The Divided Self

GEORGE MEREDITH AND ENGLISH COMEDY by V.S. Pritchett. 123 pages. Random House. $5.

There are novelists that almost nobody reads and almost everybody feels guilty about. Then there are novelists that nobody reads--and what's more, nobody feels he has to. On this non-must list, the Victorian George Meredith ranks high--unfairly high, argues V.S. Pritchett, an expert craftsman of satirical short stories and, at 69, still Britain's best practicing critic.

Even Pritchett may not be able to start a Meredith revival. He has, nonetheless, brilliantly made Meredith a man who had something to Say to Our Times --although he did not quite know how to say it. In Pritchett's critique, Meredith emerges as a writer trapped in a literary no man's land: he kept raising modern questions but ended up with Victorian answers.

Gentleman Georgy. Meredith was born in 1828 into an identity crisis. The son of a bankrupt tailor who married the family cook, he was brought up so properly by more respectable relatives that he came to be known as "Gentleman Georgy." There were further confusions.

A self-conscious Celt--the family liked to claim its line from a Welsh prince--Meredith was heir to two years of a German education. He complicated his life-style even more by affecting a Regency appearance and manner. A halfhearted stab at law, a simultaneous enthusiasm for poetry and boxing--nothing in Meredith's early life seemed to go together. By the time he was ready to write his novels, Pritchett implies, he had become a one-man, multi-role social comedy in himself. The ordeal of self-discovery--sorting it all out--became the theme of his books. Meredith was always trying on egos for size in front of his readers. Other novelists became their characters. Meredith's characters almost invariably became him.

Meredith worked two modern themes: the war between the generations and the war between the sexes. His best-known novel, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859), deals with an absolutist father who brings up his son according to a rigid system that, among other things, makes no allowance for sex. The reaction is as disastrous as it is predictable.

Meredith was one of the first novelists to face up to "modern love"--he even wrote a sonnet sequence with that title. He was also something of an early feminist; indeed, it was part of his literary credo that comedy could not exist without equality of the sexes. Among Victorian writers, he was conspicuous for creating women characters who could think --"the lady with brains," as he described his heroine in The Egoist. Meredith married one himself--the daughter of another comic novelist, Thomas Love Peacock. She collaborated with him on a study of the art of cookery, bore him a son, then deserted him for a painter.

Aggressive Prudery. Meredith was divided, above all, on the subject of sex. Like every Victorian author, he suffered, in Pritchett's words, "from the aggressive prudery of his readers." Much as he might have liked to strip down to bare revelations, Meredith, a tailor's son to the end, settled for a costume change, etherealizing passion and abstracting love into a distant, chaste project. Still, it can be argued that no novelist of the 19th century had more to tell about the destructive and self-destructive impulses that coexist with love.

It took Meredith the better part of his life to catch on. Nevertheless, by the time of his death--May 18, 1909--he had come to a glorious Victorian sunset as the Sage of Box Hill. Almost stone-deaf, looking, in Virginia Woolf's phrase, like a ruined bust of Euripides, Meredith held court. When no one else was around, he talked to his dogs. In art, as in life, he was a nonstop talker, and it is the rhetorical, aphoristic Meredithian grand manner that finally puts off today's readers. Reading Meredith in quantity, Pritchett concedes, is like "a continuous diet of lobster and champagne," leading him to speculate whether writers with poor stomachs compensate with rich prose. (Meredith, a would-be gourmet, was afflicted by dyspepsia and had to survive at one time on vegetable juice.)

In Meredith's case, the style was truly the reflection of the man. For all his sermons against the sin of pride, he was an egoist writing about egoism. Thus the modern reader of his books is nearly suffocated by the presence of Mine Host, nudging, lecturing, possessed, as the novelist himself confessed, by the "cursed desire to show the reason." Nonetheless, it was Meredith's "splendid vanity," concludes Pritchett, that gave him the strength to put his contradictions on the line and struggle to resolve them. That, for Meredith, was what it meant to write a novel. The curse of self-consciousness may have made him hopelessly Victorian in manner. But that self-consciousness, deepened at best into self-awareness, also made Meredith our secret contemporary.

sbMelvin Maddocks

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