GEORGE MEREDITH TO ANY WHO DESIRE TO JOIN "THAT ACUTE AND HONOURABLE MINORITY WHICH CONSENTS TO BE THWACKED WITH APHORISMS AND SENTENCES AND A FANTASTIC DELIVERY OF THE VERITIES." GEORGE MEREDITH Introduction to his Novels JAMES MOFFATT HODDER AND STOUGHTON NEW YORK AND LONDON Printed at The Edinburgh Frew Sixty-eight Old Bailey B.C. Contents Pe PREFACE INTRODUCTION . , * , 1 THE SHAVING OF SHAGPAT . . 67 FARINA . -V ' . . 83 THE ORDEAL OF RICHARD FEVEREL . 91 EVAN HARRINGTON . . . .117 EMILIA IN ENGLAND (SANDRA BELLONI) 137 RHODA FLEMING 155 VITTORIA -. . . . , . 171 THE ADVENTURES OF HARRY RICHMOND 191 Page BEAUCHAMP'S CAREER . . .209 THE HOUSE ON THE BEACH . . 231 THE CASE OF GENERAL OPLE AND LADY CAMPER . / . . 239 THE TALE OF CHLOE . . ; .247 THE EGOIST 255 THE TRAGIC COMEDIANS . . .275 DIANA OF THE CROSSWAYS . . .289 ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS . .> . 309 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA . . 335 THE AMAZING MARRIAGE . . .353 INDEX 401 ri Introduction. ABOUT the middle of last century a shrewd American sat down to record some impressions of our English character which he had received during a recent visit to this island. He closed his chapter upon literature with the comfortable reflec- tion that after all some retrieving power lay in the English race, which would eventually produce a recoil from the limitations of "a self-conceited, modish life, clinging to a corporeal civilization," beefy, mechanical, and averse to ideas. Like a genuine Platonist, Emerson recollected that there were two nations in England : not the Nor- mans and the Saxons, not Gelt and Goth, not the rich and the poor, but "the perceptive class and the practical finality class." There was the nation of genius, perhaps amounting to a dozen souls, and there was the nation of animal force, which numbered some twenty George Meredith millions. It seemed to him that these differ- ent complexions or types of nature must re- act on one another. To their interchange and counterpoise he considered that the English character owed a large measure of its virility. Only three years or so after the idealist of Concord had published his survey, the smaller of these nations was to receive at least one notable recruit in the person of a novelist who was not afraid to state that he specially wanted "the practical Englishman to settle his muzzle in a nosebag of ideas." The year 1859 may be taken, for the sake of conven- ience, as one of the landmarks in the English literature of the nineteenth century. Before it closed, Leigh Hunt, de Quincey, Hallam and Macaulay passed away, while Thackeray and Dickens gave to the world their evening gifts in "The Virginians" and "A Tale of Two Cities." Carlyle's work lay almost en- tirely behind him. New lights were rising. "The Idylls of the King," Fitzgerald's "Omar Khayyam," Mill's essay on Liberty, "The Origin of Species," and "Adam Bede," all published in 1859, usher in the later period of Victorian literature. Freeman and 2 Introduction Froude, Huxley and Tyndall, were just enter- ing the arena, while Spencer was presently to follow them. "The Defence of Guene- vere" had recently caught the attention of the cultured, and in the following year Swin- burne was to woo deaf ears with "The Queen Mother" and "Rosamund." "Adam Bede " took the wind out of the sails of most contemporary fiction upon the serious tack, however, and among that becalmed class must be reckoned a prose romance entitled "The Ordeal of Richard Feverel." It was written by a young Londoner, hitherto known for the most part as the author of some rather unsuccessful verse and of two fantastic stories whose merit and promise had been generously recognised by the discerning few, and cordially reviewed it is a pleasure to re- call by George Eliot herself, no fewer than three times. It would be idle and impertinent to raise the veil which Meredith's reticence and modesty have drawn over his career. His life is in his books, though few writers have published perhaps so much and left their per- sonalities so deeply in the shadow. Such 3 George Meredith items of his biography as are relevant to this sketch can be stated very briefly. He was born in Hampshire, on the 12th of February, in the same year as Ibsen and Tolstoy, 1828, with the blood of working-people in his veins. His father was of Welsh extraction, his mother of Irish. After they separated he was educated in Germany, and it is superfluous to point out the significance of this for his intellectual development. Returning to this country in his sixteenth year, he was appren- ticed unwillingly to the study of law, from which, like Dickens, he soon rolled off" into literature and journalism, acting, for example, as the war-correspondent of the Morning Post in Italy during 1866. He first tried verse, in a simple, lyric vein. His later poetry became a more characteristic medium of utterance, but he is never pensive, or blithe, or stately for long, and, as an acute re- viewer once pointed out, verse with him virtually tends to become more and more " a kind of imaginative logic, a reasoning in pic- tures." Meredith ultimately became a poet of almost the first rank, within certain limit- ations, but from the very first he was a poet Introduction in his prose. Yet even his early prose, im- measurably finer than his early verse, won quite an inadequate hearing. Recognition came slowly to his door, and amid deprecia- tion and comparative neglect he had to struggle for years with actual privation. One solace in this ordeal was his friendship with a brilliant coterie of men, including James Thomson, the author of "The City of Dread- ful Night," and that strange humourist, Thomas Love Peacock, whose daughter be- came Meredith's first wife. Holman Hunt thus describes his appearance about this time : "Of nut-brown hair and blue eyes, the per- fect type of a well-bred Englishman, he stood about five feet eight." Eventually he shared the curious household organised at Chelsea by Swinburne and the two Rossettis, but four men of genius within four walls are scarcely a permanent concourse of atoms, and Mere- dith's stay was only shorter than that of Swinburne. His later years were mostly spent amid the Surrey hills, gladdened by the widening reputation which the years brought tardily around his name. Public apprecia- tion of his genius was comparatively slow 5 George Meredith and limited. This has been partly due to the peculiar nature of his work, partly, perhaps, to the general state of the English literary conscience when he first made his appeal to the reading public if it be true, as Professor Saintsbury declares, that our criticism had reached a humiliating nadir between 1840 and 1860. Meredith's reception at any rate is not an isolated phenomenon ; it illustrates the familiar law that contemporary criticisms of a masterpiece are often a stagger- ing bequest to posterity. He had to row against the tide, and the effort was harder for him than for many others. His ideal of prose- fiction was in daring revolt against the con- ventional canons of an age which was not prepared to welcome even a consummate genius setting itself to be the exponent of life lived under restless tendencies due to the scientific movement and the ethical idealism of the period, with its sense of social respon- sibility and trend towards introspectiveness. He also share'd the tendency of the Victorian period to be less inspired and more artistic than its predecessor, and in this way became a voice for other audiences than those found 6 Introduction in the market-place. "My way," he con- fessed, "is like a Rhone island in the summer drought, stony, unattractive and difficult, between the two forceful streams of the un- real and the over-real. My people are actual, yet uncommon. It is the clock-work of the brain that they are directed to set in motion." Or, in another of his metaphors, he set out to make a road between Adam and Macadam, and he did so, using prose-fiction to mirror contemporary life as it lay between the ani- mal existence and the artificial. To this task he brought imagination and penetration, flexi- bility of mind and a cosmopolitan freedom of outlook, gifts which were certain to prevail before long with the competent, but as certain to miss immediate or widespread favour with people who found it difficult to appreciate his methods or to sympathise with his peculiar aims. For, however it may be rated, his work must be allowed to possess distinction. Even a casual reader can hardly fail to be impressed by its sense of power and its absence of echoes. In reach and range it breathes an originality, often a daring originality, which 7 George Meredith differentiates it easily from previous or con- temporary fiction. The influence of Richard- son has been traced here and there, but taken as a whole, Meredith's work occupies a class of its own and goes back to few serious pat- terns. There is, indeed, more than a remin- iscence of Peacock, e.g., in the fantastic ele- ment which occasionally crops up, from "The Shaving of Shagpat " that amazingly witty burlesque of the Arabian Nights to the weariful apologues of Delphica and the Rajah in London which disfigure that already tangled web, " One of Our Conquerors." Dr. Folliot in "Crotchet Castle" is cousin to Dr. Middleton in "The Egoist," and the idea underlying books like "Maid Marian" and "Farina" is substantially the same an at- tempt to reproduce, with gentle satire, the mediaeval romance of sentiment and gay adventure. The whimsical element, in " Nightmare Abbey," for example, the bril- liant dialogue of " Melincourt " and "Head- long Hall," the attitude of keen and even caustic humour towards contemporary society and its foibles, the admixture of raillery and sympathy, the subservience of the love- Introduction interest to wider matters, the Rabelaisian fling, the dash of farce, the combination of narra- tive and dissertation, the sense that nothing can be too good and few things too bad to be laughed at these are some of the elements common to Peacock and his distinguished son- in-law, although the latter is exact and careful in his use of language and free from outbursts of boyish petulance. In the prelude to " The Egoist," and occasionally in the rhapsodical apostrophes and some of the ethical concep- tions throughout the novels especially, there are not indistinct echoes of Garlyle, for whom, as readers of "Beauchamp's Career" will recollect, Meredith, like Dickens had undisguised admiration. Garlyle is one of the few contemporary writers directly men- tioned by the novelist, and the affinities of thought and even expression between the two writers demand rather more attention than seems to have been as yet bestowed on them. How much of Meredith's own succinct and irregular style, for example, is recalled in his famous account of " Heroes and Hero- Worship" "a style resembling either early architecture or utter dilapidation, so loose and 9 George Meredith rough it seemed ; a wind-in-the-orchard style, that tumbled down here and there an appre- ciable fruit with uncouth bluster ; sentences without commencements running to abrupt endings and smoke, like waves against a sea- wall ... all the pages in a breeze, the whole book producing a kind of electrical agitation in the mind and the joints. " Many a reader of Meredith has felt precisely like Nevil Beau- champ in Malta, as he read the black and bright lecturer on Heroes, "getting nibbles of golden meaning by instalments, as with a solitary pick in a very dark mine, until the illumination of an idea struck him that there was a great deal more in the book than there was in himself." It is this volume and animation, informed by a brilliant style and imagination of a very high order, that constitutes the main title of George Meredith to literary fame. His work has been remarkably sustained and even in quality. " Richard Feverel " was pronounced by the Times to be "a powerful work, pene- trative in its depth of insight and rich in its variety of experience." It is a remarkable piece of writing, but it is doubly remarkable 10 Introduction when we consider that it was composed by a man of thirty as his first serious romance, and as far back as 1859. Plenty of writers possess ability enough to secure one conspicuous success, comparatively speaking, and there are authors in every age who practically live upon the reputation of a single early work. But " Richard Feverel" was only the first blossom of Meredith's genius. It was not tentative nor did it exhaust the author's power. The long line of its successors proved that he possessed intellectual resources versatile and serious enough to deserve the closest consideration from anyone who would estimate the central currents of literary influence flowing through the Victorian era. A dozen times at least in almost every one of his novels we stop to say, "this is literature"; the workmanship wears what Coventry Patmore called "the glittering crown of wit," viz., "a synthesis of gravity of matter and gaiety of manner." But Meredith is more than a litterateur. There are passages which arrest and impress the reader with a still deeper feeling, when the mass of thought or the thrill of action is clothed upon with passion, and words fit ti George Meredith emotion with a felicitousness or a closeness which seems inevitable. At Belthorpe or at Wilming Weir, with Emilia singing in the wood, over Clare Doria Forey's diary and the marine duet in "Lord Ormont and his Aminta," with Mazzini in Italy or Beauchamp at Venice, at the cricket supper in "Evan Harrington" or with Harry and Temple on the Priscilla, with Lord Fleetwood at his prize fight and Diana Warwick at the Crossways over these and fifty other passages, salt and aglow with the breath of reality, the pulse quickens. We forget the author, we forget the book ; the word springs to our lips, "This this is life." The sense of style and com- position, elsewhere (it must be owned) not always unobtrusive, falls away before the consciousness of life seen and life shown. Genius is not a word to be applied broadcast, particularly among novelists, but no other term is adequate to such proofs of mental power. No doubt there are tracts in Meredith over which, more or less reasonably, people gasp and yawn, but these are trifling compared to the total achievement of the author, and it is upon the evidence of such passages as I 12 Introduction have indicated that in all fairness he must be judged. A racehorse, Montaigne will tell you in his acute and charitable way, is remem- bered not by his defeats but by the races he has won. If novels are to be written on a theory, it is good to have the theory expounded by the novelist himself, as by Fielding in the preface to "Joseph Andrews." Thanks to scattered hints throughout the novels, principally in defence of his hand-maiden Philosophy, as well as to the published "Essay upon Comedy," we possess sufficient points to enable us roughly to calculate the curve pur- sued by Meredith's vivacious, graceful genius. Take first and foremost