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THE MODERN
STUDENT'S LIBRARY
EACH VOLUME EDITED BY A LEADING
AMERICAN AUTHORITY
This series is composed of such works as are conspicuous in the
province of literature for their enduring influence. Every volume
is recognized as essential to a liberal education and will tend to
infuse a love for true literature and an appreciation of the
qualities which cause it to endure.
_A descriptive list of the volumes published in this series appears
in the last pages of this volume_
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
_THE MODERN STUDENT'S LIBRARY_
THE ORDEAL OF RICHARD FEVEREL
THE ORDEAL
OF
RICHARD FEVEREL
A HISTORY OF A FATHER AND SON
BY
GEORGE MEREDITH
EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION
BY
FRANK W. CHANDLER
PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AND COMPARATIVE LITERATURE AND DEAN OF THE
COLLEGE OF LIBERAL ARTS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
NEW YORK CHICAGO BOSTON ATLANTA
SAN FRANCISCO DALLAS
COPYRIGHT, 1896, 1917, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
Printed in the United States of America
_All rights reserved. No part of this book
may be reproduced in any form without
the permission of Charles Scribner's Sons_
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I.--THE INMATES OF RAYNHAM ABBEY 1
II.--SHOWING HOW THE FATES SELECTED THE FOURTEENTH BIRTHDAY
TO TRY THE STRENGTH OF THE SYSTEM 9
III.--THE MAGIAN CONFLICT 16
IV.--ARSON 21
V.--ADRIAN PLIES HIS HOOK 30
VI.--JUVENILE STRATAGEMS 35
VII.--DAPHNE'S BOWER 42
VIII.--THE BITTER CUP 47
IX.--A FINE DISTINCTION 55
X.--RICHARD PASSES THROUGH HIS PRELIMINARY ORDEAL, AND IS
THE OCCASION OF AN APHORISM 60
XI.--IN WHICH THE LAST ACT OF THE BAKEWELL COMEDY IS CLOSED
IN A LETTER 67
XII.--THE BLOSSOMING SEASON 72
XIII.--THE MAGNETIC AGE 83
XIV.--AN ATTRACTION 92
XV.--FERDINAND AND MIRANDA 97
XVI.--UNMASKING OF MASTER RIPTON THOMPSON 106
XVII.--GOOD WINE AND GOOD BLOOD 115
XVIII.--THE SYSTEM ENCOUNTERS THE WILD OATS SPECIAL PLEA 120
XIX.--A DIVERSION PLAYED ON A PENNY WHISTLE 124
XX.--CELEBRATES THE TIME-HONOURED TREATMENT OF A DRAGON
BY THE HERO 127
XXI.--RICHARD IS SUMMONED TO TOWN TO HEAR A SERMON 145
XXII.--INDICATES THE APPROACHES OF FEVER 153
XXIII.--CRISIS IN THE APPLE-DISEASE 163
XXIV.--OF THE SPRING PRIMROSE AND THE AUTUMNAL 175
XXV.--IN WHICH THE HERO TAKES A STEP 180
XXVI.--RECORDS THE RAPID DEVELOPMENT OF THE HERO 199
XXVII.--CONTAINS AN INTERCESSION FOR THE HEROINE 213
XXVIII.--RELATES HOW PREPARATIONS FOR ACTION WERE CONDUCTED
UNDER THE APRIL OF LOVERS 216
XXIX.--IN WHICH THE LAST ACT OF THE COMEDY TAKES THE PLACE
OF THE FIRST 233
XXX.--CELEBRATES THE BREAKFAST 246
XXXI.--THE PHILOSOPHER APPEARS IN PERSON 255
XXXII.--PROCESSION OF THE CAKE 262
XXXIII.--NURSING THE DEVIL 279
XXXIV.--CONQUEST OF AN EPICURE 290
XXXV.--CLARE'S MARRIAGE 310
XXXVI.--A DINNER-PARTY AT RICHMOND 325
XXXVII.--MRS. BERRY ON MATRIMONY 341
XXXVIII.--AN ENCHANTRESS 352
XXXIX.--THE LITTLE BIRD AND THE FALCON: A BERRY TO THE
RESCUE! 376
XL.--CLARE'S DIARY 392
XLI.--AUSTIN RETURNS 409
XLII.--NATURE SPEAKS 420
XLIII.--AGAIN THE MAGIAN CONFLICT 429
XLIV.--THE LAST SCENE 437
XLV.--LADY BLANDISH TO AUSTIN WENTWORTH 454
INTRODUCTION
I
Among the Victorian novelists, George Meredith occupies a place apart.
Unlike Dickens, Thackeray, and Eliot, he appeals to a select few. Those
who appreciate him are folk of his own temper--cultivated, intellectual,
urbane. They are persons of taste and discernment. They are generally
the middle-aged rather than the young. They are those who, aloof and
contemplative, relish the comedy of life, rather than those who throw
themselves whole-heartedly into the game. It is not to be marvelled at,
therefore, that Meredith should have won his way slowly, or that
recognition, when it came, should have rendered his position unique
and secure.
Meredith's career as a writer of prose was opened, in 1856, with
_The Shaving of Shagpat_, an experiment in fantastic Oriental
romance. In the following year, he exploited German romance less
successfully in _Farina, a Legend of Cologne_. Having thus trained
his 'prentice hand, he passed to mastery of his craft in _The Ordeal
of Richard Feverel_, published in 1859. This was his first modern
novel, and probably his best. It showed him, not only expert in the
use of language and original in literary technic, but distinguished,
also, as an observer of the world and an analyst of character. The
psychological novel of George Eliot, just emerging, found here a
rival even more subtle. _Adam Bede_, a twin-birth with _Feverel_,
although detailed in its exploration of motive and feeling, demanded
less mental effort on the part of its readers; it accordingly
attracted much greater attention. Whereas it was often reprinted, no
second edition of _Feverel_ came from the press for nearly two
decades.
In the meantime, Meredith had continued his course undeterred by
lack of popular approval, writing six other novels before the
appearance, in 1879, of _The Egoist_--most characteristic of all.
Two novels in particular reflected his experience of Italy, gained
while acting there as war correspondent in 1866. The first was
_Emilia in England_ (1864), later rechristened _Sandra Belloni_. The
second was its sequel _Vittoria_ (1867). The other works of the
period comprise the semi-farcical _Evan Harrington_ (1861); the
serious _Rhoda Fleming_ (1865); the clever _Harry Richmond_
(1870-71); and Meredith's favorite--_Beauchamp's Career_ (1874-75).
