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GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
LONGMANS, GREEN & CO. 
 FOURTH AVENUE AND 30TH STREET 
 
GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 A STUDY OF HIS WORKS 
 AND PERSONALITY 
 
 BY 
 
 J. H. E. CREES 
 
 M.A. (Camb.), M.A., D.Lir. (Lond.) 
 
 HEAX»MASTER OF THE CRVPT GRAMMAR SCHOOL, GLOUCESTER 
 
 AUTHOR OF " DIDASCALUS PATIENS," "THE REIGN OF THE EMPEROR 
 
 PROBUS," ETC. 
 
 OXFORD 
 
 B. H. BLACKWELL 
 
 BROAD STREET 
 
 MCMXVIII 
 
 ! ^ » V 
 
PRINTED DY 
 
 IIAZELL, WATSON AND VINEY, LD,, 
 
 LONDON AND AYLESBURY. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 Nine years have passed since George Meredith was 
 united again to Earth, the subject and the inspirer 
 of so many of his finest pages, and it seems worth 
 while to essay a considered judgment of his con- 
 tribution to Hterature. The present writer has 
 walked all round his subject and taken a Meredithian 
 elevation from different points of view. He must 
 now leave it to others to decide whether his judg- 
 ments are correct. 
 
 To live in and with Meredith, to read and reread 
 the eighteen or so volumes of four to five hundred 
 pages that he has left us, is an ordeal as well as an 
 experience, a discipline as well as a delight. It 
 may result in the student's being swept into the 
 Meredithian orbit to revolve as an obedient satellite 
 around a more powerful luminary. One may be 
 ever miscarrying with abortive epigram. Yet a 
 conclusion safely on this side of moderation would 
 be, first that the art of novel- writing is an art which 
 even in the hands of but a middling practitioner 
 demands more respect than is always accorded it, 
 and secondly, that Meredith himself, in his com- 
 bination of most vigorous intellect with fervent 
 
 V 
 
Preface 
 
 poetry and all the normal qualities of the novelist, 
 in his creation of what is almost a new literary 
 form — that of the didactic prose epos, the philo- 
 sophy of history applied to life and its problems 
 — is an unparalleled and wondrous phenomenon, 
 one of those rarely appearing giants of speech and 
 thought whose kinship in tenseness of intellectual 
 life and myriad- mindedness win them the epithet 
 Shakespearean. 
 
 With Meredith we cHmb to the Andes of the 
 intellect, and the vastness of the prospect, the 
 radiance of the sun illumining so many dinerent 
 intellectual kingdoms, atones for the touch of frost 
 in the air. But the thin aether is a trial for weak 
 hearts and lungs. Not all can scale these heights, 
 still fewer can abide on these lone tablelands of 
 intellect. Yet the hardened mountaineer will win 
 full many a thrill of sudden discovery such as he 
 can never gain in softer climes. 
 
 One must scale these ascents by oneself. Yet 
 a word of recognition and of thanks is due to 
 tliose who have climbed these altitudes before us. 
 Mr. Trevelyan's handbook on Meredith's poems is of 
 great service in one's earUer steps, and his fine essay 
 in Clio a Muse is the more mature work of a critic 
 who can now give free, easy, and delightful ex- 
 pression to his mellowed judgment. Dr. Verrall's 
 brilliant essay, the work of a scholar whose gifts of 
 heart and intellect would have made him a worthy 
 comrade of any of Meredith's great intellectuals, does 
 
 vi 
 
Preface 
 
 full justice to the master's wit so well defined as 
 " manipulation of meanings," though the friendly 
 controversy waged by Mr. Trevelyan with him as 
 to the difference between poetry and wit seems to 
 dissolve into verbal legerdemain. Mrs. Sturge 
 Henderson has made a painstaking study of the 
 various novels. Mr. Clodd's Recollections would 
 seem to contain many interesting things/ and Mr. 
 le Gallienne's enthusiastic essay should not be 
 neglected. Yet probably everyone who journeys 
 through Meredith will prefer to tell his own story 
 for himself, and to each his own experience will 
 seem the thing of highest value. Here no catalogue 
 raisonne of Meredith's novels and poetry will be 
 attempted, but rather a study of the different 
 elements in his personality which contributed to 
 his greatness. 
 
 With Meredith a writer's difficulty is not lack of 
 matter. The vein is rich ; one quarries and quarries. 
 One admires at first his cleverness, then his poetic 
 ecstas\% lastly his noble soul. It was his poetry, 
 he told Mr. Clodd, that he valued most, yet perhaps 
 a study of his genius must take account chiefly of 
 that to which his most strenuous enorts were 
 devoted, his novels, and moreover his poetic power 
 can be triumphantly demonstrated best in some 
 of his novels. They treat of life's problems not 
 with too rosy a view, but they stand far apart 
 
 1 I have not seen the book. Two references taken from it 
 are gleaned from a review. 
 
 vii 
 
Preface 
 
 from the novels of the stews, or the poetr^^ of 
 the overripe. It was his aim to treat Hfe philo- 
 sophically, to study character more minutely than 
 before, to make the novel an aid to the art of living 
 as well as an intellectual recreation. 
 
 How far does he rise to his own ideal ? It would 
 be needful to review each novel to answer inWy. 
 Not all have reached an equal height. Art abides 
 constant but inspiration comes and goes, and few 
 masters are always at their greatest. The Egoist 
 is the Meredithian type supreme and unsurpassable, 
 The Ordeal of Richard Fever el is tenser, a rare 
 example of the tragic, Eva7i Harrington is the finest 
 example of the extravaganza, Beauchamp's Career 
 stands not unworthily near TJie Ordeal, One of Our 
 Conquerors is crammed so full of rich fare as to be 
 difficult to queasy stomachs, The Shaving of Shagpat 
 is an astonishing feat of virtuosity in style, The 
 Tragic Comedians is a masterpiece of subtle psy- 
 chology and impetuous narrative. And if we 
 cease to enumerate we feel that it is unjust to 
 slight the others, and then that much more than 
 a passing word is due to the poems which — even 
 the most abstruse — grow in force and meaning as 
 we return to them. It is indeed an embarrassment 
 of riches. Truly here is God's plenty. 
 
 vui 
 
CONTENTS 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 PAGE 
 
 INTRODUCTORY I 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 THE COMIC SPIRIT — THE SENTIMENTALIST . I7 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 YOUTH . . . . . . .35 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 MEREDITH'S POETRY 70 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 MEREDITH'S PHILOSOPHY .... 85 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 MEREDITH THE ARTIST ...» I29 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 CONCLUSION ....... 181 
 
 INDEX 231 
 
GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 INTRODUCTORY 
 
 " Lo ! of hundreds who aspire 
 Eighties perish — nineties tire ; 
 They who bear up in spite of wrecks and wracks. 
 Were seasoned by Celestial hail of thwacks. 
 
 " Fortune in this mortal race 
 Builds on thwackings for its base ; 
 Thus the All- wise doth make a flail a staff 
 And separates His heavenly corn from chaff." 
 
 So sang Meredith of the history of the reformer. 
 His progress is encompassed by thwackings ; 
 thwackings are the milestones which mark his path, 
 the rewards which celebrate his achievements. And 
 such too often is the career of a writer of original 
 force, who must educate the world before he can 
 delight it, for in the realm of mind it is as hard as 
 elsewhere to make the best of both worlds. Some 
 great writers have w^on immediate immortality by 
 limning once and for ever the age in which they 
 lived, by recording legibly that all may read the 
 ideas and aspirations of the present, elevated and 
 
George Meredith 
 
 traDsfijjured by rhat one touch of genius which 
 makes all ages kin, changing the contemporary 
 into the eternal. Others, perhaps of equal genius, 
 but of less felicity, pioneers, harbingers of an age 
 they never saw, have incurred a painfuller im- 
 mortality, widening the bounds of men's thought, 
 purging it of imperfections, bestowing on the world 
 lasting delight and permanent profit for a daily 
 wage of disesteem or contumely, toiling at a task 
 which offered them the martyr's crown before the 
 laurel wreath. Aeschylus, happy in the opportune- 
 ness of his birth, portrayed the Athens of the Persian 
 War and the men of Marathon, MapaBcovofidxat, 
 with their simple piety and homely heroism, even at 
 the moment of the passing of that golden age ; 
 while Euripides, deeming no myth sacred, putting 
 every view, however time-honoured, under the 
 microscope, gained the jeers of Aristophanes and 
 the mockery of the groundlings whose sons and 
 successive posterity were to swear by him as the 
 only tragic poet. The idol of the future is the Aunt 
 Sally of the present. The pioneer of intellect ploughs 
 a lonely furrow. He is assailed by invective, beset 
 by contumely, the butt of ridicule, the San Sebastian 
 of the slings and arrows of outrageous criticism. 
 He is depressed by disregard, chilled by the icy 
 waters of contempt, haunted by the dread of 
 beggary, the recompense of stoutness of conviction. 
 He has the bitter epithet of bungler hurled at him 
 by far inferior rivals while his conscience forbids 
 
 2 
 
Introductory 
 
 the winning of an easy victory with their own 
 weapons. And when detraction recites its paHnode, 
 his sole compensation is to repl}^ (from the Elysian 
 Fields) " I told you so." Music, better perhaps 
 than any other art, affords examples of the trials 
 and privations of genius born before its time. But 
 literary greatness, too, follows a course directly 
 opposite to worldly greatness. It passes from 
 contempt to canonisation, from insulting disregard 
 to the dubious honours of the cult. But yesterday 
 none was so poor to do our genius reverence, to-day 
 a miracle has come to pass and he awakens famous. 
 We still stone our prophets and build them sumptu- 
 ous memorials after. " Tantae molis erat," such 
 a tribulation is it to inaugurate a new era. 
 
 Our aim is to portray the personalit}^ and to 
 appraise the performance of such a harbinger of 
 this latest age. Privation and dire poverty seem 
 not to have fallen to his lot, and the breeze-swept 
 chalet of Boxhill was a far happier habitation than 
 the attics of Grub Street. Yet Meredith's path 
 through life was painful enough to colour his views 
 and to trammel his activities. Experience taught 
 him to endure criticism with indifferent mildness, to 
 submit to approbation VNdth ironic patience. En- 
 thusiasm for his work evoked good-humoured 
 insouciance or amused surprise. Time doubtless 
 brings with it callousness and genius grows accus- 
 tomed to neglect. But that one who at thirty-one had 
 given Richard Feverel to the world should win scant 
 
 3 
 
George Meredith 
 
 honour before sixty is neither natural nor normal, 
 and unheeding apathy, so much more dire a tribula- 
 tion than the bitterest ridicule, must have chilled a 
 man of Meredith's keen sensibility. It is not true 
 that it made no difference to Meredith whether 
 the world regarded him as a prophet or not. The 
 scant success of his novels, the complete failure 
 of his poems, had the inevitable financial results. 
 Instead of writing poetry as he desired, Meredith 
 must needs write " potboilers," which he detested ; 
 instead of writing great novels, he must, to win his 
 daily bread, peruse bad grammar and sorry fiction 
 for Messrs. Chapman & Hall, Apollo day-labourer 
 to Admetus. 
 
 Yet painful as neglect must be to genius, neglect 
 neither soured the sweetness of Meredith's disposition 
 nor narrowed his range of interests. A man of 
 great physical vigour, he delighted to excess in 
 violent exercise. He flung himself with the keenest 
 zest into numerous sports ; his was a pedestrian 
 Muse. He combined two characteristics, different 
 if not contrar}^ ; he was a good Hampshire man 
 but he was also a good European. The visionary 
 ardour of the Celt flamed in an intellect of super- 
 subtle keenness ; he united with a romantic sym- 
 pathy for nature an all-pervading irony, and a 
 rare mastery of words. Rarely has one seen a 
 more many-sided personality, rarely has there 
 arisen a man of letters who came so close to nature. 
 The felicitous imion of these qualities was the 
 
 4 
 
Introductory 
 
 secret of his greatness. Passion and intellect 
 were loyal yoke-fellows, fervour and reason hounds 
 that ran in the leash together. This marriage of 
 heart and brain marks a new epoch in the realm of 
 novel-writing, pregnant with striking consequences. 
 
 Man is an animal that laughs. He may with equal 
 truth be termed an animal that narrates. The saga 
 instinct is one of the earUest symptoms of a germin- 
 ating civilisation. As soon as man begins to tell 
 tales, he has begun to free himself from the bondage 
 of the actual, from the grossest physical necessities, 
 from the tyranny of the struggle for existence. 
 For however brief an interval he enjoys the delight 
 of the artist in shaping facts, in bringing the world 
 under his own dominion. The saga is the first 
 link in the long chain which will reach to the 
 Republic of Plato, that ideal system which is to 
 educe cosmos out of chaos, to order the whole 
 world. 
 
 There is plastic force latent in the saga, however 
 spontaneous it may seem. Whichever camp of 
 scholars claims us, for all its divine freshness of 
 the morning dew, " Homer " — we must admit it — 
 is the product of many nimble minds shaping and 
 reshaping for centuries a legend which was ever 
 being fashioned anew. It has grown rather with 
 the silent yet unceasing processes of a living 
 organism than by conscious ordered design. It 
 seems at first artless enough, a tale devoid of arriere- 
 pensee, a pageant of blithe scenes o'erbrimming with 
 
 5 
 
George Meredith 
 
 the joy of life, but over all there looms the 
 figure of War, bane of mortals, woeful and piteous, 
 and the scene in which Priam endures to do that 
 which none had brooked before him, and prays for 
 Hector's corpse of Hector's slayer, contains much 
 " criticism of life " implicit. No man indeed, child 
 of whatever age, who tells a tale with any art at 
 all, can fail to betray his thoughts on human life. 
 The view may be implied or explicit, simple and 
 naif rather than profound and conscious, but view 
 it is. 
 
 The novel is our modern epic. The story-telling 
 instinct has at length — one knows not why — found 
 a divorce from verse. Man's impulse to narrate 
 is perennial, and to that extent the modern novel, 
 with all its crudities, its falseness of sentiment, its 
 distortion of view, is a more genuine growth than 
 more pretentious literary forms. Its function is 
 primarily and primitively to minister to the desire 
 of the imagination to range far and wide with fancy 
 free, banishing for a while all that cramps and con- 
 fines it within the prisoning fetters of the daily round, 
 to idealise the present and to make the real romantic, 
 to give an individual touch to themes of world- 
 wide interest. The mind is a thing which cannot 
 work when severed from the body which confines 
 it. So, too, the novel is a thing which cannot 
 function without its framework of fact. A novel 
 which is not a story is not a novel, but a treatise, 
 a homily, or a vast essay. 
 
 6 
 
 
Introductory 
 
 Obviously, then, one dichotomy of the novel 
 might be the technique of narrative and philosophy. 
 The novelist must tell his story clearly and directly, 
 he must make proper arrangements for the develop- 
 ment of character, he must give his story a suitable 
 beginning, a regular logical course, and a neat 
 conclusion, he may enlighten it with wit, suffuse it 
 with humour, embellish it — but sparingly — with 
 digressions. Such is the technique of the novel, and 
 though wit and humour are a rare equipment, the 
 modem novelist has shown that in many respects 
 he is well armed with the lower accomplishments 
 of his craft, and that though the great artists are 
 few, the good workmen are many. There are some 
 perhaps who would almost restrict the novelist to 
 these prosaic tasks. But literature is more than 
 craftsmanship. Some great writers may have been 
 engrossed rather in technical problems and the 
 methods by which new difficulties may be over- 
 come to the neglect of the great questions of 
 life which demand not solution but pondering 
 upon. They have merited the reward of those 
 who have served art well ; yet the world will 
 with reason always love to linger beside the great 
 man who meditates aloud or chats engagingly 
 with his readers upon things in general rather 
 than to con the cunning artificer who is prepared 
 to cut up human things into so many lengths 
 of cloth. 
 
 The narrative element, which, as we have said, 
 
 7 
 
George Meredith 
 
 is the fundamental of a novel, naturally predomin- 
 ates in the history of a Tom Jones, or a Jonathan 
 Wild, or a Peregrine Pickle. But as early as 
 Fielding men had learnt to digress, to discuss their 
 hero, and to moralise upon the world at large. 
 The novel was loosely knit, and the leaning towards 
 the picaresque accentuated the tendency to produce 
 books whose sole unity consisted in their being the 
 record of the successive adventures of a single 
 hero. The tendenc}^ to concentrate, to exercise a 
 more rigorous control, to organise the novel, has 
 much developed, but it developed slowly. It 
 needs, in fact, a more scientific mind and a more 
 orderly temperament than the Bohemians of Grub 
 Street could have attained, or an earlier century 
 than the nineteenth could have fostered. 
 
 The contrast between the repute of the novel 
 to-day and its status one hundred years ago is 
 marvellous. Novels were held in contempt, deemed 
 the fit pabulum only of weak intellects. To 
 read novels, it was declared with justice, was a 
 pursuit which gave one a distaste for more serious 
 studies. Though novels may still have the defects 
 of one century ago, the critic cannot, if he would, 
 ignore the achievements of our modern novelists, 
 In the opinion of one good judge. Professor Saints- 
 bury, between the years 1 840-1 900 more was 
 achieved in the novel form by writers who adopted 
 that form than was achieved in any other prose 
 form in any literature. The novelist is now not 
 
 8 
 
Introductory 
 
 merely a skilled narrator whose art serves to 
 beguile a weary hour. He is an earnest votary 
 of the highest of all studies, a hierophant of 
 humanity ; like a great dramatist he holds the 
 mirror up to life, he has the dramatic faculty with 
 the necessary modifications, he not only tran- 
 scribes, he improves upon nature, and all that he 
 tells us is coloured consciously or unconsciously 
 by his point of view. His greatest equipment is 
 his own personality, and even his mastery over 
 words and his constructive skill are not more impor- 
 tant. An eminent living novelist ^ justly maintains 
 that the novel has to-day no rival in the trans- 
 mitting of the impassioned vision of life. Among 
 the items of equipment are a sense of beauty — 
 for the novelist is charmed and seduced by what he 
 writes — and a passionate intensity of vision. Every 
 fine emotion inspired in the reader must have been 
 previously felt by the writer in a far greater degree. 
 Nor is this all. The novelist must have fineness of 
 mind. His mind must be " sympathetic, quickly 
 responsive, courageous, honest, humorous, tender, 
 just, merciful, permeated and controlled by common 
 sense." His mind must have the quality of being 
 noble. It is a formidable catalogue of qualities. 
 Yet it is certain that without these qualities a 
 really great novel cannot come into existence, and 
 that in the short list of writers who possess such gifts 
 George Meredith will take his stand unchallenged, 
 1 Mr. Arnold Bennett. 
 
 9 
 
George Meredith 
 
 Poetry has been defined as criticism of life. The 
 "'^definition will suit the great novel even better* 
 Beside and beyond all Meredith's interest in his 
 characters, his working out of an elaborate intrigue, 
 his brilliancy of expression, we find an eager, 
 unsleeping observation of the world of man, an in- 
 cessant sensitiveness to all that can react upon the 
 writer in life's vast variety of interests. Meredith 
 drives a coach richly adorned and heavily laden, 
 but he moves to a definite though distant goal. 
 To change the metaphor, a Meredithian novel is 
 a rich banquet, set by the author for his guests, 
 in which the variety of meats is bewildering, 
 leading sometimes to dyspepsia. A banquet it is 
 in truth, a symposium, in which all personages 
 contribute either by word or deed their view of 
 certain definite problems, a gathering which evokes 
 the complaint, if there be complaint at all, that 
 the fare is too sumptuous rather than too meagre. 
 For with Meredith the critical, analytic faculty is 
 yalways at work. Criticism of life provokes always 
 (further criticism, Dickens criticised life and was 
 /called a radical, Thackeray criticised life and was 
 branded as a cynic, Meredith in his turn is dubbed 
 by those without the pale an intellectual whose work 
 is caviare to the general. But there is one solid 
 result. The novel, once a mere anodyne to dull 
 the sense of pain at " times so out of joint," or 
 a narcotic whose kindly stupefaction delivers us 
 from the malady of thought, is, or can be, a great 
 
 10 
 
Introductory- 
 branch of literature, as weighty as the Decline and 
 Fall, as profound and eloquent as the Republic, as 
 impassioned as Romeo and Juliet. 
 
 What we may call the philosophising tendency, 
 implicit doubtless from the beginning, remains in 
 embryo until the nineteenth century. The vogue 
 of the historical novel did much to aid this tendency. 
 The true historical novelist feels himself obliged 
 more frequently than others to expound and 
 interpret, and the works of Scott are obviously 
 addressed to a constituency which appreciates the 
 compliment of being taken seriously and which 
 is well content to pause from time to time while 
 the historical background is explained. The passage 
 of philosophy from historical romance to plain 
 unadulterate fiction is easy. We next find Thackeray 
 delighting for a brief interval to leave his puppets, 
 as he calls them, to chat to his readers with that 
 delightful ease, that mellowed wisdom, that clear 
 perception of life's irony which is the hardest-won 
 crown of the artist in human life. The showman, 
 as he calls himself, moralises, incorrigibly senti- 
 mental, upon the whimsies of mortality. His 
 creations are not exactly types — they are too 
 intimately known to him for that — but his reflections 
 are bound to develop into generalisations. And with 
 his successors the delineation of character becomes 
 profoundly modified. So far we have been inclined 
 to look at life upon the surface, or at any 
 rate chiefly to describe the histories of not very 
 
 II 
 
George Meredith 
 
 profound personalities. But now we must probe 
 deeper. The science of psychology has been 
 initiated, and initiated rather by men of letters 
 than by the man of science. In proportion as men 
 grow sophisticated, the analyst of mental pro- 
 cesses becomes more subtle. The novel is no 
 more the novel of incident but the novel of char- 
 acter, true though it may be that no novel can 
 consist exclusively of character or of incident but 
 must comprise the two. We pierce the depths 
 of the human mind with our scalpel, we put its 
 subtlest parts beneath our microscope. The art 
 of the novelist has suffered a change similar to 
 that experienced by the art of the musician, which 
 in little more than a century has made the tran- 
 sition from Gliick and Handel to Brahms and 
 Wagner. We are learned, almost academic. The 
 Alexandrine age has come. 
 
 In this passage from the simple to the super- 
 subtle, from the depiction of the most ordinary 
 types to the delineation by a thousand touches 
 of the most finished products of a most artificial 
 society, the culminating figure is George Meredith. 
 The transition from Fielding to Meredith, the 
 extreme points in our line of masters, is one which 
 can be easily traced despite occasional breaks and 
 even chasms. At the end philosophy, not the mere 
 tteUing of a tale, must now predominate. Life is 
 no more a gay raree-show, a kaleidoscope of many- 
 coloured hues, a vivid panorama. It may be all 
 
 12 
 
Introductory 
 
 this, but philosophy has now annexed the novel 
 too. The novelist, like the philosopher, must now 
 declare that the untested life is not worth living. 
 He sets out to expound the science of human life 
 in many volumes, and if the science of human life 
 is the apex of all sciences, the novelist is suddenly 
 hoisted to the topmost place in the literary hierarchy. 
 
 Such is the new conception of the novel first \ 
 clearly conceived and explicitly enunciated by 
 Meredith himself. Diana of the Crossways contains 
 the locus classicus. The art of the novelist has 
 not yet attained its majority, being neither blush- 
 less infant nor executive man. We must — oh ! 
 shades of Smollett and of Sterne — attain a theory 
 of life, penetrate to life's core, and rose-pink and 
 dirty drab shall pass away. Our insight must be| 
 unerring, unplagued by the distortions of senti-| 
 mentalism, that refusal to see facts as they are, I 
 the arch-enemy of all progress and of true know- 
 ledge. We must advance towards this' goal, with 
 a giant's stride if we can, a century a day. " Peruse 
 your Realists," learn even from them. " Be wary 
 of the disrelish of brainstuff." The brainstuff of 
 fiction is internal history, and to suppose it dull 
 is the profoundest of errors." The example only is 
 needed and our paladin is content doubtless to set 
 it, ready if need be to have a dozen for audience 
 as a beginning. " History without Philosophy is the 
 skeleton map of events, Fiction a picture of figures 
 modelled on no skeleton anatomy." 
 
 13 
 
 1 
 
George Meredith 
 
 Such was Meredith's manifesto to the world. He 
 wrote content with Uttle more than his specified 
 dozen for audience, satisfied if only the enlightened, 
 the intellectual, would give him an occasional round 
 of applause. The first chapter of Diana, wTitten 
 when he was verging towards threescore, only 
 summarises in vivid language those principles 
 which he laid down for himself in early years, and 
 which he followed, despite abuse, neglect, and 
 contumely, until on the threshold of old age the 
 world at length found that it had been harbouring 
 an extraordinary genius unawares. 
 
 "Be wary of the disrelish of brainstuff." It is 
 a phrase to mark a new epoch, it is the sign of the 
 advent of the intellectual as novelist, it heralds 
 an age in which science is to be literary, and litera- 
 ture scientific. The stuff of literature is the whole 
 of human life, the fittest object of cognition. It 
 is a difficult task, the ordering of human life, the 
 interpretation as well as the amassment of a vast 
 multitude of particulars, the synthesis at a white 
 heat of science and imagination. And, strangest 
 of all, the man whose vision can pierce deepest 
 into the penetralia of human nature is not the 
 scientist with all his apparatus and ingenious 
 technique, nor even the professed philosopher with 
 all his subtlety of analysis, but the great literary 
 artist who comprises within his larger nature both 
 scientist and philosopher, and subconsciously, by 
 
 14 
 
Introductory 
 
 mere intuition, arrives at judgments and gains 
 glimpses of reality which scientist and philosopher 
 can only seize upon, study, and laboriously justify. 
 Dryasdust has not enthroned himself in the art of 
 human life as he has in the art of making history. 
 He recognises, it may be, his limitations, and 
 prefers to transcribe, or even annotate, a mediaeval 
 charter. We have to learn that those who seek 
 profound acquaintance with man and his psychology 
 must seek it in the pages of our greatest writers, in 
 the Iliad, Hamlet or King Lear, The Divine Comedy, 
 or Don Quixote. The insight of the genius of the 
 past shone out in flashes ; the genius of the future 
 will have more system, he will make many more 
 discoveries, he will indeed be always making fresh 
 discoveries. He will husband his gains, too pre- 
 cious to be flung away in prodigal profusion ; he 
 will attempt himself a science of human life, or at 
 least enunciate some of its principles ; he will be 
 always and consciously psychologising. He will 
 write novels with a purpose, but his purpose is to 
 demonstrate human life in action ; he aims to make 
 the novel the highest, truest form of life. He will 
 demand the mental energ}^ the universal range of 
 a Shakespeare, the powerful reasoning and ordered 
 science of a Newton, the philosophic breadth and 
 artistry of a Plato, the soaring rapturous enthusiasm 
 of a Shelley. That it is possible to catalogue 
 thus the qualities which the novelist of Meredith's 
 vision will need without rendering Meredith himself 
 
 15 
 
George Meredith 
 
 entirely ridiculous is no slight evidence of the 
 success with which he met the exacting claims 
 made upon him by his exalted conception of the 
 novel's range. 
 
 It is a wondrous mind that we shall find portrayed 
 for us when we come to an examination of the 
 Meredithian novels, a mind fertile, teeming in 
 metaphor beyond most writers, over-brimming 
 with imagery, learning, brilliant phrase, and lyric 
 ecstasy. It is not a Protean mind like Shake- 
 speare's, for in the kingdom of Meredith all things 
 must be subjected, all things must be moulded and 
 fashioned before they become Meredithian creations. 
 Those who were privileged to enjoy his converse 
 tell us that it was rich in the same qualities which 
 are so noteworthy in the novels, notable in its wit 
 and humour, lambent with a gentle satire, marked 
 in its broad manysidedness by keen interest in 
 contemporary topics and a glowing hope in the 
 progress of the future. But yet he is depicted 
 for us better in his books than by the best of 
 Boswells. No man ever attained a more perfect 
 unity of thought and deed, a completer consistency 
 of theory and practice. His life, at least his 
 spiritual life, is recorded for us, clearly and lucidly, 
 in his eighteen volumes : 
 
 " quo fit, ut omnis 
 votiva pateat veluti descripta tabella 
 vita senis." 
 
 i6 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE COMIC SPIRIT — THE SENTIMENTALIST 
 
 I. The Comic Spirit 
 
 We crudely divide life into tragedy and comedy, 
 though we are nearly always conscious that life 
 is too large for cross-section views, that most 
 lives partake of both tragedy and comedy, and 
 that tragedy and comedy, comedy and tragedy are 
 blended in rich variety. Most great writers, how- 
 ever, group themselves under the banners of either 
 Democritus or Heracleitus. Our own author, 
 though the writer of Rhoda Fleming could never be 
 described as lacking in seriousness of view, loves 
 irony far more than tragedy. He is fascinated by 
 that wondrous incongruity which marks the deeds 
 of men, he archly smiles at the pranks of Willoughby 
 or the high strategy of the Poles, and leaves others 
 as a rule to delineate the mournful destinies of such 
 as Richard Feverel or Dahlia Fleming. He is ever 
 communing w^ith the Comic Spirit ; like an angel 
 aloft he marks the impish tricks of those with 
 whom he chiefly deals, the highly sophisticated 
 types of a mannered age. He is not the humorist, 
 for there is nothing whimsical or odd about him ; 
 c 17 
 
y 
 
 George Meredith 
 
 he has too clear a sense of logic. He is not an 
 exemplar of Laughter holding both his sides, 
 for he holds in some contempt the boisterous 
 energy of those who would assault his sense of the 
 discordant, and he insists on subtler methods. He 
 is just a supramundane spirit with the clearest 
 insight and a real though detached sympathy, who 
 grows to tolerate the fool by describing him, whose 
 features just yield in a faint smile, who is rarely 
 perturbed, never lacking in charity, who pins his 
 victims like butterflies on a card, but does not 
 belabour them with his horsewhip like a furious 
 farmer. He will not harrow us ; he simply teaches 
 \ us what we are, believing that there is man's best 
 
 punishment and fittest corrective. 
 / Comedy, then, is something which with a keen 
 sense of the incongruous wages truceless war against 
 the unreal masquerading as the true, against 
 pretence in the guise of reality, against the cowardice 
 which refuses to look life in the face. These different 
 phases of one great defect of human nature Mere- 
 j dith groups under the one head, Sentimentalism. 
 I To this he gives no quarter ; against this, as he 
 confesses in his letters, he has an invincible pre- 
 judice. He loves the youth ardent and courageous 
 l^who has the courage of his convictions, the fair 
 /maiden gifted with a woman's finest charm who 
 '' refuses to base her dominion on sex or superficiality, 
 vnot content in matters of the mind to be man's 
 ' obedient slave. For such as these he has tender- 
 
 i8 
 
The Comic Spirit 
 
 ness and sympathy in failure or in error, but for 
 those who have raised the banner of sentimentalism 
 in any way he vows implacable hostility. Vittoria 
 is unformed, immature, a bundle of impulses rather 
 than a mature woman, but even in her crudity she 
 is a nobler creature than the three Misses Pole 
 with their make-believe, their imposture, their 
 blinking at the truth. Willoughby is doubtless 
 a gallant gentleman who rules a county and a 
 country-house, a princely person of great address, 
 of fine presence, who in short " has a leg," 
 but it is Willoughby whom the imps of comed}^ 
 incessantly torment, and it is Vernon Whitford, 
 " Phoebus Apollo turned fasting friar," who wins 
 the heart of Clara Middle ton. 
 
 A true instinct urged Meredith to devote himself 
 to comedy. His conception of life accords in the main 
 with the dictum of Socrates that "no one willingly 
 errs," that it is lack of intelligence, afxaOla, which 
 causes more than half the troubles which afflict 
 the world. One cannot rage furiously against, 
 those who are not as wise as we ; one can only) 
 smile gently at their failings, or even laugh heartily] 
 diverted to the top of one's bent. Thus though 
 The Ordeal reaches a true tragic pitch, though The 
 Tragic Comedians ends in utter downfall, Meredith 
 as a rule is satisfied if his characters — all who 
 deserve it — attain after thrilling adventures and 
 hairbreadth escapes peaceful deliverance from the 
 imps of comedy. He leads them many a dance. 
 
 19 
 
George Meredith 
 
 Many of his comedies — Evan Harrington, for in- 
 stance — are extravaganzas whose drollery forbids 
 the question whether mirth has not banished veri- 
 similitude. Meredith is the novelist of the young. 
 He loves to take a character unformed, expose 
 it to the whirligig of fortune, trace the gradual 
 development of the heroic in a hero, and disrniss 
 him with his benediction. He has not quite the 
 y same range of emotion as other novelists, but 
 ^ within the circle which he has drawn for himself he 
 is supreme. 
 
 If there had been any doubt as to Meredith's 
 conception of the true aim of the novel, his Essay 
 t/ow Comedy would have dissipated it. Theorist and 
 practician combine felicitously in Meredith, who 
 has distilled his philosophy into this brilliant 
 janalysis of the Comic Spirit, the most lucid ex- 
 / position of the scope and function of Comedy from 
 * the Meredithian point of vievv'. The Comic Spirit 
 ever held Meredith, and with him it annexes the 
 English novel. We must first define it by nega- 
 tives. It is not the farcical, nor the humorous, 
 nor the rollicking, things often confused with it. 
 It is based upon the finest perception of the in- 
 congruous, it requires a most subtle delicacy, it 
 flourishes rarely and only in a society of cultivated 
 men and women. Those who do not skim the 
 cream of life, who are attached to the duties, yet 
 escape the harsher blows, make acute and balanced 
 observers. The Comic Muse is one of woman's 
 
 20 
 
The Comic Spirit 
 
 best friends, and flowers best in a state of society 
 where men and women can meet equally and freely. 
 " Where the veil is over woman's face, as in the 
 East, you cannot have society, without which the 
 senses are barbarous, and the Comic Spirit is driven 
 to the gutters of grossness to slake its thirst." The 
 fool is Comedy's true mark. " Folly is the natural - 
 prey of the Comic, and it is w^th the springing 
 delight of hawk over heron, hound over fox, that 
 it gives her chase, never fretting, never tiring, sure 
 of having her, allowing her no rest." The Comic 
 Muse has too rarely flowered. In England we have 
 been agelasts or hypergelasts, Puritans or Bac- 
 chanalians. And yet no country needs the Comic 
 Muse more, or would reap greater benefits from it. 
 " Prosers would be cut short in the street and left 
 blinking, dumb as pillar posts." The strength of 
 the Comic Muse is no doubt its weakness also. It 
 appeals to the intellect, its laughter is impersonal ; 
 its test is that it awakens thoughtful laughter. It 
 " sits above the world humanely malign, and casts 
 an oblique light on the objects of its consideration 
 followed by volleys of silvery laughter." Class \ 
 distinctions are doubtful and changeful, but here j 
 is one aristocracy that has sharp lines of demarca-/' 
 tion, an aristocracy of perceptions. " Not to have \ 
 the Comic Spirit is to be bull blind to the spiritual, ( 
 to have it is to have a high fellowship. Look there I 
 for your unchallengeable upper class." 
 
 An aristocracy no doubt, but an aristocracy 
 
 21 
 
 ^ 
 
George Meredith 
 
 which will require all its wealth of intellect to 
 counter-balance its weakness in numbers. The 
 votaries of the Comic Spirit are like the ao(f)ol of 
 Euripides, the inner circle of the initiated. Yet 
 jk/^ it is superhuman rather than inhuman, for it is 
 truly said, " Estimate your capacity for comic 
 perception by being able to detect the ridicule of 
 them you love, without loving them less." And 
 the prophet of this narrow aristocracy combines 
 his delight in the hunt of Folly with a strain of 
 ardent poetry.^ It is a perpetual antithesis, a 
 contradiction which we joyfully accept. 
 
 In any case the Essay puts us at once in posses- 
 sion of Meredith's standpoint, and his novels are 
 only a more copious exposition of his views. He 
 appeals to us not by boisterous joviality or mechani- 
 cal puns, but by a subtle perception of contrasts, by 
 an exquisite sense of the irony of things. It is a 
 reflection of the terrestrial in one who dwells in a 
 higher sphere, noting and recording with a smile 
 of perfect kindliness the follies of an inferior race, 
 noting them for a race of superterrestrials, his 
 kinsmen in the Comic Spirit. It is not the jolly 
 pastime of those who eat roast beef and drink beer ; 
 it is the diversion of those in whom the spiritual 
 prevails over the grossly sensual, whose veins are 
 filled with ichor, and whose food is ambrosia. 
 
 1 Meredith himself is emphatic upon this point, and sees 
 even in Comus a " mild moon's ray " of the Comic Spirit. 
 
 22 
 
The Sentimentalist 
 
 II. The Sentimentalist 
 
 Even the greatest soul has its own hete noire, 
 " If I did not take sentimentalists for objects of 
 study, they would enrage me past any tolerance. 
 The Tempter of Mankind never has such a grin as 
 when he sees them mix the true and the false." 
 It is an age when the sentimentalist is abroad. 
 Fine shades and nice feelings are to be found 
 everywhere in a time of artificial civilisation, and 
 they give our philosophical novelists the easiest 
 of targets, being " the product of a fat soil, that 
 mental attitude which despises gold the child of 
 gold." In Sandra Belloni we have an elaborate 
 study of the sentimental trinity, Arabella, Cornelia, 
 and Adela Pole, or as the irreverent called them, 
 Pole, Polony, and Maypole. 
 
 They are sketched by a master-hand with gentle f 
 but deadly satire. But the satire is the philo- \ 
 sopher's /cdOapac^. "Man is the laughing animal,! 
 and at the end of an infinite search the philosopher I 
 finds himself clinging to laughter as the best of 
 human fruit, purely human, and sane and com- 
 forting." The Poles are emotional snobs. They' 
 are highly cultivated, too highly cultivated for a/ 
 rough world, and they find the crudities of their' 
 nearest rivals, the Tinleys, almost as distressing 
 as the aitchlessness of their parent. They desire, 
 to play the Lady Bountiful in their social realm,! 
 to be ±he arbiters of elegance within a radius of ten 
 
 23 
 
George Meredith 
 
 miles; they soar in imagination not to coronets — 
 for marriage is still a distasteful far-off contingency 
 — but to the social prestige of coronets ; they are, 
 shocked though they would be to hear it, sublimated 
 presentations of Mrs. Leo Hunter. In their cam- 
 paign they make great progress, though they are 
 retarded by a bibulous Irish grocer's widow named 
 Mrs. Chump, who brings them back to terra firma 
 at once. Mrs. Chump, blind to the fine shades, a 
 flouter of the delicate feelings, was once the in- 
 amorata of Mr. Pole, over w^hom she still has some 
 mysterious hold, and when she installs herself at 
 Brookfield she drinks champagne with her unhappy 
 host till he is distracted. 
 
 Still another contrast is found in Emilia Belloni, 
 a girl with a wonderful voice who is too near to 
 Nature to be romantic or sentimentalist. She 
 combines rich contralto notes with a sometimes 
 untied bootlace ; she sings in a wood by night, but 
 only because her landlady objects to music indoors ; 
 she has a most wonderful father who is an irritable 
 violinist and sometimes throws potatoes at his 
 wife and daughter. She soon wins the admiration 
 of Cornet Wilfrid Pole, another sentimentalist who 
 rides the hippogriff, " one of those who travel to 
 Love by the road of sentiment " and go on " accu- 
 mulating images and hiving sensations till such 
 time as (if the stuff be in them) they assume a form 
 of vitality, and hurry them headlong." In a word, 
 Wilfrid is one of Meredith's impressionable .young 
 
 24 
 
The Sentimentalist 
 
 men who flutter from flower to flower in a chaos of r 
 conflicting sentiment. The novel, stifler and less f 
 spontaneous than other of Meredith's novels, I 
 develops in interesting fashion this conflict between j 
 sentiment and reality, between those who are based 
 on solid realities like Emilia, even on things of the 
 earth earthy such as potatoes (the poor child's usual 
 diet in hard times), and those who would ignore such 
 vile things. Wilfrid well symbolised these lasti/ 
 when in headlong pursuit of his lad3^-love he rushed \ 
 full tilt against a potboy, became nothing but an 
 exhalation of beer, and strove to remove the traces 
 of his calamit}^ by copious application of Alderman's 
 Bouquet, " setting a perfume to contend with a.\ 
 stench, instead of waiting for time, change of| 
 raiment, and the broad lusty airs of heaven to blow,' 
 him fresh again." The moral is drawn delightfully, ; 
 for the philosopher is usually tender in his treat-/ 
 ment, as is proper. " For if sentiment which 
 spurns gold is the child of gold, so the fantastic 
 philosopher who anatomises Sentiment could not 
 exist without Sentiment, wherefore let him be kindly- 
 cruel." 
 
 Deep feeling and " sentiment," things so alike 
 to those who deal only in the superficial, are deadliest 
 enemies. The former feels, feels to its inmost 
 fibres, but it is slow to indulge in the luxury of 
 melancholy or in sensuous reverie, it is shy of de- 
 monstrations, and will not wear its heart upon its 
 sleeve. It is a real thing, based upon realities, 
 
 25 
 
George Meredith 
 
 with a clear vision of the real. Sentimentalism is 
 a sham, masquerading as a lover of glorious 
 emotions, yielding to them, passing no farther, 
 wilfully blind to unpleasant reality, hiding, like 
 Wilfrid Pole, a stench beneath a perfume. Its 
 votaries float upon the void like Icarus, and do not 
 know that their wings of wax will melt at the first 
 heat. Despite its imperfections, its stiffness, its 
 longueurs of philosophic disquisition, Emilia in 
 England works out not ineffectively the subtly 
 suggested contrast between the laboured futility of 
 the three fair sentimentalists in chief, the cox- 
 combry of Wilfrid mounted on the hippogriff, the 
 despair of Sir Purcell Barrett the dreary organist 
 who could not face the world with a brave front 
 and who is so indistinct of character that we scarcely 
 visualise him, and the eager ardent impulses of 
 Emilia, unformed and immature indeed, but sincere 
 to her inmost soul, and nobly unconventional. 
 The Poles would fain hide their Mrs. Chump, but 
 they struggle in vain, and the party on Besworth 
 Lawn witnesses both their grandest triumph and 
 their startling fall from greatness. They are com- 
 pelled, in order to save themselves from ruin, to 
 flatter Mrs. Chump, to entreat her, to lie to her — and 
 to drink champagne with her ad libitum. Indeed the 
 pidow, maudlin, vulgar as she is, is nearer Nature 
 than the nymphs who, perhaps so justly, despise her. 
 The real is here in full cry after sentimentalism, but 
 the elusive quarry scarcely finds its deathblow, even 
 
 26 
 
The Sentimentalist 
 
 though the author forgets at times his admonition 
 to be kindly-cruel. For feeling and " sentiment " 
 are truceless foes, and Meredith, gazing at the 
 unholy masquerade, yields to fiercest wrath, and 
 cannot forbear from tearing the simulacrum to 
 tatters if only in a novel. 
 
 SentimentaHsm, then, is a timorous apprehension 
 of realities, sometimes of realities in the world at 
 large, sometimes in reference to a person's im- 
 mediate environment. If Comedy indeed " pro- ^ 
 poses the correcting of pretentiousness, of inflation, 
 of dulness, and of the vestiges of rawness and 
 grossness to be found among us," it cannot fail 
 to deal some of its heaviest blows upon the man 
 who lives in a self-centred world. Of this acti- 
 vity of the Comic Spirit The Egoist is the supreme 
 example. Willoughby, as Meredith once declared 
 to a perturbed friend who feared that he was Will- 
 oughby, is each one of us. Yet the most perfect \ 
 examples of the man concentred all in self are to | 
 be found in the landed class, for " little princes ] 
 abpund in a land of heaped-up riches " and Comedy j 
 deals " with human nature in the drawing-room of | 
 civilised men and women where we have no dustj 
 of the struggling outer world " ; " it is a game played j 
 to throw reflections upon social life," and there- 
 fore we need adordly setting such as Patterne Court 
 can give. i/TA^ Egoist is a book of hairbreadth 
 escapes and thrilling evasions not less humorous 
 because the happy ending is within an ace of tragedy* 
 
 27 I 
 
George Meredith 
 
 It is a marvellous exposition of that art which is 
 the opposite of the realistic method, that " con- 
 scientious transcription of all the visible and a 
 repetition of all the audible," a method which is 
 mainly accountable for our present " branfulness." 
 The Egoist is the tour de force of a virtuoso revel- 
 ling in an ironic fantasia, an amazing pattern of 
 verbal sleight-of-hand, such as only a highly- 
 civilised, perhaps a super-civilised, age could either 
 bring to birth or admije. Incident follows thick 
 upon incident. We are on probability's verge, 
 but we are tolerant and our tolerance is amply 
 rewarded. 
 