these lines from his "Modern Love." He writes : In tragic life, God wot, No villain need be ! Passions spin the plot : We are betrayed by what is false within. The heart of Meredith's method lies in these three lines, and it is true to the Aristotelian canon. There are really no villains in his novels. The oversong of the philosophy which dominates his prose, is that character amounts to fate ; some inward twist of the 13 George Meredith soul, some mental deviation, that explains the mischief done by a man to himself or others. Impulses and motives swarm in the pool of consciousness, and over that pool you find Meredith bending eagerly. It is rippled by circumstance, to be sure, but he is mainly engrossed in a minute and varied study of that " busy little creature," the human self, with its attendant infusoria of whims and passions. This was not by any means a new departure in fiction. Such a psychological attitude had been already occupied by George Eliot, whose lineal successor in this direction Meredith undoubtedly may claim to be ; and it is not perhaps insignificant that the definitive edition of the Com6die Humaine was published in the same year as "Richard Feverel." But es giebt kein Plagiat in der Philosophic, and this interest in mental chemistry is perennial. Meredith captivates his audience at any rate by quite an original application of the psycho- logical method, combining the unconcern of the artist with something of the keen serious- ness felt by a responsible thinker. He sums all this up conveniently in the phrase "the Comic Spirit"; a hint which supplies us with 14 Introduction the colours upon his palette and the features of the one model who sits to him in all manner of positions for her portrait. The " Comic Spirit n represents an attitude of mind to life. Contemplative passion or better still impassioned contemplation might be taken as its definition. It is the ethos of a calm, curious observer, alive to the pretences and foibles of mankind, yet loving them none the less that he is thus acutely sensitive to their untrained opinions, their affectations, pedantries, delusions, inconsistencies, hypo- crisies. The Comic Spirit is incisive. But it is creative and instructive, as well as critical. It represents the wit of wisdom, sly, shrewd, and sympathetic as we find it, for example, in Chaucer or in Shakespeare, the Shake- speare of Theseus in the "Midsummer Night's Dream " as he chides Hippolyta. In Meredith it plays upon men's motives as these are rippled by the social world. It feels for the springs of action lying in the ideas rather than in the appetites of man. Life, Meredith pro- tests, is crossed and recrossed by people who drift into absurdities, or riot in unconscious vanities, or make pretensions, or violate indi- 15 George Meredith vidually and in the bulk unwritten laws of justice, reason, and good sense, getting them- selves into every kind of tragic or false position. The Comic Spirit traces in all this "what is false within," what pulls the strings. And its object is not malign. Really it is on the side of hope, imagination, and romance ; it is never spiteful or superior. It prevents the lassitude of indifference and delivers from a bitter and mad despair. You come near denning it when you speak of "the humour of the mind," rich and warm and wise, which strives to transmute sympathy from intolerable pain into active interest, and which is pleasantly bent upon disen- tangling commonsense from its corruptions and from what is often worse its caricatures. What then is the proper field of the Comic Spirit? Evidently social life, and especially the refined and polished existence peculiar to the trim parks of modern civilisation, "where we have no dust of the struggling outer world, no mire, no violent crashes." Like his favourite poets, Menander, Terence, and Moltere, Meredith is a painter of man- nersmanners being ultimately mores. He 16 Introduction is deeply concerned with the qualities and conditions of contemporary society, the marsh where the plant of his quest grows luxuriantly. Man's future on earth, he is frank to confess, does not concern the Comic Spirit ; but man's honesty and shape- liness in the present does. To Meredith, accordingly, the state of English society with its mental lethargy, is a fair province for the exercise of his analysis. "The English," we read, "are people requiring to be studied, who mean well, and are warm somewhere below, as chimney-pots are, though they are so stiff. " ' ' They call themselves practical for hav- ing an addiction to the palpable." This applies mainly to the upper classes ; for although Meredith hardly ever fails in depicting coun- try folk or vulgar natures, these are foils as a rule to the leading figures, and his method naturally leads him to find his central pivots elsewhere. He succeeds, where Dickens failed, with his aristocrats. Over and again his microscope is turned upon the British aristocracy or upper middle class, not seldom (like the Matthew Arnold of "Culture and Anarchy") upon young gentlemen "who are 17 George Meredith simply engines of their appetites and to the philosophic eye " quite savage and primeval. His backgrounds range from Wales to Italy; German socialism, the Italian or Spanish War of Independence, English politics, mining, education, railways, the navy any- thing to throw into relief the pettiness of luxury, whether luxury means the wrapping up of the mind or the indulgence of the appetites. It is noticeable, too, that he is fond of introducing some conflict and play of different temperaments, either social or racial, English or foreign ; for example, Celtic and Italian, Radical and Tory, Conservative and Philis- tine, artistic and patriotic. This is due not merely to his fine cosmopolitanism, elevated above any Florentine idea offuori, but to the obvious advantages afforded by such situa- tions for the trial and purgation of character Emergencies and exigencies like these pro- vide ample and easy material for the Comic Spirit alert to understand the workings of our British nature. Too busy to be diverted by the contemporary revival of mediaevalism, Meredith has strenuously warred against the solid materialism and complacent impcr vious- 18 Introduction ness to ideas which, in his judgment, distinguish and imperil the fat, opulent epoch lying under his own eyes. How ironical is such a use of the English novel ! In Meredith's hands it is a sort 1 of boomerang, as is apparent when we recollect the circumstances of its origin, in an essentially unheroic and prosaic society of people, who were (as T. H. Green excellently puts it) quite "self-satisfied and pleased with their surroundings." Satire lavished on this state of things is not effec- tive. Native obtuseness proves too thick for most of its quick shafts. Besides, prop- erly speaking, the satirist is but semi-artistic; like the bluebottle, to borrow from Emilia's fancy, he only sings when he is bothered. Meredith has the gentler and more piercing method of delicately analysing a decadent society to itself, and assisting health by the revelation of innate capacities for mischief as subtle and formidable as bacilli. An artist to the finger-tips, he would be inadequately described as a man of letters. He is that, but he is more. Not unlike Hugo and Tolstoy, he can allow his art to be saturated with his ethic, and yet retain the essentials of 19 George Meredith the artist's glamour ; which is wise indeed for an author who addresses people rightly suspicious of prose or verse that has designs upon them. But this ethical interest steers wide of malignant irony and cynicism, those barbarian forms of humour. They are spiteful and superior. They represent a savage type of the genuine Comic Spirit, and Meredith is at pains to show, in characters like Adrian Harley and Colney Durance, how ineffec- tive and subordinate a place is assigned to the satirical temper in the direction of affairs. What are the spurts of satire? " Darkening jests on a river of slime." The Comic Spirit is a spirit of silvery laughter. " You may estimate your capacity for comic perception by being able to detect the ridicule of them you love, without loving them less." Meredith's art, indeed, like that of all genuine humourists, rises from deep pools of gravity. Laughter, with him, to be legitimate must be the child of sympathy and of delight. It is infinitely serious, too serious to be cynical or pessimistic. To be cynical, he bluntly declares, is merely the raw attempt of the worldly man to appear deep ; 20 Introduction as a form of mental and moral superficiality, it should be dismissed by the penetrative observer with derision. Neither depression nor scepticism is the ultimate attitude towards the inconsistencies and errors of the race. "Who is the coward among us ? He who sneers at the failings of Humanity." "What is contempt," he asks again, "but an excuse to be idly minded, or personally lofty, or comfortably narrow, not perfectly humane ? " Meredith never sneers. He is never savage or morose, hardly ever mocking in the vein of Ibsen and Anatole France, though he can be caustic when he chooses. The controlling principle of his work is to be nobly serious and witty, often in the same breath. Wit with him has a surgical function in contemporary society, but this does not involve an accumulation of physiological details or the pursuit of human documents. Folly indeed seems to him cap- able of ever new shapes in an effeminate and decadent age. A pestilence flieth abroad ; but its infection is to be met by common- sense allied to laughter. " The vigilant Comic Spirit as the genius of thoughtful laughter " 21 George Meredith such is Meredith's contribution to the moral sanitation of the day. It is too intellectual, too limited in its range, too rarefied, to be a per- fect purge, but it has a function of its own. He is never done praising laughter, thought- ful laughter. It clears the heart, as thunder clears the air. It is the wine and bread of sanity. In his opinion, one great cure for the age and its troubles would be reached if people could be persuaded first of all to laugh at themselves a little, and thus get rid of silly pride and obstinacy ; then to laugh, with trembling in their mirth, at other people, instead of growing impatient and angry at the follies and affectations of the race. Folly is the natural prey of the Comic Spirit; and if people are to be lifted out of folly, with its pretensions, its love of posing, its indulgence of the senses or the emotions at the expense of the mind, the first step is to make them smart and meditate. Meredith, like Thackeray, although with weapons of a different calibre, strikes at his age, with its absurdities and maladies, in a splendid discon- tent. But his blows are as positive in direc- tion as they are delivered with artistic grace. 22 Introduction To resume a simile applied somewhere by Chateaubriand to Cromwell's revolutionary methods, he destroys what he encounters in much the same peremptory and deliberate fashion as Michael Angelo destroyed the marble with his chisel. Unflinching realism of this kind helps to make Meredith's optimism both grate- ful and convincing. "I can hear a faint crow of the cocks of fresh mornings far, far, yet distinct." However the artistic merits of the two writers be adjusted, there is no doubt that the moral atmosphere in Thomas Hardy's novels is distinctly autumnal : in Meredith, upon the other hand, it is that of a bright, keen day in spring, when to be out- of-doors is a healthy joy for those who do not mind tingling ears and cheeks slapped by the rain. This were the word less ugly might be termed his meliorism. He stands much nearer to an invigorating cordial Scandi- navian, like his contemporary Bjornson, than to the sombre genius of Ibsen. He contests and challenges, because it seems to him worth while to do so. The tide is usually turning on his beach. Face all the facts, he 23 George Meredith insists, instead of shrouding inconvenient things in a painted veil of sentiment ; yet as eagerly he urges "the rapture of the forward view," and with elastic optimism hurries on to administer a sharp rebuke to those who nod gloomily and dolefully over progress, breaking into Jobisms over the nightmare of "life as a wheezy crone." Ideals, or idols, are not always gifted with two legs. What of that? "Who can really think and not think hopefully?" "When we despair or discolour things, it is our senses in revolt, and they have made the sovereign brain their drudge. . . There is nothing the body suffers, that the soul may not profit by. . . Philosophy bids us to see that we are not so pretty as rosepink, not so repulsive as dirty drab ; and that the sight of ourselves is wholesome, bearable, fructifying, finally a delight." Here we have the ethical soul of Meredith articu- late. It is an optimism which is surer of itself than in Matthew Arnold, and less exasperating, because drawn from deeper fountains, than in Browning ; on its horizon there is the promise, absent from Mark Rutherford's quiet and gray skies, of 24 Introduction a dawn with uplifting power. Meredith knows his Richter, and many sections of his philosophy are little more than a brilliant expansion and application of the German's adage: be great enough to despise the world, and greater in order to esteem it. Only from such a mental attitude does endurance flow: "A fortitude quiet as Earth's At the shedding of leaves." Progress, accordingly, is bound up with mental and moral discipline, alike for men and nations. "Strength is not won by miracle or rape." Shibli must be thwacked, if he is to reach his goal, and the resolute philosophy of thwacking for mind no less than for body and fortune pervades all Meredith's romances. It is the only way to cure egoism with its arrogance and mischief. "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 a base." Or, as Dr. Middleton rudely shocked that arch-sentimentalist Sir Willoughby Patterne 25 George Meredith by blurting out, all unwhipped boys make ill-balanced men. "They won't take rough and smooth as they come. They make bad blood, can't forgive, sniff right and left for approbation, and are excited to anger if an east wind does not flatter them. . . We English beat the world, because we take a licking well." The rain and wind blow through Meredith's verse and prose, and they form by no means an accidental setting. He is an obstinate believer in the sweet uses of adversity, and spends pages of instruction and amusement in an effort to commend the old thesis that the bloom of health comes to the soul as to the body by frank battling with the elements, not by luxurious coddling within doors. "I am well and 'plucky,' a word which I propose to substitute for 'happy' as more truthful." In this remark of George Eliot to Mrs. Bray there is a good deal of Meredith's philosophy about facing facts and accepting adversity bravely. It is at this point that the Comic Spirit pounces, with relentless beak, upon the two cardinal foes to health and progress in con- temporary life. These