Another and more passive type of the egoist is the epicurean. He asks only to have his tastes gratified, and, being devoted to material comfort, demands little of the world but material supplies. Epicurianism is marked by an indulgent good-humor so long as it is itself indulged, and when not gratified sinks into nothing worse than peevishness. Though it may be a deplorable trait, it is not a ridiculous one in itself, and is therefore satirized only when in conjunction with something that produces an incongruity. The constant stream of satire directed against the epicurean clergy, for instance, is due to the sense of an incompatibility between a profession which inculcates simplicity at least, if not actual asceticism, and a régime of sensuous indulgence. Those who are legitimately worldly, as for example the patrician triad depicted by Thackeray,—Miss Crawley, the Countess of Kew, and Madam Bernstein,—may not be admirable, but neither are they absurd.
In Adrian Harley we have the egoistic epicure in all his plump perfection. Meredith hastens, however, to exculpate the founder of the hedonistic philosophy:[1]
"Adrian was an epicurean; one whom Epicurus would have
scourged out of his garden, certainly; an epicurean of our modern
notions."
The combination in him of cynic, self-pamperer, and
Sir Oracle forms a type which Meredith especially delights
to dishonor, because its own smugness puts a splash of
- ↑ In an access of particularly malicious realism, Meredith calls attention to a region that was already "a trifle prominent in the person of the wise youth, and carried, as it were, the flag of his philosophical tenets in front of him." He is also described as having "an instinct for the majority, and, as the world invariably found him enlisted in its ranks, his appellation of wise youth was acquiesced in without irony." Again,—"discreetness, therefore, was instructed to reign at the Abbey. Under Adrian's able tuition the fairest of its domestics acquired that virtue."