 The Egoist has a genuine hero, and he is marvel- 
 lously analysed. A hero indeed he is, the hero 
 of a whole county, its richest landlord and its finest 
 gentleman ; worshipped with incense and obla- 
 tion since his youngest days. The whole county 
 awaits his marriage choice with awe and much 
 patience, it venerates, though a mutinous section 
 has an uncanny penetration into his faults. Wil- 
 loughby has in outward seeming all the virtues and 
 all the gifts of Fortune, splendid health, court- 
 liness, an apt turn of phrase, a fine figure, quick- 
 ness of perception. In fact *' he has a leg," though 
 we need not follow the author into his two-page 
 - disquisition on it. A fine equipment, but alas ! 
 ^ he is blind in one eye. He is egocentric, revolved 
 around by the whole world. He must lord it over 
 all with sovranty unquestioned, whether it is his 
 
 28 
 
The Sentimentalist 
 
 future wife, his protege, or rather Vernon's, Cross- 
 jay Patterne, or the unhappy Flitch who in a bale- 
 ful hour of independence left Patterne Court for 
 the great world. Humour him and, as Mrs. Mount- 
 stuart Jenkinson said, you can do anything with 
 him, but every religion has its heretics. There 
 was Constantia Durham, " the racing cutter," who 
 eloped with Harry Oxford in preference, for though 
 it is not given to every man to be a hero to his 
 lady-love, Willoughby insisted on being hero. Why 
 was it then that he seemed to some intolerable, 
 filled others almost with loathing ? Minute an- 
 alysis of his character seems fitting, for it is his 
 own first pastime. He is generous by aim, or per- 
 haps impulse and disposition, as Clara Middle ton 
 suggests; he hates deceit; he loves "silver purity,] 
 the fruit of the full bloom " ; he cannot endure a 
 hostile public opinion, perhaps for this reason es- 
 chews politics ; he is implacable, it is admitted ; but 
 ridiculous, kind Heaven, never ! And so the v/hole 
 novel displays a struggle to keep him in perfect 
 balance, poised on his self-constructed pedestal. 
 Constantia's jilting — dare we use the word ? — 
 had been a deadly blow, but a marriage with the 
 adorable Clara would be ample consolation. 
 However, the egoist's course of true love 
 never did run smooth. At first the thought, at 
 length the word, the fateful, ominous, hideous 
 word " twice " reverberates with ghastly echoes; 
 down the labyrinths of his mind. Constantia had 
 
 29 
 
George Meredith 
 
 forsworn him for another, Clara never shall. Elo- 
 quence, pertinacity, crafty hints of maiden jeal- 
 ousy, manoeuvres in which all things from fourteen- 
 year-old boys to ninety-year-old port play their 
 part — no artifice is left untried. For the egoist is 
 the father and child of himself. He is so highly 
 civilised that the tiniest suggestion of ridicule is 
 cruellest agony. He has " an appalling fear on 
 behalf of his naked eidolon, the tender infant elf, 
 
 swaddled in his name before the world There 
 
 the poor little loveable creature ran for any mouth 
 to blow upon, and frostnipped and bruised it cried to 
 him, and he was ol no avail." Through such sen- 
 sitiveness he had refused to live in town, had barred 
 himself in his mansion, encircled by a band of 
 adoring satellites. So too in conversation he 
 sought accordant notes, " that subservient harmony 
 of another instrument desired of musicians when 
 they have done their solo-playing." So too he 
 loved to throw out characterisations of himself 
 in self-defence. He is unpoetical ; poetry, as it 
 is proved to demonstration, is of no account. The 
 very intensity of his perceptions debars him from 
 the bays. " Call me^ a positive mind." Having 
 plumped for science, in this a rara avis amongst 
 country gentlemen, " he has escaped the vice 
 of domineering self-sufficiency peculiar to classical 
 men." His egoism has its attractive side. Yield 
 to him, and he is a Prince Charming who loves to 
 be generous ; thwart him by accident or deliberately, 
 
 30 
 
The Sentimentalist 
 
 and he will **cut" gallant Captain Patterne of the 
 Marines — an act inexplicable to poor Crossjay — 
 will tell Clara of Vernon's unhappy secret marriage, 
 will expel Crossjay without ceremony from the 
 Hall after having nearly ruined him by indulgence. 
 As a Scientist he has early adopted the principles 
 of Eugenism, and that is why he scrutinises Laetitia 
 Dale's complexion so closely, for he has a deep 
 solicitude for his babes yet unborn. He is a complex 
 character to which no delineation much shorter 
 than the actual novel could do justice ; but despite 
 that shivering before public opinion which leads 
 to all manner of disguise, he is fathomed — it is 
 strange how clearly — by his train of worshippers. 
 The Egoist is from one point of view the history 
 of the development of an antipathy. Clara Middle- I 
 ton, a maiden of eighteen, is described by Meredith, 
 the first of a host of adorers, with all his wealth j 
 of poetic metaphor as " a Mountain Echo, one who ' 
 carries youth like a flag," and a dainty rogue in , 
 porcelain withal. She has money, health, and i 
 beauty, " the triune of perfect starriness which : 
 makes all men astronomers." Willoughby is the ! 
 impassioned lover at first sight. He carries the 
 fortress by storm, and fixes the date of the marriage 
 six months hence. Clara and her father, Dr. Middle- 
 ton, the great scholar, come to stay at Patterne 
 Hall — and familiarity breeds aversion. In his 
 folly Willoughby reveals all his variety of weak- 
 nesses, and apologises for them in the boastful 
 
 31 
 
George Meredith 
 
 strain of the true egoist. The maiden hints the 
 possibiHty of aUenation, Willoughby indignantly 
 denies it. The lady's distaste increases, but her 
 father, a rare enthusiast for good wine, has been 
 vanquished by the craft of the self-lover. Patterne 
 Hall contains in its cellars port such as only the 
 connoisseur can appreciate, " wine such as can 
 light up candelabras in the brain, to illuminate 
 all history, and solve the secret of the destiny of 
 man." In a brilliant chapter we behold the scholar 
 overcome by this grand vintage, overcome in 
 metaphor not in fact, for, as he proudly tells us, 
 he can carry three bottles — and his departure is 
 postponed sine die. Willoughby meantime is con- 
 scious of the danger of the situation, " intuitively 
 a conjurer in self-defence," conscious too that 
 Clara has tried to escape by train to a girl-friend. 
 His dulness of vision into the heart of his enemy 
 was compensated by his agile sensitiveness obscur- 
 ing but rendering him . miraculously active. "He 
 offers his hand again to Laetitia Dale, who refuses 
 him. But Crossjay, locked out of his bedroom 
 owing to his treachery towards Willoughby and 
 1 snugly ensconced beneath the ottoman, is a hearer, 
 and reveals enough to De Craye, the Irishman, 
 to enable him to disseminate the news. We are 
 now nearing the amazing finale, which hurries on 
 with overpowering gusto. In a scene which seems 
 visualised in the manner of a playwright, we find 
 different personages entering in succession : Lady 
 
 32 
 
The Sentimentalist 
 
 Busshe and Lady Culmer, blest pair of vultures 
 who can always scent trouble in the breeze ; 
 Mr. Dale the invalid, who stands, as he patheti- 
 cally complains, between two locked doors; Dr. 
 Middleton, Willoughby, and Vernon, — all grouped 
 upon the boards by an amazing feat of stage- 
 craft. The game of cross-purposes is played to 
 the heart's content. Willoughby, to do him justice, 
 is a great general and has a proleptic mind. In- 
 terrogated as to whether he has proposed or 
 not, he looks at Mr. Dale, expressively saying, 
 " There are situations, Mr. Dale, too delicate to 
 be clothed in positive definitions." Lady Busshe 
 is dealt with on the principle that a nod is as good 
 as a wink to a Lady Busshe, and so the complica- 
 tion draws to its denouement, the faithful lover is 
 rewarded, and Vernon wins Clara. " Sitting beside 
 the lovers, the Comic Muse is grave and sisterly. 
 But taking a glance at the others of her late com- 
 pany, she compresses her lips." It is a proper 
 note to end on, for the brilliance of Meredith is 
 never devoid of feeling, and Meredith with all his 
 intellect has a knightly devotion for damsels in dis- 
 tress which does not fail to show itself in time of need. 
 Yet it is the analysis of character by an infinity 
 of subtle touches that gives The Egoist its unique 
 place in literature. It is the perfect example 
 of Meredith's view of Comedy carried to a con- 
 clusion which, in its intricacy yet complete triumph, 
 has all the beauty of a consummate chess ending 
 
 D 33 
 
George Meredith 
 
 or a problem of the higher mathematics. The fine 
 shades and deHcate feelings were never more con- 
 vincingly portrayed. " It is the finest essence of 
 comedy — the ballast being reducible to moisture 
 by a patent process — the laughter of reason re- 
 freshed " — a deed of the mind which will be a joy 
 for ever. 
 
 34 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 YOUTH 
 I 
 
 And yet our great exponent of the Comic Spirit 
 is not untouched by or insensible to the ardours 
 and fervencies of youth. Youth, with its profound 
 inexperience, its divine seriousness, its love of 
 the extreme, can provide the student of the Comic 
 Spirit with as fertile a theme and as copious material 
 as anything in this mortal life. It is fair game, 
 for it can always see others' follies, though never 
 its own. It is a perpetual source of jest to the 
 Adrian Harleys of this world, to hearts less selfish 
 than the Epicurean of Raynham Abbey an ever- 
 welling spring of some humaner pleasure. Yet it 
 has a noble side. If it is charming in its follies, 
 it bears itself with a divine air amid its failures. 
 Great writers and noble natures are aware of this. 
 Meredith would have been a much smaller man 
 and a far inferior writer had he not estimated his 
 progress in perception of the comic by his ability, 
 true to his own monition, still to love those whom 
 he ridiculed. Even while he noted every minute 
 folly and traced every far-branching ramification 
 of stripling absurdity, he could thrill in noble sym- 
 pathy with everything sublime in youth's progress 
 to the higher wisdom, with everything tragic in its 
 
 35 
 
George Meredith 
 
 passage through calamity perchance and crashing 
 failure to a clearer vision. *' Si jeunesse savait, ^ 
 si vieillesse pouvait." It is an agelong lamen ta- 
 ction. But one author dowered with the genius 
 of perpetual youth did know and " could." An 
 eager, overbearing sympathy, a ** feeling with " 
 his heroes of the early twenties, possesses him as 
 he beholds them tried in passion's fiery furnace, 
 passing onward to that "ordeal" which is ap- 
 pointed every man. He could delight in their boyish 
 ardour, their henchman sage, their devoted Sancho, 
 or at need their Ripton Thompson, as he rides 
 forth to squire them in their venturous essay to 
 storm the world. He will expose their weaknesses 
 but not forget to celebrate their strength, point 
 the due moral, indite the worthy epitaph. When 
 Beauchamp fights Bevisham,his uncle Lord Romfrey, 
 and all his friends at once, when Richard Feverel 
 
 I/' defies his father and — still worse — his father's system, 
 it is Meredith who stands chief mourner at the 
 glorious failure of a forlorn hope, it is he who strews 
 lilies on their tombs with bounteous hand. For 
 though the cynic's wisdom tells us that 'tis but a pace 
 from the sublime to the ridiculous. Earth's " deepest 
 
 '> gnomes " aver that with all gallant souls but one 
 short step divides the ridiculous from the sublime. 
 As we stand beside the bier of Meredith's young 
 heroes and gaze at their calm features they take 
 a godlike serenity. We think of them in the 
 words of another poet of youth : 
 
 36 
 
Youth 
 
 " They have outsoared the shadow of our night ; 
 Envy S'Hd calumny and hate and pain, 
 And that unrest which men miscall delight. 
 Can touch them not and torture not again ; 
 From the contagion of the world's slow strain 
 They are secure, and now can never mourn 
 A heart grown cold, a head grown gray in vain ; 
 Nor, when the spirit's self has ceased to burn. 
 With sparkless ashes load an unlamented urn," 
 
 But let us view the hero as lover, Romeo in the 
 
 nineteenth centur}^ 
 
 II 
 
 " Ay me ! for aught that I could ever read, 
 Could ever hear by tale or history, 
 The course of true love never did run smooth. . . . 
 Or, if there were a sympathy in choice. 
 War, death, or sickness did lay siege to it. 
 Making it momentany as a sound. 
 Swift as a shadow, short as any dream." 
 
 More than three centuries ago love was portrayed 
 in its swift dazzling course from birth, first rapture, 
 to untimely end. Since then Romeo and Juliet 
 has stood the incomparable expression of love's 
 ardours and its thrills, a wondrous picture wrought 
 in flaming fervour by a genius himself aflame. It 
 had remained without a rival, almost without a 
 counterfeit, for though love be changeless and eternal, 
 man's esteem of it is ever changing. The laboured 
 lubricity of the Restoration, the more controlled 
 transports of " the age of reason " were not likely 
 to produce the peer of Romeo. Yet in time's course 
 the soul of Shakespeare was to find an avatar. Our 
 own age too can claim a supreme and almost sole 
 example of vov<; conjoined with passion, a poet who 
 was to touch the same lyre, pass through the gamut of 
 
 37 
 
George Meredith 
 
 love's emotions, reproduce triumphantly in a prose 
 form the same white heat that glowed in the greatest 
 of our poets, fling down the gauntlet and depart un- 
 beaten from the lists of tragic passion, image forth a 
 second Romeo, fiery and impetuous, and a heroine, 
 tender, loyal, and courageous. 
 
 Yet The Ordeal of Richard Feverel is more even than 
 a great love-romance. It is a sumptuous banquet for 
 the mind as w^ell. The author has a problem of 
 
 y perennial interest to propose, and it is this. Given a 
 child, what is his best upbringing ? Shall we devise 
 some cunning system, imprison him knowingly or un- 
 knowingly within four walls of precept and aphorism, 
 formula and theorem, or shall we yield to the hap- 
 hazard method of flinging him headlong into the 
 maelstrom of a Public School, to sink or swim as 
 
 y best he can ? Shall Science rule, or Chance ? 
 
 After an unhappy matrimonial experience Sir 
 Austin Feverel found the problem confronting 
 him. Sir Austin is the composer of The Pilgrim s 
 Scrip, a selection of well-culled aphorisms. He 
 is a man of considerable insight and great powers 
 of expression, wanting, to make his composition 
 1 perfect, only laughter which " had relieved him of 
 ' much of the blight of self-deception and oddness 
 and extravagance." He has a system, a system 
 
 ^ only dimly adumbrated, but apparently amounting 
 to this. His son must be segregated from every- 
 one and everything unfit — the very servants must 
 be modest in their love-passages. Every moment 
 
 38 
 
Youth 
 
 must be sedulously devoted to his perfecting, 
 no impure influence is to be near him, nor aught 
 that might excite or stimulate unlawful impulses. 
 The result is a boy, healthy, ardent, and generous, 
 but impetuous and self-willed, fond of the role of 
 youthful king, the ruthless tyrant of his entourage ; 
 yet, as Mrs. Berry observed later, as fine a boy as 
 England can produce. How will he fare when he 
 must, as indeed the system itself prescribes, go 
 forth enfranchised into life ? 
 
 On his fourteenth birthday he gives us matter 
 upon which to ground a judgment. In company with 
 Rip ton Thompson, "the boy without a character," he 
 concerts the burning of Farmer Blaize's rick, and 
 thereby almost secures Tom Bakewell lifelong 
 transportation. Thence follow tortuous stratagems, 
 in the course of which Sir Austin, Adrian Harle}', 
 and Richard all visit separately the obdurate 
 farmer, who, wroth at the burning of his ricks, 
 wroth still more at the tampering with his witnesses, 
 demands full confession. Richard, confessing in 
 the nick of time, learns his first lesson. "The liar 
 must eat his lie ; the Devil's mouthful." Is it 
 not written in The Pilgrim s Scrip ? 
 
 Time passes. Richard writes poetry, outlet for 
 idle humours. He is ridiculed, injudiciously, and 
 the poet ceases. But one day he beholds Sir Austin 
 bending over the fair hand of Lady Blandish, and 
 love was ever infectious. At first Richard is like 
 Romeo, in love with love, but he is set on fire by a 
 
 39 
 
George Meredith 
 
 chance meeting under romantic circumstances with 
 Lucy Desborough, the niece of Farmer Blaize, 
 the girl whom he had so scornfully ignored when 
 the liar went to eat his lie. In a pastoral modestly 
 styled " a diversion on a penny whistle " we have 
 a passionate outburst of soaring poetry which 
 in the fervour of its impulse perhaps none else but 
 Shakespeare could have written, and which in its 
 appeal to natural beauty recalls to us Theocritus. 
 Ferdinand has landed on an island of the still- 
 vexed Bermoothes, and finds Miranda eating dew- 
 berries. . . " When Nature turns artist, and pro- 
 duces contrasts of colour on a fair face, where is 
 the Sage, or what the oracle shall match the depths 
 of its lightest look ? " " Then truly," we may agree, 
 " the system triumphed." Two souls, both fresh 
 in their experience, pure, ardent, and loyal, become 
 one. They meet, talk, caress, and laugh, for better 
 y than sentiment " laughter opens the breast to love." 
 Let them laugh therefore, says our author. 
 
 The system had not provided for this spontaneous 
 love-match. The lovers are separated. Finally 
 Richard, by a happy accident, bears off Lucy from 
 a London railway-station and marries her, aided 
 by Ripton Thompson, " the dog " who is so faithful 
 to Lucy. Sir Austin, in gloomy dudgeon, refuses 
 at first to see his heir, and then endeavours to 
 Separate him for a while from Lucy. The course 
 of the aUenation of the two lovers is then narrated, 
 an . alienation partly due to a Delilah named Mrs. 
 
 40 
 
Youth 
 
 Mount. Richard tears himself free, but will not go 
 back at once to a wife of whom he is not worthy. 
 Then after he has consented to return he is involved 
 in a duel. He comes to his wiie, who is now at 
 the Abbey high in Sir Austin's favour, merely to 
 part with her. He survives the duel, but the 
 shock has killed Lucy, and the story ends with 
 Richard bereft of consciousness on a bed of sickness, 
 hovering between life and death, striving to image 
 on his brain the wife who is his no more. 
 
 The conclusion of the novel gave Meredith much 
 trouble and it is undeniably forced. But accepting 
 it as natural, or at any rate possible — and it is not 
 more forced than the conclusion of Romeo and Jiiliei — 
 we must needs confess that the catastrophe is Shake- 
 spearean in its tragicalit}^ and that few things have 
 been conceived more thrilling and more overwhelm- 
 ing than the final scenes of The Ordeal. Richard 
 is involved in direst calamity, and not less distressing 
 is the situation of the unhappy author of the system 
 who finds it, and his whole life, fallen in ruins. His 
 very earnestness, his very zeal to make his son 
 as perfect as possible, by some tragic irony results 
 in this colossal overthrow. 
 
 But despite the system, our interest centres in 
 Richard. Our hero is a real hero. He illus- 
 trates Aristotle's dictum that the proper end of 
 tragedy is to depict some heroic figure which 
 through some single flaw in its composition comes 
 to ruin. His fatal weakness is the fault of the 
 
 41 
 
George Meredith 
 
 Sophoclean Ajax, avOdBeta. Once he has de- 
 termined upon action, nothing moves him. All 
 things must bend to his will upon pain of his dis- 
 pleasure. He will storm at his cousin Clare, 
 , who is secretly in love with him, for marrying a 
 man much older than herself, rescue his mother 
 from her aged paramour " Sandoe," and lie on a 
 magnificent scale to further his design of gaining 
 Lucy. His stubbornness is wonderful, and it 
 gives us a character of amazing force. 
 
 The Ordeal then deserves, if any novel does, the 
 title of Shakespearean, written as it is with a Shake- 
 spearean verve and energy of impulse, with an ex- 
 uberance of poetic feeling, and a keen joy in verbal 
 wit such as are found in combination elsewhere only 
 in Shakespeare. It resembles Romeo and Juliet in 
 its passionate fervour, its general outlines, and in 
 the forced nature of its plot, and also in its Mrs. Berry, 
 who is worthy of a place beside the nurse of Juliet 
 — perhaps upon a ducking-stool, for she is a vulgar 
 old lady. Incessant as the wit is, the heart prevails 
 over the intellect. The Ordeal is the portraiture 
 Vby a noble soul of a soul not lacking many of the 
 » elements of nobility, of one who fell, but did not 
 [fall so low as "to feel base and to accept the bliss 
 ' that beckons," of unbounded courage not blended 
 always with discretion, of a fervour which scorned 
 the limitations of a compromise that is so often 
 moral evasion, and flouted the dictates of what 
 the world caUs commonsense. Alas ! that all 
 
 43 
 
Youth 
 
 should come to wreck and ruin ! But " Love the 
 charioteer is easily tripped, while honest jog-trot 
 Love keeps his legs to the end." Of the structure 
 of the book, the artistic grouping of characters, the 
 fertile invention of incident, the riotous opulence 
 of irony, that consolation of the wise, one could 
 not speak with less enthusiasm. Rarely have such 
 gifts of heart and brain been manifest. 
 
 By way of contrast Sigismund Alvan, the Tragic 
 Comedian, stands forward as a less noble Romeo 
 possessed by a less pure passion. He is a Continental 
 rather than an English type. English thought 
 is sometimes reproached with being too insular. 
 We shroud ourselves in our island mists, and in- 
 volve ourselves in our own virtue. Our morality 
 is a native product, so too is our hypocrisy. We 
 are Philistines, slaves of conventions, we show 
 the shopkeeper taint in our passions, we prove 
 by our journals that we are turning to fat, and 
 ideas are unknown to us and unwelcome. There 
 is much truth in these charges. Like the Greeks 
 whom Tacitus describes, we admire nothing except 
 our own productions. Continentals seem to us as 
 eccentric as we do to them. Yet some of our writers 
 have influenced all Europe, some have even been 
 influenced by Europe. Among the last is Meredith, 
 who, true Anglo-Celt as he was, was touched by 
 many foreign influences and has translated the 
 French esprit into eighteen volumes. In The Tragic 
 Comedians we have a study of a truly Continental 
 
 43 
 
George Meredith 
 
 personality — one of Byron's men — Sigismund Alvan, 
 Ferdinand Lassalle as his actual name was, the 
 richly endowed Socialist leader, who is enamoured 
 of a high-born beauty, and suffers shipwreck through 
 the frenzy of his passions. 
 
 It is a *' you and I " between Alvan and Clo tilde 
 von Riidiger (Helene von Racowitza). The other 
 persons scarcely count, so lightly are they sketched. 
 We have here one episode in the story of the adven- 
 tures of " tha't wandering ship of the drunken 
 pilot, the mutinous crew, and the angry captain 
 called Human Nature." Clo tilde, young, beauti- 
 ful, " golden-serpent," with a petulance and way- 
 wardness which she mistakes for wit and 
 profundity, hears herself compared with Alvan, 
 the magnetic revolutionary, who bids fair to 
 overthrow the existing fabric of things, a leader 
 who has followers who swear by him, and whose 
 personality has triumphed over every difficulty. 
 She resolves to meet him, and both are taken by 
 storm. An inferior Romeo and an inferior Juliet 
 encounter. Clo tilde is overwhelmed. "Oh to 
 match this man's embracing discursiveness, his 
 ardour, his complacent energy, the full strong 
 sound which he brought out of all subjects ! He 
 struck and they rang. There was a bell for every- 
 thing in him. He spoke of himself as the towering 
 Alp speaks out at a first view, bidding that which 
 he was be known." And she, who was she save 
 Paris, " the symbolised goddess of the lightning 
 
 44 
 
Youth 
 
 brain that is quick to conceive, eager to realise 
 ideas, impassioned for her leader but ever putting 
 him to the proof, graceful beyond all rhyme, collo- 
 quial as never the Muse, light in light hands, but 
 valiant unto death for a principle, and therefore 
 not light, anything but light in strong hands, very 
 steadfast rather, and oh ! constantly entertaining." 
 It is the old theme of love at first sight with a 
 sinister pair of lovers. Alvan had lived the lives 
 of three, the sins of thirty were laid to his charge. 
 He has been on the wrong side of the moon. " I 
 have seen the other face of it — a visage scored 
 with regrets, dead dreams, burnt passions, bald 
 illusions, and the like, sunless, waterless, without 
 a flower." Clo tilde comes to him, sweet as the 
 breath of the young Spring, and their first night's 
 converse is wonderfully described — penned at a 
 white heat of passion and intellect fused together, 
 not smacking of the midnight oil, but savouring 
 of the lonely exaltation of the silent small hours, 
 the w^ork of an author intoxicated by his own 
 genius. It was a duet, a mingled concert of rivu- 
 lets, " meeting and branching, running parallel, 
 uniting and branching again, divided by the theme, 
 but unerring in the flow of the harmony." Barriers 
 are for those who cannot fly : it is a proud maxim 
 characteristic of the man's superb confidence. He 
 almost bears her off in the dawn. But no ! he will 
 not be centaur ; he will come and ask for Clotilda 
 in due form. The thought dismays her " My 
 
 45 
 
George Meredith 
 
 father is not very well, — my mother, she is not 
 very well. They are neither of them very well ; 
 not at present. Spare them at present." We 
 read her character in these words. 
 
 The coquette gains a few days' respite, and to get 
 news of Alvan caresses Prince Marko, the Indian Bac- 
 chus, who is deemed her lover. She falls ill and does 
 not meet Alvan until she is convalescing in Switzer- 
 land. She is urged to fly to Itaty. Let them proclaim 
 their republic on those heights. But Clotilde must be 
 won according to the rules. They have much talk 
 about the future, in the course of which we are assured 
 with grim irony that Alvan will never fight a duel. 
 
 At length the parents discover the situation, 
 and the battle is begun. In desperation Clotilde 
 rushes to Alvan 's hotel, and now he plays an 
 inverted part. There shall be no subterfuge. 
 Alvan's wife shall not run to her nuptials through 
 rat-passages. He takes her to one of her friends, 
 and there her mother appears. Alvan gives Clotilde 
 back to her mother " bent on winning a parent- 
 blest bride^ — one of the world's polished silver 
 vessels. It is an act of horribly empty sublimity." 
 Clotilde, who had learnt to rely on Alvan blindly, is 
 now left to brave the tempest in her own frail skiff. 
 She is marched through the streets by an irate 
 Teuton father, who clutches at her hair and locks 
 her in her bedroom. " This was a manifestation 
 of power in a form more convincing than the 
 orator's." Of course she yields in appearance. 
 
 46 
 
Youth 
 
 Alvan spends a night in agony, finely described. 
 Not the perfect knight, but a giant going through 
 a giant's contortions, he is fleshly as the race 
 of giants, and gross, coarse, dreadful, likely to be 
 horrible when whipped and stirred to the dregs. 
 " He was a true man, a native of earth, and if he 
 could not quit his huge personality to pipe spiri- 
 tual music during a storm of trouble, being a soul 
 wedged in the gnarled wood of the standing giant 
 oak, and giving mighty sound of timber at strife 
 rather than the angelical cry, he suffered, as he 
 loved, to his depths." And when Clo tilde re- 
 nounces him he is " the shirted Heracles." He 
 raves and curses. " There's three of beast to one 
 of goddess in her." He raged against that ancient, 
 poisonous thing, the woman. Then by an abrupt 
 transition, " Poor fool ! The letter is a flat lie. 
 The whole continent shall be up." A little later 
 he would not have the letter unwritten. " I love 
 it ! She is plastic in my hands. You cannot 
 exaggerate her for good or for evil. She is match- 
 less, colour her as you please." He goes off to a 
 Minister to demand admission to her. Such is the 
 spectacle of a Titan in the toils. 
 
 And he obtains an interview ! The Tragic Come- 
 dian batters at doors and volleys close arguments, 
 pleading in no troubadour fashion. General von 
 Riidiger's official superior obtains permission for 
 Tresten and Storchel to see Clotilde on Alvan's 
 behalf, to elicit whether she renounces him or not. 
 
 47 
 
George Meredith 
 
 Alvan is triumphant. At first he deems two hours 
 sufficient space to win her, then he wagers that he 
 will have her on her knees in half an hour. Nay ! 
 he swears to strike her to the heart in ten minutes. 
 " I promise to fold my arms and simply look. 
 She points to me straight, but of course if you 
 agitate the compass, the needle's all in a tremble ; 
 and the vessel is weak, I admit, but the instinct's 
 positive. To doubt it v/ould upset my understand- 
 ing." In other words, things must happen because 
 they must happen. " She is a Pyrrha, Lydia, 
 Lalage. I see her in the Horatian ode as in one 
 of those old round shield-mirrors, which give you a 
 speck of the figure on a silver solar beam, brilliant, 
 not much bigger than a dewdrop. She is a New 
 Comedy girl, a ' To-morrower.' " But oh ! preg- 
 nant irony, " it must end to-morrow, though I kill 
 something." He goes on to talk of Paris for the 
 honeymoon, and of his bride's trousseau. " I war- 
 rant her mine and all mine, head and heels at a 
 whistle, like the Cossack's horse. I promise her 
 another forty manful working years." 
 
 Such was Alvan on the eve of the fateful day. 
 Like our author, he was a lover of nature and even 
 then could calm his soul on " a Mont Blanc evening." 
 He could for an hour stand " disfevered by the 
 limpid liquid tumult, inspirited by the glancing 
 volume of a force which knows no abatement, and 
 is the skiey Alps behind the great historic citicd 
 plains ahead." He slept well but lightly and 
 
 48 
 
Youth 
 
 awoke in the stillness of morning. Once again 
 he pictured the future, in poetic dreams he gave 
 " our simple civilised ambitions," wife, children, the 
 citizen's good name, a concrete form as he lovingly- 
 dwelt on her " the only wife ! the wild man's 
 reclaimer ! the sweet abundant valley and channel 
 of his river of existence henceforw^ard." He goes 
 forth to see a glorious morning gloriously described. 
 " Morning swam on the lake in her beautiful naked- 
 ness, a wedding of white and blue, of purest white 
 and bluest blue." He watched the early w^orkman 
 and was led to ponder on the future course of poli- 
 tics. How careful of himself he would be ! He 
 gives Tresten his final instructions, and then the 
 hour of waiting for the news. " His vivid imagi- 
 nation could enact the whole scene." " Ah ! Tres- 
 ten, this is worth a struggle ! Love does this, 
 this." He dreams of deep eyes " that give him 
 in realms of light wdthin light all that he has dreamed 
 of rapturousness and blessedness." And so he 
 lingers, and Meredith describes him in an image 
 used by Homer and Shakespeare before him. " He 
 waited, figurable by nothing so much as a wald 
 horse in captivity sniffing the breeze, when the 
 flanks of the quivering beast are like a wind-struck 
 barley field, and his nerves are cords, and his nostrils 
 trumpet him ; he is flame kept under and strain- 
 ing to rise." 
 
 And thus we leave him to the irepcTrereLa, his 
 agonies of disillusionment, his disappointed frenzy. 
 E 49 
 
George Meredith 
 
 No artist could have raised the tension to a higher 
 pitch after the previous description. Meredith 
 therefore with the finest tact tells us the sequel 
 only through an interview between Tresten and 
 the Baroness, once Alvan's beloved. Clotilde re- 
 pelled Tresten and Tresten repelled Clotilde. She 
 refused to see Alvan, though coquette-like she had 
 promised to write to Storchel, a hint which he did 
 not understand. Alvan in his fury challenged 
 her father, and Marko takes up the challenge. It 
 seemed an insoluble riddle. Alvan " was like some 
 great cathedral organ foully handled in the night 
 by demons." Clotilde is compassionate towards 
 Marko who is doomed to be killed ; she has a senti- 
 mental sympathy; she is overcome by the pathos of it. 
 She too has now her waiting period, less thriUing 
 since she has less soul. But it is Marko who returns 
 to tell of Alvan's wound. She laughed scornfully, 
 but the truth remained, and on the third day 
 Alvan is dead. Marko is duly rewarded, but his 
 bride buries the consumptive conqueror within a few 
 months. She wrote her version of the story, " not 
 sparing herself so much as she supposed," and 
 now, with Meredith, we may suffer her to leave 
 the scene. 
 
 Tragic Comedians are they both, grand pretenders, 
 self-deceivers, whom we must long scan to dis- 
 tinguish where their characters strike the note of 
 discord with life. Complex and gigantic, they 
 call truly for the junction of the two Muses to 
 
 50 
 
Youth 
 
 name them. " And being Tragic Comedians they 
 give rise, of course, to no Tragedy but to Tragic 
 Comedy," not a colossal downfall of Titans, but 
 to a fiasco, which, like all fiascos, has its ludicrous 
 side. Alvan lies floating many a rood, and our 
 author helps us to circumnavigate him. He was 
 ** a house of many chambers," and we lament 
 that " that mass of humanity profusely mixed of 
 good and evil, of generous ire and mutinous, of 
 the passion for the future of mankind and vanity 
 of person, magnanimity and sensualism, high 
 judgment, reckless indiscipline, savagery, chivalry, 
 solidity, fragmentariness, was dust." A stormy 
 blood made wreck of a splendid intelligence. He 
 was a twofold personality : hence his ruin. 
 
 No artist is always inspired. He sets himself to 
 various tasks, some easier, some harder, some thrown 
 off with gusto, some carried through by grievous 
 toil. Technique rarely deserts him, but inspiration, 
 the spark which sets him all aflame, is sometimes 
 lacking. Yet when the perfect marriage of theme 
 and craft is achieved — and perfect marriages are 
 as rare in the realm of ideas as in real life — then 
 the result abides for ages to admire. The Tragic 
 Comedians is a masterpiece. It is a feat of con- 
 summate virtuosity, an astounding proof of 
 Meredith's intellectual opulence, of the firmness of 
 his line. Love — the passion at its highest when 
 it is a madness almost divine, perilously near the 
 beast yet safely sundered — always summoned 
 
 51 
 
George Meredith 
 
 Meredith's highest creative faculty. It is so in 
 Feverel in the immortal rhapsody on a penny 
 whistle. It is so in this rhapsody of almost Oriental 
 fervour not for a penny whistle, but for a whole 
 orchestra. We have portrayed a tyrannous passion, 
 such as the women in the Medea pray may pass 
 beside them that seizes on Alvan, a passion 
 with its brutish side as well as its romantic 
 glory, for is he not a centaur ? " Love and man 
 sometimes meet for noble concord ; the strings 
 of the hungry instrument are not all so rough that 
 Love's touch on them is indistinguishable from 
 the rattlings of the wheels within ; certain herald 
 harmonies have been heard. But Love which 
 purifies and enlarges us and sets free the soul, Love 
 visiting a fleshly frame, must have time and space, 
 and some help of circumstance, to give the world 
 assurance that the man is a temple fit for the rites." 
 The paroxysms of his passion, the first meeting 
 — love at first sight recalling Romeo and Juliet 
 so clearly — his fury when Clotilde gives him up, 
 his waiting for the final interview, are described 
 with more than tragic force and lyric intensity. 
 "The course of true love never did run smooth." 
 The quotation worthily describes a passion which 
 none else but Shakespeare could have portrayed 
 so fervently. Rarely has such tragic tension been 
 so powerfully achieved, and though we perceive at 
 once the difference between the methods of the 
 playwright and the novelist, such scenes take 
 
 52 
 
Youth 
 
 us back to the greatest things in our greatest 
 dramatist. 
 
 Adjectives are unsatisfying for Meredith at his 
 best. The art of the book is not less great than its 
 passion. The plot is simple and the dramatis 
 personae few. The author is all the more able 
 to unravel all their complexities, to limn their 
 character in every hue, to miss no single touch. 
 It is Clo tilde and Alvan and nothing else. Alvan is 
 an embodiment of that boundless confidence which 
 is the leader's finest equipment. He cannot con- 
 ceive a rebuff, his persuasion is overpowering. 
 He has strength enough to dominate a whole people 
 and to shatter a throne ; he can even persuade 
 Clotilde's parents to accept the Jew-revolutionary 
 as their son-in-law. He will reassert his ascen- 
 dancy over Clotilde in two hours, a space of time 
 which under his imperious logic comes down by 
 quick descents to half a minute. If he cannot he is 
 a ''fiat-headed Lap." His vitality is amazing. He 
 is forty and still exuberant in his vigour, looking 
 forward to another forty years of increasing labour. 
 And yet his confidence is his weakness too. When 
 such a man loses faith the crash is all the greater, 
 "he is a grinning skull without a brain." He did 
 not understand women. " He regarded them as 
 ninepins destined to fall, the whole tuneful nine, 
 at a peculiar poetical turn of the bowler's wrist.'* 
 After a single figure " all your empty noughts 
 count with women for hundreds, thousands, millions, 
 
 53 
 
George Meredith 
 
 noblest virtues are but sickly units," for first 
 impressions are everything. He falls in colossal 
 ruin, shivered to atoms. Misunderstanding Clo- 
 tilde's impish tricks, he gives up all hope and aban- 
 dons all his principles to fight a duel with her father. 
 He is overcome by an adversary who has had only two 
 hours' practice and who is himself doomed to perish 
 by consumption shortly. His egotism overawes 
 but sometimes amuses even himself, as when his 
 roseate vision of octogenarian strenuousness re- 
 ceives a nod from the Baroness " from the palsied 
 summit of ninety." 
 
 So he falls, the Colossus, in grievous ruin. Yet 
 there are few lacriniae renim. Titan is overwhelmed, 
 but we of a later, feebler race find it difficult to weep 
 for one who was cast in the biggest mould, despite 
 his grossness and his egotism. And yet how 
 strange an irony that his end is due to his very 
 abdication of the centaur, his yielding to the 
 " simple, civilised ambitions," his desire to satisfy 
 the conventions, and to be as the Philistines ! But 
 fur his own empty sublimity, his theatrical surrender 
 of Clotilde to her mother, his purpose would have 
 been achieved. He commands Clotilde to go 
 with her mother. Going, she marks who is the 
 conqueror, and, like many a frail fair, before and 
 since, drags down to rum a mightier lover. True 
 love is flaming, but it consumes all thoughts of self, 
 all traces of the primaeval savage. Our Tragic 
 Comedian never reached this height. What Alvan 
 
 54 
 
Youth 
 
 said of Clotilde is strangely true of him, ** there's 
 three of beast to one of god in him." " A veritable 
 ancient male — a man of angels and devils." Alvan 
 loved as the Titan loves, Clotilde never loved at 
 all. We reach the last page thrilled and marvelling, 
 but we find in it no pathos. The art is transcendent, 
 the characters inhuman. " The laughter of the 
 gods is the lightning of death's irony over mortals." 
 
 Ill 
 
 " The Youth, who daily from the east 
 Must travel, still is Nature's Priest, 
 And by the vision splendid 
 Is on his way attended ; 
 At length the Man perceives it die away, 
 And fade into the light of common day." 
 
 Youth, we have said, is divinely charming. It 
 is self-absorbed, it is lacking in humour, it is devoid 
 of balance, but it has a marvellous something which 
 can atone for all its defects, something which is far 
 better than all the calculations of the worldling. 
 All life is not, alas ! the early twenties. The 
 impetuous youth develops into the unattractive 
 crank with a bee in his bonnet, or even into an 
 unprepossessing charlatan ; but till the vision 
 splendid has faded away, he is possessor of a spell 
 subduing all who come within the circle of his 
 influence, constraining them by some mysterious 
 magnetism to further all his ends. Such is Beau- 
 champ, twin-brother of Feverel, a midshipman 
 who, with intense seriousness, issues a challenge 
 to Messieurs les Colonels de la Garde Imperiale, 
 
 55 
 
George Meredith 
 
 who demands that his beloved Renee de Croisnel 
 should give up her elderly suitor, the Marquis de 
 Rouaillout, and almost prevails; who fights an 
 election as Radical and insists upon no insincere 
 compliments and no halfcrowns for doubting 
 electors — in the course of which election he is 
 summoned to France by the distressed and married 
 Renee, an odd interlude for the candidate of 
 naval defence and purity of all sorts — who demands 
 from his uncle, Everard Romfrey, upon whom he 
 is entirely dependent, an apology for the outrage 
 upon Shrapnel ; who coerces Rosamund Culling into 
 denying that she has been insulted by Shrapnel, thus 
 securing from Romfrey the required apology, who, in 
 short, v.ill defy the whole world if it opposes him, 
 and almost storms it by his very wilfulness. He is 
 the darling of the gods, destined therefore to an 
 early death, even though the final despatch is not the 
 happiest example of the author's skill, Beauchamp 
 at fifty, a warped, one-sided visionary, with all the 
 attractiveness of youth departed, a relentless propa- 
 gandist of one idea, the acrid editor of a monomaniac 
 review, this would have been a sorry spectacle. 
 
 Beauchamp, as we have declared, is brother to 
 Feverel. He has been in the Navy and has there 
 learnt not to act the little prirxe, a discipline denied 
 to Feverel, but either might have acted very simi- 
 larly in similar circumstances, Beauchamp is by 
 training less self-centred, readier to devote himself 
 to a common cause. He dies in the attempt to 
 
 56 
 
Youth 
 
 save a waif from drowning, a bit of the flotsam 
 and jetsam which haunts the riverside. His death 
 would have seemed more fitting, and have been 
 dramatically more effective, had he not previously 
 gone through a critical illness, recovered, married, 
 and begotten a son. Dramatic justice demanded 
 Beauchamp's death, but his creator was hard put 
 to it to inflict the sacrificial stroke. The hero 
 is spared the pains of age, and age's disillu- 
 sioned pessimism ; his end has all the poignancy 
 and all the beauty of youthful death. His 
 faults are glaring, but Romfrey judged aright 
 when he declared that Neville was one of the true 
 Romfrey breed, and that fev/ in England were 
 his peers. At the final moment, when, with Shrapnel 
 and Romfrey, we look at *' the insignificant bit 
 of mudbank life remaining in this world instead 
 of him," we involuntarily re-echo their silent 
 thought, " This is what we have in exchange for 
 Beauchamp." Beauchamp has failed of lasting 
 achievement, but it has been a glorious failure, 
 and his memory is green, and will flower in the 
 hearts of his friends. 
 
 But Beauchamp does not always die young, and 
 then there comes the age of disillusionment, either 
 for himself or, if the hero prove a quack, for 
 his idolisers. We shall do w^ell to consider for a 
 moment enthusiasm in the middle age. In Harry 
 Richmond we have the apio-rela of a quack. 
 Fiction, like History, is always repeating itself. 
 
 57 
 
George Meredith 
 
 Who cannot detect in Augustus FitzGeorge Roy 
 Richmond, adventurer, star of courts and baronial 
 halls, dazzling the more vulgar with his manner 
 and his noble presence, impersonator in bronze 
 — fit metal — of Marshal Fiirst von Eppenwelzen, 
 and then again by fortune's caprice pursued of 
 duns, grand seigneur out at elbows, orator truly 
 " intoxicated by the exuberance of his own ver- 
 bosity," a Cagliostro convinced by the spell of 
 his own eloquence, something of the ready wit 
 of Falstaff, something of the rotund style of 
 Wilkins Micawber ? The novel is a history of the art 
 of mystifying, a tract upon the final impotence 
 of quackery, the story of a colossal fraud such as 
 oft duped the credulous of the Victorian Age. 
 
 The " claimant " is indeed a fine figure. He 
 is kingly in his mien, possessor of all the address 
 and tact in the management of men which vie 
 associate with exalted personages. Wonderful is 
 his resource whether in words or deeds, his mental 
 agility responds to every call. He can cajole an- 
 nuities out of a sister-in-law, suppers out of a 
 pastry-cook from Richmond, Yorks, can even throw 
 sops to Cerberus, broker's men of villainous fero- 
 city, most difiicult of all tasks, we are assured. 
 He borrows from you with an air of superb magnani- 
 mity, and you thank him for his condescension. 
 He can secure an interview in a royal library 
 between a princess and his son, and to mask the 
 alarm of an irate duenna sets fire to it. He 
 
 58 
 
Youth 
 
 almost achieved a marriage between Harry and 
 this princess, the Princess Ottilia of Eppenwelzen- 
 Sarkeld, which neither the contracting parties nor 
 their relatives desired. And all this could he do 
 because he was first convinced of his own greatness 
 and his lofty birth. Prick the bubble, reveal to 
 him at last that his annuity paid with such secrecy 
 comes not from princely coffers but from Dorothy 
 Beltham's careful savings, and his reason is shat- 
 tered. He passes by a fiery death into the elements, 
 a fit ending for a modern Empedocles.^ And yet 
 he is a hero, of quackery and (yellow) plush breeches 
 doubtless, yet a hero who has attained middle age, 
 and by his knowledge of the world and its weak- 
 nesses can entrance the weaker sex, at least, w"ith 
 the spell of his glamour. 
 
