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Meredith's Literary Theory and Science: Realism Versus the Comic Spirit
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
The purpose of this paper is to correlate George Meredith's theory of literature with his philosophy of evolution. At the present time, Meredith's fame rests primarily upon his conception of the Comic Spirit, brilliantly elaborated in the Essay on Comedy and exemplified in many of the novels. His acceptance of natural evolution, and his extension of its principles into a threefold hierarchy of physical, mental, and spiritual attainment, are apparent in his philosophy and poetry, but are often obscured by the very brilliance of the comic social analysis in the novels. The influence is there none the less; it is readily observed in the psychological springs that move the more important characters, and it helps to shape Meredith's attitude toward fiction as a whole. The present study pertains chiefly to this second aspect—the relation between Meredith's evolutionary doctrine and the theory of literature by which he approached his own and his contemporaries' writing.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1938
References
1 The writer has considered it unnecessary to repeat here the readily available summaries of Meredith's system of evolution. For a convenient statement of this doctrine as it is used throughout this paper, the reader is referred to the Cambridge History of English Literature, xiii, 492, or J. B. Priestley's George Meredith, pp. 72–78.
2 See Matz, B. W., “George Meredith as Publisher's Reader,” The Fortnightly Review, lxxxvi (August, 1909), 282–298.
3 Diana of the Crossways, Ch. xxiv.
3a Ibid.
4 Meredith, Letters Collected and Edited by his Son (New York, 1912), i, 20.
5 Letters, ii, 401.
6 Ch. xiii.
7 Ch. xix.
8 Diana of the Crossways, Ch. xxiv.
9 Meredith's group of four poems, “The Vital Choice,” “With the Huntress,” “With the Persuader,” and “The Test of Manhood,” 1892, compares the rival claims of ascetic Artemis and warmly sensual Aphrodite. J. W. Cunliffe in his English Literature during the Last Half-Century (c. 1919), p. 24, considers the golden mean here presented to be Meredith's “solution of the problem of conduct”:
His task to hold them both in breast, and yield
Their dues to each, and of their war be field.
In Diana of the Crossways, Ch. xxxvii, Meredith in a similar manner analyzes love between the sexes, summarized as “the speeding of us, compact of what we are, between the ascetic rocks and the sensual whirlpools.”
10 Diana of the Crossways, Ch. i.
11 Letters, i, 156.
12 Prelude to The Egoist.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid.
17 “An Essay on Comedy,” 1877, in Miscellaneous Prose (London, 1910), p. 47.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid., p. 45.
20 “The Woods of Westermain,” 1883.
21 “An Essay on Comedy,” pp. 44–45.
22 W. T. Young, “George Meredith, Samuel Butler, George Gissing,” in The Cambridge History of English Literature, xiii (1917), 494.