Some there are who are not quite guiltless of these failures, but Meredith is not one of them. He is unique also, except for the corroboration of George Eliot, in making the ironic interpretation of life in itself an object of satire, in so far as it is brought forward as an excuse for our deficiencies, for then it betrays a certain weakness in our mental processes. For this he has one direct spokesman and two or three dramatic examples. The former is the incisive Redworth, who is exasperated at this vicarious refuge claimed by needy human nature.[241]
“‘Upon my word,’ he burst out, ‘I should like to write a book of Fables, showing how donkeys get into grinding harness, and dogs lose their bones, and fools have their sconces cracked, and all run jabbering of the irony of Fate, to escape the annoyance of tracing the causes. And what are they? Nine times out of ten, plain want of patience, or some debt for indulgence, * * * It’s the seed we sow, individually or collectively.’”
Chief of the latter—the dramatic examples—is a youth who, just returning from his father’s funeral, with bitter prospects ahead, encounters a being more wretched than himself, a forsaken young woman shelterless, and desperately ill.[242]
“Evan had just been accusing the heavens of conspiring to disgrace him. Those patient heavens had listened, as is their wont. They had viewed and not been disordered by his mental frenzies. It is certainly hard that they do not come down to us, and condescend to tell us what they mean, and be dumb-foundered by the perspicuity of our arguments—the argument, for instance, that they have not fashioned us for the science of the shears, and do yet impel us to wield them.”
A little later in the same story is a bit of “eloquent and consoling philosophy” on a happy juxtaposition of the meat and the eaters.[243]
“A thing has come to pass which we feel to be right! The machinery of the world, then, is not entirely dislocated: there is harmony, on one point, among the mysterious powers who have to do with us.”
Another deeply meditative young man is Algernon Blancove. On the very point of turning over a new leaf, he has the misfortune to lose a wager of a thousand pounds,—which he did not have in the first place.[244]
“A rage of emotions drowned every emotion in his head, and when he got one clear from the mass, it took the form of a bitter sneer at Providence, for cutting off his last chance of reforming his conduct and becoming good. What would he not have accomplished, that was brilliant, and beautiful, and soothing, but for this dead set against him!”
With a gentler touch Clotilde is pictured, on hearing of the disaster to Alvin, as venting the “laugh of the tragic comedian.”[245]
“She laughed. The world is upside down—a world without light, or pointing finger, or affection for special favorites, and therefore bereft of all mysterious and attractive wisdom, a crazy world, a corpse of a world—if this be true!”