The Sun.
London, England, 1864-04-26 00:00:00

LITERATURE,

George Meredith's New Work,

Emilia in England. By George Meredith. Three
vols. Chapman and All.

"Emilia in England" is a book to be read with
a relish. It is flavoured with the salt of wit. It
is the work of a true Artiet, and—better still than
that, according to our notion of things—it is
the work of a genuine and delightful Humorist.
For, very cordially indeed do we go with our
author himself where he insists—he is descant-
ing at the moment upon The Pitfall of Senti-
ment—that man is, par excellence, the Laughing
Animal : "and," says he, "at the end of en
infinite search, the philospher finds himself
clinging to laughter as the best of human fruit,
purely human, and sane, and comforting." Nay,
we are fain to continue our (potation with a very
especiahappEcetion of the writer's own words to
himself. " So, let us be cordially thankful to those
[George Meredith is assuredly one of them] who
furnish matter for sound, embracing laughter." It
is some few years ago, Inge, since the writer of
these three volumes Pont took our admiration by
storm wish a ':etirst of this very laughter—sound
andemb:acing—purely human, and sane, and com-
fort. ag. This, namely, was when he made his first
appearance as a Humorist, bearing in his hand the
strangest, wildest, most fantastic apologue that
surely mortal man ever conceived, to wit, " The
Shaving of Shagpat"—hight an Arabian (cer-
tainly, judging from our own experiences, a tho-
roughly English) Entertainment. Since then the
author of that " Shaving of Shagpat" has made more
signal and conspicuous advances in the cultivation
of w hat is, at once, his rare art and his rare gift as a
Humorist then even his most sanguine, or rather,
it should rather be said, his most confiding appre-
ciators could at the outset have anticipated. His
audience, probably, even now, is rather select than
wide—but it will widen! As surely, indeed, as his
own human sympathies and, for that matter also,
his own highly cultivated intellectual powers, have
all this while been widening into a fuller and more
perfect mastery over his art as a Novelist. Among the
most original writers of fiction in our time—an age,
too, notable for its great novelists—Mr, Meredith,
though we believe one of the youngest, certainly
one of the latest corners amongst them, has already
assumed to himself a distinguished position—one
that, estimated by the mere rate of its advaice, ap-
pears t'h be securing for him the certainty of a per-
blenent reputation in our literature. Among oar
younger writers we know not anyone who applies
himself to the cultivation and development of his
powers more thoroughly or, we might even say it,
more conscientiously. As yet, each work of his has
been an improvement upon its predecessor. And
that of itself, surely, is something. That of itself is
an attestation that the anthor, in his character as an
Artist, is perpetually bent upon applying his powers
to the utmost possible advantage—so writing
throughout that he, himself, is manifestly the most
fastidious of his critics. Stage by stage in the
onward progress of his career as Novelist, he has
so unmistakably risen, by steadily pursuing
the road he, himself, at the outset deli•
berately selected as the one he would traverse
by preference, that at each pause, so to speak,
two indications of the ascent are distinctiy appre-
ciable—a purer atmosphere is breathed, and the
horizon is enlarged. Three by three, Mr. Meredith
has already in a very few years contributed
nine volumes to our imaginative literature. And
nine volumes, not merely of story, bat of literature.
"The Ordeal of Richard Feverell" was, after its
fashion, as much of an advance upon "The Shaving
of Shagpat" as the history of the Ordeal itself was
surpassed in human scope, so to speak, and diversity
of character by the record of the adventures (in
search of a position) experienced by Evan Harring-
ton, or rather, by Evan's three aspiring sisters, the
most aspiring amongst them all being that won-
derful creature, the Countess. Here, again, in
his new work of fiction, " Emilia in England,"
Mr. Meredith appears to us to have advanced far
beyond the position he assumed as the writer of
Evan Herrington." Strangely enough, as in that
novel, Three Sisters, though none of them the
