The Tragic Comedians. George Meredith
been known to turn from us altogether, never to turn back, so poor and shrunken, or so fleshly-bulgy have we all appeared in the fairy jacket they wove for the right one of us to wear becomingly. But the busy great world was round Clotilde while she was malleable, though she might be losing her fresh ideas of the hammer and the block, and that is a world of much solicitation to induce a vivid girl to merge an ideal in a living image. Supposing, when she has accomplished it, that men justify her choice, the living will retain the colours of the ideal. We have it on record that he may seem an eagle.
‘You talk curiously like Alvan, do you know,’ a gentleman of her country said to her as they were descending the rock of Capri, one day. He said it musingly.
He belonged to a circle beneath her own: the learned and artistic. She had not heard of this Alvan, or had forgotten him; but professing universal knowledge, especially of celebrities, besides having an envious eye for that particular circle, which can pretend to be the choicest of all, she was unwilling to betray her ignorance, and she dimpled her cheek, as one who had often heard the thing said to her before. She smiled musingly.
CHAPTER II
‘Who is the man they call Alvan?’ She put the question at the first opportunity to an aunt of hers.
Up went five-fingered hands. This violent natural sign of horror was comforting: she saw that he was a celebrity indeed.
‘Alvan! My dear Clotilde! What on earth can you want to know about a creature who is the worst of demagogues, a disreputable person, and a Jew!’
Clotilde remarked that she had asked only who he was. ‘Is he clever?’
‘He is one of the basest of those wretches who are for upsetting the Throne and Society to gratify their own wicked passions: that is what he is.’
‘But is he clever?’
‘Able as Satan himself, they say. He is a really dangerous, bad man. You could not have been curious about a worse one.’
‘Politically, you mean.’
‘Of course I do.’
The lady had not thought of any other kind of danger from a man of that station.
The likening of one to Satan does not always exclude meditation upon him. Clotilde was anxious to learn in what way her talk resembled Alvan’s. He being that furious creature, she thought of herself at her wildest, which was in her estimation her best; and consequently, she being by no means a furious creature, though very original, she could not meditate on him without softening the outlines given him by report; all because of the likeness between them; and, therefore, as she had knowingly been taken for furious by very foolish people, she settled it that Alvan was also a victim of the prejudices he scorned. It had pleased her at times to scorn our prejudices and feel the tremendous weight she brought on herself by the indulgence. She drew on her recollections of the Satanic in her bosom when so situated, and never having admired herself more ardently than when wearing that aspect, she would have admired the man who had won the frightful title in public, except for one thing—he was a Jew.
The Jew was to Clotilde as flesh of swine to the Jew. Her parents had the same abhorrence of Jewry. One of the favourite similes of the family for whatsoever grunted in grossness, wriggled with meanness, was Jew: and it was noteworthy from the fact that a streak of the blood was in the veins of the latest generation and might have been traced on the maternal side.
Now a meanness that clothes itself in the Satanic to terrify cowards is the vilest form of impudence venturing at insolence; and an insolent impudence with Jew features, the Jew nose and lips, is past endurance repulsive. She dismissed her contemplation of Alvan. Luckily for the gentleman who had compared her to the Jew politician, she did not meet him again in Italy.
She had meanwhile formed an idea of the Alvanesque in dialogue; she summoned her forces to take aim at it, without becoming anything Jewish, still remaining clean and Christian; and by her astonishing practice of the art she could at any time blow up a company—scatter mature and seasoned dames, as had they been balloons on a wind, ay, and give our stout sex a shaking.
Clotilde rejected another aspirant proposed by her parents, and falling into disgrace at home, she went to live for some months with an ancient lady who was her close relative residing in the capital city where the brain of her race is located. There it occurred that a dashing officer of social besides military rank, dancing with her at a ball, said, for a comment on certain boldly independent remarks she had been making: ‘I see you know Alvan.’
Alvan once more.
‘Indeed I do not,’ she said, for she was addressing an officer high above Alvan in social rank; and she shrugged, implying that she was almost past contradiction of the charge.
‘Surely you must,’ said he; ‘where is the lady who could talk and think as you do without knowing Alvan and sharing his views!’
Clotilde was both startled and nettled.
‘But I do not know him at all; I have never met him, never seen him. I am unlikely to meet the kind of person,’ she protested; and she was amazed yet secretly rejoiced on hearing him, a noble of her own circle, and a dashing officer, rejoin: ‘Come, come, let us be honest. That is all very well for the little midges floating round us to say of Alvan, but we two can clasp hands and avow proudly that we both know and love the man.’
‘Were it true, I would own it at once, but I repeat, that he is a total stranger to me,’ she said, seeing the Jew under quite a different illumination.
‘Actually?’
‘In honour.’
‘You have never met, never seen him, never read any of his writings?’
‘Never. I have heard his name, that is all.’
‘Then,’ the officer’s voice was earnest, ‘I pity him, and you no less, while you remain strangers, for you were made for one another. Those ideas you have expressed, nay, the very words, are Alvan’s: I have heard him use them. He has just the same original views of society and history as yours; they’re identical; your features are not unlike … you talk alike: I could fancy your voice the sister of his. You look incredulous? You were speaking of Pompeius, and you said “Plutarch’s Pompeius,” and more for it is almost incredible under the supposition that you do not know and have never listened to Alvan—you said that Pompeius appeared to have been decorated with all the gifts of the Gods to make the greater sacrifice of him to Caesar, who was not personally worth a pretty woman’s “bite.” Come, now—you must believe me: at a supper at Alvan’s table the other night, the talk happened to be of a modern Caesar, which led to the real one, and from him to “Plutarch’s Pompeius,” as Alvan called him; and then he said of him what you have just said, absolutely the same down to the allusion to the bite. I assure you. And you have numbers of little phrases in common: you are partners in aphorisms: Barriers are for those who cannot fly: that is Alvan’s. I could multiply them if I could remember; they struck me as you spoke.’
‘I must be a shameless plagiarist,’ said Clotilde.
‘Or he,’ said Count Kollin.
It is here the place of the Chorus to state that these: ideas were in the air at the time; sparks of the Vulcanic smithy at work in politics and pervading literature: which both Alvan and Clotilde might catch and give out as their own, in the honest belief that the epigram was, original to them. They were not members of a country where literature is confined to its little paddock, without, influence on the larger field (part lawn, part marsh) of the social world: they were readers in sympathetic action with thinkers and literary artists. Their saying in common, ‘Plutarch’s Pompeius,’ may be traceable to a reading of some professorial article on the common portrait-painting of the sage of Chaeroneia. The dainty savageness