GEORGE MEREDITH’S MEN AND WOMEN.
Like Shakespeare and Scott, Mr. Meredith is uniformly gallant in his
romances. With the exception of Richard, his young heroes are generally
feeble youths; sometimes pleasant and good-natured, like Harry Richmond
and Evan Harrington, and at others bloodless, make-believe men like
Wilfred Pole and Percy Dacier. But all, as in the case of Scott’s
amiable young men and Shakespeare’s lovers, are merely foils for the
greater worth of the heroines. Imogen, Juliet, Beatrice, Miranda, the
ladies of the gentlemen of Verona, Portia, and Lady Macbeth are all
unworthily mated, and as Mr. Ruskin has said of Scott’s heroes, we
are left wondering at the extreme and unmerited good fortune of these
various young men who have drawn prizes, apparently as rewards for
their amiable and pleasing manners. The fluted tenor of romance is on
the whole an ill-treated personage. We invent him to do the love-making
instead of ourselves with the different ideals of feminine perfection
we imagine. But with his qualifications, his serious merits, we are not
concerned. So long as he is handsome, has the art of using his voice,
his mouth, and his eyes, carries his doublet and hose gracefully,
twangs the guitar of loverhood musically, and recites his sonnets to
advantage--behold the virtues we demand of him. He must be picturesque,
above all, and the bloom of youth must lie upon his cheek, else as
a sonneteer and troubadour is he pronounced unserviceable by the
orchestra.
Now, the heroine is quite another matter, as Mr. Meredith, following
great examples, shows us. She must claim our sympathy, our love, and
our admiration. She must be surpassingly fair, and no less lovely of
mind and soul. We are to quit her enamoured and regretful, vividly
aware of her attractions, both mental and physical. And this has Mr.
Meredith achieved in the case of all his heroines--maidens and widows.
They are beautiful, witty, pure, womanly, and most captivating. Each
one holds us enslaved as we follow her fortunes. She has but to open
her lips, and we are at her feet. In spite of his harshnesses, Mr.
Meredith remains great by his generous sympathy with the weak. In the
strife between men and women, a strife he never blinks away, or feigns
to discredit because his men choose to fall in love with his women,
he ranges himself upon the side of women always and inevitably--and
what a defence in the ranks of the enemy! He brings no drivelling,
one-sided sympathy to bear upon the subject, but clear, logical sense
and a keen eye for the weaknesses of the sex he defends. He laughs
at woman sometimes, and enjoys a witticism and a taste of cruelty
at her expense. But he makes it understood that his laughter is not
scoffing and his cruelty is not bitter. On the contrary, they but
add flavour to his championship, and make us the prouder of the big
blows he directs against her tyrant. The tyranny of his own sex he
doubts as little as its selfishness, which he has immortalized past
cool endurance for man in the person of Sir Willoughby Patterne. The
conventional woman, all horrors and shivers at the aspect of the
natural and undecorated, made up of drawing-room theories and lap-dog
sentiments, he rejects as unworthy of that which he conceives woman
might be, if relieved from the sentimental trammels and restrictions
that the selfish grossness of man has imposed upon her. He believes
that women would be all the better for living more as men do, and men
for meeting them half-way--one sex modified by the other, and mutually
ennobled; eating healthily in acknowledgment of all healthy appetites,
as opposed to the coarse Byronic view that condemns them to live upon
air and the sentiments. Sandra talks freely of potatoes, fine ones
too, while her sentimental lover writhes and shivers, feeling pelted
by those potatoes, and the founts of love are nearly dried at the root
of his heart. Can a young gentleman with a proper respect for himself
feel romantically disposed towards a young woman, even if she be
divinely beautiful, when she owns to a capacity to dine off potatoes?
or ascend to heaven on an aria when the prima-donna refreshes herself
with bottled stout? For such types, frequent enough, he suggests that
sunlight must be too strong and gross, and wonders why they have not
set their wits to invent some soft extract of a shadowy illumination
wherewith to diminish the terrors and uglinesses of mere nature.
He acknowledges the influence of woman in no false, Frenchified way,
but accepts it as the strong ordeal and revelation of man. ‘Women have
us back to the conditions of primitive man, or they shoot us higher
than the topmost star.... By their state is our civilization judged;
and if it is hugely animal still, that is because primitive men abound
and will have their pasture.’
