Now this is not simply bad writing: it is ambitious bad writing. It is an outburst, for the rest of the novel is done in a plainish style. But if one reads this whole chapter called The London Walk Westward one sees that Meredith did have a conscious, intelligent intention. He is staging London. He imagines a literary Rajah looking at the London scene with an Oriental eye who has the idea that Londoners march eastward for fuel and westward for food. The scene is a piece of theatre. He is explicit about this.

  According to the Stage directions [he writes] the Rajah and His Minister Enter a Gin Palace. It is to witness a service that they have learned to appreciate as Anglicanly religious.

  And there we have the key to this clumsy cleverness. Where have we read such things before? Meredith has taken them from the burlesque in Fielding. In Fielding it has dramatic effect. The artifice is clear. A classical mind controls it. In Meredith, German romantic grotesque has muddled it, and the cleverer he is the worse the muddle. The sunset hour may very well be London’s sentimental hour, in which fancies are muddled: the stream of consciousness is probably pretty thick with stuff like this at that time of day; but for that reason it calls for a precise or selective describer.

  There is no objection to Meredith putting his scenes on the stage. The tradition of Fielding, so strongly influenced by the theatre, is important to English comedy. One kind of comedy depends on seizing an incident or scene, setting it apart or aslant from its context—the fight between the women in the churchyard in Tom Jones, the rituals of the debtors in the Marshalsea scenes in Little Dorrit. The writer of comedy has to shape and form his scenes. Meredith is simply unsuccessful in staging crowds; he is effective in staging individual people.

  The fact is that Meredith, the tailor and disciple of Teufelsdröckh, moves towards fantasy and abstraction the better to make his psychological point. The example of Sir Willoughby Patterne’s leg shows him at work. There are two pages of it and it establishes Sir Willoughby’s person, his character, and their effect on other people. For Meredith our ambience and what we suggest to the fancies of others is part of ourselves: we exist as histories, as poems in the minds of others:

  The leg of the born cavalier is before you: and obscure it as you will, dress it degenerately, there it is for the ladies who have eyes. You see it: or, you see he has it. Miss Isabel and Miss Eleanour disputed the incidence of the emphasis, but surely, though a slight difference of meaning may be heard, either will do: many, with a good show of reason, throw the accent on leg. … Mrs Mountstuart signified that the leg is to be seen because it is a burning leg. There it is and it will shine through. He has the leg of Rochester, Buckingham, Dorset, Suckling; the leg that smiles, that winks, is obsequious to you, yet perforce of beauty self satisfied; that twinkles to a tender midway between imperiousness and seductiveness, audacity and discretion; between “you shall worship me” and “I am devoted to you” is your lord and slave alternatively. It is a leg of ebb and flow and high tide ripples.

  (In that sentence we see Meredith as usual swapping into the wrong image. But he rescues himself and comes to the decisive point)

  Such a leg, when it has done with pretending to retire, will walk straight into hearts of women. Nothing so fatal to them.

  Unmistakably, that leg is a sexual symbol. Meredith intends that. Patterne is as male, apparently, as Darcy was. The leg is not for the drawing room alone. But Meredith quickly retreats from the unmannerly idea.

  A simple seeming word of this import is the triumph of the spiritual and where it passes for coin of value, the society has reached a high refinement: Arcadian by the aesthetic route.

  There you have the late-Victorian pretender, rising above his insinuation.

  There is a surprising passage of self-criticism in Beauchamp’s Career, in the scene in which Beauchamp is explaining the difference between the Conservative and Liberal parties to Miss Halkett. It goes:

  (Liberalism) stakes too much on the chance of gain. It is uncomfortably seated on half a dozen horses; and it has fed them, too, on varieties of corn.

  Miss Halkett replies:

  I know you wouldn’t talk down to me but the use of imagery makes me feel that I am addressed as a primitive intelligence.

  Beauchamp replies:

  That’s the fault of my trying at condensation, as the hieroglyphists put an animal for a paragraph. I am incorrigible you see.

