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Unknown - "The Bible, King James version, Book 45: Romans"

Francis Hueffer (translator) - "Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2"

Ralph Centennius - "The Dominion in 1983"

George Meredith - "The Shaving of Shagpat, v3"

The Tragic Comedians, Complete

G >> George Meredith >> The Tragic Comedians, Complete




Next to the sight of Alvan her friend Marko was welcome. The youth
visited her in the evening, and with the glitter of his large black eyes
bent to her, and began talking incomprehensibly of leave-taking and
farewell, until she cried aloud that she had riddles enough: one was too
much. What had he to say? She gave him her hand to encourage him. She
listened, and soon it was her hand that mastered his in the grasp, though
she was putting questions incredulously, with an understanding duller
than her instinct. Or how if the frightful instinct while she listened
shot lightnings in her head, whose revelations were too intelligible to
be looked at? We think it devilish when our old nature is incandescent to
talk to us in this way, kindled by its vilest in hoping, hungering, and
fearing; and we call on the civilized mind to disown it. The tightened
grasp of her hand confessed her understanding of the thing she pressed to
hear repeated, for the sake of seeming to herself to repudiate it under
an accumulating horror, at the same time that the repetition doubly and
trebly confirmed it, so as to exonerate her criminal sensations by
casting the whole burden on the material fact.

Marko, with her father's consent and the approval of the friends of the
family, had taken up Alvan's challenge! That was the tale. She saw him
dead in the act of telling it.

'What?' she cried: 'what?' and then: 'You?' and her fingers were bonier
in their clutch: 'Let me hear. It can't be!' She snapped at herself for
not pitying him more but a sword had flashed to cut her gordian knot: she
her saw him dead, the obstacle removed, the man whom her parents opposed
to Alvan swept away: she saw him as a black gate breaking to a flood of
light. She had never invoked it, never wished, never dreamed it, but if
it was to be? . . . 'Oh! impossible. One of us is crazy. You to fight?
. . . they put it upon you? You fight him? But it is cruel, it is
abominable. Incredible! You have accepted the challenge, you say?'

He answered that he had, and gazed into her eyes for love.

She blinked over them, crying out against parents and friends for their
heartlessness in permitting him to fight.

'This is positive? This is really true?' she said, burning and dreading
to realize the magical change it pointed on, and touching him with her
other hand, loathing herself, loathing parents and friends who had
brought her to the plight of desiring some terrible event in sheer
necessity. Not she, it was the situation they had created which was
guilty! By dint of calling out on their heartlessness, and a spur of
conscience, she roused the feeling of compassion:

'But, Marko! Marko! poor child! you cannot fight; you have never fired a
pistol or a gun in your life. Your health was always too delicate for
these habits of men; and you could not pull a trigger taking aim, do you
not know?'

'I have been practising for a couple of hours to-day,' he said.

Compassion thrilled her. 'A couple of hours! Unhappy boy! But do you not
know that he is a dead shot? He is famous for his aim. He never misses.
He can do all the duellist's wonders both with sword and pistol, and that
is why he was respected when he refused the duel because he--before these
parents of mine drove him . . . and me! I think we are both mad--he
despised duelling. He! He! Alvan! who has challenged my father! I have
heard him speak of duelling as cowardly. But what is he? what has he
changed to? And it would be cowardly to kill you, Marko.'

'I take my chance,' Marko said.

'You have no chance. His aim is unerring.' She insisted on the deadliness
of his aim, and dwelt on it with a gloating delight that her conscience
approved, for she was persuading the youth to shun his fatal aim.

If you stood against him he would not spare you--perhaps not; I fear he
would not, as far as I know him now. He can be terrible in wrath. I think
he would warn you; but two men face to face! and he suspecting that you
cross his path! Find some way of avoiding him. Do, I entreat you. By your
love of me! Oh! no blood. I do not want to lose you. I could not bear
it.'

'Would you regret me?' said he.

