One gets a sense of Meredith's resources of breadth and variety next in taking up "Evan Harrington." Here is a satiric character sketch where before was romance; for broad comedy in the older and larger sense it has no peer among modern novels. The purpose is plain: to show the evolution of a young middle-class Englishman, a tailor's son, through worldly experience with polite society into true democracy. After the disillusionment of "high life," after much yeasty juvenile foolishness and false ideals, Evan comes back to his father's shop with his lesson learned: it is possible (in modern England) to be both tailor and gentleman.
In placing this picture before the spectator, an incomparable view of genteel society with contrasted touches of low life is offered. For pure comedy that is of the midriff as well as of the brain, the inn scene with the astonishing Raikes as central figure is unsurpassed in all Meredith, and only Dickens has done the like. And to correspond in the fashionable world, there is Harrington's sister, the Countess de Saldar, who is only second to Becky Sharp for saliency and delight. Some find these comic figures overdrawn, even impossible; but they stand the test applied to Dickens: they abide in affectionate memory, vivid evocations made for our lasting joy. As with "Feverel," the book is a piece of life first, a lesson second; but the underlying thesis is present, not to the injury of one who reads for story's sake.
An extraordinary further example of resourcefulness, with a complete change of key, is "The Adventures of Harry Richmond." The ostensible business of the book is to depict the growth from boyhood to manhood and through sundry experiences of love, with the resulting effect upon his character, of the young man whose name gives it title. It may be noted that a favorite task with Meredith is this, to trace the development of a personality from immaturity to a maturity gained by the hard knocks of the master-educator, Love. But the figure really dominant is not Harry nor any one of his sweethearts, but that of his father, Roy Richmond. I must believe that English fiction offers nothing more original than he. He is an indescribable compound of brilliant swashbuckler, splendid gentleman and winning Goodheart. Barry Lyndon, Tarascon, Don Quixote and Septimus go into his making—and yet he is not explained;—an absolute original. The scene where, in a German park on an occasion of great pomp, he impersonates the statue of a Prince, is one of the author's triumphs—never less delightful at a re-reading.
But has this amazing creation a meaning, or is Roy merely one of the results of the sportive play of a man of genius? He is something more, we feel, when, at the end of the romance, he gives his life for the woman who has so faithfully loved him and believed in his royal pretensions. He perishes in a fire, because in saving her he would not save himself. It is as if the author said: "Behold, a man by nature histrionic and Bohemian, and do not make the mistake to think him incapable of nobility. Romantic in his faults, so too he is romantic in his virtues." "And back of this kindly treatment of the lovable rascal (who was so ideal a father to the little Richmond!) does there not lurk the thought that the pseudo-romantic attitude toward Life is full of danger—in truth, out of the question in modern society?"
"The Egoist" has long been a test volume with Meredithians. If you like it you are of the cult; if not, merely an amateur. It is inevitable to quote Stevenson who, when he had read it several times, declared that at the sixth reading he would begin to realize its greatness. Stevenson was a doughty admirer of Meredith, finding the elder "the only man of genius of my acquaintance," and regarding "Rhoda Fleming" as a book to send one back to Shakspere.
That "The Egoist" is typical—in a sense, most typical of the fictions,—is very true. That, on the other hand, it is Meredith's best novel may be boldly denied, since it is hardly a novel at all. It is a wonderful analytic study of the core of self that is in humanity, Willoughby, incarnation of a self-centeredness glossed over to others and to himself by fine gentleman manners and instincts, is revealed stroke after stroke until, in the supreme test of his alliance with Clara Middleton, he is flayed alive for the reader's benefit. In this power of exposure, by the subtlest, most unrelenting analysis, of the very penetralia of the human soul it has no counterpart; beside it, most of the psychology of fiction seems child's play. And the truth of it is overwhelming. No wonder Stevenson speaks of its "serviceable exposure of myself." Every honest man who reads it, winces at its infallible touching of a moral sore-spot. The inescapable ego in us all was never before portrayed by such a master.
But because it is a study that lacks the breadth, variety, movement and objectivity of the Novel proper, "The Egoist" is for the confirmed Meredith lover, not for the beginner: to take it first is perchance to go no further. Readers have been lost to him by this course. The immense gain in depth and delicacy acquired by English fiction since Richardson is well illustrated by a comparison of the latter's "Sir Charles Grandison" with Meredith's "The Egoist." One is a portrait for the time, the other for all time. Both, superficially viewed, are the same type: a male paragon before whom a bevy of women burn incense. But O the difference! Grandison is serious to his author, while Meredith, in skinning Willoughby alive like another Marsyas, is once and for all making the worship of the ego hateful.
