GEORGE MEREDITH
A bright, warm, summer morning. I was working under pressure in my
study in Cheyne Walk on an article which had to be finished that
afternoon. Saturdays were my busiest days and this was Saturday, and
only morning. The maid rapped at the study door and said, "Mr. John
Burns to see you, Sir."
In came Burns, preceded by his great voice and hearty laugh, making
apology for interruption. "Can you drop the work and come with me?"
said he.
"Impossible," said I. "Sorry, but--"
"Well, I 'm off to George Meredith's," said he, laying a post card on
my writing table. The post card was from Meredith, who appointed the
meeting, and added:
"We 'll have a fine Radical day. Bring your friend."
"You are the friend," said Burns.
"I 'll come," said I. "Give me a quarter of an hour, and I 'll finish
this article somehow." And so I made sacrifice to one of my gods, the
god that dwelt on the sunny slope of Box Hill. The article {223} was
brought to a quicker turn than it had dreamed of, a hansom was called;
we rushed to Clapham Junction and took train for Burford Bridge.
It was more than a quarter of a century ago, but it seems like
yesterday. And yet, though it was more than a quarter of a century
ago, the Great Dock Strike had seemed so long before that it was almost
forgotten. In the dock strike, that is to say, in 1889, I had made
John Burns' acquaintance. He says I "discovered" him, discovered the
real John Burns under the red-hot agitator who was expected to lead a
hundred thousand men to incendiarism and the sack of London.
I do not remember the year which brought this Meredith day to our
spinning world. But it must have been in the early nineties, and Burns
on the London County Council, and perhaps for a session or so a member
of Parliament. The date, however, does n't matter. If it were not
1892 it may have been 1893 or '94. Let's get on.
Neither Burns nor I had ever met George Meredith. Burns and he had had
some correspondence which resulted in the post card and our expedition
to Box Hill that blossomy, fragrant morning when the England of dreams
lay all about us, and the stream that ran by Burford Bridge "babbled o'
green fields" and played with flowers.
We arrived at the little station in Surrey about noon. Whatever it may
be now, it was then a little station. We strode off to Box Hill, and
turned a corner, and there, trapping the sunshine, was Flint Cottage,
George Meredith's home, at the bottom of {224} a sloping garden running
over with roses. Roses, roses everywhere, and higher in the sloping
garden, overlooking a valley that the gods had made for poets to dream
in, was a little chalet where Meredith wrote, and slept, and had the
muses to wait on him. To the chalet a gardener directed us when we
asked for his master. We climbed the path. The chalet door stood
partly open. Burns knocked on a rose trellis. "Come in!" cried a
voice. In we went. There was George Meredith, in a Morris chair, with
a rug over his knees, and sheets and sheets and sheets of manuscript
over the rug. If he were to rise, the whole mountain of paper would
tumble helter-skelter to the floor.
"No! don't move," said my companion. "I'm John Burns." Then he
introduced me.
"I knew you, John Burns, I knew you. Your photographs are like you.
The voice is what I imagined it would be. Sit, gentlemen, sit. There,
by the window. No better view in England, I really think. I comfort
myself with it. It is good enough for parliament-men and our
scribbling kind," said Meredith, smiling roguishly at me. The grasp of
his hand was firm and generous. His voice had rich, deep tones. But
he looked a fragile being.
"Like the schoolboy, I can say, 'This is n't writin', it's readin','"
and he pointed to the manuscript.
"Chapman and Hall-ing," I ventured to say.
"That's right," said Meredith, "you see the slave bearing his burden."
If John Burns' photographs were faithful, so were Meredith's, or so was
the one with which I had been {225} familiar. His beard and hair were
grey, almost white then. He looked older than he was. He was only
sixty-five. Only sixty-five, and I thought him old! He lived to be
eighty-one. I liked his voice. I had been told that it was high and
shrill. It was nothing of the kind. It was mellow, clear, and his
speech was scholar-like, with quaint shafts of wit. They used to tell
of his "artificial talk." I heard none of it. He was as natural as
his roses. But there might be prickly thorns under the rose.
