The Egoist

  THE EGOIST

  GEORGE MEREDITH was born in 1828, the son of a Portsmouth tailor. He was educated in local schools and later at the Moravian School at Neuwied near Coblenz. In 1844 he was articled to a solicitor but turned instead to writing, publishing Poems in 1851 and his first work of fiction, The Shaving of Shagpat, in 1856. In 1849 he had married Mary Ellen Nicolls, Thomas Love Peacock’s widowed daughter. After a few years the marriage foundered and, having left Meredith, Mary Ellen died in 1861. In 1864 he married Marie Vulliamy. From his first introduction to the literary world, Meredith became a hard-working man of letters, acting for many years as reader for Chapman Hall, and devoting much time to journalism. This, however, did not interrupt the flow of his novels. The best known were The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859), Evan Harrington or He Would be a Gentleman (1861), Emilia in England (1864), later re-published as Sandra Belloni (1886), Rhoda Fleming (1865), The Adventures of Harry Richmond (1871), Beauchamp’s Career (1876), The Egoist (1879), The Tragic Comedians (1880), and Diana of the Crossways (1885). His most important works of non-fiction were his volume of poems, Modern Love (1862) and his Essay on Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit (1897). After a long period of relative neglect, Meredith became famous and respected in his old age, and in 1905 he received the Order of Merit. He died in 1909.

  GEORGE WOODCOCK was editor of Now from 1940 to 1947 and of Canadian Literature from 1959 to 1977. He has taught at Canadian and American universities, has received many literary awards for his books, and in 1973 was awarded the Molson Prize, the highest Canadian award for achievements in the arts and humanities. He received the UBC Medal for Popular Biography in 1973 and again in 1976 and was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1968, and later an FRGS. He has published some eighty books – on travel, history, verse, literary criticism and biographical studies. They include Anarchism (Penguin 1963), The Crystal Spirit: A Study of George Orwell (Penguin 1970), Herbert Read, Who Killed the British Empire?, Gabriel Dumont , Notes on Visitations, Peoples of the Coast, Thomas Merton, Monk and Poet, The Canadians, The World of Canadian Writing, British Columbia: A History, Collected Poems and Letter to the Past. He has also edited William Cobbett’s Rural Rides, Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native and Herman Melville’s Typee for Penguin Classics.

  GEORGE MEREDITH

  The Egoist

  EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION

  BY GEORGE WOODCOCK

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published in 1879

  Published in Penguin Books 1968

  15

  Introduction and Notes copyright © George Woodcock, 1968

  All rights reserved

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-14-195876-7

  Contents

  INTRODUCTION BY GEORGE WOODCOCK

  A NOTE ON THE TEXT

  The Egoist

  NOTES

  Introduction

  1

  The Egoist is George Meredith’s most self-consistent and characteristic novel. It is the work in which he makes the least concession to the ways of Victorian novelists and to the predilections of Victorian readers; in which he reveals most openly the tensions between his own nature and his philosophy of living; in which he exposes with the most accurate and merciless of laughter the distortions of feeling which a society of self-seekers imposes on its devotees.

  The Egoist was not the most popular of Meredith’s novels among his contemporaries; that distinction was reserved for Diana of the Crossways, a much weaker book, in which he compromised notably with the sentimentality he himself always denounced. It was not even Meredith’s own favourite, perhaps because in writing it he had exposed too much of himself; he gave his preference to that heroic failure, Beauchamp’s Career, a strange combination of probable politics and unlikely passion.

  Yet The Egoist is the book for which Meredith is most regarded at that crucial period in a writer’s fame, the second half-century after his death; today it is probably more read and certainly more discussed than any of his other novels. Like Congreve’s The Way of the World, which Meredith regarded highly, and Wilde’s Importance of Being Earnest, which as far as I know he never even mentioned, it is among those jeux d’esprit in which art and intellect dance together in forms that are literature’s nearest effective approach to abstraction. In Meredith’s other works his mannerisms and artifices perplex and annoy; in The Egoist, for once, they are entirely appropriate, entirely absorbed into a carefully integrated structure of speech and thought.

  The thought is important, for Meredith’s intent in writing The Egoist was far from that of producing a work of art for art’s sake. Wilde’s occasional propagandizing for a hedonistic libertarianism may perhaps be dismissed as a lapse of aestheticist consistency; Meredith never ceased to be – in his own way – a self-consciously didactic writer, and even The Egoist reflects his didacticism. He had definite and detailed views on the need to live naturally. In his novels the physical exertions in which he rather loudly indulged in daily life were transferred to the positive characters, and in such a context became the symbols of a healthy attitude to existence. He had, moreover, strong opinions on that malignant sickness of Victorian England, the class system, and the agonies of snobbery and social pride which he suffered within himself were transformed into fiction so that they might be observed and analysed with exemplary effect.

