BOOKS.
THE COMIC SPIRIT IN GEORGE MEREDITH.* MEREDITH does not lack acute and sympathetic interpreters.. Mr. G. M. Trevelyan has brilliantly expounded his philosophy, and Mr. Richard Curie has given us a valuable and illuminat- ing study both of his teaching and his art. Now we have an American critic, Mr. Joseph Warren Beach, who in this little- work deals with what is perhaps Meredith's most notable and individual quality, the gift of •." thoughtful laughter." It is- always risky to interpret a writer from the point of view of one function; the critic is apt to exaggerate its importance- and construe everything in terms of it. But in Meredith the- comic is fundamental; and for our guidance we possess his• own exposition of the meaning of comedy, so that we can avoid. the fantastic in our reading of it. We cannot think, however,. that Mr. Beach's work is as much that of the pioneer as he. seems to consider it. "The comedy itself they [i.e., the critics] pass by with grave unconsciousness." We should have- thought that the comedy in Meredith was precisely the element most generally appreciated and most easily estimated. Thirty years ago Stevenson set the fashion in calling atten-- tion to it. Mr. Beach is a careful, acute, and frequently an eloquent exponent. He is a discriminating analyst of character and a trustworthy guide to the psychology of Mere- dith's figures. He is always interesting,-too, and has the knack of coining memorable phrases. Where we do not find him so- trustworthy is in his appreciation of the artistic side. It is difficult to follow a critic who thinks Diana of the Crossways' the " most commonplace " and " least Meredithian " of the • The Comic Spirit in George Meredith. By Joseph Warren Beach. London:, Longmsns and Co. [5s. net.] novels. Using comedy in Mr. Beach's own sense-Percy Dacier seems to the present writer one of the most supremely comig. of Meredith's figures, and the scene in which he proposes to Constance Asper one -of the great -comic scenes in literature. Or take again the whole rela- tions of Sir Lukin with Diana. Yet Mr. Beach declares: ." It is precisely imagination that ' Diana' lacks. . . . It is a plain narrative of ordinary people with no touch of the rare to- put out the ordinary reader." Sometimes, too, the perspective is doubtful. He finds it very significant that six novels of Meredith appeared in the Fortnightly Review, " which might almost have been called the organ of the Positivists: men earnest in the effort to construct a philosophy of nature and devoted to the cause of humanity." But the desiccated "nature" of Positivism is as remote from Meredith's "Earth Mother" as a clod from a star. In a new -edition we would suggest a more careful revision of the proofs. The book teems with misprints, and on page 172 we bare counted four within eight lines.
Comedy Mr. Beach defines as "lean humour," that is to say, humour " divested of those appurtenances of the sensuous, of sentimentality, of naturalistic detail, of material accident, of -waggish impertinent wit, that make so fat and succulent the -work of most English humorists." It aims at laughter, but only the laughter which leads to thought. Its game is folly, but not all follies. Some are too pitiful and- tragic for the comic muse._ The folly it aims at is the unnatural, the perversion into which vain and idle people drift, the pretentious—in a -word the aberrations of the civilized and the intelligent. As Voltaire wrote, almost in Meredith's words, " Ce loisir, dans lequel les hommes rendus a ens-memes as livrent ii leur -caractere et it leur ridicule, est le seal temps propre pour la comedie."•- The Comic Muse is most at home in the drawing- room because it is when men are beyond the pressure of physical need that they become comic. She flashes Nature's bull's-eye intothe recesses of Artifice, for she is Nature's servant. Unlike Tragedy, " she does not flatter us with a sense of dusky snysteries and thrilling hazard. Her business is rather to prune the imagination, and with clarifying laughter restore the deluded to a right sense of values." Yet her function is the same as that of the Aristotelian tragedy, though her means are different ; she purifies the emotions by laughter,. instead of by pity and terror-. The basis of the comic is the- incongruous. The egoist and the sentimentalist believe that they cherish noble passions whereas their hearts are full of little 'withered vanities. The ordinary humorist seeks only the con-, trast between profession and practice as-in_ a Pecksniff, but _Meredith goes further down and exposes, not the blatant -hypocrite, but the subtle self-deceiver. "It is the discrepancy," says Mr. Beach, " between the real and the supposed motive that- makes the comedy ; the game of bluff played by the actor .against himself, the complacent self-deception, the mock -sublimity." The comic spirit, indeed, is no other than com- monsense or philosophy. It bates the spurious and would -create a true sense of value. If it " watches over senti- snentalism with a birch rod," it cheers and raises the humble. " Philosophy," in. Meredith's words, " bids us see that we are not so pretty-as rose-pink, not so repulsive as dirty drab; and that, instead of everlastingly shifting those barren aspects, the sight of ourselves is wholesome, bearable, fructifying, finally a delight."
