This is not a novelist’s aside about the process of observation, for note the phrase “they partly pervert it as well”. This phrase pushes the story forward, for Meredith is beginning to point out that Harry’s judgment of his father is leaving the simple adoring stage and that his judgment will now begin to be perverted.

  Meredith moves on to his favourite habit of building a scene after it has happened. We turn to Temple’s version of the affair. This youth noticed that when Richmond Roy climbed down from the bronze horse he did not jump to earth in one bound, as Harry fancied, but clambered with difficulty and walked towards him “like a figure dragging logs at its heels”. And Temple noticed one more thing: the petulant old margravine had her watch in her hand. (There is an absurd interval when Richmond Roy goes off with the boys to struggle out of his bronze-varnished, metallic-looking disguise.) In a page or two we shall know why the margravine has her watch in her hand: Richmond Roy’s imposture was done for a bet and she bursts out into a fish wife’s tirade because Richmond Roy broke the conditions. In fact, he surpassed them. He said he had stipulated for fifteen minutes on the horse; he sat it out for twenty-three. The moral is that, only by living in a Court can the son (who is going to become a prince) learn the exigence and capriciousness of princes. And so we come to the next stage in the development of those who live by romantic delusion; they may degenerate into mountebanks. The son is torn between loyalty to his father and the powerless knowledge that his father is no more than a pathetic court jester to a bored old princess. Harry’s role as powerless observer is part of his own corruption. He notes that his father

  took the colour of the spirits of the people around him

  and

  So conversational were his eyes and brows that he could persuade you to imagine he was carrying on a dialogue without opening his mouth. His laughter was confident, fresh, catching, the outburst of his very self, as laughter should be.

  but its effect fades at once when he goes out of a room even for a moment:

  Strange to say, I lost the links of my familiarity with him when he left us on a short visit to his trunks and portmanteaux.

  After the German adventure, Richmond Roy turns up at Bath pursued by an heiress and Harry joins him in the comedy and, having got money out of Squire Belton, temporarily pays his father’s way. We now see something terrible: that the father’s love of his son is as false as everything else about him; he is really after the fortune the son will inherit from the Squire. In Bath, Richmond Roy is in danger of what he most fears: marriage. He slips away.

  Harry Richmond deludes himself now with the notion that his father is the victim of circumstances and is not an impossible character. The spell of his talk still works, even if his actions appal:

  I may call it a thirsty craving to have him inflating me, puffing the deep unillumined treasure-pits of my nature with laborious hints, as mines are filled with air to keep the miners going.

  A laborious metaphor, it is true, but the conclusion is exact: passivity leads to the loss of any sense of value.

  While he talked he made these inmost recesses habitable. But the pain lay in my having now and then to utter replies. I found a sweetness in brooding unrealizingly over dreams and possibilities, and I let him go gladly that I might enjoy a week of silence, just taking impressions as they came, like the sands in the ebb tide.

  The son knows his father’s methods of persuasion are subtle and allows himself to be deceived; when they are back in Germany and Harry is in love with Ottilia, the princess, the father encourages the boy by “the veiled method”. It was, as one knows, the method Don Quixote frequently used with Sancho.

  Richmond Roy has sometimes been called another Micawber; an example of the weakness of English critics for calling all strange and histrionic characters Dickensian. But compared with Roy, Micawber is only half a character. Dickens did not present the dark and rascally side of the Micawberish character; if the comic gift is poetic Micawber is a figure in popular poetry. He is more exact in outline than Roy, but he is not an idea as well as a man; neither the man nor the idea is analysed. Micawber is never a tragic figure, but to some extent Roy is. Micawber waits for something to turn up; Roy, the rogue, makes it turn up. Micawber is possibly curable. Roy is incurable, will exhaust himself, will die. He will affect everyone; Micawber affects no one except Mrs Micawber. David is never seriously involved with him. Micawber derives his body from the general London fantasy; Roy has no scene; but when he appears he creates one. He is floating.

