The Ordeal of Richard Feverel

l, urbane. They are persons of taste and discernment. They are generally the middle-aged rather than the young. They are those who, aloof and contemplative, relish the comedy of life, rather than those who throw th

hard Feverel, published in 1859. This was his first modern novel, and probably his best. It showed him, not only expert in the use of language and original in literary technic, but distinguished, also, as an observer of the world and an analyst of character. The psychological novel of George Eliot, just emerging, found here a r

dra Belloni. The second was its sequel Vittoria (1867). The other works of the period comprise the semi-farcical Evan Harrington (1861); the serious Rhoda Fleming (1865); the clever Harry Richmond (1870–71); and Meredith's favorite -Beauchamp's Career (1874–75). It is The Egoist, however, that most completely illustrates its author's conception of the novel of types.

ocialist leader Lassalle, and Diana of the Crossways (1885) certain traits of Sheridan's granddaughter, Mrs. Norton. One of Our Conquerors (1891), Lord Ormont and his

d Modern Love (1867). His poetry, like his prose, is rich in content but difficult at times by reason of its crabbed and meticulous expression - a trait due to no obscurity of thought or lack of feeling, but rather to the desire to compress muc

y. He became literary adviser to the publishers Chapman and Hall; he edited for a short period The Fortnightly Review, and served abroad as correspondent for The Morning Post. But most of his maturity was passed in rural retirement in Surrey. He was twice married, at first unhappily to a daughter of the novel

is common sense chastising with the laughter of reason aberrations from the sensible. Comedy measures individual shortcomings by the social norm. It results from "the broad Alpine survey of the spirit born of our united social intelligence." It is "a game played to throw reflections upon social life, and it deals with human nature in the drawing-room of civilized men and women, where we have

n these words of his famous Essay: "If you believe that our civilization is founded in common-sense, you will, when contemplating men, discern a Spirit overhead. . . . It has the sage's brows, and the sunny malice of a faun lurks at the corners of the half-closed lips. . . . Its common aspect is one of unsolicitous observation. . . . Men's future upon earth does not

tive of the infinitesimal." He is rather an idealist, who holds it to be the business of art to render life in quintessence. The artist must both simplify and elaborate. First, he must simplify experience into typical deeds and persons, eliminating from his scheme the merely accidental and particular. Second, he must elaborate his simplification, presenting it through representative concrete instances that it may lose the aspect of an abstract for

by his comic outlook upon life. Unswayed by the petty prejudices of his people, he surveys them with Olympian serenity, aware of a hundred impulses and errors in their conduct that will lead to conclusions undreamt of

smart chatter, but to the smarter discourse of the master of the puppets, who, while making them dance, lectures for the edification of the elect. Thus Meredith, having shown his hero touched by jealousy, lapses into a little essay on the theme. "Remember the poets upon Jealousy," he writes. "It is to be haunted in the heaven of two by a Third; preceded or succeeded, therefore surrounded, embraced, hugged by this infernal Third; it is love's bed of burning marl; to see and taste the withering Third in the bosom of sweetnes

, the irruption of new characters, their disappearance after they have done their turn, expectation balked by shifting situations, the frequent postponement of the dénoueme

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the registration of the infinitesimal vibrations of first causes, the tracking in human life of the shadowiest trail of primal instinct, the hairbreadth measurement of subtle psychological tangents: and the embodiment of these results in artistic form." Meredith, in Richard Feverel, declares that for the novel "An audience will come to whom it will be given to see the elementary machinery at work. . . . To them nothing will be tr

difficult between the two forceful streams of the unreal and the over-real which delight mankind - honour to the conjurors! My people conquer nothing, win none! they are actual yet uncommon. It is the clockwork of the

n to bound "and taking a lift of arms, fly aloft, clapping heels." If a woman runs, Meredith writes: "She was fleet; she ran as though a hundred little feet were bearing her onward smooth as water over the lawn and the sweeps of grass of the park, so swiftly did the hidden pair multiply one another to speed her. . . . Suddenly her flight wound to an end in a dozen twittering steps, and

ation; it is beflounced with epigram and allegory. It is truth rendered more precious, as the medieval critics advised, by being wrapped in sayings not to be lightly understood by the vulgar. So, when a lover admires the chasteness o

ses and pecks at it like a domestic fowl." Of one who has ceased to love we hear that "the passion in her was like a place of waves evaporated to a crust of salt." Of a lady's letter we learn that it "flourished with light strokes all over, like a field of the bearded barley." Of a heroine we are told that: "She was not of the creatures who are excited by an atmosphere of excitement; she took it as the nymph of the stream her native wave, and swam on the flood with expansive languor, happy to have the master passions about

and accents falling on them haphazard, like slant rays from driving clouds; all the pages in a breeze, the whole book producing a kind of electrical agitation in the mind and the joints." It is Meredith's gift for phrase that enables him to paint those wonderful backgrounds for action which are the despair of common writers. Sometimes the scenes are sketched in with but a touch or two of suggestion. So, when Richard Feverel and Lucy spend an evening afloat,

an uplifting coolness pervaded the heights. . . . The plumes of cloud now slowly entered into the lofty arch of dawn and melted from brown to purple black. . . . The armies of the young sunrise in mountain-lands neighbouring the plains, vast shadows, were marching o

