His Qualities.
To read Mr. Meredith's novels with insight is to find them full of the
rarest qualities in fiction. If their author has a great capacity for
unsatisfactory writing he has capacities not less great for writing that
is satisfactory in the highest degree. He has the tragic instinct and
endowment, and he has the comic as well; he is an ardent student of
character and life; he has wit of the swiftest, the most comprehensive,
the most luminous, and humour that can be fantastic or ironical or human
at his pleasure; he has passion and he has imagination; he has considered
sex--the great subject, the leaven of imaginative art--with notable
audacity and insight. He is as capable of handling a vice or an emotion
as he is of managing an affectation. He can be trivial, or grotesque, or
satirical, or splendid; and whether his _milieu_ be romantic or actual,
whether his personages be heroic or sordid, he goes about his task with
the same assurance and intelligence. In his best work he takes rank with
the world's novelists. He is a companion for Balzac and Richardson, an
intimate for Fielding and Cervantes. His figures fall into their place
beside the greatest of their kind; and when you think of Lucy Feverel and
Mrs. Berry, of Evan Harrington's Countess Saldanha and the Lady Charlotte
of _Emilia in England_, of the two old men in _Harry Richmond_ and the
Sir Everard Romfrey of _Beauchamp's Career_, of Renee and Cecilia, of
Emilia and Rhoda Fleming, of Rose Jocelyn and Lady Blandish and Ripton
Thompson, they have in the mind's eye a value scarce inferior to that of
Clarissa and Lovelace, of Bath and Western and Booth, of Andrew
Fairservice and Elspeth Mucklebacket, of Philippe Bridau and Vautrin and
Balthasar Claes. In the world of man's creation his people are citizens
to match the noblest; they are of the aristocracy of the imagination, the
peers in their own right of the society of romance. And for all that,
their state is mostly desolate and lonely and forlorn.
His Defects.
For Mr. Meredith is one of the worst and least attractive of great
writers as well as one of the best and most fascinating. He is a sun
that has broken out into innumerable spots. The better half of his
genius is always suffering eclipse from the worse half. He writes with
the pen of a great artist in his left hand and the razor of a spiritual
suicide in his right. He is the master and the victim of a monstrous
cleverness which is neither to hold nor to bind, and will not permit him
to do things as an honest, simple person of genius would. As
Shakespeare, in Johnson's phrase, lost the world for a quibble and was
content to lose it, so does Mr. Meredith discrown himself of the
sovereignty of contemporary romance to put on the cap and bells of the
professional wit. He is not content to be plain Jupiter: his lightnings
are less to him than his fireworks; and his pages so teem with fine
sayings and magniloquent epigrams and gorgeous images and fantastic
locutions that the mind would welcome dulness as a bright relief. He is
tediously amusing; he is brilliant to the point of being obscure; his
helpfulness is so extravagant as to worry and confound. That is the
secret of his unpopularity. His stories are not often good stories and
are seldom well told; his ingenuity and intelligence are always
misleading him into treating mere episodes as solemnly and elaborately as
main incidents; he is ever ready to discuss, to ramble, to theorise, to
dogmatise, to indulge in a little irony or a little reflection or a
little artistic misdemeanour of some sort. But other novelists have done
these things before him, and have been none the less popular, and are
actually none the less readable. None, however, has pushed the foppery
of style and intellect to such a point as Mr. Meredith. Not infrequently
he writes page after page of English as ripe and sound and unaffected as
heart could wish; and you can but impute to wantonness and recklessness
the splendid impertinences that intrude elsewhere. To read him at the
rate of two or three chapters a day is to have a sincere and hearty
admiration for him and a devout anxiety to forget his defects and make
much of his merits. But they are few who can take a novel on such terms
as these, and to read your Meredith straight off is to have an
indigestion of epigram, and to be incapable of distinguishing good from
bad: the author of the parting between Richard and Lucy Feverel--a high-
water mark of novelistic passion and emotion--from the creator of Mr.
Raikes and Dr. Shrapnel, which are two of the most flagrant unrealities
ever perpetrated in the name of fiction by an artist of genius.
Another Way.
On the whole, I think, he does not often say anything not worth hearing.
He is too wise for that; and, besides, he is strenuously in earnest about
his work. He has a noble sense of the dignity of art and the
responsibilities of the artist; he will set down nothing that is to his
mind unworthy to be recorded; his treatment of his material is
distinguished by the presence of an intellectual passion (as it were)
that makes whatever he does considerable and deserving of attention and
respect. But unhappily the will is not seldom unequal to the deed: the
achievement is often leagues in rear of the inspiration; the attempt at
completeness is too laboured and too manifest--the feat is done but by a
painful and ungraceful process. There _is_ genius, but there is _not_
felicity: that, one is inclined to say, is the distinguishing note of Mr.