It is _The Egoist_, however, that most completely illustrates its
author's conception of the novel of types. In this work, with rare
skill and comic _elan_, if with a persistency a little wearisome,
he lays bare the secrets of a heart and intellect thoroughly
self-centered, proceeding so obviously from the desire to make
out a case that he is likely to displease those who value story, yet
satisfying those who enjoy brilliant comment on character and a
study of its intricacies.
In his later novels, Meredith never forgot the typical in attending
to the particular, even though _The Tragic Comedians_ (1880)
reflected incidents in the life of the socialist leader Lassalle,
and _Diana of the Crossways_ (1885) certain traits of Sheridan's
granddaughter, Mrs. Norton. _One of Our Conquerors_ (1891), _Lord
Ormont and his Aminta_ (1894), and _The Amazing Marriage_ (1895)
bring to a close the catalogue of Meredith's fiction, except for the
unfinished _Celt and Saxon_ published after his death.
Of Meredith as a poet this is not the place to speak. Suffice it to
say that he did his first writing in verse, issuing a volume when
twenty-three, and several others later in life, the best known being
his sequence of irregular sonnets entitled _Modern Love_ (1867).
His poetry, like his prose, is rich in content but difficult at
times by reason of its crabbed and meticulous expression--a trait
due to no obscurity of thought or lack of feeling, but rather to the
desire to compress much meaning within a cryptic phrase. As a
playwright, Meredith attempted comedy in The _Sentimentalists_,
which was acted posthumously. As an essayist, he fathered a
memorable discussion of the comic spirit and its uses, made concrete
in his novels.
Meredith's life was comparatively uneventful. He was born in 1828 at
Portsmouth, the son of a naval outfitter. Early left an orphan, he
was educated in Germany, and, returning to England, studied law,
experimented in journalism, and fell in with a group of intellectuals
led by Frederic Harrison and John Morley. He became literary
adviser to the publishers Chapman and Hall; he edited for a
short period _The Fortnightly Review_, and served abroad as
correspondent for _The Morning Post_. But most of his maturity was
passed in rural retirement in Surrey. He was twice married, at first
unhappily to a daughter of the novelist, Thomas Love Peacock, and
then more fortunately to a Miss Vulliamy, who bore him two children.
His fame grew very slowly. Not until the age of sixty was he
recognized as among the chief English novelists. But at the time of
his death, in 1909, he was admittedly the foremost man of letters in
Great Britain.
II
Meredith is first and last an intellectualist. Hence his preference
for the psychological novel, for the novel of types, for the novel
that is half essay, for the novel of distinctive style. Hence, also,
his conception of the importance for the novelist of comedy and the
comic spirit. Comedy, according to Meredith, is embodied mind, and
its function is to expose violations of rational law. It is common
sense chastising with the laughter of reason aberrations from the
sensible. Comedy measures individual shortcomings by the social
norm. It results from "the broad Alpine survey of the spirit born of
our united social intelligence." It is "a game played to throw
reflections upon social life, and it deals with human nature in the
drawing-room of civilized men and women, where we have no dust of
the struggling outer world, no mire, no violent crashes, to make the
correctness of the representation convincing." Comedy is thus
refined rather than Rabelaisian; it is impartial rather than
sentimental. It relies upon creating ideal figures that epitomize
mankind in certain follies. It is typical and general in character,
whereas tragedy is concerned primarily with the individual.
"The comic spirit conceives a definite situation for a number of
characters, and rejects all accessories in the exclusive pursuit of
them and their speech." On the stage, the great master of such
comedy is Moliere, and in the novel, we might add, Meredith.
Meredith's confession of faith in the efficacy of the comic spirit
is given in the prelude to _The Egoist_, and in these words of his
famous _Essay_: "If you believe that our civilization is founded in
common-sense, you will, when contemplating men, discern a Spirit
overhead.... It has the sage's brows, and the sunny malice of a faun
lurks at the corners of the half-closed lips.... Its common aspect
is one of unsolicitous observation.... Men's future upon earth does
not attract it; their honesty and shapeliness in the present does;
and whenever they wax out of proportion, overblown...; whenever they
offend sound reason, fair justice; are false in humility or mined
with conceit,... the Spirit overhead will look humanly malign and
cast an oblique light on them, followed by volleys of silvery
laughter. That is the Comic Spirit."
Unquestionably it is by the aid of this spirit that Meredith writes
his novels, even including such a tragedy from the victim's point of
view as _Richard Feverel_. For Meredith is theoretic or nothing.
Conceiving of a folly to be displayed and made ridiculous, he
invents persons and situations best to accomplish his purpose. He
is, therefore, no mere realist examining the confused detail of
actual life "by the watchmaker's eye in luminous rings eruptive of
the infinitesimal." He is rather an idealist, who holds it to be the
business of art to render life in quintessence. The artist must both
simplify and elaborate. First, he must simplify experience into
typical deeds and persons, eliminating from his scheme the merely
accidental and particular. Second, he must elaborate his
simplification, presenting it through representative concrete
instances that it may lose the aspect of an abstract formula and
acquire emotional significance. Meredith is thus an intellectualist
engaged in playing a game of literary chess. He has made the pattern
on his board and designed the pieces, and he moves them according to
a pre-arranged plan. Just as his Sir Austin seeks to enact the role
of Providence in determining the career of Richard Feverel, so
Meredith plays Providence to his personages, and, more than most
novelists, he visibly controls their fate.
Since Meredith's folk are etherealized specimens of humanity set and
kept in motion by their creator, it is his attitude toward them that
interests us quite as much as their actions. Meredith's attitude is
determined by his comic outlook upon life. Unswayed by the petty
prejudices of his people, he surveys them with Olympian serenity,
aware of a hundred impulses and errors in their conduct that will
lead to conclusions undreamt of by themselves but clearly foreseen
by the novelist and his readers. From a rarer atmosphere than that
in which his people move, Meredith looks down upon their whimsies
and their deeds with a smile of calm omniscience.
Moreover, he separates himself from them by a wall of clever
comment, sometimes sparkling and ironical, sometimes soberly
extended to the proportions of an essay. Indeed, his novels are
sometimes one-third narrative and two-thirds essay, with the
dissertational manner infecting the narrative parts incurably. No
one, I suppose, would continue reading _The Egoist_ merely from
interest in its plot. To enjoy it one must relish inspecting at
leisure the artificial attitudes of artificial people and listening,
not merely to their smart chatter, but to the smarter discourse of
the master of the puppets, who, while making them dance, lectures
for the edification of the elect. Thus Meredith, having shown his
hero touched by jealousy, lapses into a little essay on the theme.