 A hero indeed, yet heroes age so quickly. Men 
 and the gods love them, and the gods call them, from 
 Achilles downwards, to their banquets early. A 
 Feverel or Beauchamp, flushed with the radiance of 
 youth, is gloriously attractive. In imagination he 
 can storm heaven, or drive his chariot through the 
 constellations, but how soon the visionary splen- 
 dour fades, how scon the idealist shrinks and 
 withers into the fanatic crank ! Still more melan- 
 
 1 We feel constrained to quote^Meredith on Empedocles : 
 
 " He leaped. With none to hinder. 
 Of Aetna's fiery scoriae 
 In the next vomit shower, made he 
 A more peculiar cinder." 
 
 59 
 
George Meredith 
 
 choly the declension when the ideal is no ideal, 
 but merely self-exploited, the foisting of another 
 member upon the house of Guelph. 
 
 Richmond is a self-seeking Beauchamp — if the 
 contradiction in terms is pardonable — projected 
 into later life, quintessentially inane, fervidly 
 optimistic, builder of skiey palaces which dissolve 
 leaving no rack behind, a projector for whom no 
 ambition is too vaulting, no scheme too hare-brained, 
 leader of a party and unable to convince his own 
 son, an acrobat in perpetual inequilibrium, rescued 
 from crashing collapse by perpetual mobility. 
 But we weary at length of this faded flower. Even 
 our author, " complacent penman," feels the turn 
 of the tide, " a sign that the end, and the delivery 
 of reader and writer alike, should not be dallied 
 with." 
 
 But youth is not always so resolute and deter- 
 minate. Its struggles are not always with the outer 
 world ; it has sometimes to struggle with itself, to 
 bring itself to birth. As we read we wonder whether 
 Wilfrid Pole will ever pass from Sentiment to Passion, 
 from coxcombry to manliness. Evan Harrington 
 
 \j . has a like issue : we are perplexed whether Evan 
 I will triumph over himself, or miss full manhood. 
 The problem is worked out, not merely sym- 
 bolically, in a tailor's shop, and with the particular 
 question is linked the more general theme of 
 snobbery, 
 
 ^x Snobbery is a theme which has inspired the in- 
 
 60 
 
Youth 
 
 vective of the satirist and the jest of the humorist. 
 Dreadful indeed is trade, and even in this nation ^ 
 of shopkeepers those who have made fortunes 
 out of it are most ashamed. In this delightful 
 scherzo the master, himself the grandson of a grand 
 tailor, has let his wit play with lambent flame 
 upon the subject. The " snip " — the slang must 
 be tolerated — and the '* snip's " goose, his frac- 
 tional humanity, the horrors that association with 
 him cause in every well-bred soul — it is a theme 
 that Meredith gambols with like a sportive kitten. 
 The dreadful skeleton in the Harrington cupboard, 
 the awful suspense which racks all the accomplices 
 in a monumental hypocrisy, their guilty fears, the 
 innuendoes of their foes, the final revelation of 
 imposture, form a tragedy inverted. If all ends 
 happily in bold defiance of the laws of probability, 
 who will be captious and churlish enough to grudge 
 Evan and Rose Jocelyn their wedding-bells and 
 nuptial felicity ? 
 
 The story opens with the death of the great 
 Melchisidec Harrington, who bears a striking re- 
 semblance to Melchisidec Meredith, the author's 
 grandfather. Mel is a man of marvellous gifts 
 (x\lcibiades and Mirabeau combined), who, despite 
 his tailordom, goes into society, comporting himself 
 with dignity, and by no means " that efflorescence 
 of divine imposture " which Lady Jocelyn styles 
 him. His daughters, beauties all, have won in a 
 crescendo of gentility, a captain in the Marines, 
 
 6i 
 
George Meredith 
 
 that ever-affronted arm of the Service, a brewer, and 
 a Portuguese count ! However, the path of gentility 
 too often leads to bankruptcy. It remains for Evan 
 to redeem his father's name. But he has been 
 in Portugal consorting with an English diplomatist 
 and his family, to whom he has been introduced 
 by his sister, the Countess de Saldar, now a lady 
 of high fashion. Mrs. Harrington, a woman of 
 great decision, insists that Evan shall turn tailor 
 and go to Mr. Goren of London to learn his system. 
 The Countess vows that he shall not, while Evan 
 is for the moment swayed by either in turn. On 
 his way to Mr. Goren by some freak of Fortune 
 he meets the Jocelyns again, and with his sister 
 is invited to stay at Beckley Court. In that 
 mansion the wonderful generalship of the Countess 
 has full scope. Her dead father, she discovers, was 
 
 y Sir Abraham Harrington of Torquaj^, recently 
 deceased, a fib which costs her much trouble in 
 the end. Now Evan, stopping at the Green Dragon 
 
 i/ of Fallowfield, had fallen in with Harry Jocelyn 
 and his friends Laxley and Forth, all of them in- 
 ferior to Evan as gentlemen, as their conduct proves. 
 In an amusing altercation he had declared himself 
 a tailor's son. With amazing skill the Countess 
 passes this off as a jest, but a group forms against 
 her which seeks every opportunity to keep the 
 story alive, and even organises an investigation party 
 which shall go to Lymport. Meanwhile, the attach- 
 ment between Rose Jocelyn and Evan develops 
 
 62 
 
Youth 
 
 itself and its avowal is not checked by the hostility 
 of Rose's parents. The clouds thicken at a picnic 
 described with great skill, the battle of the bull-dogs, 
 for Mrs. Harrington appears, resolved to reveal every- 
 thing. It is a staggering blow, even though the 
 Countess as a slight compensation has procured 
 the appearance of a mad and deserted husband, 
 and a betrayed damsel, incidents which overwhelm 
 two members of the hostile group. But to 
 accomplish these ends the Countess had been 
 compelled to forge a letter. Evan discovers the 
 fact, and as honour compels him to disclose the 
 forgery he roundly delares himself the forger. He 
 necessarily leaves Beckley next morning, as does 
 his sister, though her retreat — a retreat made only 
 under protest and perforce — is conducted with 
 consummate skill. Rose is lost to Evan, but Juliana, 
 an ugly little consumptive who has been fascinated 
 by him, still believes in him, or still loves him, 
 which comes to the same thing. When she dies, 
 which of course soon happens, she leaves her estate, 
 including Beckley Hall, to Evan, now engaged — 
 on the part-time system at any rate — in tailoring. 
 Evan nobly surrenders his heritage to Lady Jocelyn. 
 The famity go and thank him in the tailor's shop — 
 a well-staged scene. Rose abandons Laxley, and 
 she and Evan are happ}^ ever after. 
 
 In such a diverting extravaganza, a plot is merely 
 tiresome, an indispensable something which is a 
 nuisance. " Let the Comic Muse for once strain 
 
 63 
 
George Meredith 
 
 human nature rather toughly/' say we with 
 Meredith. He burst all shackles, and, with a de- 
 
 y lightful opportunism that at every crisis seems 
 
 to have something up its sleeve, surrenders himself 
 
 to every impulse that the moment brings, " a 
 
 cork on the wave of the minute," content if only 
 
 he and his readers are sufficiently diverted. And 
 
 indeed they are. The scene at the Green Dragon, 
 
 the thrilling series of ever more and more elaborate 
 
 complications of falsehood at Beckley Court, the 
 
 picnic, they are the spirit of Fun incarnate. But 
 
 I it is not merely mirthfulness unrestrained, though 
 
 \ we have this in plenteous store. There is a serious 
 
 / ! aim lurking beneath the perpetual jests at tailordom. 
 
 It is the revenge of the brilliant grandson of a tailor 
 
 who has risen superior to the false shame of spurious 
 
 sentiment upon a world that gibes at a deserving 
 
 y trade, and jeered at the wonderful Mel ; it is a 
 bathing in the humorous which demonstrates that 
 Meredith had got past Evan's early attitude and had 
 shaken himself free from the sentimentalistic attitude 
 which, though " the child of gold, abhors gold." 
 And there is much charming romance. Meredith 
 had a soul which was nobly and beautifully re- 
 sponsive to the slightest touch of genuine sentiment. 
 To him nothing is a greater joy than to depict the 
 attachment of two youthful, ardent creatures. He 
 / leaps at once to the lyrical when his characters 
 ^ permit it. Evan is long in developing. He had 
 good fortune, and is let off easily by the favouring 
 
 64 
 
Youth 
 
 goddess. But he is modest and — rare gift of 
 youth — content to play second fiddle. " Are you 
 impatient with this young man ? He has little 
 character for the moment. Most youths are like 
 Pope's women, they have no character at all, and 
 indeed a character that does not wait for cir- 
 cumstances to shape it is of small worth in the 
 race that must be won. To be set too early is to 
 take the work out of the hands of the Sculptor 
 who fashions men. Happily a youth is always j 
 at school, and without mark two or three hours( 
 ago he will have something to show you now." 
 
 If Meredith always surpasses himself with love 
 as theme, what shall one say when wine, or even 
 ale, inspires him ? His rhapsodic enthusiasm for 
 the latter takes a full fling in the Green Dragon 
 scene. It is magnificent. From the opening 
 subtlety as to *' good evening " and " good night " 
 right through the dithyramb on ale, the speeches, 
 the by-play between the ''gentlemen" and Raikes, 
 it is the screaming comic, the author's highest 
 success in the rustic manner — a manner in which 
 he does not always succeed — a far more brilliant 
 achievement than the Ipley and Hillford revel. 
 Raikes, the maniac, who elsewhere confesses that 
 " it is curious thing that the seduction of a duchess 
 has always been one of my dreams," the unsuccess- 
 ful histrion who can always act well off the stage, 
 has a Pistolesque ranting style which is entirely 
 in keeping with the situation. 
 F 65 
 
George Meredith 
 
 Despite his role of second fiddle, Evan rightly 
 gives his name to the book. He has been tested 
 in the crucibles. He is in the way of becoming 
 the true metal. He is " not banished from the 
 help which is always reached out to us when we have 
 fairty taken the right road ; and that for him is 
 the goal to Lymport. Let the kingdom of Gilt 
 Gingerbread howl as it will ! We are no longer 
 children but men ; men who have bitten hard at 
 experience and know the value of a tooth ; who 
 have had our hearts bruised, and cover them with 
 armour ; who live not to feed, but look to food that 
 we may live ! What matters it that yonder high- 
 spiced kingdom shall excommunicate such as we 
 are ? We have rubbed off the gilt, and have 
 assumed the command of our stomachs. We are 
 men from this day 1 " . 
 
 We will pass by Dudley Sowerby, a dubious 
 hero of that youthfulness which always seems 
 middle-aged, and Algernon Blancove, young but 
 an entire fool, and consider for a moment Shibli 
 Bagarag, the last of our young heroes. He is, 
 unfortunately, an allegory, but will perhaps for 
 that very reason illustrate the better the Meredithian 
 view of youth. In his ardour Shibli ventures on a 
 hazardous emprise, the shaving of Shagpat, the 
 son of Shimpoor, tailor of Bagdad, scion of a house 
 that had been tailors from time's dawn. The intent 
 is laudable, but youth must be schooled to mode- 
 rate its ambitions, or rather to proportion ambi- 
 
 66 
 
Youth 
 
 tions to faculties. How shall Shibli be taught 
 this ? By that discipline which ever chastens 
 vaulting pride, the discipline of thwacks. The 
 shaving of Shagpat is a deed necessary, ordained 
 by fate, but the panoply of the doer must be forged 
 by the gods, the task is not to be accomplished by 
 the gay insouciance of a light-hearted stripling. 
 Needing the aid of Noorna bin Noorka, in seeming 
 a crone of illest favour, he betroths himself to her. 
 She is transformed, ** nor know we anything so 
 fair as is the smile upon thy face." Shibli must 
 gain the sword of Aklis, and to gain it he must have 
 three charms, the phial of the well of Paravid 
 (insight), the hairs of the horse Garraveen (enthu- 
 siasm), and the Lily of the Lovely Light (idealism).^ 
 He is confronted by many illusions, many are those 
 who have failed in their quest and gone to people 
 the realms of Rabesqrat, or are beasts in Aklis, 
 or have gone to feed the Roc in the abyss beneath 
 the Bridge of Rocs' Eggs. But there is virtue in 
 Shibli, and aided by Noorna, who is steadfast in 
 her assistance, he makes good progress on his 
 perilous course, coercing the genie Karaz (sworn 
 defender of abuses) to aid him b}^ potent spells. He 
 makes us tremble when he mounts Garraveen 
 and is carried away by windy conceit. Noorna is 
 in despair. She bids Karaz fling him off and thus 
 
 1 The interpretation of the allegory by Mr. James McKechnie 
 (Hodder & Stoughton, 1910) is very skilful, and has been mainly 
 followed. 
 
 67 
 
George Meredith 
 
 loses Garraveen, but Shibli sees clearly now. Later 
 he reaches the Hall of Aklis, and passes into the 
 Hall of the Duping Brides (popularity) and they 
 beguile and crown him. Happily he gazes in a 
 mirror, and lo ! his crown, it is bejewelled with 
 asses' ears stiffened upright, and skulls of monkeys 
 grinning with gems. He is convulsed with laughter 
 and loosed from the throne. Thus may humour, 
 the gift of seeing ourselves as others see us, de- 
 liver us from destruction even when all speak well 
 of us. He flags in vigilance, he is beset by other 
 troubles, but ever at such times — a noble thought ! 
 — there comes to him the vision of Shagpat lording 
 it at Bagdad, and he is filled with zeal anew to carry 
 out his purpose. The end comes. Despite the 
 machinations of assembled quackery Shibli frees 
 mankind from its slavish bondage to illusion, shaves 
 Shagpat by the sword of the spirit of the age and 
 the triple spells of insight, enthusiasm, and idealism. 
 So may the enthusiasm of youth, preserved till 
 death by such as Shibli's creator, aided by mind, 
 clear vision, steadfast will, achieve tasks that 
 seemed impossible. 
 
 There has been profit, one would trust, in linger- 
 ing on these different portraitures of the youthful 
 and of gallant spirit. Great fiction, it has been 
 declared, is autobiographic at least in the sense 
 that it is based on personal experience. The 
 author sets down what he sees and feels within, 
 not what is external to him. Carrying this view 
 
 68 
 
Youth 
 
 to exaggeration, some have found two characters 
 only in Siiakespeare, Shakespeare himself and Mary 
 Fitton. Regarding our own author, we would 
 suggest that there is much of Meredith in these 
 most attractive presentations of the ardent, and 
 that a great author must largety create in his own 
 image. In this loving sympathy for youth we can 
 discern not a little of the lineaments of an author 
 marked even at fourscore by youthful ardour, 
 by his freshness of interest, and his receptivity. 
 What his heroes were in the realms of his volumes, 
 that was Meredith in his own intellectual world. 
 In his composition was much of Beauchamp, much 
 of Feverel, much of Shibli. (Is this not true 
 indeed of all great Liberals ?) He had besides 
 the mastery of words that stamps the literary 
 artist, the wisdom of the sage, and till the end 
 the glow chivalric of a Spenserian knight roaming 
 through Faeryland, combating strange monsters, 
 champion of distressed maidens. 
 
 69 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 Meredith's poetry 
 
 " Enter these enchanted woods, 
 
 You who dare. 
 Nothing harms beneath the leaves 
 More than waves a swimmer cleaves. 
 Toss your heart up with the lark, 
 Foot at peace with mouse and worm, 
 
 Fair you fare. 
 Only at a dread of dark 
 Quaver, and they quit their form : 
 Thousand eyeballs under hoods 
 Have you by the hair. 
 Enter these enchanted woods, 
 
 You who dare." 
 
 Youth takes us straight to poetry ; Romeo 
 the^^poet is almost as natural as Romeo the lover. 
 Our novelist was also a poet and perhaps first a 
 . poet. He hymned j^outh's heroisms with lyric 
 V fervency, himself a pattern of perpetual youth. 
 Of Meredith the poet the fourteen novels are 
 sufficient proof. But in the intervals between 
 his novels Meredith wrote and published — at his 
 own expense — several volumes of poems which 
 throw much light upon his personality and philo- 
 sophy. He regarded the division of him into poet 
 
 70 
 
Meredith's Poetry 
 
 and novelist as unnatural, and with some reason. 
 Poems and novels are obviouslv the creations 
 of one mind and have a unity resulting there- 
 from which none can mistake. Yet it is con- 
 venient, and even natural, to consider his poetry 
 apart from his prose, and in this chapter we shall" 
 consider its differences and its similarities. 
 
 Poetry is a thing of diverse manifestations and 
 multitudinous characteristics. With some poets 
 it has been the expression of their sense of the 
 beautiful, the outpouring of their sensuous delight 
 in all that surrounded them, the carolling of the 
 lark, the passionate strains of the nightingale, 
 the record of a series of thrilling sensations enshrined 
 in language that cannot die. With others it has 
 been a vehicle for direct criticism of life, a vivid 
 commentary, forceful, humorous, sardonic by turns, 
 lit up at intervals by strains of loftiest eloquence. 
 With some we range for ever through fair pleas- 
 aunces, gazing down pleasing vistas, beholding 
 ravishing panoramas, we seem to journey through 
 a land of magic, a realm of spells and sorceries, 
 of faery Queens and gallant Princes, and case- 
 ments opening upon perilous seas forlorn. Or 
 again we yield yourselves to a sterner mastery 
 and a loftier theme as we listen to organ notes 
 which tell of war in Heaven and justify the ways 
 of God to man ; or, finally, we may even v»'ith our 
 later Alexandrian chase " mystic wrynesses," some- 
 times with little satisfaction from the quest. Of 
 
 71 . 
 
George Meredith 
 
 Meredith's poetic faculty there can be no question. 
 Yet it is strange that that poetic rapture which, 
 gleams ever and anon in his freer numbers should 
 in his verse so often veil itself within impenetrable 
 cloud. The poems are the poems of a modern 
 Empedocles, a hierophant of the Earthly impalpable, 
 suggestive, mystic, vague, oracles with all the 
 oracularity as well as the raptness of the tripod. 
 They are expositions of the new creed of Earth, 
 rhythmic chants of the Meredithian cosmogony, 
 didactic, excogitated, intense, everything but thrill- 
 ing in their sheer beauty. 
 
 Meredith has his own test of poetr}^ perhaps 
 suggested by a fine passage in Carlyle. 
 
 " Is it accepted of Song ? 
 Does it sound to the mind through the ear. 
 Right sober, pure sane ? has it disciphned feet ? 
 Thou wilt find it a test severe ; 
 Unerring whatever the theme." 
 
 It is a test which Meredith will not always pass 
 unchallenged. It is just in this matter of rhythm, 
 of triumphant, overpowering flow that he often 
 fails. His thought does not carry him through 
 a poem in one sweep, he is retarded by the heaviness 
 of his impedimenta, the very massiveness of his 
 cargo delays him. It is partly due to his metres. 
 He is at times overcome by his anapaests, a measure 
 which has since Mr. Swinburne exercised such a 
 tyrannous and disastrous sway in English literature. 
 No poet could help failing with such a vile jigging 
 
 72 
 
Meredith's Poetry 
 
 rhythm as "If courage should falter, 'tis whole- 
 some to kneel," the - right butterwoman's rank 
 to market. But the defect must go deeper than 
 that. The deepest gnomes of Earth tell us that 
 " blood, and brain, and spirit, three join for true 
 felicity." It is true of poetry as of life. But 
 in Meredith it is brain which is ever present and 
 ever dominant. He has given us puzzles instead 
 of poetry; we looked for an ecstasy and found a 
 headache. 
 
 It goes without saying that a man like Meredith 
 could not write some thousands of lines without 
 saying many fine things and without being fre- 
 quently inspired. His sonnets on " Modern Love " 
 gain the reader's attention at once with their 
 splendid plunge in medias res ; Love in a Valley 
 is a charming youthful description of a young 
 lover's beloved such as Richard Feverel would have 
 delighted to pen before parental satire chilled him. 
 The many sonnets contain striking thoughts and 
 phrases ; The Woods of Westermain is a fine piece 
 of symbolism ; The Nuptials of Attila has a strange, 
 striking wildness ; the Ode on the French Revolution, 
 and France iSyo are wonderful examples of the 
 interfusion of poetry and the philosophy of history. 
 But even the finest poems may at times melt away 
 into the vague, and there are some which are far 
 harder to construe than a poem of Pindar's or a 
 choric ode from Aeschylus. The Ode on the Comic 
 Spirit might — as has been said by one of Meredith's 
 
 73 
 
George Meredith 
 
 greatest admirers^ — have been expressed better in 
 prose, has in fact been better expressed in the 
 Essay on Comedy, A consideration of the character- 
 istics of the poems and a comparison with the 
 novels may help us to discover the causes of these 
 failures. 
 
 The poetic chariot, like other aerial means of 
 transport, may be too heavily weighted. It needs 
 ballast or it flies in a trice to the cloudy inane, 
 but it leaves the treatise or the precept to the 
 pedestrian Muse. Poetry is a matter of nice 
 equipoise, and this due equipoise Meredith rarely 
 achieved. He achieves it more frequently in his 
 short poems, particularly in his sonnets, perhaps 
 because his philosophy had not time to get under 
 weigh ; but too often his pronunciamentos on ethics 
 and theology merely illustrate the fatal defect of 
 the didactic poem. He has arresting phrases and 
 striking thoughts, but even a thousand freshly- 
 minted phrases cannot hide the fact that The Empty 
 Purse is a mere homily to prodigal youth, a fearsome 
 Shrapnel letter which could have been better and 
 more intelligibly put in Meredithian prose. It 
 is not a mere paradox that Meredith's verse is often 
 more prosy than his prose, his prose more poetical 
 than his verse. He has magnificence and splendour 
 at times, but he lacks beauty and song-like melody. 
 He is too absorbed in his discourse, has too much 
 
 1 Mr. G. M. Trevelyan, in his admirable book The Poetry of 
 George Meredith. 
 
 74 
 
Meredith's Poetry 
 
 to say, to think of graces of expression, and what 
 is even more important he has so much to say 
 that he cannot organise it. In poetry as else- 
 where it remains true that you cannot get a quart 
 into a pint-pot. 
 
 It is curious that Meredith is more didactic in 
 verse than in prose, but it is undoubtedly the case. 
 His whole philosoph}^ of Earth, only hinted at in 
 his novels, finds expression in various poems, and 
 if for no other reason those who wish to understand 
 Meredith wiU always have to " peruse " his poems. 
 In such a fine poem as Earth and Man Meredith 
 rises to grandeur as he deals with — 
 
 " he the \vind-whipped, any whither wave 
 Crazily tumbled on a shingle-grave 
 To waste in foam," 
 
 who must needs find as he speculates upon Nature's 
 riddles — 
 
 " ever that old task 
 Of reading what he is, and whence he came, 
 Whither to go, finds wilder letters flame 
 Across her mask." 
 
 And yet Nature owes something to Man, for he has 
 made a glorious return. 
 
 " He builds the soaring spires 
 That sing his soul in stone: of her he draws. 
 Though blind to her, by spelling at her laws, 
 Her purest fires. 
 
 " And order, high discourse. 
 And decency, than which life is less dear. 
 She has of him : the lyre of language clear. 
 Love's tongue and source. 
 
 75 
 
George Meredith 
 
 In passages so finely conceived and expressed 
 as this we find a force and fervour which is lacking 
 in Tennyson's melancholy musings on Man's destiny. 
 We may perhaps apply to Tennyson Meredith's 
 own words of criticism. " Why, this stuff is not 
 the Muse, it's Musery. The man has got hold of 
 the Muse's clothes-line and hung it with jewelry." 
 After all it is true that philosophy is the palace of 
 thought, and a poem without philosophy fails even 
 more than the poem packed too full with philosophy. 
 
 But such an ode as this has its counterpart in 
 the frigid Ode on the Comic Spirit, or The Empty 
 Purse, and if the finer poems are difficult enough, 
 the others will, it is to be feared, continue to " tlie 
 general " unreadable. 
 
 Prophets can vex by repetition. We get tired 
 of the Earth philosophy, and we find that its prea- 
 chers can be just as dogmatic as those of any other 
 theory, that agnosticism can be just as emphatic 
 as orthodoxy. We may not believe in God, but 
 we must believe in Good, and though the extra 
 letter makes much difference, disbelief in this un- 
 substantial abstraction finds rebuke as definite 
 as the denunciations of a more definite creed. 
 
 " Then let our trust be firm in Good, 
 
 Though we be of the fasting ; 
 Our questions are a mortal brood. 
 
 Our work is everlasting. 
 We children of Beneficence 
 
 Are in its being sharers ; 
 And Whither vainer sounds than Whence, 
 
 For word with such wayfarers," 
 
 76 
 
Meredith's Poetry 
 
 And if creedlessness is rebuked, Meredith is whole- 
 hearted in his censure of the turbulence of pas- 
 sion. We even reach the striking conclusion that 
 " the hoofed half-angel in the Puritan nigh reads 
 her (Nature) when no brutish wrath deters/* 
 
 " Sin against immaturity, the sin 
 
 Of ravenous excess, what deed divides 
 
 i>Ian from vitality; these bleed within ; 
 Bleed in the crippled relic that abides. 
 
 Perpetually they bleed ; a limb is lost, 
 A piece of life, the very spirit maimed," 
 
 But, as Meredith goes on to say, our laws must be 
 based on some natural foundation or they have 
 no real sanction. 
 
 " But culprit who the law of man has crossed 
 With Nature's, dubiously is blamed ; 
 
 Despite our cry at cutting of the whip. 
 
 Our shiver in the night when numbers frown : 
 
 We but bewail a broken fellowship, 
 A sting, an isolation, a fall'n crown." 
 
 In other words, as Weyburn said to Aminta, such 
 people offend against good citizenship but against 
 no divine law, such perplexed problems will arise 
 until we can read Nature aright, for — 
 
 " Not till Nature's laws and man's are one. 
 Can marriage of the man and woman be." 
 
 There is much moralising on Nature, but there 
 is in compensation much close observation of 
 Nature, and in particular close observation of 
 
George Meredith 
 
 wooded Nature. We note as soon as we enter the 
 enchanted woods the snake in his golden bath, the 
 mossy-footed squirrels, the yaffle and the moth- 
 winged jar, as we step over the dry twigs and cones, 
 and the other debris of a forest, we note even the 
 shredded husks of seedlings flown, mine of mole 
 and spotted flint. We find this observation even 
 in the earliest phase. The enamoured youth of 
 Love in the Valley can botanise beneath his be- 
 loved's bedroom and has a keen eye for colour. 
 He notes the birdfoot-trefoil in the grass glades 
 and the large and smoky red dropping from the 
 sun's cold disk, and a breath of the south-west 
 can always make his Pegasus fly over the sward. 
 Elsewhere Meredith delineates with marvellous 
 accuracy the " song seraphically free of taint of 
 personality " of the lark ascending — 
 
 " As up he wings the spiral stair, 
 A song of light, and pierces air 
 With fountain ardour, fountain play. 
 To reach the shining tops of day 
 And drink in everything discerned. 
 An ecstasy to music turned." 
 
 It is a marvellous piece of observation and, as 
 Mr. Trevelyan has observed, much nearer a de- 
 scription of the lark's song than the work of other 
 great poets. Yet it seems permissible to point 
 to the converse truth that Shelley and Keats, who 
 perhaps did not observe the lark so closely, 
 have produced something which for sheer poetry 
 
 78 
 
Meredith's Poetry 
 
 must be av/arded a higher place, in giving us the 
 unpremeditated rapture rather than the studied 
 observation. 
 
 But from such fine passages we come baxk too 
 soon to difficulties and abstrusenesses, for which 
 occasional striking lines are not sufficient compensa- 
 tion. If poetic excellence consisted merely in the 
 power of forging striking lines, Meredith would 
 stand higher. But it is something more than this, 
 and a succession of pregnant aphorisms retard 
 the movement of a poem. Strangely enough, 
 Meredith's poetry is more abstract than his prose, 
 and his narrative poems are few. The result is 
 unfavourable to poetic delight. The fine lines 
 are not so frequent as the fine phrases in the novels, 
 and some of his ideas have been better put by 
 Meredith himself in his own vivid prose. Compari- 
 sons are odious. Not a great number of Mere- 
 dithian passages would deserve inclusion in an 
 anthology containing only the very finest achieve- 
 ments of Enghsh Literature. His poems cannot 
 be neglected, but, fine as they can be, we do not 
 feel that they hold the unique position of his greatest 
 novels. Some will even regard them as valuable 
 chiefly as containing a fuller revelation of Meredith's 
 manysidedness and a fuller exposition of his philo- 
 sophy than we get elsewhere. They need the 
 labours of the grammarian, the annotations of the 
 commentator, and the paraphrase of a translator. 
 Poetry is often a sort of shorthand revelation in 
 
 79 
 
/ 
 
 George Meredith 
 
 a stanza of a wealth of thought and passion such 
 as a whole chapter in prose might scarcely express. 
 With Meredith the process of compression is carried 
 still farther, and then the shadows of Heracleitus 
 are nothing to his gloom. When intellect and 
 emotion contend for mastery with him, intellect 
 generally prevails. But intellect, which has its 
 place in poetry, has not the highest place, and 
 hence the curious result that the evOova-caa/jLo^, 
 which lends such a glory to many of his novels, 
 seems in his verse to be over-weighted, cumbered by 
 the massy coach of learning, philosophy, and historic 
 insight that it has to draw. It is an Orphic revela- 
 tion, vocal to the prudent, and understanded 
 by the epopts, but by them alone. There are of 
 course flashes of lyric power, intermittent gleams 
 of highest poesy, but the light which never was on 
 sea or land does not shine in Meredith's poems. 
 The poet says many striking things, he coins many 
 an arresting phrase, but he does not realise that 
 if the novelist must not be didactic, still less may 
 the poet. The Ode on Comedy is a true and subtle 
 appreciation, but a Greek critic would have de- 
 scribed it as " frigid." Like many English odes, 
 it lacks afflatus. Meredith evangelises, but the 
 evangel of Nature and Earth the Mother is a cold 
 creed, and the evangelist preaches his delight at 
 us, and strives to convert us by dogma and asser- 
 tion rather than by the contagion of sympathy 
 and admiration. To Lafcadio Hearn, who greatly 
 
 80 
 
Meredith's Poetry 
 
 admired Meredith, his religion of Nature seemed 
 terrible, " the more terrible that we feel it to be 
 perfectly true, it is the religion of a thinking man 
 of science, who is almost incapable of any senti- 
 mental weakness." Meredith is unforgiving like ^^ 
 Nature. Life is a race with forces which have-^ 
 given man life, but will give him death if he stops 
 running. Even the gospel of Nature will not 
 stand too much of the ex cathedra st3^1e, " that sly 
 temptation of the illumined brain, deliveries ora- 
 cular, self-spun," a temptation shunned by Mere- 
 dith yet yielded to. He loses thereby contact 
 with the ordinary appreciative reader and thus 
 illustrates his own dictum : 
 
 " Who sweats not with the flock will seek in vain 
 To shed the words which are ripe fruit of sun." 
 
 If then it be true, that much that Meredith 
 says in verse he has also said better in prose, the 
 conclusion would seem to follow that his verse 
 is lacking in the finest sense of form, and that the 
 poet in pondering over his message failed to find 
 its aptest vehicle, forgot that when one preaches 
 courage it is not necessary to use the vile rhythms 
 of " If courage should falter, 'tis wholesome to kneel," 
 and that' one is not bound in inculcating moderation 
 to dance to the broken measure of — 
 
 " Our political, even as the merchantman, 
 A temperate gale requires 
 For the ship that haven seeks " ; 
 
 G 8l 
 
George Meredith 
 
 lines which are neither grand, novel, nor Pindaric. 
 And thus though we are delighted by striking lines 
 and splendid thoughts, we are rarely borne away by 
 the poet's impulse, and are impressed by the poet's 
 reason rather than by his imagination. Philosophy 
 for the lyric poet is a good servant, but a bad master. 
 It has been best perhaps to consider the unfav- 
 ourable aspects of Meredith's verse first. But 
 there is much to be said on the other side. To 
 Lafcadio Hearn it seemed that Meredith's per- 
 manent place in literature would be due rather to 
 his poetry than to his prose, and that the virtue 
 of his poetry lay in that solid matter which has 
 repelled " the general." Swinburne, in his enthusiastic 
 and just eulogy of Modern Love, describes Meredith 
 as one of the three or four poets now alive whose 
 work, perfect or imperfect, is always as noble in 
 design as it is often faultless in result. Robert 
 Louis Stevenson declared that the sheer beauty 
 of one stanza in Love in a Valley made him drunk 
 with delight. Only long quotations could justify 
 this enthusiasm, but it would be possible to pro- 
 duce such passages. Let those who desire to know 
 what Meredith could do read amongst others of 
 the longer poems Love in a Valley, Modern Love, 
 The Nuptials of Attila, The Woods of Westermain, 
 and they will find much to delight the careful reader. 
 Among his fine sonnets, those on Lucifer in Star- 
 light, The Spirit of Shakespeare^ The Discipline of 
 Wisdom, The World's Advance, A Later Alexandrian 
 
 82 
 
Meredith's Poetry 
 
 are finely conceived and finely expressed. And 
 one ode, France, December iSyo, rises to the magni- 
 ficent. It is a wonderful piece of philosophy-history 
 raised by intense imagination to a great height of 
 Poetry. 
 
 " We look for her that sunUke stood 
 Upon the forehead of our day, 
 An orb of nations, radiating food 
 For body and for mind alway. 
 Where is the Shape of glad array ; 
 The nervous hands, the front of steel. 
 The clarion tongue ? Where is the bold proud face ? 
 We see a vacant place ; 
 We hear an iron heel." 
 
 If Meredith had poured forth oceans of poetic 
 lamentation he could not have said more, or said 
 it nearly so nobly. Compression and reticence 
 have here attained the grand style. 
 
 So in passing judgment upon Meredith's poetry 
 we find ourselves suspended between unqualified 
 eulogy and bewilderment or even censure. Mr. 
 Trevelyan, in his most interesting account of the 
 poems, shows that even a disciple finds it necessary 
 to be apologetic at times, and to paraphrase his 
 master before he considers him intelligible. A 
 fine critic like Dowden can speak of the poems 
 as only "a slender affluent '' of his novels; and 
 Mr. le Gallienne compares them to "a mass of 
 rich yarn that awaits the w^eaver, full of threads 
 of wondrous colour but still yarns," and declares 
 that there is more poetry than poems in this author 
 who lacks high economy of form. We do indeed at 
 
 83 
 
George Meredith 
 
 times feel tempted to aver that it is the raw material 
 of poetrj/ that has been given us rather than poetr}^ 
 itself. And yet again we feel that such a judg- 
 ment is ungrateful when we consider the mass of 
 noble thoughts and fine phrases, and the abun- 
 dance of poetic feeling that the poems contain. 
 It is a hard task to put a new philosophy into verse, 
 and at the same time to create the highest poetry. 
 Wordsworth alone in modern times has been able to 
 give expression to a new view of Nature and at 
 the same time largely to extend the bounds of poetry. 
 And yet how tedious he can be, how often he gives 
 us words instead of thoughts and prose in place 
 of philosophy. It would be rash to compare 
 Meredith with Wordsworth in respect of poetic 
 achievement and the creation of a nev/ kind of 
 poetry, but he is, like Wordsworth, a man vv^ho will 
 let his views at times overpower his inspiration, 
 and he is, again like Wordsworth, a pioneer. He 
 sought to add new elements to poetry, and "be not 
 infrequently succeeded nobly. His defence is that 
 which the husband of Modern Love makes for a 
 certain novel : 
 
 " Unnatural ? My dear, these things are life : 
 And life, some think, is worthy of the Muse." 
 
 Life is in very truth worthy of the Muse, and the 
 poet need not apologise if he is ever seeking to 
 gain a deeper understanding of these problems, 
 
 " More brain, O Lord, more brain ! or we shall mar 
 Utterly this fair garden we might win." 
 
 84 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 PHILOSOPHY 
 
 It is not our ambition to construct a Meredithian 
 system of ethics, teleology, or metaphysics, and 
 with most novelists any such elaboration would 
 be impossible or futile. But in dealing with the 
 achievement of a mind which has pondered deeply 
 over human life in all its bearings, and which was /^ 
 ever activety engaged in putting- — we will not say 
 solving — problems relating to humanity, it is right 
 and proper that we should dwell upon certain 
 aspects of its views and certain guiding principles 
 which it had attained. Man, his fortunes here r^ 
 on Earth, his past, his present, and his future, the 
 problems of existence, the end of human efforts, 
 history, politics, sociology and theology, all these 
 varied aspects of man's intellectual life were matters 
 of keen interest to Meredith. He had at least a 
 creed, instinctive rather than matter for logic, 
 and his creed, though not reduced to arid formulas, 
 was coherent and logically developed. He lived 
 in a mental universe fashioned and shaped into 
 some semblance of uniformity by his unwearied 
 efforts. 
 
 «5 
 
 ^ 
 
George Meredith 
 
 Almost first with Meredith was the question of 
 the relation of the sexes, involving as it does so many 
 questions of morality, the Woman's question, not 
 so limited an aspect of it as the Suffrage, but the 
 much wdder, deeper problem of Woman, her place 
 lin the world, her attitude towards Man, Man's 
 attitude towards her, the mode and form of their 
 association, the right conception of marriage. We 
 can all quote glibly such epigrams as " Men may 
 have rounded Seraglio Point, they have not yet 
 doubled Cape Turk," " I expect that Woman will 
 .be the last thing civilised by Man " (the utterance 
 of a wounded husband whose wife had betrayed 
 and left him). But more than a few casual epi- 
 grams are needed to solve so weighty a matter, 
 and perhaps a preliminary glance at a few Meredi- 
 thian heroines will help us to a definite view, for 
 a novelist's heroines should show best his concep- 
 tion of Woman. 
 
 The youngest shall have place of honour. They 
 are often honoured with the title Shakespearean, 
 and if w^e mean by this most womanly in their 
 sweet girlishness, gay yet not boisterous, witty yet 
 not pert, keen intellects yet no bluestockings, re- 
 ceptive, true mates of their partners in very mood 
 that sways them, no dainty Lydia Languishes but 
 creatures of flesh and blood, nurtured on *' good beef 
 and good bread " with sound digestions and healthy 
 appetites, not frail and sickly therefore but of 
 perfect health this side the Amazon, spirited yet 
 
 $6 
 
Philosophy- 
 no hoydens, pure but no prudes, reverent yet keen 
 questioners of the world's deeds, brave, devoted, 
 resolute and nobly sincere, Meredith's heroines 
 have indeed the charm of Shakespeare's finest 
 conceptions. They are devoid of the petty and 
 the narrow, the typical fault of woman, they bear 
 around their head Romance's halo, but even the 
 keenest tracker of the sentimental can find no 
 trace in them of that. They have too clear a vision 
 of realities, their intuitions never fail them. The 
 progress of refinement and the advance of intel- 
 lect have even added charms which were lacking 
 in Shakespeare, and have removed some things 
 which displease and jar on us in Juliet and Rosalind. 
 /Meredith's heroines step into his volumes, ideals 
 impersonate in living creatures, noble incarnations 
 of the noble English woman — perhaps Earth's finest 
 t5^e — and at their entrance they conquer all men's 
 hearts and constrain them to follow in their train with 
 reverent adoration. We have, thank Heaven ! left 
 far in our rear the age of Dora Spenlow, and even Jane 
 Austen, consummate artist as she was, is behind the 
 fashioH ; she would have shuddered at Clara Middle- 
 ton's wet feet and clothes, and even swooned at 
 Carinthia jumping out of windows twelve feet high 
 and walking o'er the Tyrol heights. But now our 
 maidens have bodies as well as souls, they are 
 daughters of the gods divinely tall, and passably 
 strong. Would that a novelist could make such 
 paragons walk the earth, not merely tread within 
 
 87 
 
/ 
 
 George Meredith 
 
 the enchanted walls of his own world. There might 
 be fewer bachelors. I 
 
 Of these creations Cl^ija Middleton, Rose Jocelyn, 
 and Lucy Desborough are the most charming, 
 if maidens so peerless may be placed in order. 
 Clara at eighteen is overwhelming ; she carries 
 youth " like a flag." She soon penetrates Will- 
 oughby, and the struggle to extricate herself at 
 once begins. Its long course is followed with rapt 
 interest ; we feel with Clara, w^e draw the breath 
 when she does, we too are harrowed by suspense. 
 But we dimly feel that such a glorious maid is not 
 destined for Willoughby, and our anguish therefore is 
 never tragic. She gives herself to Vernon Whitford, 
 the scholar of the unhappy past, a man of modest 
 self-effacement and prudent, loyal counsels, who, 
 we feel, has been well-deserving and is extraordin- 
 arily lucky. Quite as fortunate, if not more so, was 
 Evan Harrington in winning Rose Jocelyn. Rose 
 is a noble, resolute girl whose insight pierces to 
 the heart of the indeterminate and undetermined 
 Evan, and detects beneath all the surface of weak 
 resolve a foundation of strength and manhood. 
 She loves him as he loves her, and it is she who, 
 caring little for conventions and little for world- 
 ling prudence, carries through the match. The 
 meeting of the lovers beside the boathouse is as 
 charming though less impassioned than the lovers* 
 scene in The Ordeal. Rose is unreserved but 
 never forward, and despite or through her charming 
 
 88 
 
Philosophy 
 
 inconsequence can move her parents as she pleases. 
 At times indeed we wonder whether such broadness, 
 such generosity, such boldness of resolution, are 
 not beyond the Woman which convention has 
 shaped, but we are silenced by the statement that 
 Rose Jocelyn did tread this earth, known by the 
 name of Janet Duff Gordon ; we are told, too, by 
 her creator, that Janet was an even finer creature 
 than Rose. 
 
 Lucy Desborough, Richard Feverel's beloved, 
 demands a note. She has not the " character " 
 of either Rose or Clara. She is womanly, true 
 lover, loyal to the death to Richard, and for the 
 first part of The Ordeal has simply to receive his 
 protestations and caresses. But she grows in the ^ 
 school of human life, and when occasion calls for 
 strength and draws it out, she is shown growing 
 and ever growing in firmness of resolve. 
 
 But thinking upon Meredith's heroines soon 
 takes us into the less easily fathomed depths of 
 sex questions. Many of his woman are touched - 
 however slightly by these matters. Clara escapes 
 the yoke of a tyrant sentimentalist, Lucy Des- 
 borough, Carinthia Kirby, and Diana Merion suffer 
 from the faithlessness, the tyrannous humour, or ^ 
 the suspicion of a husband ; Dahlia Fleming is 
 ensnared into an irregular union, queenly Natalie 
 Dreighton and Aminta Farrell (Browny) enter 
 deliberately into such unions, Nesta, the child of 
 Natalie and of Victor Radnor, brought face to face 
 
 89 
 
George Meredith 
 
 with man's brutality demands to penetrate beyond 
 / convention. In no case is a moral clumsily en- 
 forced nor morals clumsily inculcated, yet it is 
 every moment plain that the author is grappling 
 with hard facts, and urging us to do the same. He 
 will not follow Mrs. Grundy as lawgiver ; he has, 
 like all great writers, the godlike insight that pierces 
 through the external to the core of things, he can 
 plumb the depths of inmost soul. He has no tole- 
 rance for the " false sensations, peculiar to men, 
 ^ concerning the silver purity of woman, the lost 
 innocency, the brand of shame upon her which 
 are commonly the foul sentimentalism of such as can 
 be too eager in the chase of corruption when occa- 
 i sion suits and are another side of pruriency nor 
 I absolutely foreign to the best of us in our youth." 
 1 He will not austerely turn aside from erring woman 
 land let the man go free. 
 
 The novel in which the deceived woman is most 
 prominent is Rhoda Fleming, the most gloomy 
 . and the most didactic of Meredith's novels,^ one in 
 which he often meditates upon " the human act once 
 set in motion (which) flows for ever to the great ac- 
 count." He is more lenient than father and sister 
 ever could be to the unhappy Dahlia, ensnared by 
 the villainy of Edward Blanco ve, weak and imprudent 
 but no wanton. For him the antithesis between 
 rose-pink and dirty drab is unreal. He seems 
 
 1 Except perhaps The Amazing Marriage, which teems with 
 the didactic. 
 
 90 
 
Philosophy 
 
 with no small measure of the inspiration of the 
 original context to bid him that is without sin cast 
 the first stone. Robert Armstrong, for all his faults 
 and inexplicable errors, knows better than Farmer 
 Fleming and treats poor Dahlia chivalrously. " The 
 young man who can look on them we call fallen 
 women with a noble eye is to my mind he that is 
 most nobly begotten of the race, and likeliest to 
 be sire of a noble line." He can condemn with a 
 severity equal to his tenderness for the fallen grand- 
 motherly laws — 
 
 " Giving rivers of gold to our young 
 To furnish them beak and claws." 
 
