The Egoist

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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
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 he 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.

Concerning pathos, no ship can now set sail without pathos; and we
are not totally deficient of pathos; which is, I do not accurately
know what, if not the ballast, reducible to moisture by patent
process, on board our modern vessel; for it can hardly be the
cargo, and the general water supply has other uses; and ships well
charged with it seem to sail the stiffest:--there is a touch of
pathos. The Egoist surely inspires pity. He who would desire to
clothe himself at everybody's expense, and is of that desire
condemned to strip himself stark naked, he, if pathos ever had a
form, might be taken for the actual person. Only he is not allowed
to rush at you, roll you over and squeeze 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
and country, of wealth and station; a not flexile figure, do what
we may with him; the humour of whom scarcely dimples the surface
and is distinguishable but by very penetrative, very wicked imps,
whose fits of roaring below at some generally imperceptible stroke
of his quality, have first made the mild literary angels aware of
something comic in him, when they were one and all about to
describe the gentleman on the heading of the records baldly (where
brevity is most complimentary) as a gentleman of family and
property, an idol of a decorous island that admires the concrete.
Imps have their freakish wickedness in them to kindle detective
vision: malignly do they love to uncover ridiculousness in
imposing figures. Wherever they catch sight of Egoism they pitch
their camps, they circle and squat, and forthwith they trim their
lanterns, confident of the ludicrous to come. So confident that
their grip of an English gentleman, in whom they have spied their
game, never relaxes until he begins insensibly to frolic and
antic, unknown to himself, and comes out in the native steam which
is their scent of the chase. Instantly off they scour, Egoist and
imps. They will, it is known of them, dog a great House for
centuries, and be at the birth of all the new heirs in succession,
diligently taking confirmatory notes, to join hands and chime
their chorus in one of their merry rings round the tottering
pillar of the House, when his turn arrives; as if they had
(possibly they had) smelt of old date a doomed colossus of Egoism
in that unborn, unconceived inheritor of the stuff of the family.
They dare not be chuckling while Egoism is valiant, while sober,
while socially valuable, nationally serviceable. They wait.

Aforetime a grand old Egoism built the House. It would appear that
ever finer essences of it are demanded to sustain the structure;
but especially would it appear that a reversion to the gross
original, beneath a mask and in a vein of fineness, is an
earthquake at the foundations of the House. Better that it should
not have consented to motion, and have held stubbornly to all
ancestral ways, than have bred that anachronic spectre. The sight,
however, is one to make our squatting imps in circle grow restless
on their haunches, as they bend eyes instantly, ears at full cock,
for the commencement of the comic drama of the suicide. If this
line of verse be not yet in our literature,

Through very love of self himself he slew,

let it be admitted for his epitaph.

CHAPTER I

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

There was an ominously anxious watch of eyes visible and invisible
over the infancy of Willoughby, fifth in descent from Simon
Patterne, of Patterne Hall, premier of this family, a lawyer, a
man of solid acquirements and stout ambition, who well understood
the foundation-work of a House, and was endowed with the power of
saying No to those first agents of destruction, besieging
relatives. He said it with the resonant emphasis of death to
younger sons. For if the oak is to become a stately tree, we must
provide against the crowding of timber. Also the tree beset with
parasites prospers not. A great House in its beginning lives, we
may truly say, by the knife. Soil is easily got, and so are
bricks, and a wife, and children come of wishing for them, but the
vigorous use of the knife is a natural gift and points to growth.
Pauper Patternes were numerous when the fifth head of the race was
the hope of his county. A Patterne was in the Marines.

