On the whole, Mr. Meredith is hard on his own sex. Sometimes he draws a young fool like Lord Palmet in ‘Beauchamp’s Career,’ who can be a lord, a fool, and a gentleman at the same time; who makes us laugh and holds our sympathies, there is something so extremely natural in his idiocy and something so very engaging in his candour; and then we feel that the author is not hard on him, and has no desire to excite our contempt. But this tenderness to young men of gentle birth is rare in Mr. Meredith’s volumes. His laughter at them is not usually soft-hearted, but grim, as in the case of the youth who bought cigars to save himself from excesses in charity, and who, after an ill-digested dinner and wine, sat so long without moving a leg that he indulged in the belief that he had reflected profoundly, and woke up with the philosophic intent to forget himself; being under some doom, nobody caring for him, happiness unknown to him, born under a bad star, and ‘following his youthful wisdom, the wounded hart dragged his slow limbs toward the halls of brandy and song.’
As an apology for his somewhat merciless dissection of fools like these young men, Mr. Meredith adds:
‘One learns to have compassion for fools, by studying them; and the fool, though nature is wise, is next door to nature. He is naked in his simplicity; he can tell us much, and suggest more. My excuse for dwelling on him is that he holds the link of my story. Where fools are numerous, one of them must be prominent, now and then, in a veracious narration. There comes an hour when the veil drops on him, he not being always clean to the discreeter touch.’
And so he diligently leads us through the unshadowy mental recesses of the fool in question, as a sample of others abounding, not compassionately by any means, with perhaps too pointed a suggestion of sneer on the tip of his caustic pen. He shows him awaking to the conviction that England is no place for him to dwell in—a conviction we cordially share, with the consciousness that England alone could have produced him—with visions of himself married to a wife who in the colonies would make butter or cheese while he rode on horseback through space; saw himself rejoicing her with a declaration of love, astounding her with a proposition of marriage, and in little more than a week sailing on the high seas, newborn; ‘nothing of civilization about him, save a few last very first-rate cigars, which he projected to smoke on the poop of the vessel, and so dream of the world he left behind.’
If this is compassionate treatment of the fools, we wonder what Mr. Meredith would be likely to regard as severe handling of the genus. Indeed, Algernon Blancove, as the typical brainless young English gentleman, of no morals and less manners, runs in several varied editions throughout the author’s works. We come upon him under different names, sometimes more of a boor, as in the case of Harry Jocelyn; sometimes more of a gentleman, as in the person of Ferdinand Laxley, but ever drawn from the same persistently objectionable type.
His older men, like Major Waring and Seymour Austen, he touches with a truly remarkable kindliness; a gentle sadness and reasonableness pervade the atmosphere in which he steeps their picture, and such is their humane influence upon him, that he drops, or nearly drops, metaphor, and adopts the language of commonplace but cultivated humanity. If, as has been said by M. Taine, George Sand makes us wish to be in love and the English novelists aim to make us wish to be married, Mr. Meredith may be accused of a desire to prove to us that in men middle-age is more attractive and lovable than youth, and that the sedate sadness that accompanies it but adds to the dignity of life, its thoughtful measure never exceeding a refined and placid geniality, and knowing no other discord than a very mild sense of disapprobation. In his men of this period, and even beyond it, he indeed portrays us thorough gentlemen, patient and honourable men of dignified habits of life and of keenly alert wits. Sometimes they have just a flavour of fire and brimstone unconsumed in an anterior stage, as in the case of Beauchamp’s delightful uncle. He is a sort of twelfth-century baron pleasantly masquerading as a nineteenth-century country gentleman, and more than one romantic young person would be indisposed to hesitate upon the side of youth, if ordered to make her choice between this elderly gentleman and his fiery nephew. Nearly on the first page he enchants us with the honest wholesomeness and vigour of his talk, when, in reply to something Beauchamp has said, he exclaims:
‘Damned fine speech! Now you get out of that trick of prize-orationing. I call it snuffery, sir, it’s all to your own nose! You’re talking to me, not to a gallery. Cæsar wraps his head in his robe; he gets his dig in the ribs for all his attitudinizing. It’s very well for a man to talk like that who owns no more than his bare bodkin life. Tall talk’s his jewellery; he must have his dandification in bunkum. You ought to know better. Property and titles are worth having, whether you are worthy of them or a disgrace to your class. The best way of defending them is to keep a strong fist, and take care you don’t draw your fore-foot back more than enough.’
Such he walks the book, a stout and resolute old gentleman, with words of sense upon his lips, capable of manly tenderness and dignified concessions, and the embodiment of all virile virtues as well as those belonging to his class. While the charming French girl and the sweet English maiden hold our senses thrilled, it is this mediæval baron that soundly raps our nodding judgment, and keeps our wits awake.
Sometimes, as in the case of Edward Blancove, Mr. Meredith wheels us round from cold dislike into sympathy and admiration. But not often. His unpleasant young men are not more susceptible of conversion than they are usually to be found in real life, and he is not fond of playing such tricks as this one, wherein we get from the lips of a coldly argumentative and sharply legal young gentleman, who has, hitherto, conducted himself as something of a well-bred knave, such honest words as these:
‘Plainly, sir, in God’s name, hear me out. She’s—what shall I call her? my mistress, my sweetheart, if you like—let the name be anything—“wife” it should have been and shall be—I left her, and have left her, and have not looked on her for many months. I thought I was tired of her—I was under odd influences—witchcraft, it seems. I could believe in witchcraft now. Brutal selfishness is the phrase for my conduct. I have found out my villainy. I have not done a day’s sensible work, nor had a single clear thought, since I parted from her. She has had brain-fever. She has been in the hospital. She is now prostrate with misery. While she suffered, I—I can’t look back on myself. If I had to plead before you for more than manly consideration, I could touch you. I am my own master, and am ready to subsist by my own efforts; there is no necessity for me to do more than say I abide by the choice I make, and my own actions. In deciding to marry her, I do a good thing, I do a just thing. I will prove to you that I have done a wise thing.’