  He infects Harry; he uses Harry, his son, just to get his money. He will exploit his heart for it. He pushes the impossible love affair with Princess Ottilia, for his own interests. And when at last, total bankruptcy, disgrace and exposure arrive, and he is reduced to the level of a joke, Meredith hits upon one of his most spirited pieces of invention. Good comedy depends a great deal on what one calls the doubling principle, either by repeating an episode in other circumstances or another key, or by introducing a character to his double. Since Meredith is expert in the fantastic and knows how to make it acceptable, the episode is marvellously successful. He confronts Richmond Roy with a false Dauphin, a claimant to the French throne. The incident is also one more example of the merits of avoiding the scène à faire. This is how he builds it. He begins by stating the confrontation with the double as a rumour. Success depends on the complexity, the gaiety and suggestiveness of the surrounding events. Briefly, the father is giving splendid Balls in London announcing the forthcoming marriage of Harry to Ottilia—which is scandalously untrue—in short, creating one of his social mystifications, in the interests of his claim. Suddenly Squire Belton picks up the rumour about the Dauphin. The hearsay is put into the mouth of the choleric squire who is dining en famille. He is always a good narrator:

  “I tell you they call him Mr I K Dine in town. Ik Dine and a Dauphin. They made a regular clown and pantaloon o’ the pair, I’m told. Couple o’ pretenders to Thrones invited to dine together and talk over their chances and show their private marks. Oho! by-and-by William. You and I”.

  The ladies take the hint and retire. The squire con-tinued in a furious whisper:

  “They got the two of them together, William. Who are you? I’m a Dauphin; who are you? I’m Ik Dine bar sinister. Oh! says the other, then I take precedence over you. Devil a bit, says the other; I’ve got more spots than you! Proof, says one. You’re first, t’other. Count, one cries. T’other sings out Measles. Better than a dying Dauphin, roars t’other; and swore both of ’em was nothing but Port wine stains and pimples! Ha! Ha! And, William will you believe it?—the couple went round begging the company to count the spots—ha! ha!—to prove their birth. Oh Lord, I’d ha’ paid a penny to be there. A Jack of Bedlam Ik Dine damned idiot—makes name of Richmond stink!”

  (Captain Bulstead shot a wild stare round the room to make sure the ladies had gone)

  Worse: Richmond Roy had stood up at a public dinner and returned thanks on behalf of an Estate of the Realm. The last frightful news is conveyed in Meredith’s most seeming casual manner to Harry while he is playing Badminton. It is over and over again the novelist’s method to describe one action in the midst of another, simply because life as it is lived is in the intermingling of one surface with another. How does bad news come? What is the instant like? Harry hears it and in the same split second sees the beauty of Janet Ilchester’s eyes as she raises them to volley back the shuttlecock. This is a treatment of action which the next generation of novelists will learn and teach the cinema.

  After this a much milder and subtler account than the squire’s is given of the Dauphin-Roy meeting; the farce was not as broad as it was said to be. Farce, in reality, rarely is—Meredith notes. And he wishes to show that even in ridicule Roy could hold to some taste and dignity. How else could his career be credible? So, yet another account comes from the fomentor of the plot. There are three indirect accounts, three turns of the screw; they make the whole fantastic incident settle into reality and they make it more diverting than a single straightforward statement would do.

  The climax of the novel has one of those surprises that justify and give a solid and yet ironical foundation to a romance into which we had been willingly bounced. The rope, as Henry James would have said, had seemingly been absolutely cut by Richmond Roy’s extravagant career. We have seen that he has got hold of his son’s inheritance which has paid for the yachts, the chateaux, the town houses and parties, and his exploits at the German court. Now every penny has gone. Only one thing remains for Richmond Roy: to marry a wealthy merchant’s widow in order to pay his colossal debts. The law threatens.

