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Inherent Principles of Order in Richard Feverel

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

John W. Morris
John W. Morris*
Affiliation:
Wisconsin State College, Eau Claire
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Extract

A father who is deserted by his wife and who sets out to rear his son according to a “scientific System” unconsciously founded on his distrust of women and his own wounded pride should be an ideal subject for comedy. The system, running, as it must, counter to common sense and human nature, is bound to fail. And its collapse, with the consequent exposure of the father's false pride and the reassertion of the collective wisdom of society, would provide the comic deflation and denouement. The laughter provoked by the discomfort of the father, underscored by a reaffirmation of the adequacy of common sense, would produce an appropriate comic catharsis. This same situation, of course, has its serious possibilities. The father may ruin his son's life. But not in comedy. Comedy says that the probabilities are that the son, common sense, and nature will overcome the false system of the father. And the comic artist, knowing well that the whole truth will spoil his comedy, is careful not to tell the whole truth—only the comic (probable) side of it. The dark spirit of tragedy always hovers just outside the bright circle drawn by comedy, but it must not be allowed to cross the line. In comedy, as in all art, what is ruled out is as important as what is included.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 78 , Issue 4-Part1 , September 1963 , pp. 333 - 340
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1963

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References

1 Quoted in J. A. Hammerton, George Meredith: His Life and Art in Anecdote and Criticism (Edinburgh, 1911), p. 203.

2 George Meredith: A Study of His Works and Personality (Oxford, 1918), p. 41.

3 The English Novel: A Short Critical History (New York, 1957), p. 279.

4 George Meredith (London, 1926), p. 145.

5 The History of the English Novel, viii (London, 1937), p. 320.

6 George Meredith: A Primer to the Novels (London, 1909), pp. 105–106; quoted in Hammerton, pp. 201–202; quoted in Hammerton, pp. 203–204.

7 Art and Substance in George Meredith: A Study in Narrative (Lincoln, Neb., 1953), p. 42.

8 The Ordeal of George Meredith: A Biography (New York, 1953), pp. 61–63.

9 For the description of comedy underlying this discussion, I am chiefly indebted to Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, 1957). I have also drawn much from the following: Albert Cook, The Dark Voyage and the Golden Mean (Cambridge, Mass., 1949); Paul Goodman, The Structure of Literature (Chicago, 1954); J. V. Cunningham, Tradition and Poetic Structure (Denver, Colo., 1960); Scott Buchanan, Poetry and Mathematics (New York, 1929); and Richard B. Sewall, The Vision of Tragedy (New Haven, 1959).

10 The Works of George Meredith, Memorial Edition (London, 1909), ii, 172–173—hereafter cited in my text by volume and page.

11 Sewall, p. 7.

12 “Lexicon Rhetoricae,” Critiques and Essays in Criticism 1920–1948, ed. Robert Wooster Stallman (New York, 1949), p. 234.