It is this world of artificial relations that we enter with Clara Middleton, aware that the never-encountered Constantia Durham had already fled from it in panic. We breathe its curious dry air as, through the eyes of Clara, and later of Colonel de Craye and even eventually of Laetitia, we observe Willoughby’s conceit and callousness reveal themselves in full monstrosity.
Then, almost exactly half-way through the book, Clara reaches the point where she can endure no longer Sir Willoughby’s attentions and the obtuseness of her father. She runs away, and as she does a great storm beats over the countryside. The storm clears the air and the flight clarifies the situation like the great cleansing sheets of rain. Everyone is suddenly aware, that, even though Clara returns, the relationship between her and Willoughby has irrevocably changed, and from this point Clara (her very name, used in earlier Meredith books, is significant) looks on her situation with the clear eye of comedy, so that slowly her fear of Willoughby vanishes and all that remain are the Egoist’s wild and comic manoeuvres to find a solution that will fit the realities of the situation and at the same time save his face among the snobs who surround him.
Comedy is, for Meredith, the dissolving element of Egoism. The Egoist is described as ‘A Comedy in Narrative’, and its Prelude invokes the Comic Spirit. Meredith was not the first English novelist to attempt a definition of the comic spirit in literature. Fielding had preceded him a century before when he wrote the Author’s Preface to Joseph Andrews. Fielding went part of the road which Meredith followed. Like Meredith he denied any intention of perpetrating Burlesque, and maintained that it was not the Monstrous, but the Ridiculous that fell into his province.
The only source of the true Ridiculous (as it appears to me) is affectation.… Now, affectation proceeds from one of these two causes, vanity and hypocrisy: for as vanity puts us on affecting false characters, in order to purchase applause; so hypocrisy sets us on an endeavour to avoid censure, by concealing our vices under an appearance of their opposite virtues…
From the discovery of this affectation arises the Ridiculous – which always strikes the reader with surprise and pleasure; and that in a higher and stronger degree when the affectation arises from hypocrisy, than when from vanity: for to discover anyone to be the exact reverse of what he affects, is more surprising, and consequently more ridiculous, than to find him a little deficient in the quality he desires the reputation of. I might observe that our Ben Jonson, who of all men understood the Ridiculous the best, has chiefly used the hypocritical affectation.
In Fielding’s definition, Joseph Surface, the most consummate hypocrite of English literature, would also be its most comic character. He is not, nor does he or any of Fielding’s own characters achieve a comic complexity approaching that of Sir Willoughby Patterne. Parson Adams is funnier than Sir Willoughby, but that is not quite the same thing; one is meant to provoke our laughter, the other to stir our thought as well. The difference in approach can be seen when we consider the most famous and most characteristic passage from the Essay on the Idea of Comedy:
If you believe that our civilisation is founded in common sense (and it is the first condition of sanity to believe it), you will, when contemplating men, discern a Spirit overhead; not more heavenly than the light flashed upward from glassy surfaces, but luminous and watchful; never shooting beyond them, nor lagging in the rear; so closely attached to them that it may be taken for a slavish reflex, until its features are studied.… Its common aspect is one of unsolicitous observation, as if surveying a full field and having leisure to dart on its chosen morsels, without any fluttering eagerness. Men’s future on earth does not attract it; their honesty and shapeliness in the present does; and whenever they wax out of proportion, overblown, affected, pretentious, bombastical, hypocritical, pedantic, fantastically delicate; whenever it sees them self-deceived or hoodwinked, given to run riot in idolatries, drifting into vanities, congregating in absurdities, planning short-sightedly, plotting dementedly; whenever they are at variance with their professions, and violate the unwritten but perceptible laws binding them in consideration one to another; whenever they offend sound reason, fair justice; are false in humility or mined with conceit, individually, or in the bulk – the Spirit overhead will look humanely malign and cast an oblique light on them, followed by volleys of silvery laughter. That is the Comic Spirit.
