MEREDITH AND THE NOVEL Also by Neil Roberts GEORGE ELIOT: Her Beliefs and Her Art THE LOVER, THE DREAMER AND THE WORLD: The Poetry of Peter Redgrove TED HUGHES: A Critical Study (with Terry Gifford) Meredith and the Novel Neil Roberts Senior Lecturer in English University of Sheffield tt First published in Great Britain 1997 by ft MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 0-333-67594-0 m First published in the United States of America 1997 by ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC., Scholarly and Reference Division, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 ISBN 0-312-16535-8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Roberts, Neil. Meredith and the novel / Neil Roberts. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-312-16535-8 (cloth) 1. Meredith, George, 1828-1909—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Fiction—Authorship. I. Title. PR5014.R63 1997 823'.8—dc20 96-32087 CIP ©Neil Roberts 1997 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his rights to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Transferred to digital printing 2003 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire To the Memory of Jim McCabe, Teacher Contents List of Abbreviations viii Introduction 1 1 The Ordeal of Richard Feverel 13 2 The Novels of the 1860s 47 3 The Adventures of Harry Richmond 89 4 Beauchamp's Career 111 5 The Egoist 150 6 The Tragic Comedians 187 7 Diana of the Crossways 205 8 The Final Phase 230 Notes 254 Bibliography 276 Index 282 Vll List of Abbreviations AM: The Amazing Marriage BC: Beauchamp's Career DC: Diana of the Crossways E: The Egoist EH: Evan Harrington HR: The Adventures of Harry Richmond TC: 'Essay on the Idea of Comedy and of the Uses of the Comic Spirit' LOHA: Lord Ormont and His Aminta OOC: One of Our Conquerors ORF: The Ordeal of Richard Feverel RF: Rhoda Fleming SB: Sandra Belloni TC: The Tragic Comedians V: Vittoria Vlll Introduction There has always been an element of provocation, scandal and unfinished business about Meredith's reputation. His earliest reviewers could not cope with the stylistic variation and genre- breaking formal innovation of a novel such as The Ordeal of Richard Feverel. At the height of his popularity, in the early 1890s, Oscar Wilde wrote that 'His style is chaos illumined by flashes of light ning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language; as a novelist he can do everything, except tell a story: as an artist he is everything except articulate. When his reputation was in decline, in the 1930s, Virginia Woolf offered an assessment that might have established him as a precursor of modernism, asserting that he was 'at great pains to destroy the conventional form of the novel. ... And what is done so deliberately is' done with a purpose to prepare the way for a new and an original sense of the human scene.'2 In the period of most intense recent critical attention, the early 1970s, one of his best modern critics, David Howard, described him as the 'most irritating novelist of nineteenth cen tury', adding that 'if we ignore that capacity to irritate we are inventing a safe Meredith to argue about'.3 Allowing for the seductions of paradox, Wilde's description is a perceptive way into the often irritating but profoundly original world of Meredith's novelistic art. The irritation and the original ity are the obverse and reverse sides of the sense of the new in art. What is, if not unique, then certainly highly imusual among major Victorian novelists, is that this sense of the new is still felt by readers encountering Meredith today. As Gillian Beer has said, he is 'a writer whom individuals discover with excite ment for themselves'.4 This excitement is like that of reading new work. The question of his place among his peers is compli cated by the fact that the Brontes, Dickens, George Eliot, Hardy, James are, for the present at least, known quantities: Meredith is the unknown quantity that changes one's sense of the possibilities of the novel in the way that important new work does. 1