  Here we must look at the women in the story. Meredith is a fervent admirer of women. He sees them idealistically and romantically at first: in each one he sees the captivating personal and moral essence; he is aware of them as persons who have minds, loyalties and dreams. They are moral entities, as well as being objects of desire. They want or have wanted to “become something”; they have conceived a future which contains something else besides their probable marriages. Meredith is deeply sensitive to a woman’s longing to “become”. Women know the kind of love they want. Trapped by their own weaknesses or by convention in an inferior status, they are not self-deceived. They are often idealists who keep their secrets and are devious. Their characters change and develop. It may be a criticism that there are no unpleasant or devilish women in his novels, despite his references to the serpent of passion. Some critics have seen Ottilia, the exquisite German Princess with whom Harry is in love as no more than a poetically idealised princesse lointaine and that a hidden Meredith is morbidly subject to the “romantic agony”. Ottilia is undoubtedly a princesse lointaine to Harry, the romantic dreamer. But she is a realist. And she is what her education has made her. For example, Richmond Roy spreads the cunning rumour that Harry has been wounded by a would-be assassin. She rushes to his bedside. She is rather put out to discover that he has merely been wounded in a duel. Only a duel! She is a conventional princess. What a come-down! Everyone who is anyone in Germany has fought a duel at some time! So Romantic love ends and turns into a protective affection and becomes—in Meredithian terms—a platonic spiritual adviser, a piece of poetry that will remain in the mind as a guide in the later crises of life. But Ottilia will still be a conventional German princess, as well as a symbol. Against Ottilia must be put Kiomi, the gypsy, a primitive, and Janet, the decent practical girl who is real because she is difficult. We are made to unsee the women as dreams, and come to see them as they are and what they represent.

  Yet how mad women can be! Harry Richmond’s Aunt Dorothy gives us a tremendous surprise. Aunt Dorothy has done all she can to cure Harry’s obsession; and Aunt Dorothy has stood everything. But when Harry sees that the only escape for his father (now that he is ruined) is to marry a rich woman who is a simpleton, the Aunt who is the sister—remember—of Richmond Roy’s dead wife, is indignant at such an immoral proposal. The rogue has already driven one woman out of her mind. But is Aunt Dorothy’s moral indignation genuine? Is she perhaps jealous? Indeed she is. All women are mad about Richmond Roy and she was and is the maddest. It is she (the squire discovers) who has secretly financed a great deal of Richmond Roy’s career. It is she who secretly pays his creditors in the final disaster. Both sisters have loved the man. And—for in Meredith there is always the final irony—up to now Richmond Roy has always known whom he will swindle next and how he will do it: but now we learn he has no idea that Dorothy has loved him and has paid. That revelation destroys him: he has to face his reality; he is what he always was—nothing but a swindling, seducing music teacher and an emptiness. The end of Richmond Roy is a collapse into feeble-mindedness and insanity.

  This ought to be the end of the novel, but, alas, Meredith adds tedious and unbelievable complexities and a final melodrama. He tries to show Harry recovering from the spell. I am afraid it does not convince. I don’t think Meredith was convinced. It is, no doubt, tremendously symbolical that Harry should come home to see the family house burned down and his father burned alive in it, but it is too tremendous. Never trust a Victorian when he sets fire to a mansion at the end of a book.

  Chapter Five

  When we come to Beauchamp’s Career, The Egoist and Diana of the Crossways, Meredith enlarges the implication of his study of romantic egoism, its gestures and its poses. With his foreign eye, he looks at England and finds that egoism is the dominant sickness of English society. Self-interest, self-complacency, self-love, self-righteousness are the characteristics of the Victorian islanders. The idea does not originate with him, of course—in politics he was some sort of Tory-Radical, an appealing English contradiction, very useful to the mid-Victorian novelists who unfailingly swing to a middle position. The idea originates with Carlyle who had written in Past and Present that “enlightened Egoism, never so luminous, is not the rule by which a man’s life can be led … the soul will have to be rescued from asphyxia”. And Meredith makes an ironic bow to Carlyle early in Beauchamp’s Career. There is always a sad, intelligent, bullied widow forced to live in an ambiguous stituation in Meredith’s novels, a mother surrogate. In this novel she is Rosamund Culling. She reflects on the hero, young Beau-champ, whom she adores as if he were a son:

  His favourite author was one writing of Heroes, in (so she esteemed it) a style resembling either early architecture or utter dilapidation, so loose and rough it seemed, a wind-in-the-orchard style, that tumbled down here and there an appreciated fruit with uncouth bluster, sentences without commencement, running to abrupt endings and smoke, like waves against a sea-wall, learned dictionary words giving a hand to street-slang, and accents falling on them haphazard, were slant rays from driving clouds; all the pages in a breeze, the whole book producing a kind of electric agitation on the mind and the joints.… To her the incomprehensible was the abominable, for she had our country’s high critical feeling; but he, while admitting that he could not master it, liked it.

