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 figure of genteel imposture.  His lordly practice of never sending in a bill was hardly that of a man who accepted the conditions of his trade.  In Evan Harrington three generations of a family’s shame were held up to ridicule.  No wonder that Augustus Meredith, when he was congratulated by a customer on his son’s fame, turned away silently with a look of pain.

The comedy of the Meredith family springs, of course, not from the fact that they were tailors, but that they pretended not to be tailors.  Whether Meredith himself was more ashamed of their tailoring or their pretentiousness it is not easy to decide.  Both Evan Harrington and Harry Richmond are in a measure, comedies of imposture, in which the vice of imposture is lashed as fiercely as Moliere lashes the vice of hypocrisy in Tartuffe.  But it may well be that in life Meredith was a snob, while in art he was a critic of snobs.  Mr. Yeats, in his last book of prose, put forward the suggestion that the artist reveals in his art not his “self” (which is expressed in his life), but his “anti-self,” a complementary and even contrary self.  He might find in the life and works of Meredith some support for his not quite convincing theory.  Meredith was an egoist in his life, an anti-egoist in his books.  He was pretentious in his life, anti-pretentious in his books.  He took up the attitude of the wronged man in his life; he took up the case of the wronged woman in his books.  In short, his life was vehemently pro-George-Meredith, while his books were vehemently anti-George-Meredith.  He knew himself more thoroughly, so far as we can discover from his books, than any other English novelist has ever done.