GEORGE MEREDITH
George Meredith was impatient of talk about life’s ironies; he took
things as they came, accepted Fate’s decrees with fortitude, and did not
blame Nature for being natural. That is to say, he took up this attitude
in debate; internally he might and did lament over things not specially
lamentable. And, whatever he might say, he can hardly have failed to
feel something of the irony of his position in the Nineties. He had won
through long years of total neglect and hard toil. He had passed the
hardly less painful period of purely esoteric appreciation. First, nobody
cared for his work; then he became the oracle of a small circle; neither
fate was pleasing to a nature so large and eager, so avid of fame, with
so keen a zest for life, and so imperious an appetite for its best
things, material and intellectual. George Meredith liked recognition; he
liked also good and even fat living, old vintages, pleasant lodgment, and
ease of mind. He wrote best about the sunshine when he saw it through a
glass of fine claret, and lark pie was for him the best preparation for
an ode to the lark. But it was long before he could afford to translate
into practice his theories of good provender. In his youth, it is said,
he was so poor that a single bowl of porridge had often to suffice him
for the day, and long after he had reached maturity he was so little
esteemed that John Morley, coming to London ten years his junior, was
soon able to repay his generous welcome by printing two or three novels
which would otherwise have stood small chance with the publishers. In his
later middle age, though he could afford himself fairly full indulgence
in those dietetic fantasies which were his joy, he was so harnessed to
the daily task that he could not imagine, so he said, what he would do if
turned loose in the paddock of independence. But now in the Nineties and
his own sixties, just as he had grown into a cult, he had to live as a
recluse at Box Hill, almost a prisoner in his arm-chair, very deaf, and
with an impaired digestion.
[Illustration: GEORGE MEREDITH.]
Concerning that “Egyptian bondage” of journalism, all Meredith’s
philosophy could not prevent him expressing himself with extreme
bitterness. “No slavery,” he said, “is comparable to the chains of hired
journalism.” When a man talks thus it is natural to infer that he is
complaining of the injury such work does to his intellect and conscience;
obviously from the purely physical viewpoint writing for newspapers, for
some hundreds a year in Victorian valuation, is not worse than being an
Egyptian fellah, a Chinese coolie, or even an English dustman. But it
is hard to believe that even on the moral and intellectual side there
was much hardship; for, curiously enough, George Meredith was rather
specially free from scruples of the kind which torture some men. Indeed,
he was unusually wide-minded in the matter of “writing to order”; in that
sense, at least, the chains hung lightly on him. There have always been
journalists of great and even boisterous independence, and they were
more numerous in Meredith’s time than in our own. Even now, however,
the idea of the refined and penniless man of genius working against his
convictions under the lash of a brutal and tyrannous proprietor belongs
not to Fleet Street, where they produce newspapers, but to the Haymarket,
where they produce plays. Doubtless there is a good deal of compliance
in matters indifferent, or esteemed indifferent. Men with very red
noses have been known to argue eloquently in favour of local option, and
nothing but total abstinence is compatible with the coolness of head
requisite for some arguments in favour of “the trade.” But, as mere men
of business, newspaper proprietors save themselves, wherever possible,
the strain of attempting to force a highly individual writer against his
convictions. Mr. Massingham has never had to choose between no dinner and
the advocacy of causes likely to appeal to the editor of _John Bull_.
Mr. Bottomley has never been compelled by hunger to adopt the views of
the United Kingdom Alliance or the Anti-Betting League. But Meredith did
indubitably, as a Liberal, write habitually for the political columns
of the Conservative _Morning Post_ in London and the Conservative
_Ipswich Journal_ in the provinces; as a professed lover of liberty he
did indubitably argue in favour of slavery; and, if all the secrets of
the files were revealed, it would probably be found that, as a literary
critic, he said many things in print which were contrary to his private
taste and conviction.