are both born of the Introduction habit of taking ourselves too seriously, and their names are pride and sentimentalism. To avoid thwackings, to neglect inconvenient ideas and experiences, to shelter oneself be- hind incredulity or disdain from awkward things in the rough, actual world, is the chosen paradise of quite a host of men and women. Meredith's soul does not weep in secret for this mischievous and widespread pride. He darts on it like an unhooded falcon. From first to last, with all his gaiety and gravity, he is engaged in exposing the pride of egoism, to its own shame and good. Social ambition the disposition to rise in the world naturally terms its most obvious expression, as in "The House on the Beach," or better still in that most pitiful tale " Rhoda Fleming " (more pitiful because wider than " The Tale of Chloe") and in the sparkling comedy of "Evan Harrington." But this had been for long exploited by Thackeray, and after all it forms a naive and therefore less dangerous symptom of the disease. ' ' Dombey and Son, " too, had lashed sufficiently the pride of mer- cantile position. Yet more subtle phases lie behind ; the conceit of a peacock, as in the 27 George Meredith strutting vanity of Shibli Bagarag ; a vain pas- sion for hereditary distinction, as in "Harry Richmond;" an affectation of culture and re- finement, as in the Misses Pole ; an attempt to play Providence and cut down nature to suit an artificial theory, as in Sir Austin Feverel : and so on. Pride is a very Proteus in these novels. You have the pride of injured feel- ings, the obstinate pride that (in Lord Ormont and Lord Fleetwood, 'the base Indians' of their tribe) inflicts cruelty half unwittingly upon others and even starves itself for some fancied insult; you have the pride, half creditable, half Quixotic, that drives Richard Feverel from his wife and child, in a passage which Stevenson, with brave enthusiasm, pronounced the "strongest since Shakespeare, in the English tongue"; you have the feudal pride of Egoism, a narrow self-confidence which calmly appropriates as much of the world as it can reach and as calmly dooms the rest. In short, if "passions spin the plot," the master-passion with Meredith's heroes and heroines is pride. Or rather, we should say, false pride. For the author is quick to allow that "a man's pride is the front and 28 Introduction headpiece of his character, his soul's support or snare." It is a snare in almost all the Meredith-romances, to lover, husband, father, man of the world. Life is continually netting itself in the meshes of false pride ; in a refusal to admit one has been wrong, in the disinclination to repair a mistake, in the habit of clinging at all costs to belief in one's own superior wisdom, in the greed of admiration, or the dislike of criticism. The battle of false pride is always against itself, and Meredith is never finer, he is seldom more satisfying, than in portraying this struggle of the soul to ex- tricate itself from the results of a past impulse of passion or from the coil of inherited pre- judice. Tragedy with him consists in showing how this awakening is either inadequate or too late, and failure (in the last analysis) means pride imperfectly beaten out of life. "Surely an unteachable spirit, "he declares, "is one of the most tragic things in life." Which is a variation upon Garlyle's favourite thesis that no one falls into misery without having first tumbled into folly. Perhaps the irony of this is even less evident in the sullen forms of pride than in the disasters that await sheer, 29 George Meredith irrepressible, good-natured souls like Roy Richmond and Victor Radnor, in whom false pride exists as a lovable but fatal spirit of san- guine and infatuated buoyancy. To sentimentalism, or emotional self-indul- gence, which forms the companion weed of highly civilized society, Meredith is equally remorseless. Here also there is to be detected, in his judgment, a fatal lack of that inward and thorough grappling with the facts of life (and by facts Meredith does not exclude ideas) which is the fundamental virtue of his ethic. The sentimentalist lives in unrealities. He looks at Nature with his eyes half-closed, or else he considers some select portions of her. Factitious and morbid, he is a dilettante play- ing delicately and selfishly with extracts from the Book of Life ; the result being that his opinions and aims are essentially false, his aspirations generally little better than mere twitches of egoism, and his tenderness a petty whimper of false sympathy. Peace is his ideal, meaning a lotos-land of freedom from disturbance; "peace, that lullaby word for decay!" A character of this kind is the nat- ural, trashy product of a fat soil, where 30 Introduction wealth and leisure often can be adjusted so as to shut off the elect from impolite Nature. Sentimentalists, as Meredith goes on gravely to explain, are a variety due to a long process of comfortable feeding, but there is one differ- ence between them and the pig. The pig too passes through a training of rich nourish- ment. Only it is not in him combined with an indigestion of high German romance. Pray do justice to the pig! Particularly in the "Egoist" and (with an unwonted note of tragedy) in "Sandra Belloni," Meredith takes wickedldelight in analysing the absurdity and mischief of a spirit which would varnish civilization, or in another metaphor con- ceal the tails of those polished, stately crea- tures who inhabit culture's paradise. Garlyle lashed this Werterism or Transcendentalism ; Heine mocked it ; Emerson pricked it ; Mere- dith laughed it out of court. Sentimentalism in a word spells for him mental immaturity and moral opium. It is, to use his own fine aphorism, enjoyment without obligation, an attempt to taste existence without incurring responsibility. Upon the other hand, the better policy of treating Nature frankly, 31 George Meredith which Meredith shares with the scientific movement of the age, makes an incessant demand upon courage and brains, especially brains. If people are to peruse Nature with virile and keen intelligence and by Nature Meredith seems to mean the whole system of accessible facts and forces within and around the human consciousness an open eye and unflinching sincerity are required ; hence the earliest symptom of philosophy in man is aversion to sentimentalism, in the guise either of self-pity or Byronic melancholy or contempt for the world. Attempts to cheat Nature by ignoring the flesh, for example, are not much less mischievous than the tendency to idolize it. Asceticism and sensuality alike, he is careful to point out, rest upon a common basis of sentimentalism, which is fundament- ally onesided and consequently vicious ; and no reader of "The Egoist" is likely to forget the merciless exposure of a pseudo- Puritanism which in aesthetic and aristocratic superiority bans the rough, wholesome world. Sex and the senses have their place some- where in the moral order, and it is always a grateful service to have the truth enunciated 32 Introduction afresh that Nature with her plain and bracing laws cannot be misjudged or undervalued by any man, however civilized, with impunity. That applies to enigmas as well as to aspira- tions. "We do not get to any heaven by re- nouncing the Mother we spring from; and when there is an eternal secret for us, it is best to believe that Earth knows, to keep near her, even in our utmost aspirations." Thus Meredith finds but empty flashes in the sham spiritualism, so characteristic of the early Victorian age, which affects in prudery or piety to obliterate the physical. To stigmatize it is senseless ; to decorously conceal it is hypocrisy and in the long run though some- times the run is not very long sheer cruelty. The natural precedes the spiritual, which invariably presupposes it. "Nature, though heathenish, reaches at her best to the footstool of the Highest. Through Nature only can we ascend. St. Simeon saw the Hog in Nature, and took Nature for the Hog." But if this uglier under-side of things has to be reckoned with in philosophy and practice, without dainty shudders, it is wholly mis- conceived by those who regard it callously. 33 George Meredith There is no vulgar realism in Meredith. He stands remote from the voluptuousness of the early Swinburne and from the strange acqui- escence in man's earthly bias which recurs, sadly or savagely, in Thomas Hardy. A strong Rabelaisian love of wine and prizefighting and the like, running even to the verge of grossness, pervades some of his pages ; but you are seldom allowed out of hearing of his own adages that "the mistake of the world is to think happiness possible to the senses," and that "all life is a lesson that we live to enjoy but in the spirit." With this proviso, it may be fairly said that uncompromising reality is the supreme note of his ethic ; a note echoed by the one poet of our own day who ap- proaches Meredith upon this plane I mean Mr. William Ernest Henley. Glough is as sincere in resenting the habit of playing tricks with the soul, but his sincerity is practically helpless. The sum of Meredith's deliverance is that you are stepping down not up, if you are amiably taking opium in the soul or singing lullabies to the brain, instead of resolutely facing the web of cause and con- sequence in their real, actual proportions. 34 Introduction Failure to see this elementary principle, he attributes not inaccurately to cowardice, which is simply a form of mental blindness. And when conscience is only a passenger, with the passions and prejudices working the vessel, and the brain a prisoner in the state- cabin, the uncertainty of the future merely consists of the variety of ways in which the final disaster may arrive. '* Resolution," we are told, "is a form of light, our native light in this dubious world." The worst charge against sentimentalism is that it festers a flabby, stupid character, in which courage, the cour- age of veracity, is melted away. Thanks to their conventional training, at least in the earlier Victorian periods at which Meredith's novels began to appear, women especially are apt to find themselves from time to time in a trying situation, before or after marriage, where they are hampered or put in a somewhat false position. Meredith is never weary of depicting such phases of experience, in which moral courage is the one path to safety (not to say, honour), and yet often the least obvious or easy resource open to "those artificial creatures called women 35 George Meredith who dare not be spontaneous, and cannot act independently if they would continue to be admirable in the world's eye." They have to avoid motion, in order "to avoid shattering or tarnishing." That is perhaps why his heroines, like some of George Eliot's, annoy us by the marriages they make. Meredith's ideal is a clear-sighted, free, and sensible womanhood, and he has a rude contempt for the weak, clinging, girl and her emotional delights. The bevy of girls, mainly English, who con- stitute one of the most charming features in his fiction, are no "wandering vessels crying for a pilot," but healthy, open-eyed mates. What a splendid company they are ! Besides Renee and Ottilia, you live with Diana Warwick, Cecilia Halkett, Jenny Denham, Clara Middleton (" the dainty rogue in porcelain "), Rose Jocelyn, Emilia, Aminta, Carinthia ("the haggard Venus"), Julia Rip- penger, Elizabeth Ople, Nesta Radnor, Annette, and Jane Ilchester A troop of maids, brown as burnt heather-bells, And rich with life as moss-roots breathe of earth, In the first plucking of them. 36 Introduction For the womanhood of his women, in their passage from girlhood to maturity and in their relations with one another as well as with men, the highest praise that need be given to Meredith is that' he makes us think, and think without incongruity, of Shakespeare. His heroines have both character and charm ; they are fresh, bright creatures, with a native bloom upon them, and he is versatile enough to succeed with other types ; e.g., the clever old ladies, headed by Lady Eglett and Lady Camper (in that little perfect tale of her re- lations with General Ople), or the stout, cheery* vulgar women represented by Mrs. Berry, Mrs. Grickeldon, and the inimitable Mrs. Chump, who rank with the nurse in " Romeo and Juliet." It is only another taste of his fine quality, in the reading of woman, which the reader finds in the mischievous etchings of the Countess de Saldar, or of Li via and Henrietta in " The Amazing Marri- age," the Misses Pole especially Cornelia and the feminine pariahs in "Richard Feverel" and "One of Our Conquerors." Per contra, Meredith has a Brontesque antipathy to the " veiled, virginal dolly-heroine " of ordinary 37 George Meredith fiction, just as he shows little regard for those who fling over the traces of their sex to "trot upon the borders of the Epicene." Start women on that track, and it is a race- course ending in a precipice. His golden hope seems to be a witty, charming woman, of clear intellect and free [movement, yielding not a feather of her womanliness for some portion of man's strength. If Beauchamp, we may guess, was his own favourite hero, Diana Warwick embodies most of the feminine qualities which he desiderates. The " Ballad of Fair Ladies in Revolt " is sufficient proof that he was in full sympathy with the modern reaction of woman against the conventional restraints of a position which was generally disposed to treat her as a sort of fringe upon human nature, or a creature bound to go in bit and blinkers. Nevertheless, respect for her is assumed as a test of social health. It is the civilization, not the abolition, of marriage which her best friends will advocate. Any- thing less, however specious, means a dance to dissolution. There are a dozen passages in Meredith which indicate this cardinal idea of his social ethics. Consistently upon the 38 Introduction side of women in their demand for a fuller scope, instead of being forced to "march and think in step, the hard-drilled Prussians of society," he is as resolutely against any wild, crude claim for rights which would ignore the individual quality of woman or obliterate the natural distinctions of sex. He would pro- bably have refused to join Ibsen in shaking down the pillars of conventional society. Samson is not his model in reform. His policy rather is lustily to drive out the Philistines from the temple. Naturally, "the ancient game of two," which ends or at least develops in marriage, can hardly fail to form a cen- tral problem for any writer who deals with the bases of modern society ; and Meredith's triumph is that upon this ground he has created women who have brains and judg- ment, yet are women to the core. What are the " Maid of Air " and the " Grace of Clay " compared to the loveliness of the truly natural woman filled with God's fire ? He is neither for Lesbia nor for Beatrice, neither for Aspasia nor for Hypatia ; his quarrel with the average man on behalf of woman is that she is wronged by having false demands made 39 