Equally artificial and brilliant, and of a fascinating brevity, is ‘Tragic Comedians.’ Limelight plays blindingly upon the characters, and Clotilda and Alvan seem to flash before us like a couple of splendid meteors, to faint and fade in their own exhausted light. We blink and gaze after them, thrilled, startled, and subdued by their resplendency, with a keen sense of the theatrical in their portraits and in their actions. Garish the book is, but most vivid, of a fascination not to be coldly analyzed, of a charm indescribable. It is simply the short story of the wooing of a royal lover, of his lady’s betrayal of his love, and of her marriage with his rival. Never was a wooing like Alvan’s, never such a lover. That is why we doubt the reality, and dream of the footlights. We listen to him and read his telegrams, and in spite of the Alpine sunlight and the cool mountain air, we think of fireworks. We read of Clotilda’s golden hair, and we picture her flying through the clouds, chased by her fellow-meteor and fronted by the black night of marriage that extinguishes her after his decent burial. Some of their sayings seem written across the memory in letters of dancing light, and we dream of the scenes enacted by this pair of tragic comedians long after we have left them. Of all Mr. Meredith’s lovers, Alvan is the one who fascinates and thrills us most.
Taking a general survey of his qualities, we may note that Meredith the writer and man is always more interesting than even his best characters. It is how he develops them, what he thinks of them, his inimitable asides and epigrams, that we look for most. In this he is not Shakespearian, for whereas we get nothing of Shakespeare in any of his plays, in all of his books do we get much of Mr. Meredith. And in none of them too much. The one in which he sinks himself completely is, to my thinking, except as a remarkable tour de force, the least interesting. This is the ‘Shaving of Shagpat.’ George Eliot described it as pleasant light reading. This reads like a joke, if so illustrious and serious a personage as George Eliot could be deemed guilty of perpetrating a joke so mild. The story and its abounding verses are more Eastern than probably anything in Oriental literature, and if we had not ‘Vathek’ as a precedent, we should be disposed to regard the feat as an incredible one. For after ‘The Shaving of Shagpat,’ ‘The Arabian Nights’ reads as a model of sober commonplace and the epitome of everyday experience. Not only is the style Oriental, but facts and colouring and atmosphere are fabulously so. The impression left upon the bewildered reader is that of a kind of dazed passage beaten through a mass of broken jewels in a soft artificial light, richly perfumed with the heavy odours of Eastern flowers and scents. Houris and genii; roses, lilies, nightingales; diamonds, opals, rubies, and sapphires; jets of flame starting into illuminated fountains from the heart of lilies set in opal lakes; winged voyages through the pure Eastern air, over cities and plains and sunlit and moonlit landscape; impassioned Oriental songs, gorgeous metaphor richly massed through a wearisome brilliance of colours and imagery; wild amorous speech and tales, and descriptions of feminine beauty to turn the head of a sage and awaken a throb of envy in the breast of Théophile Gautier. Conceive, in fact, every strong imaginative effect heaped in reckless profusion, till, from sheer fatigue of overwrought senses, we hail with delight and relief the seizure of the Identical, the final triumph of the barber, and the shaving of Shagpat. There are many beautiful passages in it, and the humour of the parody is both subtle and exquisite, but it is too luscious for a single reading, though we may agree with the poet:
‘Ripe with oft telling, and old is the tale,
But ’tis of the sort that can never grow stale.’
This is Mr. Meredith, un-English and impersonal, and he pleases us less. We prefer his human comedy and his home comic muse to this parody of distant literature. We like best to feel his Saxon iron grasp and his deep glance ransacking humanity, as it lives and breathes, to its uttermost depth, and twisting it to every unimaginable revelation. We feel then in the presence of our prose Browning, earnest even in his laughter; Titanic, with an unsuspected softness of heart beneath a rugged and untender manner, and upon a homely shaft of mother-wit ready to shade from us the scientific penetration of his inward vision of us. His wit is like a rainbow lighting up a stormy sky, and his mocking carries no baleful suggestion of a sneer.
CHAPTER VI.
GEORGE MEREDITH’S MEN AND WOMEN.
Like Shakespeare and Scott, Mr. Meredith is uniformly gallant in his romances. With the exception of Richard, his young heroes are generally feeble youths; sometimes pleasant and good-natured, like Harry Richmond and Evan Harrington, and at others bloodless, make-believe men like Wilfred Pole and Percy Dacier. But all, as in the case of Scott’s amiable young men and Shakespeare’s lovers, are merely foils for the greater worth of the heroines. Imogen, Juliet, Beatrice, Miranda, the ladies of the gentlemen of Verona, Portia, and Lady Macbeth are all unworthily mated, and as Mr. Ruskin has said of Scott’s heroes, we are left wondering at the extreme and unmerited good fortune of these various young men who have drawn prizes, apparently as rewards for their amiable and pleasing manners. The fluted tenor of romance is on the whole an ill-treated personage. We invent him to do the love-making instead of ourselves with the different ideals of feminine perfection we imagine. But with his qualifications, his serious merits, we are not concerned. So long as he is handsome, has the art of using his voice, his mouth, and his eyes, carries his doublet and hose gracefully, twangs the guitar of loverhood musically, and recites his sonnets to advantage—behold the virtues we demand of him. He must be picturesque, above all, and the bloom of youth must lie upon his cheek, else as a sonneteer and troubadour is he pronounced unserviceable by the orchestra.
