The Egoist Read online

  Both Martin Tinman and Sir Willoughby Patterne are emotional vampires; they seek to establish and sustain their pretensions by preying on the emotions of others, while all they have to offer are the mechanical responses of sham sentiment. In each case their victims or potential victims include the whole of their immediate circle, but the prime victim is a woman. This pattern of the victimization of woman appears in most of Meredith’s major novels; it was complemented, outside his fiction, by a genuine concern for the liberation of women from the social and legal discriminations which they suffered in the Victorian era. The New Women who accepted Diana of the Crossways as a fictional manifesto for the cause of feminism were not entirely wrong.

  Yet they were only partially right, since the battle of the sexes was never neatly resolved in any of Meredith’s books. It was still being fought out in his last novel, The Amazing Marriage, whose writing bridged a very long span, from its beginning in 1879 immediately after The Egoist was completed, to its final publication in 1895. Even in this last novel, some familiar types of The Egoist period are still present: the vain Fleetwood, who, like Sir Willoughby, has been jilted by one woman and regards the winning of the heroine mainly as a victory to re-establish his own superiority; the selfish and calculating guardian uncle (the parent-substitute) who forces the marriage of Carinthia and Fleetwood; Carinthia herself, originally as innocent in the ways of the world as Clara Middleton, but quick to develop in understanding when Fleetwood deserts her, and ready to reject him when he undergoes a sentimental revulsion and wishes to resume their relationship. Carinthia eventually shows her independence by going off with her brother to support the Carlist rebels in Spain; meanwhile Fleetwood dies in a monastery and Carinthia, returning from Spain, marries a Welsh mine-owner whose modest, unspectacular virtues provide the necessary contrast to the rather flamboyant villainy of Fleetwood.

  It is a sign of the growing importance in Meredith’s imaginative vision of the liberation of women as the end of the sexual struggle that the emphatic male hero vanishes from his novels in 1876, when Nevil Beauchamp throws his stormy life away rescuing the child whom Meredith describes as an ‘insignificant bit of mudbank life’. From that point the driving passion that characterized such relatively conventional heroes as Beauchamp and Richard Feverel is given only to the villains, who expend it in the service of their vanity; the quiet dependable men whom Clara, Diana and Carinthia eventually marry in recognition of their devotion are the precursors of the heroes and anti-heroes, men without passion and emphasis, who appear in so many twentieth century novels.

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  In Meredith’s novels, sexual passion is never in fact so important as sexual domination, which may often be a matter of the coldest calculation. No censorial decision was more absurd than that which led Mudie’s Library to kill the prospects of The Ordeal of Richard Feverel in consequence – according to Meredith – ‘of the urgent remonstrances of several respectable families who objected to it as dangerous and wicked and damnable…’. On the other hand, if The Ordeal of Richard Feverel or Diana of the Crossways or The Egoist could have been banned as a threat to the Victorian patriarchal family, there might have been logic in the act. Yet the outspoken feminism of Meredith’s later years was a by-product rather than a cause of the sexual conflicts represented in his novels. A didactic writer, in that he recognized and sought to use the power of comedy in affecting the outlooks and hence the actions of men, Meredith was not a reforming propagandist. Here there was a sharp distinction between him and a writer like Bernard Shaw, who criticized him from the Fabian point of view. Shaw would use a play quite deliberately to discuss an immediate social problem and to implant in the minds of his audience the idea of a concrete remedy. The problems that concerned Meredith were not so easily solved; placed in an unavoidable social setting, they were essentially problems of personal awareness. The therapy of comedy was not expected to reform societies; it was expected to cure individuals of certain malformations of feeling.

  None, Meredith recognized, was in greater need of therapy than himself. Sir Willoughby, he once told a young writer, ‘is all of us’, and there is no doubt that he exposed more of himself in his negative characters than in his positive ones, who were much more likely to take their characteristics from his friends, for example, F. A. Maxse, Leslie Stephen, Robert Louis Stevenson.

