Books: The Wounded Egoist

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THE ORDEAL OF GEORGE MEREDITH (368 pp.)—Lionel Stevenson—Scribner ($6).

The year 1859 flares up in English literature like a volcanic eruption. In that one year were published (wholly or in part) Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities, Thackeray's The Virginians, George Eliot's Adam Bede, Tennyson's Idylls of the King, Darwin's The Origin of Species, Fitzgerald's translation of The Rubciydt of Omar Khayyam. Almost ignored in the rush was a novel named The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, by one George Meredith. Today, nearly a century after, both Meredith and his Ordeal are still little more than names in an English syllabus, read only by confirmed Meredithians and by literary historians who devote their lives to tracing and piecing patiently together the links from which the chain of literary tradition and continuity is made.

Lionel Stevenson, biographer of Thackeray and professor of English at the University of Southern California, is just such a historian and a Meredithian to boot. His Ordeal of George Meredith is the first grand-scale resurrection of Victorian literature's most neglected writer. Other writers (including Henry James and Oscar Wilde) have briefly and brilliantly discussed Meredith's peculiar genius, but none has placed him in the great chain so accurately as Stevenson or studied his life and letters with such devoted care.

Meredith was a tailor's son, born in 1828. No biographer can tell much about his early years, for he covered those years with "an impenetrable cloak of silence."

Bitterly ashamed of his parentage, he made a lifelong business of tailoring for himself an identity that better fitted his grand manner and handsome appearance. By the end of his life, he had done such a good job of costumery that he seemed to believe himself a nobly descended Welshman, and the phrase "these English!" uttered with a lordly snort, was his favorite expression of contempt.

Cast a Cold Eye. English literature owes a debt to wounded snobbery. Dickens never forgot the humiliation of working in a blacking warehouse; Trollope, of going to school in tattered trousers; Shaw, the comedown of being shifted from a "rich" to a "poor" school. Much of the greatness of these men came from their ability to cast a cold eye of ridicule on their own snobbery. But none of them went so far as the wounded Meredith in hailing satire of self as the first essential of "true human progress."

Such a man, Meredith himself believed, can only be one whose emotions are under the complete control of the intellect. Meredith, more akin to Shaw than to Dickens and Trollope, became an intellectual comedian whose life was one long perpetration of jokes against his haughty self. His Ordeal of Richard Feverel sardonically recounted the misadventures of a proper Victorian young gentleman brought up in almost complete ignorance of sex. The hero of The Egoist was a young baronet of such absurd self-love that he delayed his marriage (and lost the girl) worrying that she might remarry if he died first.