  More tenuously, in the shadow of the Meredith concerned with moral-social problems, there lived a political Meredith. Though James Thomson called him ‘the Browning of our novelists’, and Wilde slyly amended the definition into his famous quip, ‘Meredith is a prose Browning, and so is Browning’, the only attitude that Meredith and Browning tangibly shared was a common political concern for the Italian Risorgimento, which aroused Meredith’s enthusiasm, sent him to the front as a correspondent during the abortive war between Italy and Austria in the summer of 1866, and resulted in two romantic novels, Sandra Belloni and Vittorio. At home Meredith professed himself a Radical, but a sure instinct told him that writers are best outside political activity and his one burst of electoral campaigning, when he canvassed for his friend F. A. Maxse at Southampton in 1867, was most important for the literary use he made of it in Beauchamp’s Career.

  At least one Marxist critic has devoted a lengthy book to arguing Meredith’s right to be considered a class-conscious revolutionary novelist (Jack Lindsay, George Meredith: His Life and Work, London, 1956). Yet, though the political scene figures in most of Meredith’s novels, in part for the good reason that in that age of Reform by easy stages politics were the active c
oncern of the kind of people he portrays, his principles were diluted in practice by the fact that he was a hard-working man of letters who did not always show very delicate scruples as to how his pen was used; for years, as an anonymous editorialist for the Tory Ipswich Journal, he wrote for money against his avowed political allies.

  His concern with class was genuine and passionate – as it has been with so many English novelists of the past two centuries – but it was rarely expressed in direct political terms, mainly because he was less interested in the machinery of politics than he was in the more delicate mechanisms by which social conventions affected individual men and women, shaping their outlooks and perverting their feelings. Even in Beauchamp’s Career the actual election is less important as a political event than as a symbol of Nevil Beauchamp’s attempt to break free of the conventions of his own upbringing and of the effect of that attempt on his relationships with others of his class. In The Egoist politics echo hardly at all; there is merely Sir Willoughby’s vague intention to enter Parliament in some unspecified future. But the novel would not exist at all if it were not for Meredith’s passionate opinions about the effect of Victorian ruling-class conventions upon human feelings. The very first sentence confesses the fact:

  Comedy is a game played to throw reflections upon social life, and it deals with human nature in the drawing-rooms 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.

  In other words, Meredith is seeking deliberately to rise above the political struggle, even to the extent that it figures in Beauchamp’s Career and to illuminate the pretensions of the most powerful class within the very citadel of security which its members have built out of their social conventions. The paradox of the great Egoist, Sir Willoughby Patterne, is that he is dependent for his self-assurance on the good opinion of others, and to gain and keep that he must always make the appearance of being successful in terms of the prevailing fashion. He manipulates conventions for his personal ends, but in turn becomes their prisoner within the gaol of his own social prestige.

  2

  The peculiar flavour of The Egoist comes largely from this fact that it is a study of social pretensions within a stable situation. Its characters are limited deliberately to a group of people close enough in terms of class to come together naturally in an extended house party; no major character is socially insecure, ascending or descending the ladder of class.

  Thus The Egoist in fact differs from the earlier novels not only in the elimination of the more flamboyantly heroic aspects of the struggle against social conventions, but also in abandoning, as fictional mechanisms, acute class differences and extreme snobbery; both exist in the world of The Egoist, but they seldom surface, to make a telling point, as in Sir Willoughby’s treatment of his distant relative, Lieutenant Patterne.

  By contrast, Meredith’s first novel, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, introduces class in a very direct way through Richard’s marriage to a girl of lower status, which leads to his later troubles, and also contains one of Meredith’s earliest disquisitions on the nature of snobbery.

  I now see [says Adrian Harley Richard’s cousin] that the national love of a lord is less subservience than a form of self-love; putting a gold-lace hat on one’s image, as it were, to bow to it. I see, too, the admirable wisdom of our system: – could there be a finer balance of power than in a community where men intellectually nil, have lawful vantage and a gold-lace hat on? How soothing it is to Intellect – that noble rebel, as the Pilgrim has it – to stand, and bow, and know itself superior!

  In fact, snobs are of two kinds, those who – as Adrian suggests – can look on others’ social eminence with satisfaction, and those who wish to share that eminence. Proust was inclined to be a snob of the first kind, Meredith – outside his persona as a writer – of the second. But he was too intelligent for his attitude not to be ambivalent. In later years he elaborately attempted to conceal the fact that he came of a line of tailors, yet in Evan Harrington (1861), rather obviously subtitled He Would Be a Gentleman, he wrote daringly near the bone by telling the story of a tailor’s son striving to ascend the social ladder. If Evan Harrington is a social climber, Richmond Roy, the father of the hero in Harry Richmond (1871), is the grossest kind of social impostor, and in others of Meredith’s works the struggle of lower middle class men, stained by their involvement in trade, to rise above their origins by effort or fraud, is important and is always the subject of comedy, a comedy which doubtless gained piquancy in the writing from the fact that Meredith was exposing his own most sensitive nerve-ends.