George Meredith of her, being usually expected to form some sort of accompaniment to a tune played by the lordly male. Vittoria's wit and courage, for example, are missed by Carlo Ammiani after marriage ; she is but "a little boat tied to a big ship," and even Nevil Beauchamp smiles at the idea of a pretty woman exercis- ing her mind independently, much less moving him to examine his own. Meredith's indig- nant heart is surely in Diana Warwick's epigram, "Men may have rounded Seraglio Point ; they have not yet doubled Gape Turk." "What Nature originally decreed," he said once, "men are but beginning to see, namely, that women are fitted for most of the avenues open to energy, and by their entering upon active life they will no longer be open to the accusation men so frequently bring against them of being narrow and craven." In their loves, enthusiasms, and appetites Meredith likens women somewhere to boys, and it would be tempting to enlarge on his boys another of the conspicuous successes in his work, possibly because (when unspoiled) boys exhibit a nonchalant, fresh, unsentimen- tal attitude to things in general. Fortunately, 40 Introduction anyone who knows Meredith knows Heriot, Temple, little Gollett, and Ripton, as he knows Sam Weller or the rustics in Thomas Hardy's novels. We must be content to take boys farther on in their career. *'The chief object in life, if happiness be the aim and the growing better than we are, is to teach men and women how to be one ; for if they're not, then each is a morsel for the other to prey on." Absorbed in this dilemma of the sexes, Meredith concentrates his efforts, not only on man's treatment of woman, but on man's ideal of himself. One of his real contributions to social ethics is the analysis of the true gentleman, particularly in " Evan Harrington " and "Sandra Belloni." As an observer of English society, he has only derision for false gentility, an antipathy which, like the enthusiasm for prizefighting and gipsies, he shares with George Borrow. Upon the other hand, he evidently seeks to destroy the prevalent delusion that good nature is a form of weakness and "strength" to be measured by self-assertion. He is strong in heroes, but they are of an original type. The flamboyant, brilliant man seldom comes to 41 George Meredith much in Meredith's romances. Self-confident, young characters generally drop into disaster, from Alvan to Victor Radnor, in a sense from Nevil Beauchamp to Lord Fleetwood. The quiet, strong, trustworthy nature, again, gets a far larger stroke in Meredith than (for example) in Thackeray. Major Dobbin and Warrington win nothing like the reward that falls to such men as Redworth, Merthyr Powys, Dartrey Fenellan, Austin Wentworth, Seymour Austin, Owain Wythan, Vernon Whitford, and Matthew Weyburn. They lack or at any rate are outshone in social arts and graces, but they possess solid qualities that manage somehow to bring them out success- ful in the end. Impetuousness and bubbling ardour play the rocket's career in Meredith. His avowed partiality is for the drab men "drab" being the antithesis of "effervescing" and "irrepressible" for men of deep, self- controlled natures, who refuse lightly to kindle at the spark of personal ambition, and who above all will not stoop to regard women as objects upon which to practise daintily the fowler's art. Clean, brave, unselfish and intel- ligent are Meredith's high adjectives for man. 42 Introduction These ideals of womanhood and manhood run up into Meredith's general conception of human nature as part of Nature. The latter conception is developed principally in his poetry, but it underlies his prose, and the novels cannot be intelligently read apart from some grasp of what he means by the Earth or Nature. It is not a mere accessory to human life and feeling, a background to be painted in, by way of contrast or harmony. Meredith's Nature is, as in Aristotle to quote Professor Butcher's definition , "not the outward world of created things; it is the creative force, the productive principle of the universe." Nature in these novels and poems is vital, radiant, and supreme, a living presence which re- minds us of the pulsing, all-embracing Nature of Lucretius, and, in certain other aspects, of Nature as the expression and embodiment of that divine wisdom for man which Marcus Aurelius inculcated. The distinctive value of Meredith's teaching on this point, how- ever, is that nature is for him deeper and more complex than it could be for the ancient stoics. His Nature is the cosmos of evolu- tionary science. "The Ordeal of Richard 43 George Meredith Feverel," as we have seen, was published in the same year as "The Origin of Species," and the salient feature of Meredith's work is that it has been carried out in full view of the contemporary scientific movement which seeks in Nature the ethical standards as well as the physical origin of man. The cardinal principle of his ethical idealism is the trustworthiness of the moral instincts. Nat- ure is a living organism, whose end for man is spiritual, not material, and human life is unintelligible apart from its relationship to natural facts and forces. Life according to Nature is man's destiny, which means, not the worship of the senses, nor the ascetic denial of the senses, but the spirit's control of the senses. The end of Nature is man's ethical completeness. Neither the mind, nor the senses, nor the soul, is to be starved, but each and all must play their part in the drama of being. " Blood and brain and spirit, three Join for true felicity. Are they parted, then expect Some one sailing will be wrecked." The beginning of wisdom, therefore, is to 44 Introduction let Nature reach and teach us ; otherwise it is not possible to perceive man's ideal or the conditions under which it can be realised. This requires courage, for self and the senses render man disinclined to face and welcome the total order of Nature. "The senses loving Earth or well or ill Ravel yet more the riddle of our lot. The mind is in their trammels." Most forms of contemporary pessimism and sentimentalism are traced by Meredith to this handicap the refusal to confront the order of Nature frankly and fully. Only the mind or brain is equal to this task. If a man dares to face and trust Nature, he is rewarded with hope and insight. If he does not, his view of the world and of himself is distorted. Thus to take but one example cynicism is bound up with a false view of Nature. "You hate Nature," says Gower Woodseer to the cynical Lord Fleetwood, "unless you have it served on a dish by your own cook. That's the way to the madhouse or the monastery. There we expiate the sin of sins. A man finds the woman of all women fitted to stick him in the soil, and trim and point him to grow, and 45 George Meredith she 's an animal for her pains ! The secret of your malady is, you Ve not yet, though you 're on the healthy leap for the practices of Nature, hopped to the primary conception of what Nature means. Women are in and of Nat- ure." False views of oneself, as well as of the other sex, whether these views are ascetic or sensual, proceed from the same root, according to Meredith. A primary concep- tion of Nature is a-wanting. This primary conception involves not only a just relation of the sexes but their common interest in self-sacrifice, brotherliness, and unselfishness. Nature's supreme function is to recall her children from their moods of indulgence and egotism to the higher discipline of helpfulness. The great thing to think about, Meredith reiterates, is not reaping but sowing (compare, e.g., the fifth chapter of "Lord Ormont and his Aminta," and "Vit- toria" throughout). His passionate recoil from anything like luxurious individualism, and his stress on human fellowship as the true sphere of Nature's revelation, spring from his reading of her primary law the law of sacrifice and service. Nature's crown and flower is man, 46 Introduction but man conscious that personality means kinship and helpfulness to his fellows. As the author puts it, in Vittoria's ringing stanza at Milan : Our life is but a little holding, lent To do a mighty labour ; we are one With heaven and with the stars, when it is spent To serve God's aim: else die we with the sun. "Service," said Diana Warwick, "is our des- tiny in life and death. Then let it be my choice, living to serve the living, and be fret- ted uncomplainingly." The joy of Earth belongs to those who thus enter intelligently and bravely into the order of her discipline, which aims at speeding the race upwards to God and good. This is the burden of Meredith's philosophy, and it lifts him clear of any languid or defiant or sus- picious attitude towards Nature. He has a coherent, balanced view of human nature; he believes that men are meant for good ; and he is sure that Nature or the universe is on their side in the struggle against lust and pas- sion. "I say the profoundest service that 47 George Meredith poems or any other writings can do for their reader is not merely to satisfy the intel- lect, or supply something polished and inter- esting, nor even to depict great passions or persons or events, but to fill him with vigorous and clean manliness, religiousness, and give him good heart as a radical possession and habit." That sentence of Walt Whitman sums up the drift of Meredith's prose as well as of his verse. There is not a whimper in it, not an atom of cowardice. He invigorates the reader while he amuses. And he does so, claiming to present the right order and use of life, because he has read Earth deep enough to see the rose of the soul unfold itself bravely under the grey skies of evolutionary science. The novels testify to this conviction in grave, buoyant, and energetic prose. They are studies in several types of human character, tragic and comic, designed to expound the bracing philosophy of Nature as that is inter- preted by the Spirit of Comedy (in the Meredithian sense of the term), which is "the fountain of sound sense, not the less perfectly sound on account of the sparkle." Novels written in this vein cannot fail 48 Introduction to have a keen interest and value of their own, but it is superfluous to observe that their appeal is to a circle which must be comparatively restricted. This subtle, in- tellectual treatment of human nature in prose fiction, through the medium of the "Comic Spirit," addresses itself to people of sharp perception and sensitive faculties, even when the subjects are by no means recon- dite in themselves. A writer like Meredith finds his audience as well as his material, not in the marketplace, but in a society of quick- witted, cultured beings. A certain nimble- ness of mind is requisite for the appreciation of his work, and this implies, as he is well aware, that his audience constitutes "an acute and honourable minority." For the crowd prefers to be thumped rather than tickled, and resents fiction being ranked as an elect handmaiden to philosophy. Thanks to his high conception of the English novel and its function, Meredith makes little or no attempt to catch the multitude with broad effects, high colours, or strong flavours. His work has an extra- ordinary range. But, like Diana Warwick, 49 George Meredith he does not lay himself out as a writer for "clever transcripts of the dialogue of the day, and hairbreadth escapes," breathless ad- ventures, gushing sentiment, and the ooze of pathos. Consequently the atmosphere is somewhat rarefied at times. Certainly it cannot be described as wholly congenial to the average Briton, an excellent person who commonly prefers blunt, hard satire, humour with its i's dotted and its t's carefully crossed. As Meredith himself confesses genially, "the national disposition is for hard-hitting with a moral purpose to sanction it"; ethereal, nimble wit does not allure the many. As handled by Meredith, it is often clear and true. But it invokes "the conscience residing in thoughtfulness," and comedy of this kind must frequently be content to play to empty benches. To the first edition of "Modern Love" he prefixed the lines: "This is not meat For little people or for fools." Unfortunately it is apt to become food for a cult or coterie, which is a serious handicap upon any writer. So far as an author's refusal to be simple is 50 Introduction wilful and affected, the public revenges itself by visiting him with an unworthy but not undeserved neglect. Now, two spirits struggle for the soul of Meredith as a literary artist. There is a lyric, spontaneous feeling, which now and then issues in passages of direct intuition and unaffected charm, vibrating with emotion and pure fancy. Meredith has his "native woodnotes wild"; and they are by no means confined to his prose, as readers of poems like "Juggling Jerry" and "Love in a Valley" (especially in its original version) will gladly testify. Along with this, however, a spirit of strain and affectation makes itself heard. There is a tone of painful artifice in him, of which e.g. "Modern Love," the later odes, and " One of Our Conquerors" bear melancholy traces. Whole pages of Meredith's work are spoiled by a passion for the intricate. It is as though he were fascina- ted by anything off the high road : complex motives, tangled situations, abstruse points of conduct. "In Our fat England," he pleads unabashed, "the gardener Time is playing all sorts of delicate freaks in the hues and traceries of the flower of life, and shall we not 51 George Meredith note them? If we are to understand our species, and mark the progress of civilization at all, we must." To which one would be inclined to answer not by a simple negative but by drawing distinctions, and especially by demurring to the implication that twists and freaks are anything but a subordinate element in average human existence. To Meredith, in fact, the flower of life is an orchid oftener than a lily of the field. His predilection for subtle shades and traceries tends to present ordinary life to him as morally exotic. His creative imagination redeems him, certainly ; the natural sights and sounds that fill his pages protect the reader generally against any prolonged sense of artificiality. I would not go nearly so far as to say that nothing seems to interest him strongly except "derangement, the imper- ceptible grain of sand that sets the whole mechanism out of gear." That is true, but it is not all the truth, although one can readily understand how a case for this verdict could be strongly and unfairly stated, if critics persist in remaining blind to the fact that the dramatic motif in a novel of Meredith is 52 Introduction really never far-fetched. Its variations and developement, however, often are. "The light of every soul burns upward ; let us allow for atmospheric disturbance." This would be an adequate defence, were it not that in ex- patiating upon the allowance and watchfully detecting the whirl of motes within the beam, he now and then seems clean to forget that he has a taper needing his attention. The difficulty is aggravated by his fondness for developing a story