Meredith gathered his papers and put them aside. He leaned back in his
big, comfortable chair, and said "now let's talk" as another man might
say "let's have a drink." And we three sat, and talked and remade the
world like a lot of youngsters. We knew better, each of us, knew that
the dreams we were indulging would never be realised, that probably we
would never call them up and look at them again--we would n't
dare--they would be buried with us, no doubt. Some other youngsters
might dream similar dreams by and by. No doubt they would. But to-day
was to-day. And to-morrow I would be twice as old as Meredith, though
half his years, and know in all my body half as much as his little
finger knew. That very day he was the youngest of the three. He
bubbled quietly, like champagne in a hollow-stemmed glass. The
conversation capered. We might have been lads out of school, and we
ragged the authorities. Meredith was the youngest and gayest of the
three, Burns the most enthusiastic, and I came dragging on with not
exactly timorous whoop-hurrahs! And it was {226} June, and high noon,
with roses everywhere, and still more roses, and the humming of bees.
And the big world was far away--a million miles.
It was "a fine Radical day" no doubt, in more than the limited
political sense. Burns was the only political Radical of the three.
He called me "a crusted Tory." I don't remember what he called George
Meredith, who left us guessing, I think, as some of his printed pages
were likely to do. Anyway, we did n't talk books. Life was better.
And there was a lot of life to talk about yet, at the end of an age.
Besides, our host was pressing us to stay to luncheon.
Down the garden path we strolled, still talking. Meredith said, as we
seated ourselves at table: "I 'm here alone at present: you come like a
rescuing expedition. This talk is a shower on parched land." After
luncheon the talk went on, under trees, and tea-time had come before we
knew it. After tea a walk over Box Hill.
You will have gathered by this time that the talking was not about
Meredith or his books. He guided us from those high pastures where we
would have liked to browse to the lower marshes where we might stumble
as we pleased over politics, Home Rule and no rule, free trade and
protection, dear food and cheap food, municipal administration, the
housing of the poor, socialism, and all those everlasting puzzles which
England is discussing now as she discussed them thirty years ago. They
were very dear to John Burns. They seemed interesting to Meredith. He
enjoyed talking another man's {227} shop; at any rate, he enjoyed
talking Burns' shop so much that the talk scarcely touched on books.
It may be mentioned at this point that John Burns, even at that time,
owned probably more books than Meredith, and knew the insides of them.
Whether or not he knew the insides of more books than did Meredith is
another matter. Meredith, you know, was a publisher's reader.
I did manage, while we were at tea, to get in a word about "One of Our
Conquerors" and its tribute to good wine, certain passages which could
have been written only by a connoisseur.
"Ah, I 'm that; yes, I 'm that! Burns would n't appreciate that, but
you do." And I spoke of a certain description in the same book, a view
from London Bridge, westward, in the late afternoon. And the man
chasing his hat in a high wind. I said I had taken an American friend
there recently, and he had had to chase his hat, and then, for solace,
we had gone to the restaurant in the city, the one described by
Meredith, and had had food, and cracked a bottle of the delicate wine
which, with tender ritual, had been opened and served to the two men in
the story.
"And," said I, "although you disguised the restaurant and the label, I
will not disguise from you the fact that my friend is also a
connoisseur of the bright and beautiful, the American celebrator of
choice things and moments--Thomas Bailey Aldrich--and that he rose at a
point in our simple feast and said, with reverence: 'I salute George
Meredith.'"
{228}
Meredith's eyes twinkled. He rose, lifted his straw hat, bowed, and
said: "The Author of 'Marjorie Daw', I am your obliged and humble
servant."
And so the honours were even between Aldrich and himself.
Burns put in his word here. "We must go for the five-thirty train.
Good-bye, Mr. Meredith, we have had the--"
"No, no, John Burns! It 's not to be heard of! Both of you are to
stay for dinner! Mark you that, John Burns. Never, never shall I
forgive you two if you leave a poor lone man of ink without dining at
his table. The thing is forbidden, forbidden absolutely, John Burns."
Is it strange then that we stayed for dinner, having already taken
luncheon, tea, and a stroll with the magician of Box Hill? Not only
did we stay, but we stayed till nearly midnight, having just time to
catch the last train for London.
And this is a very pleasant part of my recollections of the day:
Our host, when he had shown us to the dining room, excused himself for
a moment, lighted a candle, and, opening a door in a corner of the
room, descended to the cellar. In two or three minutes he reappeared,
his delicate face lighted by the candle which he held in his left hand
directly behind a dusty half-bottle of wine, through which the light
shone softly in a ruby glow. One saw first the wine, then the light,
then the face, as ascending the stairs they entered from below,
mounting slowly with {229} exquisite care lest the wine be shaken.
