Meredith would not publish another volume of verse for over twenty years. To support himself and his family, he needed to write novels, sometimes having two or three on hand at once. Here too he struggled to be true to himself and his grand vision of life, and (in every sense) raise a readership.

THE EARLY FANTASIES

In his earliest prose works, he had followed the ‘vagaries of his own brain’, as he put it to Jessopp (Letters I: 160). The Shaving of Shagpat and Farina both take their heroes on extraordinary journeys to fulfil seemingly impossible missions, which reveal their (and our) human limitations and powers. The first and more engaging of these two fantasies, inspired partly by the outlandish tale heard at the Duff Gordons, partly also by the age-old myth of strength residing in hair, The Shaving of Shagpat is as exuberant as the early poems, and with little of their selfimposed formal constraint.

Shibli Bagarag's mission is to shave off the ‘Identical’, the one special hair on the enormously bushy head of the clothier Shagpat that makes everyone kowtow to him. In the kind of fusion of the real and the surreal now dubbed magic realism, Shibli is as endearingly ordinary as his task is extraordinary. Reminiscent of his creator, he strides along hopefully, ‘brushing among the flowers and soft mosses of the meadows, lifting his nostrils to the joyful smells, looking about him with the broad eye of one that hungereth for a coming thing’. Easily carried away by his own pride, in this same episode he manages to catch the treacherous Horse Garraveen, only to ignore the instruction to dismount. The result is an ignominious ducking in the watermeadows, one of the physical ‘thwackings’ that his inflated ego invites. ‘Leave me not my betrothed’, he begs the mysterious old crone he has promised to marry, Noorna bin Noorka, for ‘what am I without thy counsel?’ (SS, ‘The Horse Garraveen’; 134, 137). Yet in contrast to the youth in the interpolated tale about Bhanavar the Beautiful, Shibli succeeds in his mission.