GEORGE MEREDITH
[Illustration]
GEORGE MEREDITH
_A STUDY_
BY
HANNAH LYNCH
Methuen & Co.
18, BURY STREET, LONDON, W.C.
1891
[_All rights reserved_]
To
ROSAMOND VENNING.
MY DEAR MISS VENNING,
Will you, when you read this little book of mine, find fault with
my unmeasured Hibernian enthusiasms and antipathies, and quote your
favourite Greek advice--μηδὲν ἄγαν? So that you bring to the reading
of it some surrender of your reserve and a break in that classic
moderation that we poor barbarians do not quite understand--violently
tinctured as we are by nature--it will be a fresh debt added to the
life-long debt I gladly owe destiny for that memorable first meeting in
Athena’s charming little city.
The thought of it waves memory back into broad sunshine untravelled
by clouds, among sun-stained marble pillars and rose and mauve tinted
hills, girdling purple waters, and the long silver olive plain of
Attica. Do you remember still our first walk along the cactus-bordered
path to the Acropolis? Was it not of ‘Tragic Comedians’ that we talked?
So now, years after, I offer you in grateful remembrance this little
gathering of ideas you may not wholly share, but will not wholly
reject, through affection for your friend, to whom so wide a difference
would be nothing less than a real misfortune.
HANNAH LYNCH.
PARIS, _February, 1891_.
PREFACE.
A couple of months ago I was asked to give a lecture in Paris on a
modern English writer, and I naturally selected my favourite, the
subject of this little book. It was afterwards suggested to me that
the lecture would bear expansion, a task I the more readily undertook
because I was happy enough to learn that my humble effort had sent at
least three intellectual foreigners to the fountainhead to study for
themselves the novels of Mr. Meredith, curious to see if I had not
overrated his merits, as is the habit of enthusiastic disciples, and
greatly astonished to find their expectations disappointed, and my
estimate unexaggerated.
While still engaged upon this work I received from London Mr. Le
Gallienne’s book, ‘George Meredith,’ and not having by me copies of
‘Modern Love’ or the other poems of Mr. Meredith, I availed myself of
his quotations of the famous sonnet and ‘A Meeting.’ I have also taken
from Mr. Lane’s Bibliography, added to Mr. Le Gallienne’s book, the
dates of the appearance of each of the novels, as my own copies all
belong to the recent uniform editions published by Messrs. Chapman and
Hall.
HANNAH LYNCH.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE GRADUAL RECOGNITION OF GEORGE MEREDITH AS A NOVELIST 1
II. MEREDITH’S STYLE AND INFLUENCE 25
III. THE NOVELS OF GEORGE MEREDITH: ‘RICHARD FEVEREL’ AND
‘RHODA FLEMING’ 53
IV. ‘EVAN HARRINGTON,’ ‘THE ADVENTURES OF HARRY RICHMOND,’
‘SANDRA BELLONI,’ AND ‘BEAUCHAMP’S CAREER’ 89
V. ‘THE EGOIST,’ ‘DIANA OF THE CROSSWAYS,’ ‘TRAGIC
COMEDIANS,’ AND ‘SHAVING OF SHAGPAT’ 117
VI. GEORGE MEREDITH’S MEN AND WOMEN 153
GEORGE MEREDITH.
CHAPTER I.
THE GRADUAL RECOGNITION OF GEORGE MEREDITH AS A NOVELIST.
It is our habit to class under the name of light literature all
fiction, from that of Richardson to the ephemeral stories of the latest
London favourite, though, as a matter of fact, even that historic
bore, Gibbon, is not heavier reading than the novels of Richardson.
We accept the term ‘light’ literature in a high sense as well as in a
low one, and to the high class of light writers belong our old English
masters and friends, Fielding, Scott, and Thackeray. These writers were
purely and simply novelists, and if they showed themselves to the
thinkers in their just interpretation of the motives whence actions and
complications arise, and the consequences to which they lead us, it was
hardly because they thought so much as that they observed exactly, and,
with the exquisite intuition of genius, penetrated life and its meaning
by the road of sympathy rather than reflection, and unconsciously gave
the colour of philosophy to their reproduction of observations.
Men of wide sympathies and humorous observers, which are the two most
truthful qualities of portraiture, they were able to enter into all,
or nearly all, phases of existence, and under the influence of the
personalities and the scenes they portrayed, give us what I take to
be a false impression--that of having deliberately thought out each
one. The falseness of this impression is proved by the confession of
Thackeray and Dickens, that no one could be more completely surprised
than either by the doings and sayings of their various characters.
