George Meredith: A Study

The atmosphere of ‘Evan Harrington’ is neither that of sombre passion nor poignant pain. It has none of the lyrical outbursts that thrill us in ‘Richard Feverel,’ and we are spared in it any violent shaking of the soul. We are allowed to view life more temperately, and follow the fortunes of the characters with an undisturbed exercise of philosophic calm and judgment. A delicious humour colours it throughout, and we are back upon the old sea of metaphors that the writer had nearly drifted from in the simple, undecorated strength of ‘Rhoda Fleming.’ We are tossed about upon its topmost sprays, that sometimes drench us and leave us in wonder whether the author will suddenly get serious and, to use one of his own figures, announce that the curtain has fallen upon this particular part of his performance, and expect us to cry, ‘What an exciting game it has been!’ Could anything be more boisterous than the description of the great Mel, the tailor of Lymport? There is a Homeric exaggeration about him that fascinates while it bewilders. Was ever such a man drawn since the days of mythological heroes? Great ladies loved him; he dressed himself up as a footman, and thought nothing of setting a house on fire for the privilege of carrying in his arms a titled beauty. He was the guest and boon fellow of lords, and he measured them; he was a tailor, and he kept horses; he had gallant adventures, was preposterously handsome and big and glorious; he shook hands with his customers, and was never known to have sent in a bill. The writer remarks: ‘Such a personage comes but once in a generation, and when he goes, men miss the man as well as their money.’

We do not make the acquaintance of the great Mel, but his spirit haunts the scenes of his turbulent career, and we learn of him through fabulous reports and a family of handsome and distinguished daughters, and one son, Evan. All inherit their father’s physical and natural superiority. They pass, as to the manner born, into the upper sphere, and comport themselves in that select circle with dignity and ease. Behind them in the town of Lymport the tailor’s shop, with the name of Harrington upon the door, exists, carried on by the great man’s widow as a means of liquidating his debts. It is the successes and disturbances, the intrigues and exposure of this superior family—born for greatness but not to it—that the book records; and never was genius more untiringly and extravagantly used than in the combined efforts of these three lovely ladies and their brother to conceal the family origin and pass for people of blood. The partial success that crowns their efforts is but an inadequate return for such an expenditure of brain in well-conceived and audacious contrivances. People born with a soul above buttons cannot be blamed for every laudable effort to find their way into their natural element! Imagine a single rose-bush bearing flowers of exceptional beauty in a cabbage-garden, and you will have the incongruous effect of the tailor’s daughter, the Countess de Saldar, in a middle-class drawing-room. Grand manners and aristocratic habits were hers, not by right of breeding or blood, but simply by right of nature. So we sympathize with her in all her graceful and unapproachable intriguing to maintain herself in a society to which she had won entrance by her own unaided genius.

Contrast the genial spirit in which the writer records the adventures and difficulties of this splendid charlatan with the spirit in which Thackeray has painted us his wonderful Becky Sharpe—the broad, half-smiling approval of the more modern satirist, with the ferocity of hate of his great predecessor. Not only does Mr. Meredith admire the woman’s genius for intrigue, but he brings sympathy and affection to the task of making her intelligible to us. So far from seeking to make her odious to us, as Thackeray deliberately does in the portrayal of Rebecca, he leaves it impossible for us to judge her more harshly than he himself does. Wherever she is, we know that we cannot be dull, and we are amused and captivated enough to be willing to dispense with the chill atmosphere of perfect morality and candour. He does not pursue her with a relentless exposure of her inmost vices. He preaches no moral after the fashion of the English novelist, and he takes his intriguing heroine as he finds her—an excellent study in which he delights. She is no vulgar hypocrite, like Becky, under the mask of a fine lady. Born in the sphere to which she feels she justly belongs, she would simply have been a great lady with uncommon diplomatic abilities and with a genius in the shading and splitting of social niceties. Forced to play the part of adventuress, she plays it grandly, and never shabbily. All her marvellous capacities are directed to the concealment of the family shame and to the maintaining of her sisters and brother in the eminence to which they have risen. She is a generous schemer, for her family are included in her enormous ambition. It is not for herself individually, but for the family of the Harringtons, for their united glory and stable position that she so unweariedly plots and intrigues and lies. The three daughters of the great tailor have respectively married a major, a wealthy brewer, and a Portuguese count. Caroline, the beauty, is unhappy as the major’s wife, and finally reaches the climax in exaltation by making the conquest of a duke. Evan now becomes the hope of the family, and it is on his fortunes, his efforts to appear a gentleman, seconded by his sister’s (the countess’s) efforts to penetrate into English aristocratic society, and secure an heiress for her brother, that the story runs.