 The later history of Dahlia after her ensnare- 
 ment is very beautifully worked out. Edward 
 Blancove sees his wickedness and is sincerely 
 penitent. But Dahlia, like Clarissa, will not suffer 
 her wronger to right the wrong, which is in truth 
 impossible. With splendid chivalry for the dis- 
 tressed, Meredith paints Dahlia as chastened and 
 purified by suffering and calamity, rising to heights 
 of character that otherwise she might not have 
 attained. She is not a dubious person to the 
 changed Edward, nor is she to us. She is neither 
 quite right as Ann Veronica would deem her, nor 
 by any means quite sinful as Mrs. Grundy would 
 pronounce. It is indeed possible " both to think 
 her saintly, and have the sentiments inspired by 
 the unearthly in her person. For she has the 
 
 91 
 
George Meredith 
 
 capacity to suffer evil and to pardon it. She had 
 come out of her martyrdom stamped with the 
 heaventy signmark." We feel that Dahlia must 
 die, that one with her experience cannot ever re- 
 turn to the placid humdrum of her happier youth. 
 Yet her passing is not abrupt, but gradual. We 
 learn as we gaze at her to hate " the sham decent " 
 and we feel that her dying words are also Meredith's 
 adjuration. " Help poor girls." We feel, too, how 
 near the novelist in his tender treatment has come 
 to the words in which the great poet of Nature 
 meditates over a similar sad story. 
 
 " Blest are they 
 Whose sorrow rather is to suffer wrong 
 Than to do wrong, albeit themselves have erred. 
 This tale gives proof that Heaven most gently deals 
 With such in their affliction." 
 
 Lord Onnont and his Aminta tells a story of 
 haughty neglect and reserve, ending in a wife's 
 sudden rending of the marriage tie. Lord Ormont, 
 who has married Aminta Farrell, a dark beauty, 
 will not let the world know that she is his wife. 
 He evades somewhat wrathfully Aminta's attempts 
 to secure a public avowal, and his sister. Lady 
 Charlotte Eglett, is an entire sceptic as to the mar- 
 riage. The fault is due to Ormont's opinion of the 
 sex. " He quaintly minimised women and reduced 
 them to pretty insects or tricky reptiles. . . . He must 
 be generous in his own way, and at his own time." 
 
 At length there comes the frequent result. To 
 
 92 
 
Philosophy 
 
 Meredith as an independent thinker convention qua 
 convention meant nothing. He is not, however, 
 one of those moraUsts who regard the Rape of 
 Helen as a brilliant act of emancipation, or put 
 Paris on the highest pedestal of fame. He pleads 
 for a more thoughtful consideration of life's pro- 
 blems, and a less mechanical harshness of judgment, 
 but he does not suggest that there is necessarily 
 anything noble in stealing another man's wife. He 
 does not admire " the terrible aggregate woman 
 of man's creation, who exhibits virtue with face 
 of waxen angel, with paw of desert beast, and 
 blood of victims on it." " Her subjects are the 
 mixed subservient, among her rebellious are earth's 
 advanced who have cold morning on their foreheads, 
 and the}^ would not dethrone her, they would but 
 shame and purify by other methods than the 
 druggist. Undoubtedly she dislikes the vicious. 
 On that merit she subsists." But Weyburn and 
 Aminta are not unnecessarily idealised. As Wey- 
 burn himself puts it, " We offend against good citi- 
 zenship, not against Divine Law." 
 
 In One of our Conquerors we have a similar pro- 
 blem. Victor Radnor is wedded before attaining 
 his majority to a wealthy old lady, Mrs. Burman. 
 But she has a beautiful girl-companion, Natalie 
 Dreighton, who captures the impressionable heart 
 of Victor. They live together true mates, and 
 Mrs. Burman (Radnor) " flew her flag with the 
 captain wanting" It was Victor's eloquence, 
 
 93 
 
George Meredith 
 
 histrionic self-deceiver as he was, that swept 
 Natalie away, a flower detached on the river's 
 bank by swell of flood sailing " through beautiful 
 scenery, with occasionally a crashing fall, a tur- 
 moil, emergence from a vortex, and once more 
 the sunny whirling surface," as we are told in a 
 striking image. Mrs. Burman is implacable. She 
 condemns the lovers for living in open sin, but 
 will not grant them a divorce. It would have 
 mattered little if Victor had been content with 
 seclusion and merely domestic happiness, but he 
 with his " itch to be the bobbing cork on the wave 
 of the minute " demands nothing less than recogni- 
 tion as a leader of society. The result is a series 
 of evacuations and retreats from positions each 
 more imposing than the previous. Victor has 
 withdrawn from Craye and Crockholt owing to 
 the assaults of the enemy led by Mrs. Grundy and 
 inspired by Mrs. Burman, but Victor will be victor 
 in name and in deed. As a pleasant surprise for 
 wife and daughter he builds, regardless of expense, 
 a splendid mansion in the Home Counties, for he 
 is now a City magnate whose inspired recklessness 
 has made him immensely rich. 
 
 But the situation is complicated by his daughter 
 Nesta, a girl of virginal freshness who knows 
 nothing of her parents' past. Victor's triumph 
 will be complete only when he has achieved a 
 splendid marriage for her. But how can he ac- 
 complish this without informing both the happy 
 
 94 
 
Philosophy 
 
 lover and his beloved ? This is the problem which 
 ever weighs down Natalie, and grips her at the 
 heart. Victor had whirled her aw^ay, but she could 
 still think. Without regretting the step which had 
 led to a noble, almost ideal, union of true lovers, 
 she had not the sanguine disposition which enabled 
 him to conquer difficulties by ignoring them. She 
 had not the stout heart which is capable of braving 
 the world ; she was in the car with a racing chario- 
 teer — up beside a more than Titanically audacious 
 balloonist, " a goldfish in his globe, and a pot on 
 the fire with a loose lid," as Meredith calls him 
 when the metaphors run riot. She was ever 
 hanging back, feebly attempting to resist Victor's 
 bold designs without avail. The Honourable Dudley 
 Sowerby falls in love with Nesta and asks for her 
 hand. Natalie at last acts. She sees Sowerby, 
 and enlightens him. Still her agony continues. 
 Mrs. Burman is fighting a battle with death ; she 
 has strange fancies. Victor, who has wonderful 
 power over men, has won her doctor, her lawyer, 
 and her butler, but Mrs. Burman is still implacable, 
 and the bulletins reveal her tenacity. She sends 
 an emissary to the great concert at Lakelands on 
 August 23 — -the date of her dream — forbidding 
 the occupation of that mansion. Later she summons 
 Victor to meet her. He goes, accompanied by 
 Nes^ta — a strange scene powerfully portrayed — 
 and it is plain now that Mrs. Burman is in ex- 
 tremis. She dies, but she dies five hours and a 
 
 95 
 
George Meredith 
 
 half after l^esU ^had succumbed to the strain of 
 an incessant struggle. The blow overthrows Victor, 
 who loses his reason. Such is the fate of One 
 of our Conquerors. 
 
 So the problem is this. Given two kindred souls, 
 one already bound by the marriage bond, the other 
 free, can they be united, can they defy Mrs. Grundy 
 and all her terrors ? Or rather can Victor brave 
 all conventions and consort with the conventional, 
 can he both eat his cake and have it ? Our con- 
 queror fails, but he fails partly because his beloved 
 has not the same superb confidence. 
 
 This, then, is the main theme, but there are com- 
 plications. Natalie the stately, the noble, a queen 
 among women with her stature and her glorious 
 voice, is still the adherent of the conventional 
 in spite of her own defiance of it, and " has a pro- 
 vincial gentlewoman's tradition of manners." Her 
 daughter Nesta, true child of such parents, impulsive, 
 ardent, relying with no misgiving on " the genial 
 sense of youth " to whom " love was an unerring 
 light and joy its own security," has an instinct 
 for doing the right thing. She has, to quote a beauti- 
 ful image, " a heart of many strings, open to be 
 musical to simplest wandering airs or to the gales." 
 While on a visit to the Misses Duvidney, quaint 
 old ladies of a *' Chippendale elegance," she meets 
 a Mrs. Marsett, a woman of a dubious past — and 
 present — ^who has been wronged by a certain 
 Major. Nesta is kind and sympathetic to this 
 
 96 
 
Philosophy 
 
 vulgar, yet ill-used woman, who reverences in Nesta 
 the lofty innocence which is not hers. Natalie is 
 angered and distressed with a mother's anxiety 
 at the bare possibility of such association. And 
 yet Nesta in being kind to Mrs. Marsett has simply 
 manifested her noble nature. In her resolute facing 
 of the problem which such people as Mrs. Marsett 
 present, and the thoughts to which such troubles 
 give rise, Nesta finely typifies the modern tendency 
 of the best and bravest amongst women to look 
 boldly at evils and seek to relieve them, rather 
 than to blink and pass by in prudish modesty. 
 It is perhaps not without design that Meredith 
 lavishes all his powers in depicting as the child of 
 parents whose union was not blessed by traditional 
 rites this beautiful and noble girl — a worthy 
 peer of .Rosalind and Miranda, though not so witty 
 as Rosalind — whose goodness was an intuition and 
 not a lesson painfully learnt. If this be so, it is 
 a splendid piece of irony. To Meredith, as to all 
 great minds, niarriage was a sacrament. There ji^ 
 is, however, a lofty height Irbih which even thef 
 noblest of earthly institutions may appear but 
 formalism, and some, few only, can rise to a 
 plane from which even a marriage ceremony and 
 the signing of a register are but a ritual, husks 
 and externalities, mere outward visible signs of 
 that inward sacramental grace which ennobles 
 every true marriage. Of the tribulations which 
 encompass those who tread this perilous path, of 
 H 97 
 
George Meredith 
 
 the inevitable undoing of those who flout convention 
 and yet demand its approbation, of the difficulties 
 on top of difficulties which beset those who battle 
 against the world, Meredith says nothing. His 
 story tells us but too clearly. One of our Con- 
 querors is a novel with both a hero and a heroine, 
 but we sharply distinguish between them, the one 
 from the other. For Victor's debacle we feel less 
 sympathy ; his defects are obvious. We are 
 sorry for his failure but we are not harrowed. For 
 Natalie our feelings are very different. " The 
 shallowness of the abstract Optimist is indeed ex- 
 posed enough in Victor's history, but perhaps 
 we may accept the verdict that (looking on their 
 child) father and mother had kept faith with nature." 
 But of Natalie alone we can say more. " An in- 
 corruptible beauty in the woman's character claimed 
 to speak for her memory. Even the vigorous in 
 defence of righteous laws are softened by a sinner's 
 death to hear excuses, and may own a relationship, 
 haply perceive the faint nimbus of the saint." Death 
 among us proves us to be still not so far from " the 
 Nature saying at every avenue to the mind, Earth 
 makes all sweet." 
 
 We associate the intellectual with the town, 
 especially the great town, we naturally assign him 
 a place in some great library or museum into 
 which the hurricane and the frost, the sunshine 
 and the flowers never enter, a place where the at- 
 mosphere is deoxygenated or of artificial purity. 
 
 98 
 
Philosophy 
 
 How infinitely invigorating, then, is it to find as 
 we open the door into one of Meredith's novels 
 the winds of heaven rushing to meet us, to hear 
 entrancing pastorals of birds, the murmurings of 
 rustUng boughs, to find that our intellectuals live 
 in " civiHsed Arcadias," country houses from which 
 the enchanted woods of Westermain are never far 
 distant, to discover that we may wander by the 
 riverside with Richard and Lucy, that with Vittoria 
 and her retinue of patriots we may scale the 
 Motterone, with Carinthia Kirby admire sunrise 
 in the Tyrol and Carinthia herself, be drenched with 
 Vernon Whitford and Clara and, if we will, par- 
 take of dubious jorums as a remedy. The south- 
 wester which blew with such fervour around the 
 chalet at Boxhill is in the novels the prevailing 
 wind, and Meredith's prose eulogies will give 
 the south-west an honoured place among those 
 many winds which poets so capriciously have 
 hymned at different times. 
 
 No novelist can expel Nature from his novels, i/ 
 no novelist, if he is wise, will invoke Nature too 
 frequently ; man is his proper study. In the 
 Wessex novels we find a minuter observation 
 achieved with marvellous fidelity, we find indeed 
 in almost every modern novel some laborious efforts 
 in word-description, but in none save Meredith 
 do we find the novelist at times thrust aside 
 by the poet, vivid broad stretches of colour giving 
 us in a few bold strokes a picture unforgettable. 
 
 99 
 
George Meredith 
 
 Nature is the eternal background in Meredith, ever 
 ready to return though thrust forth by the 
 pitchfork, for Meredith Hved to the full, joying in 
 flesh and blood and that expressive "Earth," 
 as intensely as in the things of mind, an athlete 
 in both brain and body. He loved Nature with 
 a surpassing love and in all her moods, but his 
 keenest joy was to describe English scenery, 
 and of English scenery to a Hampshire man 
 Hampshire came first — and those other counties 
 which took the south-wester in all its freshness 
 ere it passed on to London. How well one remem- 
 bers Cecilia and Beauchamp's da^dong ride across 
 the Downs, those swift-running coursers which kept 
 pace with their steeds, on the morning when, as 
 Romfrey had hoped, they were to plight their troth ; 
 or Redworth's ride to the Crossways on a November 
 night — the Downs " like floating islands, like fairy- 
 laden vapours, solid, as Andrew Hedger's hour of 
 eating ; visionary as too often his desire ! " — or 
 the February south-wester of the same novel, 
 when " a broad warm wind rolled clouds of every 
 ambiguity of form in magnitude over peeping azure, 
 or skim.ming upon lakes of blue and lightest green, 
 or piling the amphitheatre for majestic sunset . . . 
 daughters of the wind, but shifty daughters of this 
 wind 6f the dropping sun that have to be watched 
 to be loved in their transformations " ; or Fleetwood's 
 walk with Carinthia " at that hour of the late 
 afternoon when south-westerly breezes, after a 
 
 JOG 
 
Philosophy- 
 summer gale, drive their huge white flock over the 
 fields fresh as morning on the march to pile the 
 crown of the sphere, and end a troubled day with 
 grandeur." Truly " he who would have the secret 
 of a strengthening intoxication must court the 
 clouds of the south-west with a lover's blood." 
 Nature is the background of that scene upon which 
 all the intellectuals and Olympians appear to play 
 their parts, to fight their battles, and to find their 
 full development. Nature in all its aspects from 
 the beauties of the Italian landscape which we 
 descry from Motterone, or the storm in a German 
 forest which so powerfully affects Richard Feverel, 
 to a Hampshire snowstorm, the peace of a Kentish 
 bucolic picture, or the Turner glories of a London 
 skyscape, or the joy of a swim in the sea with Matey 
 Weyburn and Aminta, that extraordinary passage 
 in which the lovers, reduced for a time to the 
 semblance of bobbing corks for Neptune's sport, 
 resolve finally on their future course. 
 
 The sea is almost as dear to Meredith as the land, 
 and it makes its entry with triumphant effect even 
 in the trifling story of The House on the Beach. For 
 Meredith might with Landor declare, " Nature 
 I loved, and after Nature art." It was Meredith 
 who found " quick pace the sovereign remedy for 
 the dispersing of the mental fenmist," the tireless 
 walker who with " the Tramps " coursed over 
 the Home Counties on so many summer Sundays, 
 loved to climb the Tyrolese heights, traversing thirty 
 
 lOI 
 
George Meredith 
 
 miles a day, and delighted even to excess in such feats 
 of physical strength as later led to spinal weakness. 
 It is with much pathos, though without unmanly 
 repining, that he writes to console Leslie Stephen on 
 the latter's deathbed. " We who have loved the 
 motion of legs and the sweep of the wind, we come 
 to this. But for myself I will own that it is the 
 Natural order. There is no irony in Nature." For 
 he had loved Nature in all her moods and aspects, 
 sun and shower, snow and cloud ; fleeing from 
 London, after all " the largest brothpot of brains 
 anywhere simmering on the hob," he had preferred 
 to build a house upon the Boxhill heights exposed 
 to all the fury of the south-west blasts, he scorned 
 actually as well as metaphorically the " comforter," 
 " trusting to the spin of the blood," giving his 
 work thereby that intense vitality, that exuberance 
 of energy, that all-round sanity which can arise 
 alone from entire eve^la, from rich streams of blood 
 warm coursing through the veins, from oneness 
 with Nature. A half-century before, Words- 
 worth had given to poetry a new motive, a new 
 outlook in his realisation of an imaginative union 
 with Nature in all her moods and all her phases, 
 and had thus widened Literature's boundaries. 
 It cannot be maintained that Meredith was a pioneer 
 of such achievement. But in him too we breathe 
 deep draughts of the fresh air, our faces once again 
 can " feel the wind and rain." Nature has forced 
 her way into the arid, enervating region of the novel. 
 
 102 
 
Philosophy 
 
 Nature has blown away the cobwebs of the brain, has 
 given a spin to the blood, colour and vitality to 
 all around us. 
 
 But it is Nature with a difference. To Words- 
 worth Nature is some unknown, mysterious, far- 
 off Power, which despite its distance consents to 
 reveal herself to some few devout worshippers, bind- 
 ing them to her in some vague shadowy association. 
 With Meredith we are Nature, we are quodcumque u^ 
 vides, quodcumque moveris, the Lucanian definition 
 of God, we are the sons of Earth, true autochthons, 
 derived aeons ago from Earth, deriving still all 
 power and force from Earth and from Earth's 
 contact. One in an universal brotherhood with 
 all creatures that have life and breath, one even 
 with the inanimate, evolving slowly but surely 
 from primal slime to such glorious races as only 
 the future shall reveal, depending for our pro- 
 gress entirely upon our insight into Earth our 
 mother, basing, if we are wise, all our morals, all 
 our principles of conduct on such purpose as we 
 can descry in Earth, taking as our watchword 
 the Stoic ^rjv Kara (f^vatv, life in conformity with 
 Nature, with a profounder understanding of its 
 meaning, thus shall we hold our onward course. 
 But what others call Nature, Meredith more often ^ 
 chooses to call Earth. The difference is significant. 
 It emphasises his belief that we are sprung from the] 
 soil, of the earth earthy, but in some higher sense, \ 
 that as we come from Earth so we are dissolved/ 
 
 103 
 
George Meredith 
 
 again into Earth. It is Pantheism once more, 
 / given a new meaning and an added force, and a 
 strenuous purpose, made into the intellectual basis 
 of man's outlook. The inert majority do not require 
 ^ an intellectual basis for their morality, and Pantheism 
 is too vague, too unsatisfying, too poetic for the 
 ordinary man. Yet vague as this Pantheism is, it 
 gives scope for prayer. Shrapnel in that long screed 
 which shocked Romfrey's house-part}/ has much to 
 say upon its efficacy. As Matey kneels beside his 
 dead mother he feels the helpfulness of prayer " as a 
 little fountain." "We must pray," Meredith says 
 often in his letters; "without pra3Tr we are 
 unable to bear truth." Such a creed will not fit 
 itself with ease into the framework of a vast 
 organised religion. It is and must be the belief 
 of a few who, like Shelley or Meredith himself, are 
 raised far above the ordinary feelings of mankind. 
 It has few priests, it makes few proselytes. And 
 yet to understand the Meredithian point of view, 
 and thereby to gain fresh insight into his novels, 
 we must needs linger for a moment over this new 
 / religion of which Meredith was hierophant. 
 ^ Pantheism being the basis of Meredith's religious 
 
 view, what effect has it on the problems of conduct 
 such as confront the ordinary man ? Pantheism 
 is a religion without a revelation, and therefore 
 its votaries must work out their conclusions in 
 accordance with the vague principles from which 
 they start. Though Meredith's views on ordinary 
 
 104 
 
Philosophy 
 
 questions of morality are not seldom as definite 
 and as clear-cut as the plainest burgess's, though 
 in many questions of casuistry he may seem rather 
 to march with streaming banners into battle in 
 defence of the right and the noble than to put 
 forth a balanced judgment of pros and cons from 
 the tribunal, his definiteness hardly seems the pro- 
 duct of his creed. He trusts, one would assume, 
 largely to instinct. Instincts are given by earth, 
 and when they are not obviously destructive or 
 perverted or inconsistent, one can safely follow them. 
 It may be inferred therefore that no natural instinct 
 can be entirely wrong. Instinct may be perverted, 
 it may need the shackles or the leash, it may need 
 instruction or illumination, it may need to be 
 brought into relation with other even higher instincts, 
 but it cannot be ignored, it must not be defied. 
 Asceticism will find no favour in such a s^^stem. 
 Life is something to be enjoyed in all its richness ; 
 pleasure is not inherently wrong. But some pleasures 
 are nobler than others, and there are some things 
 termed pleasures which the best and noblest turn 
 from with contempt. Because we tread new paths 
 of thought it will not follow that the systems of 
 morality and the standards of conduct which have 
 been evolved during the long line of ages are 
 substantially wrong ; it may be that our civilisa- 
 tion with all its faults is fundamentally " based 
 on common sense." Meredith emphatically held 
 that it was. But all systems of belief have 
 
 105 
 
George Meredith 
 
 the petrifying tendency — the letter tyrannises, the 
 spirit is forgotten or ignored. The poet, the thinker, 
 the philosopher, even the novelist, of every age 
 must submit creeds and conventions to new tests, 
 must reinspire them with spiritual force, infuse them 
 with new life, if necessary slay them, for out of 
 their dead bodies new creeds and new beliefs of 
 greater potency spring up. 
 
 Hence the perpetual conflict between, not mor- 
 ality, but the dubious interpretation of moral prin- 
 ciples, and the bold insurgent who is so often in 
 reality a moral pioneer, that marks every genera- 
 tion which is not spiritually dead. The insurgent 
 passes, dies often in the odour of sanctity — like 
 treason, heresy never prospers — what was per- 
 manent in his teaching is incorporated with or- 
 thodoxy's received creed, till once again its true 
 meaning is obscured, and fresh heresies and fresh 
 combats come. In these battles the great writer 
 too will take his place. He will be jeered at as a 
 crank, denounced as impious, abhorred as impure, 
 though often it is his intense ardour for purity 
 which leads him onward to the charge. Finally, 
 his heresies will be discovered to be platitudes, 
 and again as ever wisdom will be justified of her 
 works. So in Meredith we find hard problems 
 boldly treated. Life has its noisome corners as 
 well as its open plains and windswept mountain- 
 lands. The philosopher must explore all life. But 
 those who love to dawdle over filth, who advance 
 
 io6 
 
Philosophy 
 
 with the watchword of " Art for Art's sake " 
 on their lips what time they assault our nostrils 
 with the odours of the dungheap, get from Meredith 
 nothing but disgustful censure. The knowledge of 
 the world which comes " from having sifted and 
 assorted a lot of our dustbins is not the highest 
 or the truest form of knowledge. It is the sheer 
 refuse of the abominable. The world imagines 
 those to be at our nature's depths who are im- 
 pudent enough to explore its muddy shallows." 
 He thought himself that much of his strength lay in 
 painting morbid emotion and exceptional positions, 
 but of the former there is scarcely a trace in him. 
 " My conscience will not let me so waste my time. . . . 
 My love is for epical subjects — not for cobwebs 
 in a putrid corner though I know the fascination 
 of unravelling them." He speaks with horror of the 
 French realists. " Who reads must smell putrid for 
 a month ... a nocturient, cacaturient crew . . . 
 sheer Realism is at best the breeder of thedungfly." 
 The third-rate novelist always w^ants us to see, not 
 life in the nude, in its awful purity, but life en 
 dishabille. Meredith is not of that sort. Perhaps, 
 lilie Squire Beltham, he would have put all prudish 
 talk of " chastity" into the women's linen-basket; 
 but to him true love is a nobler, more awful thing 
 than the furtive, hole-and-corner intrigues of certain 
 exponents of " Life." " Love," he says in his 
 letters, " is the renunciation of self ; Passion is 
 noble strength on fire." Though marriage troubles 
 
 107 
 
George Meredith 
 
 are frequent in his novels, he lets one of the dis- 
 tressed, Victor Radnor, say with all his emphasis 
 that seven-year marriages are " donkey nonsense." 
 " Love and man sometimes meet for noble concord, 
 the strings of the hungry instrument are not all 
 so rough that Love's touch upon them is indis- 
 tinguishable from the rattling of the wheels within, 
 herald harmonies have been heard." ^ He looks 
 onward with eager hopefulness to a noble picture 
 of the right union of women and men from the 
 roots to the flowering heights of that rare graft. 
 A character Kke Diana gives Thomas Redworth 
 and us a new comprehension of Love, " a word 
 in many mouths, not often explained. With her, 
 wound in his idea of her, he perceived it to sig- 
 nify a new start in our existence, a finer shoot of 
 Ithe tree stoutly planted in good gross earth ; 
 the senses running their live sap, and the minds 
 companioned, and the spirits made one by the 
 jwhole-natured conjunction. Li sooth, a happy 
 prospect for the sons and daughters of Earth, 
 divinely indicating more than happiness: the speeding 
 of us, compact of what we are, between the ascetic 
 rocks and the sensual whirlpools, to the creation of 
 certain nobler races, now very dimly imagined." 
 
 If we must not be ascetics, we may of course 
 have our cakes and ale, our Old Veuve, our dry 
 still Sillery and our yet grander ancient port of 
 ninety years, if there be such a vintage. Meredith's 
 
 ^ Previously quoted p. 52 (from The Tragic Comedians). 
 
 108 
 
Philosophy 
 
 Dionysiac ecstasies may seem unreal to some, yet 
 had he followed Mr. Pempton in vegetarianism and 
 Miss Priscilla Graves in anti-alcoholism, he would 
 merely have accentuated his aloofness from ordinary 
 humanity. His love of beer was at least one point 
 of contact with the working man, and without it 
 the marriage of beef and beer at Ipley, and the 
 kindred picture of the Green Dragon's midnight 
 supper would never have found creation. But 
 Meredith generally rises above such homely fare. The 
 kitchen takes its place amongst the things which 
 give men rapture. " There is no more responsive 
 instrument than man to his marvellous cook," says 
 he in describing the great feats of Armadine at Lake- 
 lands ; but wine has called forth more numerous 
 rhapsodies, one at least immortal. Victor is a good 
 judge of a fine wine, and when he meets Colney 
 Durance in the City they enjoy it together. Old Veuve 
 has " extracted a spice of individuality from the 
 saccharine," and there is no more work for Victor 
 after luncheon on that day. Wine is " the cele- 
 bration of the uncommon nuptials of the body and 
 the soul of man," and Meredithian characters all 
 are given their suitable vintage. Matey Weyburn, 
 faring forth on a sad journey, is given by Lady 
 Charlotte Eglett as a stirrup-cup some " toned old 
 Burgundy happy in the year of its birth, the grandest 
 of instruments to roll the gambol march of the 
 Dionysiac through the blood of this frame and sound 
 it to the spirit." But most wondrous of all is that 
 
 109 
 
George Meredith 
 
 port stored in Willoughby's cellars, worthy of the 
 most dithyrambic of Meredithian dithyrambs, a wine 
 which softens even Dr. Middleton's stern connois- 
 seurship to enthusiastic admiration, and at orice 
 arrays him beside Willoughby in the contest with 
 the divine Clara. But despite the authority of 
 Cratinus, and of father Ennius, who never sprang 
 forth to sing of arms save when "well-drunken," 
 wine did not always inspire Meredith's praise of wine, 
 as conviviality did not always inspire Dickens's 
 praise of good fellowship. It is distressing to find 
 him saying, in his later years at any rate, " I take 
 wine rarely ; it does not help labour of the brain, 
 but leads to flashy, trashy stuff." Such is the 
 difference between rhapsody and creeping prose. 
 
 A mind so keenly interested as Meredith's found 
 utterance on many things, sometimes the finished 
 disquisition, sometimes the ohitev dictum. Of 
 politics he was an eager follower. Acutely critical, 
 elaborately analj^tic, he could detect much that 
 was faulty in the framework of society in its present 
 constitution. By the carefulness of his examina- 
 tion he illuminated many dark plaoes, enabling 
 those that came after to ameliorate the condi- 
 tion of things. With his keen perception of national 
 deficiencies, and his ardent desire that they should 
 be made good, he was at once brought up against 
 / that impenetrable stone wall, the English tempera- 
 ment. Himself a Celt with the true Celtic fer- 
 vour, he sometimes becomes impatient, but at any 
 
 HO • 
 
Philosophy- 
 rate he sees the difficulty. No doctrinaire himself 
 but master of a swift, bold, logical, intuitive mind, 
 he saw how the lumbering Englishman with his 
 instinctive dread of logical conclusions, with that 
 intellectual timorousness which always lingers at the 
 halfway house of compromise, sunk in an agelong 
 lethargy of mind, needed above all the stimulus of 
 ideas and the guidance of general principles. The 
 Englishman of this type — thank Heaven not the only 
 type — is clearly impersonate in Dudley Sowerb}^ 
 who on an important occasion lost his train — and in 
 consequence his lady-love. The political Englishman 
 who is neither Liberal nor Conservative but the 
 dubious Liberal-Conservative of the mid-Victorians, 
 not a "Trimmer" with a "Trimmer's" definite 
 standpoint, but a thinker who exalts the swing 
 of the pendulum into a sacred dogma, a man 
 without a reasoned creed or rules of conduct, 
 with prejudice, caution, almost cowardice as their 
 only substitute, who mistakes procrastination for 
 balance and inarticulateness for profundity — this 
 Englishman is always missing trains. Reform, 
 Catholic Emancipation, Social Redress, National 
 Defence, these are a few of the trains which he has 
 missed. Meredith cannot endure that his beloved 
 England should feed upon " the pap of Compromise." 
 He delighted in " the man of hope and forward-look- 
 ing mind," and portrayed with gusto and without 
 antipathy the grand old English squire — perhaps 
 the nearest modern equivalent of the Horatian 
 
 III 
 
George Meredith 
 
 " iustum et tenacem propositi virum " — with his 
 ingrained obstinacy, his manly love of fair play, 
 and his massive feudalism, the Romfrey or the 
 Beltham, harsh yet kindly ; but he reserved all his 
 satire, tingling though not ferocious, for the formal, 
 uninspired, and uninspiring mediocrity, the man 
 whose dull lack of intuition, as in the case of Diana's 
 husband, leads to cruelty and moral wrong, or for 
 the quarter-sessions mind, Sir Twickenham Pryme 
 with all his mangolds. He admired English mas- 
 siveness, squat though it might be rather than 
 foursquare to the winds, and the English power 
 of getting things done ; he loved with a particular 
 admiration that noble type of the English man of 
 action the " sahib," a Dartrey Fenellan or an Austin 
 Wentworth, who comes floating in from another 
 quarter of the globe to infuse a breeze of freshness 
 into the most rarefied atmosphere and to succour, 
 or even marry, distressed maidens, and in the eternal 
 \\ conflict between theory and practice, between the 
 idealist and the man of facts and figures, in which 
 neither is entirely right, yet neither altogether wrong, 
 Meredith was, we may say, a strict umpire, albeit 
 his secret bias was for the bold leap forward into 
 unknown country.' 
 
 The conjunction of Celt and Saxon, their anti- 
 pathies and their antagonisms, perhaps best draw 
 out this aspect of the English character. In Celt 
 and Saxon, which we must presumably call a novel, 
 a brilliant chapter, an " inter-drone," while ruining 
 
 112 
 
Philosophy 
 
 whatever dramatic effect the novel might or could 
 have had, vividly summarises England as it appears 
 from an inteUectual's standpoint. We were not 
 always so. A great EngUshman and a great poet 
 of two hundred and fifty years ago described us as 
 " a Nation not slow and dull but of a quick, ingenious, 
 piercing spirit." Of this nation the intellectual centre 
 was London. " Behold now this vast city, a City 
 of Refuge, the Mansion House of Liberty." There 
 are not more anvils " than there be pens and heads 
 there, sitting by their studious lamps, musing, 
 searching, revolving ... a Nation of Prophets, of 
 Sages, and of Worthies." 
 
 But after followed the second Charles and bigot 
 James and then Dutch William, and in the reign 
 of good Queen Anne John Bull was brought to birth. 
 Why have we idolised Bull and the bulldog ? 
 Possibly it is the national characteristic of self- 
 depreciation — a virtue too, but in cultivating it we 
 have become Bull-ised. The contrast between Bull, 
 braggart and poltroon, and the historic England is 
 painful. We must banish Bull ; we have appeared 
 bottom-upward to mankind for half a century. 
 Preferable is "3. splendid, fire-eyed, motherly Brit- 
 annia — a pafpitating figure alive to change, pene- 
 trable to thought, and not a stolid concrete of our 
 traditional old yeoman characteristics." England 
 seems at times " the donkey of a tipsy coster- 
 monger, obedient to go, without the gift of ex- 
 pression. The only voice it has is the puritan bray." 
 
George Meredith 
 
 « 
 
 Celt and Saxon is not a novel developing to 
 
 any climax or crisis. It is a disquisition upon 
 national characteristics of much subtlety and 
 considerable, sometimes fatiguing, wit. England 
 and Ireland — it is an odd union effected by bribery, 
 cemented by coercion. Contiguity maketh a nation 
 acquainted with strange bedfellows, who cannot 
 procure a divorce a mcnsa et thoro, Male insensi- 
 bility and feminine quickness, or even shrewishness — 
 it is an incongruous match which needs must rouse 
 the quick mind of Meredith, friend of both nations, 
 conscious that each has something to bestow upon 
 the other. 
 
 Bull, the Bull of admiring cartoonist and self- 
 complacent publicist, the rubicund grotesque, the 
 full-grown Golden Calf of heathenish worship, " im- 
 pervious ... to whatsoever does not confront the 
 sensual eye of him with a cake or a fist," the derision 
 of Europe, the execration of the Celt, he is a poor 
 type to honour. Why have we so lovingly idealised 
 our lowest and our grossest characteristics, giving 
 enemy and neighbour cause to blaspheme ? PhiUs- 
 j tines are we indeed, as Matthew Arnold so often 
 ^ declared, provincials in the great world. The 
 thesis is hammered out stroke after stroke with 
 a wit which is boundless and crushing. The sin 
 of stupidity, how hard it is to cure, for even Heaven 
 fights vainly against the vice. And here our 
 man of genius steps forward, makes a few rapier 
 strokes which get past the guard, but are no more 
 
 114 
 
Philosophy 
 
 than pin-pricks to the elephantine foe, irritating 
 but futile, and so the contest ends in which they 
 both are victors. Yet perchance those who by ,/ 
 careful dieting try to reduce Bull, to purge him 
 of his grossness, to develope his embryo of a brain, 
 will some day achieve something. Such, at any rate, 
 is Meredith's fervent prayer. 
 
 Of the hesitating, timorous Englishman, Dudley 
 Sowerby will serve as a type. This peer's son " of 
 an old warrior race, beneath the thick crust of 
 imposed peaceful maxims and commercial pursuits 
 and stiff correctness," is described with much in- 
 sight and not without sympathy. He has many 
 sound qualities, but his mind moves too slowly, 
 he cannot adapt himself. He has stupidity, or 
 rather the Latin stupor which may be defined as 
 failure to react quickly to one's environment. " He 
 wore his morality cap-a-pie, like a mediaeval knight 
 his armour." He needs maxims and moralities 
 as measuring rules ; he cannot trust to his instinct. 
 He is " like the man who escapes cold by wrapping 
 in comforters instead of trusting to the spin of the 
 blood." He is too "safe." No sooner has he re- 
 covered from the shock of Nesta's birth than he 
 hears of her association with Mrs. Marsett. He 
 lost his train to London — his most typical action. 
 We will hope that he won a " safe " bride. He 
 lost Nesta. 
 
 Men fail in the "ordeal" from want of courage 
 as well as from precipitance. It was fitting that 
 
 1X5 
 
George Meredith 
 
 Diana should have been writing her romance 
 The Man of Two Minds at the time that Percy 
 Dacier was courting her. " He is courting but," Hke 
 Dudley/' he is burdened with the task of tasks. He 
 / Jias an ideal of womanhood and of the union of couples, 
 /'a delicacy extreme as his attachment, and he must 
 induce the lady to school herself to his ideal, not 
 allowing her to think himself less devoted to her 
 person." But sudden weakness, startling disclo- 
 sures of the frailty of his idol, a hasty act, expiable 
 to Meredith at any rate, bring disharmony which 
 nothing could remedy save some performance 
 like the Suttee. Percy beside his pietistic Constance 
 and her prie-dieu chairs and crucifixes, " a devious 
 filmy sentimentalist," seemed to unfavourable eyes 
 *' the efhgy of a tombstone gentleman, fixed upright, 
 and civilly proud of his tombstone bride." He had 
 taken undoubtedly the woman best suited to him, 
 for was he not " a man to prize the altar-candle 
 above the lamp of day " ? To Meredith, Dacier 
 would have seemed more admirable if he had gone 
 through with his plan and borne Diana away, 
 even after her betrayal of a Cabinet secret to Mr. 
 Tonans. But this is too much in the manner of 
 the Old Buccaneer and Countess Fanny, and com- 
 monsense — the basis of our civilisation — replies 
 to our author that it is not always easy or desirable 
 to imitate this gallant pair. 
 
 The Dudleys and the Percys have their female 
 counterparts. If they are young and opulent, 
 
 ii6 
 
Philosophy. 
 
 they may be a Miss Constance Asper, a symphony 
 in white that symboHses purity, wealthily religious 
 with a sham spiritualism, a person whom Diana 
 always eclipses and Meredith — a rare thing — cannot 
 tolerate. If they are older and somewhat more 
 of the burgess type, behold a Mrs. Cram borne 
 Wathin, a " lady of incisive features bound in stale 
 parchment," with all the rewards, together with 
 the expectations of the virtuous. " Her appearance 
 and her principles fitted her to stand for the Puritan 
 rich of the period, emerging by the aid of an extend- 
 ing wealth into luxurious worldliness, and retaining 
 the maxims of their forefathers for the discipline 
 of the poor and erring." 
 
 Such people fail through lack of feeling and lack ( 
 of imagination. They are desirous to do well, 
 but they cannot distinguish between the true and 
 the sham ; they are even kind and helpful, but they 
 are always on the wTong side. Respectability is f 
 their idol and convention their fetish, and by ^ 
 some fatality they ever back the Constance Aspers 
 and the Percy Daciers and the Mr. Warwicks 
 rather than the Dianas who are worth a thousand 
 of their wrongly cherished proteges. They have 
 great aspirations, they dwell in the odour of 
 sanctity, and they are the greatest obstacles to 
 progress. Describe their virtues without extenua- 
 tion — as our author does — and the remorseless ^ 
 chronicle is their condemnation. Mrs. Wathin is 
 a really virtuous woman of the world, and her piety 
 
 117 
 
George Meredith 
 
 is as great as her worldliness, her worldliness is 
 equal to her piety. She is " lucky in having had 
 a guided girlhood, a thick-curtained prudence, and 
 in having stock in the moral funds, shares in 
 the sentimental tramways," and at fixed hours, as 
 Meredith wittily says, " even as she washed her 
 hands, she abjured worldliness, a performance 
 that cleansed her. If she did not make morality 
 appear lovable to the objects of her dislike, it 
 was owing to her want of brains to see the origin, 
 nature, and right ends of morality." Limned by 
 such a master as Meredith, she is at once condemned. 
 Yet such types do not convince us that the 
 English are past all hope and that the Celt is perfect. 
 Carinthia with her stranger eyes saw, like Meredith 
 with his Celtic eye, the " clean hearts of the English," 
 with the " no spot of bad blood to vitiate them." 
 On her strange bridal day she had seen the great 
 battle of Ines and Todd, " the two strong English- 
 men at shake of hands that had spoiled one 
 another's faces," [and] " she was enlightened with 
 a comprehension of her father's love for the people 
 seizing the spiritual of the gross ugly picture, 
 as not ever}^ man can do and but a warrior Joan 
 among women." In The Amazing Marriage, Sandra 
 Belloni, and elsewhere Meredith is the enthusiastic 
 Welshman. Merthyr Powys and his sister, and Owain 
 Wythan are patriotic performances whose insubstan- 
 tiality is wrapt in a Welsh mist. We will credit 
 these characters with all the virtues attributed to 
 
 ii8 
 
Philosophy 
 
 them, but we must deny them vitality. Again, for 
 the Irish Meredith had plainly a fellow-feeling, but 
 they are rather good-humoured airy rattlers of the 
 De Craye type, or bellicose fire-eaters like Mr. Sullivan 
 Smith who lack ballast, and thus they fall below 
 even a Sowerby. They are clearly sketched and have 
 charm, even though Harry Lorrequer almost peeps 
 out of them at times. As for Diana, brilliant, witty, 
 noble creature as she is, she typifies Erin in her 
 lack of solidity, and her Enghsh mate is indeed her 
 tfue complement. Her final union with Red- 
 /worth is morally as well as dramatically fitting. 
 It IS one of the elements of Meredith's greatness 
 that he could look all round a nation or an indivi- 
 dual and show us all sides of them, not one. Red- 
 worth is a magnificent example of what the English- 
 man can be, resolute, practical, a good sportsman, 
 one who counts the costs before he embarks upon 
 an undertaking, but never falters once he is involved 
 in it. There is a delightful blend of romance and 
 practicality in his deliberations when he is first 
 captivated by the Irish beauty. Even as he talks 
 to her he meditates upon his financial position. 
 He talks to Diana of the best English letter-writers, 
 but his mental obligato is " eight or ten hundred. 
 Comfortable enough for a man in Chambers. To 
 dream of entering as a householder on that sum, 
 in these days, would be stark nonsense.'' Or, as he 
 tells her that one ought to cross St. George's Channel 
 oftener, a gentle delirium enfolds his brain. " A 
 
 119 
 
George Meredith 
 
 householder's life is often begun on eight hundred a 
 year ; on less, on much less — sometimes on nothing 
 but resolution to make a fitting income, carving out 
 a fortune. Eight hundred may stand as a superior 
 basis. That sum is a distinct point of vantage." It 
 means security, and if the heart of the man is strong 
 and sound . . . and then he relapses into the dots and 
 dashes which Meredith condemns in a less favoured 
 character. 
 
 We see the ironj^ of it, with Meredith, but we ad- 
 mire — and surely too with Meredith once more 
 — this steady grip at once of romance and reality, 
 this steadfast resolve to hitch his waggon to a star, 
 and the equally firm purpose not to allow his waggon 
 to capsize into the nearest ditch or to be shattered 
 against the nearest stone wall, the faithfulness 
 which knows no wavering and no changefulness, 
 the solidity which is carried down even to his Chris- 
 tian name. One who is neither Irish, Scot, nor 
 Welshman, but English, will exult that Meredith 
 could and did paint an Englishman in these colours, 
 and fondly think, with Meredith, that if all were 
 like him we should sweep the four quarters of the 
 world. 
 
 To Meredith progress is a very real thing. He 
 had no belief in immediate perfectibility, but he had 
 a distant vision of the human race going forward 
 and ever forward, and he did believe that there 
 was such a thing as civilisation, founded on common- 
 sense, and that it would win fresh triumphs. But he 
 
 120 
 
Philosophy 
 
 had no illusions. Progress is slow, sometimes pain- 
 fully slow, and for any particular observer it is the 
 process and the struggle which make things worth 
 while. Ebpur si miwve.^ 
 
 One cannot doubt that " in many estimable and ^ 
 some gifted human creatures it is the quality of 
 the blood which directs the current of opinion, and 
 pens us within party confines," or to put the matter 
 otherwise, optimism and pessimism too often 
 merely denote states of digestion. The contrast 
 between Victor Radnor and the satirist Colney 
 Durance seems to illustrate this assertion. Colney 
 thinks ill of his fellowmen and flogs them in con- 
 sequence. It is to him doubtless high morality, 
 but to Meredith " our satirist is an executioner 
 by profession, a moralist in excuse or at the tail 
 of it." Colney loved the lash too devotedly to 
 be a persuasive teacher. His Whipping Top is 
 destined to failure, and his description of England 
 seems to some " a portrait of himself by the artist." 
 Victor, " histrionic self-deceiver " as he was, is 
 no nearer the truth, and it shows Meredith's great- 
 ness, wisdom, and breadth of view that he is tolerant 
 of the weakness of humanity while he never ceases 
 to press for amendment. " Keep the young genera- 
 tions in hail and bequeath them no tumbled house." 
 It is part of his greatness that, keen critic as he 
 is of civilisation, he believes its basis to be com- 
 monsense, and while he believed in progress he 
 knew that it might be one step in one hundred 
 
 121 
 
George Meredith 
 
 / years instead of a giant's stride one hundred years 
 a day; that while he believed it the duty of the 
 
 j novelist to probe the problems of human life, he 
 left the reader to think out the solutions, and that, 
 keen votary of progress as he was, he formulated 
 no Newcastle Programme. 
 