  The most curious of these studies in snobbery occurs in one of Meredith’s least known works, The House on the Beach, a novella of unusual brevity (40,000 words) and almost Dickensian quaintness. Published in 1877, it became a kind of burlesque transition from the earlier novels to The Egoist, which appeared two years later.

  The novel is set in a shabby little seaside resort, the minor Cinque port of Crikswich. Martin Tinman, the bailiff of Crikswich, is a retired tradesman who dreams that his position as a very minor royal official will eventually lead to his acceptance at Court. Gradually he builds up a life of fantasy centring upon hours of posturing secretly before a cheval-glass in the Court suit he has bought in preparation for the event. The summons in fact never comes, but it seems to Tinman that the achievement of his ambition may have been brought a stage nearer when Van Diemen Smith and his daughter Annette arrive in Crikswich.

  Smith is a friend of the distant past, returning with a fortune from exile; long ago he deserted from the British army and fled to Australia, where he made good. Tinman knows the secret of Smith’s desertion, which could still result in imprisonment, and, having been rejected as a possible spouse by all the wealthy and marriageable women of the district, he coldly proceeds to blackmail his old friend into allowing him to marry Annette. Smith resorts to parental prerogative in overruling Annette’s growing unwillingness, until he quarrels with Tinman and refuses to allow the marriage to proceed. Tinman writes the letter of betrayal, but before he can post it, a great storm springs up in the Channel and his house on the beach is threatened by the mounting waves. Tinman is in the grip of his dream, posturing before his mirror and oblivious of the winds and waters raging outside. In the nick of time he is saved by a rescue party dispatched by Van Diemen Smith, and carried away from the collapsing house which, with all his possessions, is engulfed by the waves.

  For a moment, after his rescue, Tinman stands on the sea wall in full view of his fellow citizens.

  In this exposed position, the wind, whose pranks are endless when it is once up, seized and blew Martin Tinman’s dressing-gown wide as two violently flapping wings on each side of him, and finally over his head. Van Diemen turned a pair of stupefied flat eyes on Herbert, who cast a shy look at the ladies. Tinman had sprung down. But not before the world, in one tempestuous glimpse, had caught sight of the Court suit.

  The person whom this exposure of the pretensions of her former suitor affects most strongly is Annette, fully conscious now of liberation from the marital tyranny which had threatened her.

  It… seemed to her the most wonderful running together of opposite things ever known on this earth. The young lady was ashamed of her laughter, but she was deeply indebted to it, for never was mind made so clear by that beneficent exercise.

  The ‘opposite things’ which Annette perceives are of course the natural impulses represented by the storm and the unnatural pretensions which, in destroying Tinman’s house and so ludicrously exposing his pretensions, it defeats.

  The House on the Beach was completed late in 1876 and published in the New Quarterly Magazine in January 1877. By that time Meredith was already preparing for his famous lecture at the London Institution on ‘The Idea of Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit’. The lecture was delivered on 1 February 1877 and published in the April issue of the New Quarterly Magazin
e, though it did not achieve book form for another twenty years, being finally published in 1897 as An Essay on Comedy. Before 1877 had ended, Meredith was already at work on The Egoist, which was finished in February 1879 and published in October that year. The fact that The House on the Beach was published, the lecture on Comedy delivered, and The Egoist commenced, all in the same year, signifies more than a temporal link between these works. It shows the extent to which, at a time when he was despairing of the wide popularity which came to him eight years later with Diana of the Crossways, Meredith for a brief period abandoned compromise with the tastes of his time, not only by writing the most dazzlingly intellectual of all his novels, but also by developing to their logical extremity the ideas on egoism, on sentimentality, and on the function of comedy, which had been part of his equipment almost from the beginning of his literary career. It may also be that Meredith, who completed The Egoist in his fifty-first year, had reached the height of his creative powers and wrote in consciousness of this fact; certainly nothing that he produced in his remaining twenty years of active writing showed a comparable sureness of touch.

  On the most obvious level the link between The House on the Beach and The Egoist can be seen in the peculiar twisting of the Meredithian sexual theme which dominates the plots of both novella and novel. The heroines, Annette and Clara, are both engaged to wealthy and egotistical men, who are the victims of their own overweening pretensions. In each case a father – for reasons of his own – seeks to force the heroine to keep her troth to a man she has grown to despise; in each case the egoist is exposed, so that his neighbours and friends see him at last for the empty being he is; by this exposure and by her own recognition of the freedom conferred by a comic view of her situation, the girl is liberated. Finally, there is in each novel a modest aspirant to the heroine’s hand (in The House on the Beach an actual journalist and in The Egoist an aspiring journalist) who waits until the comedy of egoism is played out and his worthiness can triumph.