Books: The Divided Self

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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.

∙Melvin Maddocks