"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 Molière, 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 rôle 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 dénouement 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."