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The Egoist is George Meredith’s most self-consistent and characteristic novel. It is the work in which he makes the least concession to the ways of Victorian novelists and to the predilections of Victorian readers; in which he reveals most openly the tensions between his own nature and his philosophy of living; in which he exposes with the most accurate and merciless of laughter the distortions of feeling which a society of self-seekers imposes on its devotees.

The Egoist was not the most popular of Meredith’s novels among his contemporaries; that distinction was reserved for Diana of the Crossways, a much weaker book, in which he compromised notably with the sentimentality he himself always denounced. It was not even Meredith’s own favourite, perhaps because in writing it he had exposed too much of himself; he gave his preference to that heroic failure, Beauchamp’s Career, a strange combination of probable politics and unlikely passion.

Yet The Egoist is the book for which Meredith is most regarded at that crucial period in a writer’s fame, the second half-century after his death; today it is probably more read and certainly more discussed than any of his other novels. Like Congreve’s The Way of the World, which Meredith regarded highly, and Wilde’s Importance of Being Earnest, which as far as I know he never even mentioned, it is among those jeux d’esprit in which art and intellect dance together in forms that are literature’s nearest effective approach to abstraction. In Meredith’s other works his mannerisms and artifices perplex and annoy; in The Egoist, for once, they are entirely appropriate, entirely absorbed into a carefully integrated structure of speech and thought.

The thought is important, for Meredith’s intent in writing The Egoist was far from that of producing a work of art for art’s sake. Wilde’s occasional propagandizing for a hedonistic libertarianism may perhaps be dismissed as a lapse of aestheticist consistency; Meredith never ceased to be – in his own way – a self-consciously didactic writer, and even The Egoist reflects his didacticism. He had definite and detailed views on the need to live naturally. In his novels the physical exertions in which he rather loudly indulged in daily life were transferred to the positive characters, and in such a context became the symbols of a healthy attitude to existence. He had, moreover, strong opinions on that malignant sickness of Victorian England, the class system, and the agonies of snobbery and social pride which he suffered within himself were transformed into fiction so that they might be observed and analysed with exemplary effect.

More tenuously, in the shadow of the Meredith concerned with moral-social problems, there lived a political Meredith. Though James Thomson called him ‘the Browning of our novelists’, and Wilde slyly amended the definition into his famous quip, ‘Meredith is a prose Browning, and so is Browning’, the only attitude that Meredith and Browning tangibly shared was a common political concern for the Italian Risorgimento, which aroused Meredith’s enthusiasm, sent him to the front as a correspondent during the abortive war between Italy and Austria in the summer of 1866, and resulted in two romantic novels, Sandra Belloni and Vittorio. At home Meredith professed himself a Radical, but a sure instinct told him that writers are best outside political activity and his one burst of electoral campaigning, when he canvassed for his friend F. A. Maxse at Southampton in 1867, was most important for the literary use he made of it in Beauchamp’s Career.

At least one Marxist critic has devoted a lengthy book to arguing Meredith’s right to be considered a class-conscious revolutionary novelist (Jack Lindsay, George Meredith: His Life and Work, London, 1956). Yet, though the political scene figures in most of Meredith’s novels, in part for the good reason that in that age of Reform by easy stages politics were the active concern of the kind of people he portrays, his principles were diluted in practice by the fact that he was a hard-working man of letters who did not always show very delicate scruples as to how his pen was used; for years, as an anonymous editorialist for the Tory Ipswich Journal, he wrote for money against his avowed political allies.

His concern with class was genuine and passionate – as it has been with so many English novelists of the past two centuries – but it was rarely expressed in direct political terms, mainly because he was less interested in the machinery of politics than he was in the more delicate mechanisms by which social conventions affected individual men and women, shaping their outlooks and perverting their feelings. Even in Beauchamp’s Career the actual election is less important as a political event than as a symbol of Nevil Beauchamp’s attempt to break free of the conventions of his own upbringing and of the effect of that attempt on his relationships with others of his class. In The Egoist politics echo hardly at all; there is merely Sir Willoughby’s vague intention to enter Parliament in some unspecified future. But the novel would not exist at all if it were not for Meredith’s passionate opinions about the effect of Victorian ruling-class conventions upon human feelings. The very first sentence confesses the fact:

In other words, Meredith is seeking deliberately to rise above the political struggle, even to the extent that it figures in Beauchamp’s Career and to illuminate the pretensions of the most powerful class within the very citadel of security which its members have built out of their social conventions. The paradox of the great Egoist, Sir Willoughby Patterne, is that he is dependent for his self-assurance on the good opinion of others, and to gain and keep that he must always make the appearance of being successful in terms of the prevailing fashion. He manipulates conventions for his personal ends, but in turn becomes their prisoner within the gaol of his own social prestige.