The country and the chief of this family were simultaneously
informed of the existence of one Lieutenant Crossjay Patterne, of
the corps of the famous hard fighters, through an act of heroism
of the unpretending cool sort which kindles British blood, on the
part of the modest young officer, in the storming of some eastern
riverain stronghold, somewhere about the coast of China. The
officer's youth was assumed on the strength of his rank, perhaps
likewise from the tale of his modesty: "he had only done his
duty". Our Willoughby was then at College, emulous of the generous
enthusiasm of his years, and strangely impressed by the report,
and the printing of his name in the newspapers. He thought over it
for several months, when, coming to his title and heritage, he
sent Lieutenant Crossjay Patterne a cheque for a sum of money
amounting to the gallant fellow's pay per annum, at the same time
showing his acquaintance with the first, or chemical, principles
of generosity, in the remark to friends at home, that "blood is
thicker than water". The man is a Marine, but he is a Patterne.
How any Patterne should have drifted into the Marines, is of the
order of questions which are senselessly asked of the great
dispensary. In the complimentary letter accompanying his cheque,
the lieutenant was invited to present himself at the ancestral
Hall, when convenient to him, and he was assured that he had given
his relative and friend a taste for a soldier's life. Young Sir
Willoughby was fond of talking of his "military namesake and
distant cousin, young Patterne--the Marine". It was funny; and
not less laughable was the description of his namesake's deed of
valour: with the rescued British sailor inebriate, and the hauling
off to captivity of the three braves of the black dragon on a
yellow ground, and the tying of them together back to back by
their pigtails, and driving of them into our lines upon a newly
devised dying-top style of march that inclined to the oblique,
like the astonished six eyes of the celestial prisoners, for
straight they could not go. The humour of gentlemen at home is
always highly excited by such cool feats. We are a small island,
but you see what we do. The ladies at the Hall, Sir Willoughby's
mother, and his aunts Eleanor and Isabel, were more affected than
he by the circumstance of their having a Patterne in the Marines.
But how then! We English have ducal blood in business: we have,
genealogists tell us, royal blood in common trades. For all our
pride we are a queer people; and you may be ordering butcher's
meat of a Tudor, sitting on the cane-bottom chairs of a
Plantagenet. By and by you may . . . but cherish your reverence.
Young Willoughby made a kind of shock-head or football hero of his
gallant distant cousin, and wondered occasionally that the fellow
had been content to dispatch a letter of effusive thanks without
availing himself of the invitation to partake of the hospitalities
of Patterne.

He was one afternoon parading between showers on the stately
garden terrace of the Hall, in company with his affianced, the
beautiful and dashing Constantia Durham, followed by knots of
ladies and gentlemen vowed to fresh air before dinner, while it
was to be had. Chancing with his usual happy fortune (we call
these things dealt to us out of the great hidden dispensary,
chance) to glance up the avenue of limes, as he was in the act of
turning on his heel at the end of the terrace, and it should be
added, discoursing with passion's privilege of the passion of love
to Miss Durham, Sir Willoughby, who was anything but obtuse,
experienced a presentiment upon espying a thick-set stumpy man
crossing the gravel space from the avenue to the front steps of
the Hall, decidedly not bearing the stamp of the gentleman "on his
hat, his coat, his feet, or anything that was his," Willoughby
subsequently observed to the ladies of his family in the
Scriptural style of gentlemen who do bear the stamp. His brief
sketch of the creature was repulsive. The visitor carried a bag,
and his coat-collar was up, his hat was melancholy; he had the
appearance of a bankrupt tradesman absconding; no gloves, no
umbrella.

As to the incident we have to note, it was very slight. The card
of Lieutenant Patterne was handed to Sir Willoughby, who laid it
on the salver, saying to the footman, "Not at home."

He had been disappointed in the age, grossly deceived in the
appearance of the man claiming to be his relative in this
unseasonable fashion; and his acute instinct advised him swiftly
of the absurdity of introducing to his friends a heavy
unpresentable senior as the celebrated gallant Lieutenant of
Marines, and the same as a member of his family! He had talked of
the man too much, too enthusiastically, to be able to do so. A
young subaltern, even if passably vulgar in figure, can be
shuffled through by the aid of the heroical story humourously
exaggerated in apology for his aspect. Nothing can be done with a
mature and stumpy Marine of that rank. Considerateness dismisses
him on the spot, without parley. It was performed by a gentleman
supremely advanced at a very early age in the art of cutting.