  It is when we touch this sensitive problem of the materials out of which Meredith fabricated his novels, and particularly The Egoist, that we come near the roots of his view on the war of the sexes. His relationship with the Peacock family, in particular, is central to any consideration of his characteristic moral preoccupations, of the content of his novels, and even in his ways of writing.

  The relationship began when Meredith, a lawyer’s clerk of twenty and yet untried as a writer, met Edward Gryffydh Peacock, the son of the author of Nightmare Abbey. The two young men were members of a literary circle which gathered around the bohemian lawyer Richard Charnock, to whom Meredith was articled, and they contributed to a handwritten Monthly Journal, in which appeared Meredith’s first works to receive even the limited publicity of a privately circulated magazine. Edward Peacock’s widowed sister, Mary Ellen Nicolls, was also a contributor to the Monthly Journal. Soon, in 1849, she became Meredith’s wife; he was twenty-one and she was seven years older.

  Meredith’s marriage brought him close to Thomas Love Peacock, particularly when the financial difficulties of the young couple made them accept his temporary hospitality. In human terms the experiment was almost disastrous. Peacock, a man who liked comfort, quiet and peace of mind, resented Meredith’s exuberance and was distressed by the openness with which financial and emotional difficulties were aired by his daughter and son-in-law. The two men disagreed politically; as a crowning infliction, Meredith smoked incessantly and Peacock detested tobacco.

  Yet, despite this temperamental incompatibility, Peacock’s literary outlook impressed itself strongly on Meredith at this formative stage in his development as a writer. As late as 1872, almost a quarter of a century after their first meeting, he wrote for the Graphic a series of intensely Peacockian dialogues entitled Up to Midnight, and his predilection for developing his novels through scenes of dramatic conversation, to which the narrative was subordinated, became the mechanism for an intellectualization of the novel along lines which Peacock had prefigured. Nevertheless, he advanced on Peacock, in that his characters were never merely the mouthpieces of idées fixes; they projected clearly individualized temperaments; they learnt from experience, and if they did not always grow in the process, at least they gained in self-awareness, which can hardly be said of any of Peacock’s totally static characters.

  It is in The Egoist that the Peacockian dialogue is most effectively naturalized into an instrument of Meredithian analysis. Meredith’s dialogue is not necessarily more realistic in its texture than Peacock’s. One cannot imagine any two living creatures conversing as Sir Willoughby and Laetitia Dale do at their most sententious. But it does chart the emotional lives of those strange beings of Meredith’s imagination in such a way that we are aware not of mere intellectual crotchets, but also of genuine feelings, of worthy and unworthy calculations, of cracks in the carapace of affectation through which we can feel a beating of human blood. In fact, it is one of Meredith’s great originalities that he can give a highly poised and intellectualized dialogue such transparency that in the end it becomes more revealing of the inner motives of the speakers than a deliberately realistic conversation would be. Virginia Woolf, the daughter of Meredith’s intimate friend Leslie Stephen, defined the effect of this achievement when she remarked that in The Egoist, ‘Meredith pays us a supreme compliment to which as novel-readers we are little accustomed.… He imagines us capable of disinterested curiosity in the behaviour of our kind.’

  But Peacock was not merely, for Meredith, a father-in-law turned into a literary parent. He also became the model for one of the principal characters of The Egoist. Dr Middleton, Cl
ara’s father, is a classical scholar who speaks and looks as Peacock did, who harbours his Tory prejudices, who shares his love of wine and food and ease, and who displays the same ruthlessness in his efforts to avoid any human complications that may disturb the calm he regards as essential for his scholarly work.

  The formal elaboration of The Egoist, paralleling the elaboration of conventions within which the appropriately named Patterne dances his pompous minuet of life, is characterized by the triangular grouping of characters: Willoughby–Clara–Laetitia; Willoughby–Clara–Vernon; Clara–Vernon–Horace; Willoughby–Mrs Jenkinson–Clara. The shifting relations within and between such triangles are the choreography of the work as a whole. Most interesting of all the triangles is that of Willoughby–Clara–Dr Middleton, the triad which provides the clues to the genesis of The Egoist.

