Books: The Wounded Egoist

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George Meredith was hardly the man to translate his own exact misadventures into literal print, but he had enough of his own, at least, to stimulate imagination. One of them began when he married the daughter of Satirist Thomas Love Peacock and settled down to earn a living writing poetry.

When his first volume left him poorer than before, he turned reluctantly to fiction. For 30 years thereafter he slogged away, writing novels that nobody could understand and consoling himself with poems that only a few poets wanted to read. Typically, even George Meredith's everyday letters were written in a syntax so impenetrable that they needed a second or third reading.

When his sharp-tongued wife protested against their dolorous way of life, he retaliated savagely, and soon their love match degenerated into the biting, scratching partnership that Meredith described in the poem Modern Love:

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!

Mrs. Meredith ended the farce by eloping with a portrait painter. Meredith worked on alone for a while, a crusty grass widower. He became a reader for the publishing firm of Chapman & Hall, promptly turned down one of history's biggest bestsellers, Mrs. Henry Wood's East Lynne, His acceptance of such newcomers as Thomas Hardy and George Gissing never attained the fame of his rejection slips, which turned back Samuel Butler's Erewhon ("Will not do"), and Shaw's early novels, Cashel Byron's Profession and Immaturity ("No").

"A Suit of Nerves." At 36, George Meredith had the good fortune to marry a second wife who paid no attention whatever to his endless sarcastic diatribes; they loved each other dearly. "[She is] a mud fort," he murmured contentedly. "You fire broadsides into her, and nothing happens."

The turning point, bringing fame and money, came with The Egoist, in which the humiliations of the vain man were described as never before or since. "A complete set of nerves not heretofore examined," said Robert Louis Stevenson, "and yet running all over the human body—a suit of nerves." "A young friend of Mr. Meredith's," Stevenson added, "came to him in an agony. 'This is too bad of you,' he cried. 'Willoughby is me!' 'No, my dear fellow,' said the author, 'he is all of us.' "

Today, beyond his poems, it is The Egoist that stands out from all Meredith's works as the successful testament of his creed. It is also the key book in Biographer Stevenson's joining of the chain of intellectual comedy which runs approximately from Sterne's Tristram Shandy, through Peacock's novels, down via The Egoist to much of Oscar Wilde, Shaw and even the early Aldous Huxley. And yet, Meredith remains as freakishly separate from these other links in the literary chain as does Thorstein Veblen in the chain of social philosophers—and for much the same reasons. He tried to depict life accurately, but, in Wilde's words: "His style would be quite sufficient of itself to keep life at a respectful distance."