Analysis of George Meredith’s The Tragic Comedians

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on May 21, 2025

George Meredith based his novel The Tragic Comedians on an account of a love affair that became famous in social circles of his day. In the opinion of later critics, his use of the true account stifled the ingenuity apparent in his previous novel, The Egoist (1879). In the 1892 edition, an introductory note about the historic Ferdinand Lassalle was added to the novel, in which an effort is made to sort fact from myth.

The book’s narrative derives from Helene von Donnige’s remembrance of her relationship with Ferdinand Lassalle, a notorious German socialist. Helene was a young woman of 19, betrothed to an Italian 28 years her elder, when she first met Lassalle. Their dramatic meeting produced love at first sight, and the two could not dream of parting. They would part, however, and regardless of whether her version were entirely true, Lassalle did die a tragic death following imprisonment for an incident in which he claimed innocence, when he fought and died with the Turks in the Crimean War.

In the novel, the Lassalle figure is named Alvan, while von Donnige is Clothilde, a young woman easily manipulated by her high-society family. She commits to marry Alvan, although she suspects her aristocratic family will never agree to the match. In the name of honor, Alvan sends her to her family to gain their blessing on the union. Clothilde’s family insists she marry their chosen match, Marko Romaris, and they eventually trick her into committing to him.

Meredith suggests she is rendered incapable of action in one scene in which she wishes to appeal to Alvan’s friend, Dr. Storchel, but the sight of the family friend Colonel von Tresten “had frozen her,” so she “stood petrified” before the doctor, “as if affected by some wicked spell.” Enraged at the family’s refusal of him, Alvan insults Clothilde’s father, an aging general, and challenges him. Clothilde’s mind is further muddled by “the collision of ideas driven together by Alvan and a duel . . . Alvan, the contemner of the senseless appeal to arms for the settlement of personal disputes!”

As Marko leaves to confront Alvan in the general’s place, Clothilde exclaims “‘I am a prisoner!’” and knows the horror of being “dragged to her happiness through a river of blood,” as she feels confident that Alvan will kill Marko. However, Marko shoots Alvan, who dies three days later. Giving in to her fate, Clothilde proceeds with the wedding to Marko.

Meredith remarks on Alvan’s acting against character in a final statement regarding the way the world should view such men. Of Alvan, he writes, “he perished of this weakness, but it was a strong man that fell. If his end was unheroic, the bolt does not overshadow his life . . . a stormy blood made wreck of a splendid intelligence.” In doing so, he suggests that Alvan and Clothilde must share the blame for Alvan’s death, as two egotistical sentimentalists.

Meredith provides the context for understanding his title by writing of Alvan, “he was neither fool nor madman, nor man to be adored: his last temptation caught him in the season before he had subdued his blood, and amid the multitudinously simple of this world, stamped him a tragic comedian: that is, a grand pretender, a self-deceiver.” He thus incorporates into fiction his theory shared in 1877 in a lecture on The Idea of Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit, in which he held, according to Lionel Stevenson, that “perfect comedy is neither satire nor burlesque, but a dispassionate and clear-sighted perception of folly, sentimentality, and conceit.”

Bibliography

Lindsay, Jack. George Meredith: His Life and Work. 1956. Reprint, Millwood, N.Y.: Kraus, 1980.
Moffat, James. George Meredith: A Primer to the Novels. Port Washington, N.Y., Kennikat Press, 1969.
Stevenson, Lionel. The English Novel: A Panorama. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960.