It is the sign of Sir Willoughby’s complexity in comparison with the comic characters of Fielding, that he is not guilty of a single affectation, of one glaring manifestation of vanity or hypocrisy, but that all the sins against common sense which Meredith details can be brought against him. Nor does the complexity lie merely in the many-sidedness of his folly. It lies also in the method of representation. Fielding’s characters, and even those of Congreve and Wilde, who seem nearest to Meredith among English comic writers, are at best three-dimensional; we see in clear action the divergence between deed and pretension, the evidence of deception or self-deception. But in the case of Sir Willoughby we have not merely the external witness; we see the process at work within him and realize, in the depth of his thoughts, the extent to which natural impulse has been replaced by artificial calculation, in the same way as the living substance of some perished animal is replaced by the fossil’s hard stone. This probing complexity gives Meredith’s comic art an analytic quality, which, before him, was almost unknown among the writers of comedy. Their approach tended to be the descriptive one of the old-fashioned natural historian; to observe, and represent, and wonder at man’s folly. Meredith’s is the diagnostic approach, seeking the pathology of vanity and its ultimate causes. Once we know those causes, he suggests, we may not suddenly cure a patient so chronic as Sir Willoughby, but we shall cease to become enslaved by his pretensions and, in ceasing to do so, we may – as Meredith suggests that Laetitia will do – begin his liberation.
But, though Meredith undoubtedly intended this lesson to be understood by those who read The Egoist, to end on the didactic note would be to leave a wrong impression of his actual achievement. It is as a consummate portrait of vanity and egoism that The Egoist succeeds; Sir Willoughby reformed would be Sir Willoughby destroyed, and in the wisdom of his art Meredith did no more than hint at the possibility. Here his obedience to the rigid laws of classical drama stood him in good stead; no novel benefits more from its observance of the unities. This is the story of the exposure and the defeat of Egoism; the transformation of Egoism would be another story, and Meredith was too much Sir Willoughby and too sensible an artist, to attempt it.
A Note on the Text
The text of The Egoist which I have used is Meredith’s last, from the 1897 collected edition of his works. Meredith’s revisions of many of his novels show great dissatisfaction with the earlier versions and, in such books as The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, involve major structural changes which do not always seem justified. In the case of The Egoist, however, Meredith seems to have recognized this for the jeu d’esprit it was, and to have realized that any great meddling would have destroyed it. In consequence the changes he made were minor – a few brief cuts, a few substitutions of more felicitous words and phrases – and they represent no more than a last polishing of a work nearer perfection than anything else he wrote. A very few misprints which found their way into the 1897 edition have been corrected by reference to the First Edition, and on a very few occasions I have reverted, for the sake of clarity, to earlier and to my mind better punctuation.
A FACSIMILE OF THE TITLE PAGE OF THE FIRST EDITION
PRELUDE
A Chapter of which the Last Page only is of any Importance
COMEDY is a game played to throw reflections upon social life, and it deals with human nature in the drawing-room of civilized men and women, where we have no dust of the struggling outer world, no mire, no violent crashes, to make the correctness of the representation convincing. Credulity is not wooed through the impressionable senses; nor have we recourse to the small circular glow of the watchmaker’s eye t
o raise in bright relief minutest grains of evidence for the routing of incredulity. The Comic Spirit conceives a definite situation for a number of characters, and rejects all accessories in the exclusive pursuit of them and their speech. For being a spirit, he hunts the spirit in men; vision and ardour constitute his merit; he has not a thought of persuading you to believe in him. Follow and you will see. But there is a question of the value of a run at his heels.
Now the world is possessed of a certain big book, the biggest book on earth; that might indeed be called the Book of Earth; whose title is the Book of Egoism, and it is a book full of the world’s wisdom. So full of it, and of such dimensions is this book, in which the generations have written ever since they took to writing, that to be profitable to us the Book needs a powerful compression.
