George Meredith: A Study — Hannah Lynch

GEORGE MEREDITH

A STUDY

BY
HANNAH LYNCH

Methuen & Co.
18, BURY STREET, LONDON, W.C.
1891

ROSAMOND VENNING.

MY DEAR MISS VENNING,

Will you, when you read this little book of mine, find fault with my unmeasured Hibernian enthusiasms and antipathies, and quote your favourite Greek advice--μηδὲν ἄγαν? So that you bring to the reading of it some surrender of your reserve and a break in that classic moderation that we poor barbarians do not quite understand--violently tinctured as we are by nature--it will be a fresh debt added to the life-long debt I gladly owe destiny for that memorable first meeting in Athena’s charming little city.

The thought of it waves memory back into broad sunshine untravelled by clouds, among sun-stained marble pillars and rose and mauve tinted hills, girdling purple waters, and the long silver olive plain of Attica. Do you remember still our first walk along the cactus-bordered path to the Acropolis? Was it not of ‘Tragic Comedians’ that we talked?

So now, years after, I offer you in grateful remembrance this little gathering of ideas you may not wholly share, but will not wholly reject, through affection for your friend, to whom so wide a difference would be nothing less than a real misfortune.

HANNAH LYNCH.

PARIS, February, 1891.

PREFACE.

A couple of months ago I was asked to give a lecture in Paris on a modern English writer, and I naturally selected my favourite, the subject of this little book. It was afterwards suggested to me that the lecture would bear expansion, a task I the more readily undertook because I was happy enough to learn that my humble effort had sent at least three intellectual foreigners to the fountainhead to study for themselves the novels of Mr. Meredith, curious to see if I had not overrated his merits, as is the habit of enthusiastic disciples, and greatly astonished to find their expectations disappointed, and my estimate unexaggerated.

While still engaged upon this work I received from London Mr. Le Gallienne’s book, ‘George Meredith,’ and not having by me copies of ‘Modern Love’ or the other poems of Mr. Meredith, I availed myself of his quotations of the famous sonnet and ‘A Meeting.’ I have also taken from Mr. Lane’s Bibliography, added to Mr. Le Gallienne’s book, the dates of the appearance of each of the novels, as my own copies all belong to the recent uniform editions published by Messrs. Chapman and Hall.

HANNAH LYNCH.

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER PAGE

I. THE GRADUAL RECOGNITION OF GEORGE MEREDITH AS A NOVELIST 1

II. MEREDITH’S STYLE AND INFLUENCE 25

III. THE NOVELS OF GEORGE MEREDITH: ‘RICHARD FEVEREL’ AND ‘RHODA FLEMING’ 53

IV. ‘EVAN HARRINGTON,’ ‘THE ADVENTURES OF HARRY RICHMOND,’ ‘SANDRA BELLONI,’ AND ‘BEAUCHAMP’S CAREER’ 89

V. ‘THE EGOIST,’ ‘DIANA OF THE CROSSWAYS,’ ‘TRAGIC COMEDIANS,’ AND ‘SHAVING OF SHAGPAT’ 117

VI. GEORGE MEREDITH’S MEN AND WOMEN 153

GEORGE MEREDITH.

CHAPTER I.

THE GRADUAL RECOGNITION OF GEORGE MEREDITH AS A NOVELIST.

It is our habit to class under the name of light literature all fiction, from that of Richardson to the ephemeral stories of the latest London favourite, though, as a matter of fact, even that historic bore, Gibbon, is not heavier reading than the novels of Richardson. We accept the term ‘light’ literature in a high sense as well as in a low one, and to the high class of light writers belong our old English masters and friends, Fielding, Scott, and Thackeray. These writers were purely and simply novelists, and if they showed themselves to the thinkers in their just interpretation of the motives whence actions and complications arise, and the consequences to which they lead us, it was hardly because they thought so much as that they observed exactly, and, with the exquisite intuition of genius, penetrated life and its meaning by the road of sympathy rather than reflection, and unconsciously gave the colour of philosophy to their reproduction of observations.

Men of wide sympathies and humorous observers, which are the two most truthful qualities of portraiture, they were able to enter into all, or nearly all, phases of existence, and under the influence of the personalities and the scenes they portrayed, give us what I take to be a false impression--that of having deliberately thought out each one. The falseness of this impression is proved by the confession of Thackeray and Dickens, that no one could be more completely surprised than either by the doings and sayings of their various characters. And this confession is borne out by the mixture of exuberant spirits and sentiment that colours all the works of these novelists. Serious thinkers are neither prone to exhibit high spirits, like schoolboys let loose among pens and paper and a reckless abundance of ink, nor tears of sentiment, like a distraught heroine recording her melancholy impressions. Writers of this sort, however great and universal, are ‘light,’ because their double aim--for which we cannot be too grateful--is to touch us by the tragic or homely sorrows of existence, or to amuse us by the absurdities and tricks of our fellows, and if, by chance, they should happen to instruct us through the great lessons of life they unconsciously teach us, it is due to the simplicity and directness of their genius. And this is the estimate we English readers will ever preserve of Thackeray, in spite of the severe pronouncement against him beyond the Channel by our more artistic brethren. He may preach, as the eminent French critic, M. Taine, complains; but we are glad to be so sermonized, and return to him as to a friend who can never fail us. He may digress, but we are thankful for such digressions as his, and feel that we would not yield his faults for the more acrid greatness of Balzac.

But this latter half of the nineteenth century has produced quite a different sort of novelist; one whose mission is deliberately chosen, heavily weighed, and unweariedly fulfilled. Not in the least anxious is he to amuse us, or rouse soft and pleasurable emotions in us. The artistic exactions of the dilettanti are unregarded by him, and his voice carries far other than the note of caressing persuasion in it. He does not court our suffrage, rather does he seek to break and bend us before the sweeping storm of thought, and carry us through new paths into a world where no word is idle, no action or instinct without its most serious consequences; heedless of the fact that we may entangle ourselves inextricably in the briars and brambles of a strange phraseology, indifferent to what may be our mental suffering in endeavouring to follow him, and decipher his oddly-clothed meaning.