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The peculiar flavour of The Egoist comes largely from this fact that it is a study of social pretensions within a stable situation. Its characters are limited deliberately to a group of people close enough in terms of class to come together naturally in an extended house party; no major character is socially insecure, ascending or descending the ladder of class.

Thus The Egoist in fact differs from the earlier novels not only in the elimination of the more flamboyantly heroic aspects of the struggle against social conventions, but also in abandoning, as fictional mechanisms, acute class differences and extreme snobbery; both exist in the world of The Egoist, but they seldom surface, to make a telling point, as in Sir Willoughby’s treatment of his distant relative, Lieutenant Patterne.

By contrast, Meredith’s first novel, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, introduces class in a very direct way through Richard’s marriage to a girl of lower status, which leads to his later troubles, and also contains one of Meredith’s earliest disquisitions on the nature of snobbery.

In fact, snobs are of two kinds, those who – as Adrian suggests – can look on others’ social eminence with satisfaction, and those who wish to share that eminence. Proust was inclined to be a snob of the first kind, Meredith – outside his persona as a writer – of the second. But he was too intelligent for his attitude not to be ambivalent. In later years he elaborately attempted to conceal the fact that he came of a line of tailors, yet in Evan Harrington (1861), rather obviously subtitled He Would Be a Gentleman, he wrote daringly near the bone by telling the story of a tailor’s son striving to ascend the social ladder. If Evan Harrington is a social climber, Richmond Roy, the father of the hero in Harry Richmond (1871), is the grossest kind of social impostor, and in others of Meredith’s works the struggle of lower middle class men, stained by their involvement in trade, to rise above their origins by effort or fraud, is important and is always the subject of comedy, a comedy which doubtless gained piquancy in the writing from the fact that Meredith was exposing his own most sensitive nerve-ends.

The most curious of these studies in snobbery occurs in one of Meredith’s least known works, The House on the Beach, a novella of unusual brevity (40,000 words) and almost Dickensian quaintness. Published in 1877, it became a kind of burlesque transition from the earlier novels to The Egoist, which appeared two years later.

The novel is set in a shabby little seaside resort, the minor Cinque port of Crikswich. Martin Tinman, the bailiff of Crikswich, is a retired tradesman who dreams that his position as a very minor royal official will eventually lead to his acceptance at Court. Gradually he builds up a life of fantasy centring upon hours of posturing secretly before a cheval-glass in the Court suit he has bought in preparation for the event. The summons in fact never comes, but it seems to Tinman that the achievement of his ambition may have been brought a stage nearer when Van Diemen Smith and his daughter Annette arrive in Crikswich.

Smith is a friend of the distant past, returning with a fortune from exile; long ago he deserted from the British army and fled to Australia, where he made good. Tinman knows the secret of Smith’s desertion, which could still result in imprisonment, and, having been rejected as a possible spouse by all the wealthy and marriageable women of the district, he coldly proceeds to blackmail his old friend into allowing him to marry Annette. Smith resorts to parental prerogative in overruling Annette’s growing unwillingness, until he quarrels with Tinman and refuses to allow the marriage to proceed. Tinman writes the letter of betrayal, but before he can post it, a great storm springs up in the Channel and his house on the beach is threatened by the mounting waves. Tinman is in the grip of his dream, posturing before his mirror and oblivious of the winds and waters raging outside. In the nick of time he is saved by a rescue party dispatched by Van Diemen Smith, and carried away from the collapsing house which, with all his possessions, is engulfed by the waves.

For a moment, after his rescue, Tinman stands on the sea wall in full view of his fellow citizens.

The person whom this exposure of the pretensions of her former suitor affects most strongly is Annette, fully conscious now of liberation from the marital tyranny which had threatened her.