Slowly, and with great care, Meredith wrapped a napkin around the
bottle, and drew the cork, placing the bottle at my plate and saying,
with the most gracious, old-world courtesy: "For one who knows and
appreciates, from one who appreciates and knows."
There was "approbation from Sir Hubert Stanley!"
"John Burns is a teetotaller, they say," added Meredith. "Of such is
not the kingdom of my heaven. Burns says you discovered him. What do
you think of your discovery? Tell me how it came about."
"Burns does not embody my idea of a modest man," said I. "As for that,
there seems to be some doubt, nowadays, whether modest men should be
permitted to live. What does Gilbert say:
"'You must stir it, and stump it
And blow your own trumpet,
Or, bless me, you have n't a chance!'
"Well, I came upon Burns first, in '89, when he had London scared (of
course London would n't confess that it was scared but it was) and he
was 'stumping it' at the dock gates, and from cart-tails on Tower Hill,
and was listened to by thousands and tens of thousands of hungry men,
and their wives, and youngsters--"
"'Agitating the dregs of London', the newspapers put it," said Meredith.
"All for sixpence an hour," said Burns.
"You have the floor!" said Meredith to me.
{230}
"I told you he is not accurately described as a modest man. This is
_my_ story," I continued, "the story as I see it. London had heard of
him--when was it?--in '86, or so, when he led a crowd of East Enders to
Trafalgar Square where mass meetings were not permitted, and the crowd
got out of hand and smashed plate-glass windows, and Burns got his head
broken, or nearly so, and went to gaol."
"'Serve the brute right!' I remember the run of thoughtful British
opinion," put in Meredith.
"I was not in England at the time, but I remember the verdict," I said.
"The trouble was," said Burns, "I hadn't been introduced to the
authorities. There I touched a fundamental British prejudice. The
affair secured me the introduction, and opened Trafalgar Square--"
"To the mob," said Meredith.
"To mass meetings," said Burns.
"I am playing British chorus," was Meredith's rejoinder.
"Second chapter," said I. "There came the year of the Great Dock
Strike. The casual labourer swarmed out of chaos, and struck for a
sane, not to say 'civilised' method of hiring, and sixpence an hour."
"And the dock companies, or whatever they were, were not sane, and,
also, they had n't a sixpence, they said"--thus Meredith.
"Which was absurd, Mr. Meredith, as you are on the point of adding," I
went on. "We don't know how many thousands of men were thrown out
{231} of work. Nobody knows to this day, but here is what I am coming
at; there were thousands of them, and there was great suffering in
their families. Well, when I first saw Burns he was organising
kitchens, and feeding women and children, and making ten speeches every
twenty-four hours, and sleeping an hour or two when he could find time
and a place to lie down. Some nights he did not sleep at all. The
night before I met him he slept four hours in his clothes and boots.
In three days he made thirty-six speeches; in three weeks he averaged
ten speeches a day, out of doors. He is hoarse still, no wonder.
"I lost sight of him for a bit, and found him again on Tower Hill,
speaking to a big crowd. His platform was a dray. When he stopped
speaking and jumped down from the dray, I introduced myself to him,
said I was mightily interested, and that I wanted to interview him.
"'All right,' said he; 'begin!'
"If he were not modest, I was. 'Not here,' said I, 'let's go where we
can talk in quiet.' So I tucked him into a hansom and, followed by a
yelling crowd which we soon left out of sight, we drove to a club of
mine in the West End, where we had a long talk. The immediate results
were--oh, well, some articles in which I tried to show the world the
real John Burns."
"That was the discovery?" asked Meredith.
"Burns calls it so. He was no more modest about being discovered then
than he is now. He has a way of telling you straight what he thinks,
or what he 's at, or of telling you that he won't tell you."
{232}
"I 've noticed that. John Burns, are you under any delusions about
popularity? I think you are not."
"I 'm not," said Burns. "When the crowds are cheering their loudest, I
am asking myself how soon they will hang my carcass on the outer walls."
"A cheering and useful inquiry," observed Meredith. "My impression is
that you have a long course to cover. But leaders of the people are
wisest when they remember that there _are_ outer walls for the hanging
of carcasses."
"The confessions of Radicals strengthen the soul," said I.
"These are not confessions; they are articles of faith," exclaimed
Burns.
I intimated that my faith in a political sense was as a grain of
mustard seed, human nature being what it was, and political stupidity
unconquerable. Gladstone being mentioned by our host, I asked Burns to
tell his Gladstone story, that is, what the G.O.M. said to him, and
what he said to the G.O.M. at their first meeting.
