Some there are who are not quite guiltless of these failures, but Meredith is not one of them. He is unique also, except for the corroboration of George Eliot, in making the ironic interpretation of life in itself an object of satire, in so far as it is brought forward as an excuse for our deficiencies, for then it betrays a certain weakness in our mental processes. For this he has one direct spokesman and two or three dramatic examples. The former is the incisive Redworth, who is exasperated at this vicarious refuge claimed by needy human nature.[1]
"'Upon my word,' he burst out, 'I should like to write a
book of Fables, showing how donkeys get into grinding harness,
and dogs lose their bones, and fools have their sconces cracked,
and all run jabbering of the irony of Fate, to escape the annoyance
of tracing the causes. And what are they? Nine times
out of ten, plain want of patience, or some debt for indulgence,
- * * It's the seed we sow, individually or collectively.'"
Chief of the latter,—the dramatic examples,—is a youth
who, just returning from his father's funeral, with bitter
prospects ahead, encounters a being more wretched than
himself, a forsaken young woman shelterless, and desperately
ill.[2]
"Evan had just been accusing the heavens of conspiring
to disgrace him. Those patient heavens had listened, as is
their wont. They had viewed and not been disordered by his
mental frenzies. It is certainly hard that they do not come
down to us, and condescend to tell us what they mean, and be
dumb-foundered by the perspicuity of our arguments—the
argument, for instance, that they have not fashioned us for
the science of the shears, and do yet impel us to wield them."
