George Meredith and English Comedy, page 1
GEORGE MEREDITH AND ENGLISH COMEDY
The Clark Lectures for 1969
by
V. S. PRITCHETT
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter One
A Writer like myself who is neither scholar nor historian, who is not even, in the exclusive sense, a critic, who is utterly ungraduated and lives by standing at his stall in Grub Street every week, must be very moved by the honour of being asked to give the Clark Lectures. I hope it will be understood that I am far from comparing this college to Mr Sapsea in Edwin Drood when I say that, like his Miss Brobity, I did feel a “species of awe” when the task was proposed to me; and in the curious, perhaps extra-marital relation between the writer and a great university, I feel (as she did about him) the excitement of “a life-long homage to mind”. It is an extraordinary experience to be called to a great seat of learning; for a professional writer is a man with no seat—or rather the only seat he has is his own anxious one. And as he nips from subject to subject, living by the impromptus of the ego, he is mostly up and down or out and about. He is—he depends on being—short of breath. I am told that the profession I belong to is now disappearing fast, along with the printed word and the pleasure of reading it: all the more therefore do I value the chance of speaking in this College where Literature is not merely evaluated but valued, and of making a stand for pleasure and idiosyncrasy. And I take heart from the fact that the learned Clark who gave his name to these lectures had his lighter side. I discover from Mr E. M. Forster that Clark once took a holiday in Spain and wrote a short book about it. It was called Gazpacho. I cling to our common Spanish folly.
To call myself a critic would be going too far. I call myself a writer—sometimes an artist. Mr E. M. Forster told a Harvard audience years ago that the critic thinks before he writes, but the artist writes before he thinks. He is in the position of the sculptor who chips away at the stone in order to find the figure, his figure, a true self, inside it. The writer’s work is a perpetual business of chipping off, a long process of rejection. Scores of obstructive sentences must be chipped away, until the desired sentence or self is made clear. A story or a novel is the residue of innumerable rejected words.
Anyone who has written a story or novel is painfully aware of this. If what he has to say has been given to him by God, Nature, Society or Literature itself, the how of saying it will be his daily preoccupation. The novelist’s “how” has always been important to me as I munch my way from novel to novel. For some writers the question of “how” is simple: they follow the decent conventions. For others, there is either experiment or—much commoner—the struggle to find ways round the natural defects of their talented minds.
It is because we learn so much from the writers who have either got into difficulties or who have a certain vanity in creating them, that I have chosen Meredith as my subject. He is pretty well as vain of his messes as he is of his accepted achievements. He consciously created many obstacles for himself: to take one example, the Idea—and everything was Idea to him—that there was such a thing as absolute Comedy. He had theories about Comedy. He was not thinking of comic relief, humorous observation, farce or satirical orgy. He allowed Laughter as a healthy exercise but Comedy was a rather chaste Platonic Idea. Now the comic tradition in the English novel is a powerful one; it is an alternative to the Puritan tradition; it inspects as it alleviates or makes finer the demands of moral seriousness. Meredith who was a great adapter from the past can tell us a good deal about our comic tradition. What he was trying to do was to conceptualise—which is not a common English habit; and he was conceptualising a dominant tradition of the English novel. In comic irony our novelists have been pre-eminent. It is their most militant and most graceful gift. It has moderated or refined their didactic habit and drawn them closer to nature.
There is a serious initial difficulty in dealing with Meredith now. At any time during the last forty years it has been pretty safe to put on superior and evasive airs and to say that “no one reads him”. Just as “no one” reads Scott or Thackeray. We can easily add to the list of such complacencies and they change from generation to generation. But there is no doubt that Meredith not only is but always was a difficult case. His small number of distinguished admirers were intense in their delight in him; but his many detractors ended with exasperation. About his very late novel One of Our Conquerors which appeared serially in 1890 and 1891, I find this quotation from the critic of The Athenaeum:
it is becoming a common experience to meet cultivated persons who gravely assure us that Meredith is our greatest living novelist. … To us this vogue is inexplicable. … So far from being a great novelist, he does not seem to us to possess the qualifications which go to the making of a capable novelist of even the second rank, and, even if those qualifications were his, their effect would be ruined by a literary manner which even in these days of affectation and strain is of unique perversity.
