“The one great principle of the English law is, to make business for itself. There is no other principle distinctly, certainly, and consistently maintained through all its narrow turnings. Viewed by this light it becomes a coherent scheme, and not the monstrous maze the laity are apt to think it. Let them but once clearly perceive that its grand principle is to make business for itself at their expense, and surely they will cease to grumble.”
No less favored with warmth of feeling is the famous Circumlocution Office, to which much eloquence is devoted in a chapter “containing the whole science of government.” There are pages of satirical description, the keynote of which is found in an early paragraph:[135]
“This glorious establishment had been early in the field, when the one sublime principle involving the difficult art of governing a country, was first distinctly revealed to statesmen. It had been foremost to study that bright revelation, and to carry its shining influence through the whole of the official proceedings. Whatever was required to be done, the Circumlocution Office was beforehand with all the public departments in the art of perceiving—How Not To Do It.”
It is recognized as something of an anomaly that Meredith should have begun publishing fiction along with George Eliot, and fifteen years before Hardy and Butler, for he belongs with the latter as post-Victorian in art and character. He represents at once the maturity of the nineteenth century and the embryonic promise of the twentieth, whose new currents were already meeting and clashing with the old full tide. About him there could be nothing artless or naïve, nothing unconscious or preoccupied. Ripeness of judgment, deliberation in method, are stamped on every line, giving an effect of purposefulness without dogmatism, and profundity without owlishness. Whatever he does is done intentionally,[136] and if some lack of spontaneity is the result, it is amply compensated for by the strength and sureness that come from a man’s command of himself and his material. In so far as he is obscure, involved, compactly sententious, his malice is, like Browning’s, aforethought. Not in ignorance nor indifference does it arise, but from independent choice and a certain scorn of any other procedure.
Accordingly while direct satire is not wanting in his novels, it is restrained in amount and sophisticated in nature. It does not take the shape of facile application of obvious conditions, nor of flamboyant portraiture, but of concentrated analyses of phases of life, from a scientific point of view, rather than ethical, and presented with calm detachment.
Meredith is quite capable of telling pure story, as in Vittoria and Harry Richmond, but he is also capable of putting in some personal seasoning, particularly evinced in the openings of Beauchamp’s Career, and An Amazing Marriage, and throughout The Egoist.
Of these two discursive introductions, the former is more amenable to quotation. It deals with the situation incident to a rumor of French invasion, and personifies Panic as a sleepy old spinster roused into brief hysteria, and lapsing back into comfortable stupor.[137]
“This being apprehended, by the aid of our own shortness of figures and the agitated images of the red-breeched only waiting the signal to jump and be at us, there ensued a curious exhibition that would be termed, in simple language, writing to the newspapers, for it took the outward form of letters: in reality, it was the deliberate saddling of our ancient nightmare of Invasion, putting the postillion on her, and trotting her along the highroad with a winding horn to rouse old Panic. * * * She did a little mischief by dropping on the stock-markets; in other respects she was harmless, and, inasmuch as she established a subject for conversation, useful.
“Then, lest she should have been taken too seriously, the Press, which had kindled, proceeded to extinguish her with the formidable engines called leading articles, which fling fire or water, as the occasion may require. * * *
“Then the people, rather ashamed, abused the Press for unreasonably disturbing them. The Press attacked old Panic and stripped her naked. Panic, with a desolate scream, arraigned the Parliamentary Opposition for having inflated her to serve base party purposes. The Opposition challenged the allegations of Government, * * * and proclaimed itself the watch-dog of the country.”