"Remember the poets upon Jealousy," he writes. "It is to be haunted
in the heaven of two by a Third; preceded or succeeded, therefore
surrounded, embraced, hugged by this infernal Third; it is love's
bed of burning marl; to see and taste the withering Third in the
bosom of sweetness; to be dragged through the past and find the fair
Eden of it sulphurous; to be dragged to the gates of the future and
glory to behold them blood; to adore the bitter creature trebly and
with treble power to clutch her by the windpipe; it is to be
cheated, derided, shamed, and abject and supplicating, and
consciously demoniacal in treacherousness, and victoriously
self-justified in revenge." Needless to say, generalizations of this
sort, intruding upon the narrative at every turn, choke its progress
and prove distracting.
Almost equally distracting is Meredith's predilection for resorting
to the methods of comedy while writing fiction. As W. C. Brownell
has put it; "The necessities of comedy, the irruption of new
characters, their disappearance after they have done their turn,
expectation balked by shifting situations, the frequent postponement
of the denouement when it particularly impends, and the alleviation
of impatience by a succession of subordinate climaxes--all the
machinery of the stage, in fact--impair the narrative."
III
But if the tricks of the essayist and the playwright are freely
borrowed by Meredith, sometimes to his disadvantage and to ours,
they are nevertheless in a measure appropriate to the kind of
fiction he affects. For Meredith is a psychological novelist. He is
bent upon displaying the inward process of the mind. As Richard Le
Galliene has said of him: "The passion of his genius is ... the
tracing of the elemental in the complex; the registration of the
infinitesimal vibrations of first causes, the tracking in human life
of the shadowiest trail of primal instinct, the hairbreadth
measurement of subtle psychological tangents: and the embodiment of
these results in artistic form." Meredith, in _Richard Feverel_,
declares that for the novel "An audience will come to whom it will
be given to see the elementary machinery at work.... To them nothing
will be trivial.... They will see the links of things as they pass,
and wonder not, as foolish people now do, that this great matter
came out of that small one." Certainly Meredith's efforts have
tended to realize that time. But the psychology of his characters is
general rather than individual. You are conscious that these minds
are typical, or even symbolic. They belong to an imaginary and
rational world treated as though it were real.
An incidental passage in _Beauchamp's Career_ shows that Meredith
has understood both his limitations and his peculiar ability. "My
way," he writes, "is like a Rhone island in the summer drought,
stony, unattractive, and difficult between the two forceful streams
of the unreal and the over-real which delight mankind--honour to the
conjurors! My people conquer nothing, win none! they are actual yet
uncommon. It is the clockwork of the brain that they are directed to
set in motion, and--poor troop of actors to vacant benches!--the
conscience residing in thoughtfulness which they would appeal to;
and if you are there impervious to them we are lost."
In Meredith's novels, which indeed reveal in operation "the
clockwork of the brain," the author has taken care still further to
intellectualize his appeal by means of his style. His technic holds
attention; he is an artificer of style, and, as such, he writes a
style of artifice. He seeks to express himself with novelty and
distinction. If a boy runs, Meredith speaks of him as being seen to
bound "and taking a lift of arms, fly aloft, clapping heels." If a
woman runs, Meredith writes: "She was fleet; she ran as though a
hundred little feet were bearing her onward smooth as water over the
lawn and the sweeps of grass of the park, so swiftly did the hidden
pair multiply one another to speed her.... Suddenly her flight wound
to an end in a dozen twittering steps, and she sank." If a heroine
of eighteen would take leave of her admirer, she says: "We have met.
It is more than I have merited. We part. In mercy let it be forever.
Oh, terrible word! Coined by the passions of our youth, it comes to
us for our sole riches when we are bankrupt of earthly treasures,
and is the passport given by Abnegation unto Woe that prays to quit
this probationary sphere."
Fancy any human being--least of all a girl--discoursing thus! But,
no matter how simple a thought or action, Meredith sends it forth
arrayed in finer gear than Solomon in all his glory. It is
beribboned with metaphor and personification; it is beflounced with
epigram and allegory. It is truth rendered more precious, as the
medieval critics advised, by being wrapped in sayings not to be
lightly understood by the vulgar. So, when a lover admires the
chasteness of his lady, Meredith remarks: "He saw the Goddess
Modesty guarding Purity; and one would be bold to say that he did
not hear the precepts, Purity's aged grannams maternal and paternal,
cawing approval of her over their munching gums."
But Meredith's gift of phrase and his knack of knocking out
epigrams, and his mastery over metaphor and lyrical description
cannot be too highly commended. Diana is "wind-blown but ascending."
When Redworth sees her kindling a fire, "a little mouse of a thought
scampered out of one of the chambers of his head and darted along
the passages, fetching a sweat to his brows." After Sandra's
singing, the stillness settled back again "like one folding up a
precious jewel." A dull professor "pores over a little inexactitude
in phrases and pecks at it like a domestic fowl." Of one who has
ceased to love we hear that "the passion in her was like a place of
waves evaporated to a crust of salt." Of a lady's letter we learn
that it "flourished with light strokes all over, like a field of the
bearded barley." Of a heroine we are told that: "She was not of the
creatures who are excited by an atmosphere of excitement; she took
it as the nymph of the stream her native wave, and swam on the flood
with expansive languor, happy to have the master passions about her;
one or two of which her dainty hand caressed fearless of a sting;
the lady patted them as her swans." There is brilliant illumination
in such comparisons, a light shed instantaneously upon traits and
mental experiences otherwise not to be revealed. When the Egoist
would affectionately approach his shrinking Clara, nothing could
better deliver the situation than Meredith's simile: "The gulf of a
caress hove in view like an enormous billow hollowing under the
curled ridge. She stooped to a buttercup; the monster swept by."
It is felicity in the use of rhetorical figure that enables Meredith
to characterize the style of a Carlyle as, "resembling either early
architecture or utter dilapidation, so loose and rough it seemed; a
wind-in-the-orchard style, that tumbled down here and there an
appreciable fruit with uncouth bluster; sentences without
commencement running to abrupt endings and smoke, like waves against
a sea wall, learned dictionary words giving a hand to street slang,
and accents falling on them haphazard, like slant rays from driving
clouds; all the pages in a breeze, the whole book producing a kind
of electrical agitation in the mind and the joints." It is
Meredith's gift for phrase that enables him to paint those wonderful
backgrounds for action which are the despair of common writers.
