MR GEORGE MEREDITH'S NEW NOVEL.*
WE have been amused, impressed, bored, and filled with admira- tion and disappointment by Mr. George Meredith's new story.
Of Sir Willoughby Patterne, the typical egoist and the hero of the comedy, Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson observed at his coming of age, "You see he has a leg." The word is mystic, and of various interpretation ; it characterises him from that time forth. Mrs. Mountstuart, we may remark, is a fatal coiner of epithets. She hits off all her acquaintance with a good- natured, but appalling accuracy, and thereby saves Mr. Mere- dith the necessity of too often blushing at his own cleverness. He naively admires her wit as much as we do, She describes Vernon Whitford, Sir Willoughby's cousin and destined rival, as " Phosbus Apollo turned fasting friar." Laetitia Dale, the egoist's first lady-love,, and eonstantia Durham, his second, are similarly given in apa 1 rase ; the former has" romantic tale on her eyelashes ;" the latter is a "racing cutter." We are the more grateful to Mrs. Mountstuart for these and other luminous hints concerning the people 'with whom we are brought in contact, because after Mr. Mere- dith has done his best, he does not succeed in teaching us much more about them. We get plenty of elaboration, but little further practical insight. To return to young Sir Willoughby, the god of himself and the county ; after jilting Laetitia, who is poor, he engages himself to Constautia, who is healthy and wealthy, as well as handsome. But she jilts him (though he will not allow himself to regard the matter in that light), and
meets Lnetitia, on his return, in a he goes abroad for three years ;
lonely lane, looks in her eyes, "found the man he sought there,
squeezed him passionately, and let her go, saying. . . . . It was decreed that we should moot.' " She accordingly hopes for a time again, tremulously, but subsides once more, on learning that he has started fresh game in the person of one Clara Middleton, whom Mrs. Mountstuart presently pronounces to be "a dainty rogue in porcelain." Clara is the heroine, and is much described.
She is the daughter of the rich and learned scholar, Dr. Middleton, a strong figure, with a grand head and rolling voice ;
when angered, he is like "a Dictionary bitten ;" but at all times, a humorous and refreshing personage. The engagement between Clara and Willoughby is somewhat hurriedly formed ; she is young and ignorant of the world, and, to her, love was "one of the distant blessings of the mighty world, lying somewhere in the world's forests, across wild seas, veiled, encompassed with beautiful perils, a throbbing secrecy, but too remote to quicken her bosom's throbs." She begins to learn her own mind later, and has fits of gravity and misgiving, and in her reveries sings to herself, "above her darker-flowing thoughts, like the reed warbler on the branch beside the night.dream.„ When her lover came to embrace her, she took the salute with apparent insensibility, but a moment later she blushed crimson, " divinely feminine in reflective bashfulness." However, circumstances and civilisation unite to make a coward of her; modern women are "like Prussians, who must both march and think in step." After many doubts and hesitations, Plans made and defeated, plots and palpitations, she is at length despairingly emboldened to request Sir Willoughby to release her from her engagement. He is at first incredulous of the serious i
. ntention of the "profane
request," but on her timid reiteration, treats it as a, maiden folly—a fear of unworthiness of her great destiny—on which point he chivalrously reassures her, and will hear no more of the matter. Hereupon intrigues begin, and very ingeniously are they conducted. Prominent among the intriguers, though by no will of hie own, is Crossjay, a delightfully boyish boy, who, with Dr. Middleton, are the most nearly human creatures in the book. Vernon Whitford, this boy's tutor for the Navy, is em- ployed through two and a half volumes chiefly in hunting over the country after him to fetch him back to his lessons, Cross- jay's predilection being for birds' eggs, ponds, earth, hedges, and rainstorms. When found, he has to be pulled out of the * no Egoist : a Comedy in Narrative. By George Meredith. 8 role. London; 0 K. Paul and Co.
ground, rank of the soil, like a root. In the end, he is mainly essential in running the unhappy egoist to earth ; and is then made one of the many millstones which are hung round the baronet's humiliated neck, previous to plunging him into the- matrimonial sea.