The heiress in whose pursuit Evan is carried off to Portugal to learn the management of his mouth, how to dress his shoulders and to direct his eyes, is Miss Rose Jocelyn, one of Mr. Meredith’s brave and loyal girls, with a sweet spice of naturalness in her virtues and in her defects, if she can honestly be said to possess any. In her train we find Evan returning to England, clad like a wandering don in sombrero and cloak. Rose’s expressed dislike of tradespeople gives him a hankering to announce himself as such, which honest intention the countess resolves to thwart, and is herself thwarted by Providence in the shape of a brother tailor, who comes aboard the Jocasta to announce the great Mel’s death, and both ruins and saves the situation by mention of a shop and a uniform. Evan’s experiences on the road and in the shop are drawn in Mr. Meredith’s best style, and we are introduced to one of his oddities, Tom Cogglesby, and also to the suffering countess in low society. On his way up to London Evan is engaged in an ugly fight in an inn, where he comports himself as the only gentleman, and those born to the title as cads—not an uncommon exchange of rôles. He meets Rose, and instead of London he, with his guide and protectress, the incomparable countess, turns to Beckley Court, the home of Rose’s parents. Here the countess has a field worthy her great talents. To keep her footing firm, to guide Evan through the briars of a false position, and help him to win Rose, whom he honestly loves—this is no small undertaking with such combined forces against her. Lady Jocelyn calls her ‘a female euphuist, euphuism in woman being the popular ideal of a duchess.’

The pronounced comedian in a book where all the characters pertain more or less to comedy, is Mr. John Raikes. The tricks that are played on this young man by fortune and by men are innumerable, and there is perhaps a flavour of Dickens about him in the prolonged burlesque he plays. His burlesque lovers’ quarrels and the countess’s intrigues fill the middle of the book, until Evan breaks his neck in a breakneck leap.

Here is an opportunity for the countess, which she uses to some purpose. Unfortunately, she is felled by a stroke of fate, and her origin is exposed at a dinner-table with the duke. The little shadow of tragedy peeps here in the married misery of Caroline, the most beautiful of the sisters, and beloved of the duke. The fortunes of hero and heroine are fluctuating, and on the whole better for Evan than might have been expected. He is known to be a tailor, and yet the half-engaged lover of a beautiful heiress, and the guest of her parents. It is true, the widow of the great Mel, bent upon honesty, imperils the situation, and Evan completes the work by taking upon himself one of the countess’s crimes, is rejected by Lady Jocelyn, and leaves Beckley Court under a cloud, only believed in by Juliana, Rose’s rival. The fifth act finds him in London studying tailordom, offered the protection of Caroline’s duke. Juliana, the heiress of Beckley, desperately and vainly in love with him, dies leaving him Beckley Court and all her possessions. Here is a comical reversal of things, and an opportunity for clearing away all doubts of him by one sweeping act of generosity. Rose is engaged to his rival, Laxley, and when her father hears that Evan renounces the estate, and exclaims, ‘He must have the soul of a gentleman! There’s nothing he can expect in return, you know,’ cuttingly retorts, ‘One would think, papa, you had always been dealing with tradesmen.’ The end may be anticipated: marriage for Rose and Evan, and the consolations of the Church of Rome for the dear countess.

‘Sandra Belloni’ and ‘Harry Richmond’ are two of Mr. Meredith’s pictorial and melodious novels. Pictures and song abound in them, and breathless vivifying races with passion. Writers are not uncommonly enamoured of their heroines, and while none of his can claim a lack of sympathy and admiration on Mr. Meredith’s part, there are three that stand out as rivals for the post of his heart’s beloved. In different ways, all leading to the one source, like the various roads to Rome, is he equally the recording lover of Emilia or Sandra, Clara Middleton and Diana. These are his trio of perfect and bewitching women—not perfect in the wooden or puppet sense, but perfect with the lovely perfection of nature steeped, in the case of two, in the unanalyzable social charm which he so well knows how to make us feel and thrill to. Clara is the exquisite maiden of upper England, who could never be imaged out of her social surroundings; Diana brings to breeding an exhilarating dash of rebellious Irish blood and a purity of body and mind no less superlative than her younger sister’s; and Emilia, unlike both, is all passion and flame mounting on the swell of song.

