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INNER ACTION IN THE NOVELS OE GEORGE MEREDITH WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO "ONE OP OUR CONQUERORS" Margaret Ann Harris Thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the University of London. September, 1969. ProQuest Number: 10096749 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest. ProQuest 10096749 Published by ProQuest LLC(2016). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 2 ABSTRACT My case for Meredith is that a discussion of his novels in terms of his acknowledged concern for analysing and representing inner action shows him as a more interesting and significant figure than is generally allowed. The usual ways of regarding his work, in terms of his ideas about the Comic Spirit or Nature, tend to overlook his conscious and respon­ sible exploration of the capacities of fiction throughout a career which spanned half a century. In his earlier works Meredith modified various popular forms of fiction, always resisting what he took to be conventional expectations of excitement in external action in favour of stressing the complex reality of the inner life. From The Egoist on his independence was even more strikingly manifested, and in both the themes and the techniques of his late novels he experimented further with "reading the inner as well as exhibiting the outer". Meredith's idiosyncratic style has always been subject to criticism and abuse because of its elliptical tortuosity. While it is both a dense and a mercurial mode, it is by no means ungoverned : the voice of Meredith as omniscient narrator is always present in his narrative. 3 but subtle and rapid stylistic variations are used to project attitudes in his characters and evoke atmosjphere. This ventriloq^i technique is one of his main methods of representing inner action : to the same end he also makes more than mechanical use of documentary devices such as tutelary books and letters; and his congenital allusiveness leads him to some peculiar exercises with imagery. As well as presenting Meredith's stylistic excesses in an extreme form. One of Our Conquerors provides a particular opportunity for considering Meredith's aims and methods since the manuscript of the novel survives, as well as an early draft. Consideration of Meredith's revisions points to a pressure to intensify his treat­ ment of inner actio n , to modify the natio n al theme, and to continue his expatiations on the purpose of fiction. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS A grant from the University of London Central Research Eund enabled me to visit the United States to carry out the work on Meredith's manuscripts from which Part Three of this thesis issued directly, and other sections benefitted. I am grateful for this opportunity, I wish to thank Professor Barbara Hardy for her guidance, and for being so generous of herself; Mrs. Gillian Beer, who has very kindly talked Meredith on a number of occasions; and the frie n d s without whose support the thesis would never have eventuated. REFERENCES AND ABBREVIATIONS The following abbreviations and cue-titles have been adopted. Coolidge Bertha Coolidge, A Bibliography of the Altschul Collection of George Meredith in the Yale University Library (New Haven 1931). ELH fA journal of English Literary History 1 JEGP Journal of English and Germanic Philology L etters W.M. Meredith, ed.. Letters of George Meredith (2 v o l s ., 1 9 1 2). MFS Modern F ic tio n Studies ma Modern Language Q uarterly MLR Modern Language Review NCF Nineteenth Century Fiction Notes and Queries PMLA [P u b licatio n s of the Modern Language A ssociation of America] REL Review of English L ite ra tu re RES Review of English Studies SEL Studies in English Literature VNL Victorian News Letter VS Victorian Studies Page references to the works of George Meredith are to the Memorial Edition (27 vols., 1909-11)# unless other­ wise indicated. CONTENTS Page PART ONE. CREDITE'S CAREER AS A NOVELIST I. INTRODUCTION 9 II. EXPECTATION AND INNOVATION 36 PART TWO. REPRESENTATION OF INNER ACTION III. THE PROBLEMS OF MEREDITH'S STYLE 101 IV. TECHNIQUES: DOCUMENTARY DEVICES 111 V. TECHNIQUES: STYLISTIC PROJECTION' I 33 VI. CHANGES OF HEART Am MIND 15I VII. IMAGERY 193 PART THREE. ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS VIII. THE COMPOSITION OF ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS 1. The Special Case 213 2 . "Across London Bridge" 225 3 . The Revision of A Conqueror 255 in Our Time: chapter i 4. The Revision of A Conqueror 275 in our Time: chapter ii Page 5 . "The London Walk Westward" 284 6. Nataly 292 7. Lakelands 298 8. "The Couple J u s tifie d of Love" 313 9 . Ne8ta and her Suitors 328 10. New Directions 347 11. Revision for Serial Publication 369 IX. THE ACHIEVEMENT OF ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS 374 A NOTE ON MEREDITH'S NOTES 377 SELECTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY 407 8 PART ONE MEREDITH'S CAREER AS A NOVELIST I . INTRODUCTION Most people who have heard of George Meredith, do not confuse him with George Eliot, and have sufficient notion of his work to realise that he wrote both poetry and prose, can produce a standard account of his career. Meredith is regarded as the author of two novels. The Ordeal of Richard Feverel and The Egoist; a handful of poetry, from which Modern Love is culled as worthy of a tte n tio n ; and the essay on "The Idea of Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit"; and there the historians stop, apparently feeling no compunction to place his achievement once it has been described in these terms. Hence there emerges the image of Meredith as a jo v ial and harmless eccen tric, urging h is somewhat idio sy n cratic notions about the Comic Spirit in more than slightly idiosyncratic language; and this figure has been hailed with awe (by his more infatuated contemporaries), with delight in this simple healthy world-view (an attitude fairly common in the first decades of this century), or, most recently, with scorn at his involutions and precious­ ness . None of these possible attitudes - and they are possible, each emphasising a particular aspect of the man and his work - does Meredith justice. Indeed, as 1 0 so many have found, It is no simple matter to give him his due. Even so warm an admirer as R.L. Stevenson wrote of Meredith to Henry James in 1888 "He is not an easy man to be yourself with; there is so much of him, and the veracity and the high athletic intellectual humbug are so intermixed."^ I can only concur with Stevenson's mixture of affection and exasperation, and suggest that so individual a writer as Meredith, one whose work produces such vehement reactions, must merit more than a summary dismissal. My claims for him are based on his fiction - a hard fate for a man who thought himself pre-eminently a poet - and proceed from the assertion that while he is not a great novelist, he is an important major one who wrote a great novel. The Egoist, and approaches greatness in his other works, notably Diana of the Crossways. His thirteen complete novels among their other achieve­ ments reflect the recognition in the latter part of the nineteenth century that men do have an inner life which is as proper a subject for prose fiction as their observable actions; and it was primarily this recognition along with the allied understanding of the nature of consciousness deriving from developments in psychological theory, which 1. Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson: A Record of Friendship and Criticism, ed. Janet Adam Smith (1948), p .170. 1 1 conditioned the emergence of the characteristic con­ centration of the twentieth-century novel on what Lawrence called "putting the action inside". This is not to suggest that the twentieth century discovered the inner life: the discovery was rather that it was possible systematically to analyse and represent its workings. And I maintain that to regard Meredith's fiction in terms of his awareness of such possibilities is to see him as at once more representative of tenden­ cies in the novel, and more intrinsically interesting, than his reputation would appear to allow. Any critical rehabilitation of Meredith must in the first instance be directed towards modifying the judgement generally implicit, and specifically laid down for example in The Great Tradition, that Meredith as a poet may be disregarded, and as a novelist ignored. The grounds for his dismissal are apparently that his matter is naive and h is manner awkward, esp ecially when set against Jamesian norms. Dr. Leavis localises his charges: he is talking of the déraciné James, for whom the congenial soil and climate were in Europe rather than in the country of his birth. There is still some idealizing charm about his English country-house in The Portrait of a Lady, but that book is one of the classics of the language, and we can't simply regret the conditions that produced something so finely imagined. It is what The Egoist is supposed 12 to be. Compare the two books, and the greatness of Henry James as intellectual poet-novelist of 'high civilization' comes out in a way that, even for the most innocently deferential reader, should dispose of Meredith's pretensions f o r e v e r .

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