XVI.—­GEORGE MEREDITH

(1) THE EGOIST

George Meredith, as his friends used to tell one with amusement, was a vain man.  Someone has related how, in his later years, he regarded it as a matter of extreme importance that his visitors should sit in a position from which they would see his face in profile.  This is symbolic of his attitude to the world.  All his life he kept one side of his face hidden.  Mr. Ellis, who is the son of one of Meredith’s cousins, now takes us for a walk round Meredith’s chair.  No longer are we permitted to remain in restful veneration of “a god and a Greek.”  Mr. Ellis invites us—­and we cannot refuse the invitation—­to look at the other side of the face, to consider the full face and the back of the head.  He encourages us to feel Meredith’s bumps, and no man whose bumps we are allowed to feel can continue for five minutes the pretence of being an Olympian.  He becomes a human being under a criticizing thumb.  We discover that he had a genius for imposture, an egoist’s temper, and a stomach that fluttered greedily at the thought of dainty dishes.  We find all those characteristics that prevented him from remaining on good terms first with his father, next with his wife, and then with his son.  At first, when one reads the full story of Meredith’s estrangements through three generations, one has the feeling that one is in the presence of an idol in ruins.  Certainly, one can never mistake Box Hill for Olympus again.  On the other hand, let us but have time to accustom ourselves to see Meredith in other aspects than that which he himself chose to present to his contemporaries—­let us begin to see in him not so much one of the world’s great comic censors, as one of the world’s great comic subjects, and we shall soon find ourselves back among his books, reading them no longer with tedious awe, but with a new passion of interest in the figure-in-the-background of the complex human being who wrote them.

For Meredith was his own great subject.  Had he been an Olympian he could not have written The Egoist or Harry Richmond.  He was an egoist and pretender, coming of a line of egoists and pretenders, and his novels are simply the confession and apology of such a person.  Meredith concealed the truth about himself in his daily conversation; he revealed it in his novels.  He made such a mystery about his birth that many people thought he was a cousin of Queen Victoria’s or at least a son of Bulwer Lytton’s.  It was only in Evan Harrington that he told the essentials of the truth about the tailor’s shop in Portsmouth above which he was born.  Outside his art, nothing would persuade him to own up to the tailor’s shop.  Once, when Mr. Clodd was filling in a census-paper for him, Meredith told him to put “near Petersfield” as his place of birth.  The fact that he was born at Portsmouth was not publicly known, indeed, until