 Meredith escapes the formula therefore and the sys- 
 / tematiser. After all, ideas, like everything spiritual, 
 are intangible though real forces, and as we try 
 to grasp them they evade us like the aeriest breezes. 
 But though neither a complete system nor a com- 
 plete survey of Meredith's ideas is possible, there 
 is a certain interest in noting various points of view 
 which appealed to him. His letters tell us that he 
 took an emphatic view on the question of National 
 Defence. " Our stiff-necked people must pass under 
 this yoke " (Conscription). Neptune's divinity, 
 he tells us, has been killed by steam. Several of his 
 heroes and others of his personages hold such views. 
 Beauchamp and a friend hold that the navy is 
 totally inadequate and that our island, " the female 
 annuitant of nations," is defenceless against a de- 
 termined foe. They mournfully explore the Home 
 Counties in the search for a suitable line of defence, 
 and they discover spot after spot, each in a scene 
 of extreme pastoral beauty, where the final stand 
 before unfortified London is destined to be made. 
 Lord Ormont, an earlier personage in point of time, 
 had carried his views still farther. He doubted 
 the efficacy of Nelson's crowning mercy of Trafalgar. 
 
 122 
 
Philosophy 
 
 Skepsey, " that queer little water- wagtail," was a 
 living personification of John Bull pavescens. His 
 views, which are a source of amiable amusement to 
 his friends, lead to his beating his wife, and there- 
 after appearing in a police-court, practising the 
 noble art of self-defence, and challenging all comers — 
 with like results, for when there is an enthusiasm 
 for National Defence, all roads seem to lead to the 
 police-court. Meredith was an advocate of some 
 form of conscription long before the view was any- 
 thing but a rare crotchet. The enemy in those days 
 was — France. We were to shiver in our shoes at — 
 France ; we were destined to destruction, did we not 
 take the due precautions, at the hands of — France ; 
 we must summon all our strength for the over- 
 throwal of — France. Prophets can, w^e suppose, 
 be judged only by the sequel. The French invasion 
 never came, and the soundest principles of naval 
 strateg}^ declared then as now that an island's 
 best defence is a supreme navy, which perhaps then 
 we did not possess. However, Meredith, detecting y^ 
 our naval weakness, cried for the wrong solution, 
 and in the light of recent events we may congratu- 
 late ourselves that the struggle between France 
 and England anticipated by so man\7 of Meredith's 
 characters never came. Even in this matter 
 Meredith's humour did not desert him. Possessed 
 as he w^as with the notion that we were defence- 
 less, he knew too well the ridicule which besets the 
 scaremongers, and that it is well not to cry wolf 
 
 123 
 
 \ 
 
George Meredith 
 
 too often and in too tragic tones. It is worthy of 
 note that Meredith makes all his advocates of national 
 regeneration by military service go to extremes, 
 and it can have been by no accident that this great 
 master of the ludicrous gives all these propa- 
 gandists a ludicrous setting. 
 
 Yet Meredith was no Gallophobe ; Mrs. Lovell's 
 attitude was doubtless his. " She liked the French, 
 she liked their splendid boyishness, their unequalled 
 devotion, their merciless intellects ; the oneness 
 of the nation when the sword is bare and pointing 
 to chivalrous enterprise. She had her imagination 
 of them as of a streaming banner in the jaws of the 
 storm, with snows among the clouds and lightnings 
 in the chasms." He admired ardently the intel- 
 lectual clarity so different from our own confused 
 ferment passing for thought. After 1870 he could 
 not but feel deeply for that " prematurely buried 
 glory, that heaves the mound oppressing breath 
 and cannot cease, and calls hourly, at times keenly, 
 to be remembered, rescued from the pains and 
 the mould spots of that foul sepulture." He de- 
 votes one of his grandest poems to France and 
 its oppressor — 
 
 " We see a vacant place. 
 We hear an iron heel," 
 
 And yet unhappy France is still " thrilling like 
 a lyre." 
 
 If others failed, statesmen, men of affairs, and publi- 
 cists, at least our great man of letters in his study 
 
 124 
 
t*hilosophy 
 
 descried the coming Germanism, and his intuition 
 casts many flashes upon it. The striking description 
 in Colney Durance's satiric serial, " the European 
 emissaries " of Dr. Grannius, " entomologist, bo- 
 tanist, palaeontologist, philologist, and at sound of 
 horn a ready regimental corporal, wearing good 
 manners as a pair of bath-slippers," draws blood. 
 The nation, as we read in the Essay on Comedy, has ^ 
 had no comic training, they whirl clubs in con- 
 troversy, they are Orsons who badly need the 
 discipline of the comic training. It is a truism 
 now, but it needed clear insight to see this nearly 
 forty years ago. Meredith, who had received some 
 of his education in Germany, knew the German pro- 
 fessor ; Dr. Julius von Karsteg has the true German 
 contempt for everything English, and does not 
 shrink from telling Harry Richmond of the faults 
 of his nation. Prince Hermann, in the same novel, 
 is a great empire-builder. " Mistress of the Baltic, 
 of the North Sea, and the East, as eventually she 
 must be, Germany would claim to take India as 
 a matter of course, and find an outlet for the 
 energies of the most prolific and the toughest of 
 the races of mankind — the purest, in fact the only 
 true race properly so-called out of India, to which 
 it would return as to its source, and thus create an 
 empire magnificent in force and solidity, the actual 
 wedding of East and West" Here we have the 
 true German union of high vaulting ambition and 
 fustian, the same conviction of a divine mission 
 
 125 
 
George Meredith 
 
 which none else can see. Truly Teutonismus is 
 no child of recent date. 
 
 Yet Meredith saw the German's strength as he 
 saw his defects. He had, as his letters show, " a 
 certain solid intellectual appreciation of the race, 
 and disgust of their manners ; admiration of their 
 strength and a sense of their spiritual flatness ; 
 great respect for them and a hesitation to deter- 
 mine whether they are now at their full growth, 
 or that there is light above them to conjure higher 
 and higher. If the latter,, they are the world's 
 masters." 
 
 The great democrat, especially if he is an intel- 
 lectual, often sees and smiles at the Vv^eaknesses 
 of the great British public, its submission to the 
 scaremonger, its ready acquiescence in the moni- 
 tions of the journalist, between whom and the man 
 of letters there rages incessant even if unacknow- 
 ledged feud. No doubt England's cherished bard 
 is the leading article, but the bard is a bondman. 
 Simeon Fenellan is eternally grateful to Victor 
 Radnor, .who " saved me from living on the pro- 
 duce of my pen — 'which means, if there is to be 
 any produce, the prostrating of yourself to the 
 level of the round middle of the public." Alvan 
 more comprehensively declares, above all things 
 '* I detest the writing for money. Fiction and 
 verse appeal to a besotted public, that judges of 
 the merit of the work by the standard of its taste ; 
 avaunt. And journalism for money is Egyptian 
 
 126 
 
Philosophy- 
 bondage." The journalist is sometimes accessible 
 to social influences. Lady Charlotte Eglett can 
 persuade 'an editor not to publish the letters of a 
 beloved brother who is making a fool of himself 
 with his "curry and capsicums." The editor gets 
 valuable information by various methods. If a 
 statesman like Dacier confides in his beloved, she 
 may rush off to see Mr. Tonans at the place where 
 To-morrow is made. Flattering reviews can be 
 won by skilful management, as Redworth finds when 
 the lady of his heart writes novels. But the re- 
 wards of the journalist are instant and immediate ; 
 the writer for the future pities him in self-defence 
 and the pity has a spice of contempt. Rickney 
 in Celt and Saxon is no unfavourable specimen of 
 the journalist. " Physician, spiritual director, man- 
 at-arms," he moulds that fearsome thing, public 
 opinion, by " the Biscay billow of the leading article, 
 Bull's favourite prose-bardic construction of sen- 
 tences that roll to the antithetical clim.ax, whose 
 foamy top is offered and gulped as equivalent to an 
 idea." " It is a poor life. . . . A man of forethought 
 who has to be one of our geysers ebullient by the 
 hour must live days of fever. His apprehensions 
 distemper his blood, the scrawl of them on the dark 
 of the undeveloped dazzles his brain. He sees in 
 time little else ; his very sincereness twists him 
 awr}^ A shepherd on the dovv^ns is more a man. 
 As to the gobbling age, it really thinks better of him 
 than he of it." Still, it must be confessed that the 
 
 127 
 
George Meredith 
 
 halfpenny paper of to-day does not seem vastly 
 inferior to the penny paper of Meredith's time. 
 Then, as now, the press delighted in scares, in none 
 more than in the periodical National Defence scare. 
 For all his belief in the need of greater prepared- 
 ness, Meredith can describe with incisive wit the 
 gradual crescendo of demand and outcry, the forma- 
 tion of a few volunteer corps, the delivery of a score 
 of patriotic speeches, and the calming of the tempest 
 by the same hands as those which raised it. If 
 Meredith was a great Liberal, it was not because he 
 could not see clearly or describe remorselessly the 
 weaknesses of a popular government. The scare in 
 the political world has its counterpart in the slump 
 of the financial world described vividly in Celt 
 and Saxon and One of our Conquerors. Even 
 the democrat, especially if he has the Puck-like 
 spirit of Comedy, will acknowledge at times what 
 fools these mortals be. He will not lose his love 
 for humanity ; he will still be in his politics " with 
 the active minority on behalf of the inert but suffer- 
 ing majority." In spite of eloquent articles on 
 the need of educational reform, in spite of a succes- 
 sion of heaven-sent Ministers of Education — one 
 per annum — the world dislikes and will continue 
 to dislike ideas, and its great men wiU continue to 
 play the role of schoolmaster to an idle and in- 
 attentive class, satisfied perforce if their pupils 
 niove forward one foot a century. 
 
 128 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 MEREDITH THE ARTIST 
 
 So far we have dealt with what Meredith had to 
 say, with the vast wealth of matter which, if it is 
 to become literature, must be beaten into form, 
 hewn out into something more precise, more clearly 
 cut. Unless he has the shaping, plastic faculty, 
 the greatest thinker must be ineffective, and his 
 work will prove null. It is time now therefore 
 to consider Meredith's technical equipment as a 
 literary artist, and the examination will resolve 
 itself into two parts — the study of those qualities 
 of style or expression which are common to all 
 who practise the writer's craft, and the study of 
 those specific qualities which mark off the novelist 
 from other penmen, the power of teUing a tale, 
 of constructing a plot, of developing it and carrying 
 it to a climax, and of achieving a successful de- 
 nouer/ient, of delineating characters while and by 
 teUing a story. 
 
 Style is the man. It is the expression of his 
 individuality, of his differentia, of those things 
 in and by which he is contrasted with other men. 
 Those who have any individuality at all, and who 
 allow this individuality^ te develop, must, whether 
 K 129 
 
George Meredith 
 
 in speech or in the written word, attain to some- 
 thing individual. It is therefore, as a rule, useless 
 to criticise a person for writing differently from 
 other people, and it is more profitable to consider 
 how well any style expresses an individuality, 
 and how far these individual characteristics are 
 worth expressing. Now, individuality is often slow 
 in developing, and its literary expression is still 
 more tardy in development. We should not there- 
 fore criticise writers who are slow in achieving self- 
 expression. It takes long to fathom a personality 
 — to " find one's self," to use an expressive phrase 
 — and then the plastic process must be carried 
 through. Music perhaps affords the most striking 
 parallel. All composers begin by expressing whether 
 their own ideas or the ideas of others in the language 
 which they have learnt and the phrases which they 
 have caught, just as the clever child will reproduce, 
 sometimes very aptly, the phrases of its elders 
 long before it has analysed their meaning. The 
 apprentice composer writes then as he has been 
 taught to write, but soon he passes from this phase. 
 He discovers himself, first in faint glimpses, then in 
 a clearer image, and in a joyful fervour he begins 
 to create. Soon, if his equipment is complete, a 
 new thing of beauty has been added to the world's 
 treasures. Thus it is with words also. We all 
 must at the outset use a lingua franca, often a jargon 
 containing many phrases useful only as counters, 
 the confused expression of anonymous England, 
 
 130 
 
Meredith the Artist 
 
 or anonymous France, of you and me and all the 
 world. The counter has it uses. Originality of 
 speech is out of place in the purchase of a railway 
 ticket or a mutton chop, perhaps even in the proposal 
 of a vote of thanks. But he v;ho is endowed with 
 a fine sense of style must often note the inadequacy 
 of the hacknej^ed phrase, and feel for other methods, 
 of expression. Not to do so is rather spiritual 
 indolence than love of the precise and unpretentious. 
 If such a seeker after utterance hits on worthy 
 methods, he becomes a classic, a master of style ; 
 if his methods are grotesque, he wins a place in the 
 literary museums of later Dryasdusts, their theme 
 and admiration. Pitfalls lie in the path of the 
 artist in words. Great is individuality ; yet none 
 by taking thought can add a cubit to it. It can 
 be fostered, cherished, brought to its full develop- 
 ment, but the fable of the bursting frog has its 
 warning. When a small man strives to become a 
 giant, his labours have their issue in the ridiculous 
 mouse ; if a great man strains inspiration at the 
 unappointed moment, he merely parodies himself. 
 No man had ever a more individual style than 
 Meredith, the mirror of his varying moods and 
 points of view ; no style could suit more aptly his 
 method and his outlook. By what discipline it 
 was attained we know not, but it exists already 
 when The Ordeal appears, written when Meredith 
 was thirty-one. It is a style which requires vast 
 learning and vast powers of thought, unusual 
 
 131 
 
George Meredith 
 
 swiftness of perception, a striking faculty of com- 
 pression, a style which makes no less demand on 
 reader than on writer. Such judgments may be 
 passed on many of the greatest stylists, but it 
 particularly fits the prophet of the intellectual 
 who wrote for a select half-dozen. The style has 
 been called both " terse and redundant," and the 
 description is apt. None ever thought more quickly 
 or boasted such a teeming fancy. The wealth 
 is poured forth by a prodigal, but the prodigal 
 has a bank balance which will never be exhausted, 
 and is lord of a Pactolus which never will run dry. 
 Not even Tacitus himself can pack more thought 
 into a sentence, none is more sinewy. This terse- 
 ness and redundance is a contradiction which 
 could arise only in an intellect of extraordinary 
 range and fertility. The style has been called 
 obscure. Obscure it is no doubt to those who have 
 been nourished on the potato bread of inferior 
 journalism, but it is for those who have no disrelish 
 of the brain, and take pains to sharpen their 
 intelligence. If in course of time education is a 
 possession widely disseminated, then will Meredith 
 have his tens of thousands of appreciative readers. 
 As it is, he is not too difficult for any men of real 
 education to understand and to appreciate, and his 
 circle of admirers is widening every year, especially 
 amongst the young. Even now passing into a 
 Public Library and taking his volumes from the 
 shelves one finds in thumbmarks, corrections of 
 
 132 
 
Meredith the Artist 
 
 his spelling/ and pleasing grime the evidence of 
 careful study. Obscurity is a matter of standards. 
 Caesar is obscure to a third-form boy, Shakespeare 
 still more so — and indeed to many others would 
 they confess it — Milton is repellently obscure to 
 those who have no classics, and Browning is obscure 
 to those who do not profess the Browning cult. Yet 
 when we have passed the tyro stage, the obscurities 
 of these writers become fewer and fewer, and unless 
 we hold the view that reading is a species of shower- 
 bath under which the reader sits drenched and 
 passive, entirely dependent upon the kind offices 
 of the bathman and taking no hand in the operation 
 himself, and that to hold communion with an author 
 should be as easy as smoking a pipe, we shall not 
 attach too much importance to the charge of ob- 
 scurity. Obscurity, child of lack of thought or of 
 a muddled mind, first in the list of Literature's deadly 
 sins, is never found in Meredith. His obscurity is 
 born of excess of thought, not lack of it. 
 
 It almost necessarily follows from the need of 
 more precise analysis of character that Meredith 
 was constrained to adopt elaborate or even laboured 
 methods of expression. Meredithian obscurity 
 proceeds from high-strained intellectual activity, 
 not from laziness or incompetence. It is the clever 
 man conversing with his auditors and assuming 
 that they have the same intuition of the logical 
 
 ^ His spelling of such words as loveable and developeing is a 
 sore puzzle to readers of the " ex- seven " standard. 
 
George Meredith 
 
 nexus that he has ; it is a desire to progress quickly 
 which leads him to skip some of the necessary 
 steps in the demonstration. But merely to charac- 
 terise Meredith's style as obscure is to shirk the 
 duties of a critic. Its greatest quality is in the 
 oldest sense of the word " wit." Never were 
 sentences written so compact of deep thought, 
 skill in manipulation of words, keen observation, 
 aphoristic pregnancy. It is the greatest style 
 which has ever been devoted to the writing of the 
 novel. It is unerringly precise, too precise for 
 the dull reader, packed with meaning, philosophic 
 in the sense that it is always seeking to deduce 
 the universal from the particular, rollicking in the 
 farcical lyrical or impassioned, in the description 
 of ardent feeling or of natural scenery. It lacks 
 except in the greatest moments but one thing, 
 rhythm ; it has not that lightness and ease of move- 
 ment which the greatest prose has beside all its 
 other charms. It at times reminds us of the pan- 
 technicon rather than the chariot of Phoebus. 
 
 Of this style perhaps the greatest characteristic 
 is the epigram. The epigram we have always 
 with us. It is the one weapon of the young 
 Varsity scholar, it is the mechanical product often 
 of the literary hack. Yet mankind likes to have 
 its ideas presented to it in an attractive dress, and 
 the epigram is thought's pleasing wrapper. The faults 
 of the epigrammatist need not be dilated upon. He 
 strains after point and glitter, he hunts for brilliance 
 
 134 
 
Meredith the Artist 
 
 rather than reality, he avoids the obvious truth 
 to quest for the far-fetched paradox. Dangers 
 beset him on every side, not least the danger that 
 he may prove tedious to his readers for all his wit. 
 From such dangers Meredith finds an escape more 
 easily than some could. For one thing, epigrams are 
 not forced with him, but the natural expression 
 of a mind which thinks in pictures and reasons by 
 analogies. It is rare to find an unmeaning epigram 
 in Meredith, common to find one which casts a 
 dazzling, brilliant light upon a truth which we had 
 never before realised and which had lain concealed. 
 Such condensed thought-processes therefore find 
 their proper vehicle of expression in the epigram, 
 of which no master of such greatness has appeared 
 since Bacon, himself a consummate exponent of the 
 art of terse expression, of packing into a sentence 
 as much as it will hold. One soon gets tired of 
 verbal fireworks, and can be bored as sadly by the 
 wits as by the dunces, wearied by a cascade of 
 brilliancies as the eye is dazed by continual flash 
 and glitter. Meredith himself depreciates the epi- 
 gram and its paper popgun pellets, " a torch to 
 see the sunrise." " There is more in the world 
 than the epigrams aimed at it contain," but perhaps 
 this depends upon the aimer of the epigram. The 
 epigram can be merely a display of verbal sleight- 
 of-hand ; it was not so with Meredith. Possessed 
 in this respect of the most wonderful brain of re- 
 corded history, he wrote epigrams as easily as most 
 
 135 
 
George Meredith 
 
 people sign their names ; indeed a Meredithian 
 epigram is a sign-manual. His brain functioned 
 in epigram, and his works should interest the 
 professed psychologist by the extraordinary men- 
 tality revealed in action. Wit, defined by Verrall 
 in his fine appreciation of Meredith as " manipula- 
 tion of meanings," is the product of a subtle mind, 
 the admiration of a subtle age, of an age resembling 
 the age of Euripides, in whom we can find many 
 analogies to Meredith. It possesses an extra- 
 ordinary mastery of the half-tones of language, it 
 despises the crudity of calling a spade a spade as 
 it scorns the vulgar embelhshment of " agricultural 
 implement," and in the end perhaps calls it neither. 
 *'You should imply things. Van," said the Coun- 
 tess de Saldar, herself a mistress of the art, and 
 implication is almost the basis of Meredith's 
 technique. Sometimes the hint is complete in a 
 single word, sometimes the process of suggestion 
 lasts some pages, as in the scene where the burn- 
 ing of Farmer Blaize's ricks is discussed, or where 
 Lady Busshe and Lady Culmer make a visit to 
 Patterne Hall, or where Mr. Dale, standing "be- 
 tween two closed doors," strives in vain to learn 
 whether Laetitia has accepted Willoughby. Some- 
 times the wit will have its reverberations, which 
 return again and again Hke references to a theme 
 in music ; at times the jest will be a piece of symbol- 
 ism, an acted pun, as when Dudley Sowerby misses 
 a train, or De Craye presents " the dainty rogue " 
 
 136 
 
Meredith the Artist 
 
 with a piece of porcelain, promptly to be smashed 
 by dereliction of the hapless Flitch. The enemy will 
 call it merely a new word-game, but he will not really 
 hit the mark. In his great novel- symphonies of 
 human life, Meredith must have his scherzos, just 
 as the mightiest of all composers can find room for 
 his scherzos in his most tragic works. Meredith 
 does not prank out his style in epigrams ; he writes 
 wittily, simply because he cannot help it, because 
 it was easier to write them than to abstain from 
 them. They run in the conduits, as the wine was 
 to do in Jack Cade's realm when Jack was seated 
 on the throne. 
 
 Though a Meredithian character denounces an- 
 alogies as " the sapping of language," the epigrams 
 owe much of their force to an amazing command 
 of metaphor. In rapid passages from one image 
 to another there is a disdainful disregard of the cen- 
 sure that mixed metaphors bring — a Celtic quality 
 due to exuberance of imagination. At times there 
 is a superfetation of imagery, as when Natalie, united 
 to the impetuous Victor Radnor, is described as 
 being " in the car with a racing charioteer — up 
 beside a more than Titanically audacious balloon- 
 ist," a flower detached from a river's bank and 
 swept along in its current past every obstacle ; or 
 Victor himself is, amongst other things, a gold- 
 fish in his globe, and a pot on the fire with a loose 
 lid, in the same breath ; while the unhappy Rever- 
 end Septimus Barmby is " the Inchcape Bell, the 
 
 137 
 
George Meredith 
 
 curfew, the cathedral organ, a whacker of the plati- 
 tudes," merely because he has a fine bass voice 
 many fathoms deep. Profuse images compare 
 Vernon Whitford to " Phoebus Apollo turned 
 fasting friar," the goat in the cave beheld of Robin- 
 son Crusoe, and, more poetically, "a far-seen soli- 
 tary iceberg in Southern waters." Willoughby, i\Irs. 
 Mountstuart Jenkinson declares to us, " has a 
 leg." The phrase is witt3% and its hidden possi- 
 bilities lured the author to a two-page exposition of 
 all that it implies, which might seem to some an 
 overriding of the good steed Epigram. Wit is not 
 often forced in the Meredithian world, but our author, 
 perhaps too eager to improve the conversational 
 art so little practised, fails to impress us with his 
 transcript of the conversation at Diana's dinner, 
 even though " they had not wrangled, had never 
 stagnated, and were digested, refreshed, making the 
 hour of the feast a balanced recreation and a re- 
 generation of body and mind." But how rare 
 are these instances of comparative failure compared 
 with those in which the use of metaphor is ad- 
 mirable in its truth and aptness, its force and 
 humour. We are taken by storm when we read 
 of Clara " carrying youth like a flag," and need no 
 further description of her beauty ; we are at once 
 attracted when we read that Nesta had a heart 
 " of many strings open to be musical to simplest 
 wandering airs or to the gales " ; we have the most 
 vivid impression of Sandra Belloni stamped upon 
 
 13S 
 
Meredith the Artist 
 
 our minds as the girl with the hair like a " wreath 
 of black briony " and a face " like the after-sunset 
 across a rose-garden." Those pests of London 
 who would force their undesired attentions upon 
 fair maidens are impaled for ever as " Cupid's 
 footpads ' ' ; and who can resist the droll image which 
 describes the sadly sweet countenance of the Coun- 
 tess de Saldar ? Even so " you may behold some 
 majestic lighthouse glimmering over the tumult 
 of a midnight sea." How true is Al van's " barriers 
 are for those who cannot fly," and how it at once 
 paints the temperament of the man ; how true 
 that those who avoid the region of Romance 
 " escape the title of Fool at the cost of a celestial 
 crown," that friendship "if it is not Hfe's poetry 
 is a credible prose, a land of low undulations in- 
 stead of Alps," or, to come to smaller things, that 
 " advertisement is the plush of speech," and that 
 " the modern club is the Baron's Castle minus 
 the Baron." When Dudley Sowerby " wears his 
 moraUty cap-a-pie," or Willoughby on his grand 
 tour " holds a review of his maker's grotesques," 
 or John Bull is called a " rubicund grotesque im- 
 pervious to all that does not hit the sensual eye of 
 him with cake or fist," the aptness of the com- 
 parison enforces Meredith's vision of them and 
 sets these characters in a new light. When Mere- 
 dith declares that Alvan was like a cathedral organ 
 foully handled by demons, he is doing more than 
 uttering an epigram, he is coining a phrase which 
 
 139 
 
George Meredith 
 
 plumbs Alvan to his depths. If " a Httle mouse of a 
 thought scampered out of one of the chambers of 
 [Redworth's] head and darted along the passages," 
 we are struck by the boldness and the strangeness 
 of the comparison, but we recognise that nothing 
 could have hit the truth better. The explosive 
 and expansive force of ideas finds its exact re- 
 semblance in the image of the " smoking brimstone 
 to the nose, dread Arabian afrites invisible in the 
 air jumping out of vases armed for the slaughter 
 of the venerable and the cherished, the ivyclad 
 and the artistically haloed" — a wonderfully terse 
 example of a metaphor within a metaphor. Our 
 author is indeed one who " springs an image with a 
 word, and paints lasting pictures." He vignettes 
 a character in a phrase when he talks of " a dainty 
 rogue in porcelain," or of another maiden who 
 bears " a romantic tale on her eyelashes," when 
 he gives the three beauties of The Amazing Marriage 
 each their image, Carinthia " a beautiful Gorgon, 
 a haggard Venus," Henrietta Fakenham " a sun 
 going down on a stormy noon," and Countess Livia 
 *' a moon riding through a stormy night." He epito- 
 mises a volume when Mrs. Lovell celebrates the 
 splendid boyishness of the French, " their unequalled 
 devotion, their merciless intellects, the oneness of the 
 nation when the sword is bare and pointing to a 
 chivalrous enterprise. She had her imagination of 
 them as of a streaming banner in the jaws of the 
 storm, with snows among the clouds and lightning 
 
 140 
 
Meredith the Artist 
 
 in the chasms." ' The test of an epigram is the 
 question whether it is the invention or the imagi- 
 nation which has brought it to birth. If it be the 
 child of the latter, it is an added dazzling glory, 
 illustrating the truth that in the higher arithmetic 
 of genius two and two do not always make four. 
 A Meredithian epigram is not usually " a torch to 
 see the sunrise," but a brilliant searchlight of the 
 soul, casting gleams of brightness into the world's 
 darkest places and wresting their secrets from 
 the unfathomed depths. It is not the product of the 
 midnight oil, it has no smack of nails bitten to the 
 quick ; it is the free outpouring of a fertile mind and 
 joyful commerce with the elements. And then 
 his use of metaphor is so bold, unhackneyed, 
 poetic, unconventional, and all by turns. He will 
 bear you to Alpine heights of poetry, and then 
 deposit you without more ado on dear Mother Earth. 
 He has no sham dignity, and if broth-pots and bath- 
 slippers will drive in his point, let London be the 
 one and Dr. Schlesien's politeness the other. If he 
 wishes to depict a man of choleric temperament whose 
 savage breast is soothed by music — no uncommon 
 combination — then Colney Durance must take to his 
 music " like an angry little boy to his barley- sugar 
 with a growl and a grunt " ; or the active little 
 Skepsey — what better presentment could there be 
 of him than the " queer little water- wagtail," 
 
 ^ Quoted previously, on p. 124, to illustrate Meredith's view 
 of the French. 
 
 141 
 
George Meredith 
 
 truth and a glimpse of Westermain together ? 
 We are thrilled, and overjoyed by the best of such 
 images ; the epigram is here not a pleasurable titilla- 
 tion of the intellective faculties, it is a beam of light 
 which illuminates wide regions of the dark. 
 
 Meredith does not linger, as a rule, to elaborate 
 a formal simile ; he hastes from one metaphor to 
 another, leaving the reader to work them out. But 
 some fine instances of simile occur, notably the com- 
 parison of Alvan to the mettled steed. • On the other 
 hand, few authors take more delight in allegorising 
 whether at a volume's length, as where he figures 
 the overthrow of illusion to the Shaving of Shagpat, 
 or in a thumbnail sketch, as in the vivid swift 
 comparison of Human Nature to the ship with 
 the '* mutinous crew, the shattered timbers, and the 
 drunken captain." Youth has its full share in 
 these allegories. Youth's soaring pride and dream- 
 ful imagination are aptly limned in the description of 
 Demogorgon and the Hippogrift. Meredith lived in 
 a world of pictures, he personified abstractions and 
 visualised airy nothings, and such was his swiftness 
 of mind that the allegory was fully fledged in an 
 instant. Much of his force is due to the vividness and 
 impetus of his imagination when he seized a thought 
 and in a flash clothed it with flesh and blood. 
 
 In one case we have declared that the allegory 
 ran to a volume, and that is sufficiently demon- 
 strated by Mr. McKechnie's thoughtful working 
 
 ' ' Quoted on p. 49. 
 142 
 
Meredith the Artist 
 
 out of it. The master himself sometimes denied 
 the soft impeachment, sometimes confessed, ac- 
 cording to his mood, but there really seems no 
 doubt. It is a noble conception nobly worked 
 out, and were we to accept the negative opinion, 
 The Shaving of Shagpat for all its brilliance would be 
 a tedious exercise in the Arabian style, a fatiguing 
 toic/ de force. It is these gleams of deeper mean- 
 ing rising from time to time which encourage us 
 to pursue our quest, which induce us to tolerate 
 the machinery of Af rites and magicians, and which 
 give a richer zest to the great wit and humour of the 
 book. The modern world cannot endure a Marchen 
 of over two hundred pages even at Meredith's 
 hands unless it contains something more than an 
 odd tale. The Shaving of Shagpat is a wonderful 
 piece of wit and phantasy, but it has its profound 
 philosophy and piercing imagination as well. As 
 he draws to the end of Shibli's enterprise he fuses all 
 together. The tale proceeds with an overpow^er- 
 ing impulse, the style flows on with impetuous 
 force, it has something of the smooth virtuosity 
 of De Quincey, it runs on smoother wheels than 
 usually. When we reach the Great Hall and sit 
 with the King and all his ministers and share the 
 anxious interest of Bootlbac the drum-beater and 
 Areep the dervish, Zeel the garlic- seller and Krooz 
 el Krazawik the carrier, Dob the confectioner, 
 Sallap the broker, and Azawool the builder, we feel 
 that we are witnessing a great drama in the history of 
 
 143 
 
George Meredith 
 
 humanity with a climax and a irepi'Trireia. We 
 are whirled along by the impetuous sentences 
 with their long-drawn harmonies, we feel nearly 
 as Baba Mustapha who was " shot off violently, 
 and whirled away like a stone from a sling, even 
 into the outer air beyond the city walls into the 
 distance of waste places." Finally, the wonderful 
 transformation scene told in short racing sentences 
 is accomplished. " Shibli Bagarag had smitten 
 clean through the Identical. . . . Day was on the 
 baldness of Shagpat." 
 
 " Some doubt Eternity ; from life begun, 
 Has folly ceased within them, sire to son ? 
 So ever fresh Illusions vnW arise 
 And lord creation, until men are wise, 
 
 " That is a distant period ; so prepare 
 To fight the false, O youths, and never spare ! 
 For who would live in chronicles renowned 
 Must combat folly, or as fool be crowned." 
 
 But the truest test of style is not its excellence 
 in momentary flashes, but its effect in the mass, 
 its effect first in the sentence, next in the paragraph, 
 then in the chapter, and finally the cumulative force 
 of the whole work. That no style could more 
 adequately express its author's personalit}^ has been 
 already enforced. It reveals a mind teeming beyond 
 most minds in images, of incomparable fertility, 
 marked by its learning, master of phrase and 
 lyricism. It remains to analyse it more minutely. 
 
 Style must have range and variety, variety that 
 may match the various moods fleeting hke clouds 
 
 144 
 
Meredith the Artist 
 
 across the heaven, it must have contrast, and it 
 must have economy. The range of Meredith's 
 style is not as wide as that of some. The style is 
 chiefly concerned with the minute analysis of subtle 
 characteristics and reflections upon such analysis. 
 It can be brilHant ; it can be profound ; it can 
 be impassioned, soaring with perfervid rapture ; it 
 can be ironic, archly mirthful, playing with words 
 as a kitten with a ball of thread ; it can abandon 
 itself to fantastic inventions and to comic situations 
 which defy all probability with a gusto that bears 
 its readers away upon the tide of the farcical ; it 
 can be vividly descriptive and impetuously rapid ; 
 it rises at once if only for an instant to poetry when 
 Nature comes upon the scene ; it is pathetic rarely, 
 harrowing in the manner of Othello or King Lear 
 never. It lacks ease and rhythm, for the epigram- 
 matic style is a series of bounds and detonations 
 rather than the full strong flow of ordered narrative 
 proceeding like a mighty host to some appointed 
 end. It has never the divine simplicity which 
 marks the style " absolute in its numbers " and 
 which is found so often in Greek and particularly 
 in Homer, nor the noble austerity of Wordsworth 
 at his best. The philosopher is always on the 
 rostrum, and though he expounds sufficiently he 
 never steps down and talks to us in Thackeray's 
 dehghtful style. He is restrained in dealing with 
 the emotions, and eschews the tearful mawkish 
 and the moist-eyed sentimental ; he never belabours 
 
 L 145 
 
George Meredith 
 
 his readers with great thumpings of the pathetic 
 nor does he splash them as he wallows in the senti- 
 mental, as Sterne delights to do. But in the exer- 
 cise of the intellect he is uncontrollable. He gives 
 free rein to fancy and invention, he can be elaborate 
 and even laboured, he walks too quickly for those 
 who attend him, he will be abstruse and lose all 
 contact with his readers, but goes serenely on, and 
 makes a solitary mountain excursion till they are 
 nearer. Yet he has a fine imagination not too 
 sharply curbed, he storms us by the brilliance of 
 his poetry, he bestows on us in armfuls goodly 
 jests as any could desire who is not addicted ^lave 
 of the rough-and-tumble of the practical joke, and 
 his people are splendid. He is sometimes volcanic 
 and then sweeps everything away in streams of 
 boiling lava, but he prefers to sap a solemn senti- 
 mentalist with an arch smile. He excels in the 
 reflective, and makes the prentice effusions of an 
 untaught genius like Dickens seem childish and 
 unreadable by comparison. He is his own best 
 commentator and explains his own persons with 
 subtlety, wit, and incomparable learning, reigning 
 supreme in his own world. If we grow faint be- 
 neath the teacher and fail to understand, the fault 
 is ours for living in a difierent universe. These 
 things " are interesting to philosophers, if not 
 maidens " and the rest of us. And yet it is a 
 pleasant land could we but reach it, the halls, the 
 cloisters, of Alexandria swept by an English south- 
 
 146 
 
Meredith the Artist 
 
 wester, with a distant vision of snow-capped Alps 
 or austere Dolomites tinged by the glow of sunrise. 
 
 As for fine scenes, every novel will contain ex- 
 amples of Meredith's strength and weakness. Let 
 any reader con the scene in the Scala theatre when 
 Vittoria sings the great song of Italy revived, or 
 the duel in the mountain passes in the same novel, 
 the idyll of Wilming Weir in Sandra Bclloni, the 
 love-scenes in The Ordeal, or the final scene of all, 
 The Tragic Comedians, almost in its entirety, but 
 particularly the first meeting of Alvan and Clotilde 
 and Alvan' s fever of suspense, Beauchamp's de- 
 lirium, the operation upon LadyDunstane,or,in other 
 genres, the campanile of Lugano with its produce 
 of insomnia, the rght between Ines and Todd — 
 worthy of comparison with Hazlitt's similar picture 
 — Beauchamp and Renee on the Grand Canal, Beau- 
 champ and Cecilia Halkett's dialogue on the yacht, 
 Evan and Rose Jocelyn's talk by the bathing-house, 
 Matey and Aminta's swim, the luncheon visit to 
 Willoughby of Lady Busshe and Lady Culmer to 
 select Clara's wedding present, the picnic — " the 
 battle of the bulldogs " — and the supper at the 
 Green Dragon in Evan Harrington, Nesta's railway 
 journey in One of our Conquerors, Algernon Blan- 
 cove waiting for his dinner, the midnight dialogue 
 between the Misses Duvidney with reference to 
 Victor Radnor's child, when the two ladies, each on 
 her separate bed, are moved to ruth by Tasso's 
 fall from grace, — and after such a banquet he will 
 
 147 
 
George Meredith 
 
 not question our author's mastery of language and 
 extent of compass. When he fails to hold, it is 
 through wit's excess, or wire-drawn subtlety, or 
 through a certain lack of contrast. There are no 
 failures through complete misjudgment, as when 
 Dickens discourses on spontaneous combustion or 
 sheds big tears o'er little Nelly's bier. Monotony 
 is art's gravest error, and brilliant monotony wearies 
 as much as any other kind. Of excellence in shorter 
 passages a few examples may be given. 
 
 Nature can always cast a spell over Meredith, 
 and generally over his readers, as in the exquisite 
 poetry of this nocturne. " Eastward on her left 
 behind a cedar the moon had cast off a thick cloud 
 and shone through the cedar bars with a yellowish 
 hazy softness, making rosy gold of the first passion 
 of the tide, which writhing and straining on through 
 mazy lights grew wide upon the wonderful velvet 
 darkness underlying the wooded bands. ' ' The lovers 
 meet and are influenced by the beauty of the scene. 
 
 " ' I will look at you. Only take my hand. See, 
 the moon is getting whiter. The water there is 
 like a pool of snakes ; and then they struggle out, 
 and roll over and over and stream on lengthwise. 
 I can see their long flat heads and their eyes ; 
 almost their skins. No, my lover ! do not kiss me. 
 I lose my peace.' " The meeting comes to its con- 
 clusion told in language still of silvery beauty. 
 " So now the soft Summer hours flew like white 
 doves from off the mounting moon, and the lovers 
 
 148 
 
Meredith the Artist 
 
 turned to go, all being still ; even the noise of 
 the waters still to their ears, as life that is muffled 
 in sleep. They saw the cedar grey-edged under 
 the moon ; and Night that clung like a bat, beneath 
 its ancient open palms. The bordering sward about 
 the falls shone silvery. In its shadow was a swan. 
 These scenes are but beckoning hands to the hearts 
 of lovers waving them on to that Eden which 
 they claim ; but when the hours have fled they 
 know it ; and by the palpitating light in it they know 
 that it holds the best of them ! " It is a strain 
 of softest music in which seems distilled the essence 
 of all the delight which faery moonlight has awakened 
 in all the generations of those who joy in beauty and 
 have found delight in love. 
 
 Or again a lover — son of a Methodist worker in 
 leather to be precise — meditates from a height above 
 a German spa on the high-born queen of his heart 
 below him. " Beneath this roof lay the starry She. 
 He was elated to lie beneath it also ; and he beheld 
 his heavenly lady floating on the lull of soft, white 
 clouds among her sister-spheres. After the way 
 of imaginative young men, he had her features more 
 accurately now she was hidden, and he idealised 
 her more. He could escape for a time from his 
 coil of similes and paint for himself the irids of her 
 large long grey eyes darkly rimmed ; purest water- 
 grey, lucid within the ring beneath an arch of lashes. 
 He had them fast ; but then he fell to contemplating 
 their exceeding rareness ; and the mystery of the 
 
 149 
 
George Meredith 
 
 divinely grey swung a kindled fancy to the flight 
 with some queen- witch of woods, of which a youth 
 may dream under the spell of toil, East or West, 
 among forest branches. . . , She had the e:^iect on the 
 general mind of a lofty crag-castle with a history." 
 It is a prose rendering of an Elizabethan's sonnet 
 to his mistress's eyebrow^s with a dash of modern 
 philosophy thrown in. 
 
 In all these finer passages Nature is somewhere, 
 if only in the background, giving to everything a 
 subtle proportion and a subtle harmony. It is 
 so in the beautiful last pages of Viitoria, when she 
 travels o'er the mountains to seek her husband. 
 " Soft dreams of sacred nuptial tenderness, tragic 
 images, wild pit}', were like phantoms encircling 
 her, plucking at her as she went, but they were 
 beneath her feet, and she kept them from lodging 
 between her breasts. The thought that her husband, 
 though he should have perished, was not a life 
 lost if their child lived, sustained her powerfully. 
 It seemed to whisper at times almost as it w^ere 
 Carlo" s ghost breathing in her ears, ' On thee ! ' 
 On her the further duty devolved and she trod down 
 hope, lest it should build her up and bring a shock 
 to surprise her fortitude ; she put back alarm. 
 
 " The mountains and the valleys scarce had names 
 for her understanding ; they were but a scene where 
 the will of her Maker was at work. Rarely has a 
 soul been so subjected by her own force. 
 
 " Yet when her eyes lingered on any mountain 
 
 150 
 
Meredith the Artist 
 
 gorge, the fate of her husband sang within it a 
 strange chant, ending in a key which rang sounding 
 through all her being, and seemed to question heaven. 
 This music framed itself ; it was still when she 
 looked at the shrouded mountain-tops. A shadow 
 meeting sunlight on the long green slopes aroused 
 it, and it hummed above the tumbling hasty foam, 
 and penetrated hanging depths of foliage, sad-hued 
 rock, clefts, dark green ravines ; it became con- 
 vulsed where the mountains threw forward in a 
 rushing upward line against the sk}^ there to be 
 severed at the head by a cloud." 
 
 Such passages will stand comparison with the 
 finest. Our author's richest harmonies are won 
 in prose not verse, in novels not in professed poetry. 
 Philosopher and intellectual as he is, he knows the 
 inspiration of the tripod, and ever and anon the 
 poet in him bursts forth and claims a hearing. 
 
 But literature has, too, its architectural side, its 
 form and design, and some whose faculty of expres- 
 sion is glorious, lack the organising faculty which 
 sets everything in its proper place, and gives the 
 finest passages a heightened effect through the apt- 
 ness of their contest, achieving a unity in diversity. 
 The plot of novel or of play is a sore burden, a diffi- 
 culty rarely triumphed over even by th§ greatest 
 writers, for a plot is in appearance an unnatural 
 division of one section of the broad stream of 
 human life from all the others. Human life is a 
 continuous performance. The craftsman who can 
 
 151 
 
George Meredith 
 
 cut up life neatly into so many lengths often can 
 do little more. He has mastered his puppets, 
 but they are still puppets and the life is not in 
 them. The greater the artist's creative power, 
 the greater his difficulties. He has conceived 
 characters which are rich in life and interest, and 
 which, like wayward children, are so conscious 
 of their independence that they proceed regard- 
 less of their creator, who is so often compelled to 
 slay them to bring matters to an issue. A writer 
 will often manifest great skill in the development 
 of his plot, will show his master}/ of dramatic en ect 
 and achieve a line climax. But alas ! by an in- 
 evitable law which Aristotle iirst perceived, a play 
 (or novel) must have beginning, middle, and end. 
 It is the denouewent which gives trouble, and 
 accident, despite all canons to the contrary, will 
 here play its part. Feverel accidentally meets 
 . Lord Paulet and fights him, losing as a sequel wife 
 and reason, Edward Blancove accidentally arrives 
 too late to stop the marriage between Dahlia and 
 Sedgett, Lord Ormont makes restitution just when 
 Aminta has departed for Switzerland with Weyburn, 
 Beauchamp dies by a deplorable misadventure, 
 just as Romeo and JuHet die by accident and 
 Hamlet ends with a glaringly improbable series 
 of catastrophes. In comedy, the sense of proba- 
 bility being less keenly roused, we heed the matter 
 less. If Evan gains Rose by the death of Juliana 
 who has left him Beckley Court, if Clara by some 
 
 152 
 
Meredith the Artist 
 
 marvellously just dispensation falls to Vernon 
 Whitford, we merely thank the author for the 
 diversion bestowed upon us by the way, and are 
 lightly concerned at the huddling together of the 
 last chapters. Great authors curiously resemble 
 great conquerors. They trample upon all pre- 
 cedents and blithely cut the Gordian knot. A 
 plot is, after all, a mechanism for the display of 
 human life, and the exposition of human character. 
 It is a house rigged up for men to dwell in. Great 
 writers bribe our perceptions to dupe our intellects. 
 If their personages interest, we look no gift horse 
 in the mouth, we do not scrutinise the novelist's 
 dolls' house with the rigour of a building inspector. 
 The story moves, and moves easily. We are satis- 
 fied and do not watch too closely the final sleight- 
 of-hand. 
 
