Produced by Jim Tinsley
THE EGOIST
A Comedy in Narrative
by GEORGE MEREDITH
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 itdeals with human nature in the drawing-room of civilized men and women,where we have no dust of the struggling outer world, no mire, noviolent crashes, to make the correctness of the representationconvincing. Credulity is not wooed through the impressionable senses;nor have we recourse to the small circular glow of the watchmaker's eyeto raise in bright relief minutest grains of evidence for the routingof incredulity. The Comic Spirit conceives a definite situation for anumber of characters, and rejects all accessories in the exclusivepursuit of them and their speech. For being a spirit, he hunts thespirit in men; vision and ardour constitute his merit; he has not athought 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 onearth; that might indeed be called the Book of Earth; whose title isthe Book of Egoism, and it is a book full of the world's wisdom. Sofull of it, and of such dimensions is this book, in which thegenerations have written ever since they took to writing, that to beprofitable to us the Book needs a powerful compression.
Who, says the notable humourist, in allusion to this Book, who canstudiously travel through sheets of leaves now capable of a stretchfrom the Lizard to the last few poor pulmonary snips and shreds ofleagues dancing on their toes for cold, explorers tell us, and catchingbreath by good luck, like dogs at bones about a table, on the edge ofthe Pole? Inordinate unvaried length, sheer longinquity, staggers theheart, ages the very heart of us at a view. And how if we managefinally to print one of our pages on the crow-scalp of that solitarymajestic outsider? We may get him into the Book; yet the knowledge wewant will not be more present with us than it was when the chaptershung their end over the cliff you ken of at Dover, where sits our greatlord and master contemplating the seas without upon the reflex of thatwithin!
In other words, as I venture to translate him (humourists aredifficult: it is a piece of their humour to puzzle our wits), theinward mirror, the embracing and condensing spirit, is required to giveus those interminable milepost piles of matter (extending well-nigh tothe very Pole) in essence, in chosen samples, digestibly. I conceivehim to indicate that the realistic method of a conscientioustranscription of all the visible, and a repetition of all the audible,is mainly accountable for our present branfulness, and thatprolongation of the vasty and the noisy, out of which, as from anundrained fen, steams the malady of sameness, our modern malady. Wehave the malady, whatever may be the cure or the cause. We drove in abody to Science the other day for an antidote; which was as if tiredpedestrians should mount the engine-box of headlong trains; and Scienceintroduced us to our o'er-hoary ancestry--them in the Oriental posture;whereupon we set up a primaeval chattering to rival the Amazon forestnigh nightfall, cured, we fancied. And before daybreak our disease washanging on to us again, with the extension of a tail. We had it foreand aft. We were the same, and animals into the bargain. That is all wegot from Science.
Art is the specific. We have little to learn of apes, and they may beleft. The chief consideration for us is, what particular practice ofArt in letters is the best for the perusal of the Book of our commonwisdom; 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 weread it by the watchmaker's eye in luminous rings eruptive of theinfinitesimal, or pointed with examples and types under the broadAlpine survey of the spirit born of our united social intelligence,which is the Comic Spirit? Wise men say the latter. They tell us thatthere is a constant tendency in the Book to accumulate excess ofsubstance, and such repleteness, obscuring the glass it holds tomankind, renders us inexact in the recognition of our individualcountenances: a perilous thing for civilization. And these wise men arestrong in their opinion that we should encourage the Comic Spirit, whois 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, themusic of the Book. They tell us how it condenses whole sections of thebook in a sentence, volumes in a character; so that a fair pan of abook outstripping thousands of leagues when unrolled may be compassedin one comic sitting.