This kind of writer is a thinker first and a novelist afterwards, and not a thinker only, but a scientific psychologist. The novel is to him the sum of his mental labour, as the system is that of the metaphysician. The simple art of the first story-teller, Homer, and of Scott, no less differs from his method than from Kant’s ‘Kritik.’ His appearance, taking into account the materials of which his peculiar genius is composed, and the bewildering use he makes of them, is rare; and if, happily, he should obtain a hearing, after long strife with the general stupidity of the blockheads and patient endurance of the bites and barks of literary puppydom at his heels, he is sure to create a revolution in the world which subsists on amusement and distraction by this new way of popularizing philosophy through fiction and the rose-lights of imagination. His chance, of course, very much depends upon diction, and this explains to us George Eliot’s immediate recognition. As the first of the modern analytical novelists in England, she had the good fortune to start by a simple and facile style, within reach of the least intellectual reader. Hence, those who did not want to be compelled to think, could, without twist or turning, without racking their brains, or grasping a distracted head in their palms, follow her story even when they ignored the profound mental consciousness from which it sprang. But picture the catastrophe, the wide convulsion and fright her first appearance as the author of ‘Daniel Deronda’ would have created! She would have had to wait, at least, as long for recognition and admiration as her great and inadequately appreciated successor.

Remote from her in point of style, though still of her school, by reason of severe thought worked to a conclusion, oftener than hers an unanswerable interrogation, is the only living master in English literature--George Meredith. He stands beside her and Tolstoi in the rank of serious intellectual workers, though we may doubt if foreign nations will ever reach the glib acquaintance with his name and the titles of his books that they are pleased to boast with those of the Russian master. Mr. Meredith is above and beyond all a thinker, less simple and direct, less wholly preoccupied with the mission of improving humanity and beautifying life, than either George Eliot or Tolstoi. Perhaps he has a healthier conviction that the world is very well as it is, and that in the main it is all the better that we are neither so muddy nor so pink as realists and sentimentalists would have us believe, but are just comfortably spotted and well-meaning to escape excess of censure or admiration.

The British race, we know, has never been remarkable for brilliancy, nor, to any special degree, has it given evidence of perspicacity. But nowhere has it shown such an inexcusable and comical consistency of stupidity as in its slow recognition of Mr. Meredith, and its blundering acceptance of him when once a few laudatory reviews have revealed to it the existence of a prophet in its midst. We have had among us for more than thirty years a giant, and a race of pigmies, noted for nothing but the absence of genius, of even marked individuality in their stream of literary production, that flows on continuously and uneventfully, gape and blink at the odd sound of his voice, and persist in regarding him as a grotesque monster. He brings us the fruits of his colossal intellect in masterpiece after masterpiece, and because he applies some hard knocks to our understanding, never bright and always fearful of the new, we either turn from him in cold neglect, or else we grow witty with the wit of pigmies, at his expense, and accuse him ‘of breaking his shins over his own wit.’ That which we do not understand, we decide, with the superiority of the inane and the ignorant, to be not worthy the understanding. Used as we have been to the lucid prose of Thackeray and the brilliant vulgarity and homeliness of Dickens, spoiled as our literary talent has been more recently by the flood of bloodless fiction poured into the circulating libraries and fast bringing the monthly magazines to a deadlock of incompetency and unimaginative drivel, can we wonder, though we may deplore, that the taste for excellence and vigour has diminished?

That his first novel, ‘Richard Feverel,’ should have passed unheeded, in spite of the remarkable review which the Times gave it in 1859, is something to wonder at, for surely such a book might have been expected to startle the best of his country into superlative praise, and meet with immediate popularity. It had already been preceded by a volume of notable poetry, by that extraordinary tour de force, ‘The Shaving of Shagpat,’ and by ‘Farina, a Legend of Cologne.’ Yet these were not sufficient to convince his fellows that in their presence stood mighty genius claiming the poor return it is in our power to make it--the hospitality and welcome of our minds. Does such denseness deserve pity or blame? For churlishness it cannot be called, as the neglect shown the great is never deliberate. Two years were we left to sharpen our wits upon the pages of ‘Richard Feverel,’ and, mayhap, acquire a taste for qualities utterly novel to the age and, in a measure, to the nation--for something more than English characteristics go to the forming of a writer like Mr. Meredith--and in 1861 we were asked to make what we could of ‘Evan Harrington.’ The story appeared in Once a Week, and was illustrated by the late Charles Keene, under the title of ‘Evan Harrington; or, He Would be a Gentleman.’ Mr. Stevenson makes doleful mention of a serial of Meredith’s that nearly wrecked a newspaper financially, and presumably this was the unlucky experiment, from which it may be gathered that ‘Evan Harrington’ had no greater success than ‘Richard Feverel,’ and that the hour of recognition had not yet dawned. Explain it who can. Was there not a grain of perversity at the bottom of it? And can there be a more thankless task than that of labouring against the tide of fatal dulness, or an unkinder solitude than that of a man who is a head and a half above the tallest of his fellows, and can neither lift them up to his level nor descend to theirs? There are compensations, certainly, but these only serve to mitigate the sufferings of intellectual isolation, and, to the artist, can never fill adequately the place of generous and hearty appreciation. Wrapped in his philosophic cloak, the thinker may make shift to do without his fellows, and call them by hard names, but to the artist and the poet, sympathy and the warm praise of living voices is like sunshine to the human frame. But reliable, if rare, critics had begun to find him out. In 1862, when his second book of poetry appeared, ‘Modern Love,’ the Spectator chose to assail, as an unfledged beginner, the man who had given such work as his to the world; whereupon Mr. Swinburne, wrathful, though not invective--rare chance!--wrote a letter that all disciples of Meredith remember with gratitude. But it is still hard for us to understand how the career of any man of letters could be so slow, and appreciation so long grudged him, as has been the case with a penman of so pronounced a type. That he should excite hostility, being himself of no tender fabric, is comprehensible and easily explained by the impatience and sense of irritation that he often rouses in the breasts of his admirers. But we can recognise the qualities and greatness of the writer who provokes our hostility, and generously give him that which is his due, while not withholding that which he excites. Writing of ‘Modern Love,’ Mr. Swinburne, who is certainly upon his own ground in criticising a brother poet, says, ‘Every section of this great progressive poem is connected with the other by links of the finest and most studied workmanship,’ and that ‘a more perfect piece of writing no man alive has ever turned out’ than the noble sonnet beginning,

‘We saw the swallows gathering in the skies.’

