A convoluted plot of betrothals and break ups but primarily a psychological study of the various characters, most particularly the egotist. Well written but slow reading ( )

Ha legközelebb valaki ezt mondja: „Úgy irigyellek, hogy ennyit olvashatsz”, azt fogom felelni neki: „Igazán? Akkor talán próbálkozz meg George Meredith-tel.” Elképesztően szenvedtem ezzel a szöveggel. Pedig Babits szerint ez „a tökéletes társadalmi regény”, és ezt annyira komolyan gondolta, hogy a saját (és Tóth Árpád) csontos kacsójával fordította le – mi kellhet még az élvezethez? Én valami Henry James-i, Galsworthy-i angolszász gyönyörre számítottam, egy kis finom szellemesség, egy kis pszichológia – ehelyett egy olyan regényt kaptam, ami, ha nem is kérdőjelezi meg Babits józan ítélőképességét, de jelzi, hogy egy könyv, ami 100-150 éve elemi erővel világította meg a társadalmi játszmákat, mára olyan mondatmocsárrá lényegülhet át, amiből a XXI. század olvasója alig tud kikeveredni.

Pedig amúgy ez egy iszonyatosan érvényes történet, még mai szemmel is. A látszólagos főszereplő Sir Willoughby (az "Önző"), az egoista angol főrend, aki egész környezetét úgy igyekszik berendezni, hogy minden kizárólag az ő kényelmét szolgálja – legfőképpen az embereket, állítólagos barátait, akiket mesterien manipulál. Az igazi főszereplő azonban nem ő, hanem menyasszonya, Clara, aki a történet egy pontján rájön, mennyire szerencsétlen dolog volna összekötnie életét Willoughbyval, és megkísérel kikeveredni a jegyesség társadalmi csapdájából. Meredith szinte tökéletesen érzékelteti, micsoda szélmalomharc ez, és mennyire értetlenül áll a környezet azelőtt, hogy Clara érvényt akar szerezni szabad akaratának. Még alkalmi szövetségesei sem azt látják ebben a szándékban, ami – egyikük zavartságnak magyarázza, másikuk kacérságnak, a harmadik pedig hősiességnek, holott nincs többről itt szó, mint egy normális emberi igényről, hogy magunk dönthessünk saját életünk folyásáról. Meredith kétfajta típusú szövegből szerkeszti össze a regény korpuszát: egyrészt fejezetről fejezetre újabb és újabb párokba rendezi szereplőit, és azok végtelenszer állnak neki újabb és újabb aspektusból megvizsgálni a problémát. Ezzel kitágítják a regény értelmezési síkjait, és nem mellesleg ezekből a beszélgetésből az is nyilvánvalóvá válik lassacskán, hogy Clara annak ellenére, hogy szakítani akar vőlegényével (vagy éppen azért?), mégis a legtisztább erkölcsi lény a brancsban. Ám ez a töménytelen „párbaállás” egy idő után egyszerűen megőrjíti az embert. Amikor Dr. Middleton és De Craye ezredes megint meglátja egymást az ösvényen, nekem kedvem támad felordítani: „Meg ne szólaljatok! Forduljatok sarkon, és fussatok, bolondok! Ha valamelyikőtök kinyitja a száját, sose keveredünk ki ebből a fejezetből!”

A másik szövegtípus az olvasónak címzett írói monológ, ami tulajdonképpen menet közben kísérli meg elmagyarázni nekünk, mi is történik. Ez Meredithnek a hazai pálya – és a falra mászok tőle. Bizonyos korlátok között kecses, szellemes szöveg, csak éppen nincsenek korlátai. Az író elindul mondjuk a.) pontból, és meg sem áll w.)-ig. Eredeti asszociációkra és hasonlatokra fordítja le a mondanivalóját, de olyan gátlástalanul, hogy mire befejezi, én már konkrétan nem emlékszem, honnan is indultunk el. (Megjegyzem, talán Meredith is így volt ezzel. Lehet, hallucináltam, de én időnként meg mertem volna esküdni rá, hogy az agymenés végeztével nem azok a szereplők folytatták a csevegést, akik elkezdték.) Hangsúlyozom (illetve hadd mentegessem önmagam), én imádom, amikor Proust sütikről héderel, vagy amikor Dickens oldalakon keresztül kokettál az olvasójával. Most is folyamatosan vártam, hogy ráérzek e könyv ritmusára – de hiába. Egy ilyen brutálisan ornamentikus szószaporításra egész egyszerűen nem voltam felkészülve. Pedig egy iszonyatosan fontos sztori van a közepén, amit mindenképpen érdemes kibontani belőle. Csak épp az egész bele van tömködve valami pudingba, és ki se látszik. Úgyhogy mindenképpen ajánlom annak, akik bírják a nagy koncentrációt igénylő, lassúdad XIX. századi szövegeket. Hátha ők meg tudják mondani, én látom-e rosszul, és Babitsnak mégis igaza van… Mindenesetre olvasás előtt zárjanak ki minden zavaró tényezőt: biztosítsanak maguknak temperált környezetet, esetleg vonuljanak el egy faluba a Zemplén közepébe. Ártani nem árthat. (Ja, és vigyenek magukkal valami könnyedebb olvasmányt, kikapcsolódásképpen. Egy kis gazdaságszociológiát, mondjuk.)
( )