It is a long time since I read this entrancing novel, and here in Paris, where I write, it is not attainable for reperusal. Hence many of the names of the characters have escaped my memory, though I can recall their personalities and actions vividly. I am still impressed with the acquaintance of a wonderful Greek—a Mr. Pericles, a wandering millionaire, ready upon hearsay to traverse Europe in the trail of undiscovered musical genius. Staying at the country house of one vulgar wealthy merchant, Mr. Pole, he unearths something like it in the voice of Emilia. The Pole family consists of three of those inimitable, ambitious, and diplomatic ladies that only Mr. Meredith hitherto has drawn us. I forget their names. There is a brother, Wilfred Pole, a cornet, one of those limp and flaccid jeunes premiers novelists and opera-composers are fond of selecting to sing the sweetest tenor in duet with the heroines. The hero of the novel, as of the opera, is usually the heroine’s foil, his unworthiness the shade against which her splendour and strength shine. There is a dreadful Irish widow, whose name I certainly remember—Mrs. Chumps. This awful creature is, like the Irishman of English comedy, purely the result of Saxon imagination dwelling upon our island without the illumination of personal knowledge of the race or the country. I have here in Paris met a Scotchwoman who gravely informed me that she was gathering materials for an Irish novel, though she admitted she had never been in Ireland, and her acquaintance of Irish people is exclusively confined to the few specimens of the race she had had the misfortune to meet with abroad. I shall be curious to see that novel when it appears, and fancy she is not the first Britisher to represent us to posterity upon materials for observation so slight and so misguiding. The only sympathy the lady mentioned appears to bring to her gigantic task is a partiality for a liquid as peculiar to the lowlands and highlands of Scotland as to the mountains and bogs of Ireland. May unlimited quantities of whisky enlighten her and enliven us! for she is bitten by a mighty hatred of the nameless Celt. Under such circumstances, barring the stimulus of mountain distillery, the widow Chumps seems to have been drawn. Her brogue savours more of the Thames than of the banks of the Suir. Such an Irish brogue is nowhere to be heard in Ireland. And there is something curiously alien to that country in her denseness and want of sensitiveness, for we know that pride and sensitiveness are the curses of the race. She is an old flame of Pole’s—‘me Pole’ she perpetually calls him, to the horror of the refined daughters and the elegant cornet; and as Mr. Pole has squandered her money entrusted to him, he is obliged to endure her overt tendernesses and force his children to bow to her. This contest produces several lively scenes, including the sequel when the widow finds she is betrayed and cheated and her Pole a bankrupt. Mr. Pericles adds to the liveliness, and also one Lady Something, who is almost in love with Wilfred, and plays an ugly trick on him and on Emilia by getting him to declare his passion for her and his indifference to Emilia within the latter’s hearing. The curtain drops on the degradation of the gallant cornet and the sorrowful enlightenment of Emilia. There is also a tragic figure of an organist and impoverished baronet, who loves one of the ladies of the Pole establishment, and commits suicide because she, loving him, must marry for her family, and several lively social youths and maidens and matrons, who act chorus, wittily, epigrammatically, and sprightlily, as Mr. Meredith’s chorus ever does. Then there are Italian politics—a favourite theme with the writer—an attractive Welsh brother and sister, and several unforgettable love-scenes; notably, one great passionate love-scene at Wilming Weir by moonlight, worthy to rank with those matchless chapters in ‘Richard Feverel.’ The lover himself is weaker and more pitiable than the average young gentleman elected by the novelist to pipe fluted sentimentalities to the sweet thrilling note of the heroine; a man—or a make-believe of man, which is by far the commoner article, for true and real men are rarer than true and real women, rare as these be—who could doubt the delicacy of Sandra’s passionate cry, ‘My lover!’ and who ‘could pledge himself to eternity, but shrank from being bound to eleven o’clock on the morrow morning.’ Writers are sometimes compunctious for the abasement to which they have submitted their heroines, and spare them the wedding-ring. Sandra does not marry Wilfred, and we hear of ‘the mellowed depth, the soft human warmth, which marriage had lent to her voice,’ afterwards in Italy. I forget whom she married, but I daresay it was her Welsh lover, the noble Italian enthusiast, blessed with a noble sister.

