The Egoist E-Book

George Meredith

• Herausgeber: George Meredith
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

English novelist and poet. He was born in Portsmouth, England, a son and grandson of naval outfitters. His mother died when he was five. At the age of 14 he was sent to a Moravian School in Neuwied, Germany where he remained for two years. He read law and was articled as a solicitor, but abandoned that profession for journalism and poetry shortly after marrying Mary Ellen Nicolls, a widowed daughter of Thomas Love Peacock in 1849. He was twenty-one years old; she was thirty. He collected his early writings, first published in periodicals, into Poems, which was published to some acclaim in 1851. His wife left him and their five-year old son in 1858; she died three years later. Her departure was the inspiration for The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, his first "major novel".He married Marie Vulliamy in 1864 and settled in Surrey. He continued writing novels, and later in life he returned to writing poetry, often inspired by nature. Oscar Wilde, in his dialogue The Decay Of Lying, implies that Meredith, along with Balzac, is his favourite novelist, saying "ah, Meredith! Who can define him? His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning." (font. Wikipedia)

Leseprobe

The EgoistA Comedy in Narrative

by

George Meredith

Table of Contents

Prelude: A Chapter of which the last page only is of any importance

A Minor Incident Showing an Hereditary Aptitude in the Use of the Knife

The Young Sir Willoughby

Constantia Durham

Laetitia Dale

Clara Middleton

His Courtship

The Betrothed

A Run with the Truant; a Walk with the Master

Clara and Laetitia Meet: They are Compared

In which Sir Willoughby Chances to Supply the Title for Himself

The Double-Blossom Wild Cherry-Tree

Miss Middleton and Mr. Vernon Whitford

The First Effort After Freedom

Sir Willoughby and Laetitia

The Petition for a Release

Clara and Laetitia

The Porcelain Vase

Colonel De Craye

Colonel De Craye and Clara Middleton

An Aged and a Great Wine

Clara’s Meditations

The Ride

Treats of the Union of Temper and Policy

Contains an Instance of the Generosity of Willoughby

The Flight in Wild Weather

Vernon in Pursuit

At the Railway Station

The Return

In which the Sensitiveness of Sir Willoughby is Explained: And he Receives Much Instruction

Treating of the Dinner-Party at Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson’s

Sir Willoughby Attempts and Achieves Pathos

Laetitia Dale Discovers a Spiritual Change and Dr Middleton a Physical

In which the Comic Muse has an Eye on Two Good Souls

Mrs. Mountstuart and Sir Willoughby

Miss Middleton and Mrs. Mountstuart

Animated Conversation at a Luncheon-Table

Contains Clever Fencing and Intimations of the Need for it

In which We Take a Step to the Centre of Egoism

In the Heart of the Egoist

Midnight: Sir Willoughby and Laetitia: With Young Crossjay Under a Coverlet

The Rev. Dr. Middleton, Clara, and Sir Willoughby

Shows the Divining Arts of a Perceptive Mind

In which Sir Willoughby is Led to Think that the Elements have Conspired Against Him

Dr Middleton: The Ladies Eleanor and Isabel: And Mr. Dale

The Patterne Ladies: Mr. Dale: Lady Busshe and Lady Culmer: With Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson

The Scene of Sir Willoughby’s Generalship

Sir Willoughby and His Friend Horace De Craye

The Lovers

Laetitia and Sir Willoughby

Upon which the Curtain Falls

Prelude

A Chapter of which the last page only is of any importance

Comedy 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 no dust of the struggling outer world, no mire, no violent crashes, to make the correctness of the representation convincing. Credulity is not wooed through the impressionable senses; nor have we recourse to the small circular glow of the watchmaker’s eye to raise in bright relief minutest grains of evidence for the routing of incredulity. The Comic Spirit conceives a definite situation for a number of characters, and rejects all accessories in the exclusive pursuit of them and their speech. For being a spirit, he hunts the spirit in men; vision and ardour constitute his merit; he has not a thought of persuading you to believe in him. Follow and you will see. But there is a question of the value of a run at his heels.

Now the world is possessed of a certain big book, the biggest book on earth; that might indeed be called the Book of Earth; whose title is the Book of Egoism, and it is a book full of the world’s wisdom. So full of it, and of such dimensions is this book, in which the generations have written ever since they took to writing, that to be profitable to us the Book needs a powerful compression.