Her eyes fell on his, and the beauty of those great dark eyes made her
fondness for him legible. He caused her a spasm of anguish, foreknowing
him doomed. She thought that haply this devoted heart was predestined to
be the sacrifice which should bring her round to Alvan. She murmured
phrases of dissuasion until her hollow voice broke; she wept for being
speechless, and turned upon Providence and her parents, in railing at
whom a voice of no ominous empty sound was given her; and still she felt
more warmly than railing expressed, only her voice shrank back from a
tone of feeling. She consoled herself with the reflection that utterance
was inadequate. Besides, her active good sense echoed Marko ringingly
when he cited the usages of their world and the impossibility of his
withdrawing or wishing to withdraw from the line of a challenge accepted.
It was destiny. She bowed her head lower and lower, oppressed without and
within, unwilling to look at him. She did not look when he left her.

The silence of him encouraged her head to rise. She stared about: his
phantom seemed present, and for a time she beheld him both upright in
life and stretched in death. It could not be her fault that he should
die! it was the fatality. How strange it was! Providence, after bitterly
misusing her, offered this reparation through the death of Marko.

Possibly she ought to run out and beseech Alvan to spare the innocent
youth. She stood up trembling on her legs. She called to Alvan. 'Do not
put blood between us. Oh! I love you more than ever. Why did you let that
horrible man you take for a friend come here? I hate him, and cannot feel
my love of you when I see him. He chills me to the bone. He made me say
the reverse of what was in my heart. But spare poor Marko! You have no
cause for jealousy. You would be above it, if you had. Do not aim; fire
in the air. Do not let me kiss that hand and think . . .'

She sank to her chair, exclaiming: 'I am a prisoner!' She could not walk
two steps; she was imprisoned by the interdict of the house and the
paralysis of her limbs. Providence decreed that she must abide the
result. Dread Power! To be dragged to her happiness through a river of
blood was indeed dreadful, but the devotional sense of reliance upon
hidden wisdom in the direction of human affairs when it appears
considerate of our wishes, inspirited her to be ready for what Providence
was about to do, mysterious in its beneficence that it was! It is the
dark goddess Fortune to the craven. The craven with desires will offer up
bloody sacrifices to it submissively. The craven, with desires expecting
to be blest, is a zealot of the faith which ascribes the direction of
events to the outer world. Her soul was in full song to that contriving
agency, and she with the paralyzed limbs became practically active,
darting here and there over the room, burning letters, packing a portable
bundle of clothes, in preparation for the domestic confusion of the
morrow when the body of Marko would be driven to their door, and amid the
wailing and the hubbub she would escape unnoticed to Alvan,
Providence-guided! Out of the house would then signify assuredly to
Alvan's arms.

The prospect might have seemed too heavenly to be realizable had she not
been sensible of paying heavily for it; and thus, as he would wish to be,
was Marko of double service to her; for she was truly fond of the
beautiful and chivalrous youth, and far from wishing to lose him. His
blood was on the heads of those who permitted him to face the danger! She
would have felt for him still more tenderly if it were permitted to a
woman's heart to enfold two men at a time. This, it would seem, she
cannot do: she is compelled by the painful restriction sadly to consent
that one of them should be swept away.

Night passed dragging and galloping. In the very early light she thought
of adding some ornaments to her bundle of necessaries. She learnt of the
object of her present faith to be provident on her own behalf, and
dressed in two of certain garments which would have swollen her bundle
too much.

This was the day of Providence: she had strung herself to do her part in
it and gone through the pathos of her fatalism above stairs in her
bedroom before Marko took his final farewell of her, so she could speak
her 'Heaven be with you!' unshaken, though sadly. Her father had
returned. To be away from him, and close to her bundle, she hurried to
her chamber and awaited the catastrophe, like one expecting to be raised
from the vaults. Carriage, wheels would give her the first intimation of
it. Slow, very slow, would imply badly wounded, she thought: dead, if the
carriage stopped some steps from the house and one of the seconds of the
poor boy descended to make the melancholy announcement. She could not but
apprehend the remorselessness of the decree. Death, it would probably be!
Alvan had resolved to sweep him off the earth. She could not blame Alvan
for his desperate passion, though pitying the victim of it. In any case
the instant of the arrival of the carriage was her opportunity marked by
the finger of Providence rendered visible, and she sat rocking her parcel
on her lap. Her love of Alvan now was mixed with an alluring terror of
him as an immediate death-dealer who stood against red-streaked heavens,
more grandly satanic in his angry mightiness than she had ever realized
that figure, and she, trembled and shuddered, fearing to meet him,
yearning to be taken to him, to close her eyes on his breast in blindest
happiness. She gave the very sob for the occasion.