Bear in mind this was written by the third living English poet in the year 1862, of a comparatively unknown poet, while yet Browning and Tennyson were writing their best. And then explain how it is that Meredith the poet is still less known than Meredith the novelist, and that until very lately reading people, if asked about George Meredith, invariably corrected the rash questioner by the suggestion that he doubtless meant Owen Meredith. With Owen Meredith they were familiar enough, but George Meredith? They would shake their heads and tell you that they never heard of him, or if, perchance, they had, invariably added the rumour that they had also heard: ‘A perfectly unreadable writer, I believe, whom nobody--possibly not even himself--understands, and very few try to understand.’

Five or six years ago I imagined this incredible ignorance to be exclusive to Dublin, where we are not very assiduous in the pursuit of literature, or of anything else but the fortunes of the political heroes of the hour. But upon crossing the Channel, and finding myself in the blessed atmosphere of literary fervour and progress, I was amazed to see how few were the literary persons I met who knew much more of Mr. Meredith than his name, and even here I was more than once confronted with the inevitable Owen Meredith. That the lovers of Mr. Rider Haggard and John Strange Winter should not read his works is but the completion of their intellectual taste; and strange, indeed, would it be to see a copy of ‘Diana of the Crossways’ in the hands of these worthy persons; but that the readers of Shakespeare and Thackeray and George Eliot should shun him--this is where the incredible and inexplicable eccentricity of public taste displays itself. And yet in 1862 he had written:

‘We saw the swallows gathering in the sky,
And in the osier isle we heard their noise.
We had not to look back on summer joys,
Or forward to a summer of bright dye.
But in the largeness of the evening earth
Our spirits grew as we went side by side.
The hour became her husband and my bride.
Love that had robb’d us so, thus bless’d our dearth!
The pilgrims of the year wax’d very loud
In multitudinous chatterings, as the flood
Full brown came from the west, and, like pale blood
Expanded to the upper crimson cloud.
Love that had robb’d us of immortal things,
This little moment mercifully gave,
And still I see across the twilight wave
The swan sail with her young beneath her wings.’

It may be argued that the long delay in the acknowledgment of his sovereignty is due to himself, to his obscurities, his ruggedness, his enormous intellectual difficulties offered the reader, like five-barred gates, to leap, and, in the event of failure, fall against, stunned and aching all over from the force of big mental bruises. But Browning is fifty times more obscure, more rugged, more difficult. It is true, Browning’s apotheosis, in somewhat ironical form, lies in a Browning Society that, perhaps, may achieve a glossary and a full compilation of notes. Whereas, all the poet asks us to bring to him is a little thought and some brains. As Browning has his lucid and melodious words, when the simplest may understand him upon a first reading, so has Mr. Meredith--a fact that does not seem to have served him to such popularity as Browning enjoyed. Can anything be sweeter, softer, more musical than this little poem ‘The Meeting’?--

‘The old coach-road thro’ a common of furze,
With knolls of pine, ran white:
Berries of autumn, with thistles and burrs,
And spider-threads droop’d in the light.

‘The light in a thin blue veil peer’d sick;
The sheep grazed close and still;
The smoke of a farm by a yellow rick
Curl’d lazily under a hill.

‘No fly shook the round of the silver net;
No insect the swift bird chased;
Only two travellers moved and met
Across that hazy waste.

‘One was a girl with a babe that throve,
Her ruin and her bliss;
One was a youth with a lawless love,
Who claspt it the more for this.

‘The girl for her babe humm’d prayerful speech;
The youth for his love did pray;
Each cast a wistful look on each,
And either went their way.’

And still are we confronted with the mystery of such a poet’s unpopularity. Explain it by the unattractiveness of his difficulties, and what have you to say against the soothing charm and the exquisite simplicity of such lines as these, that linger in the memory, not only because of their delicate music, but because of their vividness of picture and the autumn sadness that lies upon it. In workmanship the poem is equal to the best of its sort, and Heine, in his matchless songs, has never touched us with a pathos more searching from its unpretentiousness.

Two years after the appearance of ‘Modern Love,’ ‘Emilia in England’ was published, and in the same year M. E. D. Forgues translated an adaptation of it for the Revue des Deux Mondes, under the title of ‘Sandra Belloni, Roman de la Vie Anglaise.’ This looks like progress in public opinion. At least, it may be thought, after thirteen years of neglected labour in strife with feeble and vitiated taste, the author of so much brilliant work is upon the point of enthusiastic recognition. Not so at all. ‘Emilia’ created as little sensation as ‘Richard,’ and we may believe that the subscribers to the circulating libraries were as little fluttered by the production of the one as they had been by that of the other--being equally unaware of the existence of either. The book was not extensively reviewed, and only the happy few congratulated themselves upon the acquisition. Perhaps their satisfaction in it was increased by the fact that it was not shared by the crowd, for though the lovers of an unappreciated novelist may ardently desire to bestrew their paths with converts, it is not unusual in them to cover themselves in a sort of fierce and holy pride with a bit of his cloak of isolation. If he is miserably misunderstood, do not they share to some extent his misfortunes? And is there not a very decided superiority--sad, if you will, for none but the churlish and carping few desire to keep salvation and paradise exclusively for themselves--in the fact of their mutual want of appreciation?