Young Sir Willoughby spoke a word of the rejected visitor to Miss
Durham, in response to her startled look: "I shall drop him a
cheque," he said, for she seemed personally wounded, and had a
face of crimson.

The young lady did not reply.

Dating from the humble departure of Lieutenant Crossjay Patterne
up the limes-avenue under a gathering rain-cloud, the ring of imps
in attendance on Sir Willoughby maintained their station with
strict observation of his movements at all hours; and were
comparisons in quest, the sympathetic eagerness of the eyes of
caged monkeys for the hand about to feed them, would supply one.
They perceived in him a fresh development and very subtle
manifestation of the very old thing from which he had sprung.

CHAPTER II

The Young Sir Willoughby

These little scoundrel imps, who have attained to some
respectability as the dogs and pets of the Comic Spirit, had been
curiously attentive three years earlier, long before the public
announcement of his engagement to the beautiful Miss Durham, on
the day of Sir Willoughby's majority, when Mrs. Mountstuart
Jenkinson said her word of him. Mrs. Mountstuart was a lady
certain to say the remembered, if not the right, thing. Again and
again was it confirmed on days of high celebration, days of birth
or bridal, how sure she was to hit the mark that rang the bell;
and away her word went over the county: and had she been an
uncharitable woman she could have ruled the county with an iron
rod of caricature, so sharp was her touch. A grain of malice would
have sent county faces and characters awry into the currency. She
was wealthy and kindly, and resembled our mother Nature in her
reasonable antipathies to one or two things which none can defend,
and her decided preference of persons that shone in the sun. Her
word sprang out of her. She looked at you, and forth it came: and
it stuck to you, as nothing laboured or literary could have
adhered. Her saying of Laetitia Dale: "Here she comes with a
romantic tale on her eyelashes," was a portrait of Laetitia. And
that of Vernon Whitford: "He is a Phoebus Apollo turned fasting
friar," painted the sunken brilliancy of the lean long-walker and
scholar at a stroke.

Of the young Sir Willoughby, her word was brief; and there was the
merit of it on a day when he was hearing from sunrise to the
setting of the moon salutes in his honour, songs of praise and
Ciceronian eulogy. Rich, handsome, courteous, generous, lord of
the Hall, the feast and the dance, he excited his guests of both
sexes to a holiday of flattery. And, says Mrs. Mountstuart, while
grand phrases were mouthing round about him, "You see he has a
leg."

That you saw, of course. But after she had spoken you saw much
more. Mrs. Mountstuart said it just as others utter empty
nothings, with never a hint of a stress. Her word was taken up,
and very soon, from the extreme end of the long drawing-room, the
circulation of something of Mrs. Mountstuart's was distinctly
perceptible. Lady Patterne sent a little Hebe down, skirting the
dancers, for an accurate report of it; and even the inappreciative
lips of a very young lady transmitting the word could not damp the
impression of its weighty truthfulness. It was perfect! Adulation
of the young Sir Willoughby's beauty and wit, and aristocratic
bearing and mien, and of his moral virtues, was common; welcome if
you like, as a form of homage; but common, almost vulgar, beside
Mrs. Mountstuart's quiet little touch of nature. In seeming to say
infinitely less than others, as Miss Isabel Patterne pointed out
to Lady Busshe, Mrs. Mountstuart comprised all that the others had
said, by showing the needlessness of allusions to the saliently
evident. She was the aristocrat reproving the provincial. "He is
everything you have had the goodness to remark, ladies and dear
sirs, he talks charmingly, dances divinely, rides with the air of
a commander-in-chief, has the most natural grand pose possible
without ceasing for a moment to be the young English gentleman he
is. Alcibiades, fresh from a Louis IV perruquier, could not
surpass him: whatever you please; I could outdo you in sublime
comparisons, were I minded to pelt him. Have you noticed that he
has a leg?"