Meredith's work, in prose and verse alike. There are magnificent
exceptions, of course, but they prove the rule and, broken though it be,
there is no gainsaying its existence. To be concentrated in form, to be
suggestive in material, to say nothing that is not of permanent value,
and only to say it in such terms as are charged to the fullest with
significance--this would seem to be the aim and end of Mr. Meredith's
ambition. Of simplicity in his own person he appears incapable. The
texture of his expression must be stiff with allusion, or he deems it ill
spun; there must be something of antic in his speech, or he cannot
believe he is addressing himself to the Immortals; he has praised with
perfect understanding the lucidity, the elegance, the ease, of Moliere,
and yet his aim in art (it would appear) is to be Moliere's antipodes,
and to vanquish by congestion, clottedness, an anxious and determined
dandyism of form and style. There is something _bourgeois_ in his
intolerance of the commonplace, something fanatical in the intemperance
of his regard for artifice. 'Le dandy,' says Baudelaire, 'doit aspirer a
etre sublime sans interruption. Il doit vivre et dormir devant un
miroir.' That, you are tempted to believe, is Mr. Meredith's theory of
expression. 'Ce qu'il y a dans le mauvais gout,' is elsewhere the
opinion of the same unamiable artist in paradox, 'c'est le plaisir
aristocratique de deplaire.' Is that, you ask yourself, the reason why
Mr. Meredith is so contemptuous of the general public?--why he will stoop
to no sort of concession nor permit himself a mite of patience with the
herd whose intellect is content with such poor fodder as Scott and
Dickens and Dumas? Be it as it may, the effect is the same. Our author
is bent upon being 'uninterruptedly sublime'; and we must take him as he
wills and as we find him. He loses of course; and we suffer. But none
the less do we cherish his society, and none the less are we interested
in his processes, and enchanted (when we are clever enough) by his
results. He lacks felicity, I have said; but he has charm as well as
power, and, once his rule is accepted, there is no way to shake him off.
The position is that of the antique tyrant in a commonwealth once
republican and free. You resent the domination, but you enjoy it too,
and with or against your will you admire the author of your slavery.
Rhoda Fleming.
_Rhoda Fleming_ is one of the least known of the novels, and in a sense
it is one of the most disagreeable. To the general it has always been
caviare, and caviare it is likely to remain; for the general is before
all things respectable, and no such savage and scathing attack upon the
superstitions of respectability as _Rhoda Fleming_ has been written. And
besides, the emotions developed are too tragic, the personages too
elementary in kind and too powerful in degree, the effects too poignant
and too sorrowful. In these days people read to be amused. They care
for no passion that is not decent in itself and whose expression is not
restrained. It irks them to grapple with problems capable of none save a
tragic solution. And when Mr. Meredith goes digging in a very bad temper
with things in general into the deeper strata, the primitive deposits, of
human nature, the public is the reverse of profoundly interested in the
outcome of his exploration and the results of his labour. But for them
whose eye is for real literature and such literary essentials as
character largely seen and largely presented and as passion deeply felt
and poignantly expressed there is such a feast in _Rhoda Fleming_ as no
other English novelist alive has spread. The book, it is true, is full
of failures. There is, for instance, the old bank porter Anthony, who is
such a failure as only a great novelist may perpetrate and survive; who
suggests (with some other of Mr. Meredith's creations) a close,
deliberate, and completely unsuccessful imitation of Dickens: a writer
with whom Mr. Meredith is not averse from entering into competition, and
who, so manifest on these occasions is his superiority, may almost be
described as the other's evil genius. Again, there is Algernon the fool,
of whom his author is so bitterly contemptuous that he is never once
permitted to live and move and have any sort of being whatever and who,
though he bears a principal part in the intrigue, like the Blifil of _Tom
Jones_ is so constantly illuminated by the lightnings of the ironical
mode of presentation as always to seem unreal in himself and seriously to
imperil the reality of the story. And, lastly, there are the chivalrous
Percy Waring and the inscrutable Mrs. Lovell, two gentle ghosts whose
proper place is the shadow-land of the American novel. But when all
these are removed (and for the judicious reader their removal is far from
difficult) a treasure of reality remains. What an intensity of life it
is that hurries and throbs and burns through the veins of the two
sisters--Dahlia the victim, Rhoda the executioner! Where else in English
fiction is such a 'human oak log' as their father, the Kentish yeoman
William Fleming? And where in English fiction is such a problem
presented as that in the evolution of which these three--with a following
so well selected and achieved as Robert Armstrong and Jonathan Eccles and
the evil ruffian Sedgett, a type of the bumpkin gone wrong, and Master
Gammon, that type of the bumpkin old and obstinate, a sort of human
saurian--are dashed together, and ground against each other till the
weakest and best of the three is broken to pieces? Mr. Meredith may and
does fail conspicuously to interest you in Anthony Hackbut and Algernon
Blancove and Percy Waring; but he knows every fibre of the rest, and he
makes your knowledge as intimate and comprehensive as his own. With
these he is never at fault and never out of touch. They have the unity
of effect, the vigorous simplicity, of life that belong to great creative
art; and at their highest stress of emotion, the culmination of their
passion, they appeal to and affect you with a force and a directness that
suggest the highest achievement of Webster. Of course this sounds
excessive. The expression of human feeling in the coil of a tragic
situation is not a characteristic of modern fiction. It is thought to be
not consistent with the theory and practice of realism; and the average
novelist is afraid of it, the average reader is only affected by it when
he goes to look for it in poetry. But the book is there to show that
such praise is deserved; and they who doubt it have only to read the
chapters called respectively 'When the Night is Darkest' and 'Dahlia's
Frenzy' to be convinced and doubt no longer. It has been objected to the
climax of _Rhoda Fleming_ that it is unnecessarily inhumane, and that
Dahlia dead were better art than Dahlia living and incapable of love and
joy. But the book, as I have said, is a merciless impeachment of
respectability; and as the spectacle of a ruined and broken life is
infinitely more discomforting than that of a noble death, I take it that
Mr. Meredith was right to prefer his present ending to the alternative,
inasmuch as the painfulness of that impression he wished to produce and
the potency of that moral he chose to draw are immensely heightened and
strengthened thereby.