The ‘opposite things’ which Annette perceives are of course the natural impulses represented by the storm and the unnatural pretensions which, in destroying Tinman’s house and so ludicrously exposing his pretensions, it defeats.

The House on the Beach was completed late in 1876 and published in the New Quarterly Magazine in January 1877. By that time Meredith was already preparing for his famous lecture at the London Institution on ‘The Idea of Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit’. The lecture was delivered on 1 February 1877 and published in the April issue of the New Quarterly Magazine, though it did not achieve book form for another twenty years, being finally published in 1897 as An Essay on Comedy. Before 1877 had ended, Meredith was already at work on The Egoist, which was finished in February 1879 and published in October that year. The fact that The House on the Beach was published, the lecture on Comedy delivered, and The Egoist commenced, all in the same year, signifies more than a temporal link between these works. It shows the extent to which, at a time when he was despairing of the wide popularity which came to him eight years later with Diana of the Crossways, Meredith for a brief period abandoned compromise with the tastes of his time, not only by writing the most dazzlingly intellectual of all his novels, but also by developing to their logical extremity the ideas on egoism, on sentimentality, and on the function of comedy, which had been part of his equipment almost from the beginning of his literary career. It may also be that Meredith, who completed The Egoist in his fifty-first year, had reached the height of his creative powers and wrote in consciousness of this fact; certainly nothing that he produced in his remaining twenty years of active writing showed a comparable sureness of touch.

On the most obvious level the link between The House on the Beach and The Egoist can be seen in the peculiar twisting of the Meredithian sexual theme which dominates the plots of both novella and novel. The heroines, Annette and Clara, are both engaged to wealthy and egotistical men, who are the victims of their own overweening pretensions. In each case a father – for reasons of his own – seeks to force the heroine to keep her troth to a man she has grown to despise; in each case the egoist is exposed, so that his neighbours and friends see him at last for the empty being he is; by this exposure and by her own recognition of the freedom conferred by a comic view of her situation, the girl is liberated. Finally, there is in each novel a modest aspirant to the heroine’s hand (in The House on the Beach an actual journalist and in The Egoist an aspiring journalist) who waits until the comedy of egoism is played out and his worthiness can triumph.

Both Martin Tinman and Sir Willoughby Patterne are emotional vampires; they seek to establish and sustain their pretensions by preying on the emotions of others, while all they have to offer are the mechanical responses of sham sentiment. In each case their victims or potential victims include the whole of their immediate circle, but the prime victim is a woman. This pattern of the victimization of woman appears in most of Meredith’s major novels; it was complemented, outside his fiction, by a genuine concern for the liberation of women from the social and legal discriminations which they suffered in the Victorian era. The New Women who accepted Diana of the Crossways as a fictional manifesto for the cause of feminism were not entirely wrong.

Yet they were only partially right, since the battle of the sexes was never neatly resolved in any of Meredith’s books. It was still being fought out in his last novel, The Amazing Marriage, whose writing bridged a very long span, from its beginning in 1879 immediately after The Egoist was completed, to its final publication in 1895. Even in this last novel, some familiar types of The Egoist period are still present: the vain Fleetwood, who, like Sir Willoughby, has been jilted by one woman and regards the winning of the heroine mainly as a victory to re-establish his own superiority; the selfish and calculating guardian uncle (the parent-substitute) who forces the marriage of Carinthia and Fleetwood; Carinthia herself, originally as innocent in the ways of the world as Clara Middleton, but quick to develop in understanding when Fleetwood deserts her, and ready to reject him when he undergoes a sentimental revulsion and wishes to resume their relationship. Carinthia eventually shows her independence by going off with her brother to support the Carlist rebels in Spain; meanwhile Fleetwood dies in a monastery and Carinthia, returning from Spain, marries a Welsh mine-owner whose modest, unspectacular virtues provide the necessary contrast to the rather flamboyant villainy of Fleetwood.

It is a sign of the growing importance in Meredith’s imaginative vision of the liberation of women as the end of the sexual struggle that the emphatic male hero vanishes from his novels in 1876, when Nevil Beauchamp throws his stormy life away rescuing the child whom Meredith describes as an ‘insignificant bit of mudbank life’. From that point the driving passion that characterized such relatively conventional heroes as Beauchamp and Richard Feverel is given only to the villains, who expend it in the service of their vanity; the quiet dependable men whom Clara, Diana and Carinthia eventually marry in recognition of their devotion are the precursors of the heroes and anti-heroes, men without passion and emphasis, who appear in so many twentieth century novels.

