Beauchamp himself is an impossible fellow, too wearisomely in earnest, of a single note, which he twangs in a monotonous variety of tones from morning until night. We fancy at the start, after the ominous prologue, that we are fronting a humorous adventure when we find him a sailor lad, addressing his challenge to the gentlemen of the French guard. But unhappily we are not shown the French guardsmen reading his missive, and the episode falls flat. We feel we have been deceived, and resent the deception. To make up for it, we give our sympathies, such as they are, to the uncle, a mixture of twelfth-century baron and unintelligible Whig. He relieves us of the monotony of Beauchamp’s lance-breaking with society, and his extraordinary conduct in his heart affairs. No sympathy is due to a man who could go prating politics through drawing-rooms and missing two such women as Renée and Cecilia Halkett to fall upon Jenny Denham. Indeed, there are some chapters in the book that provoke a sigh in the bosom of the conscientious readers for the useful art of skipping. Noticeably those dealing with that unmitigated old bore, Dr. Shrapnel, and his everlasting letters. Mr. Romfrey suggested that his speechifying nephew should be sent into his element over in Ireland. But no Irish speech-maker of the most pronounced stage in the disease could ever match Beauchamp by reason of the latter’s want of humour. Irish orators off the Parliamentary stage and the public platform are ready to laugh at themselves and at each other, whereas Beauchamp is in deadly earnest from six o’clock in the morning until twelve o’clock at night. Surely it can have been nothing else but sheer weariness that forced the writer to pitch his hero unexpectedly into the Channel, and bring his career to an untimely end. Never was catastrophe more inexplicable, and from the artistic point of view less justifiable, than Beauchamp’s death. We wake as from a prolonged nightmare with a gasp. Having failed to understand why he was there at all, we fail still less to comprehend why he is knocked into eternity in a single last page, and instead of being touched, we are simply astounded. Of a truth, the drawback to the book is its politics incessantly harped upon. The subject, treated in the high colours of Dumas, of the plumed and sabred days, carries a scent of intrigue and romance to interest us; or the song and chapters of revolt, conspiracy and revolution have our hearts for a nod. What should we have done had we waded through all this truly English stuff of Whiggery, Toryism and Radicalism, without the sweet refreshment of those Venetian days—the night on the Adriatic, and the lovely morning at sea under the Alps? Or canvassing with this tiresome hero without the society of that amiable and amusing idiot, Lord Palmet, whose mind runs to women, and who murmurs before a virtuous voter in a local institute, ‘Capital place for an appointment with a woman’? This is the key of his mind and his moods, but it is refreshing after the dance young Mr. Beauchamp has led us, and promises to lead us, to the end sans intermission.
He is not returned for Parliament, happily for the country, and again we are rewarded for our trials and patient endurance of them by another glimpse, all too brief, of Renée in her Norman home at Tourdestelle. This is a delightful break, but the inconsequence of Mr. Meredith’s characters! None of them seem to know their own mind, neither the men nor the women. At one moment we find Beauchamp wanting to run away with Renée, and Renée holding back. At another Renée running off to Beauchamp, and Beauchamp virtuously holding back. Again, Cecilia awaits his proposal, and he is inexplicably silent, though pushed to claim her by inclination, interest and friends; when he makes up his mind to propose, she is off to Italy, engaged to a man she does not love, knowing the man she loves was to arrive the day of her departure to claim her. Do some people act in this way out of such a novel? We are constantly expecting Beauchamp to wreck society and create a revolution. Yet at the end his uncle, the quaint, twelfth-century baron, says: ‘He hasn’t marched to London with a couple of hundred thousand men, and he escapes what Stukely calls his nation’s scourge, in the shape of a statue turned out by an English chisel. No, we haven’t had much public excitement out of him. But one thing he did do: he got me down on my knees.’ He married Jenny Denham and left a son behind him. This is all he did besides.
CHAPTER V.
‘THE EGOIST,’ ‘DIANA OF THE CROSSWAYS,’ ‘TRAGIC COMEDIANS,’ AND ‘SHAVING OF SHAGPAT.’
But however great and individual ‘Richard Feverel’ and the other novels of George Meredith may be, and however high a place some of us may accord them in the collection of books that, once read, become our daily companions—a sort of mental sustenance upon which we speedily learn to fall back from sheer force of habit—not even ‘Richard’ can be described as the most individual of Meredith’s works. In it is no hint given of the peculiar stand this new genius was to take among modern writers. In it we were not led to scent the great champion, the mighty swordsman of woman, by his commonplace Lucy and his silent Clare. ‘Richard Feverel’ was like a sun-burst, broken with storm and strife, flashed upon the insipidity of latter-day fiction and exposing its perishableness. Of such a writer anything and everything might justly be expected, but even from him was ‘The Egoist’ a surprise from which we have not yet had time to recover.