And this confession is borne out by the mixture of exuberant spirits
and sentiment that colours all the works of these novelists. Serious
thinkers are neither prone to exhibit high spirits, like schoolboys
let loose among pens and paper and a reckless abundance of ink, nor
tears of sentiment, like a distraught heroine recording her melancholy
impressions. Writers of this sort, however great and universal,
are ‘light,’ because their double aim--for which we cannot be too
grateful--is to touch us by the tragic or homely sorrows of existence,
or to amuse us by the absurdities and tricks of our fellows, and if,
by chance, they should happen to instruct us through the great lessons
of life they unconsciously teach us, it is due to the simplicity and
directness of their genius. And this is the estimate we English readers
will ever preserve of Thackeray, in spite of the severe pronouncement
against him beyond the Channel by our more artistic brethren. He may
preach, as the eminent French critic, M. Taine, complains; but we are
glad to be so sermonized, and return to him as to a friend who can
never fail us. He may digress, but we are thankful for such digressions
as his, and feel that we would not yield his faults for the more acrid
greatness of Balzac.
But this latter half of the nineteenth century has produced quite a
different sort of novelist; one whose mission is deliberately chosen,
heavily weighed, and unweariedly fulfilled. Not in the least anxious
is he to amuse us, or rouse soft and pleasurable emotions in us. The
artistic exactions of the dilettanti are unregarded by him, and his
voice carries far other than the note of caressing persuasion in it.
He does not court our suffrage, rather does he seek to break and
bend us before the sweeping storm of thought, and carry us through
new paths into a world where no word is idle, no action or instinct
without its most serious consequences; heedless of the fact that we
may entangle ourselves inextricably in the briars and brambles of a
strange phraseology, indifferent to what may be our mental suffering in
endeavouring to follow him, and decipher his oddly-clothed meaning.
This kind of writer is a thinker first and a novelist afterwards,
and not a thinker only, but a scientific psychologist. The novel is
to him the sum of his mental labour, as the system is that of the
metaphysician. The simple art of the first story-teller, Homer, and of
Scott, no less differs from his method than from Kant’s ‘Kritik.’ His
appearance, taking into account the materials of which his peculiar
genius is composed, and the bewildering use he makes of them, is
rare; and if, happily, he should obtain a hearing, after long strife
with the general stupidity of the blockheads and patient endurance
of the bites and barks of literary puppydom at his heels, he is sure
to create a revolution in the world which subsists on amusement and
distraction by this new way of popularizing philosophy through
fiction and the rose-lights of imagination. His chance, of course,
very much depends upon diction, and this explains to us George Eliot’s
immediate recognition. As the first of the modern analytical novelists
in England, she had the good fortune to start by a simple and facile
style, within reach of the least intellectual reader. Hence, those
who did not want to be compelled to think, could, without twist or
turning, without racking their brains, or grasping a distracted head
in their palms, follow her story even when they ignored the profound
mental consciousness from which it sprang. But picture the catastrophe,
the wide convulsion and fright her first appearance as the author
of ‘Daniel Deronda’ would have created! She would have had to wait,
at least, as long for recognition and admiration as her great and
inadequately appreciated successor.
Remote from her in point of style, though still of her school, by
reason of severe thought worked to a conclusion, oftener than hers
an unanswerable interrogation, is the only living master in English
literature--George Meredith. He stands beside her and Tolstoi in the
rank of serious intellectual workers, though we may doubt if foreign
nations will ever reach the glib acquaintance with his name and the
titles of his books that they are pleased to boast with those of
the Russian master. Mr. Meredith is above and beyond all a thinker,
less simple and direct, less wholly preoccupied with the mission of
improving humanity and beautifying life, than either George Eliot or
Tolstoi. Perhaps he has a healthier conviction that the world is very
well as it is, and that in the main it is all the better that we are
neither so muddy nor so pink as realists and sentimentalists would have
us believe, but are just comfortably spotted and well-meaning to escape
excess of censure or admiration.
The British race, we know, has never been remarkable for brilliancy,
nor, to any special degree, has it given evidence of perspicacity.
But nowhere has it shown such an inexcusable and comical consistency
of stupidity as in its slow recognition of Mr. Meredith, and its
blundering acceptance of him when once a few laudatory reviews have
revealed to it the existence of a prophet in its midst. We have
had among us for more than thirty years a giant, and a race of
pigmies, noted for nothing but the absence of genius, of even marked
individuality in their stream of literary production, that flows
on continuously and uneventfully, gape and blink at the odd sound
of his voice, and persist in regarding him as a grotesque monster.