Heroine of the tale, are conspicuous among the
foremost of the female characters introduced. Three
sisters, they are, moreover, who, like those of Evau
Harrington, are yearning body and soul to rise in life
—that is, in social position. Otherwise, however, the
two works are as entirely different as can well be im-
agined. Emilia Belloni—in some respects the most
admirable creature of George Meredith's imagina-
tion—is as far beyond Ruse Jocelyn, as a heroine as
the book itself, " Emilia in England," as a work of
art, surpasses " Evan Harington.4 Here, in
"Emilia in England," the Misses Pole are the three
sisters—Pole, Polar, and North Pole, as they are
not unwilling themselves to be designated—
Pole, Polony, and Maypole, as they are cruelly
dubbed to their exceeOing anguish by those vexa-
tious neighbours of theirs, the Tinsleys—horrid
vulgarians ! They, the Poles, that is, are
the daughters of a City of London Merchant,
about whose solvency the reader is kept in doubt—
sometimes even (in the very crises of the story) in
a very agony of doubt—throughout the narrative.
Wilfrid, the only son of this Merchant-Prince, or
Merchant... Beggar (we hardly know which it is to
be until the very end), is the Young Lover of the
story—the lover, that is, of Emilia Belloni, the
Emilia who is in England. He is the lover also of
Lady Charlotte, In other words, he is, all through
the work, a sort of “ young Macheath of a Guards-
man—and you fee], alternately, as you read about
his lovOis and bewilderments, "how happy could he
be with either, were t'other dear charmer away,"
Now protesting his passion for Emilia, now for Lady
Charlotte. As to his sisters, again—each of them
has a story, a love-story or a flirtation of her own,
Cornelia, Arabella, and Adele. A sentimental Baro-
net is refrigerated by the first of them (the North
Pole) into suicide. The other two find their coquet-
ries terminate without even the questionable result
in either instance, of a long engagement. The
broader fun of the story is derived from the ape
pearances put in, every now and then, all through
the three volumes by a Greek lunatic about music,
one Mr. Pericles, and a wonderful Irish widow (the
broad comedy of the book), one Mrs. Chump. A
good-natured, fat, vulgar specimen of a genuine
Celtic parvenu, talking (so capitally !) not simply
Irish, but as Adele wickedly exclaims, in
an agony of shame Irish steeped in brine—
pickled Irish! Here is a momentary glimpse of the
bitter anguish of suppressed laughter that poor little
Mrs. Lupin (who is 0116:fled with an intense sense
of the ludicrous) is subjected to (before company)
by the absurdities of Mrs. Chump and her
stupendous dialect ! " The poor lady was affected
so keenly that, in instances where one of her sex
and position in the social scale is bound to perish
rather than let even the shadow of a laugh appear,
or any sign of fleshly perception or sympathy peep
out, she was seen to be mutely, shockingly,
penitentially convulsed—a degrading sight."
Excellent is the covert drollery dexterously kept
up by our author all through the work, like a very
flattering shuttlecock of ridicule, about the Nice
Feelings and the Fine Shades. His affected alter-
cation, too, with that other (inner) self of hie, The
Philosopher,is in its waya something quite inimitable!
But, as exemplars of George Meredith at his very
best as a Humorist, commend us to those glorious,
side-splitting delineations by him of the beery
olubmen down at Brookfield—to his delightful re-
port of Tom Breaks' effort at oratory—to his report
of Tom's strenuous but futile attempt to lug in by
the head and shoulders the application of the
apologue of the Bundle of Sticks, or finally to his
Homeric account of Tom's having led on against him
and his followers, later on, upon that same day, of
the rival clubmen, those irate clubmen, who sally
forth to indulge the foe with a tastetof music to the
tune, as one of them comically puts it, of "whack
fol 10l !" Mr. Meredith, too, is wonderfully worth
while listening to when he is gravely descanting
upon the Virtues Residing in a Tail Coat, or indulg-
ing in a philosophical disquisition upon the diverse
modes of wearing a hat ! Some, at least, among
these most exhilarating indications of his rare
powers as a humorist, we must needs transfer to our
columns, if only as a whiff of the laughing gas here