  In this key triad Dr Middleton alone is immediately recognizable as a character rather faithfully derived from a model in real life. Willoughby and Clara have gone through many rebirths before they are incarnated in The Egoist, but their beginnings are to be found in Meredith’s own past, in the early triangle of Peacock–Mary Ellen–Meredith. Meredith’s marriage with Mary Ellen foundered in the conflict of two proud intellects; in 1857, eight years after they had married, she left him for Henry Wallis, the pre-Raphaelite fellow-traveller whose livid painting of The Death of Chatter-ton is to be seen in the Tate Gallery. When Mary Ellen wished to return to him, Meredith proudly refused a reconciliation, and in 1861 she died, unhappy and alone.

  Neither Mary Ellen’s departure nor her death was for Meredith the end of the relationship. It dominated the rest of his life, haunting him with the images of her misery and his inflexibility, but as the years went on these twin spectres underwent curious transformations. The most literal rendering of the lost marriage was Meredith’s long poem, Modern Love. The actual incidents described in that poem are already somewhat changed from those in Meredith’s marriage, but we cannot doubt that the conclusion he expresses in analysing the failure of the imagined love relationship sprang from his own experience:

  Thus piteously Love closed what he begat:

  The union of this ever-diverse pair;

  These two were rapid falcons in a snare,

  Condemned to do the flitting of the bat.

  Lovers beneath the singing sky of May,

  They wandered once, clear as the dew on flowers,

  But they fed not on the advancing hours:

  Their hearts held cravings for the buried day.

  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!

  Meredith suggests that he and Mary Ellen, proud and independent spirits, were diminished in the net of marriage until, using the mind to wound and dominate each other, they betrayed the heart. There is already much of The Egoist here. Sir Willoughby, seeking a certainty through conventions and sentiments, but incapable of real love, gets in the end the dusty answer of losing Clara and marrying the second-best lady, a fading Laetitia who no longer even adores him.

  Even before Modern Love was written and before Mary Ellen was dead, Meredith had begun to develop another aspect of the great marital failure which in various forms dominated the rest of his life as a writer. The Ordeal of Richard Feverel appeared in 1859, the year after Mary Ellen’s elopement with Henry Wallis, and the story of Sir Austin Feverel, Richard’s father, parallels extraordinarily that of Meredith himself.

  The outline of the Baronet’s story was by no means new. He had a wife, and he had a friend. His marriage was for love; his wife was a beauty, his friend was a poet. Sir Austin Feverel did nothing by halves. His wife had his whole heart, and his friend all his confidence.

  The poet lives in the household; he and the wife are thrown often together. ‘In time he touched his guitar in her chamber, and they played Rizzio and Mary together.’ Sir Austin learns of their faithlessness.

  … He forgave the man; he put him aside as too poor for his wrath. The woman he could not forgive. She had sinned every way. Simple ingratitude to a benefactor was a pardonable transgression, for he was not one to recount, and crush the culprit under the heap of his good deeds. But her he had raised to be his equal, and he judged her as his equal. She had blackened the world’s fair aspect for him.

  The monstrosity of Sir Austin’s self-love is evident. In terms of the novel his unfortunate marriage is mainly important as the motivation for the elaborate upbringing, designed to make him proof against the ravages of love, which is inflicted on his son Richard and which breeds its inevitable rebellion. The rejected wife appears in the latter part of the novel as a dim, veiled figure, but certainly a victim figure.

  Apart from his temperamental egoism, Sir Austin bears no obvious resemblance to Meredith; it is mainly their situations that are similar. But it is significant of a division in Meredith between the private man and the writer (a division which recurs through his life), that he continued to exclude Mary Ellen from his life at the same time as he implied a condemnation of Sir Austin for similarly excluding the erring Lady Feverel.

  The Ordeal of Richard Feverel in fact makes it clear that, if Meredith’s pride would not allow him to admit publicly any blame for the failure of his marriage, his conscience nagged, and to that continually nagging conscience we owe the series of relationships between the sexes in successive novels in which the man more clearly becomes the unfeeling tyrant and the woman the potential victim. The main shift that takes place in the relationship – apart from the rather minor one of making Clara a yet unmarried girl, and therefore a jilt rather than an adulteress – is that the woman’s defection ceases to be an act of betrayal or weakness, and becomes an act of liberation, the liberation of the feelings from the rule of convention and sterile sentiment.