by diverting allusions rather than by plain straightforward narrative. It is a vexatious and often an inartistic method. Meredith has usually a story to tell, and plenty of emotion and adventure wherewith to carry it forward. Only, you must go be- hind the booth and see the showman'working his puppets. The result is that the characters are not always kept at blood-heat, while the impatient spectator's interest is first divided and then apt to flag. In reading some of the novels for the first time you feel like a small man in a crowd, when some procession is passing bewildered and aggrieved. Colour and movement are there ; but they are neither coherent nor made obvious to you. In a 53 George Meredith more poetical figure, the stream of narrative is so overlaid at some places with lilies of comment and aphorism, that the current is seriously impeded and the flow of water almost hidden. No doubt the lilies are fresh and splendid ; but that is hardly the point at issue. The novelist is conscious of his fault. He is constantly pausing, especially in the later novels, to apologise for the intrusion of the philosopher upon the artist and for the marriage of comedy and narrative, but his contrite excuses remind one too vividly of FalstafFs. The habit seems too strong for him. Partly it is a defect of his intense in- tellectualism ; partly it is one consequence of his analytic principle thai the ideas rather than the appetites of men form the best clue to their conduct. But in any case he is open to severe criticism upon this point of technical execution. Like all mannerisms it has probably been aggravated by the partial obscurity in which the author had for long to work. Absence of popular recognition upon a scale commensurate to a man's ability is apt to foster any innate tendency to mental perversi- ties, just as the bodily gestures of a recluse 54 Introduction acquire insensibly a certain uncouth awkward- ness ; and Meredith is not wholly to be acquitted of the artistic crime of eccentricity. Isolation here also has intensified an inborn freakishness of manner. "Mystic wrynesses he chased." No one would insist upon a novel of the highest rank furnishing the precise details of a reporting column; yet how few of Meredith's romances would have been spoiled by the omission of some dis- quisitions upon mental pathology, and by the introduction of a little plain information about what exactly has been and is being done ! Is it only the "happy bubbling fool " who desires to know the progress as well as the causes of events ? In " Diana of the Crossways," for example (as in the "Amazing Marriage"), the opening chapter is devoted to a delightful preliminary talk, full of clever hints, anticipa- tions, side allusions and the like, which certainly create an interest and atmosphere for the subsequent tale. But it is only in Chapter II. that the story plunges from ex- position of feelings and gossip into the gay whirl of an Irish ball. " Let us to our story," says the author coolly, " the froth being out of 55 George Meredith the bottle." But surely the froth should be out of the bottle before it is held to the lips ! Admittedly the novelist is never feverish or fragmentary in manner, never a wayward visionary even in his exalted moments, never prolix or laborious in the sense in which George Eliot occasionally plays the pedant, almost never ornate or irrele- vant like Balzac with his descriptions of locality and furniture. But as a composer he has a dangerous endowment of fertility, and one would rather that his affinities had been with any school except the German, from which headed by Jean Paul Richter it is not inapposite to conjecture that he has caught an inartistic forgetfulness of the bound- aries that separate the essay and the romance. One is glad to have Hazlitt's countenance in finding the similar passages in Meredith's prototype, Molifcre, somewhat verbose and intricate ; they are that, even when in the one case they are carried off by the rapid dialogue in verse, in the other by the flashing prose. At the worst they are never opaque or muddy which is always something. But the trouble about these diverting and ingenious 56 Introduction asides is that Meredith knows better. If he likes, and fortunately he often likes, he can give his readers Stevenson's luxury of laying aside the judgment and being submerged by the tale as by a billow. The pity of it is that he prefers now and again to keep your head prosaically safe above the water, while he expounds to you in witty words the sequence of the tides. A passion for the bizarre in action or char- acter, accompanied by a preoccupation with the integral calculus of motives, is not un- fitly set in a compressed form of utterance which is rich to the point of obscurity. Meredith's style reflects his mental temper of keen, pregnant observation. It is terse and quick and brilliant; but it has a tendency, where inspiration flags, to lapse now and then into euphuism, extravagance, over- subtlety. It has oftener the flashing edge of crystals than limpid fluidity. Language be- comes with him in certain moods a shower of audacious and prismatic epigrams, or "a flushed Bacchanal in a ring of dancing similes." There is little or none of Swin- burne's riot in verbiage, or of Ruskin's 57 George Meredith billowy rhetoric. The writer seems nervously and even awkwardly to avoid all approaches to smooth and flexible expression. The style is difficult, but through sheer excess of thought, not through confusion. It is never plush, though too frequently it becomes brocade, rather than the silk which closely fits the limbs. Stiff in parts, though jewelled, it is apt to hang in somewhat rigid folds. There are passages of his poetry, for example, compared to which Sordello and Pacchiarotto are trans- cripts of lucidity. Some of the common clamour about Mere- dith's style, however, is due to intellectual torpidity. Years ago Mark Pattison observed that Meredith's name was "a label warning 'novel readers' not to touch. They know that in the volumes which carry that mark they will not find the comfortable convention- alities and the paste diamonds which make up their ideal of life. Worse than this, Mr. Meredith's style requires attention ; an impertinent requirement on the part of a novelist." Some people also fail to observe that in the dialogues, for example, he is true to life. Ordinary conversation as a rule 58 Introduction answers thoughts as well as words; it runs on a level where the speakers address what is meant rather than what is said. (Readers of " Rhoda Fleming" will recollect a famous instance.) Further, one is very seldom annoyed in Meredith with quips and verbal puzzles or with disagreeable attempts to paint in words, and although the staccato movement is somewhat clicking, it is never obtrusive in his readings of Nature or in his love-scenes. There one has not to pause and unravel a paragraph or disentangle sense from a sen- tence. The clotted manner drops away, confusion and inversion disappear, and the result is a vivid transcript of reality. For Meredith is like the historian, Green, "a jolly vivid man ... as vivid as lightning," to quote Tennyson's verdict on the latter. In repro- ducing subtle shades of feeling or in describing physical impressions, he has a marvellous skill ; a handful of words becomes almost transparent with imagination and delicate in- sight. No doubt, of his verse in large sections, though seldom of his finer prose, it is not extravagant to say that " the aim to astonish is greater than the desire to charm." 59 George Meredith "Forcible" suits him better than "urbane"; " dazzling," as a rule, better than "chaste" or "Attic." A style naturally luminous and picturesque sails perilously near the coasts of tortuous euphuism ; for by a strange perversity he seems upon occasion to court the very foppery of genius, till one is sadly tempted to recall the tribe of Donne and Gowley with their quaint and cumbersome conceits. Sir Lukin sends a boy to run for news of the score at a cricket-match "and his emissary taught lightning a les- son." That is Meredith all over, though his "euphuism" is adventitious rather than es- sentially frigid and trivial. Yet, judged by his best, and his best is the greater part of his output, he has command of a diction almost unrivalled for its purposes, surging and full and radiant. It is a pure joy to read many of his pages, were it only for their unflagging wit and marvellous use of metaphor that literary gift which Aristotle singled out as a sure mark of literary genius. Such qualities of style are the reflection of mental splendour in any writer, and, though cultivated, are never a mere trick. Limpid simplicity indeed is not 60 Introduction one of his main notes ; which is to be regretted, as simplicity is one condition of vitality in liter- ature. He tends to be elliptic and in a good sense embroidered, in language. In musical phrase there is more harmony and orchestra- tion than melody in parts of his work ; he is, perhaps, the Berlioz of modern prose-fiction in this country. But he has melody as well as counterpoint. The supreme qualities of bril- liant phrasing, terseness of expression, energy, exquisite colouring, and luxuriant fancy, are all conspicuous in his style ; they rightly count for much, and their wealth covers a great multitude of minor sins. If here and there he deserves the charge implied in Fal- staff's retort to Pistol, one must remember that, judged by this standard, Shakespeare himself falls to be criticised like Meredith for the same offence. In both it is as patent as it is comparatively speaking venial. Shakes- peare is king of the continent where Meredith is a prince ; and Johnson's famous verdict on the Elizabethan recurs to the mind with curi- ous persistency as one attempts to estimate the Victorian. " A quibble was to him the fatal Cleopatra for which he lost the world, and 61 George Meredith was content to lose it. ... I cannot say he is everywhere alike. He is many times flat and insipid. But he is always great when some great occasion is presented to him ; no man can say he ever had a fit subject for his art and did not then raise himself as high above his fellows, Quantum lenta solent inter viburna cufiressi." This slight summary of some cardinal ideas in Meredith's fiction, and of some salient features in his technical method, will serve perhaps to put one en route with him. I have left myself no space to touch upon some other fascinating aspects, such as his cosmopolitan outlook, from which all insularity is purged : his minor characters : his versatile humour : his technical execution : his poetical work- manship: his relation to men like Dickens, Balzac, Hugo, and especially Thomas Hardy : his attitude to politics and progress : his estimates of religion (in semitones, scanty but firm), patriotism, education, and the Celtic temperament. These and other lines of study can be worked out from the general standpoint which I have tried to sug- gest in this paper. For the primary thing to 62 Introduction be insisted on with regard to Meredith is that in focussing his position we may with advant- age look at the content rather than the form of his work. It is only consonant with his own avowed desire that we should thus ap- proach him from the side of ethics as well as of art, although no huger injustice could be done to him than to claim him for a cult or for a party, much less to convey the impression that his novels are a species even a glorified species of pamphlets. Meredith is a master of literature. Some of his novels are triumphs of creative prose, and despite their depend- ence upon a knowledge of contemporary feeling in nineteenth-century England they will rank with the supreme contributions of last century to English literature, even although they win him security rather than fulness of fame. In style and conception, we may surely say, without being Meredithy- rambic, that he is a peer of the few great literary artists in our age. His line and colour belong to the great style in literature, and three-fifths of his work is bathed in what his friend Swinburne called "passionate and various beauty." The artistic impulse asserts 63 George Meredith itself in almost every chapter he has written, for in spite of the writer's rich mental con- stitution, his complexity of material is rarely suffered to compromise the symmetry and the movement which are essential to great- ness in a genuine prose romance. Still, any eulogy of Meredith's intellectual subtlety and imaginative reach and an estimate here passes quickly into eulogy must be balanced by the admission that prose-fiction in his hands moves out into the strenuous and stirring tideway of contemporary life ; he is highly serious for all his wit and charm, and he has not the slightest notion of enticing you into a house boat or a racing gig. Some of you will remember this prose- parable by Maarten Maartens: "There was a man once a satirist. In the natural course of time his friends slew him and he died. And the people came and stood about his corpse. 'He treated the whole round world as his football, 'they said indignantly, 'and he kicked it.' The dead man opened one eye. 