 A plot is as necessary to a novel as a body to 
 a soul. But just as there never was a perfect 
 man, so there has never been a perfect plot. It 
 is because human life refuses to reduce itself to 
 a formula, because we are arbitrary in our choice 
 of a beginning and arbitrary in our choice of 
 an end, even though all may have lived happy 
 ever after. Every novelist is confronted with the 
 same difficulty of exhibiting the characters which 
 he has conceived under a series of circumstances 
 which bring out in the clearest light the chief 
 traits in those characters. Some have overcome 
 the difficulty better than others, some have been 
 
 153 
 
George Meredith 
 
 badly in need of a deus ex machina, who has not 
 offered his services. Some, Hke Thackeray, having 
 once conceived their characters in outHne have 
 yielded themselves to the impulse of their plot, 
 their characters have developed an independent 
 existence, the author gives them the reins. Such 
 a method or absence of method has sometimes been 
 highly successful. It resembles the spontaneous 
 working of nature, though nature can be disordered, 
 though she produces rank weeds as well as trim 
 rose-gardens. Others have resorted to the startling 
 or to the improbable to bring their fictions to an 
 end. Others boldly ignore the need of an ending 
 and merely stop, and if they have carried through 
 their tale with verve and gusto we forgive them. 
 The author who deals in the comic has perhaps an 
 easier task. We tolerate more readily the unreal 
 and the forced in a work devoted chiefly to our 
 amusement, we concede with alacrity the plaudite 
 which is sought of us, and we are not extreme to 
 mark what is done amiss. In truth man lives 
 a double life, the outer life conditioned by hard 
 facts and grim realities, the bed of Procrustes on 
 which stern Nature flings us all, and the inner life 
 in which the ego blossoms into full completeness 
 and the fancy luxuriates in the most glowing dreams. 
 There is a duality sometimes ironic, sometimes 
 tragic, between what a man is and what he would be, 
 and in seizing and portraying that man the literary 
 artist is beset with the same difficulty. 
 
 154 
 
Meredith the Artist 
 
 Meredith, being mortal, is subject to the same 
 troubles with his plots as other people. He was 
 born too late for the splendid carelessness of the 
 novels flung forth by Dickens, Thackeraj^ and the 
 eighteenth century, but, like his predecessors, he must 
 end his volumes somehow. In any case he never 
 scamped his work. He never disrelished brain- 
 stuit, and where he failed, he failed by reason of 
 the inherent difficulties of the particular problem. 
 But he has enough skill to persuade us to palliate 
 improbabilities, and in man}/^ cases he does more 
 than that. The Tragic Comedians, a story based 
 on real events, is well enough constructed ; The 
 Shaving of Shagpat has an obvious unity, though 
 with supernatural m.achinery the task is rendered 
 easier ; Diana of the Crossways comes to no im- 
 probable conclusion. At other times we are less 
 satisfied. The latter part of ViUoria contains no 
 very lucid exposition of motive ; Celt and Saxon 
 is scarcely a novel at all ; Weyburn and Aminta 
 as co-heads of a Swiss boarding-school on advanced 
 lines for both sexes are a bold defiance of the 
 natural. The missing of one's w^ay in a London 
 suburb (Rhoda Fleming), a. duel in The Ordeal, the 
 death of a consumptive heiress {Evan Harrington) are 
 obvious expedients for tying up loose ends. Yet after 
 such glorious exuberance of phantasy, as we find in 
 The Egoist and Evan Harrington, we are in no cen- 
 sorious mood. In others again the texture is more 
 closely knit, and save for some one grave improb- 
 
 155 
 
George Meredith 
 
 ability we may regard the denouement as skilfully and 
 artistically procured. However, if no novel might be 
 written unless it had a perfect plot, the numbers 
 published would be small, and these in interest and 
 in power would be immeasurably inferior to master- 
 pieces which have no mechanical perfection. 
 
 But returning to the analogy of architecture, we 
 must declare that it is a narrow criticism which 
 examines too vigorously the mechanism of a novel 
 and which concentrates this examination entirely 
 upon its end. We shall find many stable, many 
 noble, and many beautiful buildings, which if we 
 listen to the purists of construction have no right 
 to stand at all. After all, a novel well started will 
 finish itself somehow. ^leredith can develop his 
 theme and bring us to a crisis in the master's manner. 
 The Ordeal of Richard Fever el down to the marriage of 
 Richard is a splendid example. He does not digress, 
 though he " interdrones " with a current analysis 
 of character, and his expositions are quite different 
 from the colloquies of Thackeray and Fielding with 
 the reader. If we consider the commentary on 
 his characters as an integral part of his novels — 
 and Meredith insisted that it was — there is little 
 which is inessential, though passages like Algernon 
 Blancove's wait for his dinner have been criticised 
 as delaying the main course of the story. His 
 analysis and explication of motives are generally 
 satisfying. We do not, however, understand Richard 
 Feverel's sudden cooling towards his young bride, 
 
 156 
 
Meredith the Artist 
 
 nor the dual personality of Robert Armstrong, nor 
 Lord Fleetwood's treatment of his newly wedded 
 wife ; perhaps in a novel entitled The Amazing 
 Marriage we must accept that ex hypothesi. In 
 One of our Conquerors we have an extraordinary 
 wealth of material which has been criticised as ill- 
 arranged. Yet no novel is richer in suggestion or 
 in the play of a diverting fancy. Colney Durance's 
 satiric serial is an example of a briliant jeu d' esprit 
 which appears and reappears like a thread of briL 
 liant hue in different chapters. It is undoubtedly true 
 that the tale is not an integral part of the novel, but it 
 adds much to its rich complexity, and fe\v could wish / 
 that it had not been ingrafted in the history of' 
 Victor and Natalie. In the same novel the Brighton 
 episode of Nesta and Mrs. Marsett dealing with 
 society's treatment of injured women runs to 
 some length, but it certainly has its bearing on Nesta' s 
 development. Jenny Denham in BcaucJi amp's 
 Career seems an unnecessary personage — even though 
 Beauchamp marries her — in view of the number 
 of fair women who were prepared to take her place. 
 So might run the verdict of a piecemeal criticism. 
 But a general survey leads us to the conclusion 
 that Meredith's books are unities not a congeries of 
 men and matters. Episodes are sometimes inserted 
 which give richness to the texture, or, as in The 
 Shaving of Shagpat, in imitation of the Oriental 
 style, but they are not alien matter after the 
 mode of Fielding and of Smollett, padding to swell 
 
 157 
 
George Meredith 
 
 a volume. There are many brilliant and striking 
 scenes : the duet of the Misses Patterne in which 
 Clara makes a trio, the concluding scene in The 
 Egoist so wonderfully " staged " — for Meredith 
 has a fine dramatising sense — the departure of 
 the Countess de Saldar from Beckley, Dr. Middleton 
 and the grand vintage, the interview between Roy 
 Richmond and Squire Beltham, the conversation 
 concerning the hayrick at Raj^nham Abbe}^ the 
 bombshell of Richard's wedding cake in which 
 Adrian Harley again plays a prominent part, the 
 scene where Sedgett demands his wife Dahlia, and 
 her attempted suicide, and many others. All 
 these arise quite naturally from the action and in i 
 some cases are of great importance in its develop- 
 ment. In the more unmixed manifestations of 
 the Comic Spirit the author has more scope. He 
 can set complication upon complication to heighten 
 the intrigue, and our diversion suspends our critical 
 faculties. Such examples are The Egoist and 
 Evan Harrington, in both of which Meredith ap- 
 pears as a light-hearted charioteer who gives his 
 steeds free rein, yielding to the moment's fancy, 
 snatching by inspired opportunism triumph after 
 triumph out of the most difficult situations. Such 
 is the power of gusto which by a resolute and con- 
 sistent shutting of the eyes to the probable gets 
 more and more venturesome in each successive 
 crisis, and at the end loudly and boldly hails the 
 deits ex machina who is waiting hard by in readiness. 
 
 158 
 
Meredith the Artist 
 
 In the construction of isolated scenes the ability 
 to write effective dialogue is all-important. Here 
 Meredith's great advantage is that he can invent 
 more brilliant dialogue than any man before him. 
 It is a disadvantage, too, for the natural result is 
 that every character is tinged with the Mere- 
 dithian colour. We do not in real life talk like 
 Meredithian characters ; would that we could at 
 intervals ! The exchanges are marvellous, almost 
 exhausting, like nothing so much as an incessant 
 rally between two tennis players of marvellous 
 brilliancy, in which stroke follows stroke so quickly 
 that the spectator almost misses them. Even 
 the working man, who indeed by nature has much 
 power of " explosive repartee," gets something 
 of this faculty, and rounds for instance upon Victor 
 Radnor for his " punctilio." There is keen delight 
 in watching these ideal patterns of the art of speech, 
 and profitable study. Conversation, the worst neg- 
 lected of all arts in England, can be a fine art indeed. 
 As we listen to Diana and Percy contesting at Caen, 
 Willoughby engaged in combat (especially in the 
 final scene), the various encounters of the Countess 
 de Saldar, we get glimpses of the possibilities of 
 dialogue as rapid, terse, pointed, forcible as the 
 Greek stichomythia, and far less stilted. Dialogue 
 of this kind can arise only amid the intellectual 
 leaders or the aristocracy of rank long trained in 
 diplomacy. A fine example of the power of wit, 
 " manipulation of meanings," occurs in The Amazing 
 
 159 
 
George Meredith 
 
 Marriage. Fleetwood is the young nobleman who 
 must never be thwarted but is yet the slave 
 of his word. He plights himself in haste, and 
 keeps his troth to the letter only. " My Lord, I 
 drive to your church-door on the 14th of the month 
 at 10 a.m. to keep my appointment with Miss 
 C. J. Kirby, if I do not blunder the initials. Your 
 lordship's obedient servant, Fleetwood." Such is 
 the prelude. We are to behold one who can be 
 artistically brutal, studiedly insolent, selfish and 
 unscrupulous, and withal a grand seigneur. It 
 is a type which requires all the author's skill, but 
 extenuations are subtly suggested if we look closely 
 enough. There is madness in the family, and 
 Fleetwood's final retirement to a monastery suggests 
 the torture of a self-lacerated intellect, the triumph 
 of long-quelled pangs of conscience. He is con- 
 ceived in the grand style. We feel that manners 
 can make the man, and that speech, that wonderful 
 contrivance for expressing thought, does flower in 
 the palaces of such. They are artists in language 
 by heredity, supremely skilful in half-tones, Olym- 
 pians indeed who can cast over all their weaknesses 
 and cruelties a dignity which robs them of their 
 grossness. The consummate dialogues between 
 superb husband and wronged wife, striking both 
 in what is said and left unsaid, are noble examples 
 of Athenian aocpia. 
 
 But novels are written to show characters in action 
 and development. If we are merciful to a weak 
 
 160 
 
Meredith the i^rtist 
 
 plot, we require at any rate the compensation of 
 consummate portraiture. Character has been de- 
 lineated since Homer, if not earlier. Men first por- 
 trayed unconsciously character as it displayed itself 
 in deeds ; men later learnt to reveal it by converse 
 as well as action. The latest method is to evolve it 
 by a running commentary and elaborate analysis — a 
 method not the best, but suited best to an analytic 
 age, the only method for those who, like Mere- 
 dith, are penetrated by the importance of subtler 
 delineation. Not once but many times Meredith 
 pauses to defend his elaborateness. His effort 
 is "to render events as consistent to your under- 
 standing as a piece of logic, through an exposition 
 of character. Character must ever be a mystery, 
 only to be explained in some degree by conduct, 
 and that is very dependent on accident." Present 
 inexactness will not do for Posterity. " Posterity 
 . . . will have studied and developed nature so 
 far as to know the composition of it or not in equal 
 mixture of the philosophic and the romantic, and 
 that credible realism is to be produced solely by an 
 involvement of those two elements. Present 
 methods will not do ten centuries hence. For the 
 EngUsh, too, are a changeable people in the sight of 
 ulterior time." Instead of objurgating the timid 
 intrusions of Philosophy, we are prayed to invoke 
 her presence. Character is worth studying, but its 
 analysis must be carried much farther than it has 
 been in the past. 
 
 M i6i 
 
George Meredith 
 
 Such a mode of delineation is obviously suited 
 to the complex characters of an artificial age, 
 to men, thoughtful, meditative, shy of revealing 
 their inmost nature, men whose motives need 
 much analysis, men whose high rank, great pos- 
 sessions, and ample wealth, have enabled them to 
 develop the more highly civilised qualities, rather 
 than to the portraiture of a son of the soil, a cockney, 
 a vulgarian, types such as Dickens might love to 
 handle. With Meredith all countrymen seem to 
 grin through a horse-collar. It is not that our author 
 flouts or despises any man. It is merely that he is 
 ^ so clever, he looks down from such a distant elevation 
 upon the insignificantly small, that his vision is unable 
 to reproduce it without grave errors of refraction. 
 Gammon is a marvellous character. He is a bit 
 of primaeval nature striking in himself and adapted 
 with magnificent art to the general ensemble of the 
 characters concerned in Dahlia Fleming's tragic 
 story — the one true example of humanity which 
 gives us the everyday point of view in scenes of 
 harrowing distress, as in his way does the drunken 
 porter of Macbeth. But he is a trifle unreal. There 
 is just a soupgon of the menagerie which would 
 not have been suggested by a novelist of far less 
 skill who was in closer touch with ordinary man. 
 
 It is not true that in the pre-Meredithian age the 
 delineation of character was unknown . Ye t it is clear 
 that such immortal creations as Trulliber, Squire 
 Western, and others, are more justly styled sketches 
 
 162 
 
Meredith the Artist 
 
 of superficial characteristics carried through with 
 a spirit beyond all praise, and that Scott, that 
 master of the grandly simple style, preferred to 
 paint by broad sweeps, not by an elaboration of 
 minute touches, and that others like Dickens and 
 Smollett merely caricatured. Women again, except 
 when portrayed by their own sex and by such great 
 writers as Jane Austen and George Eliot, tend to 
 be spiteful viragos or sweetly superficial Amelias 
 whether of Fielding or of Thackeray — ^Dora Spert- 
 lows, Arabella Aliens — a curious anticipation of the 
 " flapper " — et hoc genus omne. The truth is Meredith 
 is chiefly concerned with the depiction of a new 
 type of character, heroically impetuous or sweetly 
 charming, but intellectual, surrounded by intel- 
 lectuals, responsive to all the movements of an 
 age of change, careless of Mrs. Grundy and neglect- 
 ful of early Victorianism, men and W'Omen for whom 
 that queen, as far as her point of view is concerned, 
 is almost as dead as Queen Anne ; witty and appre- 
 ciative of art, mellowed into philosophy if thej^ have 
 reached middle age, gentle, satiric, and even mildly 
 cynical, keen observers of the foibles, emancipated 
 from the prejudices of those of lower rank or inferior 
 education, types whose delineation does indeed 
 require new methods of exposition and a new kind 
 of novel. In other words the novel has followed 
 History and claims to rank, in part at least, as one 
 of the sciences, and just as the measuring sciences 
 have advanced or are advancing to greater precision 
 
 163 
 
George Meredith 
 
 and to the fifth decimal place, so human nature too 
 must have its Ordnance Surveys, its large-scale maps, 
 and the surveyor of human life must cock his vernier 
 at Snowdon and the lesser heights. 
 
 Those writers who are equally skilled at portray- 
 ing all mankind's varieties may be counted on one 
 hand. Meredith is not one of these. His great 
 achievement — and it is a unique achievement — 
 is to have succeeded with a new type, the type 
 which has just been described, the intellectual. 
 All Meredith's novels have a unity, the best of all 
 unities, which is that they have proceeded from 
 one organising mind. He has thought out his 
 own universe and all within it is in harmony. 
 Not that all his characters are philosophers, his 
 heroes and heroines are too youthful. But they 
 are one and all steeped in the atmosphere of the 
 intellectual, and if they are not intellectuals they 
 are as often as not poets fiery and ardent, morally 
 intrepid, fearless of nothing, not even of thinking 
 things to their logical conclusions — in a word, lovers 
 in the romantico-poetic phase which seems to 
 Meredith as to Plato the best prelude to philosophy, 
 incarnations perchance of the youthful Meredith, 
 or of the heroine of Love in a Valley, most charming 
 of all maidens these since the Forest of Arden passed 
 from the ken of man and the enchanted isle of 
 Prospero sank below the waves. So Meredith's 
 great difference from all other writers is that his 
 heroes are real heroes, neither Tom Joneses nor Henry 
 
 164 
 
Meredith the Artist 
 
 Mortons, nor Edward Waverleys/ and his heroines 
 real heroines who escape from lameness and in- 
 sipidity. A writer who has achieved this has 
 achieved enough to win him immortality. Moreover, 
 our youthful heroes and heroines are encompassed by 
 a galaxy of intellect, their monitors and spectators, 
 warning them too late perhaps — the philosopher does 
 not always shine in action — but ever stimulating 
 thought, ever affording us a picture of society risen 
 to a high level. For these no treatment can be too 
 subtle. We watch them with profound attention, we 
 listen with delight to the brilliant game of speech, so 
 sore a toil to an inarticulate race. Adrian Harley, 
 Vernon Whitford, Dr. Middleton in his steam-hammer 
 style, Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson, De Craye and 
 Willoughby himself, what a notable gathering of 
 brilliant people all in one single volume ! Colney 
 Durance, Simeon Fenellan, Adrian Harley, Stukely 
 Culbrett, Lady Charlotte Eglett, Mrs. Lovell, 
 Agostino, Shrapnel, the Countess de Saldar — not 
 to be rejected though she has more craft than in- 
 tellect — Diana, wit by profession unfortunatety, 
 as one reviews the novels and takes a wider sweep, 
 they come trooping past, characters such as none had 
 conceived before and none had wit to shape. At 
 length we have an author who can do justice to brain, 
 giving it its rightful place in novels which claim to be 
 a presentment of the whole range of human life. 
 At length we have an author who can give his clever 
 * Harry Richmond is a notable exception. 
 165 
 
George Meredith 
 
 people free rein in speech without making the con- 
 trast between presumed wit and the reality too 
 glaringly discrepant, for we have an author who 
 must find some vent for his wit or perish. 
 
 One result is that almost every novel is provided 
 with an epigram safe-conductor as a means of 
 delivering the author from the mass of epigrams 
 with which he is surcharged. Sometimes there is 
 a book like Sir Austin Feverel's Pilgrim's Scrip or 
 The Book of Egoism, at other times it is a wit in 
 person, Colney Durance, Gower Woodseer, Diana 
 herself, Stukely Culbrett. It is a device, but a 
 legitimate device, for the man who saj^s brilliant 
 things may now win entrance into the novel, and 
 the balance is redressed even yet to but a slight 
 extent. But beside the professed wit we have the 
 scholar, Vernon Whitford, or the heavy-metalled Dr. 
 Middle ton, a more pedantic type — the author knows 
 that wit and wisdom are not always found in union 
 ■ — or an inspiring force like Shrapnel, whose Carly- 
 lean style and sentiments so greatly horrify Romfrey 
 Hall. These men of the study win Meredith's ad- 
 miration, and this admiration comes out clearly in 
 the portraiture of Vernon Whitford, a justification 
 and a eulogy of the life within a library. Vernon is 
 a sketch of Leslie Stephen, one of Meredith's best- 
 loved friends, " a sketch but merely a sketch, not 
 doing him full justice, though the strokes within 
 and without are correct." He is a scholar and a 
 gentleman who may have academic doubts as to 
 
 i66 
 
Meredith the Artist 
 
 whether he should woo the divine Clara, but who is 
 always ready with wise and resolute counsel in a 
 crisis whether at railway-stations or elsewhere, 
 who, though he sees his weaknesses clearly enough, 
 permits Sir Willoughby to act the lordly patron, 
 but refuses to let him ruin the youngster Crossjay. 
 Nobly reticent, quietly resolved, he is of more heroic 
 stuff than Willoughby the Magnificent ; had it been 
 otherwise his creator would not have bestowed 
 Clara upon him. And Meredith does more than that. 
 The romantic tale of " the Sleeping Beauty " is 
 reversed. It is Vernon who sleeps in the hammock 
 beneath the white cherry-blossom, and it is Clara 
 who gazes at him and is unconsciously filled with 
 a sentiment which develops and reveals itself only 
 some time after. It is not fanciful to detect some 
 resemblance between Vernon and George Warrington, 
 and the resemblance extends to more than an unhappy 
 first marriage. But the contrast is as great as the 
 resemblance, and a study of the two characters will 
 reveal much of the different treatment by Meredith 
 and Thackeray of two kindred types. 
 
 A man of similar characteristics and a real hero 
 is Matthew^ Weyburn, though modesty forbids the 
 assumption that all schoolmasters are scholars of the 
 Whitford calibre. Weyburn is the strong man, who 
 does not lead cavalry charges, or act the hero — for he 
 isone in whose case arms have yielded to the toga — but 
 resolute, unshakeable, clear-visioned, a born leader. 
 At school he was the natural ruler, strenuous both at 
 
 167 
 
George Meredith 
 
 work and games, exercising unquestioned sway, with 
 a few pointed sentences dominating his fellows as he 
 pleased. His father dies while he is a schoolboy. 
 Matey, unable to go into the army, resolves to be 
 schoolmaster, to his friends' amazement, for there 
 still persists that attitude of the world which led the 
 Eton master of the tale to disguise his departure to 
 resume his work at Eton as " a visit to some friends 
 in Bucks." But Weyburn has ideals and plans 
 for the future which he can set forth with much 
 skill when he unbosoms himself to Lady Charlotte 
 Eglett, who for all her prejudices is a good judge 
 of a man. " Rhetoric haunts and Rhetoric bedevils 
 the vindication of the clouded," but our author 
 is a stout champion of the distressed schoolmaster. 
 He joins in the jest at Weyburn, but he is laughing 
 at the laughers, and, despite all temptations and 
 despite his own title, he has fixed on his hero, who 
 is not a Peninsular veteran with a peerage but a 
 plain schoolmaster. " The schoolmaster ploughs 
 to make a richer world. He has to be careful not 
 to smell of his ofhce. He must like all boj/s and it's 
 human nature not so far removed from the dog ; 
 only it's a supple human nature, there's the beauty 
 of it." It is finely said, and we in due course hear 
 much of interest upon the profession, including 
 some views of the Classics. " Latin and Greek 
 must be drilled-in, languages vre filched from, 
 converting in tokens not the standard coin." As we 
 behold a schoolmaster seated for the first time on 
 ^ i68 
 
Meredith the Artist 
 
 this elevation it is gratifying to reflect that it was 
 a schoolmaster, Dr. Jessopp of Norwich, who was 
 among the first to detect the greatness of The 
 Ordeal. 
 
 But not all men are scholars or even school- 
 masters. Meredith's world is peopled with many 
 normal, average Olympians, by no means lay-figures, 
 all portrayed as precisely as the general economy 
 of the novel permits. They are generally persons 
 of wealth and position. Of them Mrs. Mountstuart 
 Jenkinson is a type. Elderly, more witty than 
 most, diplomatic, by tactful management of Sir 
 Willoughby she almost rules the county, holding the 
 important position and influencing the tone of her 
 neighbours in the way that women of her type 
 often do. Lady Blandish, the grande dame, senti- 
 mentalist, keenly perceptive in many ways, and 
 receptive up to her limits ; Lady Jocelyn, no blue- 
 stocking but a woman with a fine intellect and a 
 broad view which makes her neglectful of conven- 
 tion ; the Countess Livia ; Lady Dunstane, who reads 
 Latin by herself, — these are all portraits by a master 
 even when regard for the general scheme of the 
 particular novel debars Meredith from finishing 
 them too elaborately. Such characters have an 
 important role ; they are needed to help on 
 the current of things. It is rarely that, as in The 
 Tragic Comedians or Lord Ormont and his Aminta, 
 we can dispense with figures of the middle ground. 
 Turned off in boundless variety, vividly and clearly 
 
 169 
 
George Meredith 
 
 depicted, they show Meredith's art as well as his 
 genius and powers of 'observation, and they illus- 
 trate his view of women as equals, essential to the 
 life of any society worth having and to the de- 
 velopment of the Comic Spirit. One type he loved 
 V with a tender malice, the female annuitant, the 
 single lady who vegetates upon an income from 
 the funds. The Misses Patterne, those darling 
 aunts of Sir Willoughby, who by Sir Willoughby's 
 gracious permission worship him devoutly, who 
 are paragons of abnegation and self-effacement 
 (unlike some aunts), who duet so charmingly to 
 Clara when they suggest at Willoughby's own im- 
 pulse their speedy evacuation of Patterne Hall — 
 how delightful they are, how many a volley of silvery 
 laughter do they excite ! The Misses Duvidney with 
 their Chippendale elegance and their devotion to 
 their Tasso, Tasso's fall from grace on his journey out 
 to say " his evening hymn," their resulting sleepless- 
 ness and their nocturnal converse about Victor in the 
 chaste seclusion of their bedroom are not less pleasing. 
 In contrast with them come the grand old squires 
 Romfrey and Beltham, the less striking Blanco ve, 
 the doctors, lawyers, and Irishmen, the men about 
 town like Sir Lukin Dunstane, who is the heavy 
 dragoon sketched to the life, and last the fools, of 
 whom Algernon Blanco ve is the most perfect example. 
 Them, too, the great intellectual can delineate with- 
 out savagery, e'en though they be those " who are 
 simply the engines of their appetites, and to the 
 
 170 
 
Meredith the Artist 
 
 philosophic eye still run wild in woods/' For '' one 
 learns to have compassion for fools by studying 
 them." We are not told Algernon's fate. " My 
 son's a rascal, everybody knows that," is the pater- 
 nal judgment on him. We rejoice to know that 
 his prospective sojourn in the colonies is not to be 
 cheered, as he had hoped, by the companionship 
 of Rhoda. 
 
 Such is the class, the wealthy, landed, and often 
 cultured class, with which Meredith mainly concerns 
 himself, and it clearly shows that " high social breed- 
 ing is an exquisite performance on the instrument we 
 are." Few of its members have money difficulties, 
 still fewer are poor. For the actually impecunious 
 we must go to Patterne the marine and Anthony 
 Hackbut, characters from another stratum. As 
 a rule the novels, unlike those of Thackeray, do not 
 treat of the vice of snobbery, especially of snob- 
 bery in its vilest and most vulgar form, the view 
 that wealthy marriage is all in all for a girl. The 
 hunting of vice in Evan Harrington is genial, not 
 envenomed. The great tailor's Christian name 
 Melchisidec is almost the biggest jest of all, for 
 if Melchisidec is Evan Harrington's father, he is 
 George Meredith's grandfather. " I too will take 
 a hand in this," the author seems to say. Laxley 
 is indeed a snob — and much less of a fine gentle- 
 man than the tailor's son — but the people of Beckley 
 Court are almost unnaturally indifferent to matters 
 of status. In the snobbery of the Misses Pole — 
 
 171 
 
George Meredith 
 
 three precieuses ridicules — transported into a later 
 century and a different milieu — there is a subtle 
 intellectual element which sets them in a different 
 class from the snob pure and simple. To Lord 
 Fleetwood, the haughty patrician, whose title, 
 wealth, and estates put him far above the common 
 herd, all men, at any rate below the peerage, are 
 equal. " He prized any form of rareness where- 
 ever it was visible ; " he could listen with pleasure to 
 the talk of an East-end Dissenting preacher ^ sewing 
 boot-leather. Greatly attracted by the aphorisms 
 of Gower Woodseer, son of this preacher, he adds 
 him to his entourage, treats him as an equal, and 
 makes even Sir Meeson Corby, who has to fetch him 
 soap, treat him as an equal. ^ Such is the Olympian 
 attitude to lesser mortals. Yet even in this world 
 we get glimpses of a bourgeoisie, Philistines who 
 alone " breed these choice beauties, put forth these 
 fresh young delicate buds of girls,*' but in this 
 case it dwells in Germany. A more Britannic view 
 is given by Mrs. Nargett Pagnell, one of " the known 
 worthy good intolerable women whom the burgess 
 turns out in regiments." She does not mince the 
 matter. " Oh that upper class ! It's a garden, and 
 
 1 One may remark in passing how much finer and more 
 sympathetic is Meredith's delineation of this type than Dickens's 
 violent caricature of it in Chadband and elsewhere. 
 
 2 Sir Meeson should have done what a satellite of a Scottish 
 nobleman did under similar circumstances, whistled. Dr. 
 Johnson (see Boswell's Tour of the Hebrides) was greatly pleased 
 at this example of address. 
 
 172 
 
Meredith the Artist 
 
 we can't help pushing to enter it, and fair flowers 
 indeed but serpents too, like the tropics." But 
 the struggle for entry does not take place in our 
 author's peaceful precincts. 
 
 We pass with a leap to the sons of toil, yeomen 
 like Farmer Fleming or Robert Armstrong who need 
 not detain us, "cits" like Skepsey and Hackbut, 
 or toilers at Mother Earth. The townsmen 
 bear a family likeness. Skepsey is Hackbut a 
 little less crazy and minus a charming niece, Hack- 
 but is a crazier Skepsey without a wife to beat. 
 They both have bees in their bonnets, and both 
 are slightly caricatured, not in the same style as 
 that in which Dickens would have exhibited these 
 somewhat Dickensian characters, yet viewed a 
 little aslant. In Dickens they would have constantly 
 repeated one phrase, in Meredith they are always 
 repeating one idea which buzzes in their ears. 
 They are monomaniacs, Skepsey on the subject of 
 national defence — Meredith's own fad, as he play- 
 fully seems to recognise — Hackbut on the vast po- 
 tentialities of wealth and his (non-existent) millions. 
 The twain have been picked up in the streets of 
 London, but in the course of their development the 
 types have been refined upon. 
 
 The sons of Earth are more interesting. True son 
 of Earth himself, ]\Ieredith loved the countryman, his 
 racy talk, his dialect, his homely sense, his beer, but 
 he surveys him from a distant elevation and through 
 a telescope. The rustics are extraordinarily lifelike 
 
 173 
 
George Meredith 
 
 and vigorous, but they dwell not in Hampshire 
 but in Meredithland. Unlike the carefully drawn 
 rustics of another master who lives in Wessex, they 
 grin through a horse-collar, idealisations not of the 
 stupid but of the earth-born, the bovine,^ the slow 
 of thought, shrewd, pithy of speech, sententious, 
 obstinate. Of all these Master Gammon is the most 
 marvellous creation, an artistic triumph if not a 
 transcription from Nature, for he is more ideal in 
 his perfection than Nature ever permits. He has 
 " the grand primaeval quality of unchangeableness 
 — a sheep-skin old Time writes his nothings on " — 
 one who is never upset and takes as his sole re- 
 laxation a visit to a funeral — " it'll give me an 
 appetite " — one whose capacity for apple dump- 
 lings and cups of tea is almost unlimited. Such 
 men in their grand steadiness are the butts of the 
 lighter wits, who ask them to multiply 52 by 21, 
 and are steadfastly denied. With his saurian eye, 
 and three green front teeth, and his box of savings 
 so nobly bestowed upon his master, £1 lys. od. in 
 copper coinage Lycurgean and severe, he is a great 
 conception. And subtly, he contributes much to 
 the general composition, the equilibrium of the 
 
 i We are reminded of the striking lines in The Woods'^ of 
 Westermain : 
 
 " Or, where old-eyed oxen chew 
 Speculation with the cud. 
 Read their pool q^ vision through. 
 Back to hours when mind was mud." 
 174 
 
Meredith the Artist 
 
 novel. In a world of betrayed beauty, highborn 
 knaves and fools, cruel Indian widows, and pig- 
 headed yeomen, he is Nature's simplest and best 
 representative, and we may take him as the measure 
 of everything else. We are brought down by him 
 at a moment of tragedy from romance and woe and 
 vague philosophy to simple reality. " It's the 
 
 heart kills," said Robert. " It's d d misfortune," 
 
 murmured the farmer. " It's the wickedness in 
 the world," thought Rhoda. " It's a poor stomach, 
 I reckon," Master Gammon ruminated, naming a 
 factor much more effective than we are wilHng 
 to admit. Happily his three green teeth save this 
 hater of the sentimental from personal experience 
 of the throes of poor digestion. 
 
 But despite the skill and force shown in such 
 creations, our satisfaction is not complete. There 
 are other things to be heard in the country 
 besides " whack ! gie them foUol." Meredith's 
 rustics may be bovine, but this is not, as he would 
 make us think, their essence. Andrew Hedger 
 " could eat hog a solid hower." But though hog 
 was his feed, hog is not Hedger' s essence as the 
 author suggests, but only perhaps his most re- 
 markable accomplishment and his most strongly 
 developed taste. We have Andrew as he appears 
 to an intellectual, but not Andrew as he appeared 
 to the world at large and to his missis, a being with 
 striking powers of assimilating hog undoubtedly, 
 but still a useful member of society. The racy, 
 
 175 
 
George Meredith 
 
 graphic, homely talk of the countryman in some rich 
 fruity dialect, which can so often make the casual 
 encounter of two cronies upon a country road or 
 in a country market-place so interesting to the 
 passing observer, is reproduced in Meredith, but 
 the wit is still terser, and subtilised, not quite so 
 obvious and pungent in its force in consequence. 
 The folk of Warbeach River perhaps illustrate this 
 defect most clearly, but the battle of Hillford and 
 Ipley, the Yellow and Blues of the Junction Club 
 and their rivals, the supper at the Green Dragon, 
 are glorious. Here Earth has brought her great son 
 and her more homely children into perfect under- 
 standing, and that beer which moistened their clay 
 as well as Meredith's has inspired and united both. 
 It is a prose Euripidean chorus from a modern 
 Bacchae with the appropriate dash of Aristophanes. 
 A vast and glorious gallery it is that Meredith 
 displays to us. Novels and plays must have 
 their ephemerids, their transient characters, their 
 ** supers." The novel as a representation of life 
 would be incomplete without its Barmbies and De 
 Crayes, its Hippias Feverels and Chillon Kirbies, 
 Zeel the garlic-seller. Dob the confectioner, and Bootl- 
 bac the drum-beater, its butlers and errant cab 
 drivers, its postilions "who are not drinkers," its 
 ladies' maids like Danvers, its Ripton Thompsons, 
 boys without character who become faithfullest of 
 dogs, its Braintops — beware of a disrelish of Brain- 
 tops ! — its Arthur Rhodeses, youthful poetic adorers 
 
 176 
 
Meredith the Artist 
 
 from solicitors' offices of the queenly fair, its public- 
 house proprietresses, its doctors, and the rest. All 
 these personae are characters, not mere masks, well 
 sketched and vividly conceived. We cannot forget 
 Flitch or Mrs. Sumlit, or Raikes, or Sir Purcell 
 Barrett, or Mrs. Chump. Narrow as the author's 
 range is alleged to be, if we enumerate his different 
 characters and their different occupations we shall 
 find them a varied gathering and a numerous host. 
 In the grouping of characters, in sketching a figure 
 so that it may not destroy the balance of the whole, 
 but in developing itself may help by contrast the 
 development of someone else, there can be shown 
 an art as consummate as, and still more subtle than, 
 that demanded in the delineation of one or two out- 
 standing figures. In The Egoist we have a large 
 number of characters set with great skill around 
 Clara and Willoughby and their immediate compeers. 
 The way in which all are mutually adjusted deserves 
 high praise. One feels at times that Meredith's 
 imagination was pictorial and that he visuaUsed 
 them all upon some stage, grouped and combined 
 after the manner of a great painter-dramatist. He 
 is particularly skilful in describing the inhabitants 
 of a great country-house, Patterne Hall, Ra3mham 
 Abbey, Beckley Court, turning out pattern after 
 pattern in inexhaustible variety. One of our 
 Conquerors is a novel with its imperfections, but 
 its imperfections are the excess of genius, not the 
 lack of it. The ** composition " of Victor's circle, 
 
 N 177 
 
George Meredith 
 
 Victor himself, Natalie and Nesta with their fine 
 voices, Sowerby with the sugared-acid of his closed 
 mouth and his plodding and conscientious flutings, 
 Barmby of the wondrous voice, Mr. Peridon, 
 Miss Pempton the anti-alcoholist, Mr. Graves the 
 vegetarian, Colney Durance the satirist scathing 
 everything with his drop of acid, Simeon Fenellan 
 the ready speaker with the gift of explosive repartee, 
 all so different, all linked together by their common 
 love of music, is a feat of extraordinary mental 
 exuberance. It is not the mere number of figures 
 — any novehst can supply lay figures ad libitum 
 — it is because they are so carefully sketched in, 
 because all the detail is so precisely worked in 
 and yet not overloaded, that the result is so 
 brilliant. On the other hand, in Lord Ormont and 
 his Aminta and The Tragic Comedians Meredith 
 can create his effects by making two or three 
 figures stand out so strongly that the others 
 scarcely matter. The author's force of intellect 
 is shown as much in the less obvious matter of 
 the construction of his novels as in his brilliance 
 of expression and power of climax. His faculty 
 of inventing apt names is notable. Sir Willoughby 
 Patterne — how apt the designation from title to 
 surname ! Almost would one think that some 
 lUa had been laid up in the heavens, that that 
 Christian name and that surname had waited 
 through all eternity for this predestined perfect 
 union. Everard Romfrey, Chillon Kirby, Natalie 
 
 178 
 
Meredith the Artist 
 
 Dreighton, Clara Middleton, Rose Jocelyn, Laetitia 
 Dale, Tracy Runningbrook — he is a poet — Richard 
 Feverel, Neville Beauchamp — how gracefully they 
 flow from the lips, what a serene beauty almost 
 reaching the Hellenic is there about them ! Or 
 to turn to the more ignoble, Sir Meeson Corby, 
 Skepsey, Anthony Hackbut, Mrs. Burman Radnor, 
 Chump, Nicodemus Sedgett (Meredith's one villain), 
 Mrs. Berry — how appropriate the Mrs ! such 
 people never have Christian names — Mr. Quintin 
 Manx, a double-barrelled mediocrity who is a punc- 
 tual M.P. if nothing else, Mrs. Cramborne Wat h in 
 of the Puritan rich, Constance Asper — how one 
 shivers at her icy purity — Shrapnel, fit name for 
 pioneer idealogue, Ines the boxer, Stukely Cul- 
 brett, Jenny Denham, evidently not a Diana but a 
 charming damsel, Baskelett blatant and bullying, 
 Jane Mattock a six feet representative of modern 
 healthy womanhood, John Mattock her brother, 
 who rejoices in a magnificent designation for a 
 railway-navvy millionaire. Van Diemen Smith with 
 dignified Christian name and plain patronymic — 
 almost too perfect a description for a deserter re- 
 turned from the colonies — Percy Dacier with a hard 
 ic}^ sound, Constantia Durham, a racing cutter who 
 races us away indeed, Tom Cogglesby, an old 
 gentleman who has obviously escaped from one of 
 Dickens's novels. Strike the Marine — who does 
 so, as fair Caroline could tell us — Mrs. Nargett 
 Pagnell ("we rhyme with spaniel") : no novelist 
 
 179 
 
George Meredith 
 
 has shown a finer sense of the fitting in the christen- 
 ing of his children. 
 
 We note, if we care to, a certain repetition in 
 Meredith, just as History is said with precisely as 
 much truth and as much falsehood to repeat itself, 
 and just as Nature with its same universal combi- 
 nation of hill and dale and plain, rock or forest, 
 cloud or sunshine, weaves her inexhaustible variety 
 of enchanting patterns, or out of the same hundred 
 elements produces all the wonders of the material 
 world. The jaded critic despises the hackneyed 
 plot, although he knows that all the plots have now 
 been invented, and should know that from the most 
 hackneyed and familiar of stories Greek dramatists, 
 following convention, not scorning it, produced 
 the most perfect specimens of tragedy. An adverse 
 critic can point out if he will that Lord Ormont 
 and his Aminta and The Amazing Marriage are 
 both based on the same foundation. If he cares 
 to proceed farther, he will find that the treatment 
 in the two novels is so different that the parallel 
 scarcely occurs to the reader. He will find an 
 indefinite number of squires and landed proprietors, 
 wits, beautiful women, but he will also find that 
 Meredith's creative powers so far approach to those 
 of Nature that, like her, he never creates twice alike, 
 that there are no replicas, that his figures are not 
 types but individuals. Our author was a man of 
 fine nobility of soul, and a profound thinker, but 
 he was great artist too. 
 
 i8o 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 " When we are knapsack on back we come to 
 eminences where a survey of our journey past is 
 desircable." The time has arrived when we must 
 cast a backward view upon the volumes which 
 we have reviewed, the pageant of stately, homely, 
 normal, and abnormal figures which has passed 
 before us, the argosies of wit and fancy that have 
 sailed by fraught with such treasures of the intel- 
 lect. It has been a rich experience, and we must 
 now endeavour to garner our impressions. Great 
 literature is the expression of great personality, 
 and Meredith's personality has surely projected 
 itself into his works. He did not cultivate the 
 impersonal, he did not shrink from the obiter dictum^ 
 yet formal utterances may give us the mere outward 
 trappings, not the essence of a man's truest self. 
 That we must strive to seize elsewhere. It will 
 be expressed more clearly in unconscious revela- 
 tions than when he is himself the orator. Some 
 Willamowitz-Moellendorf of centuries hence with all 
 the Teuton's subtlety will divide the Meredithia 
 into the productions of an epic poet, a lyricist, an 
 epigrammatist, an anatomiser of character, and the 
 world will suj^serviently follow, for it will be obvious 
 
 i8i 
 
George Meredith 
 
 that there are different "strata" and that no one 
 man could have achieved such different triumphs.^ 
 
 We find a mind of wondrous richness, subtle, 
 fecund, nimble, forceful, an abiding vivida vis — 
 the passion of the poet, the vehemence of the 
 orator, the serene wide outlook of the philosopher, 
 the arch-smile of the Comic votary, the phantasy 
 of the Euphuist, the wittiness of the Athenian, 
 combined in one prodigious mental whole. It 
 took some four men of supreme talent to produce 
 the genius of Meredith. He is, first, the poet de- 
 scribed by Shakespeare — looking into himself — 
 Vvath his eye in a fine frenzy rolling, with his fiery 
 glance that gazes at both earth and heaven, and 
 misses neither the richness of the universal mother 
 nor the glories of the firmament, neither the in- 
 finitely great nor the infinitely small, bodying forth 
 in his imagination shapes unseen before, giving 
 the vital flesh and blood to insubstantial phantoms, 
 impassioned with a romantic glow, writing not son- 
 nets but whole novels to a mistress's eyebrow, gifted 
 with the reasoning powers of a mathematician, the 
 calculation of a chess master, and the profundity 
 of a philosopher. There is the finest, subtlest 
 equipoise in this felicitous union. Poetic rapture, 
 bordering as always upon madness, is compatible 
 with the view that civilisation is based on common- 
 sense ; romance will hold no truce with senti- 
 
 ^ At times one is reminded of Dryden's lavish panegyric on, 
 Milton, " The force of Nature could no farther go." 
 
 182 
 
V Conclusion 
 
 mentalism ; the wit is quintessential wisdom. He 
 has a noble charity and a generous patience, he is 
 intense and earnest, he jests at all the world, and 
 sometimes at himself. He illustrates better than 
 any since Shakespeare that impetuous mental 
 energy which Matthew Arnold deemed the source 
 of our literary greatness. Indeed, the aptest 
 parallel to Meredith at his greatest in pregnancy 
 of thought, opulence of language, lyric fervour, and 
 tenseness of the mind, is a Shakespearean sonnet. 
 No man has ever been endowed with richer gifts. 
 The gods have heaped their favours on him, and 
 he is to outshine all mortals — but on one condi- 
 tion. Cassandra was inspired with prophetic vision, 
 but none was to believe her. Meredith was to have 
 all gifts of mind, but it was ordained that few 
 should understand him . He is a composite of various 
 nations, Celtic, English, and even French. He was 
 born at Portsmouth, lived in Westermain, and 
 loving Hampshire did not fail to love England. 
 His English ballast of commonsense steadied the 
 lightness of his Celtic ardour, its quick responsive- 
 ness and ardent sensibility ; his Celtic fervour 
 in turn found equipoise in something of French 
 logicality and esprit. His works are one vast 
 exhibition of these qualities. He was his own 
 Shrapnel, teacher, inspirer, rugged oracle, harbinger 
 of the coming age, but he was still more a Merlin, 
 wizard, prophet, gallantly tender to fair maidens. 
 There is a steed of magic potency which he 
 
 183 
 
George Meredith 
 
 himself describes to us. It is the Hippogriff , the steed 
 on which young genius mounts to survey the world. 
 " Around the height he soars to he can see no 
 barriers nor any of the fences raised by men. . . . 
 Desires wax boundless, obstacles are hidden." 
 He who rides on Hippogriff can speed in fancy 
 wheresoe'er he will. He leaves the limits of the 
 universe, and far beyond the bounds of time and 
 space he ranges, "accumulating images, hiving sen- 
 sations," conqueror, explorer, and inquirer. But 
 the steed has one defect ; it must return to earth. 
 Woe to the rider when he does so ! The radiancy 
 of his erstwhile vision is equalled by the murkiness 
 of the gloom which now besets him. His visions, 
 ecstasies, and conquests have fled from him, a poor 
 mortal now confined in time and space, weak, 
 timorous, and fitful, and imagination's glorious 
 hues have faded into sober drab of everyday. 
 Piteous past all endurance would be now his fate 
 did not soon the steed return to him, and again he 
 mounts for his aerial journey, again his visions 
 and his ecstasies return. 
 