Gissing was among those of the new generation who held exactly the opposite opinion and so was Oscar Wilde in his essay on The Soul of Man Under Socialism. So was Robert Louis Stevenson. There is the old joke that Meredith is a prose Browning and so is Browning. (The first part of that jeer is really an exact compliment.) Elsewhere, and especially in this university, Mr E. M. Forster’s dig about “The home counties posing as the universe” has been taken out of context and thought decisive, as phrases thrown off often are. But we notice that Mr Forster followed it with the words:
And yet he is in one way a great novelist. He is the finest contriver that English fiction has ever produced and any lecturer on plot must do homage to him.
There is a continual “And yet …” in both the abuse and the praise. Henry James called Meredith a sentimental rhetorician “whose natural indolence or congenital insufficiency, or both, made him in life, as in art, shirk every climax, dodge round it, and veil its absence in a fog of eloquence.” James certainly did not see Meredith as the great contriver. But later he said “Meredith did the best things best”—a remark that seems to be double-edged, for one is a bit suspicious of the phrase “the best things”. One is haunted by a doubt: did the late James make a difference between the “best things” and the glossiest things?
There is something very Meredithian in the comedy of the embarrassed relations of these two old Pretenders—Meredith and the later James, the two most stylistically, obscurely granulated novelists of their period, both so disguised by their love of feint and contrivance that they stumble upon each other like rival magicians in an absurd duel of spells and counter-spells so ineffectual that they can only drive the combatants to exhausted rudeness:
“Poor old Meredith,” James is reported to have said.
“He writes these mysterious nonsenses and heaven knows what they all mean.”
To which Meredith replies:
“Poor old James. He sets down on paper these mysterious rumblings of his bowels—but who can be expected to understand them?”
Faced by his critics Meredith has the great disadvantage of being a wit. It makes one an occasion of wit in others and generally of the mortal kind. The joke about the home counties posing as the universe, is mild beside Henley’s attempt at sympathy:
Meredith writes with the pen of a great artist in one hand and the razor of a spiritual suicide in the other.
By acrimonies of this kind, which usually draw blood among literary persons, Meredith seems to have been not greatly affected. He did not blow his brains out, stop writing or reform. He had a splendid vanity. He appears to have been able to shut himself off. He seems not to have been too depressed. He knew his own originality. His lazy, restless mind was always on the move to more epigrams, he was papered all over by egoism and as impervious as Sir Willoughby Patterne. Perhaps for all his lyrical talk of earthiness, he had no blood but simply what he called brain stuff. And in private life, condemned at last to total deafness and locomotor ataxia, he went on living to a great age, giving his perpetual exhibition as a non-stop talker, a pre-manifestation of Shaw’s Methuselah, listening to nobody and as if designed by God not to listen.
If we look again at Meredith and study his relation to our comic tradition, the task is made easy by Meredith himself. He was a deeply literary novelist: his admiration for the work of his father-in-law, Peacock, shows that. In literature he was a hero-worshipper. As a novelist he was something of a compendium, something of a jackdaw too, with an eye for the bright things. One often has the impression that he writes novels as a critic would write them; that as his pen goes to the paper a critical and a creative artist have a paralysing admiration for each other.
What was in this compendium? Meredith says very little about this and I shall suggest a reason a little later. But I think we may be allowed our view of it. It seems to me that our comic tradition is fed by three main streams upon which Meredith drew. I think of them as the masculine, the feminine and the mythic or fantastic. The division is, of course, arbitrary. Sooner or later they will mingle, separate, mingle again. The masculine tradition, if you take this view, runs from Fielding, Scott, Jane Austen, Trollope, George Eliot and on to Kipling, Wells, Waugh, Ivy Compton-Burnett and Anthony Powell. A larger number of brilliant minor figures belong to it. It is sanguine, sociable, positive, morally tough, believes in good sense, even in angered good sense and suspects sensibilit
One of the happiest couples in the world. They had in fact nothing to wish for, but the marriage of Colonel Brandon and Marianne—and rather better pasturage for the cows.