‘Rhoda Fleming’ appeared in 1865, and this book seems to have made a more decided impression, though the writer still remained in the background among well-known men of letters, and his name, like his presence, was on the whole ignored. It was published by Messrs. Tinsley, in itself an instructive lesson in the author’s popularity. But there can be no doubt that the tide was changing, slowly, it is true--indeed, imperceptibly. In 1867 ‘Vittoria’ first came out in the Fortnightly Review, a review henceforth devoted to the fiction of Mr. Meredith, and to which he seems to have contributed a good many reviews and short poems. After this, in 1871, we meet him in Cornhill recording the brilliant and ever-delightful adventures of ‘Harry Richmond,’ and this, coupled with the fact that Mr. George Du Maurier illustrated the story, and that it ran through two editions in the same year, gives us breathing-space in our long vent of indignation. We may now conclude that a portion, at least, of the British public had awaked, and were capable of relishing such entrancing novels as ‘Richard Feverel,’ ‘Sandra Belloni’ and ‘Harry Richmond,’ in which we hardly read so much as we drink in life, vividly, eagerly--life with all its sharp, sweet thrills and poignant aversions, its breathless alternation of mood and swift race of the passions.

‘Beauchamp’s Career’ followed in 1876, first in the Fortnightly Review, between 1874 and 1876, and afterwards in Messrs. Chapman and Hall’s collected editions of 1886 and 1889. Although Mr. Meredith’s career cannot be said to have been crowned with anything like a wide acknowledgment, or even anything approaching a fair reward, until he wrote ‘Diana of the Crossways’ in 1885, which brought him his first taste of substantial and general success, and cast a retrospective glamour upon its predecessors, people from the date of ‘Harry Richmond’ began to know that there was a novelist named George Meredith who was not Owen Meredith.

Considering all that the writer has had to contend with in the way of block-headedness, this is most certainly a step in advance. But to his own especial minority, it is not ‘Diana,’ with all its charm and its perilous brilliancy, that crowns Mr. Meredith’s career, but that unique masterpiece, ‘The Egoist,’ which was published in 1879. Here was a memorable triumph of art, at which we have not yet ceased to wonder, and which we hold apart from all other books that we have read. After it he may write ‘Tragic Comedians,’ ‘Diana of the Crossways,’ and volumes of poems. Anything he writes we are prepared to welcome with cordial delight and gratitude, but we do not expect another Sir Willoughby Patterne. We are satisfied with the impossibility of the repetition of such an achievement. It is not given to many artists to produce one flawless work, and to expect a second from even such a mighty one as this would be to prove one’s self insatiable.

From this time forward, reviews, articles, criticisms--hostile, humorous, and eulogistic--begin to abound; and by the time of ‘Diana’s’ appearance, the British public has been made ready to receive the intelligence that a master is in their midst--a living, breathing master, such as Tennyson and Browning, and from whom work may happily still be expected. What effect this announcement may have had upon the British public cannot be perfectly defined. Being unenthusiastic, except in the matter of low and familiar literature, it is to be feared that such news has but moderately moved it, and in the matter of taste, has not influenced it at all. This new master is unfamiliar to them in his speech and in his ideas. He does not dwell upon sordid scenes with visible pleasure; he claims them with a voice that is not of their common tongue, and faces them without the old-fashioned twinkle of the grave jester’s glance. If he caricatures humanity, it is not as Dickens caricatures it, to tickle us into inextinguishable laughter, nor yet as Thackeray does, in a vein of comic satire. If he calls upon us to recognise that life is often a sad blunder, and to pity the blunderers, he is neither sentimental in his claim, nor consciously pathetic. He indulges neither in the mawkish sentiment of Dickens, nor in the sentimental tenderness of Thackeray, and as little courts our tears as our laughter. Brain is what he asks of us, and its use in reading him.

CHAPTER II.

MEREDITH’S STYLE AND INFLUENCE.

To succeed in qualifying a style so varied and so strange as Mr. Meredith’s, and composed of so many diverse elements, would be difficult even for his peers. Its quality is at the same time rugged and elusive, obscure and dazzlingly brilliant, witty and profound, harsh and most musically tender, light as a summer cloud, majestic as a storm. But his great defect is artificiality. His splendid pages and his matchless dialogues never lose the obtrusive flavour of the midnight oil, and we see most of his characters through a blinding glitter of limelight. This excessive use of artificial illumination, while fascinating us and compelling our admiration for the writer’s extraordinary cleverness, wearies us and irritates us at times, and we long for the mental repose of a whiff of commonplace and a page or two, by way of interlude, of fluent easy prose that rests the eye and the brain. There are so many tricks and surprises bestrewing our path, five-barred gates starting unexpectedly for us to leap; we are deliberately plunged neck and heels into so many swamps, and bowled over all sorts of rocks and stones, with the oddest sensations in conflict, that we more than once pay our debt grudgingly, and, like a peaceable man knocked down by a bludgeon, are amazed at the liberty that has been taken with our understanding. In this exuberant display of his own powers does Meredith show himself to be thoroughly English. He is unapproachable as a wrestler with words and phrases, and infuses dead speech with the vitality of blood and muscles. Words with him are like thoughts--strong, living, tangible to the touch of the soul. They seem to fly, and mount, and flutter round us, to catch our breath forcibly, and hold our imagination in the grasp of blood-warmed fingers. The most ordinary action of life, described by him in a line or two, is not a photograph, but a vivid revelation, a scene stamped not on the vision, but upon the mind. When he is not playing queer tricks with us and keeping every sense insufferably alert, every nerve strained to catch the meaning that dances tantalizingly before us, flying hither and thither upon fantastic figures of speech, until the writer himself seems drunk with his own juggling, he is quieting our baffled senses by these sharp revelations that have no artificial glamour about them. He ceases to be the inhuman metaphorist, and becomes our brother again, and we forget that he ever terrified us. I open ‘Evan Harrington’ at random, and alight on a paragraph where each word is vividly set in a perfect whole. There is no twist or turning here, and as we see the red harvest-moon and the dark water and trees, so we seem to touch the hand of suffering youth:

‘Over a length of the stream the red, round harvest-moon was rising, and the weakened youth was this evening at the mercy of the charm that encircled him. The water curved, and dimpled, and flowed flat, and the whole body of it rushed into the spaces of sad splendour. The clustered trees stood like temples of darkness; their shadows lengthened supernaturally; and a pale gloom crept between them on the sward. He had been thinking some time that Rose would knock at his door and give him her voice, at least; but she did not come; and when he had gazed out on the stream until his eyes ached, he felt that he must go and walk by it. Those little flashes of the hurrying tide spoke to him of a secret rapture and of a joy-seeking impulse--the pouring onward of all the blood of life into one illumined heart, mournful from excess of love.’