  The religion of the egoist is Comfort of mind. It is this Comfort or complacency that has stupefied England in its enormous wealth and power, and has made the ruling classes indifferent to the masses and either torpid or hypocritical about social justice. Beauchamp’s Career has two excellent portraits: one is Everard Romfrey (who doesn’t like it that the workers pronounce the name as Rum Free). He is one of Meredith’s wealthy Saxon squires with money in land and Welsh mines. He eventually becomes an Earl, a lazy, choleric, half-naive, half-genial, cunning man whose faith is in the family blood and the preservation of game. He is a sort of prize bull but an eccentric. In Meredith’s words:

  a noticeable gentleman, in mind a medieval baron, in politics a crotchety Whig. … At one time a hot Parliamentarian, calling himself a Whig, called by the Whigs a Radical, called by Radicals a Tory and very happy fighting them all round.

  His ancient family

  had the root qualities, the prime active elements, of men in perfection, and notably that appetite to flourish at the cost of the weaker, which is the blessed examplification of strength. … Strength is the brute form of truth.

  (Meredith’s romantic attraction to Darwinism is mixed in with his irony.) Whatever may be said against Romfrey, he represents Nature but not Nature as Romantic poets such as Meredith think of it; it has nothing to do with moonlight, the North Downs, the sunrise. Nature is the breeding of animals, the facts of the fields, a countryman’s stoical submission to natural law.

  His chief opponent is Dr Shrapnel, the intellectual, firebrand Radical. The action of the book leads to a crisis in which a wild, long letter of Dr Shrapnel’s is filched from Nevil Beauchamp, Romfrey’s nephew. Dr Shrapnel tears the landed gentry and the manufacturers to pieces and urges young Beauchamp to political agitation. He is urging the young aristocrat to turn against his class:

  The religion of the vast English middle class is Comfort. It is their central thought; their idea of necessity; their solecism. Whatsoever ministers to Comfort, seems to belong to it, pretends to support it, they yield their passive worship to. Whatsoever alarms it they join to crush. They will pay for the security of Comfort.

  And Dr Shrapnel storms on:

  The stench of the trail of Ego in our history. Trace the course of Ego for them … first the King who conquers and can govern. In his egoism he dubs him holy; his family is of a selected blood, he makes the crown hereditary— Ego. Son by son the shame of egoism increases; valour abates; hereditary Crown, no hereditary qualities. The Barons rise. They in turn hold sway, and found their order—Ego. The traders overturn them; each class rides the classes under it while it can. It is Ego—Ego, the fountain cry, original, sole source of war. Now comes the workman’s era. Numbers win in the end: proof of small wisdom in the world. Anyhow, with numbers there is rough nature’s wisdom and justice. With numbers Ego is inter-dependent and dispersed; it is universalised.

  It is the fiery Dr Shrapnel who inflames Nevil Beau-champ with a passion to fight for social justice. A comedy has begun and an examination of the egoisms involved, and the end will be disaster and fatality. Meredith’s comedies are apt to end in a smash. He does not rise to those levels where comedy and tragedy mingle and awaken compassion.

  Beauchamp’s England is the south; the scene of unrest is the not very politically-minded city of Southampton. The real drama, of course, is in the north and that has to be reported by hearsay. The debate, as in Peacock’s attacks on industrialism, child labour and so on, is conversation and hot-tempered epigram about Tories, Whigs and the Manchester manufacturers. The suffrage is still limited; it extends to the shopkeepers, but the workers are outside it. They are shadowy primitives, a muttering tribal force never really seen; though there is one very marvellously emotive glance at them hanging anxiously round the gates of Shrapnel’s cottage when Beauchamp is lying dangerously ill and raving in a delirium that can be heard in the street. This is one of those very moving moments when some of Meredith’s people cease to be managed fictions and take on the deep seriousness of human beings. Dr Shrapnel’s opponents, on all levels, think of him as a red revolutionary, and popular emotion is for repressing him, even by violence. The uppers want him to be thrashed; the frightened lowers won’t greatly mind if he is beaten up.

 

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