So might it be amplified. A simple-seeming word of this import is
the triumph of the spiritual, and where it passes for coin of
value, the society has reached a high refinement: Arcadian by the
aesthetic route. Observation of Willoughby was not, as Miss
Eleanor Patterne pointed out to Lady Culmer, drawn down to the
leg, but directed to estimate him from the leg upward. That,
however, is prosaic. Dwell a short space on Mrs. Mountstuart's
word; and whither, into what fair region, and with how decorously
voluptuous a sensation, do not we fly, who have, through mournful
veneration of the Martyr Charles, a coy attachment to the Court of
his Merrie Son, where the leg was ribanded with love-knots and
reigned. Oh! it was a naughty Court. Yet have we dreamed of it as
the period when an English cavalier was grace incarnate; far from
the boor now hustling us in another sphere; beautifully mannered,
every gesture dulcet. And if the ladies were ... we will hope they
have been traduced. But if they were, if they were too tender, ah!
gentlemen were gentlemen then--worth perishing for! There is this
dream in the English country; and it must be an aspiration after
some form of melodious gentlemanliness which is imagined to have
inhabited the island at one time; as among our poets the dream of
the period of a circle of chivalry here is encouraged for the
pleasure of the imagination.

Mrs. Mountstuart touched a thrilling chord. "In spite of men's
hateful modern costume, you see he has a leg."

That is, the leg of the born cavalier is before you: and obscure
it as you will, dress degenerately, there it is for ladies who
have eyes. You see it: or, you see he has it. Miss Isabel and Miss
Eleanor disputed the incidence of the emphasis, but surely, though
a slight difference of meaning may be heard, either will do: many,
with a good show of reason, throw the accent upon leg. And the
ladies knew for a fact that Willoughby's leg was exquisite; he had
a cavalier court-suit in his wardrobe. Mrs. Mountstuart signified
that the leg was to be seen because it was a burning leg. There it
is, and it will shine through! He has the leg of Rochester,
Buckingham, Dorset, Suckling; the leg that smiles, that winks, is
obsequious to you, yet perforce of beauty self-satisfied; that
twinkles to a tender midway between imperiousness and
seductiveness, audacity and discretion; between "You shall worship
me", and "I am devoted to you;" is your lord, your slave,
alternately and in one. It is a leg of ebb and flow and high-tide
ripples. Such a leg, when it has done with pretending to retire,
will walk straight into the hearts of women. Nothing so fatal to
them.

Self-satisfied it must be. Humbleness does not win multitudes or
the sex. It must be vain to have a sheen. Captivating melodies (to
prove to you the unavoidableness of self-satisfaction when you
know that you have hit perfection), listen to them closely, have
an inner pipe of that conceit almost ludicrous when you detect the
chirp.

And you need not be reminded that he has the leg without
the naughtiness. You see eminent in him what we would fain
have brought about in a nation that has lost its leg in gaining
a possibly cleaner morality. And that is often contested; but
there is no doubt of the loss of the leg.

Well, footmen and courtiers and Scottish Highlanders, and the
corps de ballet, draymen too, have legs, and staring legs, shapely
enough. But what are they? not the modulated instrument we mean--
simply legs for leg-work, dumb as the brutes. Our cavalier's is
the poetic leg, a portent, a valiance. He has it as Cicero had a
tongue. It is a lute to scatter songs to his mistress; a rapier,
is she obdurate. In sooth a leg with brains in it, soul.

And its shadows are an ambush, its lights a surprise. It blushes,
it pales, can whisper, exclaim. It is a peep, a part revelation,
just sufferable, of the Olympian god--Jove playing carpet-knight.

For the young Sir Willoughby's family and his thoughtful admirers,
it is not too much to say that Mrs. Mountstuart's little word
fetched an epoch of our history to colour the evening of his
arrival at man's estate. He was all that Merrie Charles's court
should have been, subtracting not a sparkle from what it was.
Under this light he danced, and you may consider the effect of it
on his company.