If the novel has been raised to the highest place in literature in our
time, this was mainly by the power of one hand. Victor Hugo had not the
intellect, nor Flaubert the purpose, nor George Eliot the drama, nor
Thackeray the tolerance, that in union could achieve such an exaltation
of an art that was once pastime. Fiction was made by Meredith for his
generation the companion of poetry, and thus the second great
imaginative art of letters. The picaresque novel, the novel of irony,
the novel of invention, the novel of morals, the novel of emotion—the
work of Le Sage, Cervantes, Balzac, Charlotte Brontë—works of genius as
they are, take an intermediate, arbitrary, and partial place; they are
on the way to the work of intellect and philosophy in fiction, the novel
that watches life, perceives, detects, indeed, but has also the
spiritual insight, wisdom as well as knowledge, and not only temperament
but passion; that not only states the problem, but accounts for it.
George Meredith did not pause upon his knowledge of the human heart as
though knowledge in itself were a good, he used his science; nor did he
stop upon his emotion over the pain of life, he used his sympathy. He
worked much beyond and far above the regions in which the wrangle about
art with a purpose or art without a purpose goes forward. No critic will
ever impugn Meredith’s transcendent purpose. It is not possible to
imagine his prose or poetry without it.
The greatness of Meredith stands unquestionable even in the eyes of
those who think it incomplete. Great he was—in thought, in passion, in
the art of letters, a student of mankind who sought to help, without
consoling, the race he watched, suffering and hoping with that which he
studied, as a physician pressing a finger upon a brother’s wrist, caring
much for the pulse, for the blood, and for the man’s life, caring also
much for his own science. The incompleteness which so many readers
charged against his work is perhaps that it lacks the great and high
repose of art which is unconscious of appearances. A great author should
be anxious for effect, or the result of his phrase upon the educated
ear, but he should be lifted above anxiety for appearances or the result
of his phrase upon the untaught. Meredith’s prose has not this
loftiness, and therefore misses the classic simplicity. He must be
afraid of nothing who writes at the greatest heights, and Meredith
feared commonplace. Strange fear for so distinguished a mind! But the
fear is unmistakable. It appears most plainly in narrative. He will not
consent to employ the usual forthright order of words in telling what
happened. Even in recounting the order of dialogue, he can hardly bear
to use the customary ‘he said’—he prefers ‘she heard’. This perpetual
kind of device mars the manner of his work only in so far as a fine
style can be marred by a little manner, and that is not very far.
Generally when we find such a weakness of fear and human respect in
literature, it is the companion of a weakness of the whole man—or at any
rate of the whole author. But when a great man suffers from this
frailty, we gladly recognize the truth that style is a profound thing
that cannot gravely suffer from surface habits. Meredith’s style is at
the foundation of his literature. It has often been said of some author
that he has little intellect or power but a good style of writing. Of
Meredith we might almost say that he has a magnificent style, yet writes
but ill, wild as the paradox may sound. Everything worthy to be called
style is his, but the phrase is often tormented, racked, and bent. No
other man’s writing could keep its strength, its gravity, and its beauty
under such a strain. In poetry, where inversion of one kind or another
is, by a long convention, in its right home, Meredith’s fault of manner
is the use of words so strange as to be unknown, but this occurs in none
but the later poems. Difficulty in attaining to the full meaning is too
great in both the earlier and the later poems, and in the slighter
pieces the fancy is too perversely fanciful. A great imagination is
Meredith’s, but a quibbling fancy.
When Matthew Arnold called poetry a criticism of life, the phrase was
taken away from the novel, to which it should belong. Philosophic
novelists (there have not been many in the history of English letters)
are the chief critics of human life—social life, civilized life, the
life of the race and of races, and that of a man and a woman; even a
great novelist who is not a philosopher—Thackeray, for example—is a
critic of life in its ethics, its emotions, and its shows; the novelist
who is a humorist does his admirable part of criticism. But Meredith in
his day took the whole social man into his grasp and his vision. A mere
user of his arresting hand and of his searching eyes Meredith was not;
he bent all the powers of a vigilant mind and of a human heart upon the
study of character. The study was also the creation. Meredith formed the
most possible, the most complex, the most complete and least explicable
of women and men, now and then varying these vitally-mingled persons by
presenting a man who, having one quality only, such as the Egoism of the
Egoist, is yet alive with a most indubitable life. George Meredith
seldom tells a story of these people—he tells nothing less than their
history. What he tells us is so much their history that the error, the
sin, or the blunder that draws their fate about them is detected in
their youth, traced in their maturity, and finished, early or late, in
their doom. No other important student of life, except perhaps George
Eliot, has found such visible revenges. He saw them, and he was resolved
to show them. His doctrine of consequences seems to stand between that
of the Buddhist with his inevitable body of results, and that of the
Christian with his directed and decreed retribution. Meredith’s Avenger
is an offended Nature or wronged Reason, working by the force of some
undecreed law; nevertheless of a law. Undecreed; and yet Meredith, by
figure of language at any rate, attributes to the visiting and avenging
Power now something of formidable indignation and now something of
formidable indifference; and even indifference has to be felt! Even
blindness implies an eye capable of sight! Meredith had a philosophy of
Nature which taught him not—as other students of brute life might
suppose—a simple and irresponsible egoism, but self-denial,
self-conquest, and unflinching endurance. He would have the individual
man to learn the almost unlearnable lesson that his own fate is of no
importance. Of no importance to the race others have perceived and
pronounced it; Meredith would have the unit to accept and make his own
that interior resignation—if resignation is not too half-hearted a word.
All the graver poems too bear this as their principal teaching, and
their many lessons rest on this alone. To the apostolate of this
doctrine he dedicated his practice of comedy, as well as his heart of
tragedy, and the Comic Spirit has no surer mission than to attack the
outworks of that self-love within which lurks the condemned desire for
personal happiness. Austere doctrine, compared with which the courage of
the Stoic is but shallow in its penetration of the soul, is but sparing
in its wounding of the heart.