Of his men, it is the old and oldish young that he draws best. His
social epigrammatists and his grave, elderly gentlemen, or his caustic,
elderly humorists, like Sir Austin Feverel, the immortal wise youth
whose wit never goes to sleep, the gigantic fraud, Richmond Roy, and
his _fidus Achates_; Tracy Runningbrook, Stukely Culbrett, Seymour
Austen, and a host of such others. We must not forget Clara Middleton’s
Irish colonel, a very pleasant figure in ‘The Egoist,’ the German
princess’s father and Everard Romfrey. All these men have a point in
common. Their wits are keenly alert, and they know not how to be
dull. They are also gentlemen. Not that all, or many of Mr. Meredith’s
male characters of high social standing, can lay claim to this
qualification. There is in him, as in Thackeray, a singularly strong
flavour of democracy, and a tendency to reveal us the snob concealed by
the varnish of breeding. The young gentlemen in ‘Evan Harrington’ are
the exact reverse of our ideal of the article. Harry Jocelyn borrows
money from the tradesman he insults before repaying it; gets money from
him to give to a wretched girl betrayed by him, and does not apply it
to the purpose for which it has been given; conducts himself in all
circumstances as an offensive boor and an abject cur. The young lords
and squires around him do likewise. Some of the gentlemen and peers
in ‘Richard Feverel’ are very unpleasant and shady company, and in
‘Rhoda Fleming,’ Mr. Algernon Blancove would find the average clerk in
the back streets of a manufacturing town his superior in manners and
morals. We get some queer specimens of upper-class snobocracy in ‘Harry
Richmond,’ and what, pray, is Sir Willoughby Patterne if he is not a
wondrously decorative and polished snob, contemplating complacently his
own superiority in the mirror of his mind’s eye?
On the whole, Mr. Meredith is hard on his own sex. Sometimes he draws
a young fool like Lord Palmet in ‘Beauchamp’s Career,’ who can be a
lord, a fool, and a gentleman at the same time; who makes us laugh
and holds our sympathies, there is something so extremely natural
in his idiocy and something so very engaging in his candour; and
then we feel that the author is not hard on him, and has no desire
to excite our contempt. But this tenderness to young men of gentle
birth is rare in Mr. Meredith’s volumes. His laughter at them is not
usually soft-hearted, but grim, as in the case of the youth who bought
cigars to save himself from excesses in charity, and who, after an
ill-digested dinner and wine, sat so long without moving a leg that he
indulged in the belief that he had reflected profoundly, and woke up
with the philosophic intent to forget himself; being under some doom,
nobody caring for him, happiness unknown to him, born under a bad star,
and ‘following his youthful wisdom, the wounded hart dragged his slow
limbs toward the halls of brandy and song.’
As an apology for his somewhat merciless dissection of fools like these
young men, Mr. Meredith adds:
‘One learns to have compassion for fools, by studying them; and the
fool, though nature is wise, is next door to nature. He is naked in
his simplicity; he can tell us much, and suggest more. My excuse for
dwelling on him is that he holds the link of my story. Where fools are
numerous, one of them must be prominent, now and then, in a veracious
narration. There comes an hour when the veil drops on him, he not
being always clean to the discreeter touch.’
And so he diligently leads us through the unshadowy mental recesses
of the fool in question, as a sample of others abounding, not
compassionately by any means, with perhaps too pointed a suggestion
of sneer on the tip of his caustic pen. He shows him awaking to the
conviction that England is no place for him to dwell in--a conviction
we cordially share, with the consciousness that England alone could
have produced him--with visions of himself married to a wife who in the
colonies would make butter or cheese while he rode on horseback through
space; saw himself rejoicing her with a declaration of love, astounding
her with a proposition of marriage, and in little more than a week
sailing on the high seas, newborn; ‘nothing of civilization about him,
save a few last very first-rate cigars, which he projected to smoke on
the poop of the vessel, and so dream of the world he left behind.’
If this is compassionate treatment of the fools, we wonder what Mr.
Meredith would be likely to regard as severe handling of the genus.
Indeed, Algernon Blancove, as the typical brainless young English
gentleman, of no morals and less manners, runs in several varied
editions throughout the author’s works. We come upon him under
different names, sometimes more of a boor, as in the case of Harry
Jocelyn; sometimes more of a gentleman, as in the person of Ferdinand
Laxley, but ever drawn from the same persistently objectionable type.
His older men, like Major Waring and Seymour Austen, he touches with
a truly remarkable kindliness; a gentle sadness and reasonableness
pervade the atmosphere in which he steeps their picture, and such
is their humane influence upon him, that he drops, or nearly drops,
metaphor, and adopts the language of commonplace but cultivated
humanity. If, as has been said by M. Taine, George Sand makes us wish
to be in love and the English novelists aim to make us wish to be
married, Mr. Meredith may be accused of a desire to prove to us that
in men middle-age is more attractive and lovable than youth, and that
the sedate sadness that accompanies it but adds to the dignity of life,
its thoughtful measure never exceeding a refined and placid geniality,
and knowing no other discord than a very mild sense of disapprobation.