Sometimes the scenes are sketched in with but a touch or two of
suggestion. So, when Richard Feverel and Lucy spend an evening
afloat, Meredith writes: "Hanging between two heavens on the lake:
floating to her voice: the moon stepping over and through white
shoals of soft high clouds above and below: floating to her
voice--no other breath abroad! His soul went out of his body as he
listened." Or, when Richard, in gay company, passes a night at
Richmond, Meredith says simply: "Silver was seen far out on Thames.
The wine ebbed, and the laughter. Sentiment and cigars took up the
wondrous tale."
Sometimes the description is long and minute, but always it is
beautifully fresh. Thus the coming of dawn is pictured in _The
Amazing Marriage_: "The smell of rock-waters and roots of herb and
moss grew keen; air became a wine that raised the breast high to
drink it; an uplifting coolness pervaded the heights.... The plumes
of cloud now slowly entered into the lofty arch of dawn and melted
from brown to purple black.... The armies of the young sunrise in
mountain-lands neighbouring the plains, vast shadows, were marching
over woods and meads, black against the edge of golden; and great
heights were cut with them, and bounding waters took the leap in a
silvery radiance to gloom; the bright and dark-banded valleys were
like night and morning taking hands down the sweep of their
rivers."
IV
Meredith's style receives its final and distinctive flavor, however,
from the liberal dash of aphorism with which his books are
sprinkled. Often an epigram will turn upon some metaphor. Such is
the statement that: "A bone in a boy's mind for him to gnaw and
worry corrects the vagrancies and promotes the healthy activities,
whether there be marrow in it or not," or the exclamation: "Who are
not fools to be set spinning, if we choose to whip them with their
vanity! It is the consolation of the great to watch them spin."
Such, too, is the reflection that: "Most of the people one has at
table are drums. A rub-a-dub-dub on them is the only way to get a
sound. When they can be persuaded to do it upon one another, they
call it conversation." More frequently, the epigram is a neat
generalization left abstract, as for example: "Who rises from prayer
a better man, his prayer is answered"; "Cynics are only happy in
making the world as barren to others as they have made it for
themselves"; "Fools run jabbering of the irony of fate to escape the
annoyance of tracing the causes"; "Expediency is man's wisdom; doing
right is God's"; "Women cannot repose on a man who is not positive;
nor have they much gratification in confounding him"; "Convictions
are generally first impressions sealed with later prejudices"; "The
hero of two women must die and be wept over in common before they
can appreciate one another."
A thousand such jewels glitter in the richly wrought tapestry of
Meredith's style. That he painstakingly inserted them and wove this
fabric to attract attention by its singularity and beauty, he
cheerfully admits in a passage of _Emilia in England_. "The point to
be considered," he there remarks, "is whether fiction demands a
perfectly smooth surface. Undoubtedly a scientific work does, and a
philosophical work should. When we ask for facts simply we feel the
intrusion of style. Of fiction it is a part. In the one case the
classical robe, in the other any medieval phantasy of clothing."
The difficulty with a style so artificial and intellectualized is
obvious. Meredith, according to Brownell, "flatters one's cleverness
at first, but in the end he fatigues it." The perpetual crackle of
aphorism and metaphor surprises, gratifies, and then wearies; for a
writer who will never say a plain thing plainly, not only keeps his
readers under strain, but soon seems himself to be straining.
Nowhere is this more evident than in Meredith's predilection for
repeating a single happy phrase such as the epithet "rogue in
porcelain" applied to a heroine. Since the phrase tickles his fancy,
he plays with it, drops it, picks it up, mumbles it over and over as
a dog might a bone, and through chapter after chapter is ready at
any pretext to run round and round with it barking. Despite his
assiduous striving for novelty, therefore, Meredith is often
tedious, an effect induced, not merely by his style (whether
repetitious or gasping after eccentricity), but also by his method.
He is so intent upon weaving his commentary upon every speech and
action that the occasion of the commentary is smothered. A phrase
becomes the text of a sermon, a gesture the excuse for paragraphs of
oblique reflection. Thus he forfeits the advantage of downright
sincerity and of forthright progress, and teases interest out of all
patience.
V
Since Meredith is an intellectualist, we naturally ask what may be
his philosophy. Unlike Ibsen or Browning, he preaches no doctrine.
He offers no explicit theory of life. Nor does he, like Dickens or
Reade or Brieux, advocate any special reform. He is never a
propagandist. Some have lamented this fact; more have seen in it an
argument for his universality and permanence. Though he fight no
battles for specific causes, his influence is arrayed in general
against certain tendencies that he disapproves and would laugh to
defeat. Egoism, sentimentalism, hypocrisy, are fair game for his
comedy. As an intellectualist he dislikes and distrusts excess of
emotion--feeling indulged for its own sake. "Sentimentalists," he
declares, "are they who seek to enjoy without incurring the immense
debtorship for a thing done."
Well might Mrs. Carlyle complain that Meredith's work lacked tears.
That it does so he would be the first to admit, for he questions the
worth of pathos for any true captain of his soul. "Pathos is a tide;
often it carries the awakener of it off his feet," Meredith writes.
"We cannot quite preserve our dignity when we stoop to the work of
calling forth tears. Moses had probably to take a nimble jump away
from the rock after that venerable lawgiver had knocked the water
out of it." So Meredith sacrifices passion to analysis. His heroes
and heroines rarely love so simply and so ardently as do Richard and
Lucy; but the affection of even this delectable pair is modified in
presentation by the playful cynicism of the narrator of their story.
On the other hand, it is futile to cavil at Meredith or any other
artist for lacking such qualities as are incompatible with those he
most notably possesses. You cannot expect abandon of passion in the
characters of a novelist whose forte is detachment and sublimated
common sense. Your intellectualist is not to be blamed if he fails
to write as a sentimentalist.
Meredith's positive philosophy has been formulated by Elmer J.
Bailey in terms that may be briefly paraphrased: Meredith thinks of
man as torn between Nature and Circumstance. By Nature is meant the
world of instinct, of healthy normal impulse. By Circumstance is
meant the world of artificial laws erected by society as the
machinery for its conduct and control. Nature is spontaneous;
Circumstance is traditional. Man may err by allowing to either undue
dominance. His only safety lies in the use of his reason which will
enable him to keep both Nature and Circumstance in proper equipoise.