Compare this with the comment of a contemporary novelist, Anthony Powell, another aphorist:
He also lacked that subjective, ruthless love of presiding over other peoples’ difficulties which often makes basically heartless people adept at offering effective consolation.
Or again, sententiousness being natural to this kind of comedy:
Love had received one of those shattering jolts to which it is peculiarly vulnerable from extraneous circumstances.
Exercise—think of those long walks in Jane Austen’s novels—and animal spirits, horseplay, good health have their parts especially in the male comic writing of the masculine school. And Fielding established it at that period of bluff settlement and confidence in the early eighteenth century. With him a conventional copy-book morality, dignified by epigram, had come in; later it would be made more subtle; it would appease if it did not satisfy. Those harsh, abstract, political seventeenth-century words like God, King or the State have been replaced by something called “the World” and a very towny World it is. It is inhabited by “men of the world” and “women of discretion”. A certain dullness or triteness is relieved by the wild belief in Fortune, in extravagance of character and occasional glimpses of the madhouse. What does “a man of the world” think? He does not think much, or rather he thinks as others do. He is intelligent, but not intellectual. He is a pragmatist. He respects something called “the Way”. You follow “the Way of the World” even when you try to reform or civilise “the Way”. The title of Congreve’s play points to the ruling preoccupation. And what do you do? You have adventures, you meet all classes of people, you conduct intrigues. It is a life of action and you have an active but not deeply disturbed moral life. You will be observant of character in its sociable relationships. You will rarely see a man or woman alone in their privacy. You will be conscious of being an actor on the social scene and you will be given a certain consequential style, a public manner; its object, aided by the new cult of conversation, is to avoid any sight of the void or horror outside that cannot be governed. Hogarth thinks you can get people off gin by putting them on to beer; only Swift, the half-colonial exile coming from savage Ireland, has a sense of the unsociable horror, only he conceives madness and misanthropy. Ireland had no rising middle class.
But suppose you reject the Way, the belief in habit and behaviour. Suppose you rely on your own mind and not on society’s. Suppose you value your privacy, value imagination and sensibility more than common sense. Suppose you live not by clock time, but by the uncertain hours of your feeling. Suppose you live by your imagination or your fantasies. Suppose, with Gray, you think that all you have is your own “pleasing anxious being” and are, perhaps, liable to fright, illness, egocentricity and sin. Then you will be with Sterne in the disorderly, talkative, fantasticating tradition. I call it the feminine, the affectable. It is wayward. Sterne dissolved the sense of order: he saw that we cannot do as we please but that we have a mind that does exactly as it pleases, moves back and forth in time. The “I” is not a fixture; it dissolves every minute; its movements are as uncertain as the transparent jelly-fish as it washes back and forth in the current. Not action, but inaction, being washed along by the tide is the principle, astonished that we are a form of life. The Sterne or feminine strain in our comedy is discernible in Peacock, Dickens, bits of Thackeray, a lot of Meredith again, Lear, Carroll, Saki, Firbank, Virginia Woolf; in Joyce, of course, and in Beckett, in all the experiments and slackeners of social forms. I have seen Sterne described by a young critic, Alvarez, as “cool” and “poised” even existentialist and he is certainly, after being under a cloud, a reviving figure now. For Sterne follows consciousness from sentence to sentence, image to image, wilfully, even in exhibitionist manner. He is receptive to sensation and believes in the mingling of meanings and in the oblique. His feminine strain is not consequential ; if he is sententious this is only for the purpose of self-mockery; he may beat a sentimental bosom but his eye is always wandering, leading away his mind. He is a talker and very much a soliloquist. The characters in his novels do occasionally talk to each other, but they are always thinking of something else. They are self-obsessed. They live a good deal in the imagination. The speech they are interested in is the broken syntax of speech-in-the-mind and while that rambles on—not pointlessly, for Sterne is constructing a mosaic—Society, the great gregarious English burden with its call to presentable moral duty, melts away. It is replaced by an immense detail, seen as it might be under a magnifying glass that enlarges and makes everything seem to stand still. This is precisely the effect of trauma or fantasy upon us, for the magnifying glass has shown us at once a real object which is made dream-like by enlargement. Uncle Toby’s fuss about the fortifications of Namur is the real fuss of a vegetative old soldier consumed by his memories; but by enlargement it is made to seem a symbol of an extreme modesty. It is to be noted that both Fielding and Sterne tell us when to laugh; but whereas Fielding in his authoritative way, stands back from his novel when he points the finger, Sterne directs from inside it. In fact, he intends that we shall laugh at him when we laugh at his characters. Both novelists digress in order to convey their opinions or the sensible drift of their work; but Fielding’s digressions are mainly in his essayish pages, whereas, when Sterne digresses, the whole thing digresses with him. He is writing his novel backwards and very slowly backwards, the surprise lying in discovering what has already happened.