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In Meredith’s novels, sexual passion is never in fact so important as sexual domination, which may often be a matter of the coldest calculation. No censorial decision was more absurd than that which led Mudie’s Library to kill the prospects of The Ordeal of Richard Feverel in consequence – according to Meredith – ‘of the urgent remonstrances of several respectable families who objected to it as dangerous and wicked and damnable…’. On the other hand, if The Ordeal of Richard Feverel or Diana of the Crossways or The Egoist could have been banned as a threat to the Victorian patriarchal family, there might have been logic in the act. Yet the outspoken feminism of Meredith’s later years was a by-product rather than a cause of the sexual conflicts represented in his novels. A didactic writer, in that he recognized and sought to use the power of comedy in affecting the outlooks and hence the actions of men, Meredith was not a reforming propagandist. Here there was a sharp distinction between him and a writer like Bernard Shaw, who criticized him from the Fabian point of view. Shaw would use a play quite deliberately to discuss an immediate social problem and to implant in the minds of his audience the idea of a concrete remedy. The problems that concerned Meredith were not so easily solved; placed in an unavoidable social setting, they were essentially problems of personal awareness. The therapy of comedy was not expected to reform societies; it was expected to cure individuals of certain malformations of feeling.

None, Meredith recognized, was in greater need of therapy than himself. Sir Willoughby, he once told a young writer, ‘is all of us’, and there is no doubt that he exposed more of himself in his negative characters than in his positive ones, who were much more likely to take their characteristics from his friends, for example, F. A. Maxse, Leslie Stephen, Robert Louis Stevenson.

It is when we touch this sensitive problem of the materials out of which Meredith fabricated his novels, and particularly The Egoist, that we come near the roots of his view on the war of the sexes. His relationship with the Peacock family, in particular, is central to any consideration of his characteristic moral preoccupations, of the content of his novels, and even in his ways of writing.

The relationship began when Meredith, a lawyer’s clerk of twenty and yet untried as a writer, met Edward Gryffydh Peacock, the son of the author of Nightmare Abbey. The two young men were members of a literary circle which gathered around the bohemian lawyer Richard Charnock, to whom Meredith was articled, and they contributed to a handwritten Monthly Journal, in which appeared Meredith’s first works to receive even the limited publicity of a privately circulated magazine. Edward Peacock’s widowed sister, Mary Ellen Nicolls, was also a contributor to the Monthly Journal. Soon, in 1849, she became Meredith’s wife; he was twenty-one and she was seven years older.

Meredith’s marriage brought him close to Thomas Love Peacock, particularly when the financial difficulties of the young couple made them accept his temporary hospitality. In human terms the experiment was almost disastrous. Peacock, a man who liked comfort, quiet and peace of mind, resented Meredith’s exuberance and was distressed by the openness with which financial and emotional difficulties were aired by his daughter and son-in-law. The two men disagreed politically; as a crowning infliction, Meredith smoked incessantly and Peacock detested tobacco.

Yet, despite this temperamental incompatibility, Peacock’s literary outlook impressed itself strongly on Meredith at this formative stage in his development as a writer. As late as 1872, almost a quarter of a century after their first meeting, he wrote for the Graphic a series of intensely Peacockian dialogues entitled Up to Midnight, and his predilection for developing his novels through scenes of dramatic conversation, to which the narrative was subordinated, became the mechanism for an intellectualization of the novel along lines which Peacock had prefigured. Nevertheless, he advanced on Peacock, in that his characters were never merely the mouthpieces of idées fixes; they projected clearly individualized temperaments; they learnt from experience, and if they did not always grow in the process, at least they gained in self-awareness, which can hardly be said of any of Peacock’s totally static characters.