A carriage drove at full speed to the door. Full speed could not be the
pace for a funeral load. That was a visitor to her father on business.
She waited for fresh wheels, telling herself she would be patient and
must be ready.

Her pathos ways ready and scarcely controllable. The tear thickened on
her eyelid as she projected her mind on the grief she would soon be
undergoing for Marko: or at least she would undergo it subsequently; she
would certainly mourn for him. She dared not proceed to an accumulated
enumeration of his merits, as her knowledge of the secret of pathos knew
to be most moving, in an extreme fear that she might weaken her required
energies for action at the approaching signal.

Feet came rushing up the stairs: her door was thrown open, and the living
Marko, stranger than a dead, stood present. He had in his look an
expectation that she would be glad to behold him, and he asked her, and
she said: 'Oh, yes, she was glad, of course.' She was glad that Alvan had
pardoned him for his rashness; she was vexed that her projected confusion
of the household had been thwarted: vexed, petrified with astonishment.

'But how if I tell you that Alvan is wounded?' he almost wept to say.

Clotilde informs the world that she laughed on hearing this. She was
unaware of her ground for laughing: It was the laugh of the tragic
comedian.

Could one believe in a Providence capable of letting such a sapling and
weakling strike down the most magnificent stature upon earth?

'You--him!' she said, in the tremendous compression of her contempt.

She laughed. The world is upside down--a world without light, or pointing
finger, or affection for special favourites, and therefore bereft of all
mysterious and attractive wisdom, a crazy world, a corpse of a world--if
this be true!

But it can still be disbelieved.

He stood by her dejectedly, and she sent him flying with a repulsive,
'Leave me!' The youth had too much on his conscience to let him linger.
His manner of going smote her brain.

Was it credible? Was it possible to think of Alvan wounded?--the giant
laid on his back and in the hands of the leech? Assuredly it was a
mockery of all calculations. She could not conjure up the picture of him,
and her emotions were merely struck and stunned. If this be true!

But it can be resolutely disbelieved.

We can put it before Providence to cleanse itself of this thing, or
suffer the consequence that we now and for ever quit our worship, lose
our faith in it and our secret respect. She heard Marko's tale confirmed,
whispers of leaden import, physicians' rumours, and she doubted. She
clung insanely to her incredulity. Laughter had been slain, but not her
belief in the invincibility of Alvan; she could not imagine him
overthrown in a conflict--and by a hand that she had taken and twisted in
her woman's hand subduingly! He, the unerring shot, laid low by one who
had never burnt powder till the day before the duel! It was easier to
remain incredulous notwithstanding the gradational distinctness of the
whispers. She dashed her 'Impossible!' at Providence, conceived the tale
in wilful and almost buoyant self-deception to be a conspiracy in the
family to hide from her Alvan's magnanimous dismissal of poor Marko from
the field of strife. That was the most evident fact. She ran through
delusion and delusion, exhausting each and hugging it after the false
life was out.

So violent was the opposition to reason in the idea of Alvans descending
to the duel and falling by the hand of Marko, that it cried to be
rebutted by laughter: and she could not, she could laugh no more, nor
imagine laughing, though she could say of the people of the house, 'They
act it well!' and hate them for the serious whispering air, and the
dropping of medical terms and weights of drugs, which robbed her of what
her instinct told her was the surest weapon for combating deception.
Them, however, and their acting she could have with stood enough to
silently discredit them through sheer virulence of a hatred that proved
them to be duly credited. But her savage wilfulness could not resist the
look of Marko. She had to yield up her breast to the truth, and stimulate
further unbelief lest her loaded heart should force her to run to the
wounded lion's bedside, and hear his reproaches. She had to cheat her
heart, and the weak thing consented to it, loathing her for the
imposture. Seeing Marko too, assured of it by his broken look, the
terrible mournfulness less than the horrible irony of the truth gnawed
within her. It spoke to her in metal, not in flesh. It haunted her
feelings and her faint imaginations alienly. It discoloured, it scorned
the earth, and earth's teachings, and the understanding of life. Rational
clearness at all avenues was blurred by it. The thought that Alvan lay
wounded and in danger, was one thought: that Marko had stretched him
there, was quite another, and was a livid eclipsing thought through which
her grief had to work its way to get to heat and a state of burning. She
knew not in truth what to feel: the craven's dilemma when yet feeling
much. Anger at Providence--rose uppermost. She had so shifted and wound
about, and so pulled her heart to pieces, that she could no longer sanely
and with wholeness encounter a shock: she had no sensation firm enough to
be stamped by a signet.