'But always toward the goal,' he said." Meredith is no satirist. He does not even turn a superb and deliberate censor of the universe 64 Introduction like William Morris and John Ruskin ; though his aim is to waken and to brace his age, he never ostentatiously lifts the scourge or broom, and "kicking" is altogether too coarse and direct an expression to denote his genial influence. But he is really aggressive, in one sense. He produces a distinct impact upon "that conscience residing in thought- fulness," which it is his design to exercise and to increase. Resent it or not as you please, what Meredith is concerned with is that you shall treat the novel as something other than a brassy or a bun. To stir the mind's interest by a vital and varied application of "the Comic Spirit," is the motive of George Meredith. He would make his prose both voice and force. If readers fling down his works without being pushed an inch or two nearer sanity and sincerity, or without sus- pecting that these are a goal, or even without dreaming that for them a goal exists at all, then a fault lies somewhere. But the fault is not wholly Meredith's. THE SHAVING OF SHAGPAT The Shaving of Shagpat THE Shaving of Shagpat: An Arabian Entertainment," Meredith's first work in prose, was published in 1856, five years after his first book of poems. Beckford's "Vathek," which had appeared nearly seventy years earlier, "remained without distinguished progeny," says Professor Raleigh. But "Shagpat" is its late-born child. It also draws upon " The Arabian Nights," though Meredith easily outstrips Beckford in the skill by which he has caught the discursiveness, the luxuriant fancy, the riot of imagination, and the brilliant atmosphere of the Oriental phantasmagoria. Both novels are written in high spirits. But "The Shaving of Shagpat" is composed in a characteristic vein of the mock-heroic, with touches of passion and romance and exuber- ant humour. George Eliot, in one of her reviews, hailed it "as an apple tree among 69 George Meredith the trees of the wood," and, once the public grew accustomed to its puzzling qualities, the wit and genius of this tour de force prevailed with its audience, although a second edition was not called for until 1865. Three separate stories, "The Story ot Bhanavar the Beautiful," " The Punishment of Shahpesh, the Persian, or Khipil the Builder," and " The Case of Rumdrum, A Reader of Planets, that was a Barber," are woven, in oriental manner, into the plot. But the outline of the main story is as follows : Noorna bin Noorka, a waif beside her dead mother in the desert, is rescued uiid reared by a certain chief Raveloke in the city of Oolb, where in her twelfth year she obtains from an old beggar in return for a piece of gold given in charity her heart's desire in dresses, gems, and toys, but especially a red book of magic. She be- comes proficient in spells and sorcery, owing to her eagerness to discover her father, and thereby incurs the jealousy of Princess Goorelka, an accomplished sorceress, whose genie Karaz eventually manages to carry off 70 The Shaving of Shagpat Noorna as his prize. She promises to give herself to the possessor of the Identical, or hair of fortune, which was on his head, in return for his help in disenchanting her father. The latter, Feshnavat by name, is shown by Karaz to be one of a number of birds in the aviary of Goorelka. These birds are her former lovers, and they can only be disenchanted if they are kept laughing for one hour uninterruptedly. Noorna happens by accident to gain possession of Goorelka's magic ring which made its possessor " mis- tress of the marvellous hair which is a magnet to the homage of men, so that they crowd and crush and hunger to adore it, even the Identical." She disenchants her father, and then, anxious to evade her promise to Karaz, discovers that, while the hair Identical must live on some head, the ring is powerless over it except in the genie's head. She therefore manages to outwit Karaz, tears the hair from his head, and drops it on that of an innocent clothier called Shagpat. Karaz forthwith becomes her re- bellious slave. But he has his revenge. For Goorelka had persuaded Noorna, who loved 71 George Meredith flowers, to tend the Lily of Light upon the Enchanted Sea, which meant that her beauty was bound up with that of the Lily. " Whatever was a stain to one withered the other." Goorelka then blighted the petals of the Lily and turned Noorna into a wrinkled crone, ugly and tottering. Never- theless Noorna, by the power of the ring, is able to advance Feshnavat to the position of vizier, and in the meantime she anxiously awaits the coming of the barber who, as her spells inform her, is destined to shave the Identical from the head of the vain-glorious Shagpat. For the worthy clothier, finding himself the object of homage on account of his hair, naturally remains unshorn, " a miracle of hairiness, black with hair as he had been muzzled by it, and his head as it were a berry in a huge bush by reason of it." The whole city, including the king, lies under the enchantment of the hair. Only Feshnavat and Noorna retain their wits, and Shagpat audaciously claims the latter in marriage. It is at this juncture that the story opens. Noorna's magic has revealed to her that 72 The Shaving of Shagpat Shagpat is to be shaved by a certain youth who comes along a magic line which she draws from the sandhills outside the city. This youth is Shibli Bagarag of Shiraz, "nephew to the renowned Baba Mustapha, chief barber to the Court of Persia." Hungry and abject, Shibli is met by Noorna in her hag-like form, who persuades him that his fortune is made if he only succeeds in shaving Shagpat. The youth is vain and enterpris- ing. He makes the attempt, and is soundly thwacked for the insult to Shagpat and the citizens ; the latter indignantly throw him out of the city. Noorna however consoles him with the promise of honour and happi- ness, if he agrees to marry her. This, after some hesitation, he agrees to do. They are betrothed in the house of Feshnavat; Shibli is amazed to find that each of his rather reluctant kisses makes the hag become younger and prettier, whereupon Noorna reveals to his astonished ears the destiny to which he is appointed. The news turns his head. Noorna had already detected his con- ceit. "Tis clear," she said to her father, " that vanity will trip him, but honesty is a 73 George Meredith strong upholder." Shibli verifies this prog- nostication by his swelling pride at the news of what he was designed to accomplish. ' ' He exulted, and his mind strutted through the future of his days, and down the ladder of all time, exacting homage from men, his brethren ; and 'twas beyond the art of Noorna to fix him to the present duties of the enter- prise : he was as feathered seed before the breath of vanity." The serious campaign now begins. Three motives are at work in Shibli : the desire of taking vengeance for the thwacking he had received, the ambition excited by his destiny, and a genuine love for Noorna. But the obstacles are formidable. The first consists of the illusions with which Rabesqurat, the queen of the^ Enchanted Sea, has surrounded Shagpat ; these " make it difficult to know him from his semblances, whenever real danger threateneth him." Secondly, there is the weakness of natural man, who is un- likely to finish off Shagpat at one effort. And thirdly, there is the difficulty of getting Shagpat ready for shaving, as well as the trouble of finding a blade keen enough to The Shaving of Shagpat reap the magic hair which defies all mortal razors. The only blade is a sword which is to be found in Aklis, and to gain it three charms are requisite. The first is (i) a phial of water from the fountain of Paravid, each drop of which makes flowers and stones and sand to speak ; this, with the aid of Karaz, Noorna enables Shibli to secure, (ii) Then some hairs from the tail of the horse Garaveen are required. But Shibli's incur- able vanity prompts him to ride the danger- ous steed, until, to save him, Noorna is obliged to let Karaz seize Garaveen. She manages to pull three hairs from the horse's tail, but Karaz is now their foe, instead of their slave, and Shibli has to return dolefully to the city of Oolb, by aid of drops from his magic phial. Noorna, in the form of a hawk, rescues him en route from various perils, enables him to shave the king and court of Oolb, to steal the cockle-shell from under the pillow of Goorelka, and, hotly pursued by the latter, to tear up the Lily on the Enchanted Sea, thus rescuing Noorna from the spell of ugliness, and turning Goorelka into a repulsive hag who is carried off by 75 George Meredith Karaz. The Lily is the third help (iii) in their enterprise. Equipped with it, Noorna and Shibli make for the fairy mountain of Aklis. But first they must pass through the palace of Illusions, where Rabesqurat reigns as queen. Left to himself, Shibli succumbs to her Circe-like wiles, but manages to recover himself and to plunge on through similar seductions of vanity and ambition in the palace of Aklis. By the help of the seven sons of Aklis and their sister, Princess Gulrevaz, he secures the coveted Sword, at the price of all his three enchantments. His first task is to rescue poor Noorna who, by the spells of Rabesqurat, had been chained to a pillar in the sea ; this, however, is effected by Princess Gulrevaz and her magic bird Koorookh. Shibli now leaves Aklis with his precious sword, but unluckily he bran- dishes it with a silly flourish, in order to look through the veil that shrouded Rabesqurat as she ferried him across the sea to Noorna. The only cure for the disastrous illusions produced by this vision is to sleep in the bosom of his beloved ; thanks to the hair of Garaveen and to Abarak, Rabesqurat's 76 The Shaving of Shagpat dwarf slave, he gets clear from Aklis and is rescued by Noorna, in whose lap he finds new manhood. Meantime Koorookh bears them safe into the desert, where Feshnavat joins them with the news that during their absence Shibli's uncle, the loquacious and irrepressible barber Mustapha, had been thwacked for daring to practise his craft in Oolb, and that in a subsequent fit of delirium he had by the wiles of Goorelka disguised as a hag contrived to ruin his protector Feshnavat. All this had contributed to the greater glory of Shagpat, who was at the zenith of his arrogance. Feshnavat and his daughter now return to Oolb to mature the final plot. A fresh attempt by Mustapha, who gets the length of lathering Shagpat, is frustrated by Karaz in the form of a flea. By way of punishment the barber is condemned to try and shave Shagpat before the court ; at the third essay he is hurled ignominiously " like a stone from a sling, even into the outer air and beyond the city walls." The Identical blazes up for three days and three nights in triumph on the head of Shagpat who lies in a trance. But the 77 George Meredith clothier's triumph is short-lived. On the fourth day, after a fierce conflict of genii, the flashing blade in Shibli's hand shaves Shagpat clean, to the consternation of the populace ; the Identical is shorn off, and "day was on the baldness of Shagpat. " So the story ends. Baba Mustapha is hailed king of Oolb, and Shibli marries Noorna. The book is studded with scraps of verse and aphorisms, some of which illustrate germi- native ideas in the author's subsequent work. Thus the power of Illusion is represented as operating upon people of one idea. Queen Rabesqurat is "the mistress of the single- thoughted, and them that follow one idea to the exclusion of a second." See below under " Beauchamp's Career" and "One of Our Conquerors." Shibli illustrates the mischief done by airy conceit and also the profit of chastening both characteristic ideas of Meredith's ethic. The former, as a source of aberration, comes out also in the character of Shagpat, lolling gravely in his shop before the crowds who assembled to gaze at his shaggy pate. Noorna exhibits the union of wit and charm in a woman which Meredith is never 78 The Shaving of Shagpat weary of commending, and the story closes by hinting that Shibli, unlike some other heroes of the later novels, respected the wisdom of his bride, while he admired her beauty. As for minor details, note that the love scene in "The Story of Bhanavar" is placed beside running water, as is so often the case in Meredith's romances, and that the power of laughing at oneself is pronounced the cure for pedantry and conceit. In the palace of Rabesqurat Shibli sees " divers sitters on thrones, with the diadem of asses' ears stiffened upright, and monkey's skulls grin- ning with gems ; they having on each countenance the look of sovereigns and the serenity of high estate." As Shibli reflected, "if these sitters could but laugh at them- selves, there would be a release for them, and the crown would topple off which getteth the homage of asses and monkeys." The snatches of verse, which enliven "Shagpat" as well as " Farina," partly recall the quality of Meredith's early poems. When the latter were published, Dr. Hort wrote of them : " They are not deep, but show a rare eye and ear. There is a Keatsian sensuous- 79 George Meredith ness about them, but the activity and go prevent it from being enervating and immoral." " I send a scrap of Meredith . . . is it not sweet and perfect in itself as a song ? Talk of Horace and Herrick ! It seems to me more like Shakespeare's songs." This en- thusiastic criticism is borne out by several of the lyric stanzas in "The Shaving of Shagpat." The story has been beset by misconceptions. Meredith anticipated one of them in a prefatory note to the first edition, which gravely explained that the work was not a translation. Another view of it has been more persistent. Attempts have been made to read an allegorical significance into the adventures of Shibli, as though that worthy person represented the true reformer who seeks to emancipate men from the old customs and abuses to which they bow down. Some ground for this theory might plausibly be found in the conclusion, where Meredith observes gravely that " the mastery of an Event lasteth among men for the space of one cycle of years, and after that a fresh Illusion springeth to befool mankind. As the poet declareth in his scorn : 80 The Shaving of Shagpat * Some doubt Eternity : from life begun, Has folly ceased within them, sire to son ? So, ever fresh Illusions will arise And lord creation until men are wise.' " But it is as vain to allegorise this story as " Don Quixote." At the most, " The Shaving of Shagpat," like "The Idylls of the King," has " an allegory in the distance " ; no elabo- rate symbolism can be read into the details of the plot. In fact, as early as the second edition, Meredith humorously disclaimed such an intention in another prefatory note. " It has been suggested to me," he wrote, "by one who has no fear of allegories on the banks of the Nile, that the hairy Shagpat must stand to mean umbrageous Humbug conquering the sons of men ; and that Noorna bin Noorka represents the Seasons, which help us, if there is health in us, to dispel the affliction of his shadow ; while my heroic Shibli Bagarag is actually to be taken for Circumstance, which works under their changeful guidance towards our ultimate release from bondage, but with a disappoint- ing apparent waywardness. The excuse for F 81 George Meredith such behaviour as this youth exhibits, is so good that I would willingly let him wear the grand mask hereby offered to him. But, though his backslidings cry loudly for some sheltering plea, or garb of dignity, and though a story-teller should be flattered to have it supposed that anything very distinct was intended by him, the Allegory must be rejected altogether. The subtle Arab who conceived Shagpat, meant either very much more, or he meant less ; and my belief is, that, designing in his wisdom simply to amuse, he attempted to give a larger embrace to time than is possible to the profound dispenser of Allegories, which are mortal ; which, to be of any value, must be perfectly clear, and, when perfectly clear, are as little attractive as Mrs. Malaprop's reptile." FARINA Farina FARINA: A Legend of Cologne" was published in 1857. Slighter than " The Shaving of Shagpat," it is also a burlesque, although the subject is mediaeval, not oriental. The story is a subtly ironical sketch of superstition and chivalry, which reminds one of Peacock's "Maid Marian" itself a gentle satire on the romantic movement represented by M. G. Lewis and Sir Walter Scott. " Farina," however, with its blend of the supernatural and the heroic lies nearer to "The Abbot" and "The Monastery." At the close of the first chapter of "The Tale of Chloe," Meredith after- wards wrote that " A living native duke is worth fifty Phoebus Apollos to Englishmen, and a buxom young lass of the fields mounting from a pair of pails to the