He brings us the fruits of his colossal intellect in masterpiece
after masterpiece, and because he applies some hard knocks to our
understanding, never bright and always fearful of the new, we either
turn from him in cold neglect, or else we grow witty with the wit
of pigmies, at his expense, and accuse him ‘of breaking his shins
over his own wit.’ That which we do not understand, we decide, with
the superiority of the inane and the ignorant, to be not worthy the
understanding. Used as we have been to the lucid prose of Thackeray
and the brilliant vulgarity and homeliness of Dickens, spoiled as
our literary talent has been more recently by the flood of bloodless
fiction poured into the circulating libraries and fast bringing the
monthly magazines to a deadlock of incompetency and unimaginative
drivel, can we wonder, though we may deplore, that the taste for
excellence and vigour has diminished?
That his first novel, ‘Richard Feverel,’ should have passed unheeded,
in spite of the remarkable review which the _Times_ gave it in 1859, is
something to wonder at, for surely such a book might have been expected
to startle the best of his country into superlative praise, and meet
with immediate popularity. It had already been preceded by a volume of
notable poetry, by that extraordinary _tour de force_, ‘The Shaving
of Shagpat,’ and by ‘Farina, a Legend of Cologne.’ Yet these were not
sufficient to convince his fellows that in their presence stood mighty
genius claiming the poor return it is in our power to make it--the
hospitality and welcome of our minds. Does such denseness deserve
pity or blame? For churlishness it cannot be called, as the neglect
shown the great is never deliberate. Two years were we left to sharpen
our wits upon the pages of ‘Richard Feverel,’ and, mayhap, acquire a
taste for qualities utterly novel to the age and, in a measure, to
the nation--for something more than English characteristics go to the
forming of a writer like Mr. Meredith--and in 1861 we were asked to
make what we could of ‘Evan Harrington.’ The story appeared in _Once
a Week_, and was illustrated by the late Charles Keene, under the
title of ‘Evan Harrington; or, He Would be a Gentleman.’ Mr. Stevenson
makes doleful mention of a serial of Meredith’s that nearly wrecked a
newspaper financially, and presumably this was the unlucky experiment,
from which it may be gathered that ‘Evan Harrington’ had no greater
success than ‘Richard Feverel,’ and that the hour of recognition had
not yet dawned. Explain it who can. Was there not a grain of perversity
at the bottom of it? And can there be a more thankless task than
that of labouring against the tide of fatal dulness, or an unkinder
solitude than that of a man who is a head and a half above the tallest
of his fellows, and can neither lift them up to his level nor descend
to theirs? There are compensations, certainly, but these only serve
to mitigate the sufferings of intellectual isolation, and, to the
artist, can never fill adequately the place of generous and hearty
appreciation. Wrapped in his philosophic cloak, the thinker may make
shift to do without his fellows, and call them by hard names, but
to the artist and the poet, sympathy and the warm praise of living
voices is like sunshine to the human frame. But reliable, if rare,
critics had begun to find him out. In 1862, when his second book of
poetry appeared, ‘Modern Love,’ the _Spectator_ chose to assail, as
an unfledged beginner, the man who had given such work as his to the
world; whereupon Mr. Swinburne, wrathful, though not invective--rare
chance!--wrote a letter that all disciples of Meredith remember with
gratitude. But it is still hard for us to understand how the career of
any man of letters could be so slow, and appreciation so long grudged
him, as has been the case with a penman of so pronounced a type. That
he should excite hostility, being himself of no tender fabric, is
comprehensible and easily explained by the impatience and sense of
irritation that he often rouses in the breasts of his admirers. But we
can recognise the qualities and greatness of the writer who provokes
our hostility, and generously give him that which is his due, while
not withholding that which he excites. Writing of ‘Modern Love,’
Mr. Swinburne, who is certainly upon his own ground in criticising
a brother poet, says, ‘Every section of this great progressive poem
is connected with the other by links of the finest and most studied
workmanship,’ and that ‘a more perfect piece of writing no man alive
has ever turned out’ than the noble sonnet beginning,
‘We saw the swallows gathering in the skies.’
Bear in mind this was written by the third living English poet in the
year 1862, of a comparatively unknown poet, while yet Browning and
Tennyson were writing their best. And then explain how it is that
Meredith the poet is still less known than Meredith the novelist, and
that until very lately reading people, if asked about George Meredith,
invariably corrected the rash questioner by the suggestion that he
doubtless meant _Owen_ Meredith. With Owen Meredith they were familiar
enough, but George Meredith? They would shake their heads and tell you
that they never heard of him, or if, perchance, they had, invariably
added the rumour that they had also heard: ‘A perfectly unreadable
writer, I believe, whom nobody--possibly not even himself--understands,
and very few try to understand.’