Who, says the notable humourist, in allusion to this Book, who can studiously travel through sheets of leaves, now capable of a stretch from the Lizard to the last few poor pulmonary snips and shreds of leagues dancing on their toes for cold, explorers tell us, and catching breath by good luck, like dogs at bones about a table, on the edge of the Pole? Inordinate unvaried length, sheer longinquity, staggers the heart, ages the very heart of us at a view. And how if we manage finally to print one of our pages on the crow-scalp of that solitary majestic outsider? We may get him into the Book; yet the knowledge we want will not be more present with us than it was when the chapters hung their end over the cliff you ken of at Dover, where sits our great lord and master contemplating the seas without upon the reflex of that within!
In other words, as I venture to translate him (humourists are difficult: it is a piece of their humour to puzzle our wits), the inward mirror, the embracing and condensing spirit, is required to give us those interminable milepost piles of matter (extending well-nigh to the very Pole) in essence, in chosen samples, digestibly. I conceive him to indicate that the realistic method of a conscientious transcription of all the visible, and a repetition of all the audible, is mainly accountable for our present branfulness, and that prolongation of the vasty and the noisy, out of which, as from an undrained fen, steams the malady of sameness, our modern malady. We have the malady, whatever may be the cure or the cause. We drove in a body to Science the other day for an antidote; which was as if tired pedestrians should mount the engine-box of headlong trains; and Science introduced us to our o’er-hoary ancestry – them in the Oriental posture; whereupon we set up a primeval chattering to rival the Amazon forest nigh nightfall, cured, we fancied. And before daybreak our disease was hanging on to us again, with the extension of a tail. We had it fore and aft. We were the same, and animals into the bargain. That is all we got from Science.
Art is the specific. We have little to learn of apes, and they may be left. The chief consideration for us is, what particular practice of Art in letters is the best for the perusal of the Book of our common wisdom; so that with clearer minds and livelier manners we may escape, as it were, into daylight and song from a land of fog-horns. Shall we read it by the watchmaker’s eye in luminous rings eruptive of the infinitesimal, or pointed with examples and types under the broad Alpine survey of the spirit born of our united social intelligence, which is the Comic Spirit? Wise men say the latter. They tell us that there is a constant tendency in the Book to accumulate excess of substance, and such repleteness, obscuring the glass it holds to mankind, renders us inexact in the recognition of our individual countenances; a perilous thing for civilization. And these wise men are strong in their opinion that we should encourage the Comic Spirit, who is after all our own offspring, to relieve the Book. Comedy, they say, is the true diversion, as it is likewise the key of the great Book, the music of the Book. They tell us how it condenses whole sections of the book in a sentence, volumes in a character; so that a fair part of a book outstripping thousands of leagues when unrolled may be compassed in one comic sitting.
For verily, say they, we must read what we can of it, at least the page before us, if we would be men. One, with an index on the Book, cries out, in a style pardonable to his fervency: The remedy of your frightful affliction is here, through the stillatory of Comedy, and not in Science, nor yet in Speed, whose name is but another for voracity. Why, to be alive, to be quick in the soul, there should be diversity in the companion throbs of your pulses. Interrogate them. They lump along like the old loblegs of Dobbin the horse; or do their business like cudgels of carpet-thwackers expelling dust, or the cottage-clock pendulum teaching the infant hour over midnight simple arithmetic. This too in spite of Bacchus. And let them gallop; let them gallop with the God bestriding them, gallop to Hymen, gallop to Hades, they strike the same note. Monstrous monotonousness has enfolded us as with the arms of Amphitrite! We hear a shout of war for a diversion. – Comedy he pronounces to be our means of reading swiftly and
comprehensively. She it is who proposes the correcting of pretentiousness, of inflation, of dulness, and of the vestiges of rawness and grossness to be found among us. She is the ultimate civilizer, the polisher, a sweet cook. If, he says, she watches over sentimentalism with a birch rod, she is not opposed to romance. You may love, and warmly love, so long as you are honest. Do not offend reason. A lover pretending too much by one foot’s length of pretence, will have that foot caught in her trap. In Comedy is the singular scene of charity issuing of disdain under the stroke of honourable laughter: an Ariel released by Prospero’s wand from the fetters of the damned witch Sycorax. And this laughter of reason refreshed is floriferous, like the magical great gale of the shifty Spring deciding for Summer. You hear it giving the delicate spirit his liberty. Listen, for comparison, to an unleavened society: a low as of the udderful cow past milking hour! O for a titled ecclesiastic to curse to excommunication that unholy thing! – So far an enthusiast perhaps; but he should have a hearing.