Even on the fatal third day, when Marko, white as his shrouded
antagonist, led her to the garden of the house, and there said the word
of death, an execrating amazement, framing the thought 'Why is it not
Alvan who speaks?' rose beside her gaping conception of her loss. She
framed it as an earnest interrogation for the half minute before misery
had possession of her, coming down like a cloud. Providence then was too
shadowy a thing to upbraid. She could not blame herself, for the
intensity of her suffering testified to the bitter realness of her love
of the dead man. Her craven's instinct to make a sacrifice of others flew
with claws of hatred at her parents. These she offered up, and the spirit
presiding in her appears to have accepted them as proper substitutes for
her conscience.




CHAPTER XIX

Alvan was dead. The shot of his adversary, accidentally well-directed,
had struck him mortally. He died on the morning of the third day after
the duel. There had been no hope that he could survive, and his agonies
made a speedy dissolution desirable by those most wishing him to live.

The baroness had her summons to hurry to him after his first swoon. She
was his nurse and late confidante a tearless woman, rigid in service.
Death relaxed his hold in her hand. He met his fate like the valiant soul
he was. Haply if he had lingered without the sweats of bodily tortures to
stay reflectiveness, he, also, in the strangeness of his prostration,
might have cast a thought on the irony of the fates felling a man like
him by a youngster's hand and for a shallow girl! He might have fathered
some jest at life, with rueful relish of the flavour: for such is our
manner of commenting on ourselves when we come to shipwreck through
unseaworthy pretensions. There was no interval on his passage from
anguish to immobility.

Silent was that house of many chambers. That mass of humanity profusely
mixed of good and evil, of generous ire and mutinous, of the passion for
the future of mankind and vanity of person, magnanimity and sensualism,
high judgement, reckless indiscipline, chivalry, savagery, solidity,
fragmentariness, was dust.

The two men composing it, the untamed and the candidate for citizenship,
in mutual dissension pulled it down. He perished of his weakness, but it
was a strong man that fell. If his end was unheroic, the blot does not
overshadow his life. His end was a derision because the animal in him ran
him unchained and bounding to it. A stormy blood made wreck of a splendid
intelligence. Yet they that pronounce over him the ordinary fatalistic
epitaph of the foregone and done, which is the wisdom of men measuring
the dead by the last word of a lamentable history, should pause to think
whether fool or madman is the title for one who was a zealous worker,
respected by great heads of his time, acknowledged the head of the
voluminous coil of the working people, and who, as we have seen,
insensibly though these wrought within him, was getting to purer fires
through his coarser when the final intemperateness drove him to ruin. As
little was he the vanished God whom his working people hailed deploringly
on the long procession of his remains from city to city under charge of
the baroness. That last word of his history ridicules the eulogy of
partisan and devotee, and to commit the excess of worshipping is to
conjure up by contrast a vulgar giant: for truth will have her just
proportions, and vindicates herself upon a figure over-idealized by
bidding it grimace, leaving appraisers to get the balance of the two
extremes. He was neither fool nor madman, nor man to be adored: his last
temptation caught him in the season before he had subdued his blood, and
amid the multitudinously simple of this world, stamped him a tragic
comedian: that is, a grand pretender, a self-deceiver, one of the lividly
ludicrous, whom we cannot laugh at, but must contemplate, to distinguish
where their character strikes the note of discord with life; for
otherwise, in the reflection of their history, life will seem a thing
demoniacally inclined by fits to antic and dive into gulfs. The
characters of the hosts of men are of the simple order of the comic; not
many are of a stature and a complexity calling for the junction of the
two Muses to name them.