In none of his books do such passages abound as in ‘Richard Feverel,’ unless, perhaps, in ‘Harry Richmond.’ These two books, and in a lesser degree ‘Sandra Belloni,’ may best be described as picturesque and melodious. The writer is less a thinker than a poet, and sometimes he sings with a sweetness that troubles our vision and catches us queerly about the throat.

But viewing him upon the ground of the simple story-teller, we must admit that this is a ground either foreign to Mr. Meredith’s original genius, or deliberately shunned by him. The good old fashion, so dear to Scott and Thackeray, of bringing everything to a definite conclusion, either for better or worse, and clearing up all doubts as to the ultimate career of even their minor characters, is a fashion that he, with some cruelty and much contempt for the ordinary reader, utterly discards. He cares not a jot for our sympathy, still less for our judgment. He notes that life is chiefly interrogatory and unsatisfactory--an unfinished drama rarely terminating with the rightful wedding-bells or the merited reward; that choice is rarely justified by results, and that good and evil still remain vexed questions to be decided, as far as definite decision is possible, except upon their broadest issues, by temperament and individuality, by race and sex and training, as faith and love are decided. Look at the end of all his stories, and you will find yourself confronted with the unanswerable question which is sure to fix us in the examination of the lives of each one of us. There is the fatal tide, we know, but can we dare to say at what precise turning of the road of life we missed it?

This is the philosophy that ‘Richard Feverel’ exposes--conjectural, questioning; a drawn game between reason and impulse, between nature and intellect, between a philosopher’s system and a young man’s first love. Neither win, because, though a mighty fighter and a Homeric wrestler with words, Meredith is not of the definite school, and will not pander to his readers’ tastes either way. Are you for the mismanaged poor hero, or for the disappointed philosopher, gazing in the last page upon the system fondly built upon sand, and laid in ruins by the first breath of purely human disaster? Mr. Meredith resolves that your sympathies shall be balanced, as his own are soundly balanced. He leaves you with a question upon your lips, and your childish reproach is chidden by his silence.

Richard is the strongest and best hero the writer has drawn, before he fell in love with the more intricate complexities of woman, and delighted in her intellectual surprises, her social difficulties and struggles with iron fate and masculinity. We part with him as he rises from a sick-bed, widowed and broken upon the outset of brilliant manhood, enshadowed in a tragic gloom, and who is to explain to us the evolution of middle-age in this youth of burning hope and rash promise? Not the creator, certainly. The throes of commonplace speculation into which he may thrust the ordinary reader trouble him not, and he is less merciful to him even than Tolstoi. He takes us from that strong Shakespearean scene, in which Richard reads the diary of Clare Doria Forey, unveiling her unconscious and reticent love, only fully measured by her on the threshold of a loveless marriage, while overhead the candles are burning in her mortuary chamber, and flickering lugubriously upon the lips that have spoken to him from ‘behind the hills of death’; and without giving us time to clear our throats of the gathered sensations of pity and pain, he hurls us into fresh emotions, equally painful, by the death of Lucy, Richard’s young wife. And after that we learn nothing more of Richard, and are at liberty to decide for ourselves whether Sir Austin, the broker system-creator, and Lady Blandish married, like any other pair of middle-aged lovers, or preferred to continue in the less definite and secure path of platonic sentimentalities--the one studying the pilgrim’s scrip, the other adding to its wisdom.

The fault is perhaps to be laid to our complex, inquiring, and unrobust age, that men like Tolstoi and Meredith should both be incomplete as artists and as thinkers. Completeness in art belongs to simplicity of thought and directness of vision, and these are the attributes of the real story-teller, who is never diverted from his task by philosophic conjecture or by psychological problems. Mr. Meredith’s incompleteness is shown in an affectation of oddness and an artificial glamour that leave the reader with senses and wits perturbed, anxiously questioning the gravity of the writer, apprehensive of being laughed at, and not altogether sure that he has not been assisting at the marvellous performance of a juggling metaphorist, instead of the discoveries and exposition of a serious philosopher. This artificial glamour is more sparingly used in ‘Richard Feverel’; hence, perhaps, its larger popularity than any of his other works. But it is hardly, as a whole, so great as ‘The Egoist,’ ‘Rhoda Fleming,’ or ‘Diana of the Crossways.’ In it the quality of tenderness, noticeably absent in the rest, abounds, and also a lovely freshness and a visible delight in youth and in youthful joys. It is a work pre-eminently human, with all the defects and qualities of humanity strongly marked. Had it been written in blood, it could not be redder with life. Vitality is its captivating charm and melody its voice. As a work of art, it may be far from perfect, and we recognise that it is marred by many impossible situations, errors of taste and judgment, and a tendency, in the portrayal of the famous Mrs. Berry, to gross caricature. Nevertheless, we love it, faults and all, with that strong personal love and a wish for frequent dipping at its sources that it is the unshared privilege of truly great and original productions to inspire. How many are the writers we turn to in all moods, knowing we shall ever find something new, something helpful in their familiar pages! Shakespeare for the English mind and for a very few foreigners; Montaigne, and perhaps Molière, for others. Others, again, decide between Scott, Thackeray, and George Eliot. Add to this limited sphere a half-dozen of the world’s best poets, and the circle of comforters and permanent friends is formed. In such choice company may Meredith present himself with ‘Richard Feverel’ in his hand, and his place will be no mean one in their midst. Shakespeare himself might offer him the cordial hand-clasp of brotherhood, and assure him that since the appearance of Beatrice and Portia, no such women as Diana, Emilia, and his German princess had ever shot upon the dull world from masculine brains.