Five or six years ago I imagined this incredible ignorance to be
exclusive to Dublin, where we are not very assiduous in the pursuit
of literature, or of anything else but the fortunes of the political
heroes of the hour. But upon crossing the Channel, and finding myself
in the blessed atmosphere of literary fervour and progress, I was
amazed to see how few were the literary persons I met who knew much
more of Mr. Meredith than his name, and even here I was more than once
confronted with the inevitable Owen Meredith. That the lovers of Mr.
Rider Haggard and John Strange Winter should not read his works is
but the completion of their intellectual taste; and strange, indeed,
would it be to see a copy of ‘Diana of the Crossways’ in the hands of
these worthy persons; but that the readers of Shakespeare and Thackeray
and George Eliot should shun him--this is where the incredible and
inexplicable eccentricity of public taste displays itself. And yet in
1862 he had written:
‘We saw the swallows gathering in the sky,
And in the osier isle we heard their noise.
We had not to look back on summer joys,
Or forward to a summer of bright dye.
But in the largeness of the evening earth
Our spirits grew as we went side by side.
The hour became her husband and my bride.
Love that had robb’d us so, thus bless’d our dearth!
The pilgrims of the year wax’d very loud
In multitudinous chatterings, as the flood
Full brown came from the west, and, like pale blood
Expanded to the upper crimson cloud.
Love that had robb’d us of immortal things,
This little moment mercifully gave,
And still I see across the twilight wave
The swan sail with her young beneath her wings.’
It may be argued that the long delay in the acknowledgment of his
sovereignty is due to himself, to his obscurities, his ruggedness, his
enormous intellectual difficulties offered the reader, like five-barred
gates, to leap, and, in the event of failure, fall against, stunned
and aching all over from the force of big mental bruises. But Browning
is fifty times more obscure, more rugged, more difficult. It is true,
Browning’s apotheosis, in somewhat ironical form, lies in a Browning
Society that, perhaps, may achieve a glossary and a full compilation
of notes. Whereas, all the poet asks us to bring to him is a little
thought and some brains. As Browning has his lucid and melodious
words, when the simplest may understand him upon a first reading, so
has Mr. Meredith--a fact that does not seem to have served him to such
popularity as Browning enjoyed. Can anything be sweeter, softer, more
musical than this little poem ‘The Meeting’?--
‘The old coach-road thro’ a common of furze,
With knolls of pine, ran white:
Berries of autumn, with thistles and burrs,
And spider-threads droop’d in the light.
‘The light in a thin blue veil peer’d sick;
The sheep grazed close and still;
The smoke of a farm by a yellow rick
Curl’d lazily under a hill.
‘No fly shook the round of the silver net;
No insect the swift bird chased;
Only two travellers moved and met
Across that hazy waste.
‘One was a girl with a babe that throve,
Her ruin and her bliss;
One was a youth with a lawless love,
Who claspt it the more for this.
‘The girl for her babe humm’d prayerful speech;
The youth for his love did pray;
Each cast a wistful look on each,
And either went their way.’
And still are we confronted with the mystery of such a poet’s
unpopularity. Explain it by the unattractiveness of his difficulties,
and what have you to say against the soothing charm and the exquisite
simplicity of such lines as these, that linger in the memory, not only
because of their delicate music, but because of their vividness of
picture and the autumn sadness that lies upon it. In workmanship the
poem is equal to the best of its sort, and Heine, in his matchless
songs, has never touched us with a pathos more searching from its
unpretentiousness.
Two years after the appearance of ‘Modern Love,’ ‘Emilia in England’
was published, and in the same year M. E. D. Forgues translated an
adaptation of it for the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, under the title of
‘Sandra Belloni, Roman de la Vie Anglaise.’ This looks like progress
in public opinion. At least, it may be thought, after thirteen years
of neglected labour in strife with feeble and vitiated taste, the
author of so much brilliant work is upon the point of enthusiastic
recognition. Not so at all. ‘Emilia’ created as little sensation as
‘Richard,’ and we may believe that the subscribers to the circulating
libraries were as little fluttered by the production of the one as they
had been by that of the other--being equally unaware of the existence
of either. The book was not extensively reviewed, and only the happy
few congratulated themselves upon the acquisition. Perhaps their
satisfaction in it was increased by the fact that it was not shared
by the crowd, for though the lovers of an unappreciated novelist may
ardently desire to bestrew their paths with converts, it is not unusual
in them to cover themselves in a sort of fierce and holy pride with
a bit of his cloak of isolation. If he is miserably misunderstood,
do not they share to some extent his misfortunes? And is there not a
very decided superiority--sad, if you will, for none but the churlish
and carping few desire to keep salvation and paradise exclusively for
themselves--in the fact of their mutual want of appreciation?
