Books: The Wounded Egoist

THE ORDEAL OF GEORGE MEREDITH (368 pp.)—Lionel Stevenson—Scribner ($6).

The year 1859 flares up in English literature like a volcanic eruption. In that one year were published (wholly or in part) Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, Thackeray’s The Virginians, George Eliot’s Adam Bede, Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, Darwin’s The Origin of Species, Fitzgerald’s translation of The Rubciydt of Omar Khayyam. Almost ignored in the rush was a novel named The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, by one George Meredith. Today, nearly a century after, both Meredith and his Ordeal are still little more than names in an English syllabus, read only by confirmed Meredithians and by literary historians who devote their lives to tracing and piecing patiently together the links from which the chain of literary tradition and continuity is made.

Lionel Stevenson, biographer of Thackeray and professor of English at the University of Southern California, is just such a historian and a Meredithian to boot. His Ordeal of George Meredith is the first grand-scale resurrection of Victorian literature’s most neglected writer. Other writers (including Henry James and Oscar Wilde) have briefly and brilliantly discussed Meredith’s peculiar genius, but none has placed him in the great chain so accurately as Stevenson or studied his life and letters with such devoted care.

Meredith was a tailor’s son, born in 1828. No biographer can tell much about his early years, for he covered those years with “an impenetrable cloak of silence.”

Bitterly ashamed of his parentage, he made a lifelong business of tailoring for himself an identity that better fitted his grand manner and handsome appearance. By the end of his life, he had done such a good job of costumery that he seemed to believe himself a nobly descended Welshman, and the phrase “these English!” uttered with a lordly snort, was his favorite expression of contempt.

Cast a Cold Eye. English literature owes a debt to wounded snobbery. Dickens never forgot the humiliation of working in a blacking warehouse; Trollope, of going to school in tattered trousers; Shaw, the comedown of being shifted from a “rich” to a “poor” school. Much of the greatness of these men came from their ability to cast a cold eye of ridicule on their own snobbery. But none of them went so far as the wounded Meredith in hailing satire of self as the first essential of “true human progress.”

Such a man, Meredith himself believed, can only be one whose emotions are under the complete control of the intellect. Meredith, more akin to Shaw than to Dickens and Trollope, became an intellectual comedian whose life was one long perpetration of jokes against his haughty self. His Ordeal of Richard Feverel sardonically recounted the misadventures of a proper Victorian young gentleman brought up in almost complete ignorance of sex. The hero of The Egoist was a young baronet of such absurd self-love that he delayed his marriage (and lost the girl) worrying that she might remarry if he died first.

George Meredith was hardly the man to translate his own exact misadventures into literal print, but he had enough of his own, at least, to stimulate imagination. One of them began when he married the daughter of Satirist Thomas Love Peacock and settled down to earn a living writing poetry.

When his first volume left him poorer than before, he turned reluctantly to fiction. For 30 years thereafter he slogged away, writing novels that nobody could understand and consoling himself with poems that only a few poets wanted to read. Typically, even George Meredith’s everyday letters were written in a syntax so impenetrable that they needed a second or third reading.

When his sharp-tongued wife protested against their dolorous way of life, he retaliated savagely, and soon their love match degenerated into the biting, scratching partnership that Meredith described in the poem Modern Love:

Then each applied to each that fatal knife,

Deep questioning, which probes to endless dole.

Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul

When hot for certainties in this our life!

Mrs. Meredith ended the farce by eloping with a portrait painter. Meredith worked on alone for a while, a crusty grass widower. He became a reader for the publishing firm of Chapman & Hall, promptly turned down one of history’s biggest bestsellers, Mrs. Henry Wood’s East Lynne, His acceptance of such newcomers as Thomas Hardy and George Gissing never attained the fame of his rejection slips, which turned back Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (“Will not do”), and Shaw’s early novels, Cashel Byron’s Profession and Immaturity (“No”).

“A Suit of Nerves.” At 36, George Meredith had the good fortune to marry a second wife who paid no attention whatever to his endless sarcastic diatribes; they loved each other dearly. “[She is] a mud fort,” he murmured contentedly. “You fire broadsides into her, and nothing happens.”

The turning point, bringing fame and money, came with The Egoist, in which the humiliations of the vain man were described as never before or since. “A complete set of nerves not heretofore examined,” said Robert Louis Stevenson, “and yet running all over the human body—a suit of nerves.” “A young friend of Mr. Meredith’s,” Stevenson added, “came to him in an agony. ‘This is too bad of you,’ he cried. ‘Willoughby is me!’ ‘No, my dear fellow,’ said the author, ‘he is all of us.’ ”

Today, beyond his poems, it is The Egoist that stands out from all Meredith’s works as the successful testament of his creed. It is also the key book in Biographer Stevenson’s joining of the chain of intellectual comedy which runs approximately from Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, through Peacock’s novels, down via The Egoist to much of Oscar Wilde, Shaw and even the early Aldous Huxley. And yet, Meredith remains as freakishly separate from these other links in the literary chain as does Thorstein Veblen in the chain of social philosophers—and for much the same reasons. He tried to depict life accurately, but, in Wilde’s words: “His style would be quite sufficient of itself to keep life at a respectful distance.”