is the consolation of the great to watch them spin." Such, too, is the reflection that: "Most of the people one has at table are drums. A rub-a-dub-dub on them is the only way to get a sound. When they can be persuaded to do it upon one another, they call it conversation." More frequently, the epigram is a neat generalization left abstract, as for example: "Who rises from prayer a better man, his prayer is answered"; "Cynics are only happy in making the world as barr

eerfully admits in a passage of Emilia in England. "The point to be considered," he there remarks, "is whether fiction demands a perfectly smooth surface. Undoubtedly a scientific work does, and a

ith's predilection for repeating a single happy phrase such as the epithet "rogue in porcelain" applied to a heroine. Since the phrase tickles his fancy, he plays with it, drops it, picks it up, mumbles it over and over as a dog might a bone, and through chapter after chapter is ready at any pretext to run round and round with it barking. Despite his assiduous striving for novelty, therefore, Meredith is often tedious, an effect induced,

. Some have lamented this fact; more have seen in it an argument for his universality and permanence. Though he fight no battles for specific causes, his influence is arrayed in general against certain tendencies that he disapproves and would laugh to defeat. Egoism, senti

d probably to take a nimble jump away from the rock after that venerable lawgiver had knocked the water out of it." So Meredith sacrifices passion to analysis. His heroes and heroines rarely love so simply and so ardently as do Richard and Lucy; but the affection of even this delectable pair is modified in presentation by the playful cynicism of the narrator of their

ipoise. And the most serviceable instrument of reason for detecting the follies of convention or of feeling is the comic spirit. Without this spirit we are not truly intellectual, for, as Meredith has said: "Not to have a sympathy with the playful mind is not to have a mind." Let us possess mind, he seems to urge, and through mind cultivate the soul. In The Tragic Comedians he remarks: "It is the soul which does things in life - the rest is vapor. . . . Action means life to the soul as to the body. . . . Compromise is virtual death; it is the pact between cowardice and comfort,

m absolutely from without. The failure of this experiment makes the story. The first eleven chapters are in a sense introductory. They present to the reader the members of the Feverel family and describe with gusto a poaching escapade of Richard's youth. From this first ordeal he emerges triumphant by obeying the impulse of his heart to make frank confession, despite his fa

a villain, the husband of Richard's enchantress. Issuing unscathed from her ordeal, Lucy is tardily accepted by the complacent Sir Austin and received, with her child, at his house. Since Richard has at length achieved self-mastery and has resolved to return and confess to his wife, and plead for her grace, a general reconciliation seems imminent. But the novelist will not allow his tale to end happily lest its moral be frustrate. Accordingly, although Richard returns for an hour to be

system on a human being," even though this is precisely what he has done. And when Richard is to return to his wife, and Sir Austin has at last grown kind to her, we hear that: "He could now admit that instinct had so far beaten science; for, as Richard was coming, as all were to be happy, his wisdom embraced them all paternally as the author of their happiness." Of Sir Austin, Meredith remarks: "He had experimented on human

in that of his hero. Richard's yielding to Mrs. Mount, described with remarkable power, is more natural, but his mooning about Germany while Lucy is left to struggle alone is as exasperating as her failure to apprise him of the fact that she is to bear him a child. Splendid as is the last meeting of Richard and Lucy, declared by Stevens

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his uncles - the guardsman Algernon, who has lost a leg at cricket, and crochety Hippias, "the dyspepsy." Of Richard's cousins one is sympathetic, and the other is Satanic. The first, Austin Wentworth, lives in disgrace for having repaired a youthful indiscretion by marrying a housemaid. As for the second, Adrian Harley, "the Wise Youth," he is Richard's tutor, who

e dashing temptress, a little worn and half-hearted until piqued by Richard's indifference into playing her game more earnestly, and then exerting all the fascinations of the wicked. Most original of the three is Lucy's vulgar befriender, Mrs. Berry, a lovable "old-black-satin bunch," as Meredith tags her, wise but irrelevant,

nscious of the author smiling apart upon callow Richard and Ripton caught in the snares of the demi-monde. It is Thackeray over again, letting us see the self-deception of Pendennis in his admiration of the Fotheringay. Sometimes, in this novel, Meredith apostrophizes his people, emitting lyrical exclamations of admirat

rsed the world is youth's foolishness"; "It is difficult for those who think very earnestly for their children to know when their children are thinking on their own account"; "If immeasurable love were perfect wisdom, one human being might almost impersonate Providence to another"; "The ways of women, which are involution, and their practices, which are opposition, are generally best hit upon by guesswork and a bold word"; "The God of this world is in the machine, not out of it"; "Sentimentalism is a happy pastime and an important science to the timid, the idle, and the heartless; but a damning one to them who have anything to forfeit";

stretched." There are fine passages, too, of description, like those concerned with the boyish adventures of Richard and Ripton, the Ferdinand and Miranda meeting of hero and heroine, the temptation episode, and the storm in the German forest by night. "Up started the whole forest in violet fire. He saw the country at the foot of the hills to the bounding Rhine gleam, quiver, extinguished. . . . Lower down the abysses of air rolled the wrathful crash; then white thrusts of light were darted from the sk

h literature." Certainly, Meredith has here allowed to his characters a charm of personality that later he tends to sacrifice in stressing their purely typical traits. He shows here a fire of sincerity rarely afterwards burning so brightly. He is less the mere