The Tragic Comedians

The Tragic Comedians, Complete,

by George Meredith

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Title: The Tragic Comedians, Complete
Author: George Meredith
Edition: 10
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
Release Date: September, 2003 [Etext #4464] [Yes, we are more than
one year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on February 12,
2002]
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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, nothing inventing, in the spirit and flesh of both. To
ask if it was