THE EGOIST

A Comedy in Narrative


by GEORGE MEREDITH




PRELUDE

A CHAPTER OF WHICH THE LAST PAGE ONLY IS OF ANY IMPORTANCE

Comedy is a game played to throw reflections upon social life, and it
deals with human nature in the drawing-room of civilized men and women,
where we have no dust of the struggling outer world, no mire, no
violent crashes, to make the correctness of the representation
convincing. Credulity is not wooed through the impressionable senses;
nor have we recourse to the small circular glow of the watchmaker's eye
to raise in bright relief minutest grains of evidence for the routing
of incredulity. The Comic Spirit conceives a definite situation for a
number of characters, and rejects all accessories in the exclusive
pursuit of them and their speech. For being a spirit, he hunts the
spirit in men; vision and ardour constitute his merit; he has not a
thought of persuading you to believe in him. Follow and you will see.
But there is a question of the value of a run at his heels.

Now the world is possessed of a certain big book, the biggest book on
earth; that might indeed be called the Book of Earth; whose title is