THE ORDEAL OF RICHARD FEVEREL
GEORGE MEREDITH
The fiction of George Meredith, like the poetry of Browning, appeals to a limited class of intellectuals. Close attention is often required to understand the drift of events as well as the philosophy injected at every point into the narrative. A considerable general education is requisite to comprehend the literary and historical references and no little insight is needed to appreciate the subtleties of a dialogue which is often brilliant but sometimes obscure. There are elaborate explanations of the complicated motives and feelings which control the actors of the drama. They do not speak for themselves like the characters in more primitive fiction. There are no such graphic descriptions as that of the London fog in Bleak House, or of the Battle of Waterloo in Les Misérables, and there are few portraits that stand out clearly in the memory like those of Don Quixote or Beatrix Esmond. The whole work is more like a mural decoration or a tapestry than a painting with a clear perspective and strong lights and shades. The style is highly finished, and there are sometimes interesting digressions, though these have not the exquisite abandon so often found in those of Thackeray, and the satire lacks something of the airiness which is often its greatest charm. The author probes many of the hidden recesses of the human heart, but his types are hardly so universal as those of other great masters of fiction. His women are far more attractive than his men.
Meredith is at his best when he is simplest, and Richard Feverel, especially in its early chapters, is simpler than many of his other novels.
Richard Feverel is the only son of Sir Austin, a baronet, who has written his philosophy of life in a series of aphorisms entitled “The Pilgrim’s Scrip.” Left alone by a faithless wife in the care of his child, to whom he is tenderly attached, he devises a scientific system of training so perfect that the boy is to be “guiltless even of the impulse to gainsay his father’s wishes.” It works well in the young lad’s early escapades, including the setting of fire to Farmer Blaize’s hay rick, but it comes to naught when the father attempts to guard his son from the perils of love and imprudent matrimony, and to hunt a wife for him, and it ends in Richard’s clandestine marriage with the fair Lucy Dorchester, the niece of this same Farmer Blaize. The father’s efforts to keep young Richard and his wife apart after their marriage as a further discipline in accordance with his absurd system of education ends with the wrecking of two lives; with the boy’s temptation and fall and a succession of follies terminating in a duel, and finally with the death of his young wife, whose gentle spirit is broken at last under the continual sufferings to which she is subjected. It is a story of unutterable sadness in its concluding chapters.
A picture of surpassing beauty is that in which young Richard rowing upon the river on his father’s estate, first encounters the fair creature who is to become his wife.
“Above green-flashing plunges of a weir, and shaken by the thunder below, lilies, golden and white, were swaying at anchor among the reeds. Meadow-sweet hung from the banks thick with weed and trailing bramble, and there also hung a daughter of earth. Her face was shaded by a broad straw hat with a flexible brim that left her lips and chin in the sun, and, sometimes nodding, sent forth a light of promising eyes. Across her shoulders, and behind, flowed large loose curls, brown in shadow, almost golden where the ray touched them. She was simply dressed, befitting decency and the season. On a closer inspection you might see that her lips were stained. This blooming young person was regaling on dewberries. They grew between the bank and the water making pretty progress to her mouth.... The little skylark went up above her, all song, to the smooth southern cloud lying along the blue; from a dewy copse dark over her nodding hat the blackbird fluted, calling to her with thrice mellow note; the kingfisher flashed emerald out of green osiers; a bow-winged heron travelled aloft, seeking solitude: a boat slipped towards her, containing a dreamy youth; and still she plucked the fruit, and ate, and mused, as if no fairy prince were invading her territories, and as if she wished not for one, or knew not her wishes. Surrounded by the green shaven meadows, the pastoral summer buzz, the weir-fall’s thundering white, amid the breath and beauty of wild flowers, she was a bit of lovely human life in a fair setting, a terrible attraction. The Magnetic Youth leaned round to note his proximity to the weir-piles, and beheld the sweet vision. Stiller and stiller grew nature, as at the meeting of two electric clouds. Her posture was so graceful, that though he was making straight for the weir, he dared not dip a scull. Just then one enticing dewberry caught her eyes. He was floating by unheeded, and saw that her hand stretched low, and could not gather what it sought. A stroke from his right brought him beside her. The damsel glanced up dismayed, and her whole shape trembled over the brink. Richard sprang from his boat into the water. Pressing a hand beneath her foot, which she had thrust against the crumbling wet sides of the bank to save herself, he enabled her to recover her balance, and gain safe earth, whither he followed her.”
The scene which succeeds—the revelation of the love of each to the other—is worthy to stand by the side of the very best in all dramatic literature, and in the later chapters the utter devotion and perfect womanliness of the young wife, who is made a sacrifice to the baronet’s impossible “system,” creates a character which is one of the most lovable ever portrayed by the fancy of a writer of fiction.