And George Meredith aspired to be an English gentleman; he wrote about English gentlemen in all the infinite subtleties of their relationship to other English gentlemen, and more especially to English ladies. He wished to be, not an interloper and observer, tolerated because of his cleverness with the pen; he wished to be an authentic member of the caste, so secure that he might exercise that most cherished of all the privileges of the caste—to ridicule other members who fall away from the perfect caste ideal.
Do you think that I am making too much of this frailty of George Meredith? I answer that it is the key to the understanding of everything he wrote. Stop and think what it means that a man who possessed one of the great intellects of his time, who had all the wisdom of all the ages at his command, should be so bowed down with awe before the spirit of caste that he was willing to lie about himself. I do not mean merely that such a man’s whole life would become a pose; that he would pretend to be abnormally spiritual and ascetic, when as a matter of fact he was strongly attracted to lark-pies; that he would study his features, and observing that he had a refined and sensitive profile, would place himself at the window in such a position that his adorers would gaze upon this profile during the course of their visit. What I mean is that this man would have a caste-ridden mind; the subtleties of caste distinction, the minute details of appearance and conduct and thought by which caste superiority is manifested and maintained—this is the stuff out of which the man’s novels would be made, and the theme upon which his superfine intellect would be concentrated.
And so it is in the Meredithian universe. The dark, grim, vaguely shadowed Nemesis of the Greeks is gone; Jehovah with his thunders has been laid away with the other rubbish in the garret; what is left, to dominate the lives of men and women, to blast their hopes and lure them to ruin and despair, is social convention. And all such convention may be boiled down into one formula: thou shalt not break into a caste higher than that to which you were born. You may have money, and try it; you may pretend to have money, and try it; but in both cases alike you will fail. Meredith gives us masterpieces in the way of impostors trying to break in; he is even willing, under the veil of art, to use his own tragic life-story, and in “Evan Harrington” he tells about a tailor’s son who tries to break in. He turned such blasts of ridicule upon the poor tailor family and the poor tailor state of being, that Meredith’s tailor father down in South Africa was shriveled up with shame, and could not thereafter endure to hear his son’s novels discussed.
Likewise, women fail to break into the sacred caste. They have beauty, they have wit, but nothing avails. The creator of “Diana of the Crossways” lays himself out to convince us that this heroine is the most brilliant conversationalist that ever graced a London dinner-table. But she had to have money, and so she sells a government secret to a great newspaper, and being discovered, is thrown out. And if Diana failed, with all her worldly gifts, what hope for poor Lucy Feverel, who had nothing but country graces, natural loveliness of body, and sweetness and kindness and unselfishness of spirit? The “ordeal” of Richard Feverel lies in the fact that being a son of a rigid English gentleman, rigidly trained according to an ideal system, he falls in love with a country flower, and instead of seducing her according to the custom of the caste, he marries her. So, of course, the pair of them are trampled.
The defenders of Meredith will say that he does not desire such a state of affairs; he merely portrays it, because it exists. My answer to that is the familiar one, that art is propaganda. If George Meredith had believed in overthrowing the caste system in England he could surely have found ways to convey that fact to us. He might have begun with his own life; he might have taken his stand on a pedestal and said: “I, who know myself to be a highly intellectual novelist, am the son and grandson of tailors, and be pleased to make what you can of that.” If Meredith had realized vitally and vividly the anti-social nature of the caste system, and especially how that system is the very negation and death of art—surely he would have found space in his many novels for at least one character who has a little success in the effort to hold his head up against the power of snobbery. Remember, this was a time in which Alfred Harmsworth, gutter-journalist, became an earl, and Keir Hardie, pit-boy, became a labor hero. But Meredith’s caste-bound characters fail, and fail without any hint that they might have succeeded.
I do not wish to be unjust to this brilliant novelist, who was a modern man in many ways. He was entirely free from that religiosity which blighted Tennyson’s mind. He was clear-sighted about love, seeing that it is a thing of flesh and spirit, and must be both, or neither. Also he stood valiantly for the rights of ladies to be educated, and to have their talents recognized, and to dispose of their own personalities. In his old age he advanced the proposition that all marriages should be for a term of years, and that at the end of the term the parties should be free to remarry or not, as they wished. That this most sensible idea did not raise more of a storm was because most persons in Britain took it for granted that the novelist must be joking.
But as a rule what we get from Meredith is not social criticism in its broad sense, but merely caste criticism, the self-discipline of the privileged orders. Meredith’s greatest novel is “The Egoist,” a quite amazing study of one of these superior males, a creature who has been brought up from infancy to regard his sublime self as the purpose for which his own family exists, and one of a small group of select persons for whom the British Empire, and therefore the world exist. Meredith lays him bare for us in every turn and movement of his being, and we loathe him heartily, and sympathize with the series of females with whom he dallies in courtship.
Meredith is one of those super-sophisticated novelists who are unwilling to allow us to be interested in a course of events. The intellect in him has eaten up and sterilized the emotions. In reading him we are tormented by a feeling that his story and his characters would be delightful if only he would give them a chance; but he has such a brilliant style, he has so many ideas to convey to us, and so much shining wit and corruscating metaphor to display. It is like an exhibit of fireworks, which can be most ravishing for a few minutes; you catch your breath, and think you have never seen anything more lovely. But after an hour or so you decide that fireworks lack variety.
This infinitely subtle and delicate, witty and charming personality invites us to sit with him as gods upon Olympus, to look down upon the tragic fate of mortals, and find pleasure in the irony of their failures. As in the case of Corneille, we are concerned with the strife and clash of aristocratic egotisms; we take part in deadly intrigues, and in duels without mercy. But times have changed, and now no blood is shed, no corpses cover the ground; it is a duel of wit, with a death-blow in a phrase or the lifting of an eye-brow. Watching the conflict, we find ourselves asking, precisely as we asked with Corneille: What have we to do with these puppets? How do they concern us? What reality is there, what permanence to the conventions which dominate their puppet minds? What real wisdom is there behind their volleys of cleverness? So we realize that we are still in the Victorian age; and Victoria and boredom are two words for one thing.