In Meredith’s very faults there is an excess of strength. It is this superabundance and an impatience of drivelling sentiment that lead him so frequently to shock our nineteenth-century taste. I think he shocks us with deliberate aim, deeming our taste questionable and unrobust, and our fastidiousness unhealthy. These blows directed against our temple of false modesty are in no book fiercer and more astounding than in ‘Richard Feverel,’ and in no other book has he risen to such supreme heights. Here you have at its best the matchless splendour and majesty of his prose, and pages of prolonged beauty. You have ample scope to realize the vividness of his interpretation of nature, and the delight of young love so magically unveiled by him in those three beautiful chapters on the opening romance of Richard and Lucy--‘Ferdinand and Miranda,’ ‘Diversions played on a Penny Whistle,’ and ‘Time-honoured Treatment of a Dragon by a Hero.’ Which of these three chapters to choose it would be difficult to say, for there is nothing like them in all English literature for sweetness, melody, and pulse-moving charm. If I had to pronounce, I should be disposed to give the preference to the ‘Penny Whistle’ chapter, though, from the fact that the first meeting between Richard and Lucy is oftenest quoted, I judge it to be the most popular.

Match me this exquisite picture in prose or poetry: ‘The sun is coming down to earth, and the fields and the waters shout to him golden shouts. He comes, and his heralds run before him, and touch the leaves of oaks and planes and beeches lucid green, and the pine-stems redder gold; leaving brightest footprints upon thickly-weeded banks, where the foxgloves’ last upper-bells incline, and bramble shoots wander amid moist rich herbage. The plumes of the woodland are alight; and beyond them, over the open, ’tis a race with the long-thrown shadows; a race across the heaths and up the hills, till, at the farthest bourne of mounted eastern cloud, the heralds of the sun lay rosy figures and rest.’

Or yet again, this other: ‘The tide of colour has ebbed from the upper sky. In the west the sea of sunken fire draws back, and the stars leap forth and tremble, and retire before the advancing moon, who slips the silver train of cloud from her shoulders, and, with her foot upon the pine-tops, surveys heaven.’

In these three chapters we have Mr. Meredith not only at his best, but better than many of the best poets upon their own ground. He sings rather than speaks. He neither wants to astonish nor affright us, but solely to enchant us. And who can read him and remain unmoved--withstand the spell he casts upon us? Shelley was never more musical, more thrilling, and never so strong.

But there is much else in the novels of this remarkable writer besides music and poetry, and the soft showery joys and sorrows of young love. There are the qualities and deficiencies of his tragic and his mighty side as a pendant for the grace and charm of the mood we have seen. Everything in him is pronounced. He has a taste for strong lights and shadows, for grotesque asides and interruptions; is sometimes crude, always complex, and often incomplete. His coarseness is akin to the coarseness that shakes us to amazement in the tragedies and comedies of Shakespeare, where ribaldry and lovely delicacy go hand-in-hand; where, swift upon the most fanciful play of thought and scenes of pathetic beauty, and images as exquisite as a Theocritan idyl, come a burst of clownish mirth and hideous joking.

Shakespearean is the word to describe Meredith, both in his defects and in his qualities. In each is he great, with something of the unapproachable greatness, the originality, the blood and brains and nerve, of the Stratford poet, towering over his fellows to-day as Shakespeare, alive, towered over his. Human to the heels, a seer and a psychologist in one, no word is lightly written, no character lightly drawn. He delights in humanity, and almost wickedly revels in its eccentricities. Hence his tendency to exaggeration. He seizes a queer character, such as old Tom Cogglesby, John Raikes, or Mrs. Berry, and, not content with their natural oddities, like Dickens, he must steep them in the colours of his own imagination; with the result that they come out of the process caricatures, and we find it exceedingly hard to divest them of their comic garb, and trace them back to the elemental, whence they started on their devious wanderings through their creator’s mind. This characteristic, as M. Taine observes, is peculiarly English. Since Rabelais’ days the French writers are too hampered by laws and rules in art, inalterable, like those of the Medes and Persians, to dare play such tricks with reality and human nature as Dickens, Thackeray, and Meredith, in their jesting moods, permit themselves. Scott’s moods had no such promptings, perhaps because he was a better story-teller than any of the three, and found the humour of life quite sufficient without the aid of exaggeration. But then there was no satire or hardness in all Scott’s nature, and manly tenderness and sympathy were his predominant traits. He wrote stories for the pleasure of writing them, not to belabour or ridicule poor worn humanity, in which he kept his faith green and unquestioning as a child’s.

But, like Dickens, Meredith is a poet, and, like him, has all a poet’s extravagances and excesses. Scott, as a poet, is never excessive, never exuberant, and always exact. His strength is employed with a Scotch perception of its just value, whereas his Saxon brothers waste theirs with an endless profusion. Not that I would compare Meredith with Dickens, except in his tendency to caricature, which in Dickens is a vice, and in his poetical excesses. He tortures metaphor at times, and lacks measure. This is the complaint French artists bring against their English brethren. Perhaps their greater physical strength, added to the Teutonic strain that flows through their blood from the early ages, runs to excess in imagination, and produces a conception of the grotesque unapprehended by the French. Certain it is that the latter escape our violent emotions in literature, and cannot arrive at an understanding of them. Our sensibilities, strung to common themes, and unexcited by lawless love and cerebral complications, rouse their wonder; and the mixture of buffoonery and satire in our great writers incurs their indignation. For this they say we are not artists, and ignore the classical limitations of art. And doubtless they are right. Upon the whole, our works of art are less artistic than theirs, and are produced in a lesser quantity, while our greatest works sin frequently against every known canon of art.

In shedding a double ray of ridicule upon his comic characters, Mr. Meredith so envelops and twists them in metaphor, now mildly sarcastic, now a joyous shout of laughter, we cannot tell with or at us, for we are not in the secret of his comic moods; and at times so bitingly ironical that we are puzzled and astray. Fain would we know whether he feels tenderly towards us at our worst, or cherishes an inalterable contempt for us at our best. For, unlike Thackeray, he is no moralist. Here, at least, is an English novelist whom M. Taine cannot accuse of laying down hard and fast rules for our moral benefit. His two most cynical characters attract some of our sympathy. Whereas we are ordered to loathe and condemn Becky Sharpe, and feel how much her railing creator despised her, Meredith allows us to be glad of his Countess’s acquaintance, and shows us that a cynical, intriguing woman, full of vulgar pride and not illegitimate ambition, may be interesting, and not unloved by her creator. He invites us to wonder at her, and not condemn, and though he may laugh at her weaknesses, and take a wicked pleasure in exposing them, he cannot be said, on the whole, to show her any harshness. As an adventuress, she is unsurpassed, and, unlike poor Becky, lives and dies, we imagine, a fine lady, driven by ambition to duplicities, but not consciously mean or dishonest. Though a virtuous woman, her morals are crooked, and her sense of honour is the reverse of keen. We have seen how such a character in Thackeray’s hands would develop, and to what lengths in heartlessness his satire carried him. Meredith’s Countess is possible; but Becky Sharpe is impossible.