estate of duchess, a more romantic object than troops of your visionary Yseults and Guine veres. " ' 'Farina" George Meredith is a practical illustration of this scorn for the revival of mediaevalism. In spite of its love- passages and fits of spirited narrative, it is hardly an adequate example of the writer's power over the short story, but it reflects his German education and one or two of his characteristic ideas. Gottlieb von Groschen, a rich merchant and money-lender of Cologne, has one lovely daughter Margarita, in whose honour the youths of the city have formed a White Rose Club sworn to uphold her beauty against all comers. Only one youth, the slender, fair Farina, refuses to join this league of tender and quarrelsome fanatics. Farina is poor ; as a student of chemistry, he is also suspected of tampering with the black art ; but Mar- garita's heart is tender towards him, and he is in love with her. The story opens three days before the entry of Kaiser Heinrichs into Cologne after a campaign on the Danube. A troop of wild cavalry, belonging to the robber baron Werner, of Werner's Eck, an independent royal adherent, ride into the city and attempt to offer an indignity to Margarita in front of 86 Farina her father's house. Thanks to the interven- tion of a sturdy stranger, Guy the Gosshawk, who is in the Kaiser's service, the girl is rescued ; Werner rides up to scatter his un- ruly followers ; and the Gosshawk is feted by the grateful Gottlieb, while Farina goes off, rewarded for his share in the rescue by soft words from Margarita's lips and a silver arrow from her hair. Later in the evening, Guy and he foregather, and, after some nocturnal adventures in foiling an attack of Schmidt, Werner's dupe and confederate, upon Gottlieb's house, both are captured by the White Rose Club who suspect them ot designs upon Margarita. Guy is released at Gottlieb's request, but Farina, who has lost his silver arrow during the night, is consigned to prison. Next day the prowling Werner sends a forged letter from Farina to Margarita with the silver arrow which Schmidt had picked up. The note, however, is opened by the girl's aunt Lisbeth, a sour and suspicious prude, who thinks it best to keep the assig- nation herself, in the disguise of her niece. The result is that she is carried off to the 87 George Meredith robber baron's castle. On discovering their mistake, the troopers return and secure Margarita who, after opening a letter to Lisbeth from her crony, Farina's mother, had gone to visit Farina in prison. The plot is now complicated rather awk- wardly by a combat on the Drachenfels between Satan and a mysterious monk who carries off Farina from prison to witness the ghostly combat. Meredith describes the latter in Lucianic style. Satan is openly vanquished and takes refuge underground in Cologne. Monk Gregory, inflated with a victory which is apparently complete, finds himself a spiritual hero ; but, instead of having Farina to corrob- orate his tale of prowess, he is deserted by that youth, who is off with Guy to rescue Margarita. The rescue is effected after a hand-to-hand conflict between Guy and the Baron, assisted by the supernatural agency of a Water-Lady who helps Farina into the castle and paralyses the Baron by announcing that his doom has come, inasmuch as a true lover (i.e., Farina) has dipped three times in the stream round the Eck. Returning to Cologne, the party meet the Farina White Rose Club, and, on discovering that Lisbeth is still a prisoner in the castle, retrace their steps to deliver her. Farina alone proceeds to the city to resume his captivity and take his place again beside monk Gregory- The poor monk's hour of triumph has passed into degradation. Satan's overpowering stench, as he went underground, keeps the Kaiser at a distance from the city, and the blame of this pestilential odour is naturally laid by the citizens upon the luckless ecclesi- astic. Farina, however, solves the problem and mends his own fortunes by furnishing the Kaiser with a bottle of his new essence, Eau de Cologne. The king and his army thus find it possible to enter the city, and Farina's reward is the hand of Margarita. The main indications of promise in this slight tale are Meredith's treatment of young love, his description of the nightingales over- heard by Farina outside the castle, and his mastery of the art of being grave and absurd in the same breath. Margarita is the first sketch of later heroines like Jane Ilchester and Aminta and Rose Jocelyn, with her frank, blue eyes, and her mixture of boyish George Meredith camaraderie and womanly charm. Again, as in " The Shaving of Shagpat," pride has its rdle ; the monk Gregory boasts of his victory over Satan, but has to confess : " How great must be the virtues of them that encounter Sathanas! Valour availeth naught. But if virtue be not in ye, soon will ye be puffed to bursting with that devil's poison, self-incense." It is notice- able, too, that while the ascetic, who has forsworn the joys of life, falls into the snare of spiritual pride, the brave and healthy lover, in the person of Farina, escapes and succeeds. As the second last paragraph of the conclusion hints, the final victory over conceit is gained by true love. Meredith here draws a burlesque vignette of what reappears in tragic and comic shapes on almost every one of his later and larger canvases. 90 THE ORDEAL OF RICHARD FEVEREL The Ordeal of Richard Feverel 'T^HE sub-title of this novel, which -*- was published in 1859, is "A History of Father and Son." It is a study of the Egoist as father, and of a son who has the misfortune to be the victim of a paternal system. When Meredith wrote this novel, the romantic movement was beginning to give way before the scientific ; fresh ideas about evolution, heredity, and environment were in the air ; and Herbert Spencer had just published in the "British Quarterly Review " (April, 1858) his famous essay upon the place of natural reactions in education, contending that parents ought to let their children feel the true consequences of their conduct, and pleading among other things that "in its injurious effects on both parent and child a bad system is twice cursed." Like Austin Gaxton and Mr. Shandy, Sir Austin Feverel has a system of 93 George Meredith his own, but it is the system of a benevolent despot who exaggerates his parental re- sponsibilities.* His aim is to shut out the world from the tender plant, to repress some of the more natural instincts, and to bend the twig into the shape of his own personality. The consequences of this system form the contents of the story. Like George Eliot, Meredith had tried his 'prentice hand in short stories before he published his first masterpiece. The " Scenes of Clerical Life," written contemporaneously with "Shagpat" and "Farina," gave far more promise of "Adam Bede," however, than Meredith's first stories did of "The Ordeal of Richard Feverel." When Lewes read "Amos Barton," he told George Eliot, "I think your pathos is better than your fun." "Shagpat"and "Farina" are full of fun. Pathos is not in them. No reader of these jeux d' esprit could expect anything like the imaginative power, the penetration into human nature, the combination of sombre * There is an excellent statement of thi error, in the sphere of political despotism, by Mr. Chesterton in hi* sentences on Strafford (" Brownintf." p. 31). The Ordeal of Richard Feverel pathos and brilliant comedy, which "The Ordeal of Richard Feverel " presented. There should be a Society for the Protec- tion of Books against their Authors. This novel is one of those which have suffered from revision ; it has been repeatedly pruned by Meredith, and not always with discretion. If he had applied his knife to a book like "One of Our Conquerors," it would have been more to the point. As it is, a reader of the earlier editions may congratulate himself upon the fact that their defects in format are more than counterbalanced by their un- thinned chapters. The alterations, however, have not affected the essentials of the plot, which works out as follows. Sir Austin Feverel, of Raynham Abbey, had been deserted by his wife, who eloped five years after their marriage with his friend Denzil Somers. Somers, a minor poet whose pseudonym was Diaper Sandoe, "being inclined to vice, and occasionally, and in a quiet way, practising it, was of course a sentimentalist and a satirist, entitled to lash the Age and complain of human nature. " The moral tone of his poems was unex- 95 George Meredith ccptional. But he deceived his friend and patron, and, after playing Rizzio to Lady Feverel's Mary, carried off the pretty, in- experienced woman to a life of disenchant- ment and privation. The two hardly appear upon the stage of the story- Lady Feverel steals in once or twice to get a glimpse of her boy, and Somers stoops to ask an annuity from Sir Austin. But the latter despised his former friend too much to seek any revenge, though he was incapable of forgiving the wound dealt his pride by his wife.* To their only child Sir Austen devotes himself with a fussy, fingering attention. He has a cherished system of education for the boy, based half on pride and half on sentimen- talism. Convinced that schools and colleges were corrupt, he aims at playing Providence himself. He wishes to direct every move in the lad's moral and mental development " If immeasurable love were perfect wisdom, one human being might almost impersonate P rovidence to another. " But the very ordeal * Sir Austin, however, it not vindictive. The twist given to bis bruised heart produces simply a suspicion of women one of the sources to which Meredith is fond of tracing the aberrations of men. 96 The Ordeal of Richard Feverel of Richard arises from his father's well-meant, unwise endeavour to confine natural ten- dencies within the artificial restraints of a preconceived theory. This in ordinary cir- cumstances would turn out a prig or a rake. Which will Richard be? Or, is he to be either ? The novel opens on the boy's fourteenth birthday, when he and his companion, Ripton Thompson, the son of Sir Austin's solicitor, are horsewhipped by a certain Farmer Blaize for poaching and trespassing. In order to revenge themselves, the boys persuade a country lad, Tom Bakewell, to set fire that evening to the farmer's ricks. Tom is arrested and imprisoned, to the conster- nation of the lads, whose plot is found out by the baronet and his circle. Finally, after considerable manoeuvring on the part of various members of the family, the yokel is acquitted, but not until Richard has had to apologise humbly to the farmer.* His con- quest of pride appears to his father a fresh * Austin Went worth, whose influence helps Richard here as in the end of the tale, partly belongs to the class of Vernon Whitford, partly to that of Dartrey Fenellan. Adrian Harley ranks with Colney Durance, no higher. G 97 George Meredith proof of the correctness of the system. The small dose of the world, for which poor Ripton is blamed, has turned out well, the baronet reflects, owing to the excellent way in which Richard has been trained. The second stage of the ordeal, however, is more serious and less satisfactory. During the next four years, the baronet's main anxiety is to keep all ideas of love away from the lad's mind. The preliminary blossoming season, as he terms it, when conscience and mind have to be awakened, passes safely, though Richard is on the fair way to become a little prig.* The only bad omen is an attack of scribbling. Sir Austin, how- ever, gets the boy to burn his verses. "He drew out bundle after bundle : each neatly tied, named, and numbered ; and pitched them into flames. And so farewell my young Ambition ! and with it farewell all true confidence between Father and Son." Sir Austin is blissfully unconscious of this error. He congratulates himself on having * His intercourse with Ralph Morton knocks manliness into him ; but, if it hits a wholesome stroke at his vanity, it also fosters the disposition to love. For Ralph ia in the first stages of a boyish passion for Clare Doria Forey. 98 The Ordeal of Richard Feverel a pure and obedient boy, and now proceeds to safeguard his treasure against the tempta- tions of the Magnetic age. His precautions border on the ludicrous. All servants at the Abbey who show any visible symptoms of the tender passion are at once dismissed, thanks mainly to the efforts of heavy Benson, the butler; Glare Doria Forey, Richard's little cousin, has to leave the Abbey with her mother ; and Sir Austin proceeds to London in order to look out a suitable wife for his young hopeful. Richard is eighteen ; he is to marry, acccording to the system, at the age of twenty -five. But the schemes of baronets as well as of mice "gang aft a-gley." Like Pisistratus Gaxton, Richard is already at school with the two great teachers, Nature and Love. He has chosen his mate, by falling in love with Lucy Desborough, the seventeen-year old niece of Farmer Blaize. Adrian Feverel, his uncle and tutor, finds out the secret ; Benson, the butler, writes to Sir Austin ; and Richard is inveigled up to town by a false report of his father's illness. He soon dis- covers that Sir Austin is not only perfectly 99 George Meredith well but quite aware of the engagement. His father's thinly- veiled advice and sarcasms destroy any chance of confidences being exchanged between the two, but Richard is kept dangling for three weeks beside him, until Adrian and Lady Blandish (a sentimental widow, who is in Sir Austin's confidence) get the farmer to pack off Lucy back to her French school. Richard returns to the Abbey and falls ill, only to recover from his physical and apparently from his amorous malady.* The following March, as he accompanies one of his uncles to London, he happens to hear that Lucy is coming home to be married to young Tom Blaize, the farmer's son an arrangement which had been carefully concealed from him. The love-passion revives at once. He meets her, places her, with the aid of Ripton, under the care of a Mrs. Berry in lodgings, and then marries her secretly. Miranda is rescued from the Caliban who threatened to be her fate, and Ferdinand is the rescuer. * Meredith here and elsewhere is careful to note the effects produced by physical illness upon the spirit of his men and women. 100 The Ordeal of Richard Feverel Sir Austin blames neither himself* nor the system, but his son, whom he moodily reproaches for treachery and deception. The baronet nurses the devil of his wounded pride. His conceit is unbroken ; he will not admit the possibility of any error in the experiment which he has been practising on his boy. Beyond making him an allow- ance, he declines to take any notice of the marriage, shutting his heart against his only son. This bitter attitude leaves Richard sad and angry, and Lucy rather depressed. What Richard wants is not money, but a kind word from his father, which the latter, in his cold superiority and unnatural reserve, will not stoop to bestow. Meantime the young couple at the Isle of Wight are in dangerous company. Richard, for the first time, is meeting men and women in free intercourse, including a Lord Mountfalcon and a dark, tall, attractive Lady * The irony of the business is that Richard's instinct of love it vaguely stirred first of all by witnessing his father's lordly philandering with Lady Blandish. Benson, who spies another instance of this, is finally dismissed for his inquisitiveness, but not before he has been flogged by Richard for intruding upon the privacy of the younger lovers. The amorous Curate, who has strayed in from the pages of " Pendennis " is an even milder figure than his fellow in "The Adventures of Harry Richmond." 