The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Tragic Comedians, v1,
by George Meredith
#67 in our series by George Meredith

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Title: The Tragic Comedians, v1

Author: George Meredith

Edition: 10

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

Release Date: September, 2003 [Etext #4461]
[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on February 12, 2002]


The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Tragic Comedians, v1, by Meredith
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THE TRAGIC COMEDIANS

A STUDY IN A WELL-KNOWN STORY

By George Meredith

1892



BOOK 1.


The word 'fantastical' is accentuated in our tongue to so scornful an
utterance that the constant good service it does would make it seem an
appointed instrument for reviewers of books of imaginative matter
distasteful to those expository pens.  Upon examination, claimants to the
epithet will be found outside of books and of poets, in many quarters,
Nature being one of the prominent, if not the foremost.  Wherever she can
get to drink her fill of sunlight she pushes forth fantastically.  As for
that wandering ship of the drunken pilot, the mutinous crew and the angry
captain, called Human Nature, 'fantastical' fits it no less completely
than a continental baby's skull-cap the stormy infant.

Our sympathies, one may fancy, will be broader, our critical acumen
shrewder, if we at once accept the thing as a part of us and worthy of
study.

The pair of tragic comedians of whom there will be question pass under
this word as under their banner and motto.  Their acts are incredible:
they drank sunlight and drove their bark in a manner to eclipse
historical couples upon our planet.  Yet they do belong to history,
they breathed the stouter air than fiction's, the last chapter of them
is written in red blood, and the man pouring out that last chapter, was
of a mighty nature not unheroical, a man of the active grappling modern
brain which wrestles with facts, to keep the world alive, and can create
them, to set it spinning.

A Faust-like legend might spring from him: he had a devil.  He was the
leader of a host, the hope of a party, venerated by his followers, well
hated by his enemies, respected by the intellectual chiefs of his time,
in the pride of his manhood and his labours when he fell.  And why this
man should have come to his end through love, and the woman who loved him
have laid her hand in the hand of the slayer, is the problem we have to
study,