The same may be said of his male villains. Indeed, he has none. There is something eminently human in the egoism of the wise youth Adrian Harley. We greet him ever with a cheerful smile, and for one of his witty remarks would have no, or only a very slight, objection to part with our last five-pound note. Contrast him with Barnes Newcome, and you have all the difference between black and gray. All Thackeray’s bad people are irredeemably bad, and all his good people hardly want wings to fit them for the angelic sphere. It is true, his female angels do not inspire us with a very ardent yearning for the joys of Paradise, if they are to be shared in such extremely insipid and melancholy society. Eternity with Amelia and Laura Pendennis and Lady Castlewood could not be described as a captivating perspective.

But Mr. Meredith must not be acquitted of any pronounced sins against reality. English taste is such, and its restrictions and exuberances are so little in accordance with life as it is lived by even those who paint it falsely, that it is impossible for the English novelist to escape sins of the sort. In general, Meredith is sufficiently just to humanity in its faults and in its virtues; it is only when its oddities catch hold of his fancy that he runs riot, and surpasses nature; only then is he apt to overdraw his account upon the bank of credulity.

Take, for example, Mrs. Berry, whom Mr. Le Gallienne, in a recent interesting study of Mr. Meredith, describes as a character that would have been a feather in Dickens’ cap. Doubtless, but that is not a compliment to Mr. Meredith, for what might do honour to Dickens cannot be said to be worthy of him. Mrs. Berry is witty and original to an alarming degree. She is a sort of compromise between Mrs. Quickly and Juliet’s nurse; not quite so coarse as either, perhaps, but more exhaustively garrulous and obtrusive. In the fifteenth century she might have been possible and pleasant, but not so in ours. She is an anachronism that we resent. The fault may be with us, but the fact remains, that we could not tolerate a Mrs. Berry in the flesh. Of such a servant a man of genius, or one of a humorous turn, might be glad as a study; but can we imagine lending a patient ear to her free speech, a stately and solemn old English gentleman, if capable of understanding what we call humour, only in its highly starched and faultlessly correct form? A student of mankind, certainly, after a certain prejudiced fashion, especially convinced of the inferiority of woman, as it behoves a poor gentleman who has suffered grievous wrong at the hands of a daughter of Eve; but one whose collar laughter is never likely to wrinkle or crush, and whose features under no temptation can relax into anything broader than a grim stiff smile. Picture this paternal prig and polished library philosopher being entertained by Juliet’s nurse and Falstaff’s landlady, and pronouncing both to be excellent women!

A gentleman who loved his Lamb and relished his Dickens would put up with her for the sake of her wit and originality, accepting her as a possible character, which I am not disposed to do. But no young girl, with even less of Lucy’s refinement, could submit to her gross indelicacy in that scene between them in the Isle of Wight. We know how reticent and shy young girls have become since Juliet’s day; still more so young brides with the most intimate of their sex--their mothers and their sisters; how easily affronted are their susceptibilities by the slightest trending towards ground that they so savagely regard as sacred. It is as much as one’s life is worth almost to speak to a very young bride about her married life; above all, if she be deeply enamoured of her husband, and for her mother to seek to unveil it would be a sacrilege. Mr. Meredith, who makes straight for nature divested of the swaddling clothes of sentimentality, and prefers her mud to the sentimentalist’s spangles and pink clouds, will perhaps say that the excess of delicacy to which naturally sensitive and fastidious womanhood has let itself be trained is artificial, unhealthy, and absurd. I do not dispute that a little more of savage candour would be an improvement to women, and that excessive delicacy leads them by a very apparent slope into pruriency. But honesty and candour, with modesty, are surely better than either without it, and if, for the sake of honesty and candour, we show ourselves willing to dispense with an excessive modesty for that of naturalness, surely we must lose one of the nameless, and not the least, charms of maidenliness! This reproach I make to Lucy is not only in the case of her tolerance of Mrs. Berry’s coarse talk, but in the occupation it enters her mind to allot her undeclared lover, Lord Montfalcon. I reproach, in fact, Mr. Meredith, with the entire creation, all the more so as she is the only girl he has drawn upon the old wearisome lines of masculine taste, of the eternal old-fashioned ivy-type, commonplace, loving and pretty, without character or interest apart from her second in the immortal duet with his breathless hero. She is charming, as all creatures lovely to look upon and purely natural must be charming; but the freshness of youth and the pleasant daisy-and-buttercup flavour vanished with the years and increasing domestic cares, what would there have remained in her to interest us and satisfy a soaring nature like Richard’s? The affair of the cookery-book irritates and displeases us as much as it did her husband in the period of the moon of bliss, and the only satisfaction we extract from it is the inimitable wise youth’s witty description of it in his letter to Lady Blandish. Bret Harte’s speculative vision embraced a disastrous sequel to the union of the Judge and Maud Muller of Whittier’s poem, and we may be permitted to picture Lucy twenty years after, with a bunch of keys at her waist, still studying the cookery-book, strong in the fabrication of preserves and home-made medicines, superintending her children’s studies, and arching mournful and uncomprehending brows at the moral and intellectual vagaries a man like Richard would be certain to develop. An admirable wife and mother, but an inadequate study.

