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

Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing
this or any other Project Gutenberg file.

We encourage you to keep this file, exactly as it is, on your own disk,
thereby keeping an electronic path open for future readers.

Please do not remove this.

This header should be the first thing seen when anyone starts to
view the etext. Do not change or edit it without written permission.
The words are carefully chosen to provide users with the information
they need to understand what they may and may not do with the etext.
To encourage this, we have moved most of the information to the end,
rather than having it all here at the beginning.


**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**

**Etexts Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**

*****These Etexts Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****

Information on contacting Project Gutenberg to get etexts, and
further information, is included below.  We need your donations.

The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a 501(c)(3)
organization with EIN [Employee Identification Number] 64-6221541
Find out about how to make a donation at the bottom of this file.



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
********This file should be named 4461.txt or 4461.zip********

This etext was produced by David Widger <widger@cecomet.net>

Project Gutenberg Etexts are often created from several printed
editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the US
unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we usually do not
keep etexts in compliance with any particular paper edition.

The "legal small print" and other information about this book
may now be found at the end of this file.  Please read this
important information, as it gives you specific rights and
tells you about restrictions in how the file may be used.





[NOTE: There is a short list of bookmarks, or pointers, at the end of the
file for those who may wish to sample the author's ideas before making an
entire meal of them.  D.W.]





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, nothing inventing, in the spirit and flesh of both.  To ask if it
was love is useless.  Love may be celestial fire before it enters into
the systems of mortals.  It will then take the character of its place of
abode, and we have to look not so much for the pure thing as for the
passion.  Did it move them, hurry them, animating the giants and gnomes