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."