It has been remarked that for Mr. Meredith’s readers there is no half-way house between uncompromising hostility and discipleship. You either bend before him as your master--imperfect at times, genius having its limitations as all things else that are human, but great in his very imperfections--or you reject him utterly. How those who reject him can manage to reconcile it to their conscience, I am at a loss to understand. But this proves the texture and quality of his influence. It is immense or it is nought. And by this pronounced feeling he evokes may he be classed as the founder of a school. He has introduced a new element into English literature--a healthy and purely philosophic realism, which differs as widely from the realism of Fielding as it does from that of Zola. To French wit he brings German profundity of thought, the whole wrought into a thoroughly Saxon setting. Vividness of conception, intensity of vision, and strength of diction--combine these qualities, and you have English such as no other writer has given us. It is beautiful, with a beauty all its own, and there seems to be no feat of which it is not capable. He has ransacked our language until he has wrought it, through a process of bewildering originality, into a flexibility, a forcible simplicity, a majesty and rhythm that, in his prose, surpass poetry. Never before have we received such a lesson in the unimagined resources of language. Never before did we so understand how written words may be made to seize us, fell us, captivate us, make vivid and tangible to our mind every image, every trick of person, every hue and aspect of nature. He does not describe or paint: he simply vitalizes inanimate objects. And if he had not made us his debtor in any other way, we must thank him for his great and perfect disciple, Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson.

CHAPTER III.

THE NOVELS OF GEORGE MEREDITH: ‘RICHARD FEVEREL’ AND ‘RHODA FLEMING.’

As this little book is written for those who have the misfortune not to be acquainted with the novels of Mr. Meredith, I do not think it will be inadvisable to add to my essay a slight sketch of each one, hoping thereby to send readers to the head source. Those who allow themselves to be persuaded thereto will have reason to thank me, even should they be among the common majority, unable to appreciate to its full value the new chapter in English literature offered them.

Much mention has been made of ‘Richard Feverel,’ the novel of Mr. Meredith’s youth, and, we are told, his own special favourite. The plot of this powerful story turns from a mixture of graceful mirth, delicious wit, and profound reflection, to tragedy, upon what I humbly conceive to be an impossible situation. And this is the sudden separation of Richard from his young bride. But after noting the crudities and errors of taste and judgment, which are frequent enough in the book, and which never once hide from us the lambent flame of genius that steadily burns through the whole, our fear is lest our desire to praise adequately should drop us into hyperbole. It is so much easier to blame than to praise with taste--above all, to praise judiciously. Our wits will always devise fresh methods for a successful use of the whip of censure, but in admiration it is less easy to get beyond the exclamatory period, and the end of simple epithets is soon reached.

The stamp of a breathless originality lies upon each character, however minor, and commingled in their creation is an indescribable mixture of weight and delicacy, of solid, massive strength and finish to a hair’s breadth--the finish of a purely-cut cameo. Of the wise youth, that delightful cynic, turning to obesity, and devoted to his stomach, it would be impossible to say enough. Every sentence, long and short, that he utters is a gem of matchless and irresistible wit. Adrian Harley’s wit is unique, and beside him Sheridan himself must be content with a lower place. If he breeds a sceptical thought in our breast, it is the doubt that any man in real life could be so continuously and unpremeditatedly witty throughout a reasonably long record of utterances. Though not purposely a leading character, he becomes so by force of his own individuality, and the pronounced part he plays in the development of Richard’s career.

The story opens with a description of the inmates of Raynham Abbey, the seat of Sir Austin Feverel, the hero’s father. This quaint individual is introduced to us as the anonymous author of a notable book, ‘The Pilgrim’s Scrip,’ with one aphorism of which we are startled on the first page: ‘I expect that woman will be the last thing civilized by man.’ We see at once that we have to deal with a gentleman who, like Plato and Schopenhauer, and a long list of intervening philosophers, holds the amiable sex in scorn. Here we have ‘the imperfect animal’ of the one and ‘the ugly sex’ of the other more courteously, but not less contemptuously, defined. There is no pretension to novelty, for he admits that ‘our new thoughts have thrilled dead bosoms.’

Reading further, we discover the clue to his scorn of woman. The poor gentleman has been wronged upon his hearth, and is a widower while yet his wife lives. He once had a wife he loved devotedly, and a friend, a poet, whom he trusted. The one betrayed his love and the other his confidence. The story is not new, but novel indeed is its effect upon Sir Austin Feverel. Bankrupt in love and friendship, he fell upon bitterness. To keep his heart alive, while presenting a mask of indifference to intimates and relatives, he concentrated all his hopes upon his baby boy, and, for the child’s ultimate misfortune, resolved to found a system for his benefit. But he wishes his paternal tenderness to remain unsuspected by others, and dismisses the nurse who caught him sobbing over his son’s cradle.

The inmates of Raynham are certainly a queer collection of specimens: Hippias, once thought to be the genius of the family, but a premature victim to strong appetites and a weak stomach, living in the embraces of dyspepsia, and engaged in a perpetual contention with his dinner. Algernon Feverel, whose career as a gentleman of the Guards lay in his legs, until it was irrevocably cut short by the loss of one on a cricket-ground, when he devoted himself to the direction of his nephew’s animal vigour ‘with a melancholy vivacity.’ A venerable lady, known as Great-Aunt Grantley, who spent the day preparing for dinner and the night in remembering it. Mrs. Doria Forey, the baronet’s eldest sister, who fixed herself at the Abbey with the intention of marrying her only daughter, Clare, to the Hope of Raynham. There are two other Feverel ladies, known as the mothers of two remarkable sons, one our delightful wise youth, Adrian Harley, and the other, Austin Wentworth, a noble youth, who had nobly redeemed a common fault in the lives of young men, by marriage, and ‘was condemned to undergo the world’s harsh judgment, not for the fault--for its atonement.’ ‘Adrian was noted for his sagacity, which carried the world, but brought him no friends. His problem for life was to satisfy his appetites without rashly staking his character.’ He was polished, luxurious, and happy at the cost of others, and, while pursuing the maids of earth, enjoyed a reputation for virtue. The world declared him moral and wise, ‘and the pleasing converse every way of his disgraced cousin Austin.’ And we ever greet him cordially, for all his vices, and the ‘edge to his smile, which cuts much like a sneer.’