 Be sure that in his youth Meredith rode many a 
 league upon the Hippogriff, ranging the confines 
 of the universe, viewing the sum of things, mak- 
 ing triumphal progress. In later years though 
 the fine frenzy languishes into arch persiflage, 
 it is quelled, not vanquished. Let him but see 
 ardent youth or winsome maiden, and gloriously it 
 flames forth again. For he is lord of language 
 
 184 
 
Conclusion 
 
 and can flash out the thrilling phrase, strike the 
 most poignant chord, or clothe himself in kingly- 
 majesty of words. But he prefers to move on 
 lower levels. He will not soar into the empyrean, 
 intoxicating but perilous delight ; he will seat him 
 on some Idaean eminence, and watch enthroned 
 the tide of human things, serene, composed, gazing 
 chiefly on men's follies, greeting them with silvery- 
 laughter. 
 
 The literary firmament has its accessions. Fresh 
 comets blaze across the heavens with fiery tresses 
 and burn out, new planets are discovered of various 
 magnitudes, sometimes even a new sun with all its 
 system and its satellites reveals itself to us. Doubt- 
 less when a new luminary swims into his ken it is 
 easy for the watcher after long hours of expectation 
 to delude himself, and to adore it with an unde- 
 served homage. Yet he may not be wrong. The 
 immortals were once mortals who ate and drank 
 and slept, and went up and down their cities like 
 the rest of men. " Others abide our question, thou 
 art free." Yet the greatest light of all was once 
 to his friends but honest Will Shakespeare, with 
 advancing fame the witty playwright Mr. William 
 Shakespeare, and then — his earthly apotheosis — 
 transformed into W. Shakespeare, Esqre., of New 
 Place, Stratford. Ten generations have bestowed 
 most lavish homage, but rare Ben, loving him, truly 
 enough, " this side of idolatry," grufliy chid him or 
 praised at pleasure. And it is so with us. Free 
 
 185 
 
George Meredith 
 
 enough with our commendation and the super- 
 latives which mean nothing, having banished from 
 our midst for good and ill the old snarling critic, 
 we hesitate to put our men of eminence upon 
 pedestals, or to conduct them within our Pantheon. 
 We imitate the prudence of the Roman Church and 
 delay our canonisation for a few centuries. We 
 cannot bring ourselves to think that one whom 
 many of us knew or might have known, who dwelt 
 in a concrete, visible house at Boxhill, whose children 
 are still living, who, as the casual passer-by might 
 see, would go abroad in a bath-chair, or some- 
 times rode — the climax of the commonplace — in a 
 friendly motor-car, is the peer of them we never saw, 
 authors whom the dust of centuries has obscured 
 and transfigured. It is so with those of the pre- 
 ceding generation. Wordsworth — we cannot yet 
 quite canonise the stamp-collector of Rydal or place 
 him in the small group which encircles Shakespeare 
 in the Elysian fields ; Shelley has won his godhead 
 and has become a mythus only by the romance of 
 his death. Yet great men have lived after Aga- 
 memnon, and their fame is uncertain, because of 
 the very cloud of witnesses. Meredith, lauded 
 neither by too many nor too few — for of the esteem 
 of those who counted he was always sure — draws 
 nigh the august precincts of the Immortals, and 
 judgment must be passed on him. 
 
 It may be early to attempt the task, yet it shall 
 be attempted. First let us speak a moment of the 
 
 i86 
 
/ ConclusioiT 
 
 verdict of his own generation. To that he was for 
 the most part caviare. His poetry was unsaleable ; 
 his novels, for long years disregarded by most 
 critics, failed even to win disdainful comment. 
 America first appreciated, but England did not 
 widely recognise his fame until he verged upon old 
 age. We m.ay adopt two attitudes towards these 
 facts, and be regretful or be unconcerned. It 
 may be argued with much force that literature is 
 not a branch of commerce, that all great writers 
 should be amateurs and write to please themselves, 
 and that a man of letters ought not to expect by 
 heaven-sent genius to make a fortune which merely 
 ranks him with the vulgar parvenu. Can we desire 
 that great literature should sell like hot cakes ? 
 The simile is just, for publishers, like bakers, prefer 
 to sell their wares when fresh, and they prefer to 
 sell new batches, for after six months is not to them 
 every book a dead book, to be replaced by others ? 
 The booms and campaigns of the advertiser with 
 his constant succession of " best-sellers " have 
 nothing to do with literature, w^hose motto is 
 nihil nimis, and whose pose a proud reserve. The 
 man of letters knows too little of the world to gain 
 his share of profits such as accrue at times to the 
 astute bibliopole, and he continues in consequence 
 to believe with Byron that Barabbas was a publisher. 
 Yet failure or qualified success may bring as bane- 
 ful consequences as triumph. To know that the 
 public, and the publishers, will gulp. down anything 
 
 187 
 
George Meredith 
 
 that he flings to them, to have that rarest alchemy 
 which can transmute a vein of genius into thous- 
 ands of golden sovereigns, is a persistent goad to 
 haste, to over-production, and scamped work, for 
 no great literature can be produced without racking 
 labour of the brain, and frequent intervals of re- 
 pose. Commercial success will sometimes kill an 
 author's genius ; at others it merely kills the authcr, 
 as it killed the unhappy Dickens or the more 
 tragically fated Scott. Yet if we are spared the 
 mournful spectacle of genius scrambling for gold, or, 
 apeing Midas, fluttering moth-like round the flame 
 of monetary reward, sour grapes are bitter still, 
 and unrewarded merit has its grievous pangs. We 
 marvel sometimes that success leaves an author 
 unspoiled, but it is as strange that ill-success should 
 not wound the spirit and mar the labours of one 
 who is conscious of exalted powers which only a 
 minority of one can recognise. Meredith culti- 
 vated an equanimity which doubtless rose to the 
 serene, but it was a loss to him and to the world as 
 well that the philosopher became a hermit and his 
 chalet a cloister. The effect is visible in two diverse 
 ways. Master of irony, creator of consummate 
 novels that no one read, he turned his persiflage 
 upon himself. He submits to the eulogies of his 
 scanty admirers with patient gratitude, but, he in- 
 sinuates, they are wrong. For himself he does 
 not attach too much importance to his work — 
 indifference is pride's armour against the world's 
 
 i88 
 
Conclusion 
 
 contempt. He is humbly grateful for this exagge- 
 rated praise and this perhaps mistaken adoration. 
 As for study of his novels, they are not worthy it. 
 Is The Shaving of Shagpat an allegory ? Yes, no, 
 no, yes, according to his humour. It is not worth 
 considering. Yet despite the cloak of jaunty care- 
 lessness, Meredith did care. No man whose sen- 
 sibilities are cultivated to the exquisite pitch of 
 the creator of The Egoist or The Ordeal, no virtuoso 
 such as he who achieved The Shaving of Shagpat, 
 is insensible to the indifference of his fellow-men, 
 or callous to the fate of the products of his ecstasies 
 and pangs of travail. But the great nature of the 
 man which prevented him from taking himself 
 too seriously or too tragically saved him from all 
 trace of cynicism, saved him from the evils of the 
 coterie and its cult, the gravest doom that can 
 befall a writer. Most of the great Liberals have 
 not been men of the people. They live in a world 
 of ideas, they have no graces of the demagogue. 
 Yet Meredith knows the dangers of such isolation. 
 He does not seek it though he patiently endures it, 
 and warns men to avoid all spiritual pride. 
 
 " You with others gathering more, 
 Glad of more till you reject 
 Your proud title of elect." 
 
 So he proceeds calmly, earning a competence by 
 reading bad novels for a firm of publishers, as ele- 
 vating, stimulating, fascinating an occupation as 
 
 189 
 
George Meredith 
 
 that of tea-taster, and left men to admire or to con- 
 temn according to their pleasure. For Meredith had 
 gone ere ShibH into the llall of the Duping Brides. 
 The thought of wearing a crown had taken posses- 
 sion of his soul. He had cried, " Crown me, O 
 my handmaidens, and delay not to crown me, the 
 circle of my head itcheth for the symbols of majesty." 
 He had sat upon the throne calmly, serenely, tem- 
 pering the awfulness of his brows with benignant 
 glances, he had beheld the crown on his forehead 
 what it was, " bejewelled asses' ears stiffened 
 upright, and skulls of monkeys grinning with gems." 
 »/ Meredith was first, then, possessor of in some 
 ways the most consummate intellect that has ever 
 been devoted to literature. In mere cleverness 
 and wit in the Elizabethan sense he is supreme. 
 Though the birthday book compiler has already 
 gathered fair garlands of poesy and Mr. Trevelyan 
 has garnered bulky sheaves of aphorism, lexico- 
 graphers have not yet pored over his volumes and 
 disseqjted them. Doubtless in after-time they will 
 tell men of the limitless range of his vocabulary, 
 their industry will classify and catalogue his epi- 
 grams, their computations, if the task be not be- 
 yond weak mortals' power, will enumerate his 
 metaphors. It is a treasure-house that we enter, 
 and, like the Athenian at King Croesus' court, we 
 come out packed and stuffed with precious dust 
 of gold, gorged even to the mouth. Great wit 
 tg genius is not always kin ; the converse some- 
 
 190 
 
Conclusion 
 
 times holds. But this student of the fine shades and 
 delicate feeHngs, who sees as far into the brick wall 
 of human personaUty as anyone, this anatomiser 
 of human character, this intellectual euphuist 
 who will rhapsodise on a hero's leg as well as write 
 sonnets on a heroine's eyebrow, can ever and again 
 give us a sudden thrill of sheer delight and over- 
 come all sophistication by the spell of Nature. 
 For he loved the south-wester, and Earth was kind 
 to the most brilliant of her children. 
 
 Style is like a chemical solution ; it cannot carry 
 more than a certain amount of thought, the rest 
 it must deposit as a sediment. The very force 
 and range of Meredith's thoughts at times impair 
 their artistic expression. The human brain, no 
 more than the human stomach, thrives on concen- 
 trated food. From this point of view even the 
 inessential ma}^ have its dietetic value as a preven- 
 tive of mental constipation. At times Meredith 
 will lecture on his characters. On occasion, deep 
 in elaborating some new thought, he moves calmly 
 on, serenely unconscious that his readers have lost 
 contact with him. It is right to aim, not at ap- 
 proximation to a character but at supreme accuracy, 
 it is good to see farther than other men, and to 
 see more minutely ; but there are other, sometimes 
 better, ways of studying mankind than through a 
 microscope. He meets this criticism in advance. 
 He pleads for that •' garrulous, super- subtle, so- 
 called Philosopher who so frequently rushes to the 
 
George Meredith 
 
 footlights," and the pleading is often necessary. 
 The philosopher can be as abstruse as Pindar, as 
 obscure as Aeschylus, and the commentator who 
 has won his spurs in elucidating the difficulties 
 of either of the ancients might then well turn his 
 attention to the first chapter of The Egoist, in some 
 places obscmior tenehris Heracleiii, clear though 
 the general drift may be. Candid friends declare 
 that to break the secret of the ballads " you have 
 often to take to yourself a dark-lantern and a case 
 of jemmies." Admiring expounders of his poems 
 like Mr. Trevelj^an mu^-t first translate them for 
 their readers' benefit. To read a Meredithian novel 
 is not an idle daUiance with three hundred pages, 
 but a strenuous labour, a soul-stirring exercise. 
 
 /But the searching ordeal of "wit" is a stimulating 
 gymnastic demanding as much hard thinking as a 
 dialogue of Plato, and though at first we study 
 Meredith rather than read him, the process is worth 
 while. All great literature makes its demands 
 upon the intellect. It does not fade away into 
 ravishing harmonies, or evanesce in gushing senti- 
 ment. Meredith was right, fundamentally and 
 incontrovertibly right, when he claimed a place for 
 
 t/' brain " within the novel. 
 
 We seek not to gainsay that there are passages 
 in Meredith more difficult to construe than the 
 hardest of Thucydides. The fault is partly due 
 to the language in which he wrote. Modern 
 English with its *' structureless comminution " 
 
 192 
 
Conclusion 
 
 and its shapelessness of syntax is a heart-breaking 
 language for the expression of subtle thoughts. The 
 lack of noun and verb terminations, the awkwardness 
 in English of the periodic sentence, that splendid 
 instrument for the expression of complex organised 
 thought, o\ir consequent failure to delimit the 
 boundaries ^ of the different clauses, compel one 
 often to read three times a phrase or sentence dealing 
 with some abstract point before one grasps the 
 sense. The fault of obscurity is plain in much 
 English of the present day. It is found in Mere- 
 dith, who increased the difficulty by expressing him- 
 self with Tacitean brevity, and who, holding the 
 disjointed, snappy style of Macaulay in reasonable 
 disdain, oft gives his readers pause as when he 
 talks of sentimentalism " despising gold itself the 
 child of gold,'' a phrase capable of easy expression 
 in a language like Latin. Meredith is not much 
 harder than the later Shakespeare, who was admired 
 doubtless by the groundlings for the wrong reasons. 
 And, on the other hand, much of his alleged ob- 
 scurity is detected only by mental accidia or lack 
 of mental alertness. 
 
 Meredith's sign-manual is found on every page 
 of his. If Johnson made his little fishes talk like 
 whales, Meredith would have made his nightjars 
 or yaffles talk like philosophers of the twenty-first 
 century. He has no all-round style fit for all pur- 
 poses. He has not the noble simplicity of Homer, 
 nor the seeming simplicity and grim irony of Swift, 
 o 193 
 
/" 
 
 George Meredith 
 
 nor the suave ease and finish of the Spectator, though 
 in matter he is worlds above the accompKshed 
 Addison. But the age of simpHcity, which may be 
 noble, but which can be merely sprightly, has passed 
 away. We have reached the age of cro(^ta, which some- 
 times means sophistication, and the style of the anato- 
 mist must differ from the style of the mere sketcher. 
 And how delightful is the spectacle of " brain " 
 once we begin to plumb our author's depths ! How 
 wise and noble, how serene and patient is he, how 
 great a master of thought ! The epigram is at 
 all times easier to condemn than to eschew, and 
 when the epigram is a sudden flash of light in the 
 darkness, the distilled wisdom of one of the wisest 
 of all minds, the free unforced result of highest 
 mental activity, in what other mood shall it be 
 greeted than in the thankfulness of grateful ac- 
 ceptance ? How would Meredith have delighted 
 in the converse of Euphues, equalled his subtlety, 
 loved the balance of his clauses, capped his conceits 
 with better ! Assume his premisses and his style 
 is aptest for the purpose, a full-bodied vintage of 
 sharp taste. It has not the light rhythm or the 
 easy flow of some who have less to say ; it is perhaps 
 rather a series of detonations, or a succession of 
 flashes, or even, to a hostile mind, a sequence of 
 bumps. Yet he can be rapid with the swiftest. 
 Some similes in the true Homeric strain show what 
 an epic he might have written in a less complex 
 age. Shagpat's shaving is a virtuoso's feat which 
 
 194 
 
Conclusion 
 
 resembles the finest achievements of De Ouincey in 
 everything except their most impassioned notes. 
 There is not a rhythm but a pvfirj, an impetuous 
 sweep, in The Tragic Comedians which bears all before 
 it. Wine lifts him ever to the true Dionysian fervour ; 
 there is in ViUoria often a sweet, sustained, melo- 
 dious melancholy. Every qualit}^ has its defect, 
 cannot exist, perhaps, without it. Brilliance be- 
 comes fatiguing, elevation becomes isolation, learn- 
 ing becomes a burden, elaborateness may suggest 
 the wire-drawn subtleties of the pedant, philosophy 
 tends to the obscure. Yet Speech without the 
 Meredithian novels would be less wonderful than 
 we now deem it. How strong our airman is on the 
 wing. He might have boasted, like Pindar, that he 
 had arrows winning persuasion. How aptly his 
 own description of the " swallow flights" of Alvan 
 and Clotilde in converse would apply to his finest 
 passages as they range " to right and left and far 
 afield, now soaring into the blue of heaven, now 
 with a sudden downward sweep skimming a foot 
 above the earth." 
 
 But in his quality of novelist we can best judge 
 him by comparison and contrast. Widely as they 
 differ, Dickens and Meredith have some common 
 characteristics. They both see vividly and quickly, 
 (sometimes what is not there,) they have much 
 energy of temperament ; an aura of eager vitality 
 surrounds them. The more indolent, the less 
 trained mind will cherish Dickens. Dickens hits 
 
 195 
 
George Meredith 
 
 the errand-boy every time ; the errand-boy has 
 scarcely come within Meredith's ken. As the 
 Marchioness is to Clara Middleton, so, might the 
 proportion continue, is Dickens to Meredith. 
 Dickens marks the advent of Miss Bella Wilfer into 
 literature, Meredith ignores her ; Dickens is funny, 
 Meredith ironic. Dickens, prince of the smack-in- 
 the-rib style of humour, ministers to the loud guffaw 
 which in literature as elsewhere typifies the vacant 
 mind. Meredith, disdainful of the humour which 
 borders on the rough-and-tumble of the practical 
 joke, smiles quietly to himself, or if the jest be droll, 
 volleys of silvery laughter are heard. Dickens is the 
 supreme example of the achievement of untutored 
 genius taken from the streets. He is an effective 
 lightning caricaturist with a great power of catching 
 the farcical, but in some departments of the writer's 
 craft he never passed beyond pothooks and hangers, 
 in some respects he has the mental equipment of a 
 child. He will present you with a Surrey theatre 
 villain motivelessly malignant like Quilp,^ and 
 with his ad captandum morality requires your hisses 
 in the manner of ' ' the gods ' ' of that home of melo- 
 drama, or demands your gushing tears for Little 
 Nell. He oscillates between the roystering farci- 
 cal and the dripping lachrymose, and loves to lead 
 you to a " strong " melodramatic denouement in 
 which some deus ex machina of the Father Christmas 
 type appears, for Messrs. Cheeryble Brothers have 
 
 1 Compare lago and note the difierence. 
 196 
 
Conclusion 
 
 branches in every novel of Dickens. Meredith, 
 whose learning is as extraordinary as his taste is fine, 
 does not bethump us with the mawkish or pump 
 up in bucketsful the pathetic. His unreality, where 
 it occurs, is the unrealit}^ of the recluse student, 
 not of the half-taught child of genius. Thackeray 
 the typical educated man with a literary turn, had 
 shown a charming gift of easy moralising which 
 is in sharp contrast with the unreadable effusions 
 of Dickens, stilted and laboured like the work of a 
 literary apprentice. Meredith was to display a 
 faculty of still profounder yet kindly generalisation. 
 If it is dangerous for the novelist to be yoked with 
 the philosopher, Dickens has shown that the novel- 
 ist and the Tribune of the Plebs do not run well in 
 harness. Dickens had a noble sympathy for the 
 industrious poor, but in depicting a character like 
 Kit Nubbles he will assume a controversial tone 
 to which the only answer is his own phrase, " Who's 
 a denigeing of it, Betsy?" In truth he doth 
 protest too much. We hear slirill, vehement, and 
 incessant the tones of the little boy in the blacking 
 warehouse who maintained that Kit Nubbles was as 
 good as a lord, and better, and ended by sending his 
 own sons to Eton. The Caricaturist of the Dickens 
 sort enjoys one great advantage. We always laugh ; 
 whether at the caricature or at the caricaturist it 
 matters little. Compare the noble Verisopht, a 
 typical example of Dickensian naive and childish cari- 
 cature, with Algernon Blanco ve. Meredith presents a 
 
 197 
 
George Meredith 
 
 type which he has studied; he gives us the real thing, 
 not a stuffed figure from Mrs. Jarley's waxworks. 
 There is, of course, no need to depreciate the great- 
 ness or the richness of Dickens's achievement. His 
 vital energy would carry to a triumphant end works^, 
 that had far more numerous faults. Yet the con- 
 trast of two such masters is at least of interest. Mere- 
 dith too can be almost roystering. Evan Harring- 
 ton is conceived in a Pickwickian vein, instructive 
 in its difiCrences, and these two masters of the 
 Comic well illustrate what education can do and 
 cannot do for genius. ^ 
 
 The danger of too much education, or perhaps 
 of too much learning, is best illustrated by a great 
 woman novelist, George Eliot. Though she stands 
 far below in brilliance, in romantic fervour, and in 
 power of expression — quahties which one would 
 regret to call adventitious, yet qualities not en- 
 tirely essential to the novelist — her keen eye for 
 character, her skill in grasping it, especially female 
 character, and in delineating it, place her in not 
 unworthy proximity to Meredith. No abler woman 
 / ever wielded the pen, perhaps no abler woman 
 ever breathed. But her intellect and her pas- 
 I sions were never fused. She could not wear her 
 < learning lightly as a flower — few women can ; 
 
 1 It is instructive to note that Meredith has no characters 
 similar to those of Dickens v/ho constantly repeat pet phrases. 
 Meredith's more subtle characters — e.g., Hackbut and Skepsey, 
 Dickensians with a difference — have pet ideas which are always 
 running in their heads. 
 
 198 
 
Conclusion 
 
 and her career is a history of the encroachment of 
 the intellectual faculties upon the imaginative 
 to the detriment of her novels. Had she been less 
 learned she would have been more successful. For 
 all the learning, philosophic grasp, and largeness 
 of mind which compel one to admire the woman, 
 or perhaps the intellect, have quenched or stifled 
 the flame of passion ; the play of the imagination, 
 the subtle though restrained humour which consti- 
 tuted the greatness of The Mill on the Floss and above 
 all of Adam Bede, in Romola and Daniel Deronda 
 are overweighted by the writer's learning and her 
 elaborate psychological analysis. Meredith's learn- - 
 ing is still greater, his range of allusion is extraordin- 
 ary, but it is the obedient servant of his imagination 
 and hi, emotions. His energy carries him through 
 a novel unwearied and unjaded, and, despite all his 
 intellect, there is an elan vital, an ease and even 
 spontaneity which early deserted George Eliot. 
 Yet this master of her own genre could have 
 taught Meredith something which he lacked. Inv 
 depicting wa3^s and thoughts of the English pro- ( 
 vincial middle-class she is supreme. The Garths 
 and Featherstones still live, and may with suitable 
 variations of dialect be heard each week in Gloucester 
 market, or in the Newent train, or the Hardwicke 
 carrier's cart, or many another place. The Bulstrodes 
 and the Vincies and all their clan still go their way 
 magnificently detached from the furious tendencies of 
 progress, for Middlemarch is only a synonym for 
 
 199 
 
George Meredith 
 
 i provincial England. George Eliot in this respect is as 
 
 J near to actual life as we may hope to get, although a 
 
 I modem novelist who should know ^ reminds us that 
 
 no one . can ever get within a million miles of it. 
 
 Adam Bede treats of a kindred subject to Rhoda 
 
 Fleming, and the general conclusion is the same, 
 
 ^though perhaps gloomier than even that of Meredith's 
 
 sombre novel. It is interesting to speculate how 
 
 Rhoda Fleming might have been treated in the 
 
 Adam Bede manner. Gammon would have been 
 
 less marvellous but more real, Mrs. Sumfit would 
 
 have been much as she is or better, the talk of 
 
 the folk of Warbeach would have been homelier 
 
 and nearer life, Fairly Hall and Mrs. Lovell would 
 
 have been less prominent, Anthony Hackbut 
 
 might have been eliminated, and the loving study 
 
 of Algernon Blancove would have suffered many 
 
 modi (: cations. The women would have been truer 
 
 to life, the men less true and less intellectualised. 
 
 Meredith could not have given us such an accurate 
 
 i portrait, but George Eliot knew nothing of Meredith's 
 
 V diviner gust- — Phaethon in his chariot with Apollo 
 
 at his side, dashing all over the heavens and never 
 
 coming to grief. The creatress of Daniel Deronda 
 
 goes on her way heavily and cannot get her spavined 
 
 Pegasus to gallop ; a second Mrs. Poyser would have 
 
 been welcome, but we look in vain for that lady's 
 
 cheering presence in the later psychological treatises. 
 
 But the two authors have each their individual 
 
 1 Mr. Arnold Bennett. 
 200 
 
Conclusion 
 
 outlook, their individual methods, and we must 
 have now the speciaHst in the novel as everywhere. 
 It is one of the greatest joys of the true lover 
 of literature to admire the different qualities of 
 different yet somewhat similar masters of the same 
 craft without wishing to belittle either, certainly 
 without assuming the badge of the partisan. 
 
 But the true antithesis of Meredith would be Scott,/ 
 the great improvisatore. Meredith has nothing 
 of the grand and almost epic simplicity of Scott, 
 and not that complete sympathy with all sorts and 
 conditions of men which the novels of the noble 
 Tory reveal. Scott himself tells us somewhere 
 that he had ever been wont to converse with his 
 fellow-men where'er he met them, and to this habit 
 is due not a little of that grand impartiality and noble 
 disinterestedness which mark his work whether 
 he is sketching Puritan or Cavalier, Habbakuk 
 Muckle wrath or Claver'se, Cromwell or Prince 
 Charles. It was Burns who preached that " a 
 man's a man for a' that," but it was Scott who 
 practised it in literature, and this enamoured 
 Feudalist and Medievalist sheds all his prejudices 
 when he sits down to write. The simple and the 
 subtle are very different, and to jaded palates the 
 simple may have lost its savour. Scott is the man 
 of vast assimilation and keen imaginative power 
 when the past is concerned, but his vision is blindness 
 when he deals with the future or the present. He 
 has the well- filled mind and his readers gain the 
 
 201 
 
George Meredith 
 
 well-filled mind, but he has nothing that we can 
 set beside such richness of reflection as we find in 
 Meredith. The stream of epigram and metaphor 
 is absent, though when he could escape the jargon 
 of the sham archaic which he too often assigns to 
 his medieval characters Scott could construct effec- 
 tive dialogue. Yet in the range of his sympathies 
 there is something which has rightly earned for him 
 the adjective Shakespearean. 
 
 One judges, then, that Meredith might stand com- 
 parison with some of the great ones of the past. 
 Compare him with the ultra-modern and he will stand 
 still higher. He cannot describe a rustic so truly to 
 Nature as Thomas Hard}^ the other contemporary 
 master of the novel, but if Meredith could not have 
 written The Mayor of Casterhridge, Hardy could not 
 have achieved The Egoist. Meredith never chose to 
 describe a landscape so exactly as Hardy, but his 
 width of range and philosophy give him higher rank. 
 Those who find Meredith obscure or accuse him of 
 narrowness of appeal, might well pass on to Mr. 
 Henry James, the novelist of the nebulous, and they 
 may find that even obscurity is preferable to the 
 void, and that the limitations of the " up- town " 
 novel are even more pronounced. 
 
 Turning to novelists still living, we find the 
 contrast still more glaring. The present age of 
 literary men always believes that it is superior to 
 the ancients, and when one is a novelist who 
 together with this natural tendency combines a 
 
 202 
 
Conclusion 
 
 contempt for the rich store of the past, the result 
 is interesting. In the author of Ann Veronica 
 we have a writer who is convinced that in Science 
 a new instrument of Culture and Progress has been 
 found which will supersede the exploded fancies 
 of the Humanities, and vv^ho desires to substitute 
 Biology for the study of civilised man. Let us 
 examine the result. ^Ir. Wells has considerable 
 industry, a conscientious resolve to do his best, 
 and a high conception of the novelist's function. 
 He has a certain power of generalisation which is 
 too often based on the floating newspaper talk 
 of his time, some faculty of delineating character, 
 considerable constructive skill, no richness of 
 setting, and scant power of writing effective 
 dialogue. His dialogue indeed is a literal tran- 
 script of modern talk at its poorest and slangiest, 
 and its one occasional brilliancy is an iterated 
 " Oh ! damn ! " Wit is nil, humour nil, vitality 
 slight. In other words, such works are the product 
 of an entirely commonplace mind, commercially 
 effective, but not destined to any permanence. Set 
 Ann Veronica beside Clara Middleton (with many 
 apologies to that peerless maiden for the contami- 
 nation) and Capes beside Beauchamp, and their 
 creator shrivels into nothing despite the ledgers of 
 his publishers. This is partly Mr. Wells's misfortune, 
 partly his fault. He rises, it is no compliment to 
 say so, to a higher intellectual level than the man 
 in the street ; he is fully abreast of modern thought, 
 
 203 
 
George Meredith 
 
 as it finds itself expressed in current journalism. 
 If he had not, like many other votaries of " Science," 
 cut himself adrift from the main-stream of world- 
 thought by contemning everything before Huxley 
 and Darwin, he might have gone farther. Mere- 
 dith, on the other hand, in whose eyes there is no 
 opposition between Science of any sort and Litera- 
 ture, and who took an eager interest in all new 
 tendencies, is the heir of all the treasures of the past, 
 and has the serene dignity of those who are not un- 
 easy champions of a revolutionary tendency, but who 
 have preserved unbroken continuity and cherished 
 worthy traditions while ever adapting themselves 
 to the new. He has too the poetic force, the fervour, 
 and eloquence of which the latest generation gives 
 no sign. In another point also there is a contrast. 
 No man shrank less than Meredith from moral 
 problems. But he could always treat them with 
 a fine dignity and restraint. A novel is not to him 
 a laborious essay in prurience ; he will not chronicle 
 the scabrous sensations of wanton amorists. Life is 
 not to him as it is to Mr. Capes, F.R.S., a " ;:habby, 
 furtive business," and the " spiritual guttersnipe " 
 is the last person one would expect to find amongst 
 his creations. Mr. Wells's heroes have their fling 
 and are yet unhappy. The}^ are ineffective in love, 
 ineffective in everything. Beauchamp and Feverel 
 are noble even in their failures. Of a truth, as 
 Mr. Arnold Bennett says, we are not cleverer than 
 our fathers. 
 
 204 
 
Conclusion 
 
 There have been great novelists before Meredith, [y 
 The history of the English novel reveals a line of 
 great ones each with his own peculiar genius, each 
 the hero of some fresh development. Meredith's 
 own contribution will begin to be clear. It is the 
 establishment of " brain " in unquestioned supre- 
 macy within the region of the novel, the manifesta- 
 tion of a particular point of view based on a belief 
 in " brain," and of a conception of human life 
 coloured by the Comic Spirit which he did so much 
 to expound. The novel is still a story, but it is a 
 story of many strands richly interwoven. Nar- 
 rative, brilHant dialogue, pregnant aphorism, 
 radiance of metaphor, the gusto of the Comic Spirit, 
 poetic rapture, criticism of life — with such an 
 equipment Meredith transcended the novel form, he 
 strained his mould to breaking-point. His heroes 
 are Olympians, but after a course of cads and 
 vulgarians such as the circulating libraries acclaim 
 we are delighted at the contrast. They have not 
 to earn their bread and butter — Meredith cherishes 
 them as Redworth cherishes Diana and wiD not hear 
 of their enduring the chill of penury — they are magni- 
 ficently detached from the sordid, and live in Epi- 
 curean exemption from mortal cares. We need not 
 apologise for the Meredithian type. Clever men are 
 in their natural milieu in a Meredithian novel, they 
 are lawful expedients v/hich enable him to liberate 
 himself from his mass of generalisations, they are 
 entitled in any representation of life to be portrayed 
 
 205 
 
George Meredith 
 
 with other types and, strongest point of all, they 
 have never before had their chance in the novel. 
 At length intellectualism — a phenomenon un- 
 known to our earlier novelists — has found an 
 utterance, at length in fiction we have attained 
 a type rich and diverse in its varieties, yet a 
 type not learned in the professional sense but 
 lover of learning, witty, inquiring, curious minds, 
 which have passed beyond academic lumber to 
 wisdom, which are both scholars and men of the 
 world. Beside them all previous representations 
 of intellectual ability sink into the sorriest cari- 
 catures. Dr. ]\Iiddleton, the great scholar, is by 
 no means the type which we are describing — he 
 is too learned — but compare him with Scott's 
 Antiquary or any other scholar except George 
 Eliot's Casaubon and mark the difference. Vernon 
 Whitford is a finer type, but around him and such 
 men are gathered many who, if not learned according 
 to academic standards, have yet intellectual tastes. 
 Feverel wrote poetry, Nesta and Natalie were skilled 
 amateurs of music, Beauchamp penned letters in 
 French to the Imperial Guard, even Willoughby, 
 being of a positive mind — not, we will hope, a 
 disciple of Dr. Archimedes Silverpump — was lord of 
 a laboratory. The heroes of ^leredith have active 
 busy brains, they do not idle like Pendennis or fall 
 in love with Miss Costigans. His heroines are glorious 
 creatures of flesh and blood and brain. A woman like 
 George Eliot portrays her heroines more closely than 
 
 206 
 
Conclusion 
 
 a male observer. She idealises less, but she is not less 
 sympathetic, perhaps more, and she is much less 
 superficial than many novelists. Meredith may 
 slightly idealise — he is certainly a courtly gallant to 
 his bevy of fair ones — but he never superiicialises. 
 His heroines have learnt to inquire ; they are true, 
 brave mates, fearless alike of wind, weather, and 
 Mrs. Grundy. Clara can run races with Cross] ay ; 
 Lucy's love for Richard does not prevent her from 
 making a good breakfast. Indeed a dozen eggs, so 
 Adrian avers, were consumed by Romeo and Juliet 
 between them at one sitting, but we are approach- 
 ing the mytho-poeic. The Meredithian maidens do 
 not elegantly toy with a few morsels in the style of 
 Miss Blanche Amory, but all — not the fair Flemings 
 only — owe their strength and their good looks to 
 " good bread and good beef." 
 
 Where such heroes and heroines prevail we arrive 
 naturally at the Socratic conception ov^el^ ckcov 
 cifxapTuvet.^ In other words, we deal with follies 
 and foibles rather than with vices, and we are 
 amused at men's failings rather than wrathful. We 
 lack inevitably the Tragic forces of sorrow and dis- 
 tress, we do not rise to the Shakespearean heights 
 of Othello and King Lear. Great men's minds 
 are crucibles. To win the richest experience they 
 must have troubles and be harrowed, and out of 
 
 1 "In tragic life, God wot. 
 No villain need be ! Passions spin the plot : 
 We are betrayed by what is false within." 
 
 207 
 
George Meredith 
 
 the strange alchemy of sorrow comes the sad, ex- 
 quisite joy of tragedy, something passing rich and 
 strange, a KTrifia e? aei. Such, we need no telhng, 
 was Shakespeare's passage through hfe, such was 
 not Meredith's. He had the minor ills to endure, 
 indiflerence, even potboilers ^such as make the 
 brave shudder, but he was able to secure an assured 
 ^competence. Men's minds are like instruments 
 which resound to tones of certain pitch and are 
 silent to others. Meredith rarely answers to the 
 pathetic. There is little in his volumes which 
 even slightly corresponds to the rare beauty of the 
 Adsum scene in The Newcomcs. But those who 
 treat of scenes like this tread a slippery path beside 
 a precipice, and often fall from Mount Sublime 
 into the ravine Ridiculous. And the region below 
 is peopled by Little Nells and other heroines of the 
 mawkish, and little Paul Dombey incessantly desires 
 to know what the wild waves are saying and will 
 not be satisfied. Meredith perhaps chose wisely. 
 He preferred to be subtle rather than to be crude, 
 to sway the intellect rather than to thrill the emo- 
 (tions, to worship the Comic rather than the Tragic 
 Muse, and to be kindly cruel to sentiment. He 
 flacked the faculty of anger, the fury of Juvenal, 
 <and the bitter hate of Timon, but The Egoist 
 and Evan Harrington, which neither Juvenal nor 
 Timon could have conceived, will console us. He 
 lacked the sublimity of Aeschylus, but Sophocles 
 would have admired his evKokia and his subtle 
 
 208 
 
Conclusion 
 
 master}^ of language, Aristophanes would have 
 hailed him as fellow- votary of the Wine-god, and 
 Euripides w^ould have almost envied him his croc^ta. 
 The quality visible in every mood is the philo- 
 sophic strain. " Fiction," he told a literary aspi- 
 rant, " is the fruit of a well- trained mind." It was 
 a startling revelation perhaps to his youthful cor- 
 respondent, it would be an overwhelming para- 
 dox at any rate to most youthful novelists, and it 
 is a hard saying for the circulating libraries. But 
 Meredith would have gone farther. He would 
 have asserted, one is confident, that besides all the 
 qualities of heart and sensibility demanded, the 
 novelist of the future, if he is to achieve enduring 
 fame, would not be unduly equipped even with the 
 brain of a Newton or a Plato and the power of 
 generalising of a Darwin, and that to plan and 
 carry out his conceptions the wide range and power- 
 ful sweep of the logic of these great men would be 
 required. Philosophy, philosophy, how often are 
 its virtues hymned ! We are reminded of the 
 greatest of the Roman poets who sang in words 
 that even in this early phase of his development 
 have a strange mystic ring : 
 
 " nos ad beatos vela mittimus portus 
 magni petentes docta dicta Sironis 
 vitamque ab omni vindicabimus cura," 
 
 and who yearned, like his master Lucretius, to 
 know causes of things, and whose unrealised hope 
 p 209 
 
George Meredith 
 
 was to dedicate himself to philosophy after the 
 completion of the Aeneid. Meredith had the 
 same delight in the quest for cause and effect as 
 Virgil, though he was singularly free from mystic 
 yearning. What Aristotle had profoundly said of 
 poetry, that it was a liner, more philosophic thing 
 than history, Meredith determined to make true of 
 the novel. All novelists of recent times have vaguely 
 realised the possibilities in this direction. Even 
 the third-rate and the tenth-rate practitioner dimly 
 envisage the novel as being amongst other things 
 a branch of the great and noble science of casuistry, 
 which deals with the ever-changing problems con- 
 fronting humanity and its students. Meredith is 
 a Doctor in this Science, though he denies his ques- 
 tioners too definite an answer. Truth, the product 
 of an artificial age, differs from the truth of unsophis- 
 ticated Juventus Mundi as a daisy from an orchid. 
 Humanit}^ is becoming subtler, the play of motive 
 is more complex. We know that white and black 
 are not so clearly defined as a simpler age believed, 
 that men are in the mass neither saints nor sinners, 
 that the antithesis between rose-pink and dirty 
 drab is generally unreal. 
 
 Men's actions as well as their bodies must go 
 beneath the microscope. " In our fat England 
 the gardener Time is playing all sorts of delicate 
 freaks in the lives and traceries of the flower of life, 
 and shall we not note them ? " There is such a 
 thing as a Science of Human Life, and our poor 
 
 210 
 
Conclusion 
 
 England, vaguely stirring in its mental sleep, must 
 be awakened and called upon not to fear ideas. 
 Such was the message of our author, such would it 
 have been now, the need of more Science, not the 
 Science of our friend of the lecture-room and the 
 laboratory, the knowledge of the precise quantity 
 of tri-nitro-toluene which placed on a certain mark 
 will send a thousand to eternity — important as 
 that knowledge may be in certain distressful epochs 
 — but the conception of an ordered Universe and 
 of an ordered life, in which the inheritance of the 
 past, the needs of the present, and the possibilities 
 of the future are all taken in one wide view, the 
 thinking out of problems and the determination 
 neither to shirk nor to blink, to be interested in 
 the Now and to exult in the vision of the Hereafter, 
 neither to be unduly dismayed nor to be unduly 
 overjo^^ed, to be nobly serious and to be nobly 
 merry. Of Meredith, if of anyone, could it be truly 
 said : 
 
 " And he was happy if to know 
 Causes of things and far below 
 His feet to see the lurid flow 
 Of horror and insane distress 
 And headlong hate be happiness." 
 
 An earlier classic has traced both with the sym- 
 pathy and repulsion of genius the outlines of the 
 intellectual of the future in words of a finer and more 
 dehcate music than Meredith could make. It 
 is an exquisite pleasure to mark for a moment 
 
 211 
 
George Meredith 
 
 how the great Catholic, to whom rehgion was a 
 mystic sacramental thing, not a matter of Science 
 however accurate, nor of Philosophy however 
 wide of range, has expressed with perfect beauty 
 the ideal of such an one as Meredith himself or of 
 his noblest men of intellect. " The perfection of 
 the intellect is the clear, calm, accurate vision and 
 comprehension of all things as far as the Imite 
 mind can embrace them, each in its place, and 
 with its own characteristics upon it. It is almost 
 prophetic from its knowledge of history ; it is 
 almost heart-searching from its knowledge of human 
 nature ; it has almost supernatural charity from 
 its freedom from littleness and prejudice ; it has 
 almost the repose of faith, because nothing can 
 startle it ; it has almost the beauty and harmony 
 of heavenly contemplation, so intimate is it with 
 the eternal order of things, and the music of the 
 spheres." Wonderfully prophetic and wonderfully 
 true. 
 
 The content of Meredith is greater than with 
 most authors, and it is the necessary result of the 
 principles on which he proceeded. For Meredith 
 designed nothing less than to lay the foundations of a 
 science of human nature (a new psychology), and he 
 is therefore bound to be a " problem novelist." 
 Other writers have dealt at times with problems 
 of everyday life — notably Dickens — but the results 
 have been usually, from the artistic point of view, 
 disastrous. George Eliot again, in her later phase, 
 
 212 
 
Conclusion 
 
 packed her books with learning and somewhat 
 heavy philosophy. The task of synthesising is 
 terribly difficult, yet Meredith has met with no small 
 measure of success. He of course offers no cut- 
 and- dried solution of the problems which he poses. 
 He leaves the problem presented to the reader in a 
 concrete (not abstract) form for the reader himself to 
 ponder over. He suggests or hints rather than 
 enunciates the manner in which the problem may 
 be solved. He takes a wide outlook upon life and 
 manners, and from his high plateau of intellect ualism 
 he surveys mankind, and without the bitterness 
 of a disappointed nature, without rancour, and 
 with an unquenchable optimism for the future, 
 he treats of life and all its problems. 
 
 Meredith, though proud to be a Celt, is profoundly 
 conscious that he lives in John Bull's island. All 
 nations, despite that real unity which they present 
 to the detached distant observer, are sometimes 
 a duality, sometimes a congeries of innumerable 
 atoms. But one may, if it pleases, divide a nation 
 at any moment into two parts, its half-dozen men 
 of genius and the rest, its Falstaffs without the 
 humour or the power of terse expression, sometimes 
 without the geniality, of that character. The men 
 of genius impersonate the nation in its highest 
 moments, they represent it rather flatteringly to 
 the foreigner, and after their death they are honoured 
 with statues and their heterodoxies suddenly be- 
 come platitudes. The great man is always fighting 
 
 213 
 
George Meredith 
 
 a winning battle but never winning ; he is always 
 getting Pisgah views and being mocked at as a vision- 
 ary on his Pisgah elevation, or rather, as a St. Simeon 
 Stylites on his pillar ; he is always trying to make 
 the triumph of to-morrow the victory of to-day. He 
 is, if we may believe Meredith, the Celtic element 
 in a nation. It is he alone who is concerned with 
 ideas; his shopkeeper fellow-citizens, the rubicund 
 grotesques whom, strangely enough, both carica- 
 turist and eulogist have pictured in John Bull, to 
 some a hero, to others anathema, continue to amass 
 wealth and to live like fat pigs. What Matthew 
 Arnold riddled with satire and undermined with 
 sarcasm, the panoply of Philistinism in which the 
 Englishman loves to arm himself cap-a-pie, that 
 Meredith in a more abstruse but equally definite 
 manner attacked, and perhaps blunted his sword 
 upon. There is nothing that Meredith's heroes 
 are more emphatic upon than the need of ideas, 
 and nothing that his heroes, and heroines too, ex- 
 emplify better. As for Meredith himself, he is a more 
 genial Dr. Shrapnel, a man whom all his intimates 
 revere, and whom the crowd contemn or ignore, 
 a man whose thought has all the explosive character 
 that the Doctor's name has come to suggest. 
 