"It was in the lobby of the House of Commons," Burns explained, "soon
after my election. You know I was not what might be called a
worshipper of that wonderful man. A bit too independent for his
liking, perhaps."
"And the only thing he would dislike, perhaps," said Meredith, smiling.
"Well, you know. I was in the lobby, talking with a front-bench
Liberal when the great man passed. The member with whom I was talking
{233} took me up to him and presented me. The G.O.M. bowed, and we
shook hands. He said:
"'It gives me pleasure, Mr. Burns, to see you here, to welcome you to
the House of Commons.'
"I replied, 'Believe me, sir, my pleasure is equal to your own!'
"A hit, a palpable hit!" cried Meredith. "I can see Gladstone drawing
in his horns."
"He stiffened a bit, and we went our ways. That is all there is of the
story," added Burns.
"The one about the docker and the matches is not bad," said I.
"Let me have it," begged Meredith.
"At one of my meetings near the dock gates, a fellow shouted: 'Burn the
docks; break in and burn the docks!' He interrupted me two or three
times with that cry. The crowd was sullen. It had n't got its
sixpence yet. I must stop the roaring fellow, or his mates might get
out of control. I borrowed a box of matches from the nearest man.
'Catch!' I cried to the noisy chap. He caught it as I flung it over
the heads of the crowd. 'Now, then,' I called to him, 'if you are
crazy, if you don't care what happens to all these men and their wives
and children, and if you want to ruin this strike, go, fire the docks!'
But the man did n't move. I waited, but still he did n't move. Then I
said: 'Your hand has n't the courage of your mouth. Take the matches
from him, men, hand 'em back to me. Make way for him. He 's shown
that he 's a braggin' coward. Out with him!' He skulked away, hooted
by the crowd. I suppose that was the {234} origin of the yarn that I
was inciting the mob to burn the docks."
"That's the way history is written, John Burns. Have you found your
dockers suspicious regarding you?" Meredith put the question with a
naive air.
"Of course. Men of their kind are always suspicious, until they know
you. Why should n't they be? Whoever went among 'em before those days
with any other purpose than to get the best of 'em?"
"They suspected your decent clothes," said I.
Burns laughed. "One morning I appeared in a new suit of blue serge
like this, and a new straw hat, like that. 'Where'd you get 'em,
Burns?' one man shouted. 'He 's makin' more 'n sixpence out o' us,'
yelled another. Then I had to explain, anyhow, I did explain, that
Madame Tussaud's had given me a new suit, so that they could put my old
one on a wax figure of me. Tussaud's wanted my old hat, but my wife
would n't part with that. She wanted it as a trophy."
We sat at table all the evening talking, George Meredith, John Burns,
and I. Of all the men one had ever heard talk, I can't remember one
who had a charm of voice and speech excelling Meredith's. I can feel
its fascination now across the interval of nearly thirty years. It
was, I have said, a musical voice, but it was more than that. It was
rich and deep and delicate. The enunciation was perfect with a
perfection that was rare and individual; his voice was an instrument
with many banks of keys. Charm was its characteristic, charm that no
{235} one could describe, although many have tried to do so. And his
eyes, you could say, were bluish-grey, or grey-blue, but you could not
say--as they twinkled, or flashed, or seemed at rest like little lakes,
pellucid, undisturbed, or lighted instantly as some humorous or
sympathetic thought moved behind them--you could not say how, or why
they held you, or had the power, a pleasant power, of searching you,
looking through you. There was nothing that you could describe in so
many words, but there was much that you could feel and like. Even when
Meredith spoke of man, or woman, or deed that he did not like, and
spoke with dramatic force, his gaze would not blaze or harden. He
seemed to be searching serenely beyond the surface for the element of
comedy, searching with sympathy and humour for the thing that he could
understand, and understand better than any one else in the world. You
could always touch him with a sympathetic humour. He did not like wise
owls, or rather the owlishness which the run of humans take for wisdom.