And the most serviceable instrument of reason for detecting the
follies of convention or of feeling is the comic spirit. Without
this spirit we are not truly intellectual, for, as Meredith has
said: "Not to have a sympathy with the playful mind is not to have a
mind." Let us possess mind, he seems to urge, and through mind
cultivate the soul. In _The Tragic Comedians_ he remarks: "It is the
soul which does things in life--the rest is vapor.... Action means
life to the soul as to the body.... Compromise is virtual death; it
is the pact between cowardice and comfort, under the title of
expediency. So do we gather dead matter about us. So are we
gradually self-stifled, corrupt. The war with evil in every form
must be incessant; we cannot have peace." The serious note here
sounded may be heard again in his letter to a friend, Mrs. Gilman.
There Meredith says: "I have written always with the perception that
there is no life but of the spirit; that the concrete is the
shadowy; yet that the way to spiritual life lies in the complete
unfolding of the creature, not in the nipping of his passions. An
outrage to nature helps to extinguish his light."
VI
Just such an outrage to nature perpetrated with the best intentions,
but in blind folly, is the subject of Meredith's novel, _The Ordeal
of Richard Feverel_. A dogmatic and conventional father endeavors to
determine his son's life according to an infallible system of
parental dictation. Instead of allowing the boy to develop naturally
from within, Sir Austin seeks to mould him absolutely from without.
The failure of this experiment makes the story. The first eleven
chapters are in a sense introductory. They present to the reader the
members of the Feverel family and describe with gusto a poaching
escapade of Richard's youth. From this first ordeal he emerges
triumphant by obeying the impulse of his heart to make frank
confession, despite his father's endeavor to patch up the matter by
plotting. Then, in the next twenty chapters, follows the account of
Richard's passion for the lovely Lucy and of the machinations of
those who would nip it in the bud. All these checks are for the
moment overcome when Richard, after having suffered separation from
Lucy, is again thrown with her by chance and impulsively marries
her.
In the chapters next ensuing Sir Austin, instead of gracefully
accepting defeat, masks and crushes his emotions and permits his
Mephistophelian nephew, the cynical Adrian, to scheme for Richard's
alienation from his bride. Richard is lured away and succumbs to the
spell of a wicked enchantress whom at first he has thought to
reform; and then, shamed and distraught, he wanders abroad, seeking
a purge for his sin. Meanwhile, the deserted wife, at Adrian's
instigation, has been assailed by a villain, the husband of
Richard's enchantress. Issuing unscathed from her ordeal, Lucy is
tardily accepted by the complacent Sir Austin and received, with her
child, at his house. Since Richard has at length achieved
self-mastery and has resolved to return and confess to his wife, and
plead for her grace, a general reconciliation seems imminent. But
the novelist will not allow his tale to end happily lest its moral
be frustrate. Accordingly, although Richard returns for an hour to
be freely forgiven by Lucy, he dashes away forthwith, despite her
entreaties, to duel with her persecutor. Joy, even yet, might emerge
from disaster, since Richard escapes from the duel with only a
wound, but the author continues implacable. His heroine, in nursing
her husband, succumbs to a strain long protracted, and Richard,
though recovered in body, is left but a wreck of his former self.
Such is the desolating outcome of attempting to regulate healthy
human loves by a worldly system.
What is tragic for hero and heroine is gravely comic to the eye of
the intellectualist surveying the folly of men from a height far
above the troubled waves of their passion. For Meredith, Sir Austin
incarnates a comic error. His story is the comedy of one who
theorizes at length upon life, but utterly fails to deal with it
practically. Of course Sir Austin takes no blame to himself. It is
useless, he reflects, "to base any system on a human being," even
though this is precisely what he has done. And when Richard is to
return to his wife, and Sir Austin has at last grown kind to her, we
hear that: "He could now admit that instinct had so far beaten
science; for, as Richard was coming, as all were to be happy, his
wisdom embraced them all paternally as the author of their
happiness." Of Sir Austin, Meredith remarks: "He had experimented on
humanity in the person of the son he loved as his life, and at once,
when the experiment appeared to have failed, all humanity's failings
fell on the shoulders of his son." The reader's inevitable reaction
to the novel is expressed by Lady Blandish: "Oh! how sick I am of
theories and systems and the pretensions of men!... I shall hate the
name of science till the day I die. Give me nothing but commonplace,
unpretending people!"
That the plot of _Richard Feverel_ unduly tantalizes goes without
saying. The author keeps his hero and heroine apart by main force.
Granting that Richard is the victim of rascals, as well as of a
ridiculous system, his easy desertion of the wife whom he loves and
his continued separation from her seem to lie in Meredith's will
rather than in that of his hero. Richard's yielding to Mrs. Mount,
described with remarkable power, is more natural, but his mooning
about Germany while Lucy is left to struggle alone is as
exasperating as her failure to apprise him of the fact that she is
to bear him a child. Splendid as is the last meeting of Richard and
Lucy, declared by Stevenson to be "the strongest scene since
Shakespeare in the English tongue," it forfeits something of
greatness because of perversity. More natural is the faint sub-plot
intended to echo the central theme of the book in its story of
Clare's hopeless love for Richard, at first reciprocated, and then
blocked by Sir Austin and the girl's mother.
VII
In characterization, this novel excels. Its folk are persons and not
alone types. Chief of the Feverel clan is Richard's father, Sir
Austin, wounded by the infidelity of his wife and his friend, yet an
intellectual egoist, proud of his plans for ruling the family and
equally proud of his epigrams. Given less fully are Richard's aunt,
the worldly mother of Clare, and his uncles--the guardsman Algernon,
who has lost a leg at cricket, and crochety Hippias, "the dyspepsy."
Of Richard's cousins one is sympathetic, and the other is Satanic.
The first, Austin Wentworth, lives in disgrace for having repaired a
youthful indiscretion by marrying a housemaid. As for the second,
Adrian Harley, "the Wise Youth," he is Richard's tutor, whose heart
has dropped to his stomach, a clever worldling and the contemner of
honest passion, one of the most accomplished cynics of all
literature. There are minor characters, too, but equally vital, from
blunt Farmer Blaize and his son, and the disgruntled farm-hand Tom
Bakewell, to Sir Austin's sentimental companion Lady Blandish, and
Ripton, the faithful old dog.
Of the women three stand to the fore--Lucy, Mrs. Mount, and Mrs.