It is in The Egoist that the Peacockian dialogue is most effectively naturalized into an instrument of Meredithian analysis. Meredith’s dialogue is not necessarily more realistic in its texture than Peacock’s. One cannot imagine any two living creatures conversing as Sir Willoughby and Laetitia Dale do at their most sententious. But it does chart the emotional lives of those strange beings of Meredith’s imagination in such a way that we are aware not of mere intellectual crotchets, but also of genuine feelings, of worthy and unworthy calculations, of cracks in the carapace of affectation through which we can feel a beating of human blood. In fact, it is one of Meredith’s great originalities that he can give a highly poised and intellectualized dialogue such transparency that in the end it becomes more revealing of the inner motives of the speakers than a deliberately realistic conversation would be. Virginia Woolf, the daughter of Meredith’s intimate friend Leslie Stephen, defined the effect of this achievement when she remarked that in The Egoist, ‘Meredith pays us a supreme compliment to which as novel-readers we are little accustomed.… He imagines us capable of disinterested curiosity in the behaviour of our kind.’

But Peacock was not merely, for Meredith, a father-in-law turned into a literary parent. He also became the model for one of the principal characters of The Egoist. Dr Middleton, Clara’s father, is a classical scholar who speaks and looks as Peacock did, who harbours his Tory prejudices, who shares his love of wine and food and ease, and who displays the same ruthlessness in his efforts to avoid any human complications that may disturb the calm he regards as essential for his scholarly work.

The formal elaboration of The Egoist, paralleling the elaboration of conventions within which the appropriately named Patterne dances his pompous minuet of life, is characterized by the triangular grouping of characters: Willoughby–Clara–Laetitia; Willoughby–Clara–Vernon; Clara–Vernon–Horace; Willoughby–Mrs Jenkinson–Clara. The shifting relations within and between such triangles are the choreography of the work as a whole. Most interesting of all the triangles is that of Willoughby–Clara–Dr Middleton, the triad which provides the clues to the genesis of The Egoist.

In this key triad Dr Middleton alone is immediately recognizable as a character rather faithfully derived from a model in real life. Willoughby and Clara have gone through many rebirths before they are incarnated in The Egoist, but their beginnings are to be found in Meredith’s own past, in the early triangle of Peacock–Mary Ellen–Meredith. Meredith’s marriage with Mary Ellen foundered in the conflict of two proud intellects; in 1857, eight years after they had married, she left him for Henry Wallis, the pre-Raphaelite fellow-traveller whose livid painting of The Death of Chatter-ton is to be seen in the Tate Gallery. When Mary Ellen wished to return to him, Meredith proudly refused a reconciliation, and in 1861 she died, unhappy and alone.

Neither Mary Ellen’s departure nor her death was for Meredith the end of the relationship. It dominated the rest of his life, haunting him with the images of her misery and his inflexibility, but as the years went on these twin spectres underwent curious transformations. The most literal rendering of the lost marriage was Meredith’s long poem, Modern Love. The actual incidents described in that poem are already somewhat changed from those in Meredith’s marriage, but we cannot doubt that the conclusion he expresses in analysing the failure of the imagined love relationship sprang from his own experience:

Meredith suggests that he and Mary Ellen, proud and independent spirits, were diminished in the net of marriage until, using the mind to wound and dominate each other, they betrayed the heart. There is already much of The Egoist here. Sir Willoughby, seeking a certainty through conventions and sentiments, but incapable of real love, gets in the end the dusty answer of losing Clara and marrying the second-best lady, a fading Laetitia who no longer even adores him.

Even before Modern Love was written and before Mary Ellen was dead, Meredith had begun to develop another aspect of the great marital failure which in various forms dominated the rest of his life as a writer. The Ordeal of Richard Feverel appeared in 1859, the year after Mary Ellen’s elopement with Henry Wallis, and the story of Sir Austin Feverel, Richard’s father, parallels extraordinarily that of Meredith himself.

The poet lives in the household; he and the wife are thrown often together. ‘In time he touched his guitar in her chamber, and they played Rizzio and Mary together.’ Sir Austin learns of their faithlessness.

The monstrosity of Sir Austin’s self-love is evident. In terms of the novel his unfortunate marriage is mainly important as the motivation for the elaborate upbringing, designed to make him proof against the ravages of love, which is inflicted on his son Richard and which breeds its inevitable rebellion. The rejected wife appears in the latter part of the novel as a dim, veiled figure, but certainly a victim figure.

Apart from his temperamental egoism, Sir Austin bears no obvious resemblance to Meredith; it is mainly their situations that are similar. But it is significant of a division in Meredith between the private man and the writer (a division which recurs through his life), that he continued to exclude Mary Ellen from his life at the same time as he implied a condemnation of Sir Austin for similarly excluding the erring Lady Feverel.