His strength, George Meredith's strength, was in his perceptions, his
appreciations; physically he was frail, or was frail then! You would
n't have supposed him ever to have been a great walker and a man of
athletic tendencies. But he had been. Now he walked rather slowly,
with a stick, and seemed glad to stop every few minutes. His face made
me think of a cameo, by the delicacy of its carving. There was
exquisite beauty in it, and the voice enhanced that. But even the most
delicate lines {236} were firmly carved. If you handled him roughly
you might bend him, but you could not break his spirit. At the time I
speak of, he was beyond his years, far beyond them; physically, but in
no other way, he seemed an old and fragile man. And yet neither voice
nor eyes suggested anything of the kind. In spirits and outlook he
retained the keenness of mighty youth. When he talked with us he was
of no age at all, the agelessness of the eternal; it was only when he
walked with us about his garden, or over Box Hill, that the flesh
betrayed, now and then, its limitations. If you had had his eyes, you
might have looked through his body. A strong wind might have carried
him away. But he lived sixteen years after that, and, for all his
touch of melancholy, they were happy years.
Others could tell other tales of him and have done so; have said, for
one thing, that he was quick and tempery. What they meant was that his
highly sensitive make-up had n't its times or seasons, but were on and
off quite unexpectedly, as is usually the case with highly sensitive
folk. Men do not study such sensitive creatures with the object of
avoiding trouble; they blunder and thunder on and then are amazed, when
they have struck a nerve centre, to find that it has its own method of
reacting. And then George Meredith had been more than half his life a
reader for publishers. And all his life he was writing poetry and
novels! Now if there is any act less likely than another to insure
peace of mind, it is the reading of other persons' manuscripts. And to
do that regularly, professionally, for several {237} decades, while you
prefer to be a poet and love to be a novelist, is to give oneself to
occupations which not only jar upon each other, but upon the nerves of
him that undertakes the triple task. Meredith must have had a rare
power of concentration to preserve his own authorship from saturation
in the flood of manuscripts in which he swam for forty years. His
experiences would have paralysed the creative capacity in most men.
I can suppose only that they who found his talk "artificial" must have
touched some spring in him that Burns and I did not press. We found
him entirely free from artificiality. No pair of strangers could have
been more agreeably entertained. And yet we inflicted upon him a long
day. They say he was "gey ill to live wi'." Perhaps he was; perhaps
he was not. But why should n't he have been? Most writers are. And
why should n't they be? They are of a sensitive sort, in greater
degree, or less. Their business is mainly to observe, to consider, to
speak with ink. These things require concentration of mind. And while
the world is running in and out, and kindly intentioned persons are
making suggestions which have no relation to the business in hand, or
wondering why their wish cannot have precedence, or why their opinion
is not the most important thing in the universe, the poet's work, or
train of thought, has to get on, or the novelist's, or the reader of
manuscripts'. It may be true that no creative gentleman has a right to
moods, but at least he has a right to tenses. No such plea is put
forth for the rest of mankind. {238} Probably the fact is that the
person criticising considers his own mood the more important of the
two. Artistic sensibilities are as difficult for their possessors to
endure all the time as they can possibly be for any one else to
encounter a part of the time. But who ever thinks of that?
We talked on through the evening, without leaving the dining room. I
caught Burns looking apprehensively at the clock. "Yes," said I, "we
can catch it if we go at once. It's the last train." There was a
hurried leave-taking, and we were off. We left the kind old gentleman
standing in the doorway, holding a lamp which lighted us down the path
and shone full upon his face.
"Well?" said Burns, when we were seated in the train.
"A glorious day!" I answered.
"Never a better," said Burns.
Surely we never went through a better day together, and we went through
many.
Late one afternoon in 1907, I was crossing the outer lobby of the House
of Commons just as John Burns was crossing it in the opposite
direction. He saw me first and called out to me.
"Where have you come from now?" he asked, when we had shaken hands.
"And how long is it since we met?"
"America this time," said I. "I 've been there four years. But it
must be seven years since I 've seen you."
"Gadabout!" said he. "Did you ever have another Meredith day?"
{239}
"No," said I, "nor anything like it. Let's go again."
"Let's," was his response.
But we did not go again, for, as it turned out, another ten days called
me back to America. Burns, of course, was already in the Cabinet, but
he wore a blue serge suit, just as of yore.
In 1913 when again I came to England, I did not see him. I had several
months in the country but only ten days in town, when I fled with an
attentive influenza which Freshwater drove away.
But in 1916, having come the day before from a liner at Liverpool, I
was walking in Victoria Street just as Burns turned a corner.
"The oddest thing," said he. "I was just thinking of our day with
Meredith. Let's talk. But don't talk politics. Which way are you
going?"
"Any way," I said. And we strolled into the cloisters of Westminster
Abbey.
{240}