Concerning pathos, no ship can now set sail without pathos; and we are not totally deficient of pathos; which is, I do not accurately know what, if not the ballast, reducible to moisture by patent process, on board our modern vessel; for it can hardly be the cargo, and the general water supply has other uses; and ships well charged with it seem to sail the stiffest –there is a touch of pathos. The Egoist surely inspires pity. He who would desire to clothe himself at everybody’s expense, and is of that desire condemned to strip himself stark naked, he, if pathos ever had a form, might be taken for the actual person. Only he is not allowed to rush at you, roll you over and squeeze your body for the briny drops. There is the innovation.
You may as well know him out of hand, as a gentleman of our time and country, of wealth and station; a not flexile figure, do what we may with him; the humour of whom scarcely dimples the surfaces and is distinguishable but by very
penetrative, very wicked imps, whose fits of roaring below at some generally imperceptible stroke of his quality have first made the mild literary angels aware of something comic in him, when they were one and all about to describe the gentleman on the heading of the records baldly (where brevity is most complimentary) as a gentleman of family and property, an idol of a decorous island that admires the concrete. Imps have their freakish wickedness in them to kindle detective vision; malignly do they love to uncover ridiculousness in imposing figures. Wherever they catch sight of Egoism they pitch their camps, they circle and squat, and forthwith they trim their lanterns, confident of the ludicrous to come. So confident that their grip of an English gentleman, in whom
they have spied their game, never relaxes until he begins insensibly to frolic and antic, unknown to himself, and comes out in the native steam which is their scent of the chase. Instantly off they scour, Egoist and imps. They will, it is known of them, dog a great House for centuries, and be at the birth of all the new heirs in succession, diligently taking confirmatory notes, to join hands and chime their chorus in one of their merry rings round the tottering pillar of the House, when his turn arrives; as if they had (possibly they had) smelt of old date a doomed colossus of Egoism in that unborn, unconceived inheritor o
f the stuff of the family. They dare not be chuckling, while Egoism is valiant, while sober, while socially valuable, nationally serviceable. They wait.
Aforetime a grand old Egoism built the House. It would appear that ever finer essences of it are demanded to sustain the structure; but especially would it appear that a reversion to the gross original, beneath a mask and in a vein of fineness, is an earthquake at the foundations of the House. Better that it should not have consented to motion, and have held stubbornly to all ancestral ways, than have bred that anachronic spectre. The sight, however, is one to make our squatting imps in circle grow restless on their haunches, as they bend eyes instantly, ears at full cock, for the commencement of the comic drama of the suicide. If this line of verse be not yet in our literature,
Through very love of self himself he slew;
let it be admitted for his epitaph.
CHAPTER 1
A Minor Incident Showing an Hereditary Aptitude in the Use of the Knife
THERE was an ominously anxious watch of eyes visible and invisible over the infancy of Willoughby, fifth in descent from Simon Patterne, of Patterne Hall, premier of this family, a lawyer, a man of solid acquirements and stout ambition, who well understood the foundation-work of a House, and was endowed with the power of saying No to those first agents of destruction, besieging relatives. He said it with the resonant emphasis of death to younger sons. For if the oak is to become a stately tree, we must provide against the crowding of timber. Also the tree beset with parasites prospers not. A great House in its beginning lives, we may truly say, by the knife. Soil is easily got, and so are bricks, and a wife, and children come of wishing for them, but the vigorous use of the knife is a natural gift and points to growth. Pauper Patternes were numerous when the fifth head of the race was the hope of his county. A Patterne was in the Marines.
The Egoist Page 3