In his men of this period, and even beyond it, he indeed portrays us
thorough gentlemen, patient and honourable men of dignified habits of
life and of keenly alert wits. Sometimes they have just a flavour of
fire and brimstone unconsumed in an anterior stage, as in the case of
Beauchamp’s delightful uncle. He is a sort of twelfth-century baron
pleasantly masquerading as a nineteenth-century country gentleman, and
more than one romantic young person would be indisposed to hesitate
upon the side of youth, if ordered to make her choice between this
elderly gentleman and his fiery nephew. Nearly on the first page he
enchants us with the honest wholesomeness and vigour of his talk, when,
in reply to something Beauchamp has said, he exclaims:
‘Damned fine speech! Now you get out of that trick of prize-orationing.
I call it snuffery, sir, it’s all to your own nose! You’re talking to
me, not to a gallery. Cæsar wraps his head in his robe; he gets his dig
in the ribs for all his attitudinizing. It’s very well for a man to
talk like that who owns no more than his bare bodkin life. Tall talk’s
his jewellery; he must have his dandification in bunkum. You ought to
know better. Property and titles are worth having, whether you are
worthy of them or a disgrace to your class. The best way of defending
them is to keep a strong fist, and take care you don’t draw your
fore-foot back more than enough.’
Such he walks the book, a stout and resolute old gentleman, with words
of sense upon his lips, capable of manly tenderness and dignified
concessions, and the embodiment of all virile virtues as well as those
belonging to his class. While the charming French girl and the sweet
English maiden hold our senses thrilled, it is this mediæval baron that
soundly raps our nodding judgment, and keeps our wits awake.
Sometimes, as in the case of Edward Blancove, Mr. Meredith wheels us
round from cold dislike into sympathy and admiration. But not often.
His unpleasant young men are not more susceptible of conversion
than they are usually to be found in real life, and he is not fond
of playing such tricks as this one, wherein we get from the lips of
a coldly argumentative and sharply legal young gentleman, who has,
hitherto, conducted himself as something of a well-bred knave, such
honest words as these:
‘Plainly, sir, in God’s name, hear me out. She’s--what shall I call
her? my mistress, my sweetheart, if you like--let the name be
anything--“wife” it should have been and shall be--I left her, and have
left her, and have not looked on her for many months. I thought I was
tired of her--I was under odd influences--witchcraft, it seems. I could
believe in witchcraft now. Brutal selfishness is the phrase for my
conduct. I have found out my villainy. I have not done a day’s sensible
work, nor had a single clear thought, since I parted from her. She has
had brain-fever. She has been in the hospital. She is now prostrate
with misery. While she suffered, I--I can’t look back on myself. If
I had to plead before you for more than manly consideration, I could
touch you. I am my own master, and am ready to subsist by my own
efforts; there is no necessity for me to do more than say I abide by
the choice I make, and my own actions. In deciding to marry her, I do a
good thing, I do a just thing. I will prove to you that I have done a
wise thing.’
Such words as these would redeem a stormier and a shabbier youth than
Edward Blancove’s; they toss him up from the brink of common rascality
upon the verge of quiet heroism. We are forced by them, not into
condonation only, but into respect and admiring amazement, and we are
almost glad of a fault that has been so nobly redeemed.
Apart from any other claim he may have upon his generation, Mr.
Meredith’s greatest and most original will ever remain his marvellous
knowledge of woman. All young girls upon the verge of womanhood should
be recommended an exhaustive study of him upon this subject, as a
healthy antidote against the nauseous and abominable travesties of
themselves and their species circulated by the libraries, in which
volumes, however bad the men may be drawn, the women are ten times
worse, fifty times more unnatural, and at least a hundred times more
corrupting to the sane judgment. From him, instead of the current
inanities in which the typical heroine of the circulating libraries
is enveloped past recognition of human sisterhood (thank Heaven! for
a fraternity with the monstrous doll would be a greater grievance
than any we owe unkind nature), will they learn much upon their sex
that will give them material for long and profound reflection. They
will learn that the eggshell appearance of woman upon the boards of
experience is a gross exaction, the remnant of a grosser stage in
man--that the demand is the reverse of a compliment to her. Instead
of that ragged aphorism (clothing of a lie), ‘that the hardest on
women are women themselves,’ they will be offered a higher and juster
estimate of their own natural mercy, and will hear ‘that a woman in
the pillory restores the original bark of brotherhood to mankind,’ a
remark to give them pause and set their brains in another direction.
They will also learn, what they can never sufficiently appreciate,
that ‘what a woman thinks of women is the test of her nature;’ that
‘in their judgments upon women, men are females, voices of the present
sexual dilemma,’ and that in their desire to have a ‘a still woman who
can make a constant society of her pins and needles,’ ‘they create by
stoppage a volcano, and are amazed at its eruptiveness,’ and a word
upon which we cannot too insistently weigh, a gallant word from a male
pen, ‘that the motive life with women must be in the head, equally with
men.’
THE END.
BILLING AND SONS, PRINTERS, GUILDFORD
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.