‘Rhoda Fleming’ appeared in 1865, and this book seems to have made
a more decided impression, though the writer still remained in the
background among well-known men of letters, and his name, like his
presence, was on the whole ignored. It was published by Messrs.
Tinsley, in itself an instructive lesson in the author’s popularity.
But there can be no doubt that the tide was changing, slowly, it is
true--indeed, imperceptibly. In 1867 ‘Vittoria’ first came out in the
_Fortnightly Review_, a review henceforth devoted to the fiction of
Mr. Meredith, and to which he seems to have contributed a good many
reviews and short poems. After this, in 1871, we meet him in _Cornhill_
recording the brilliant and ever-delightful adventures of ‘Harry
Richmond,’ and this, coupled with the fact that Mr. George Du Maurier
illustrated the story, and that it ran through two editions in the
same year, gives us breathing-space in our long vent of indignation.
We may now conclude that a portion, at least, of the British public
had awaked, and were capable of relishing such entrancing novels as
‘Richard Feverel,’ ‘Sandra Belloni’ and ‘Harry Richmond,’ in which we
hardly read so much as we drink in life, vividly, eagerly--life with
all its sharp, sweet thrills and poignant aversions, its breathless
alternation of mood and swift race of the passions.
‘Beauchamp’s Career’ followed in 1876, first in the _Fortnightly
Review_, between 1874 and 1876, and afterwards in Messrs. Chapman and
Hall’s collected editions of 1886 and 1889. Although Mr. Meredith’s
career cannot be said to have been crowned with anything like a wide
acknowledgment, or even anything approaching a fair reward, until he
wrote ‘Diana of the Crossways’ in 1885, which brought him his first
taste of substantial and general success, and cast a retrospective
glamour upon its predecessors, people from the date of ‘Harry Richmond’
began to know that there was a novelist named George Meredith who was
not _Owen Meredith_.
Considering all that the writer has had to contend with in the way of
block-headedness, this is most certainly a step in advance. But to
his own especial minority, it is not ‘Diana,’ with all its charm and
its perilous brilliancy, that crowns Mr. Meredith’s career, but that
unique masterpiece, ‘The Egoist,’ which was published in 1879. Here
was a memorable triumph of art, at which we have not yet ceased to
wonder, and which we hold apart from all other books that we have read.
After it he may write ‘Tragic Comedians,’ ‘Diana of the Crossways,’
and volumes of poems. Anything he writes we are prepared to welcome
with cordial delight and gratitude, but we do not expect another Sir
Willoughby Patterne. We are satisfied with the impossibility of the
repetition of such an achievement. It is not given to many artists to
produce one flawless work, and to expect a second from even such a
mighty one as this would be to prove one’s self insatiable.
From this time forward, reviews, articles, criticisms--hostile,
humorous, and eulogistic--begin to abound; and by the time of ‘Diana’s’
appearance, the British public has been made ready to receive the
intelligence that a master is in their midst--a living, breathing
master, such as Tennyson and Browning, and from whom work may happily
still be expected. What effect this announcement may have had upon
the British public cannot be perfectly defined. Being unenthusiastic,
except in the matter of low and familiar literature, it is to be feared
that such news has but moderately moved it, and in the matter of taste,
has not influenced it at all. This new master is unfamiliar to them
in his speech and in his ideas. He does not dwell upon sordid scenes
with visible pleasure; he claims them with a voice that is not of their
common tongue, and faces them without the old-fashioned twinkle of
the grave jester’s glance. If he caricatures humanity, it is not as
Dickens caricatures it, to tickle us into inextinguishable laughter,
nor yet as Thackeray does, in a vein of comic satire. If he calls upon
us to recognise that life is often a sad blunder, and to pity the
blunderers, he is neither sentimental in his claim, nor consciously
pathetic. He indulges neither in the mawkish sentiment of Dickens, nor
in the sentimental tenderness of Thackeray, and as little courts our
tears as our laughter. Brain is what he asks of us, and its use in
reading him.