'The world has faults; glaciers have crevices, mountains have chasms; but is not the effect of the whole sublime? Not to admire the mountain and the glacier because they can be cruel, seems to me . . . And the world is beautiful.'
     'The world of nature, yes. The world of men?'
     'Yes.'
     'My love, I suspect you to be thinking of the world of ballrooms.'
     'I am thinking of the world that contains real and great generosity, true heroism. We see it round us.'
     'We read of it. The world of the romance writer!'
     'No: the living world. I am sure it is our duty to love it. I am sure we weaken ourselves if we do not.' (100)

This book was recommended to me by a graduate student I met at NAVSA; when I told him about my project on Victorian scientist novels, he asked if I had read The Egoist. I had not. I had actually never read any George Meredith, as far as I know. Now that I have read it, George Meredith strikes me as one of those Victorian novelists we are probably better off not reading. The Egoist is supposedly about the necessity of comedy to puncture egoism-- but it strikes me as something of a bad idea to begin your supposed paean to comedy with an incredibly unfunny and overly pedantic explanation of why humor is important.

Anyway, there are moments of what I'm interested in in this overly long and tedious novel, but there are better examples. Sir Willoughby Patterne is a man of science, sort of vaguely defined-- I don't think we ever learn what kind of science he actually does even though he's in his laboratory a lot of time-- and this does affect his romantic relationships. His egoism means he always needs to get his way, is always trying to bend his fiancée to his will. Science doesn't seem to be to blame though, because even though he's in the laboratory so much, he supposedly mostly does it because science is popular; his true passion is sport (46). On the other hand, his devotion to the laboratory is more complete than that of his rivals (71), so even if it's not his passion per se, he throws himself into it.

There is an emphasis on how he sees the world; as my epigraph above indicates, he doesn't see the world the same as his fiancée Clara, because his perceptions come from science, while hers come from ballrooms and romances. The biggest consequence of his egoism seems to be that he thinks he understands himself more than he actually does understand himself. That seems a scientific problem-- the scientist has to have the ego to believe they understand the world better, and that ego is not always warranted-- but other Victorian scientist novels deal with the topic better than Meredith does. Stay away if you can.

This book has aspects that can be appreciated. The basic idea- that a man (Sir Willoughby) became engaged again and his fiance (Clara) discovered that he expected her to match his mood, belief, and thoughts at all times and to govern her world by his needs- is a reasonable story for its time period. It is reasonable that Clara was easily trapped and that it was difficult for her to escape with her reputation intact. Something similar is presented in James' somewhat more recent The Portrait of a Lady as well. It was also interesting personally to consider that "the egoist" exists in modern times, embodied by two individuals I have known and surely many other individuals.