Mr. Beach analyses Meredith's treatment of the comic into -a number of comic types. There is the wiseacre, like Sir Austen Feverel, who thinks -himself wiser than Nature. There is the snob with a false-sense of social values. General Ople, Martin Tinman, and the immortal Countess de Saldar de San- corvo, Harry Richmond's father, and the Pole ladies are ex, amples, and there are traces of the quality even in nobler and robuster figures like Evan Harrington. With the ladies Pole we are on the confines between snobbery and sentimentality, and in the latter quality Meredith takes an especial delight. .The sentimentalist is the product of a half-civilization : he has the ideas which make civilization possible, but in him they -are unrelated to fact. He is a spiritual snob, and spiritually degenerate. Mr. Beach takes as the type of the complete senti- snentalist Sir Purcell Barrett in Sandra Belloni. Meredith has no objection to sentiment provided it has the stuff of life in it. As he says of Merthyr and Georgiana, " these were sentimen- talists who served an active deity, and not that arbitrary pro. ,jection of a subtle selfishness which rules the fairer portion of
our fat England." But in. truth it isle= activity than un- selfishness -in the ideal which saves -sentimentality from being a ,vice. Victor Radnor in One of our Conquerors serves a sufficiently active deity, but he fails from his egoism. This brings us to Meredith's greatest comic studies—the dissection of egoism. Mr. Beach is very good on the subject. The egoist may be healthy, like Sir Willoughby Patterne, or decadent like Fleetwood, but his quality is the same. He is " the selfish primitive who has extended his desires to include a wide range of social gratification; the complex uncivilized-man talking the dialect of the complex civilized." He has to observe the conventions of civilization, and at the same time gratify the primitive lust for conquest. There is no true generosity in him. He cannot spend or give or surrender himself. " That would be the loss of the ego." Such a man is in perpetual danger of- the fate. of. St. Sebastian, and terrible may be his torments at the hands of the Comic Spirit. A rarer figure is the decadent egoist, whom Mr. Beach well calls the " romantic epicure." Such an one is Fleetwood in The Amazing Marriage. He is " a deluded and comic figure because he will build for himself, out of gaseous bubbles of desire, an iridescent structure that cannot stand a breath of the wind of truth ; and all the while the veritable temple of romance stands before him unrecognized as such because its atones are weather-stained in real sun- light."
Mr. Beach has an interesting discussion on the development in Meredith of the comic art. In his earlier work his touch was uncertain. In Farina there is more clowning than comedy. The comic element in _Richard Feverel is not the clear-cut, fully realized, and acutely diagnosed thing which it is in the later novels. He is probably right in regarding Evan Harrington, The Egoist, and The Amazing Marriage as, in point of form, the most perfect. " The other comedies are less happily designed or less gratifying in execution; and while we may be deeply interested in the subject-matter and pleased with details of artistic virtuosity or imaginative splendour, there is not the same fulness of satisfaction in the general effect?' The Egoist is high-water mark, for the earlier comedies are less profound and the later less amusing. Co-ordinate with this development in art there is a development is Meredith's " comic philosophy." The type becomes rarer and subtler; the material for laughter is found more and more in qualities and characters• which on the surface seem beyond criticism. He deals less with snobs and self- conscious sentimentalists than with the splendid four-square figures who at all times have commanded the world's respect. The comic muse under Meredith's guidance dealt with the follies moat deadly in his own eyes and to his own age. But the history of foolishness is not ended. The very weapons of its exposure in one age may become its weapons of concealment in another. The life according to nature and the intellectual liberalism of Meredith wilt become also in time a conven- tion; and a new Meredith, when he arrives, may have to give us as the type of egoist the radical Beauchamp rather than the feudal Sir Willoughby.
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