him and read his
telegrams, and in spite of the Alpine sunlight and the cool mountain
air, we think of fireworks. We read of Clotilda’s golden hair, and we
picture her flying through the clouds, chased by her fellow-meteor and
fronted by the black night of marriage that extinguishes her after his
decent burial. Some of their sayings seem written across the memory
in letters of dancing light, and we dream of the scenes enacted by
this pair of tragic comedians long after we have left them. Of all Mr.
Meredith’s lovers, Alvan is the one who fascinates and thrills us most.
Taking a general survey of his qualities, we may note that Meredith
the writer and man is always more interesting than even his best
characters. It is how he develops them, what he thinks of them, his
inimitable asides and epigrams, that we look for most. In this he is
not Shakespearian, for whereas we get nothing of Shakespeare in any of
his plays, in all of his books do we get much of Mr. Meredith. And in
none of them too much. The one in which he sinks himself completely
is, to my thinking, except as a remarkable _tour de force_, the
least interesting. This is the ‘Shaving of Shagpat.’ George Eliot
described it as pleasant light reading. This reads like a joke, if so
illustrious and serious a personage as George Eliot could be deemed
guilty of perpetrating a joke so mild. The story and its abounding
verses are more Eastern than probably anything in Oriental literature,
and if we had not ‘Vathek’ as a precedent, we should be disposed
to regard the feat as an incredible one. For after ‘The Shaving of
Shagpat,’ ‘The Arabian Nights’ reads as a model of sober commonplace
and the epitome of everyday experience. Not only is the style Oriental,
but facts and colouring and atmosphere are fabulously so. The
impression left upon the bewildered reader is that of a kind of dazed
passage beaten through a mass of broken jewels in a soft artificial
light, richly perfumed with the heavy odours of Eastern flowers and
scents. Houris and genii; roses, lilies, nightingales; diamonds,
opals, rubies, and sapphires; jets of flame starting into illuminated
fountains from the heart of lilies set in opal lakes; winged voyages
through the pure Eastern air, over cities and plains and sunlit and
moonlit landscape; impassioned Oriental songs, gorgeous metaphor
richly massed through a wearisome brilliance of colours and imagery;
wild amorous speech and tales, and descriptions of feminine beauty to
turn the head of a sage and awaken a throb of envy in the breast of
Théophile Gautier. Conceive, in fact, every strong imaginative effect
heaped in reckless profusion, till, from sheer fatigue of overwrought
senses, we hail with delight and relief the seizure of the Identical,
the final triumph of the barber, and the shaving of Shagpat. There are
many beautiful passages in it, and the humour of the parody is both
subtle and exquisite, but it is too luscious for a single reading,
though we may agree with the poet:
‘Ripe with oft telling, and old is the tale,
But ’tis of the sort that can never grow stale.’
This is Mr. Meredith, un-English and impersonal, and he pleases us
less. We prefer his human comedy and his home comic muse to this
parody of distant literature. We like best to feel his Saxon iron grasp
and his deep glance ransacking humanity, as it lives and breathes, to
its uttermost depth, and twisting it to every unimaginable revelation.
We feel then in the presence of our prose Browning, earnest even in
his laughter; Titanic, with an unsuspected softness of heart beneath a
rugged and untender manner, and upon a homely shaft of mother-wit ready
to shade from us the scientific penetration of his inward vision of us.
His wit is like a rainbow lighting up a stormy sky, and his mocking
carries no baleful suggestion of a sneer.