Despite interest in the topic, it took a ridiculously long time to read this. After the initial interesting plot set-up, the novel continued on to its predictable, necessary, flowery-worded end, and the conclusion was not acceptable to me. In my opinion, the woman who consented to marry Willoughby and manage him would never (with her new understanding of him gained as the novel progresses) sacrifice her self-respect and actually marry him. To do this to this character was unforgivable. Meredith was clear that she knows she doesn't love him, but he sacrifices her to the egoist while others run away and have a happy life. She deserved better, and the combination of this with the writing style makes it difficult to fully recommend this book. An experienced reader who is willing to put aside this plot issue and who has the patience and desire to experience the decorative aspects of the language may enjoy this book. ( )

[From Books and You, Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1940, pp. 14-18:]

Fifty years ago every intelligent young man with pretensions to culture read Meredith with enthusiasm. He was read as a generation later young men read Shaw and as ten years ago they read T. S. Eliot. Now he has, I believe, few readers among the young. But The Egoist is a fine novel. It is true that it deals with a class of society which we no longer regard with the awe which Meredith thought was its due. We no longer accept these country gentlemen, these opulent ladies who drive about in barouches, as the salt of the earth, and their behaviour too often strikes us as vulgar and trivial. The world has changed since Meredith wrote, and it is hard for us now to be seriously impressed when Clara Middleton, a high-spirited girl of independent mind and ample fortune, makes such a to-do about breaking her engagement with Sir Willoughby Patterne after she has discovered that she no longer cares for him. The girls of our own time would have found it easy to deal with the situation. We demand plausibility in our novels nowadays and we are only impatient with difficulties which can be avoided by the exercise of common sense. When at last Clara makes up her mind to run away to London she slips out of the house with trepidation and walks to the station, but, a storm arising, she gets her feet wet and so misses the train, whereupon she is persuaded to return. She showed little of the wiliness which is supposed to be characteristic of her sex. It is strange that it never occurred to her that as she was going to be married she would need some clothes and no one could think it odd that she should go to London to try them.

Meredith wrote in a manner which does not make his books easy to read. This posturing of his, this cutting of capers and jumping through verbal hoops, is very tiresome. You would think that he found it almost impossible to make a plain statement plainly, and his wit, on which he seems to have prided himself, is tortured. But he had a gift for creating characters of such vitality that you can never quite forget them. They are not, like for instance the characters of Moby Dick, a little larger than life size, but they are something more than ordinary human beings. They have the artificiality of the persons in a comedy by Congreve, but it is not a dead artificiality; Meredith has inspired them with his own gusto and they live, like the puppets in Hoffmann’s old story which the magician brought to life, with a radiance all their own. They are truly creations and only a real novelist could have invented them. It is this gusto which enables you to read Meredith, if you can read him at all, with delight notwithstanding the coruscations of his style, the falseness of his values and the occasional clumsiness of his intrigue; he carries on his story with a fine swing and you are hurried along with him on the wings of his high spirits and boisterous, windswept joy in the exercise of his creative faculty.

The Egoist is Meredith’s best novel because his subject here was universal. Egoism is the mainspring of human nature. It is the one quality from which we can never escape (I do not like to call it a vice, though it is the ugliest of our vices, because it is also the marrow of our virtues), for it determines our existence. Without it we should not be what we are. Without it we should be nought. And yet our constant effort must be to check its claims and we can only live well if we do our best to suppress it. In Sir Willoughby Patterne, Meredith has drawn such a portrait of an egoist as has never been drawn before or since. But I think no one can read this book without some qualms of conscience, for he must be even a greater egoist than Sir Willoughby if he does not see in himself some of the traits at least which make Sir Willoughby at once odious and absurd. Meredith was right when he said that his wretched hero was not this man or than man but all of us. So when I recommend you to read The Egoist it is not only because it is a lively, entertaining novel, but because it may teach you something about yourself that it is good for you to know.

[From The Summing Up, The Literary Guild of America, 1938, xxiv, 85-86:]

But the two writers that it was really necessary to admire [in the 1890s] if you would be a person of culture and not a British philistine were Walter Pater and George Meredith. I was very ready to do what I was told to achieve this desirable end and incredible as it must seem I read The Shaving of Shagpat with roars of laughter. It seemed to me superlatively funny. Then I read the novels of George Meredith one after the other. I thought them wonderful; but not so wonderful as even to myself I pretended. My admiration was factitious. I admired because it was the part of a cultured young man to admire. I intoxicated myself with my own enthusiasm. I would not listen to the still small voice within me that carped. Now I know that there is a great deal of fustian in these novels. But the strange thing is that, reading them again, I recapture the days when I first read them. They are rich for me now with sunny mornings and my awakening intelligence and the delicious dreams of youth, so that even as I close a novel of Meredith's, Evan Harrington for instance, and decide that its insincerity is exasperating, its snobbishness loathsome, its verbosity intolerable and I will never read another, my heart melts and I think it's grand.