  Meredith is incorrigible and if he wearies one it is because he is the wit who always wins. Of course Beauchamp is not Meredith, but the important characters in Meredith are always extremists because they have to carry this thing he called Idea. He has another comment in Diana of the Crossways about Diana’s writing, which reverts to the Arcadian argument I quoted just now. It obviously contains glances at his own prose. Diana had been hurt, therefore she plumped for metaphor. He writes in her defence and his own:

  Metaphors were her refuge. Metaphorically she would allow her mind to distinguish the struggle she was undergoing, sinking under it. The banished of Eden had to put on metaphors, and the common use of them has helped largely to civilise us—the sluggish of intellect detest them, but our civilisation is not much indebted to that major faction.

  I have spoken at length about the excesses in Meredith’s prose and have said that they show a mind that tends to disperse its gifts and to have difficulty in finding a common ground. But he does find it once he has settled in to his work, either in the well-known lyrical interludes—the river scene and storm scenes in Richard Feverel—and in his mastery of ironic narrative and commentary where his psychological curiosity subdues the actor. Then his inventiveness as a poet brings gaiety to a prose which is even more an essayist’s than the prose of a novelist. And it is not so far from the agitated prose of those modern writers who seem to have sensed that the prose of the future will be heard and seen, and perhaps never read.

  Chapter Three

  When Mr Forster complained that Meredith’s cricket was not cricket, the trains were not trains and that the country houses were conjectural, our reply must be: “No, of course, they were not. He was writing Romance.” Meredith himself rejected everyday realism; his first book The Shaving of Shagpat was a fantasy.

  It is difficult to say exactly what a Romance should do or not do. If we except Jane Austen, the English novelists are incurable mixers; they have evidently thought they were entitled to move some things out of focus: it would be a way of making meaning emotional. If Meredith’s country houses and cricket matches float in the air, his bye-elections are very real; if his people are inflations their sensibilities and the content of their minds are not. What Henry James said in his preface to The American when he re-read it, comes nearest to an account of the mixed practice:

  The only general attribute of projected romance that I can see, the only one that fits all its cases, is the fact of the kind of experience with which it deals—experience, liberated, so to speak; experience disengaged, disemboweled, disencumbered, exempt from the conditions that we usually know how to attach to it and, if we so wish to put the matter, drag upon it.

  He goes on:

  The balloon of experience is in fact of course tied to the earth, and under that necessity we swing, thanks to a rope of remarkable length, in the more or less commodious car of the imagination; but it is by the rope we know where we are, and from the moment the cable is cut we are at large and unrelated: we only swing apart from the globe— though remaining as exhilarated, naturally, as we like, especially when all goes well. The art of the romancer is, “for the fun of it”, insidiously to cut the cable, to cut it without our detecting him.

  As for being a drug—yes, Romance is hallucination:

  There are [James goes on] drugs enough, clearly, it is all a question of applying them with tact; in which the way things don’t happen may be artfully made to pass for the way they do.

  The general advantages of Romance for the novelist is that in disposing of a too identifiable society, it frees him for the expressing of psychological insights and for telling stories that embody a fundamental myth or fable. It drains away everyday domestic character and circumstance from the novel and replaces these by the psyche floating free and heightened and magnified so that it is clearer to the poet’s and psychologist’s eye. And in Meredith’s Romance—notably in Beauchamp’s Career —circumstance and society have a psyche also. Beauchamp’s England is an inner, if partial, version of the outer England which was circumstantially described by the realists of “the condition of England” movement. Meredith’s analysis of egoism in The Egoist is tied to the notion that egoism is the very soul of the rich and ruling classes in the England of the ‘70s.

  But because society had a psyche in Meredith’s novels his people do not float in complete freedom and he was aware of the difficulty mentioned by Henry James: to palm off the way things don’t happen as the way they do. Meredith’s strange style was a device for doing this, for linking his Romance to a real world. He was divided, as I said in Chapter Two, between his longing for the grand epic subject and his skill in writing about what he called the morbid intricacies of human feeling. Here he was often very telling. Under the hearty and effervescing Romantic there was a mordant and self-punishing man. The Romantic is bound to be punished and so in the forefront of Meredith’s mind is the firm idea of the Ordeal. We are on earth to be tried by fire. We are to be tested for integrity and good sense. The idea appears in his very first novel, The Shaving of Shagpat, and it is even present in the exquisite little surface farce of General Ople and Lady Camper.