Berry. The adorable Lucy is a northern Juliet brought to sudden
maturity by her passion for Richard. Beneath him in birth, she is
more than his equal in manner and mind and spirit. Though shown only
in glimpses, she is never less than entrancing. Mrs. Mount is the
dashing temptress, a little worn and half-hearted until piqued by
Richard's indifference into playing her game more earnestly, and
then exerting all the fascinations of the wicked. Most original of
the three is Lucy's vulgar befriender, Mrs. Berry, a lovable
"old-black-satin bunch," as Meredith tags her, wise but irrelevant,
aware of the sensual springs beneath our polite pretenses, a
Juliet's nurse grown mellow. It is to be noted, however, that none
of these characters is really dynamic, unless it be Mrs. Doria
Forey, who suffers a change of heart after sacrificing that of her
daughter, and Richard who somewhat alters under the stress of his
ordeal.
Subordinate to character, plot, and central idea, yet scarcely less
effective in producing the total effect of the novel, are its
setting, its style, and its author's point of view. Already
Meredith's point of view has been defined as that of the writer of
comedy. In the dinner scene at Richmond, for example, you are
conscious of the author smiling apart upon callow Richard and Ripton
caught in the snares of the demi-monde. It is Thackeray over again,
letting us see the self-deception of Pendennis in his admiration of
the Fotheringay. Sometimes, in this novel, Meredith apostrophizes
his people, emitting lyrical exclamations of admiration or disgust
at their conduct. More often, he remains aloof, though none the less
present in spirit. Rarely does he here conform to Brownell's
statement, more applicable to his later fictions, that: "He is not
merely detached, he is obliterated. All he shows us of himself is
his talent; his standpoint is to be divined."
That which especially reveals the author's standpoint is what
Professor Saintsbury, in referring to this novel, has termed its
"style saturated with epigrammatic quality; and of strange ironic
persiflage permeating thought, picture, and expression." The
persiflage appears, above all, in the speeches of the saturnine
Adrian. As for the epigrams, their number is justified in part by
supposing them to come from Sir Austin's collection entitled "The
Pilgrim's Scrip." They abound, however, in the speech of others and
in the narrative proper. Typical spicings of style are the
following: "To anchor the heart by any object ere we have half
traversed the world is youth's foolishness"; "It is difficult for
those who think very earnestly for their children to know when their
children are thinking on their own account"; "If immeasurable love
were perfect wisdom, one human being might almost impersonate
Providence to another"; "The ways of women, which are involution,
and their practices, which are opposition, are generally best hit
upon by guesswork and a bold word"; "The God of this world is in the
machine, not out of it"; "Sentimentalism is a happy pastime and an
important science to the timid, the idle, and the heartless; but a
damning one to them who have anything to forfeit"; "The task of
reclaiming a bad man is extremely seductive to good women. Dear to
their tender hearts as old china is a bad man they are mending."
Even illiterate Mrs. Berry talks in epigram, now on checked
matrimony, which she holds to be as injurious as checked
perspiration, and now on the wickedness of old people, which, she
affirms, is the excuse for the wildness of young ones. "I think it's
always the plan in a 'dielemmer,'" she says, "to pray God and walk
forward." To Lucy, the bride, she gives this advice: "When the
parlour fire gets low, put coals on the kitchen fire.... Don't
neglect your cookery. Kissing don't last; cookery do."
Aside from its aphorisms, the style of _Feverel_ is essentially
clever, but by no means so artificial as that of Meredith's later
novels. If a stage direction seem occasionally over-elaborate, as:
"Adrian gesticulated an acquiesced withdrawal," others are
felicitous, as: "At last Hippias perspired in conviction," or: "He
set his sight hard at the blue ridges of the hills," or, of Ripton
draining a bumper at a gulp: "The farthing rushlight of his reason
leapt and expired. He tumbled to the sofa and there stretched."
There are fine passages, too, of description, like those concerned
with the boyish adventures of Richard and Ripton, the Ferdinand and
Miranda meeting of hero and heroine, the temptation episode, and the
storm in the German forest by night. "Up started the whole forest in
violet fire. He saw the country at the foot of the hills to the
bounding Rhine gleam, quiver, extinguished.... Lower down the
abysses of air rolled the wrathful crash; then white thrusts of
light were darted from the sky, and great curving ferns, seen
steadfast in pallor a second, were supernaturally agitated and
vanished. Then a shrilling song roused in the leaves and the
herbage. Prolonged and louder it sounded, as deeper and heavier the
deluge pressed. A mighty force of water satisfied the desire of the
earth." Admirable, also, are the mere hints of background given in a
flashing phrase that conjures up the scene: "Look at those old elm
branches! How they seem to mix among the stars!--glittering prints
of winter."
Taken all in all, _The Ordeal of Richard Feverel_ may be reckoned as
Meredith's masterpiece. "My old conviction grows stronger," writes Le
Galliene, "that it will be _Richard Feverel_ and perhaps no other of
his novels ... that will keep his name alive in English literature."
Certainly, Meredith has here allowed to his characters a charm of
personality that later he tends to sacrifice in stressing their purely
typical traits. He shows here a fire of sincerity rarely afterwards
burning so brightly. He is less the mere essayist and more the lyric
and dramatic tale-teller. He has set forth with skill the elements of
a large problem, confirming the truth of Chesterton's remark that he
combines subtlety with primal energy, and criticizes life without losing
his appetite for it.
FRANK WADLEIGH CHANDLER.
UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI.
THE ORDEAL OF RICHARD FEVEREL
CHAPTER I
THE INMATES OF RAYNHAM ABBEY
Some years ago a book was published under the title of "The
Pilgrim's Scrip." It consisted of a selection of original aphorisms
by an anonymous gentleman, who in this bashful manner gave a bruised
heart to the world.
He made no pretension to novelty. "Our new thoughts have thrilled
dead bosoms," he wrote; by which avowal it may be seen that youth
had manifestly gone from him, since he had ceased to be jealous of
the ancients. There was a half-sigh floating through his pages for
those days of intellectual coxcombry, when ideas come to us
affecting the embraces of virgins, and swear to us they are ours
alone, and no one else have they ever visited: and we believe them.
For an example of his ideas of the sex he said:
"I expect that Woman will be the last thing civilized by Man."
Some excitement was produced in the bosoms of ladies by so monstrous
a scorn of them.
One adventurous person betook herself to the Heralds' College, and
there ascertained that a Griffin between two Wheatsheaves, which
stood on the title-page of the book, formed the crest of Sir Austin
Absworthy Bearne Feverel, Baronet, of Raynham Abbey, in a certain
Western county folding Thames: a man of wealth and honour, and a
somewhat lamentable history.