Here this subtle psychologist concerns himself neither with plot nor passion; neither with tragedy nor romance, nor with any of what may be called the passional springs of action and will. If ‘Richard Feverel’ was an original and bewildering canter along the highway of fiction, ‘The Egoist’ may be described as a breathless charge into the unknown, a direct and forcible challenge of the unsuspected. Here we see mercilessly unveiled civilized man, as he thinks and feels, in the person of a handsome young squire enjoying every advantage of nature, fortune and birth. Nothing in him courts rejection of our sympathies. He is not a villain, and he is a polished, perfect gentleman, well informed, well mannered, well groomed, and exceedingly well mounted for a more than spirited ride through the plains and over the hills of experience. Such a man as Sir Willoughby Patterne, of Patterne Hall, in command of a rent-roll of £20,000, the ordinary novelist, or even our old friends, the great Immortals, could only conceive as playing a successful and a triumphant part through life. Why, in fact, should punishment and humiliation of the lightest nature pursue a youth in whom no vicious taste, no fixed vice, is pronounced? And who but a dissector so utterly merciless as Mr. Meredith could find courage to drive his dissecting-knife straight to the heart of the conventional system, and qualify the unrevealed disease of this graceful ornament of county society by the ugly name of egoism? the malady of the Ego? Who else but this captain of woman could draw us maidens bold enough to read the man and reject him, in spite of the big social bribes he carries in his hand? Ah, this is Mr. Meredith’s great and original note, once he has relieved his youthful soul of the romance of ‘Richard Feverel.’ Woman is his study, especially young militant womanhood, and what a study he has made of her! Upon this theme not a single male writer, living or dead, since Shakespeare, can approach him, and to it he brings modern subtle penetration added to Shakespeare’s purely natural instinct. Not only has he caught the bloom and poetry of womanhood, and made her visible to us to the soul—this were the achievement of the poet and the artist of very exquisite perceptions; but he has got at the very root of her nature—quite another thing. Women reading him gasp at his revelations, such as they would never dare to make or dream, so completely hedged round are they by the conventionalities of fiction. When they take to writing stories, they either set themselves limitations in the portrayal of their female characters stricter than their brothers, or to hide their own ignorance of themselves (a mystery for us as much as for men) set off at a galloping pace into the realms of improbability.
In all fiction there is not another girl so enchanting and healthily intelligent as Clara Middleton—none described like her. In addition to the attractions of birth, breeding, and beauty which the writer thoroughly relishes, are those of sensibilities that can be delicate without affectation, a delightful wit untainted by smartness, singular good taste and tact, and honesty of soul. Here is a sparkling young woman as clear as daylight, as fresh as the morning dew, beautiful to look upon, as Meredith’s women always are, sweet and bewitching without any shabby tricks of mind or habit, who at the same time thinks for herself, a rare virtue in the male novelist’s heroine. She is all warm blood and variable moods, as befits her age and sex, but never once untrue to the finest instincts of maidenhood, and unerring in her judgment. She is not perfect, her accomplishments are not enumerated, we never find her playing Beethoven or reading the stars, and somehow, without one word having been said upon the subject, we get the impression that she is a young woman of intellectual resources, and qualified to pronounce upon subjects that engage the minds of sages and artists, while the music of youth runs blithely through her veins, and her feet are nimble in a race with a school-boy. It is her struggle with her lover, the Egoist, that completes the interest of the book.
Here we have Mr. Meredith purified, polished, complete, without any break in the unity of his work, or any awkward twist in the even flow of narrative, based solely upon subtle and most delicate analysis. The durability of such work is quite as obvious as that of the best that has already withstood the test of centuries, and when to-day’s literature comes to be old-fashioned, ‘The Egoist’ will still hold its place as a lasting monument of psychological diagnosis.
Of the story itself little need be said, as it hangs upon a single situation unfolded in one act after a short prologue introducing us to the chief dramatis personæ. And can one possibly hope to explain how this situation is worked and twisted and unfolded—how illuminated and ransacked to its most hidden depths for the undiscovered clue of self, for the unrevealed spring which prompts even our everyday ‘yea’ or ‘nay’? To endeavour to do so would be to undertake a task only second to that of the writing of ‘The Egoist.’ Meredith, I should imagine, would shrink from it. It is simply an analysis of the Ego. The universal Ego takes the polished and affable form of a young English squire, the pink of perfection, and highly commendable to ladies of fastidious tastes, the eye of whose soul is turned ceaselessly upon self. There he walks and sits and talks before our newly-illuminated vision, naked to the soul, each beat of the heart discovered without its protection of flesh or garment; not one single young man whom we meet and part with in fiction, but the large pervading personality of human existence crystallized to one permanent shape—not Sir Willoughby Patterne, of Patterne Hall, but the soul of selfishness endowed with a form that might just as well have been yours or mine or our next-door neighbour’s. This is Meredith’s most absolute triumph of art, to which he brought all the resources of his scientific knowledge of humanity—his powerful phraseology and marvellous metaphor.
Other writers have drawn us pictures enough of selfish men and selfish women. They abound in the literature of all races, selfishness being one of our commonest defects. But Meredith has given a heart and soul and mind to the vice; in fine raiment and graceful proportions, smiled upon by the undiscerning, he makes it tread the boards of our common experience, with the blood and nerves and muscles of manhood. This is an achievement of which even a man of such singular genius as his may be proud. Other writers are happy when they succeed in drawing a type—in immortalizing a single character; but this one has done something greater, more unique and more imperishable still. Into space he enables us to stare, marvelling, at something hitherto barely suspected, now a tangible form with familiar lineaments and unforgettable tones of voice, a something that we dimly understand rises up with us and lies down with us, gives the stamp of meanness to our best endeavours, and misleads us in our noblest aspirations. Sir Willoughby is the personality of self that floats subtly round us and centres all our thoughts. It takes a masculine shape because the course of the world, both civilized and barbaric, is directed by the wheels of male selfishness. Feminine selfishness has quite another direction. It affects the domestic circle, the persons and interests immediately within its scope. It may bring added discomfort to the immediate victims, but it leaves the world without merrily indifferent, conscious of superior strength that can always laugh it down, with a vitality that cannot be sapped and a confidence in laws that form a barrier against its encroachments. Not so male egoism. This makes straight for the whole race of women, mercilessly potent by reason of physical force, and backed by all the laws, written and unwritten, of its own making.
It is this crushing exposure of the wide-spread plague, the extension and mingling of its fibres, the crudity and coarseness of its very refinement and super-fastidiousness, that gives ‘The Egoist’ a scientific as well as an artistic value, and commands for it in English literature a place apart.