For verily, say they, we must read what we can of it, at least the pagebefore us, if we would be men. One, with an index on the Book, criesout, in a style pardonable to his fervency: The remedy of yourfrightful affliction is here, through the stillatory of Comedy, and notin 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 inthe companion throbs of your pulses. Interrogate them. They lump alonglike the old loblegs of Dobbin the horse; or do their business likecudgels of carpet-thwackers expelling dust or the cottage-clockpendulum teaching the infant hour over midnight simple arithmetic. Thistoo in spite of Bacchus. And let them gallop; let them gallop with theGod bestriding them; gallop to Hymen, gallop to Hades, they strike thesame note. Monstrous monotonousness has enfolded us as with the arms ofAmphitrite! We hear a shout of war for a diversion.--Comedy hepronounces to be our means of reading swiftly and comprehensively. Sheit is who proposes the correcting of pretentiousness, of inflation, ofdulness, and of the vestiges of rawness and grossness to be found amongus. She is the ultimate civilizer, the polisher, a sweet cook. If, hesays, she watches over sentimentalism with a birch-rod, she is notopposed to romance. You may love, and warmly love, so long as you arehonest. Do not offend reason. A lover pretending too much by onefoot's length of pretence, will have that foot caught in her trap. InComedy is the singular scene of charity issuing of disdain under thestroke of honourable laughter: an Ariel released by Prospero's wandfrom the fetters of the damned witch Sycorax. And this laughter ofreason refreshed is floriferous, like the magical great gale of theshifty Spring deciding for Summer. You hear it giving the delicatespirit his liberty. Listen, for comparison, to an unleavened society: alow as of the udderful cow past milking hour! O for a titledecclesiastic to curse to excommunication that unholy thing!--So far anenthusiast perhaps; but he should have a hearing.
Concerning pathos, no ship can now set sail without pathos; and we arenot totally deficient of pathos; which is, I do not accurately knowwhat, if not the ballast, reducible to moisture by patent process, onboard our modern vessel; for it can hardly be the cargo, and thegeneral water supply has other uses; and ships well charged with itseem to sail the stiffest:--there is a touch of pathos. The Egoistsurely inspires pity. He who would desire to clothe himself ateverybody's expense, and is of that desire condemned to strip himselfstark naked, he, if pathos ever had a form, might be taken for theactual person. Only he is not allowed to rush at you, roll you over andsqueeze your body for the briny drops. There is the innovation.
You may as well know him out of hand, as a gentleman of our time andcountry, of wealth and station; a not flexile figure, do what we maywith him; the humour of whom scarcely dimples the surface and isdistinguishable but by very penetrative, very wicked imps, whose fitsof roaring below at some generally imperceptible stroke of his quality,have first made the mild literary angels aware of something comic inhim, when they were one and all about to describe the gentleman on theheading of the records baldly (where brevity is most complimentary) asa gentleman of family and property, an idol of a decorous island thatadmires the concrete. Imps have their freakish wickedness in them tokindle detective vision: malignly do they love to uncoverridiculousness in imposing figures. Wherever they catch sight of
Egoismthey pitch their camps, they circle and squat, and forthwith they trimtheir lanterns, confident of the ludicrous to come. So confident thattheir grip of an English gentleman, in whom they have spied their game,never relaxes until he begins insensibly to frolic and antic, unknownto himself, and comes out in the native steam which is their scent ofthe chase. Instantly off they scour, Egoist and imps. They will, it isknown of them, dog a great House for centuries, and be at the birth ofall the new heirs in succession, diligently taking confirmatory notes,to join hands and chime their chorus in one of their merry rings roundthe tottering pillar of the House, when his turn arrives; as if theyhad (possibly they had) smelt of old date a doomed colossus of Egoismin that unborn, unconceived inheritor of the stuff of the family. Theydare not be chuckling while Egoism is valiant, while sober, whilesocially valuable, nationally serviceable. They wait.
Aforetime a grand old Egoism built the House. It would appear that everfiner essences of it are demanded to sustain the structure; butespecially would it appear that a reversion to the gross original,beneath a mask and in a vein of fineness, is an earthquake at thefoundations of the House. Better that it should not have consented tomotion, and have held stubbornly to all ancestral ways, than have bredthat anachronic spectre. The sight, however, is one to make oursquatting imps in circle grow restless on their haunches, as they bendeyes instantly, ears at full cock, for the commencement of the comicdrama of the suicide. If this line of verse be not yet in ourliterature,
Through very love of self himself he slew,
let it be admitted for his epitaph.