and
pretender, coming of a line of egoists and pretenders, and his novels are
simply the confession and apology of such a person. Meredith concealed the
truth about himself in his daily conversation; he revealed it in his
novels. He made such a mystery about his birth that many people thought he
was a cousin of Queen Victoria's or at least a son of Bulwer Lytton's. It
was only in _Evan Harrington_ that he told the essentials of the truth
about the tailor's shop in Portsmouth above which he was born. Outside his
art, nothing would persuade him to own up to the tailor's shop. Once, when
Mr. Clodd was filling in a census-paper for him, Meredith told him to put
"near Petersfield" as his place of birth. The fact that he was born at
Portsmouth was not publicly known, indeed, until some time after his
death. And not only was there the tailor's shop to live down, but on his
mother's side he was the grandson of a publican, Michael Macnamara.
Meredith liked to boast that his mother was "pure Irish"--an exaggeration,
according to Mr. Ellis--but he said nothing about Michael Macnamara of
"The Vine." At the same time it was the presence not of a bar sinister but
of a yardstick sinister in his coat of arms that chiefly filled him with
shame. When he was marrying his first wife he wrote "Esquire" in the
register as a description of his father's profession. There is no
evidence, apparently, as to whether Meredith himself ever served in the
tailor's shop after his father moved from Portsmouth to St. James's
Street, London. Nothing is known of his life during the two years after
his return from the Moravian school at Neuwied. As for his hapless father
(who had been trained as a medical student but went into the family
business in order to save it from ruin), he did not succeed in London any
better than in Portsmouth, and in 1849 he emigrated to South Africa and
opened a shop in Cape Town. It was while in Cape Town that he read
Meredith's ironical comedy on the family tailordom, _Evan Harrington; or
He Would be a Gentleman_. Naturally, he regarded the book (in which his
father and himself were two of the chief figures) with horror. It was as
though George had washed the family tape-measure in public. Augustus
Meredith, no less than George, blushed for the tape-measure daily.
Probably, Melchizedek Meredith, who begat Augustus, who begat George, had
also blushed for it in his day. As the "great Mel" in _Evan Harrington_ he
is an immortal figu