I have called the third strain in our comic tradition mythic or fantastic and this is so adjacent to Sterne’s habit that I hesitate over the distinction. But it has to be made because the comedy of Dickens stands a great deal on its own because his genius belongs to a century of violent revolution. We shall find a good deal of Fielding and Sterne in Meredith and well-used. There is a little of Dickens, too, and it is nearly always poor copying and secondhand: the misunderstanding of the comic Dickens has already begun. In the last twenty years or so great stress has been put on the serious socially conscious Dickens, the poetic symbolist, the often melodramatic and violent enemy of social injustice; and the effect of this stress has been to make us treat his comedy as comic relief. (The comic writer never quite overcomes the classical reproof that comedy is an inferior form of writing.) I do not believe that Dickens can be split in two in this way: one part reformer, the other part original English humorist. He represents, for me, his century’s powerful release of an important psychological force.
In Dickens’s novels we are faced by a vast Gothic structure, a mixture of sprawling Parliament and sinister, often blood-and-thunder theatre. After the pragmatism of the eighteenth century, we have a myth-maker. No one believes in the Way of the World any longer. The Town has gone; it is replaced by the City and the swarm. The Town was a gambler and believed in Fortune. Money was not earned, it was won: an example, useful to comedy, was the abduction of heiresses. Debt was a luxury to be aimed at by the Town. In the City-dominated century, where money has to be earned, debt is an agony, a shame, a haunting nightmare that corrodes the next day. The first thing to say about the comedy of Dickens is that London, the city itself, becomes the chief character. Its fogs, its smoke, its noise, its courts, officers, bricks, slums and docks, its gentilities and its crimes, have a quasi-human body. London is seen as the sum of the fantasies and dreams of its inhabitants. It is a city of speeches and voices. The comedy will be in the fusion of the city’s dream life and its realities. So will the committal to moral indignation. What we precisely find in this comedy is people’s projection of their self-esteem, the attempt to disentangle the self from the ineluctable London situation; they take on the dramatic role of solitary pronouncers. All Dickens’s characters, comic or not, issue personal pronouncements that magnify their inner life. Some are crude like Podsnap, others are subtle like Pecksniff or poetic like Micawber, unbelievable like Skimpole, aristocratic casuists like the father of the Marshalsea, glossy like the Veneerings. All are actors; quip or rhetoric is second nature to them. They are strange, even mad, because they speak as if they were the only persons in the world. They live by some private idea or fiction. Mrs Gamp lives by the fiction of the approval of her imaginary friend Mrs Harris. She, like the other important comic characters, is a self-made myth. Our comedy, Dickens seems to say, is not in our relations with others but in our relation with ourselves, our lives, our poetry, our genius; it is even our justification in what Mrs Gamp calls “this wale”, this vale of tears. A character like Pecksniff, may be inferior, as an analysis of hypocrisy, to Tartuffe or Iudushka in Shchedrin’s