  One of the odd but I suppose very Victorian things about Meredith’s idea is that the ordeal is not only spiritual—we must suffer until we are purified of Romantic dross—but it is physical. Bodily pain is necessary as well as inevitable; the thing to do is to know how to take a beating or a punch-up, purge one-self by laughter and recognise the value of the discipline. The barber in Shagpat is frequently beaten. There is a chapter called “the thwackings”—note how Meredith turns a fact into a general Idea—and after all the physical thwackings of Fate he is free of his conceit, his innocence and illusions; now he can win the Princess. So little is really known about Meredith’s inner life; he is complex and became hermetic, despite the flow of talk and letters. But I think a contemporary psychologist (who had no doubts about the possibility of getting personal evidence about an author from his works) would pounce upon the case of General Opie. Plagued to the point of nervous breakdown by the practical jokes of a captivating widow, the General finds her the more irresistible the more punishment increases. We find this very strange even very bold passage, that nowadays raises an eyebrow:

  … Many who have journeyed far down the road, turn back to the worship of youth, which they have lost. Some are for the graceful worldliness of wit, of which they share just enough to admire it. Some are captivated by hands that can wield the rod, which in earlier days they escaped to their cost. In the case of General Opie, it was partly her whippings of him, partly her penetration. … You hear old gentlemen speak fondly of the switch; and they are not attached to pain, but the instrument revives their feelings of youth. … For in the distance, the whip’s end may look like a clinging caress instead of a stinging flick.

  Later on, in Beauchamp’s Career, we shall come upon the famous dramatic episode of the beating up of Dr Shrapnel, the old Radical. To the violent Victorians who seem to have taken thrashing as a matter of course, this ugly episode was not shocking. The beating up of Bradlaugh outside the House of Commons was thought of as satisfactory and character-building for Bradlaugh: it destroyed his character. But after the Shrapnel episode, Meredith finds that the two enemies distantly respect each other. It is not a great comfort, for Dr Shrapnel was old and sick and the beating hurries on his death. The point I come to is that Meredith treats this as a subject for comedy: it is true that local society is shocked by the Squire’s brutality and that Beauchamp is savage with indignation and is henceforth uncompromising in his Radical career; it is true also that Meredith’s own Radical hate of an overfed and brutal ruling England comes out. All the same his morbid eye cannot resist treating the subject as comedy. The sight of two old men whacking away at each other is grotesque, and he cannot resist it. We cannot be quite sure whether he is harking back to Fielding’s love of a little horseplay, sinning by literary association; or whether the pain of early personal experience has given him the taste and the voice that laughs off the effects, in the name of sanity.

  But the important ordeal is spiritual. The soul has to pass through fire. And what has to be burned away? Pride above all and self-delusion. The business of comedy is ruthlessly to expose the false emotions and the false image of oneself and the purpose of comedy is to establish sanity. This is the theme that dominates all Meredith’s novels; it is his only important theme. His hero should emerge at the end, fitted at last to face life. By nature his heroes are honourable but wilful extremists. They live in the imagination, which gives them a tremendous energy.

  The intensity which Meredith brought to his theme is personal and bitter. It is stated in the cynical reflection of Adrian, the so-called Wise Youth and parasite in The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, after young Richard has been pulled out of his rick-burning scrape. The passage is well-known—one has to stomach the studied Shakespearean echo in the middle: Coleridge as well, and the reference to the theatre:

  Experience? You know Coleridge’s capital simile. Mournful you call it? Well! All Wisdom is mournful. ‘Tis therefore, coz, that the Wise do love the Comic Muse. Their own high food would kill them. You shall find great poets, rare philosophers, night after night on the broad grin before a row of yellow lights and mouthing masks. Why? Because all’s dark at home. The Stage is the pastime of great minds.