The outline of the baronet's story was by no means new. He had a
wife, and he had a friend. His marriage was for love; his wife was
a beauty; his friend was a sort of poet. His wife had his whole
heart, and his friend all his confidence. When he selected Denzil
Somers from among his college chums, it was not on account of any
similarity of disposition between them, but from his intense worship
of genius, which made him overlook the absence of principle in his
associate for the sake of such brilliant promise. Denzil had a small
patrimony to lead off with, and that he dissipated before he left
college; henceforth he was dependent upon his admirer, with whom he
lived, filling a nominal post of bailiff to the estates, and
launching forth verse of some satiric and sentimental quality; for
being inclined to vice, and occasionally, and in a quiet way,
practising it, he was of course a sentimentalist and a satirist,
entitled to lash the Age and complain of human nature. His earlier
poems, published under the pseudonym of Diaper Sandoe, were so pure
and bloodless in their love passages, and at the same time so biting
in their moral tone, that his reputation was great among the
virtuous, who form the larger portion of the English book-buying
public. Election-seasons called him to ballad-poetry on behalf of
the Tory party. Diaper possessed undoubted fluency, but did little,
though Sir Austin was ever expecting much of him.
A languishing, inexperienced woman, whose husband in mental and in
moral stature is more than the ordinary height above her, and who,
now that her first romantic admiration of his lofty bearing has worn
off; and her fretful little refinements of taste and sentiment are
not instinctively responded to, is thrown into no wholesome
household collision with a fluent man, fluent in prose and rhyme.
Lady Feverel, when she first entered on her duties at Raynham, was
jealous of her husband's friend. By degrees she tolerated him. In
time he touched his guitar in her chamber, and they played Rizzio
and Mary together.
"For I am not the first who found
The name of Mary fatal!"
says a subsequent sentimental alliterative love-poem of Diaper's.
Such was the outline of the story. But the baronet could fill it
up. He had opened his soul to these two. He had been noble Love to
the one, and to the other perfect Friendship. He had bid them be
brother and sister whom he loved, and live a Golden Age with him at
Raynham. In fact, he had been prodigal of the excellences of his
nature, which it is not good to be, and, like Timon, he became
bankrupt, and fell upon bitterness.
The faithless lady was of no particular family; an orphan daughter
of an admiral who educated her on his half-pay, and her conduct
struck but at the man whose name she bore.
After five years of marriage, and twelve of friendship, Sir Austin
was left to his loneliness with nothing to ease his heart of love
upon save a little baby boy in a cradle. He forgave the man: he put
him aside as poor for his wrath. The woman he could not forgive; she
had sinned every way. Simple ingratitude to a benefactor was a
pardonable transgression, for he was not one to recount and crush
the culprit under the heap of his good deeds. But her he had raised
to be his equal, and he judged her as his equal. She had blackened
the world's fair aspect for him.
In the presence of that world, so different to him now, he preserved
his wonted demeanour, and made his features a flexible mask. Mrs.
Doria Forey, his widowed sister, said that Austin might have retired
from his Parliamentary career for a time, and given up gaieties and
that kind of thing; her opinion, founded on observation of him in
public and private, was, that the light thing who had taken flight
was but a feather on her brother's Feverel-heart, and his ordinary
course of life would be resumed. There are times when common men
cannot bear the weight of just so much. Hippias Feverel, one of his
brothers, thought him immensely improved by his misfortune, if the
loss of such a person could be so designated; and seeing that
Hippias received in consequence free quarters at Raynham, and
possession of the wing of the Abbey she had inhabited, it is
profitable to know his thoughts. If the baronet had given two or
three blazing dinners in the great hall he would have deceived
people generally, as he did his relatives and intimates. He was too
sick for that: fit only for passive acting.
The nurse-maid waking in the night beheld a solitary figure
darkening a lamp above her little sleeping charge, and became so
used to the sight as never to wake with a start. One night she was
strangely aroused by a sound of sobbing. The baronet stood beside
the cot in his long black cloak and travelling cap. His fingers
shaded a lamp, and reddened against the fitful darkness that ever
and anon went leaping up the wall. She could hardly believe her
senses to see the austere gentleman, dead silent, dropping tear upon
tear before her eyes. She lay stone-still in a trance of terror and
mournfulness, mechanically counting the tears as they fell, one by
one. The hidden face, the fall and flash of those heavy drops in the
light of the lamp he held, the upright, awful figure, agitated at
regular intervals like a piece of clockwork by the low murderous
catch of his breath: it was so piteous to her poor human nature that
her heart began wildly palpitating. Involuntarily the poor girl
cried out to him, "Oh, sir!" and fell a-weeping. Sir Austin turned
the lamp on her pillow, and harshly bade her go to sleep, striding
from the room forthwith. He dismissed her with a purse the next day.
Once, when he was seven years old, the little fellow woke up at
night to see a lady bending over him. He talked of this the next
day, but it was treated as a dream; until in the course of the day
his uncle Algernon was driven home from Lobourne cricket-ground with
a broken leg. Then it was recollected that there was a family ghost;
and, though no member of the family believed in the ghost, none
would have given up a circumstance that testified to its existence;
for to possess a ghost is a distinction above titles.
Algernon Feverel lost his leg, and ceased to be a gentleman in the
Guards. Of the other uncles of young Richard, Cuthbert, the sailor,
perished in a spirited boat expedition against a slaving negro chief
up the Niger. Some of the gallant lieutenant's trophies of war
decorated the little boy's play-shed at Raynham, and he bequeathed
his sword to Richard, whose hero he was. The diplomatist and beau,
Vivian, ended his flutterings from flower to flower by making an
improper marriage, as is the fate of many a beau, and was struck out
of the list of visitors. Algernon generally occupied the baronet's
disused town-house, a wretched being, dividing his time between
horse and card exercise: possessed, it was said, of the absurd
notion that a man who has lost his balance by losing his leg may
regain it by sticking to the bottle. At least, whenever he and his
brother Hippias got together, they never failed to try whether one
leg, or two, stood the bottle best. Much of a puritan as Sir Austin
was in his habits, he was too good a host, and too thorough a
gentleman, to impose them upon his guests. The brothers, and other
relatives, might do as they would while they did not disgrace the
name, and then it was final: they must depart to behold his
countenance no more.
