Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Tragic Comedians: A Study in a Well-known Story — Volume 1
    The Tragic Comedians: A Study in a Well-known Story — Volume 1
    The Tragic Comedians: A Study in a Well-known Story — Volume 1
    Ebook100 pages1 hour

    The Tragic Comedians: A Study in a Well-known Story — Volume 1

    By George Meredith

    ()

    Read preview
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateJan 1, 1898
    The Tragic Comedians: A Study in a Well-known Story — Volume 1
    Author

    George Meredith

    George Meredith (1828-1909) was an English author and poet active during the Victorian era. Holding radical liberal beliefs, Meredith first worked in the legal field, seeking justice and reading law. However, he soon abandoned the field when he discovered his true passion for journalism and poetry. After leaving this profession behind, Meredith partnered with a man named Edward Gryffdh Peacock, founding and publishing a private literary magazine. Meredith published poetry collections, novels, and essays, earning him the acclaim of a respected author. Praised for his integrity, intelligence, and literary skill, Meredith was nominated for seven Nobel Prizes and was appointed to the order of Merit by King Edward the Seventh in 1905.

    Read more from George Meredith

    Related to The Tragic Comedians

    Related ebooks

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      The Wisdom Of Voltaire

      Sep 7, 2022

      YEARS ago, in a happy London interlude, we lived in Covent Garden, above Rules. Over the pavement opposite, fixed to the brickwork at the back of the Vaudeville Theatre, a plaque stated that Voltaire had lived in Maiden Lane. It was 1728, and he was

      2 min read

    • Article

      Reviews

      Dec 2, 2021

      Book Film TV Podcast Games Other A riveting medieval ‘Me Too’ story Certificate: 18 Director: Ridley Scott Cast: Matt Damon, Adam Driver, Jodie Comer Released: Out now On 29 December 1386, in a frosty field on the outskirts of northern Paris, the las

      6 min read

    • Article

      Nine Haunting Postapocalyptic Novels

      Feb 3, 2022

      The paradox of imagined apocalypses is that they’re always more about the present than the future. Here's a list of a few haunting and evocative titles. The post Nine Haunting Postapocalyptic Novels appeared first on The Millions.

      4 min read

    • Article

      Commonplace Book

      Sep 1, 2022

      Sleep lingers all our lifetime about our eyes, as night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir-tree. —Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Experience,” Essays: Second Series, 1844 Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and o

      3 min read

    • Article

      Books

      May 29, 2023

      Books
      6 min read

    • Article

      The Inquisitor

      Dec 11, 2023

      The Inquisitor NEED TO KNOW RELEASE February 2024 DEVELOPER The Dust PUBLISHER Kalypso Media LINK theinquisitor.game Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition, and it's fair to say this one was fairly unanticipated too. There's a backstory to The Inquis

      5 min read

    • Article

      The Inquisitor

      Dec 7, 2023

      The Inquisitor
      5 min read

    • Article

      Book Club

      Apr 26, 2023

      Book Club
      5 min read

    • Article

      The Inquisitor

      Dec 26, 2023

      The Inquisitor
      5 min read

    • Article

      International Books

      Oct 13, 2019

      Ever heard of the US Camel Corps? Me neither. The short-lived experiment (1855-1864) saw camels introduced into the US Army because they could bear enormous weights. (Turns out they had downsides, too.) Lurie, a young outlaw, falls in with the Turks

      4 min read

    • Article

      John Ashbery

      Mar 15, 2019

      He could understand the things at home.—Wallace Stevens, “Things of August” Scribbled on the expansive mist, the desireof many dwindles to usand our “activities,” wholesomeor otherwise. Soon it becomes apparentthat neither they nor I have any prise o

      4 min read

    • Article

      'Fourteen Days' Is A Time Capsule Of People's Efforts To Connect During The Pandemic

      Feb 12, 2024

      The novel is an ambitious project, written by 36 authors yet achieving a unified voice of sorts, as every character narrates their story simply, casually, allowing themselves digressions and asides.

      3 min read

    • Article

      Circles Of The Damned

      Sep 1, 2021

      For centuries artists have mined Inferno for raw materials, but now in the sweltering days of the Anthropocene we are enacting it. The post Circles of the Damned appeared first on The Millions.

      7 min read

    • Article

      Commonplace Book

      Sep 1, 2021

      If any question why we died, Tell them, because our fathers lied. —Rudyard Kipling, “Epitaphs of the War,” The Years Between, 1919 She consulted me, a glance, and said: “I think not anything off the wagon. It arrives too quickly. Let’s have somethi

      4 min read

    • Article

      Hungry Hearts

      May 6, 2022

      Hungry Hearts
      3 min read

    • Article

      The Allure of Messy Reddit Stories

      Mar 19, 2023

      Jerusalem Demsas’s culture and entertainment picks include Children of Time, Vampire Weekend, and chasing down stories people tell—or make up—on Reddit.

      6 min read

    • Article

      Book Club

      Feb 1, 2024

      Book Club
      5 min read

    • Article

      Everything Happens SOMEWHERE

      Jun 15, 2020

      Everything, even thought, takes place somewhere. When remembering ordinary happenings and previous conversations, most people automatically recall where they took place and at what time. If not, they may ponder, “Now, where was I?” For more important

      8 min read

    • Article

      Ghosts Of The Modern Age

      Dec 3, 2020

      Ghosts Of The Modern Age
      6 min read

    Reviews for The Tragic Comedians

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      The Tragic Comedians - George Meredith

      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

      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 gm67v10.txt or gm67v10.zip********

      Corrected EDITIONS of our etexts get a new NUMBER, gm67v11.txt

      VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, gm67v10a.txt

      This etext was produced by David Widger

      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 of one, the elves and sprites of the other, and putting animal nature out of its fashionable front rank? The bare railway-line of their story tells of a passion honest enough to entitle it to be related. Nor is there anything invented, because an addition of fictitious incidents could never tell us how she came to do this, he to do that; or how the comic in their natures led by interplay to the tragic issue. They are real creatures, exquisitely fantastical, strangely exposed to the world by a lurid catastrophe, who teach us, that fiction, if it can imagine events and persons more agreeable to the taste it has educated, can read us no such furrowing lesson in life.

      THE TRAGIC COMEDIANS

      CHAPTER I

      An unresisted lady-killer is probably less aware that he roams the pastures in pursuit of a coquette, than is the diligent Arachne that her web is for the devouring lion. At an early age Clotilde von Rudiger was dissatisfied with her conquests, though they were already numerous in her seventeenth year, for she began precociously, having at her dawn a lively fancy, a womanly person, and singular attractions of colour, eyes, and style. She belonged by birth to the small aristocracy of her native land. Nature had disposed her to coquettry, which is a pastime counting among the arts of fence, and often innocent, often serviceable, though sometimes dangerous, in the centres of polished barbarism known as aristocratic societies, where nature is not absent, but on the contrary very extravagant, tropical, by reason of her idle hours for the imbibing of copious draughts of sunlight. The young lady of charming countenance and sprightly manners is too much besought to choose for her choice to be decided; the numbers beseeching prevent her from choosing instantly, after the fashion of holiday schoolboys crowding a buffet of pastry. These are not coquettish, they clutch what is handy: and little so is the

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1