  The important thing for us is that it was in the year of his wife’s flight that Meredith wrote his second ordeal story, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel. It was published in 1859, the year of Darwin’s Origin of Species and of Adam Bede, George Eliot’s first full length novel that was to become the lengthiest best-selling novel since Waverley. Meredith hoped for an equal success. He did not get it. He was praised thoroughly by a few and was doing well when the influential critics called the book prurient and Mudie’s all powerful library withdrew it. Among the novels that attacked the Victorian father, and in spite of being broken-backed, it has lasted. Richard Feverel is an extremist’s book—the extremism is intellectual and poetic—and extremists are apt to exhaust themselves when they get to the critical point of a work of art. They are apt, as Meredith always is, to become perverse and at the very point where they are masters.

  Once the rope is cut The Ordeal of Richard Feverel floats free as a bold and believable psychological novel. The world of Romance is established first by making the hero and his father enormously rich and handsome; by the invention of Sir Austin Feverel’s preposterous yet idealistic System; by exposing it to idyllic pagan love and by establishing Richard as the ideal Youth, dedicated to virginity. This will lead to disaster. For the poetic part Meredith went to Shakespeare in the story of Romeo and Juliet; but the tragedy unfolds in the setting of comic irony. Sir Austin is a monomaniac; he hopes by his educational system to conduct his son, with a father’s love, through the stages of growing up, which he calls Simple Boyhood, the Blossoming Season, the Magnetic Age, the period of Probation. He will enter a Manhood worthy of Paradise—in other words he will inherit the father’s great estate, conduct it honourably, marry a carefully selected wife of the right social class, and produce the children that guarantee the immortality of a superb social order. The System ends by turning a pleasant boy into a man almost as maniacal and masked as the father. For the flaw is that Sir Austin has become a scientific systematiser— Meredith hates science—because he is a misogynist whose pride has been injured by an unfaithful wife. Woman is the serpent—the image of Woman as serpent recurs continually in Meredith’s accounts of passion. Sir Austin has written a tiresome book of Aphorisms called The Pilgrim’s Scrip, and which contains a ferocious statement called The Great Shadock Dogma. Women must be utterly opposed:

  To withstand them (that is, Women) must we annihilate our Mothers within us: die half!

  And Meredith goes on:

  The poor gentleman, seriously believing Woman to be a Mistake had long been trying to do so. Had he succeeded he would have died his best half, for his mother was strong within. The very acridity of the Aphorisms, the Great Shadock Dogma itself, sprang from wounded softness, not from hardness.

  Despising women, he gives all his love to his son and the System is the result of it. And in one sense, the System appears liberal, if unduly shrewd. Sir Austin has attached to his family a parasitic and worldly young tutor called The Wise Youth who never commits himself, and takes his pleasures on the sly; a hearty manly victim of mésalliance, called Austin Wentworth— typical of Meredith to confuse the reader by introducing two Austins—and an uncle Hippias, a foolish, dilapidated and dyspeptic rake, the very sight of whom will be a warning against loose living. There is a grim sister and a sentimental widow (Lady Blandish) who adores the boy and who hopelessly longs to marry Sir Austin. There is material for excellent comedy and Meredith manages it well. Critics have been irked by the device of the much quoted Pilgrim’s Scrip. To us such devices are silly and knowingly facetious. They are a mannerist’s idea and come down from Fielding— Kipling’s idea of the Law is also a development of it— the practical function is to supply linking commentary or stage directions; it helps to separate the staged scenes and Meredith’s idea is that most scenes should be stylised and staged. But upon this artificial scheme lyricism blows in. It is spring in the Thames Valley, Richard is sexually awakened, falls in love with a farmer’s daughter, against all the Rules and eventually gets her to elope with him just at the moment when Sir Austin has gone to look for some eligible debutante. These proper young girls on the marriage market are a sickly lot. (There is great stress on physical health in Meredith; in a period given to the idealisation of sickness, this robustness must have caused uneasiness.) They are out of touch with Nature. And Nature, aided by scenery, is the enemy of the System. When the scandal breaks, Sir Austin refuses to see his son and there is a battle of two prides. The son—who returns his father’s love—will not ask his blessing and forgiveness unless he receives his wife as well.

 

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