The past is another country, and after stepping off the train in England in 1859, it took me about 150 pages to get my bearings in The Ordeal of Richard Feverel. Dickens is easier, because his writing is so visual, and he gives us a careful portrait of each character. Meredith is ironic and allusive; The Ordeal of Richard Feverel is almost more Milton than Dickens—metaphors and allusion are frequently extended and elliptical:
You are amazons, ladies, at Saragossa, and a thousand citadels—wherever there is strife, and Time is to be taken by the throat. Then shall few men match your sublime fury. But what if you see a vulture, visible only to yourselves, hovering over the house you are gaily led by the torch to inhabit? Will you not crouch and be cowards?
Without context, I realize, this is incomprehensible. With context—that is, in the course of reading this book, it was pretty close to incomprehensible. Amazons? Saragossa? He’s saying that sometimes women are bold, and sometimes not. There may be more to it than that—I’m not sure. It’s a kind of “mock epic,” where the trials and tribulations of modern men and women are presented as through in a Homeric epic—the contrast is supposed to be humorous. You can still amuse modern audiences by presenting mundane affairs in exalted language, provided your epic is one that is familiar to your readers, such as the Bible. Shakespeare would probably work too. Beyond that, you wouldn't have much of an audience.
Anyway, after 100 pages or so I was able to tune in the signal more or less, and found the book somewhat engaging. Richard Feverel is the son of Sir Austin Feverel, a wealthy landowner. Soon after Richard is born, Sir Austin’s best friend and wife take up together:
A languishing, inexperienced woman, whose husband in mental and in moral stature is more than the ordinary height above her, and who, now that her first romantic admiration of his lofty bearing has worn off, and her fretful little refinements of taste and sentiment are not instinctively responded to, is thrown into no wholesome household collision with a fluent man, fluent in prose and rhyme. Lady Feverel, when she first entered on her duties at Raynham, was jealous of her husband’s friend. By degrees she tolerated him. In time he touched his guitar in her chamber, and they played Rizzio and Mary together.
A rather disdainful appraisal. The reference is to a David Rizzio, a presumed lover of Mary, Queen of Scots (thank you, wikipedia). Sir Austin banishes the pair, and raises his son alone, according to a strict educational program. Richard thrives, but eventually falls in love with a young girl of the neighborhood without family or money, and marries her without consulting his father. Sir Austin reacts as he did to the earlier betrayal—he adopts a mask of indifference, neither reproaching his son nor cutting off his generous allowance, but refusing to see either his son or his new daughter-in-law.
Richard comes to London without his wife to seek an audience with his father. Months pass during which Richard sees neither his father nor his wife. Meredith’s true subject is the relations between people, how when we are offended or hurt, we isolate ourselves, thereby weakening ourselves and leaving ourselves vulnerable to intrigue and misunderstanding.
To me, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel seemed very uneven. There was much that I found tiresome—like the exalted rhetoric, or the extended passages featuring a wise but uneducated older woman who spouts homely wisdom in dialect (“Ha! ha! say that little women ain’t got art ekal to the cuningest of ‘em.”). But other parts were terrific—my favorite was a long chapter in which Richard, hanging out in London waiting for something to happen, is made the victim of a plot intent on shipwrecking his marriage before Sir Austin can make up his mind whether to give it his blessing. Richard is introduced to a courtesan who has been instructed to seduce him. Richard is under the impression that he is helping to rehabilitate her. She lets him believe this, of course, but she also begins to half believe it herself. One of the themes running through The Ordeal of Richard Feverel is masks—how we become the role that we play. For Sir Austin Feverel, the mask of aloof indifference he assumes when his son hurts his feelings proves damaging for both himself and his son. For the courtesan it is the reverse—her mask of repentance brings her to a kind of moral rebirth, even as her prey ultimately falls into her hands.
The long chapter that culminates with Richard’s seduction begins “Was ever hero in this fashion wooed”? Twenty pages later, when the deed has been accomplished, the chapter ends with the line “Was ever hero in this fashion won?” While I don’t really have the education Meredith would like his audience to have, I have read Shakespeare, and upon reading that line I remembered Richard III, and the scene where that earlier Richard exulted after seducing (verbally) his brother’s widow just days after murdering that very brother:
Was ever woman in this humour woo'd?
Was ever woman in this humour won?
Still, it is a very different kind of seduction, with none of the sardonic cunning of the earlier work. In fact, it is a rather weepy affair for both parties.
In the end, all parties are reconciled after all possible anguish is wrung out of them.
This is the third Victorian novel I have written about in this blog—the first two were The Pickwick Papers and Middlemarch. I have not really been completely won over by any of them. Perhaps I have yet to find the Victorian novelist that I can really relate to. or maybe this period just isn’t my period, period.