Algernon Feverel was a simple man, who felt, subsequent to his
misfortune, as he had perhaps dimly fancied it before, that his
career lay in his legs, and was now irrevocably cut short. He taught
the boy boxing, and shooting, and the arts of fence, and
superintended the direction of his animal vigour with a melancholy
vivacity. The remaining energies of Algernon's mind were devoted to
animadversions on swift bowling. He preached it over the county,
struggling through laborious literary compositions, addressed to
sporting newspapers, on the Decline of Cricket. It was Algernon who
witnessed and chronicled young Richard's first fight, which was with
young Tom Blaize of Belthorpe Farm, three years the boy's senior.
Hippias Feverel was once thought to be the genius of the family. It
was his ill luck to have strong appetites and a weak stomach; and,
as one is not altogether fit for the battle of life who is engaged
in a perpetual contention with his dinner, Hippias forsook his
prospects at the Bar, and, in the embraces of dyspepsia, compiled
his ponderous work on the Fairy Mythology of Europe. He had little
to do with the Hope of Raynham beyond what he endured from his
juvenile tricks.
A venerable lady, known as Great-Aunt Grantley, who had money to
bequeath to the heir, occupied with Hippias the background of the
house and shared her caudles with him. These two were seldom seen
till the dinner-hour, for which they were all day preparing; and
probably all night remembering, for the Eighteenth Century was an
admirable trencherman, and cast age aside while there was a dish on
the table.
Mrs. Doria Forey was the eldest of the three sisters of the baronet,
a florid affable woman, with fine teeth, exceedingly fine light wavy
hair, a Norman nose, and a reputation for understanding men; and
that, with these practical creatures, always means the art of
managing them. She had married an expectant younger son of a good
family, who deceased before the fulfilment of his prospects; and,
casting about in her mind the future chances of her little daughter
and sole child, Clare, she marked down a probability. The far sight,
the deep determination, the resolute perseverance of her sex, where
a daughter is to be provided for and a man to be overthrown,
instigated her to invite herself to Raynham, where, with that
daughter, she fixed herself.
The other two Feverel ladies were the wife of Colonel Wentworth and
the widow of Mr. Justice Harley: and the only thing remarkable about
them was that they were mothers of sons of some distinction.
Austin Wentworth's story was of that wretched character which to be
comprehended, that justice should be dealt him, must be told out and
openly; which no one dares now do.
For a fault in early youth, redeemed by him nobly, according to his
light, he was condemned to undergo the world's harsh judgment: not
for the fault--for its atonement.
"--Married his mother's housemaid," whispered Mrs. Doria, with a
ghastly look, and a shudder at young men of republican sentiments,
which he was reputed to entertain.
"The compensation for Injustice," says the "Pilgrim's Scrip," "is,
that in that dark Ordeal we gather the worthiest around us."
And the baronet's fair friend, Lady Blandish, and some few true men
and women, held Austin Wentworth high.
He did not live with his wife; and Sir Austin, whose mind was bent
on the future of our species, reproached him with being barren to
posterity, while knaves were propagating.
The principal characteristic of the second nephew, Adrian Harley,
was his sagacity. He was essentially the wise youth, both in counsel
and in action.
"In action," the "Pilgrim's Scrip" observes, "Wisdom goes by
majorities."
Adrian had an instinct for the majority, and, as the world
invariably found him enlisted in its ranks, his appellation of wise
youth was acquiesced in without irony.
The wise youth, then, had the world with him, but no friends. Nor
did he wish for those troublesome appendages of success. He caused
himself to be required by people who could serve him; feared by such
as could injure. Not that he went out of the way to secure his end,
or risked the expense of a plot. He did the work as easily as he ate
his daily bread. Adrian was an epicurean; one whom Epicurus would
have scourged out of his garden, certainly: an epicurean of our
modern notions. To satisfy his appetites without rashly staking his
character, was the wise youth's problem for life. He had no
intimates except Gibbon and Horace, and the society of these fine
aristocrats of literature helped him to accept humanity as it had
been, and was; a supreme ironic procession, with laughter of Gods in
the background. Why not laughter of mortals also? Adrian had his
laugh in his comfortable corner. He possessed peculiar attributes of
a heathen God. He was a disposer of men: he was polished, luxurious,
and happy--at their cost. He lived in eminent self-content, as one
lying on soft cloud, lapt in sunshine. Nor Jove, nor Apollo, cast
eye upon the maids of earth with cooler fire of selection, or
pursued them in the covert with more sacred impunity. And he enjoyed
his reputation for virtue as something additional. Stolen fruits are
said to be sweet; undeserved rewards are exquisite.
The best of it was, that Adrian made no pretences. He did not
solicit the favourable judgment of the world. Nature and he
attempted no other concealment than the ordinary mask men wear. And
yet the world would proclaim him moral, as well as wise, and the
pleasing converse every way of his disgraced cousin Austin.
In a word, Adrian Harley had mastered his philosophy at the early
age of one-and-twenty. Many would be glad to say the same at that
age twice-told: they carry in their breasts a burden with which
Adrian's was not loaded. Mrs. Doria was nearly right about his
heart. A singular mishap (at his birth, possibly, or before it) had
unseated that organ, and shaken it down to his stomach, where it was
a much lighter, nay, an inspiring weight, and encouraged him merrily
onward. Throned there it looked on little that did not arrive to
gratify it. Already that region was a trifle prominent in the person
of the wise youth, and carried, as it were, the flag of his
philosophical tenets in front of him. He was charming after dinner,
with men or with women: delightfully sarcastic: perhaps a little too
unscrupulous in his moral tone, but that his moral reputation belied
him, and it must be set down to generosity of disposition.
Such was Adrian Harley, another of Sir Austin's intellectual
favourites, chosen from mankind to superintend the education of his
son at Raynham. Adrian had been destined for the Church. He did not
enter into Orders. He and the baronet had a conference together one
day, and from that time Adrian became a fixture in the Abbey. His
father died in his promising son's college term, bequeathing him
nothing but his legal complexion, and Adrian became stipendiary
officer in his uncle's household.
A playfellow of Richard's occasionally, and the only comrade of his
age that he ever saw, was Master Ripton Thompson, the son of Sir
Austin's solicitor, a boy without a character.
A comrade of some description was necessary, for Richard was neither
to go to school nor to college. Sir Austin considered that the
schools were corrupt, and maintained that young lads might by
parental vigilance be kept pretty secure from the Serpent until Eve
sided with him: a period that might be deferred, he said. He had a
system of education for his son. How it worked we shall see.