  Thus Meredith’s view of the relationship of the sexes, as symbolic of the wider relationship between freedom and the tyranny of custom, led him far from the real-life origin of his preoccupations. Dr Middleton, an essentially minor character, could safely be modelled on Peacock. But Clara Middleton had grown as far from Mary Ellen Nicoll as Meredith’s views on the fate of women had changed since the agony he exorcized in Modern Love.

  The Egoist, in its construction, has the kind of economy which is more usual in drama than in fiction. It is true that like almost every book that Meredith wrote, its entrance is protected by a rather fearsome chevaux-de-frise in the form of a preface on comedy, heavy with elaborate parody, and an introductory chapter on Sir Willoughby’s youth and his celebrated leg, which appears excessively precious until one realizes how surely it sets the artificial tone of the world in which Willoughby poses for the edification of his admirers, the formidable Mrs Mountstuart Jenkinson (surely a lineal ancestress of Wilde’s dowagers) and the languid and brainy Laetitia, that personification of the feminine mind made sterile by enslavement to convention. But once the reader has undergone the preliminary tests which Meredith expects of him, the course is clear and the action follows in a brisk series of dramatic episodes, each fulfilling a triple purpose of

  enlightening us a shade more on Sir Willoughby’s nature, of developing the resistance of the other characters to his insolent expectations, and of building the tension that rises steadily in this close circle of emotionally involved people like the heightening atmosphere before a thunderstorm. Apart from any of its other virtues, it is a fine work of suspense, paced on by witty conversation, economical in introspection and narrative, and, from the moment when Clara begins to detect the real and detestable Sir Willoughby, making the reader a fascinated observer of the shifts by which her feminine cunning surmounts the obstacles successively falling in her path. There are aspects of The Egoist which are madly improbable. Could Dr Middleton really betray his beloved daughter for a diet of old port? Was Willoughby’s only way of living down his rejection by Clara really to marry a Laetitia
who had learnt to despise him? Such an ending is indeed not consonant with realism but it is with poetic justice,

  and that is what Meredith seeks. For The Egoist is after all a comedy, and, just as Meredith observes the unity of place and – within reasonable limits – the unity of time, so he ensures that the good – Clara and Vernon – shall get their reward, and the villain shall live to digest his suitably dusty answer.

  All this gains in meaning when we remember that The Egoist is the extreme expression of Meredith’s recurrent drama of the defeat of Egoism by the power of Comedy. At the mid nineteenth century, when Meredith began to write, Egoism was much in the air. In 1843 Max Stirner had published his treatise advocating Egoism as a revolutionary force, Der Einzige und sein Eigentum, and it is possible that Meredith, with his interest in the German intellectual life of the time, was aware of it. ‘Enlightened self-interest’, even ‘enlightened Egoism’, was spoken of freely in England to justify the irresponsible relationship between industrialists and their employees, and it had been denounced by Carlyle, whom Meredith then respected. But these external circumstances are hardly sufficient to account for the way in which, from his first published work of prose, The Shaving of Shagpat (1856), he consistently identified Egoism as the great enemy of truth, feeling and progress, and associated it with artficiality and with sentiment, which is the artificiality of feeling. This preoccupation sprang from the agonies of self-analysis by which Meredith fed his art.

  The great sin of the Egoist is that he values nothing for its own sake. Willoughby does not sec in Clara a real girl whom he can love and cherish; he sees an ornament which will enhance his regard in the eyes of the world. Vernon Whitford is retained at Patterne Hall not from any sense of friendship on Willoughby’s part, but because a resident writer adds lustre to his employer’s public image. Thus everything is prized or rejected for a false reason and a whole structure of artificial relationships is built up and sealed by sentiment. Love can thus be simulated at will and Sir Willoughby woos Clara and Laetitia within a few hours of each other, with almost identical and equally meaningless phrases of conventional passion.