While for his devotees he lay still warm in the earth, that other, the
woman, poor Clotilde, astonished her compatriots by passing comedy and
tragic comedy with the gift of her hand to the hand which had slain
Alvan. In sooth, the explanation is not so hard when we recollect our
knowledge of her. It was a gentle youth; her parents urged her to it: a
particular letter, the letter of the challenge to her father, besliming
her, was shown;--a hideous provocation pushed to the foullest. Who can
blame Prince Marko? who had ever given sign of more noble bravery than
he? He had stood to defend her name and fame. He was very love, the never
extinguished torch of love. And he hung on her for the little of life
appearing to remain to him. Before heaven he was guiltless. He was good.
Her misery had shrunk her into nothingness, and she rose out of
nothingness cold and bloodless, bearing a thought that she might make a
good youth happy, or nurse him sinking--be of that use. Besides he was a
refuge from the roof of her parents. She shut her eyes on the past, sure
of his goodness; goodness, on her return to some sense of being, she
prized above other virtues, and perhaps she had a fancy that to be allied
to it was to be doing good. After a few months she buried him. From that
day, or it may be, on her marriage day, her heart was Alvan's. Years
later she wrote her version of the story, not sparing herself so much as
she supposed. Providence and her parents were not forgiven. But as we are
in her debt for some instruction, she may now be suffered to go.

ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS

A tragic comedian: that is, a grand pretender, a self-deceiver
Above all things I detest the writing for money
At the age of forty, men that love love rootedly
Barriers are for those who cannot fly
Be good and dull, and please everybody
Beginning to have a movement to kiss the whip
Centres of polished barbarism known as aristocratic societies
Clotilde fenced, which is half a confession
Comparisons will thrust themselves on minds disordered
Compromise is virtual death
Conservative, whose astounded state paralyzes his wrath
Creatures that wait for circumstances to bring the change
Dignitary, and he passed under the bondage of that position
Dissent rings out finely, and approval is a feeble murmur
Do you judge of heroes as of lesser men?
Empanelled to deliver verdicts upon the ways of women
Fantastical
Finishing touches to the negligence
Giant Vanity urged Giant Energy to make use of Giant Duplicity
Gone to pieces with an injured lover's babble
Gradations appear to be unknown to you
He had to go, he must, he has to be always going
He stormed her and consented to be beaten
Hesitating strangeness that sometimes gathers during absences
His violent earnestness, his imperial self-confidence
His apparent cynicism is sheer irritability
Hosts of men are of the simple order of the comic
I give my self, I do not sell
I have learnt as much from light literature as from heavy
I would wait till he flung you off, and kneel to you
If you have this creative soul, be the slave of your creature
Imagination she has, for a source of strength in the future days
Looking on him was listening
Love the difficulty better than the woman
Men in love are children with their mistresses
Metaphysician's treatise on Nature: a torch to see the sunrise
Music in Italy? Amorous and martial, brainless and monotonous
Night has little mercy for the self-reproachful
Not much esteem for non-professional actresses
Not in a situation that could bear of her blaming herself
O for yesterday!
Pact between cowardice and comfort under the title of expediency
Philosophy skimmed, and realistic romances deep-sounded
Polished barbarism
Professional widows
Providence and her parents were not forgiven
Scorned him for listening to the hesitations (hers)
Self-consoled when they are not self-justified
She ran through delusion and delusion, exhausting each
She felt in him a maker of facts
Strength in love is the sole sincerity
The worst of omens is delay
The way is clear: we have only to take the step
The brainless in Art and in Statecraft
Time is due to us, and the minutes are our gold slipping away
Time and strength run to waste in retarding the inevitable
To have no sympathy with the playful mind is not to have a mind
Trick for killing time without hurting him
Two wishes make a will
Venerated by his followers, well hated by his enemies
Want of courage is want of sense
We shall not be rich--nor poor
Weak souls are much moved by having the pathos on their side
Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?
Win you--temperately, let us hope; by storm, if need be
Work of extravagance upon perceptibly plain matter
World voluntarily opens a path to those who step determinedly
World voluntarily opens a path to those who step determinedly