 But ideas in the lump are no better than any 
 unassorted mass of things good, bad, and indifferent. 
 The question is, what ideas ? To Meredith human 
 life is a spectacle of progress, slow, laborious progress 
 in which advance is a matter of centuries, but still 
 
 214 
 
Conclusion 
 
 progress. Shagpat is a man of fearful strength, 
 a formidable foe, but Shibli Bagarag will come 
 at last and prove his mastery of the event. Things 
 are bad but they will be better, and the process of 
 struggling upward is man's noblest and most joyous 
 task. The process is slow, but the novelist's optimism 
 remains unchequered, his glad spirit unsoured. It 
 is to Meredith's poetry that we must go if we would 
 learn his thought on that secular process which we do 
 venture to call a climbing upward. It is there that 
 we get some taste of the * ' rapture of the forward 
 view," some flashes of insight into problems which 
 most poets have feared to tackle. Woman is con- 
 stantly in his thoughts. " Men may have rounded 
 Seraglio Point ; they have not yet doubled Cape 
 Turk," is one of the mosf famous epigrams in his 
 works. What has man made of woman ? Is she a 
 helpmeet, a true mate, or is she still a bird within a 
 cage, thoughtless, frivolous, and aimless because man 
 has not desired that she should be anything else ? 
 All his heroines insist on thinking things out for 
 themselves, on being at least a trifle heedless of con- 
 vention, on being most delightful in their womanly 
 or their girlish charm, but yet resolute and coura- 
 geous in their desire to pierce to the depths of things, 
 to have done with the old conception of woman 
 such as prevailed in the time of that worshipful 
 Mr. B., who honoured Pamela with his hand. 
 
 Politics play no inconsiderable part in Meredith's 
 novels. Meredith is of course a Liberal, and his 
 
 215 
 
George Meredith 
 
 heroes are generally Liberals. But there is a fine 
 broadness about their actions and their views, they 
 refuse to stand on the strict party ticket, they 
 neither rant nor truckle to the groundhngs, and they 
 are above all both by birth and conduct gentlemen. 
 The duty of national defence is frequently insisted 
 upon, and all Meredithian heroes get excited upon 
 this point. Marriage again is of necessity a subject 
 on which Meredith has much to say, having 
 pondered deeply. Matrimonial misfits are not, how- 
 ever, his sole stock-in-trade, as is the case with so 
 many inferior artists. Aminta, Diana, Carinthia, 
 all have their troubles, and all act in different ways. 
 Our author takes a middle stand. Man and woman 
 should be equals, mates ; marriage should be the 
 highest form of union, a blending of sympathy, a 
 concord of tastes, and yet a mystery in which in- 
 dividuality and oneness are in some transcendent 
 way combined together. It is the marriage of 
 the spirit, however, that Meredith regards, not the 
 marriage in name in which love has gone and only 
 the embers of passion remain. He knows that even 
 convention plays a useful purpose, and when his 
 characters disregard it they do not flout it. 
 
 Meredith was a poet, and his ideas on many things 
 find their fullest interpretation in his poetry. His 
 religion is a kind of one-ness with nature, a pan- 
 theism in which man rapturously recognises his 
 kinship with Earth, Earth the mother of all. Earth 
 that " makes all sweet." It is no ignoble ideal 
 
 2i6 
 
Conclusion 
 
 that Meredith portrays in his Hfe according to 
 nature, convenienter naturae, it has no taint of 
 the satyr though it exults in the freeness of the 
 senses, it moves between the rock of asceticism 
 and the whirlpool of the senses and looks forward 
 to a nobler race as the result of an overthrowal of 
 a merely conventional morality.^ 
 
 The longer one lives and the greater one's store 
 of experience, the more one feels that, with all 
 deference to grammarians and the 'ologies, the 
 only learning ultimately worth having is the lore 
 of human life discovered and interpreted by the 
 supreme masters of literature. They are, in Plato's 
 noble words, " spectators of all time and of all exist- 
 ence/' They sit godlike on an eminence, they 
 view the strife of battle and the fury of conflict 
 from an elevation which saves them from the blind- 
 ness of the partisan and the envenomed spite of 
 puny minds, and the narrowness of the conven- 
 tionalist. One of our greatest writers was rebuked 
 for making God the Father discourse like a School 
 Divine. It would be as grave an error to make 
 Him speak in the accents of Mrs. Grundy. It has 
 been said that the command " Judge not'' applies 
 with special force to novelists. The dictum is just, 
 at any rate, to the extent that the writer must not 
 adopt the methods of the Old Bailey advocate, 
 though sometimes we hear decisions ■■ from him 
 
 ^ See the passage from Diana of the Cvossways quoted on 
 p. io8. 
 
 ^17 
 
George Meredith 
 
 falling in the measured tones of the judge upon 
 the bench. Judgment implied or explicit is almost 
 inevitable, but it should almost seem the sentence 
 of another world. . . 
 
 " Ye watch like gods the rolling hours 
 With larger other eyes than ours 
 To make allowance for us all." 
 
 So Meredith is a true Olympian. He sits with 
 Zeus on the Idaean mount, and surveys the combat 
 as it sways from side to side. He has his dar- 
 ling children, heroes who make frontal attacks 
 on life, impetuous, self-willed, yet dazzling in their 
 glorious youthfulness. But, like Sarpedon and 
 Achilles, even his best beloved must die, if so the 
 fates, the issues of their character, ordain. It is 
 not so with other novelists. Thackeray is to his 
 characters an uncle — and what a splendid uncle ! 
 — who in his kindness of heart " tips " his nephews 
 and nieces in accordance with his precept to his 
 readers. We cannot fear him. He is only Mr. 
 Arthur Pendennis got past the cynic stage. He 
 does not let his characters flame out in Phaethon 
 wise. Pendennis is saved by his creator from his 
 follies and becomes a mild married cynic. To 
 Thackeray all young men were fools — they are 
 perhaps — but that touch of the god which Meredith 
 saw and loved so well was never revealed to Thacke- 
 ray. But of Meredith we stand in awe. He knows 
 I so much, he is so wise, he loves his characters but he 
 I loves them as a god, knowing that it is the issues 
 V 218 
 
Conclusion 
 
 of fate/ ireipar okedpov, which must settle life 
 and death. He is a dweller in another sphere, 
 benign but detached. 
 
 And yet he is their kindly guardian. He can 
 be indulgent in the behalf of an ardent youth, 
 and with what fine courtliness, what magnificence 
 of gesture does he come to aid a distressed maiden ! 
 One at least of his novels deserves the title ''All 
 for Love, or the World Well Lost." Yet Dionysian 
 as he may be in his impassioned moods, we rather 
 return to the conception of him as the Olympian 
 who has learnt seairum agcre aevum, and as 
 we " walk the higher ground knapsack on " we too 
 may hope to get a clearer, wider, truer view of life 
 and all its problems. 
 
 Meredith has nothing of the saeva indignatio, 
 a quality which misleads as well as inspires ; he 
 has nothing of the Infinite, for his hopes are set in 
 Earth, not Heaven. Yet, like all great humorists, 
 he founds his humour on a serious view of 
 life. Detached though he is from human frailties, 
 we may assert that he, alone of all great novelists, 
 would have been willing to go to the stake for a 
 positive creed. The grand lines on France show a 
 fine intellect, but they also reveal a great heart 
 throbbing at the griefs of " her that sunhke stood 
 upon the forehead of our day." The comparison 
 
 1 Fate is man's character. Meredith would have scoffed at 
 " the irony of fate " and such phrases as much as Thomas 
 Redworth. 
 
 2ig 
 
George Meredith 
 
 of France's humiliation in 1870 to a premature 
 burial shows passion touched by the imagination, 
 or rather imagination kindled by passion. But 
 if he cannot be angry, he cannot hate. There is, 
 it has been said, one villain only in his novels, 
 Nicodemus Sedgett. The claim is true. Wil- 
 loughby, the Meredithian type, is not a villain. 
 He merely lives in an unreal universe of his own 
 creating. Meredith had the tense mental activity of 
 Shakespeare, but neither Hamlet's fiyious sense of 
 times that are out of joint, nor the passionateness of 
 a Beethoven, nor the inspired fury of a Michelangelo. 
 He saw top clearly, and in consequence he never 
 created a King Lear or a C minor Symphony, though 
 he is not so completely tamed as Mr. Henry 
 James, whose most violent adjectives are " poor 
 dear." 
 
 Such moderation alarms us by its aloofness. Yet 
 though we stand in awe of Meredith, clearness of 
 insight is an exquisite quality, and wisdom is more 
 precious than rubies. The more one cons it the more 
 one does admire his wisdom, the more one deems 
 it even his most marvellous quality. He was the 
 first poet to write novels, and yet the divine madness 
 which so often characterises poets turns out, when 
 we regard it closely, to be subhmated commonsense. 
 He rises far above convention's standards ; he did 
 not hate, nor did he fear John Bull and his wife 
 Mrs. Grundy. He dislikes the sentimental, but 
 he does not ply the scourge too brutally. He has 
 
 220 
 
Conclusion 
 
 proved that the novel can stand beside the loftiest 
 forms of literary art ; he has not failed in the arduous 
 venture of putting life between the two covers of 
 a book. He has shown that the content and the 
 signiticance of the Cinderella of literary forms can 
 be as vast as that of Hamlet. He has used an almost 
 godlike powder of speech to express himself. Mr. 
 Wells believes that the world would be redeemed 
 from its follies if we all joined the Fabian Society. 
 Meredith is far wiser than that. He knows that 
 if you expel Nature with a pitchfork it will 
 return. 
 
 So we come to think of Meredith's rightness 
 rather than of his brilliance or even .his poetic 
 imagination and his vast range of powers. We 
 deem him the Sage learned in the deepest lore of the 
 humanity, though he smilingly refuses to be Sir 
 Oracle and to answer our " posers." We regard 
 I him as a teacher, a schoolmaster even, who seeks 
 ( to cure our mental, moral, and social rigidit}^ It 
 ^ is not a mere exercise in the fantastic to iind some 
 parallel to him in Samuel Johnson. That truly 
 great Enghshman, whose massive intelligence had 
 reached the same conclusions as the nimbler mind 
 of Meredith, that our civilisation was founded upon 
 commonsense, is in his wisdom, his broadness — 
 despite some obvious prejudices — his tolerant hu- 
 manity, and his hatred of cant, true peer of our 
 novelist. Johnson, few men more, despised the 
 unreal, the mock-sublime, the hollow sentimental. 
 
 221 
 
George Meredith 
 
 It was he who in a moment of relaxation so aptly 
 satirised the insincere sentiment of his age : 
 
 " Hermit hoar, in solemn cell 
 Wearing out life's evening gray, 
 Smite thy bosom, sage, and tell. 
 What is bliss ? and which the way ? 
 Thus I spoke, and speaking sigh'd ; 
 Scarce repress'd the starting tear ; — 
 When the smiling sage reply'd, 
 Come, my lad, and drink some beer." 
 
 Meredith himself could not have jested more humor- 
 ously at the man of feeling, and by no one would 
 the sage's exhortation have been hailed with more 
 enthusiasm than by the chronicler of Hillford and 
 Ipley's epic deeds. And the sturdy eighteenth- 
 century moralist who bluntly said that patriotism 
 was the last refuge of the scoundrel — he might have 
 added that it is an early haven of the amateur, 
 the incompetent, and the swindler — who tested 
 protestations of deep grief by the appetite of the 
 grieved one, who rebuked IVJrs. Thrale for affecta- 
 tion of a nice refmement of thought, would have 
 hailed the ceaseless tracker-out of sentimentalism 
 as a true descendant, much as a considerable part 
 of Meredith's manysided nature would have been 
 inexplicable to him. There is at times a nobleness 
 in defying commonsense, that rarest, most elusive, 
 and least definable of the virtues, but it is magni- 
 ficent, not war ; and all who charge upon its 
 massive front must pay the penalty of destruction, 
 even the best beloved of Meredith's heroes. The 
 
 222 
 
Conclusion 
 
 hero, if he is not to die an early, poignantly pathetic 
 death, must be rich in " saving commonsense." 
 Then, like Red worth, he may win the witty and the 
 fair Diana, and even prosaically live happy ever 
 after. It is such men as he and Dartrey Fenellan, 
 men of action and decision, who bear off belike the 
 fairest damsels. Romance has wings, but they may 
 fail like those of Daedalus, and creeping common- 
 sense by no means always creeps. A world either 
 of Beauchamps or De Crayes will never do. 
 
 Even in his ivdouaiaa/icx; Meredith is magni- 
 ficently sane. There is nothing mawkish about 
 his heroes. They have no morbid introspection. 
 They do foolish and even silly things, they ride 
 the hippogriff like Wilfrid Pole. But they are all 
 teachable, all capable of improving. We admire 
 them, and still better we like them. Meredith 
 has succeeded in making his heroes de iurc heroes 
 de facto. Who ever cared for Henr}^ Morton or 
 Edward Waverley ? What reader ever said that 
 Beauchamp or Feverel was uninteresting ? In 
 a well-known passage ^ Keats has spoken of the 
 stage of ferment through which most men pass 
 between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five when 
 the character is " undecided, the way of life uncer- 
 tain, the ambition thick- sighted." Through such 
 a stage passed Evan Harrington and Wilfrid Pole, 
 and their creator would have agreed with Keats 
 
 1 Quoted by Mr. Compton Mackenzie, introduction to Sinister 
 Street. 
 
 223 
 
George Meredith 
 
 that this is man's appointed time of ordeal. Heroes 
 of this period of life have been common, never 
 perhaps more common than at present. They will 
 not always pass the test of attractiveness. We 
 cannot admire or even be interested in Michael 
 Fane, prig or even decadent, we cannot set Tom 
 Jones upon a pinnacle, though he is more of a 
 man and less of a dilettante voluptuary. Still less 
 /^can we admire those who devote their activities to 
 ^ finding nice phrases for nasty things, for unabashed 
 naturalism is a stage above mawkish romance 
 or sneaking lechery. We are wearied by the strenu- 
 ousness of those who turn over dung-hills steaming 
 hot, and assault our nostrils and brandish their 
 muck-rakes as they advance to battle with the war- 
 -cry: " Art for Art's sake." We are fatigued 
 by the laborious transcripts of over-conscientious 
 novelists who — to use an image of Mr. Henry 
 James's — love the squeezed-orange style, an orange 
 too of many pips. Meredith, courageous and emanci- 
 pated critic of the conventional, had yet no taste for 
 poking into Mother Nature's bowels. He has always 
 a noble serenity and a noble delicacy. If it were 
 the custom to afftx musical phrases to novels or 
 their chapters, he might justly have claimed as 
 his own the favourite legend of England's linest con- 
 temporary composer, nobilmente. It is his quaUty 
 through and through. He does not idolise his 
 characters, but he is nobly charitable, and of course 
 too subtle a master of speech to indulge in common- 
 
 224 
 
Conclusion 
 
 place tirade when the finer methods are available. 
 He does not chide Diana for her grave error, he 
 even pleads for her. But he knows, as she knows, 
 that she has erred, as she lies in her darkened room 
 fasting two days and nights, until her friend Emma 
 comes and rescues her from her despair. He passes 
 judgment even in his own despite, and even though 
 he briefs himself as counsel for the defence for Diana, ^ 
 or stands chief mourner at Beauchamp's funeral, the 
 hero may think that he does not " sow the thing 
 which happens," but Meredith knows better. He 
 knows, too, that Victor Radnor, type of the senti- 
 mentalist who strives to make the best of all worlds, 
 seeks the impossible ; he knows, moreover, that, 
 despite the perplexities of any marriage law, con- 
 vention is right nine times out of ten, or even more. 
 His wit is also wisdom, and he is in line with the' 
 great ones of the past, which a novelist like Mr. 
 Wells, despite his painstaking talent, is not. He 
 has shown that subtlety and profundity are not 
 inconsistent, and his profundity perhaps lay largely 
 in his subtlety, even in " the shadow of one-tenth 
 of an inch in the customary elevation of an eyelid." 
 The ironic attitude leads easily to cynicism, a 
 fault ruinous in a noveUst. Meredith, like all great 
 novelists,^ is free from it. " Cynicism," he tells 
 
 1 It may be stated in passing that whether a man does or does 
 not regard Thackeray as a cynic may be taken as a criterion 
 almost infallible of whether he has or has not any insight in 
 literary matters. 
 
 g 225 
 
George Meredith 
 
 us, " is intellectual dandyism without the coxcomb's 
 feathers." Still less inclined is he to misanthropy. 
 As he finely says of those who are always de- 
 nouncing the world, " one might as well have an 
 evil opinion of a river ; here it's muddy, there it's 
 clear, one day troubled, another at rest. We have 
 to treat it with commonsense." It is the profound 
 sense of life and its significance which is ever present 
 with Meredith as he moves what other writers 
 have playfully called their puppets.^ As one 
 studies Meredith one finds the characters grow 
 bigger and bigger and more significant. They 
 transcend our everyday existence ; without losing 
 their vitality and individuality they take on the 
 character of types illuminating vast principles. 
 Their vitality, as that of all great creations, is 
 due to their creator. In truth all the characters 
 which men have loved to ponder over and to hand 
 down to succeeding generations of admirers are 
 ovalat, existences in the mind of their inventors, 
 characters which live and, as it seems at times, 
 alone have real existence, stripped of the imper- 
 manent and inessential, living not in time or space 
 but in some fourth dimension. Such are Meredith's 
 greatest characters. They have the element of 
 
 ^ Not Meredith's designation of them. " I never outUne my 
 novels before starting them. I live day and night with my 
 characters. As I wrote of Diana and other leading types I 
 drew nourishment as it were from their breasts " (Mr. Clodd's 
 Recollections), 
 
 226 
 
Conclusion 
 
 the timeless, they iUustrate abiding principles, 
 not party shibboleths. ^ The more one studies 
 Meredith the more hmnane and kindly he seems, 
 the wider and longer his vision. He dwells in 
 his own intellectual universe, and his novels have 
 all the unity which attaches to the products of a 
 single mind. 
 
 • • • • 
 
 Our pilgrimage is ended. We have passed o'er 
 hill and dale, through cloudland too, and we have 
 traversed Meredithland at length. We have been 
 jolted at times, perhaps with one critic we have 
 thought that vve barked our shins against our 
 author's wit. What picture is there left within our 
 minds of him who wrought these palaces of 
 phantasy ? Surely we feel that we have been 
 communing not merely with a great writer but 
 with a truly great mind. Beyond denial hosts of 
 phrases which are merely the overflow of a rich 
 tide of fancy might serve as texts for chapters 
 if not for volumes, and many a single paragraph will 
 contain more brilliance and profoundness of reflec- 
 tion than the opera omnia of Mr. Hall Caine. But 
 the appeal of mere cleverness soon wanes. We are 
 struck, if we but care to study him, with the beauty 
 and the unity of our master's life, we rise from his 
 
 1 Meredith keeps his views well under control. It is inter- 
 esting to note that, despite his decided opinions, in all his novels 
 there is but one policy definitely inculcated, that of conscrip- 
 tion — a course which to many minds would not seem to have 
 the element of the permanent but rather of the transitory. 
 
 227 
 
George Meredith 
 
 works with a widened outlook and a refined con- 
 v^ sciousness. He is a moral teacher ; there is a 
 moral beauty about his finest sayings. There is a 
 truer truth and a realler reaUty about his greatest 
 utterances than we find in life's confused medley of 
 conflicting aims. There is " fine filmy work " of 
 analysis in The Amazing Marriage, yet it is not 
 the subtlety of the analysis but the nobility of 
 those reflections of the unhappy Fleetwood on his 
 sure passage to the austerities of penance and the 
 maniac tortures of the monastic cell which even 
 at times calls Hamlet to our minds. " The years 
 ^/are the teachers of the great rocky natures, which 
 Ithey round and sap and pierce in caverns. There 
 is no resisting the years if we have a heart and a 
 common understanding." Such are the utterances 
 not of a great writer but of a great man. Genius 
 is attuned to genius, and one will answer to an- 
 other o'er the vasty deeps of space. But genius 
 and the common man can scarce agree ; even a 
 succession of heaven-sent Ministers of Education 
 will not alter nature's ordinance. Yet some day — 
 ^ ten centuries hence, he would declare in persiflage — 
 we shall not need the half-penny picture paper 
 or the musical comedy to divert ourselves. The 
 Comic Spirit in that far-off time will have its 
 temple in every heart, but he will need time, 
 and above all time. 
 
 " Rich labour is the struggle to be wise, 
 While we make sure the struggle cannot cease." 
 228 
 
Conclusion 
 And we must be kindly patient too ; 
 
 " Judge niildly the tasked world ; and disincline 
 To brand it, for it bears a heavy pack. . . . 
 ' Spiral * the memorable Lady terms 
 Our mind's ascent ; our world's advance presents 
 That figure on a flat ; the way of worms. 
 Cherish the promise of its good intents, 
 And warn it, not one instinct to efface 
 Ere Reason ripens for the vacant place." 
 
 It is the Master himself who speaks. 
 
 229 
 
INDEX 
 
 Addison, Joseph, 194 
 
 Agostino 165 
 
 Allegory in Meredith 142-144 
 
 Alvan, Sigismund, the Tragic 
 Comedian, 43-55, his char- 
 acter 53, and journalism 126, 
 and barriers 139, " a cathe- 
 dral organ "139 
 
 Aristotle, on the proper end of 
 tragedy 41, his canon re 
 plays 152, on poetry 210 
 
 Armstrong, Robert, 91, his 
 dual personality 157, 173, 
 
 175 
 
 Arnold, Matthew, and Philis- 
 tines 114, 214, quoted re 
 Wordsworth 102, and Eng- 
 lish intellectual energy 183, 
 quoted 185, 211 
 
 " Art for Art's sake " 107, 224 
 
 Asper, Constance, 116, 117, 
 her name appropriate 179 
 
 Austen, Jane, her female char- 
 acters 87, 163 
 
 Bacon, Francis Lord, his epi- 
 grams 135 
 
 Bagarag, Shibli, 66-68, 144, 
 190, 215 
 
 Barabbas, a publisher, 187 
 
 Barmby, the Rev. Septimus, 
 the Inchcape Bell 137, 176, 
 178 
 
 Barrett, Sir Purcell, 26, 177 
 
 Baskelett, Cecil, 179 
 
 Beauchamp, Neville, 55-57, 
 his ride over the downs with 
 
 Cecilia 100, re invasion 122, 
 on the Grand Canal 147, his 
 death 152, 179, 203, 204, 
 223, 225 
 Beauchamp's Career viii, 55- 
 
 57. 157 
 Beckley Court 62, 64, 158, 171, 
 
 177 
 Belloni, Sandra Aemilia (Vit- 
 toria), 19, 23-26, 138, 147, 
 
 195 . 
 
 Belloni, Sa)idra [Vittoria di 
 England), 23-26, 118, 147, 
 quoted 149, 150, 155 
 
 Beltham, Squire, and chastity 
 107, 112, 158, 170 
 
 Bennett, Mr. Arnold, quoted 9, 
 200, 204 
 
 Berry, Mrs., 42, appropriate- 
 ness of her name 179 
 
 Blaize, Farmer, 39, 40, 136 
 
 Blancove, Algernon, 147, and 
 his dinner 156, the fool 170, 
 197, 200 
 
 Blancove, Edward, 90, 91, 152 
 
 Blancove, Squire, 170 
 
 Blandish, Lady, 169 
 
 Bootlbac the drum- beater 176 
 
 Boswell, Tour in the Hebrides, 
 quoted 172 note, 222 
 
 Boxhill, the chalet, 3, 99, 102, 
 186 
 
 " Brain " in Meredith's novels 
 194, 205 
 
 Braintop, disrelish of, depre- 
 cated 176 
 
 Brides, Hall of Duping, 68, 190 
 
 2^1 
 
Index 
 
 Buccaneer, the Old, ii6 
 Bull, John, a rubicund gro- 
 tesque 139, 214, 220 
 Burman, Mrs, (Mrs. Bur man 
 
 Radnor), 93-96, 179 
 Busshe, Lady, 33, 136, 147 
 Byron 43, on publishers 187 
 
 Caine, Mr. Hall, opera omnia 22 j 
 Celt and Saxon 112-115, 127, 
 
 128, 155 
 Chapman & Hall, Messrs., 
 
 Meredith "reads" for them 
 
 4. 189 
 Cheer yble Bros., Messrs., a 
 
 branch in every novel of 
 
 Dickens 196, 197 
 Chump, Mrs., 24, 26, 177, 179 
 Civilisation founded on com- 
 
 monsense 105, 182, 221 
 Clodd, Mr. Edward, Recollec- 
 tions, vii, 226 
 Cogglesby, Tom, 179 
 Comedians, The Tragic, viii, 19, 
 
 43-55, feat of consummate 
 
 virtuosity 51, 147, 155, 169, 
 
 1 78, its few characters 195 
 Comedy, Essay on, 17-22 
 Comic Spirit, the, 158, 205, 228 
 Comic Spirit, Ode on the, 73, 76, 
 
 80 
 Conquerors, One of Our, viii, 
 
 93-98, 128, 147, 157, 177 
 Corby, Sir Meeson, 172, 179 
 Craye, Colonel de, 119, 136, 
 
 165, 176, 223 
 Croisnel, Renee de, 56, 147 
 Culbrett, Stukely, 165, 166, 179 
 Culling, Rosamund, 56 
 Culmer, Lady, 33, 136, 147 
 
 Dacier, the Hon. Percy, 116, 
 127, at Caen 159, appropri- 
 ateness of name 179 
 
 Dale, Laetitia, 31, 179 
 
 Dale, Islr., 33, 136 
 
 Dan vers, Diana's maid, 176 
 
 Defence, National, 122-124, 
 
 scares 128, 216 
 Demogorgon 142 
 Denham, Jenny, 157, 179 
 Desborough, Lucy, 40, 88, 89, 
 
 207 
 Diana of the Crossways 13, 155, 
 quoted 108, 118, 119, 161, 
 217 
 Dickens, Charles, and con- 
 viviality no, his prentice 
 effusions in the pathetic 146, 
 and Little Nell 148, splendid 
 carelessness of 155, 162, and 
 Chadband 172 note, and 
 Skepsey 173, and minting 
 money 188, a comparison 
 with Meredith 195-198, tri- 
 bune of the plebs 197, 212 
 DQb the confectioner 176 
 Dragon, the Green, 62, the 
 
 supper 65, 109, 176 
 Dreighton, Natalie, 93-98, an 
 adherent of convention 96, 
 beauty of her character 98, 
 157, 178, 179, 206 
 Dryden, John, quoted 182 note 
 Dunstane, Lady, 147, 225 
 Dunstane, Sir Lukin, 170 
 Durance, Colney, 109, a pessi- 
 mist 121, and his barley 
 sugar 141, his serial 157, 1C5, 
 178 
 Durham, Constantia, 29, 179 
 Duvidney, the Misses, mid- 
 night dialogue 96, 147, 170 
 
 Earth and Man quoted 75 
 Earth, Meredith's view of, 98, 
 
 103, 104, 216, 217 
 Eglett, Lady Charlotte, 92, 
 
 gives Weyburn " toned old 
 
 Burgundy " 109, 127, 165, 
 
 168 
 Egoism, The Book of, 166 
 Egoist, The, viii, 27-34, 158 
 
 177, 189, 192, 202, 208 
 
 232 
 
Index 
 
 Elgar, Sir Edward, and nobil- 
 
 mente 224 
 Eliot, George, and female 
 
 characters 163, comparison 
 
 with Meredith 198-201, 206, 
 
 212 
 Empedocles on Etna, quoted 59 
 English language, the modern, 
 
 193 
 
 English nation, the, its clean 
 
 hearts 118, as embodied in 
 Red worth 120 
 Euphues, and Meredith 193 
 
 Fairly Hall, 200 
 
 Fakenham, Hem'ietta, " a sun 
 
 going down on a stormy 
 
 noon " 140 
 Fanny, the Countess 116 
 Farrell, Aminta, " Browny " 
 
 77, 92, 147, 152, 216 
 Fenellan, Dartrey, 112, 223 
 Fenellan, Simeon, 126, 165, his 
 
 explosive repartee 178 
 Feverel, Hippias, 176 
 Feverel, Ordeal of Richard, viii, 
 
 19, 37-43, a Shakespearean 
 
 novel 42, rhapsody on a 
 
 penny whistle 52, 88, 131, 
 
 147, 155, 156, Dr. Jessopp's 
 
 appreciation of 169, 189 
 Feverel, Richard, 17, 38-43, a 
 
 real hero 41, 152, 156, 179, 
 
 204, 206, 207, 223 
 Feverel, Sir Austin, 38-41 
 Fielding, Henry, 8, 156, his 
 
 " padding " 157 
 Fleetwood, Lord, 157, slave of 
 
 his word 160, 172, 228 
 Fleming, Dahlia, 17, ensnared 
 
 by Edward Blancove 89, 90, 
 
 chastened by suffering 91, 
 
 152, 158, 162 
 Fleming, Farmer, 173-175 
 Fleming, Rhoda, 171, 175 
 Fleming, Rhoda, 90, 155, 200 
 Flitch, cabman 137, 177 
 
 Folly the natural prey of the 
 
 Comic Spirit 2 1 
 France, December 1870, 83, 219 
 France our enemy 123, its 
 
 people 1 40 
 Friendship, life's prose 139 
 
 Gallienne, Mr. Richard le, vii 
 Gammon, Master, 162, a mar- 
 vellous creation 174-175, 200 
 Germany, her ambition 125, 
 
 126 
 Grannius, Dr., entomologist, 
 botanist, palaeontologist, 
 philologist, and ready regi- 
 mental corporal 125 
 Graves, Mr., a vegetarian 178 
 Grundy, Mrs., 90, 91, 94, 96, 
 163, 207, 217, wife of John 
 Bull 220 
 
 Hackbut, Anthony, 171, 173, 
 179, 198 note 
 
 Hamlet 15, 221, 228 
 
 Hampshire in Meredith 100 
 
 Hardy, Mr. Thomas, his rustics 
 174, 202 
 
 Harley, Adrian, 158, 165, 207 
 
 Harrington, Evan, 20, and gilt 
 gingerbread 66, at the bath- 
 ing-house 88, 147, 152, 223 
 
 Harrington, Evan, viii, 60-66, 
 an extravaganza 63, 109, 
 147, 155, 158, 171, its Pick- 
 wickian vein 198, 208 
 
 Harrington, Melchisidec, 61, 
 171 
 
 Hearn, Lafcadio, on the re- 
 ligion of Nature 81, on the 
 greatness of Meredith's 
 poetry 82 
 
 Hedger, Andrew, and eating 
 hog 100, 175 
 
 Henderson, Mrs. Sturge, work 
 on Meredith vii 
 
 Henley, W. E., quoted on 
 Meredith 192, 227 
 
 233 
 
Index 
 
 Hillford, Junction Club, 176, 
 
 222 
 Hippogriff, the, 142, the magic 
 
 steed 184 
 Homer 5, 49, 161, 193 
 House on the Beach, The, loi 
 Human Life, the lore of 210, 
 
 217 
 
 Ideas, their explosive force 140 
 Ines, his fight with Todd 118, 
 
 179 
 Intellectual as novelist, the, 14, 
 
 in Meredith's novels 164 
 Intimations of Immortality, Ode 
 
 on the, quoted 55 
 Ipley 109, 176, 222 
 
 James, Mr. Henry, novelist of 
 the nebulous 220, 224 
 
 Jenkinson, Mrs. Mountstuart, 
 29, 138, 165, 169 
 
 Jessopp, Dr., and The Ordeal 
 169 
 
 Jocelyn, Lady, 169 
 
 Jocelyn, Rose, 61, 88, 147, 152, 
 
 179 
 Johnson, Dr. Samuel, 172 note, 
 and the little fishes 193, com- 
 pared with Meredith 221 
 Jones, Tom, 8, 164, 224 
 Jonson, Ben, and Shakespeare 
 
 185 
 
 Karsteg, Dr. Julius von, con- 
 tempt for England 125 
 
 Keats, and the lark 78, and the 
 age from 15-25, 223 
 
 Kirby, Carinthia, 87, 89, a 
 beautiful Gorgon 140, 216 
 
 Kirby, Chillon, 176, 178 
 
 Landor, Walter Savage, quoted 
 
 lOI 
 
 Lark Ascending, The, quoted 78 
 Laughter, best of human fruits 
 
 ^3 
 
 Laxley, Ferdinand, 171 
 Livia, the Countess, 140, 169 
 London, a " brothpot of 
 
 brains " 102 
 Love in a Valley 73, 78, 82, 164 
 Lovell, Mrs., Indian widow 
 
 140, 165, 200 
 
 Macaulay, Lord, 193 
 
 McKechnie, Rev. James, on 
 The Shaving of Shagpat 67 
 note, 142 
 
 Mackenzie, ]\Ir. Compton, re- 
 ferred to 223, his character 
 Michael Fane 224 
 
 " Man of Two Minds, The," 
 Diana's romance 116 
 
 Manx, M.P., Mr. Quintin, 179 
 
 Marks, Prince, 46, 50 
 
 Marriage, The Amazing, 118, 
 140, " manipulation of mean- 
 ings " 159, 180, quoted 100, 
 149,228, 149, 157 
 
 Marsett, Mrs., her dubious past 
 96, 115, 157 
 
 Mattock, Jane, 179 
 
 Mattock, John, 179 
 
 Meredith, George (see also his 
 Letters and various Poems), 
 his banquet of life 10, his 
 critical faculty 10, culminat- 
 ing figure in history of novel 
 12, his teeming mind 16, his 
 conversation 16, an ironist 
 17, his conception of life 19, 
 of d/xaOia 19, his youthful 
 heroes 35-69, French esprit 
 43, grandson of a tailor 61, 
 nobly responsive to true 
 sentiment 64, much of him 
 in his presentation of youth 
 69, as poet 70-84, his lack of 
 rhythm 72, dominated by 
 " brain " 73, pronuncia- 
 mentos on ethics and theo- 
 logy 74, philosophy of Earth 
 75, 77, 80, as a philosopher 
 
 234 
 
Index 
 
 85-128, and women 86, his 
 heroines 87, and Mrs. Grundy 
 90, marriage a sacrament 97, 
 walked a quick pace loi, the 
 Tyrol loi, and asceticism 105, 
 and petrifying beliefs 106, 
 treatment of great problems 
 106, wine 109-110, politics 
 no, John Bull 1 1 3-1 14, pro- 
 gress 120, National Defence 
 122, and France 123, and 
 Germany 125, and the press 
 126, his style 131, 1 44-151, 
 his obscurity 133, his wit 134, 
 his metaphors 137, descrip- 
 tive passages 148-149, his 
 plots 151, his gusto 158, con- 
 struction of scenes 159, his 
 dialogue 159, his characters 
 161, a new type 163, his uni- 
 verse 164, and the school- 
 master 168, his names for his 
 characters 178-179, and the 
 Classics 168, his Olympians 
 169, his rustics 173, his range 
 of characters 177-178, his 
 personality proj ected into 
 his works 181, his poetic 
 quality 182, his impetuous 
 
 , mental energy 183, a com- 
 posite of various natures 183, 
 an intellectual Euphuist 191, 
 a master of speech 195, and 
 the pathetic 197, compared 
 with other writers 195-204, 
 his contribution to the Eng- 
 lish novel 205, conception of 
 tragedy 207, and the future 
 of man 2 1 6, an Olympian 2 18, 
 no saeva indignatio 219, his 
 wisdom 220, nohilmente 224, 
 and cynicism 225. See also 
 headings Nature and Women 
 
 Meyedith, Letters of, quotations 
 from, on sentimentalists 23, 
 to Leslie Stephen 102, re 
 Leslie Stephen 166, on wine 
 
 no, on love 107, on French 
 realism 107, on conscription 
 122, on Germany 126 
 
 Merion, Diana. See Diana 
 Warwick 
 
 Middleton, Clara, 19, 31-33, 87, 
 88, 138, 152, 158, 166. 167, 
 170, 177, 179, 196, 203, 207 
 
 Middleton, Dr., 31-33, on wine 
 no, 158, 165, 166, 206 
 
 Milton, John, Dryden on him 
 182, makes God the Father 
 speak like a school divine 217 
 
 Mount, Mrs., 41 
 
 Modern Love, sonnets on 73, 
 82, quoted 207 note 
 
 Morton, Henry, 165, 223 
 
 Narrative instinct, the, 5 
 
 Nature, Meredith and 77, ob- 
 servation of 78, 80, in the 
 novels 99, 191. See also 
 Earth and Pantheism 
 
 Nell, Little, 196 
 
 Newman, Cardinal J. H., 
 quoted 210 
 
 Noorna bin Noorka 67 
 
 Novel, the, modern epic 6, its 
 developments 8, criticism of 
 life 10, a lofty branch of 
 literature 11, its philosophis- 
 ing tendency 11, 163, the 
 science of human life 13, 
 brain and the novel 14-16 
 
 Novelist, modern, his tech- 
 nique 7, necessary qualifica- 
 tions 9, as psychologist 12, 
 15, scientist and philosopher 
 14, his problems of psy- 
 chology 212 
 
 Nubbles, Kit, 197 
 
 Olympians, the, of Meredith 
 
 TOI, 160, 205 
 
 Ormont, Lord, on women 92, 
 on the battle of Trafalgar 
 122, 152 
 
Ind 
 
 ex 
 
 Orniont, Lord, and his Aminta 
 
 92, 169-175, 180 
 Ottilia of Eppenwelzen-Sar- 
 
 keld, the Princess, 59 
 
 Pagnell, Mrs, Nargett, and the 
 upper classes 172, "we 
 rhyme with spaniel" 179 
 
 Pantheism in Meredith 103- 
 108, 216 
 
 Patterne, Captain, the marine 
 
 31. 171 
 Patterne, Cross] ay, 29, 31, 32, 
 
 167, 207 
 Patterne Hall 177 
 Patterne, the Misses, 158,169 
 Patterne, Sir Willoughby, 17, 
 
 19, 27-33, has a leg 19, 138, 
 
 139. 147. 159, 165, 167. 170, 
 177, final scene 178, 206, 
 220 
 
 Paulet, Lord, 152 
 
 Pempton, Miss, the anti-alco- 
 hol ist 178 
 
 Pendennis, Mr. Arthur, 206, 
 218 
 
 Peridon, Mr., 178 
 
 Plot, the perfect 153 
 
 Poetry, its different mani- 
 festations 71, a matter of 
 nice equipoise 74 
 
 Pole, the Misses, ig, 23, 26, 171 
 
 Pole, Mr., senior 23, 24 
 
 Pole, Wilfrid, 24, 26, 223 
 
 Powys, iNIerthyr, 118 
 
 Pryme, Sir Twickenham, 112 
 
 Pii'/se, The Empty, 74, 76 
 
 Quilp 196 
 
 Quincey, Thomas de, 195 
 
 Radnor, Nesta, 138, 157, 178, 
 206 
 
 Radnor, Mrs. Burman. See 
 Burman, Mrs. 
 
 Radnor, Victor, 93-98, " a gold- 
 fish in his globe, a pot on the 
 
 fire with a loose lid "95, an 
 optimist 121, 177, 178, 225 
 Raikes and Duchesses 65, 177 
 Raynham Abbey 158, 177 
 Redworth, Thomas, on a house- 
 holder's proper income 119, 
 his Englishness 120, on " the 
 irony of fate" 219 note 
 Rhodes, Arthur, 176 
 Richmond, Augustus Fitz- 
 George Roy, 58, a hero of 
 quackery 59, a self-seeking 
 Beauchamp 60, and Squire 
 Beltham 158 
 Richmond, Harry, 165 note 
 Richmond, Harry, 57-59, the 
 
 dpiareia of a quack 57 
 Rickney, a typical journalist 
 
 127 
 Romeo and Juliet 37, 41, 42, 52, 
 
 152 
 Romfrey, Everard, 56, 112, 170, 
 
 his name 178 
 RUdiger, Clotilde von, -14-50, 
 
 195 
 Runningbrook, Mr. Tracy, 179 
 
 Saintsbury, Professor, on the 
 modern novel 8 
 
 Saldar, the Countess dc, 62, and 
 implying things 136, a light- 
 house 139, her departure 
 from Beckley Court 158, 159, 
 166 
 
 Sandoe, Diaper, 42 
 
 Schlesien, Dr., his politeness, 
 141 
 
 Scott, Sir Walter, and the his- 
 torical novel II, the simple 
 style 163, and money 188, a 
 great improvisatore 201 
 
 ScriJ)t, The Pilgrim's, 38, 39, 166 
 
 Sedgett, Nicodemus, 152, 158, 
 179, 220 
 
 Sentimentalism 18, 23-27 
 
 Seraglio Point 86 
 
 Shagpat, Shaving of, viii, 66-68, 
 
 236 
 
Index 
 
 an allegory 143, 155, 157, 
 189 
 
 Shakespeare, William, 16, 49, 52, 
 two characters only in him ? 
 69, his heroines 87, and Mere- 
 dith 183, 185, 207, 208, 220 
 
 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, and the 
 ^ lark 15, quoted 37, 78, his 
 godhead 1S6 
 
 Shrapnel, Dr., 56, 104, 165, 
 179, Meredith and Shrapnel 
 183, 214 
 
 Skepsey, a water-wagtail 123, 
 141, the bee in his bonnet 
 
 173. 179. 198 note 
 Smith, Mr. Sullivan, 119 
 Smith, Mr. Van Diemen, 179 
 Smollett, Tobias, his insertions 
 
 in his novels 157 
 Snobbery 171. See Evan Har- 
 rington 
 Socrates, his conception of 
 
 wrong 19, 207 
 South-west wind 99, 100, 147 
 Sowerby, the Hon. Dudley, 66, 
 
 95, 115, 119, 136, 139, 
 
 sugared acid of his mouth 178 
 Spectator, The (Joseph Addison) 
 
 194 
 Stephen, Leslie, sat for Vernon 
 
 Whitford 166, 102. See also 
 
 Meredith, Letters of 
 Sterne, Laurence, wallows in 
 
 sentimental 146 
 Stevenson, Robert Louis, on 
 
 Love in a Valley 82 
 Strike, Captain in the Marines 
 
 61, 179 
 Style 129, 191 
 Sumfit, Mrs., 177, 200 
 Swift, Benjamin, his style 193 
 Swinburne, Mr., and anapaests 
 
 72, on Modern Love 82 
 
 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, criti- 
 cised by Meredith 76, In 
 Memoriam quoted 218 
 
 Thackeray, W. M., criticism of 
 life 10, his "puppets" 11, 
 67, delightful style 145, his 
 plots 154, 155, and his 
 readers 156, on snobbery 
 171, his easy moralising 197, 
 an uncle 218, 225 note 
 
 Thompson, Ripton, " the boy 
 without a character " 39, 176 
 
 Thucydides and Meredith, re- 
 lative difficulty of 192 
 
 Tinleys, the, 23 
 
 Todd the boxer 118 
 
 Tonans, Mr., the editor 116, 
 maker of to-morrow 127 
 
 Top, The Whipping, 121 
 
 " Tramps," the, 10 1 
 
 Trevelyan, Mr. G. M., his Clio 
 a Muse vi, on The Lark 
 Ascending 78, on Meredith's 
 poems 74, 83, 190, 192 
 
 Verisopht, Lord F., 197 
 
 Veronica, Ann, 91, 203 
 
 Verrall, Professor A. W., vi, 
 definition of wit 136, 159 
 
 Veuve, Old, 108, 109 
 
 Virgil and the causes of things, 
 quoted 209 
 
 Vittoria. See Sandra Aemilia 
 Belloni 
 
 Vittoria in England. See San- 
 dra Belloni 
 
 Warbeach River, its people 
 
 176, 200 
 Warwick, Diana, 115, 119, 159, 
 
 165, 166, 205, 216, 223, 225, 
 
 226 
 Wathin, Mrs, Cramborne, 117, 
 
 179 
 Waverley, Edward, 165, 223 
 Wells, Mr. H. G., 203, 221, 225 
 Wessex Novels, the, 99, 174, 
 
 202 
 Westermain, The^Woods of, 
 
 quoted 70, 82, 174 
 
 237 
 
Index 
 
 Weyburn, Matthew, 77, and 
 Divine Lav/ 93, 147, 152, and 
 prayer 104, Burgundy 109, 
 his character 167 
 
 Whitford, Vernon, 19, "Phoe- 
 bus Apollo turned fasting 
 friar" 138, 153, 165, 166, 206 
 
 Wilming Weir, idyll of 147, 
 148 
 
 Woman, Meredith's attitude 
 towards 86-98, 170, 216 
 
 Woodseer, Gower, 166, 172 
 Wordsworth, William, a pioneer 
 84, and Nature 102, noble 
 austerity of 145, the stamp- 
 collector 186 
 Wythan, Owain, 118 
 
 Youth 35-69, lacking in char- 
 acter 65 
 
 Zeel the garlic-seller 176 
 
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