‘Harry Richmond’ is truly a delightful novel, and, next to ‘Richard Feverel,’ ought to be the most popular of George Meredith’s books. It is all wild adventure, bubbling, bursting fun and lyrical outbursts. Impossible to catch and analyse its charm. It is a book written to weave a spell about youth and sober age. Its exuberance is unparalleled; not the exuberance of Dickens or Lever, but a quaint and original exuberance of the metaphysician and the poet taken suddenly to football and nonsense verses. He brings a relish quite other than that of the habitual jester, fetches from his chest wilder shouts of laughter, flings his ball, and tosses off his verses with a sincerity and ardour not known to those to whom such things are in the ordinary way of life. Or, at least, we are at liberty to imagine he would, for few of us have had the privilege of observing such a mixture as metaphysician and poet at play. Who can ever forget the inimitable and arch-impostor, Harry’s father, Richmond Roy—his captivating personality, his eccentricities, his feats, and his comet-like passage across the sky of our imagination? His life is a splendid comedy, though occasionally the comic muse drops us into farce as broad as any to be found in the early English dramatists. We are not even allowed to preserve a decorous gravity at the recital and exposure of his woes and misfortunes. Molière himself never devised a broader farce than his rôle in the German prince’s court and his expulsion therefrom. And Shakespeare himself, had he written nineteenth-century prose, could never have given us a lovelier picture of a little German princess and her English boy-lover, with all the proper scenic effects and landscape beauty. And what, pray, are the rough, swearing old grandfather and Julia’s husband if they be not English to the backbone, brutally, faithfully English, like Squire Western and a host of that school? They are imaged to us pure eighteenth-century—barbaric, powerful, big drinkers, and men of mighty physique, with whom there is no temporizing upon the domestic hearth nor elsewhere. This is not comedy, but life. English, too, are the scenes of Harry’s boyhood, his life in the farm and in school, where he makes the acquaintance of Walter Heriot, in love with Julia, the schoolmaster’s daughter, and his life-long boy-friend; and afterwards the little wild gipsy girl, whom Heriot betrays. All these pictures, vivid and humorous, carry us irresistibly.

Afterwards we touch a new chord when the religious sea-captain carries off the lads for the good of their souls, and one fine morning we find them straying through a lovely German forest, where they meet the little German princess—divinest and most witching of serious little maids—and Harry’s father. The story is like real life, too complicated, varying, and plotless for a brief summary. Light and air and warm life-blood quiver and flow through the chapters. With the writer, we are mounted upon a winged steed, and carried breathlessly through space. The characters are too numerous for naming, and yet all have their distinct and special parts. If they are minor at all, it is simply as the constant succession of faces through our personal experiences are minor—that is, to us—but not, we feel, in the part they individually play. We understand acutely that they are not there solely to please their creator, and do his bidding like puppets. They are not introduced to teach a moral or propound a theory, or even consciously to act as chorus. They are men and women, rustics, clowns, and society men and women, who have their distinct tastes, their distinct utterances, and their distinct capacities. The epigrammatist is never absent, and we are always delighted to meet him or her. Of course, an English commoner, however wealthy, cannot marry the daughter of an hereditary prince of Germany, and after many adventures, heart-sorrows, and joys, the countless intrigues of his father, a duel with an Austrian prince (his rival), and the single kiss of blessedness bestowed on him as upon Herr Teufelsdroch, poor Harry returns to England in the pursuance of an equally breezy career, made up of wind and wave, of storm and soft English sunshine. His father’s personality tops him, and lends the element of the grotesque to the gravity of his adventures. We cannot take him seriously with such a background.

But Mr. Meredith does not wish us to laugh unrestrainedly, and so he presents us with a figure of exquisite unblemished pathos in Harry’s sweet Aunt Dorothy, a lady we can never remember without an odd sensation about the throat. The glamour of purity that makes no parade of coldness, of divine unselfishness, of uncomplaining, scarcely-felt suffering envelopes her like a veil of glory, through which we rather define than perfectly see her. She passes through the book a beautiful ghost of pale womanhood, shedding beneficent rays upon her path. As a girl, finding her lover beloved of a weaker sister, she pleads with him for her, and makes an altar of her happiness for the younger one. When the sister dies, after unhappy wedded experiences, leaving a little boy, Dorothy is the boy’s mother and the father’s secret benefactor. She never marries, and all her money is devoted to the anonymous discharge of the arch-impostor’s debts, which, in this spurious offshoot of royalty, we may imagine were royal enough. The scene in which this fact is revealed is, for fiction, of superhuman strength—not the restrained sense of modern art, but the battle-axe strength of mediæval times. Harry marries the squire’s heiress, his cousin Janet, and deserves repose for the rest of his days.

Mr. Meredith has written one dull book. ‘Beauchamp’s Career’ would be almost unreadable, other than patiently read as an exhaustive political treatise, if it were not for Mr. Romfrey and the face of Renée, that brings the soft radiancy of a dream to bear upon its intolerable dulness. Would not this charming description make amends for much?