The Tragic Comedians.
Opinions differ, and there are those, I believe, to whom Alvan and
Clotilde von Rudiger--'acrobats of the affections' they have been
called--are pleasant companions, and the story of those feats in the
gymnastics of sentimentalism in which they lived to shine is the
prettiest reading imaginable. But others not so fortunate or, to be
plain, more honestly obtuse persist in finding that story tedious, and
the bewildering appearances it deals with not human beings--not of the
stock of Rose Jocelyn and Sir Everard Romfrey, of Dahlia Fleming and Lucy
Feverel and Richmond Roy--but creatures of gossamer and rainbow,
phantasms of spiritual romance, abstractions of remote, dispiriting
points in sexual philosophy.
The Egoist.
Just as Moliere in the figures of Alceste and Tartuffe has summarised and
embodied all that we need to know of indignant honesty and the false
fervour of sanctimonious animalism, so in the person of Sir Willoughby
Patterne has Mr. Meredith succeeded in expressing the qualities of egoism
as the egoist appears in his relations with women and in his conception
and exercise of the passion of love. Between the means of the two men
there is not, nor can be, any sort of comparison. Moliere is brief,
exquisite, lucid: classic in his union of ease and strength, of purity
and sufficiency, of austerity and charm. In _The Egoist_ Mr. Meredith is
even more artificial and affected than his wont: he bristles with
allusions, he teems with hints and side-hits and false alarms, he
glitters with phrases, he riots in intellectual points and philosophical
fancies; and though his style does nowhere else become him so well, his
cleverness is yet so reckless and indomitable as to be almost as
fatiguing here as everywhere. But in their matter the great Frenchman
and he have not much to envy each other. Sir Willoughby Patterne is a
'document on humanity' of the highest value; and to him that would know
of egoism and the egoist the study of Sir Willoughby is indispensable.
There is something in him of us all. He is a compendium of the Personal
in man; and if in him the abstract Egoist have not taken on his final
shape and become classic and typical it is not that Mr. Meredith has
forgotten anything in his composition but rather that there are certain
defects of form, certain structural faults and weaknesses, which prevent
you from accepting as conclusive the aspect of the mass of him. But the
Moliere of the future (if the future be that fortunate) has but to pick
and choose with discretion here to find the stuff of a companion figure
to Arnolphe and Alceste and Celimene.
In Metre.
His verse has all the faults and only some of the merits of his prose.
Thus he will rhyme you off a ballad, and to break the secret of that
ballad you have to take to yourself a dark lantern and a case of jemmies.
I like him best in _The Nuptials of Attila_. If he always wrote as here,
and were always as here sustained in inspiration, rapid of march, nervous
of phrase, apt of metaphor, and moving in effect, he would be delightful
to the general, and that without sacrificing on the vile and filthy altar
of popularity. Here he is successfully himself, and what more is there
to say? You clap for Harlequin, and you kneel to Apollo. Mr. Meredith
doubles the parts, and is irresistible in both. Such fire, such vision,
such energy on the one hand and on the other such agility and athletic
grace are not often found in combination.
The Fashion of Art.
This is the merit and distinction of art: to be more real than reality,
to be not nature but nature's essence. It is the artist's function not
to copy but to synthesise: to eliminate from that gross confusion of
actuality which is his raw material whatever is accidental, idle,
irrelevant, and select for perpetuation that only which is appropriate
and immortal. Always artistic, Mr. Meredith's work is often great art.