It is interesting that "Diana of the Crossways" was the book first to attract American readers. It has some of the author's eccentricities at their worst. But it was in one respect an excellent choice: the heroine is thoroughly representative of the author and of the age; possibly this country is sympathetic to her for the reason that she seems indigenous. Diana furnishes a text for a dissertation on Meredith's limning of the sex, and of his conception of the mental relation of the sexes. She is a modern woman, not so much that she is superior in goodness to the ideal of woman established in the mid-Victorian period by Thackeray and Dickens, as that she is bigger and broader. She is the result of the process of social readjustment. Her story is that of a woman soul experiencing a succession of unions and through them learning the higher love. First, the marriage de convenance of an unawakened girl; then, a marriage wherein admiration, ambition and flattered pride play their parts; finally, the marriage with Redbourne, a union based on tried friendship, comradeship, respect, warming into passion that, like the sudden up-leap of flame on the altar, lifts the spirit onto ideal heights. Diana is an imperfect, sinning, aspiring, splendid creature. And in the narrative that surrounds her, we get Meredith's theory of the place of intellect in woman, and in the development of society. He has an intense conviction that the human mind should be so trained that woman can never fall back upon so-called instinct; he ruthlessly attacks her "intuition," so often lauded and made to cover a multitude of sins. When he remarks that she will be the last thing to be civilized by man, the satire is directed against man rather than against woman herself, since it is man who desires to keep her a creature of the so-called intuitions. A mighty champion of the sex, he never tires telling it that intellectual training is the sure way to all the equalities. This conviction makes him a stalwart enemy of sentimentalism, which is so fiercely satirized in "Sandra Belloni" in the persons of the Pole family. His works abound in passages in which this view is displayed, flashed before the reader in diamond-like epigram and aphorism. Not that he despises the emotions: those who know him thoroughly will recognize the absurdity of such a charge. Only he insists that they be regulated and used aright by the master, brain. The mishaps of his women come usually from the haphazard abeyance of feeling or from an unthinking bowing down to the arbitrary dictations of society. This insistence upon the application of reason (the reasoning process dictated by an age of science) to social situations, has led this writer to advise the setting aside of the marriage bond in certain circumstances. In both "Lord Ormont and his Aminta" and "One of our Conquerors" he advocates a greater freedom in this relation, to anticipate what time may bring to pass. It is enough here to say that this extreme view does not represent Meredith's best fiction nor his most fruitful period of production.
Perhaps the most original thing about Meredith as a novelist is the daring way in which he has made an alliance between romance and the intellect which was supposed, in an older conception, to be its archenemy. He gives to Romance, that creature of the emotions, the corrective and tonic of the intellect "To preserve Romance," he declares, "we must be inside the heads of our people as well as the hearts … in days of a growing activity of the head." Let us say once again that Romance means a certain use of material as the result of an attitude toward Life; this attitude may be temporary, a mood; or steady, a conviction. It is the latter with George Meredith; and be it understood, his material is always realistic, it is his interpretation that is superbly idealistic. The occasional crabbedness of his manner and his fiery admiration for Italy are not the only points in which he reminds one of Browning. He is one with him in his belief in soul, his conception of life is an arena for its trying-out; one with him also in the robust acceptance of earth and earth's worth, evil and all, for enjoyment and as salutary experience. This is no fanciful parallel between Meredith and a man who has been called (with their peculiarities of style in mind) the Meredith of Poetry, as Meredith has been called the Browning of Prose.
Thus, back of whatever may be the external story—the Italian struggle for unity in "Vittoria," English radicalism in "Beauchamp's Career," a seduction melodrama in "Rhoda Fleming"—there is always with Meredith a steady interpretation of life, a principle of belief. It is his crowning distinction that he can make an intellectual appeal quite aside from the particular story he is telling;—and it is also apparent that this is his most vulnerable point as novelist. We get more from him just because he shoots beyond the fiction target. He is that rare thing in English novel-making, a notable thinker. Of all nineteenth century novelists he leads for intellectual stimulation. With fifty faults of manner and matter, irritating, even outrageous in his eccentricities, he can at his best startle with a brilliance that is alone of its kind. It is because we hail him as philosopher, wit and poet that he fails comparatively as artist. He shows throughout his work a sublime carelessness of workmanship on the structural side of his craft; but in those essentials, dialogue, character and scene, he rises to the peaks of his profession.