101 George Meredith Judith Felle. The former is a villain, the latter a sentimental married woman. By the diplomacy of Adrian and Lady Blandish, Richard is persuaded to come alone to London, in the hope that Sir Austin may consent at least to see him, if not to take him back. Adrian persuades Lucy to agree to this sacrifice, and even to urge it, arguing that this is in Richard's interest ; the young husband, though accusing her of cowardice and unable to understand her real motive, falls in with his uncle's plan. Mrs. Doria Forey further persuades him, after Clare's marriage, to wait for his father in London, unless he wishes to make Sir Austin marry Lady Blandish. Sir Austin's real aim, however, is to separate husband and wife. His angry temper has devised this punishment for Richard ; the latter, wishing to humour and manage his father, and ignorant of the dastardly plot, remains in the metropolis, where another plot is laid against him and Lucy. He is inveigled by a Mrs. Mountstuart, acting under the instruc- tions of Lord Mountfalcon, who has designs upon poor Lucy at the Isle of Wight. 102 The Ordeal of Richard Feverel Richard's impulse of chivalry* leads him to champion the reputation of this woman, and also to rescue his mother from the life she was living. He summons Lucy, but she misled by Adrian thinks she will make the family feel her worth more by patiently wait- ing where she is, in case the baronet should feel aggrieved by any sudden move upon his privacy. The result is that Richard, in a moment of disappointment with her, flings himself recklessly into Mrs. Mountstuart*s company, and is carried further than he meant. Meantime, Sir Austin's pride has begun to relent towards his son and daughter-in-law. He had gone off with a note-book to write aphorisms in Wales, but has now returned. Only, his amendment is too late, t Richard receives his father's tentative * The first ebullition of this quixotic instinct broke out in his attempt to hinder the loveless marriage which was being forced on his cousin Clare. This was one of the reasons which hurried him DP to London. The second course of folly was due to his ignorance of the world (one result of the system) and his vanity. Sir Austin has told Adrian to let Richard see the world, this being partly designed as an education, partly in order to keep him away from Lucy. t Meredith here touches the string which we shall find sounding loudly in " Rhoda Fleming," " Lord Ormont and his Aminta." and " The Amazing Marriage." 103 George Meredith advances coldly ; black shame keeps him from joining Lucy, whom he has wronged ; and, as Sir Austin refuses to receive her at the Abbey without him, matters are at a stand-still. Richard, cursing himself for his folly, goes off to the Continent, where he joins the sentimental Lady Felle, while Lucy, whom Mrs. Berry has rescued from her aristocratic admirer, gives birth to a child in London. At this point, Austin Wentworth, one of Richard's uncles, a quiet, strong, chivalrous gentleman, returns from abroad, and intervenes. He takes Lucy and her baby to Raynham Abbey, where the baronet capitulates at sight to the girl-wife's charm. Then he fetches Richard home from Nassau in the Rhine-land, after hard persuasion, by telling him the amazing news of his father- hood. " He felt in his heart the cry of his child, his darling's touch. With shut eyes he saw them both. They drew him from the depths ; they led him a blind and tottering man. And as they led him he had a sense of purification so sweet he shuddered again and again." All is now going well, and Richard is 104 The Ordeal of Richard Feverel hurrying home, when in passing through London he happens to hear of Lord Mount- falcon's infamous and unsuccessful plot against his wife, which had been the cause of his degradation. The lad's hot blood is up. He challenges the aristocrat to a duel, feeling that he must take vengeance on the villain and clear his personal honour* before he can settle down with Lucy. A hurried visit to Raynham Abbey follows ; he tears himself from his wife and child, after a heartrending scene, and is severely wounded in France by his opponent. He recovers, only to be told that Lucy, who had crossed to nurse him, had died of brain fever. When the novel had been published, James Thomson told his friend frankly that no woman, and scarcely any man, would ever forgive him for "the cruel, cruel ending." Lucy's death is one of the few blots in the book, and the objections to it are not to be * Thus it is false or wounded pride which wrecks the son. as, in a different form, it was a mixture of pride and vanity which had warped the father. " A mad pleasure in the prospect of wreaking vengeance on the villain who had laid the trap for him, once more blackened his brain." In the instant when he confesses to Lucy that he had been a vain fool, he is still yielding, as Meredith observes, to " the powers of hell." 105 George Meredith bundled aside as so many weak cravings for the sugar-plum ending. It is not required by the system, and it is even more inartistic* than the drowning of Beauchamp. The girl's character is described, otherwise, with singular precision, from the day when, as a pretty little child of thirteen, she sees the handsome, sulky boy coming to apologize to her uncle, down to the ripening of her nature through marriage and motherhood. She is young, even when she dies, but never insipid for an instant. Her sweet womanli- ness, even more than her beauty, is the clue to the charm which she exercises on the Feverels. She is the sort of girl Meredith paints in "Marian," except that she never dealt "a wound that lingers." There is just a suspicion of unreality in Meredith's account of her relations with Lord Mountfalcon ; her innocence and simplicity are too credulous. Even her subservience to Adrian's influence is left half-explained. But whenever she is * The shadow of the cypress (in chapter xxi) may be intended as a preliminary hint, but Lucy's pretty fear of it only came after Richard haa scattered her anxieties about his father. The tree it too subtle to bear the weight of a premonition. 106 The Ordeal of Richard Feverel with Richard the sheer loveliness of her nature breaks through.* Mrs. Berry takes us to her capacious heart from the moment when we go with Richard to her lodgings at West Kensington. She proves a shrewd and kind and homely nurse to Lucy. But she also reads Sir Austin's character and speaks to him bravely when she gets the chance. Her talkt has the plain sense and wit of Mrs. Poyser's, and she richly deserves the return of her erring Berry towards the novel's close. She had been a cook at Raynham, from which she had been exiled on a small pension for having assisted once to carry Adrian drunk to bed; the baronet's pride could not endure the presence of this witness to his relative's offence. Her revenge came to her unsought in the services she chanced to render to Richard and Lucy against Sir Austin's will. She thereby be- came an unconscious agent in upsetting the baronet's system. * She has French blood in her veins, though her father was an English naval officer. t" Don't neglect your cookery. Kissing don't last: cookery do." " One gets so addle-pated thinkin' many things. That 's why we see wonder clever people al'ays goin* wrong to my mind. I think it 'a al'ays the plan in a dielemmer to pray God and walk forward." 107 George Meredith The baronet, like Sir Willoughby Patterne, is further punished by the fact that the woman, on whose admiration he counted, comes to see through him. Lady Blandish ceases to be a worshipper and is forced to become a critic. The book ends with a letter to Austin Wentworth, which voices her vehement contempt for Sir Austin and his mad self-deceit.* Meredith characteristically traces this infatuation in large measure to his lack of humour. " The faculty of laughter was denied him. A good wind of laughter had relieved him of much of the blight of self-deception, and oddness, and extravagance ; had given a healthier view of our atmosphere of life ; but he had it not." This was the philosophy t which afterwards appeared in the ode "To the Comic Spirit." As Meredith notes, even Richard and Lucy could laugh, in the dawn of their love-passion ; which proves that their feelings were not * Adrian Feverel, the wise youth, whose satirical wisdom proves so ineffective, is guilty of the same error. "The wise youth's two ears were stuffed with his own wisdom." t Fielding has a touch of it in the fourth paragraph of his invocation in " Tom Jones " (book xiii. ch. i). 108 The Ordeal of Richard Feverel sentimental rouge. " Better than sentiment, laughter opens the breast to love." Ripton, for all his peccadilloes,* shows that the normal training of youth is healthier than the system of Sir Austin. For one thing, Ripton, like Shibli and Pisistratus Gaxton, has known what it is to be thwacked. Richard had missed the wholesome birchings of school, but his friend was familiar with the rod. " He was seasoned wood, and took the world pretty wisely ; not reckless of castigation, as some boys become, nor over- sensitive to dishonour, as his friend and comrade beside him was." His humble, adoring devotion for Lucy, which is one with his loyalty to Richard, shows the good heart in him. "He had the Old Dog's eyes in his head. They watched the door she had passed through ; they listened for her, as dogs' eyes do. When she hung on her lover timidly, and went forth, he followed without an idea of envy, or any- thing save the secret raptures the sight of her * The law of gavelkind which he uses as a feint (in ch. xiv), was Saxon custom, surviving in Wales and Kent, by which primogeniture was R et aside in favour of an equal distribution of property, at a man's death, among his sons and daughters. 109 George Meredith gave him, which are the Old Dog's own. His sensations cannot be heroic, but they have a fulness, and a wagging delight, as good in their way."* The variety of power in the novel is illus- trated by the typical chapters, "Ferdinand and Miranda "t and " A Diversion played on a Penny- Whistle, "which breathe the spirit of " Love in a Valley " ; the successive episodes of the marriage, including the rather broad farce of Ripton's hilarious conduct, which is on much the same level as the chapters entitled "A Dinner Party at Richmond" and "An Enchantress" ; the account of Glare's diary (which verges on the sentimental) ; and the agonizing interview of the penultimate chapter. Twice, when Richard finds Lucy beside the river, and when he hears that he is a father (in the chapter, "Nature Speaks"), Meredith reproduces the wonderful rhythm Carinthia, at the end of "The Amazing Marriage." accepted Wythan because he wooed her "with dot's eyes instead of words." t The paragraph which closes the chapter immediately before, and which describes Richard coming upon Lucy by the river's edge, is full of the colour and fragrance which had already been felt in some of the early poems. In his next novel, Meredith almost repeated this success in the description of Rose and Evan beside the stream, but the lovers there do not flash on one another with the thrill of their predecessors. 110 The Ordeal of Richard Feverel of nature with the moods and passions of the soul which was always a characteristic feature alike of his prose and of his verse. Meredith's device for floating his epigrams in this novel is " The Pilgrim's Scrip," which is supposed to be a volume of aphorisms published by the baronet. These are couched sometimes in a deliberately commonplace shape, but now and then the author stamps himself upon a phrase, as in the following instances : " The compensation for injustice is, that in that dark ordeal we gather the worthiest around us." "Who rises from prayer a better man, his prayer 1*5 answered." " Who can say when he is not walking a pup- pet to some woman ? " * " Sentimentalists are they who seek to enjoy without incurring the Immense Debtorship for a thing done." " Give me purity to be worthy the good in her, and grant her patience to reach the good in me " (the lover's petition). The baronet, however, did not like his aphorisms to be criticised or questioned ; they were to be taken as oracles ; even " the direct application of * This u expounded in " Evan Harrington " (see the close of chapter xviii). Ill George Meredith an aphorism was unpopular at Raynham." " The Pilgrim's Scrip" and several episodes show that the author is a trifle conscious of his powers, but the scheme and style of the novel prove that the powers are there, even though sometimes they are devoted to the splitting of psychological seeds. One out- standing feature is the maturity of conception which is displayed in the treatment of the leading characters. The motive-grinding, which is audible in several of the later novels, has already begun, but this is a defect of the writer's strength as a watcher of the deep moods of the human soul. Note, by the way, (a) the satirical allusion to Richardson's hero at the opening of the nineteenth chapter, where the author also describes Mrs. Caroline Grandison who bore eight daughters in succession, and then, despairing of a son, "relapsed upon religion and little dogs." She was "a colourless lady of an unequivocal character, living upon drugs, and governing her husband and the world from her sofa. Woolly negroes blest her name, and whiskered John-Thomases de- plored her weight." A sister of Mrs. Jellyby ! 112 The Ordeal of Richard Feverel () The paragraph on snobbery in chapter xxxv (" The Conquest of an Epicure"), with its thesis that "the national love of a lord is less subservience than a form of self-love,'* was echoed, years later, by Ruskin in his " Fors Clavigera" (letter Ixiii) criticism of Thackeray, whom he accused of being blind to the fact that "it is himself the snob truly worships, all the time, and not the Lord he looks at." (c) Sir F. G. Burnand, in his "Rec- ords and Reminiscences/' recalled the figure of Maurice Fitzgerald, an eccentric epicure and scholar, whom Meredith used to call " the wise youth." The novelist, however, repu- diated the inference that Fitzgerald was the prototype of Adrian Harley. Fitzgerald was neither selfish nor unprincipled. It is need- less to do more than mention, as a curiosity of error, the idea that Adrian is meant to represent the author's characteristic attitude towards life. (