Now, the heroine is quite another matter, as Mr. Meredith, following great examples, shows us. She must claim our sympathy, our love, and our admiration. She must be surpassingly fair, and no less lovely of mind and soul. We are to quit her enamoured and regretful, vividly aware of her attractions, both mental and physical. And this has Mr. Meredith achieved in the case of all his heroines—maidens and widows. They are beautiful, witty, pure, womanly, and most captivating. Each one holds us enslaved as we follow her fortunes. She has but to open her lips, and we are at her feet. In spite of his harshnesses, Mr. Meredith remains great by his generous sympathy with the weak. In the strife between men and women, a strife he never blinks away, or feigns to discredit because his men choose to fall in love with his women, he ranges himself upon the side of women always and inevitably—and what a defence in the ranks of the enemy! He brings no drivelling, one-sided sympathy to bear upon the subject, but clear, logical sense and a keen eye for the weaknesses of the sex he defends. He laughs at woman sometimes, and enjoys a witticism and a taste of cruelty at her expense. But he makes it understood that his laughter is not scoffing and his cruelty is not bitter. On the contrary, they but add flavour to his championship, and make us the prouder of the big blows he directs against her tyrant. The tyranny of his own sex he doubts as little as its selfishness, which he has immortalized past cool endurance for man in the person of Sir Willoughby Patterne. The conventional woman, all horrors and shivers at the aspect of the natural and undecorated, made up of drawing-room theories and lap-dog sentiments, he rejects as unworthy of that which he conceives woman might be, if relieved from the sentimental trammels and restrictions that the selfish grossness of man has imposed upon her. He believes that women would be all the better for living more as men do, and men for meeting them half-way—one sex modified by the other, and mutually ennobled; eating healthily in acknowledgment of all healthy appetites, as opposed to the coarse Byronic view that condemns them to live upon air and the sentiments. Sandra talks freely of potatoes, fine ones too, while her sentimental lover writhes and shivers, feeling pelted by those potatoes, and the founts of love are nearly dried at the root of his heart. Can a young gentleman with a proper respect for himself feel romantically disposed towards a young woman, even if she be divinely beautiful, when she owns to a capacity to dine off potatoes? or ascend to heaven on an aria when the prima-donna refreshes herself with bottled stout? For such types, frequent enough, he suggests that sunlight must be too strong and gross, and wonders why they have not set their wits to invent some soft extract of a shadowy illumination wherewith to diminish the terrors and uglinesses of mere nature.
He acknowledges the influence of woman in no false, Frenchified way, but accepts it as the strong ordeal and revelation of man. ‘Women have us back to the conditions of primitive man, or they shoot us higher than the topmost star.... By their state is our civilization judged; and if it is hugely animal still, that is because primitive men abound and will have their pasture.’
Of his men, it is the old and oldish young that he draws best. His social epigrammatists and his grave, elderly gentlemen, or his caustic, elderly humorists, like Sir Austin Feverel, the immortal wise youth whose wit never goes to sleep, the gigantic fraud, Richmond Roy, and his fidus Achates; Tracy Runningbrook, Stukely Culbrett, Seymour Austen, and a host of such others. We must not forget Clara Middleton’s Irish colonel, a very pleasant figure in ‘The Egoist,’ the German princess’s father and Everard Romfrey. All these men have a point in common. Their wits are keenly alert, and they know not how to be dull. They are also gentlemen. Not that all, or many of Mr. Meredith’s male characters of high social standing, can lay claim to this qualification. There is in him, as in Thackeray, a singularly strong flavour of democracy, and a tendency to reveal us the snob concealed by the varnish of breeding. The young gentlemen in ‘Evan Harrington’ are the exact reverse of our ideal of the article. Harry Jocelyn borrows money from the tradesman he insults before repaying it; gets money from him to give to a wretched girl betrayed by him, and does not apply it to the purpose for which it has been given; conducts himself in all circumstances as an offensive boor and an abject cur. The young lords and squires around him do likewise. Some of the gentlemen and peers in ‘Richard Feverel’ are very unpleasant and shady company, and in ‘Rhoda Fleming,’ Mr. Algernon Blancove would find the average clerk in the back streets of a manufacturing town his superior in manners and morals. We get some queer specimens of upper-class snobocracy in ‘Harry Richmond,’ and what, pray, is Sir Willoughby Patterne if he is not a wondrously decorative and polished snob, contemplating complacently his own superiority in the mirror of his mind’s eye?