Who, says the notable humourist, in allusion to this Book, who can studiously travel through sheets of leaves now capable of a stretch from the Lizard to the last few poor pulmonary snips and shreds of leagues dancing on their toes for cold, explorers tell us, and catching breath by good luck, like dogs at bones about a table, on the edge of the Pole? Inordinate unvaried length, sheer longinquity, staggers the heart, ages the very heart of us at a view. And how if we manage finally to print one of our pages on the crow-scalp of that solitary majestic outsider? We may get him into the Book; yet the knowledge we want will not be more present with us than it was when the chapters hung their end over the cliff you ken of at Dover, where sits our great lord and master contemplating the seas without upon the reflex of that within!

In other words, as I venture to translate him (humourists are difficult: it is a piece of their humour to puzzle our wits), the inward mirror, the embracing and condensing spirit, is required to give us those interminable milepost piles of matter (extending well-nigh to the very Pole) in essence, in chosen samples, digestibly. I conceive him to indicate that the realistic method of a conscientious transcription of all the visible, and a repetition of all the audible, is mainly accountable for our present branfulness, and that prolongation of the vasty and the noisy, out of which, as from an undrained fen, steams the malady of sameness, our modern malady. We have the malady, whatever may be the cure or the cause. We drove in a body to Science the other day for an antidote; which was as if tired pedestrians should mount the engine-box of headlong trains; and Science introduced us to our o’er-hoary ancestry — them in the Oriental posture; whereupon we set up a primaeval chattering to rival the Amazon forest nigh nightfall, cured, we fancied. And before daybreak our disease was hanging on to us again, with the extension of a tail. We had it fore and aft. We were the same, and animals into the bargain. That is all we got from Science.

Art is the specific. We have little to learn of apes, and they may be left. The chief consideration for us is, what particular practice of Art in letters is the best for the perusal of the Book of our common wisdom; so that with clearer minds and livelier manners we may escape, as it were, into daylight and song from a land of fog-horns. Shall we read it by the watchmaker’s eye in luminous rings eruptive of the infinitesimal, or pointed with examples and types under the broad Alpine survey of the spirit born of our united social intelligence, which is the Comic Spirit? Wise men say the latter. They tell us that there is a constant tendency in the Book to accumulate excess of substance, and such repleteness, obscuring the glass it holds to mankind, renders us inexact in the recognition of our individual countenances: a perilous thing for civilization. And these wise men are strong in their opinion that we should encourage the Comic Spirit, who is after all our own offspring, to relieve the Book. Comedy, they say, is the true diversion, as it is likewise the key of the great Book, the music of the Book. They tell us how it condenses whole sections of the book in a sentence, volumes in a character; so that a fair pan of a book outstripping thousands of leagues when unrolled may be compassed in one comic sitting.

For verily, say they, we must read what we can of it, at least the page before us, if we would be men. One, with an index on the Book, cries out, in a style pardonable to his fervency: The remedy of your frightful affliction is here, through the stillatory of Comedy, and not in Science, nor yet in Speed, whose name is but another for voracity. Why, to be alive, to be quick in the soul, there should be diversity in the companion throbs of your pulses. Interrogate them. They lump along like the old loblegs of Dobbin the horse; or do their business like cudgels of carpet-thwackers expelling dust or the cottage-clock pendulum teaching the infant hour over midnight simple arithmetic. This too in spite of Bacchus. And let them gallop; let them gallop with the God bestriding them; gallop to Hymen, gallop to Hades, they strike the same note. Monstrous monotonousness has enfolded us as with the arms of Amphitrite! We hear a shout of war for a diversion. — Comedy he pronounces to be our means of reading swiftly and comprehensively. She it is who proposes the correcting of pretentiousness, of inflation, of dulness, and of the vestiges of rawness and grossness to be found among us. She is the ultimate civilizer, the polisher, a sweet cook. If, he says, she watches over sentimentalism with a birch-rod, she is not opposed to romance. You may love, and warmly love, so long as you are honest. Do not offend reason. A lover pretending too much by one foot’s length of pretence, will have that foot caught in her trap. In Comedy is the singular scene of charity issuing of disdain under the stroke of honourable laughter: an Ariel released by Prospero’s wand from the fetters of the damned witch Sycorax. And this laughter of reason refreshed is floriferous, like the magical great gale of the shifty Spring deciding for Summer. You hear it giving the delicate spirit his liberty. Listen, for comparison, to an unleavened society: a low as of the udderful cow past milking hour! O for a titled ecclesiastic to curse to excommunication that unholy thing! — So far an enthusiast perhaps; but he should have a hearing.