We shall not, however, follow the story to its conclusion, which is very cleverly wrought out, a necessity being upon us to say something of the writing and the writer. Mr. Meredith's. reputation is high, and there is no doubt about his ability.. Now, it is conceivable, but not inevitable, that a man of ability should be able to write a good novel, or even comedy in narrative ; and there are few more agreeable sensations for a reviewer than to open a virgin volume with the assurance that he will find it full of good literature,—as good ten years hence as now. It was with an assurance,. or at least with an anticipation, of this sort that we applied our paper-knife to the Egoist. The first effect was vigorous, and not unpromising. The writer has an individuality : he is a humourist. He makes us think of him a great deal, not by directly introducing himself to us, as Tbackeray does, but after the same fashion that we are led to think of Carlyle while reading his French Revolution. In fact, Mr. Meredith often calls up an image of a handsome, witty, polished juvenile cousin of Carlyle, in eighteenth-century costume, with neat, powdered wig, lace ruffles, knee-breeches, and silk stockings, of keen and curious vision, hut too courteous to be profound or stirring, who regards the world as a foolish piece of protoplasm, chiefly valuable as stuff out of which to cut epigrams and apt similes. His thought moves in images, sometimes felicitous,. but as often grotesque or obscure. An inability to fall into conventional modes of expression is characteristic of humourists, but then the unconventionality should throw fresh light upon the subject-matter, should explain it, not disorganise it merely. Mr. Meredith's eccentricity is like that of a "left-banded" snail- shell; he must curl the wrong way, or the genius of his eccentricity is lost. The humourist, being him self a person, and generally the most conspicuous person in his book, he should be careful always to be captivating, otherwise his reader is liable to reject all he brings in rejecting him. Mr. Meredith is frequently captivating, but he does not know when to atop. We are compelled to question whether he is humorously affected, or only affectedly humorous. He is a sort of modern hermetic philosopher of drawing-rooms ; there is too often more novelty in his way of saying a thing than in the thing he says ; and although Mr. Meredith is ordin- arily very circumspect, this is a fault which is quite as apt to mislead the writer as the reader. It is occasionally best and wisest to be straightforward and simple ; there are times when wit will not do the work of strength. Such times are perilous to Mr. Meredith. Once more, he does not know when, or he is unable, to stop ; and we find him lavishing much delicate fancy and brisk ingenuity upon matters in themselves unimportant; as if a man were to spend his life carving out of a perishable melon- rind, a work of art that he might just as easily have wrought in everlasting ivory. The links in his chain of argument are elaborated in such cunning open-work of verbal filagree, that the argument is no longer a chain, but a curiosity; it must he sup- ported, it will support nothing. Again, his subtlety in the matter of adverbs and adjectives—the latter especially—is astonish- ing; but qualification is not invariably insight, and we are driven to ask whether the writer, who knows so well what a thing looks like, knows equally well what it is ? He can always say a good thing, when he gives his mind to it; but now and then he is absent-minded, and then he is prone to parody himself ; his pen, left to its own devices, and still conscious whom it be- longs to, perpetrates an empty quip, that has the form, but not the substance, of its owner. Upon the whole, as we turn page after page, our expectations are continually whetted, because of the difficulty of believing that so much promising material shall not fulfil its promise ; but we are constrained to say, at the end, that it does not. The story, such as it is, would be better plainly dressed; its clothes are too good for it. Per- haps no story would be good enough for such clothes. And there ' is, after all, only a certain amount of gold to be got out of the huniau mine ; what is the use of exciting our cupidity beyond the possibility of its gratification P Shakespeare dug pretty deep, but he did not go about his work in nearly so promising a manner as does Mr. Meredith.
Nevertheless, Mr. Meredith has a great deal of the artist in him ; and very likely he is aware of his own limitations, and does what he can to fortify his position. He opens with an artful "prelude," in which he defines the comedy, as distin- guished from the novel proper. The comedy is spirit and essence, unclogged by the novel's dull, interminable realism of detail. The truth is, of course, that Mr. Meredith has no genius for detail. M. Emile Zola has, and could doubtless write as -convincing an essay in favour of his view as Mr. Meredith has sdone in favour of his. Mr. Meredith knows many clever tricks of narrative. For example, he will reproduce, at an interval of several pages or chapters, a particular, marked phrase or
• conceit, which, carrying the mind back to the previous utterance of it, causes all that lies between to appear parenthetical, and thus gives an appearance of rapidity and homogeneity to the whole. Again, in the midst of much logical incoherence, he will .observe a thread of humorous coherency, like a juggler who pretends to make a mistake with what we afterwards discover to have been his best skill. In his moralising moments he does not proffer you the naked truth, but gives you the conventional lie, robed in the ridiculous splendour of a monkey on a hand- 'organ, thus revealing its ugliness better than actual revelation .could do. Of dialogue he is prodigal ; but it is not characteristic ,dialogue, or rather it is characteristic of nobody but Mr. Meredith, The speeches chime with the context, but not with the people who are made to utter them. Precious human nature is pulled out of shape, in order that the author may not lose the credit of his own epigrams ; and sometimes the ear catches in these utterances the fatal lilt of blank verse. But his people are altogether Mr. Meredith's weak point; he can see them, he can "hit them off," but he cannot enter into them and sympathise with them as in- dividualities. What they are made to say and think is what they really might have said and thought,—presented through the refracting medium of the thoughts and sayings of Mr. Meredith, The analysis both of Sir Willoughby and of Clara Middleton is exhaustive, and we feel that much of it is correct, but it does not enable us once to catch a genuine glimpse of either of them. The traits are all there, but not the distinct persons ; to make an adaptation of one of Mr. Meredith's own ,sayings, he describes his characters admirably, piecemeal ; when it comes to the putting of them together, he does it coldly. After closing the book, we feel, in the retrospect, that the style is the most memorable thing about it. It is like a wayward wvind blowing against the current of the story, and raising little humorous waves and eddies which both look pretty, and pre- vent our getting a clear view of what lies underneath. The whole work (to use another simile, for which Mr. Meredith must excuse us, since a prolonged and not unprofitable indulgence in his society is answerable for it) reminds us of one of those picture-puzzles that are given to children, to find out the figure or the significance which is hidden from the first view. The result of our inspection of Mr. Meredith's puzzle resolves itself into the single word,—" Clever."
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