‘A brunette of the fine lineaments of the good blood of France. She chattered snatches of Venetian caught from the gondoliers; she was like a delicate cup of crystal brimming with the beauty of the place.... Her features had the soft irregularities which run to rarities of beauty, as the ripple rocks the light; mouth, eyes, brows, nostrils, and bloomy cheeks played into one another liquidly; thought flew, tongue followed, and the flash of meaning quivered over them like night-lightning. Or oftener, to speak truth, tongue flew, thought followed: her age was but newly seventeen, and she was French.’

Beauchamp himself is an impossible fellow, too wearisomely in earnest, of a single note, which he twangs in a monotonous variety of tones from morning until night. We fancy at the start, after the ominous prologue, that we are fronting a humorous adventure when we find him a sailor lad, addressing his challenge to the gentlemen of the French guard. But unhappily we are not shown the French guardsmen reading his missive, and the episode falls flat. We feel we have been deceived, and resent the deception. To make up for it, we give our sympathies, such as they are, to the uncle, a mixture of twelfth-century baron and unintelligible Whig. He relieves us of the monotony of Beauchamp’s lance-breaking with society, and his extraordinary conduct in his heart affairs. No sympathy is due to a man who could go prating politics through drawing-rooms and missing two such women as Renée and Cecilia Halkett to fall upon Jenny Denham. Indeed, there are some chapters in the book that provoke a sigh in the bosom of the conscientious readers for the useful art of skipping. Noticeably those dealing with that unmitigated old bore, Dr. Shrapnel, and his everlasting letters. Mr. Romfrey suggested that his speechifying nephew should be sent into his element over in Ireland. But no Irish speech-maker of the most pronounced stage in the disease could ever match Beauchamp by reason of the latter’s want of humour. Irish orators off the Parliamentary stage and the public platform are ready to laugh at themselves and at each other, whereas Beauchamp is in deadly earnest from six o’clock in the morning until twelve o’clock at night. Surely it can have been nothing else but sheer weariness that forced the writer to pitch his hero unexpectedly into the Channel, and bring his career to an untimely end. Never was catastrophe more inexplicable, and from the artistic point of view less justifiable, than Beauchamp’s death. We wake as from a prolonged nightmare with a gasp. Having failed to understand why he was there at all, we fail still less to comprehend why he is knocked into eternity in a single last page, and instead of being touched, we are simply astounded. Of a truth, the drawback to the book is its politics incessantly harped upon. The subject, treated in the high colours of Dumas, of the plumed and sabred days, carries a scent of intrigue and romance to interest us; or the song and chapters of revolt, conspiracy and revolution have our hearts for a nod. What should we have done had we waded through all this truly English stuff of Whiggery, Toryism and Radicalism, without the sweet refreshment of those Venetian days—the night on the Adriatic, and the lovely morning at sea under the Alps? Or canvassing with this tiresome hero without the society of that amiable and amusing idiot, Lord Palmet, whose mind runs to women, and who murmurs before a virtuous voter in a local institute, ‘Capital place for an appointment with a woman’? This is the key of his mind and his moods, but it is refreshing after the dance young Mr. Beauchamp has led us, and promises to lead us, to the end sans intermission.

He is not returned for Parliament, happily for the country, and again we are rewarded for our trials and patient endurance of them by another glimpse, all too brief, of Renée in her Norman home at Tourdestelle. This is a delightful break, but the inconsequence of Mr. Meredith’s characters! None of them seem to know their own mind, neither the men nor the women. At one moment we find Beauchamp wanting to run away with Renée, and Renée holding back. At another Renée running off to Beauchamp, and Beauchamp virtuously holding back. Again, Cecilia awaits his proposal, and he is inexplicably silent, though pushed to claim her by inclination, interest and friends; when he makes up his mind to propose, she is off to Italy, engaged to a man she does not love, knowing the man she loves was to arrive the day of her departure to claim her. Do some people act in this way out of such a novel? We are constantly expecting Beauchamp to wreck society and create a revolution. Yet at the end his uncle, the quaint, twelfth-century baron, says: ‘He hasn’t marched to London with a couple of hundred thousand men, and he escapes what Stukely calls his nation’s scourge, in the shape of a statue turned out by an English chisel. No, we haven’t had much public excitement out of him. But one thing he did do: he got me down on my knees.’ He married Jenny Denham and left a son behind him. This is all he did besides.