We women can read men by their power to love
     We could row and ride and fish and shoot, and breed largely
     We dare not be weak if we would
     We were unarmed, and the spectacle was distressing
     We can’t hope to have what should be
     We have a system, not planned but grown
     We are chiefly led by hope
     We’re treated like old-fashioned ornaments! 
     Welcomed and lured on an adversary to wild outhitting
     Well, sir, we must sell our opium
     What ninnies call Nature in books
     When he’s a Christian instead of a Churchman
     Where love exists there is goodness
     Who cannot talk!—­but who can? 
     Without a single intimation that he loathed the task
     Wives are only an item in the list, and not the most important
     Women don’t care uncommonly for the men who love them
     Women must not be judging things out of their sphere
     Won’t do to be taking in reefs on a lee-shore
     Wonderment that one of her sex should have ideas
     Wooing a good man for his friendship
     World cannot pardon a breach of continuity
     You are not married, you are simply chained
     You’re talking to me, not to a gallery

THE EGOIST

A Comedy in Narrative

by George Meredith

This etext was prepared by Jim Tinsley jtinsley@pobox.com

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.