The Ordeal of Richard Feverel in fact makes it clear that, if Meredith’s pride would not allow him to admit publicly any blame for the failure of his marriage, his conscience nagged, and to that continually nagging conscience we owe the series of relationships between the sexes in successive novels in which the man more clearly becomes the unfeeling tyrant and the woman the potential victim. The main shift that takes place in the relationship – apart from the rather minor one of making Clara a yet unmarried girl, and therefore a jilt rather than an adulteress – is that the woman’s defection ceases to be an act of betrayal or weakness, and becomes an act of liberation, the liberation of the feelings from the rule of convention and sterile sentiment.

Thus Meredith’s view of the relationship of the sexes, as symbolic of the wider relationship between freedom and the tyranny of custom, led him far from the real-life origin of his preoccupations. Dr Middleton, an essentially minor character, could safely be modelled on Peacock. But Clara Middleton had grown as far from Mary Ellen Nicoll as Meredith’s views on the fate of women had changed since the agony he exorcized in Modern Love.

The Egoist, in its construction, has the kind of economy which is more usual in drama than in fiction. It is true that like almost every book that Meredith wrote, its entrance is protected by a rather fearsome chevaux-de-frise in the form of a preface on comedy, heavy with elaborate parody, and an introductory chapter on Sir Willoughby’s youth and his celebrated leg, which appears excessively precious until one realizes how surely it sets the artificial tone of the world in which Willoughby poses for the edification of his admirers, the formidable Mrs Mountstuart Jenkinson (surely a lineal ancestress of Wilde’s dowagers) and the languid and brainy Laetitia, that personification of the feminine mind made sterile by enslavement to convention. But once the reader has undergone the preliminary tests which Meredith expects of him, the course is clear and the action follows in a brisk series of dramatic episodes, each fulfilling a triple purpose of

enlightening us a shade more on Sir Willoughby’s nature, of developing the resistance of the other characters to his insolent expectations, and of building the tension that rises steadily in this close circle of emotionally involved people like the heightening atmosphere before a thunderstorm. Apart from any of its other virtues, it is a fine work of suspense, paced on by witty conversation, economical in introspection and narrative, and, from the moment when Clara begins to detect the real and detestable Sir Willoughby, making the reader a fascinated observer of the shifts by which her feminine cunning surmounts the obstacles successively falling in her path. There are aspects of The Egoist which are madly improbable. Could Dr Middleton really betray his beloved daughter for a diet of old port? Was Willoughby’s only way of living down his rejection by Clara really to marry a Laetitia who had learnt to despise him? Such an ending is indeed not consonant with realism but it is with poetic justice,

and that is what Meredith seeks. For The Egoist is after all a comedy, and, just as Meredith observes the unity of place and – within reasonable limits – the unity of time, so he ensures that the good – Clara and Vernon – shall get their reward, and the villain shall live to digest his suitably dusty answer.

All this gains in meaning when we remember that The Egoist is the extreme expression of Meredith’s recurrent drama of the defeat of Egoism by the power of Comedy. At the mid nineteenth century, when Meredith began to write, Egoism was much in the air. In 1843 Max Stirner had published his treatise advocating Egoism as a revolutionary force, Der Einzige und sein Eigentum, and it is possible that Meredith, with his interest in the German intellectual life of the time, was aware of it. ‘Enlightened self-interest’, even ‘enlightened Egoism’, was spoken of freely in England to justify the irresponsible relationship between industrialists and their employees, and it had been denounced by Carlyle, whom Meredith then respected. But these external circumstances are hardly sufficient to account for the way in which, from his first published work of prose, The Shaving of Shagpat (1856), he consistently identified Egoism as the great enemy of truth, feeling and progress, and associated it with artficiality and with sentiment, which is the artificiality of feeling. This preoccupation sprang from the agonies of self-analysis by which Meredith fed his art.

The great sin of the Egoist is that he values nothing for its own sake. Willoughby does not sec in Clara a real girl whom he can love and cherish; he sees an ornament which will enhance his regard in the eyes of the world. Vernon Whitford is retained at Patterne Hall not from any sense of friendship on Willoughby’s part, but because a resident writer adds lustre to his employer’s public image. Thus everything is prized or rejected for a false reason and a whole structure of artificial relationships is built up and sealed by sentiment. Love can thus be simulated at will and Sir Willoughby woos Clara and Laetitia within a few hours of each other, with almost identical and equally meaningless phrases of conventional passion.

It is this world of artificial relations that we enter with Clara Middleton, aware that the never-encountered Constantia Durham had already fled from it in panic. We breathe its curious dry air as, through the eyes of Clara, and later of Colonel de Craye and even eventually of Laetitia, we observe Willoughby’s conceit and callousness reveal themselves in full monstrosity.

Then, almost exactly half-way through the book, Clara reaches the point where she can endure no longer Sir Willoughby’s attentions and the obtuseness of her father. She runs away, and as she does a great storm beats over the countryside. The storm clears the air and the flight clarifies the situation like the great cleansing sheets of rain. Everyone is suddenly aware, that, even though Clara returns, the relationship between her and Willoughby has irrevocably changed, and from this point Clara (her very name, used in earlier Meredith books, is significant) looks on her situation with the clear eye of comedy, so that slowly her fear of Willoughby vanishes and all that remain are the Egoist’s wild and comic manoeuvres to find a solution that will fit the realities of the situation and at the same time save his face among the snobs who surround him.

Comedy is, for Meredith, the dissolving element of Egoism. The Egoist is described as ‘A Comedy in Narrative’, and its Prelude invokes the Comic Spirit. Meredith was not the first English novelist to attempt a definition of the comic spirit in literature. Fielding had preceded him a century before when he wrote the Author’s Preface to Joseph Andrews. Fielding went part of the road which Meredith followed. Like Meredith he denied any intention of perpetrating Burlesque, and maintained that it was not the Monstrous, but the Ridiculous that fell into his province.

In Fielding’s definition, Joseph Surface, the most consummate hypocrite of English literature, would also be its most comic character. He is not, nor does he or any of Fielding’s own characters achieve a comic complexity approaching that of Sir Willoughby Patterne. Parson Adams is funnier than Sir Willoughby, but that is not quite the same thing; one is meant to provoke our laughter, the other to stir our thought as well. The difference in approach can be seen when we consider the most famous and most characteristic passage from the Essay on the Idea of Comedy:

It is the sign of Sir Willoughby’s complexity in comparison with the comic characters of Fielding, that he is not guilty of a single affectation, of one glaring manifestation of vanity or hypocrisy, but that all the sins against common sense which Meredith details can be brought against him. Nor does the complexity lie merely in the many-sidedness of his folly. It lies also in the method of representation. Fielding’s characters, and even those of Congreve and Wilde, who seem nearest to Meredith among English comic writers, are at best three-dimensional; we see in clear action the divergence between deed and pretension, the evidence of deception or self-deception. But in the case of Sir Willoughby we have not merely the external witness; we see the process at work within him and realize, in the depth of his thoughts, the extent to which natural impulse has been replaced by artificial calculation, in the same way as the living substance of some perished animal is replaced by the fossil’s hard stone. This probing complexity gives Meredith’s comic art an analytic quality, which, before him, was almost unknown among the writers of comedy. Their approach tended to be the descriptive one of the old-fashioned natural historian; to observe, and represent, and wonder at man’s folly. Meredith’s is the diagnostic approach, seeking the pathology of vanity and its ultimate causes. Once we know those causes, he suggests, we may not suddenly cure a patient so chronic as Sir Willoughby, but we shall cease to become enslaved by his pretensions and, in ceasing to do so, we may – as Meredith suggests that Laetitia will do – begin his liberation.

But, though Meredith undoubtedly intended this lesson to be understood by those who read The Egoist, to end on the didactic note would be to leave a wrong impression of his actual achievement. It is as a consummate portrait of vanity and egoism that The Egoist succeeds; Sir Willoughby reformed would be Sir Willoughby destroyed, and in the wisdom of his art Meredith did no more than hint at the possibility. Here his obedience to the rigid laws of classical drama stood him in good stead; no novel benefits more from its observance of the unities. This is the story of the exposure and the defeat of Egoism; the transformation of Egoism would be another story, and Meredith was too much Sir Willoughby and too sensible an artist, to attempt it.