His disgust with journalism was, it may be surmised, less concerned with
morals than with money. He complains that the better the work the worse
the pay, and the poorer the esteem; and, just as he could not refrain
from some envy of the “best sellers” in literature (an envy which found
vent in savage criticism of much of Tennyson’s work), so he was not
a little disgusted that many journalists far less gifted made better
incomes. In truth he was not suited to the trade. The best in journalism
is still for the many, and Meredith’s manner, when all is said, was for
the few. With the prestige of a name behind his books, the average of men
might be induced (if only by the coward fear of being out of the fashion)
to begin reading, and, having begun, it was always quite possible that
he would go on long enough to find much that he could honestly like. But
anonymous writing has no such advantage. Its appeal must be immediate, or
the reader turns to the next column. With his peculiar tendencies George
Meredith could never have been a journalist of the kind that delights the
editorial soul—the man who never under-writes or over-writes either in
space or quality, who can always be depended on to produce a first-class
trade article, who never uses an expression queried by the printer’s
reader. The highest merit of the journalist is to make complicated
things clear, and dry things readable; Meredith’s genius lay in the
direction of making the simplest things obscure, and the most ordinary
things out-of-the-way. The dread of being common-place seems to have
inclined him especially to verbal contortions when he was conscious of
some thinness or ordinariness of thought. When he has really something
to say he often says it strongly and naturally; there are deep things
and true things in Meredith which could hardly be better, more shortly,
or more lucidly expressed. Browning suffered from much the same disease;
with both men it is quite a safe rule to read only so long as one can
get on comfortably; skipping the hard parts means a gain altogether out
of proportion to the loss. Meredith is never more obscure than when he
means to tell one that a man kissed a woman, or that the sky was red at
sunset. Men do quite commonly kiss women, and skies are often red at
sunset. But Meredith seems to have felt that his men must be different
from any other men, their kisses different from any other kisses, and the
women kissed different from any other kissed women. And on no account
must his sunsets be the sunsets of Tom, Dick, or Harry. Therefore, in
dealing with such things, he racked his brain for some verbal violence
which sometimes hit the mark, but more often did not. In one of his short
poems—published, if I remember rightly, in the Nineties—there occurred
the expression, “Hands that paw the naked bush.” I asked a Meredithian
exactly what it meant. Pityingly he reminded me that some lines before
there were references to winter and snow. “Now,” he said, “if you have
closely observed a bush when the leaves are off, you will remember that
here and there twigs, to the number of four or five, radiate from a sort
of clump which bears a distant resemblance to the human wrist. When
these twigs are covered with snow they distinctly suggest a hand with
the fingers spread out. The poet saw that, as he saw everything. You,
who never use your middle-class eyes except to find misprints, naturally
never saw it, and you dare to charge your own insensitiveness and lack of
imagination on a great genius.” This, of course, was crushing. But I can
imagine an Elizabethan man of taste being equally crushing to any heretic
who questioned some elaborate figure of the Ephuists, and appealed from
them to the simple delicacy of him who wrote—
“And winking Mary-buds begin
To ope their golden eyes”—
a thing any critic can admire and any coal-heaver can understand.
“Meredith,” says Lord Morley, “often missed ease.” It might be truer to
say that he took the most cruel pains to avoid ease. Macaulay notices
how Johnson used sometimes to translate into his own peculiar dialect
an observation first made in strong, simple English. Thus he once
said that a certain work had not “enough wit to keep it sweet,” and
immediately added, “It has not sufficient vitality to preserve it from
putrefaction.” One has an uneasy feeling that Macaulay was, as sometimes
happened, a little innocent in his earnestness to make a point, and
that Johnson was here only playing with himself; his ordinary literary
style, though stiff as compared with his table talk, is yet generally
muscular and masculine. But Meredith actually did in solemn fashion what
Johnson may have done in a spirit of fooling. He did continually think
in a natural and write in an unnatural idiom. In his familiar letters
one often comes across the germ of a reflection later elaborated in a
book; in the one case it is expressed in terse, vigorous English, wholly
intelligible and to the point; in the other it is tortured into two pages
of Meredithian “epigram,” most of which would be incomprehensible if he
did not generally clinch the whole thing with one splendid sentence of
quite undoubtful meaning. In these key sentences, indeed, resides the
whole value of Meredith—if we exclude a certain embarrassing impression
of disorderly opulence, of careless magnificence, which makes one feel
rather like a boy with a great jar of “chow-chow” from Canton; he has
not a vestige of an idea what he is eating, and hardly knows whether he
quite likes it, but it is sweet, obviously expensive, and provocatively
curious, and has a certain medicinal suggestion that excuses a little
gluttony. Or we might say that a Meredith novel suggests a great
firework display, meant to represent “Peace and War,” or “Ali Baba and
the Forty Thieves,” or “Grand Attack on a Sleeping City by Ten Thousand
Aeroplanes.” One does not pretend to follow the story as if it were a
piece on the stage, and much of it seems to be irrelevant; but there are
plenty of bombs, squibs and Roman candles, and rockets that go up with a
satisfying rush and break into floating glory.
As he was in his books, so was Meredith in society. In the company of an
intimate friend or two he could be natural—could talk with easy vigour,
expressing views that were often just in language that was always plain
and strong. But let a stranger—especially a distinguished stranger—join
the circle, and he deviated automatically into “epigram.” He seems to
have felt it necessary to be brilliant, and for him brilliance meant
effort; he was not content to let the good things come to the surface as
they would, but pumped them up from the recesses of his being with an
energy which sometimes affected the purity of the flow and not seldom
made the machinery creak.
There was, indeed, something a little forced about the whole man. In his
youth he was addicted to violent exercise, and especially to throwing the
beetle—the great wooden mallet with which foresters split tree-trunks.
He used to throw up the beetle and catch it, and this violent business,
designed to preserve his health, ended by ruining it; the spinal weakness
from which he suffered in later life was the direct consequence of
beetle-throwing. This indiscreet athleticism is paralleled in other
departments of Meredith’s life. In literature he was perpetually throwing
the beetle—juggling in ponderous style with ponderous things; he is a
muscular rather than a nimble wit. I remember to have seen an acrobat
climb down a table leg, hand over hand, as if he were lowering himself
from the Nelson Monument—a difficult feat, no doubt, but a very useless
and ungainly one. Meredith’s cleverness gave often the same impression
of wasted power and even compromised dignity. In life, again, he tended
to this exaggerated strenuousness without adequate object; it might have
been better for him, and for others, if there had been more repose. His
first marriage was wrecked because he came into contact and conflict with
a temperament too like his own, and the sequel proved that his generally
benevolent and kindly nature had a core of hardness which might in truth
be suspected from his writings. Concerning Carlyle’s matrimonial affairs,
he wrote that “a woman of the placid disposition of Milton’s Eve, framed
by her master to be an honest labourer’s cook and housekeeper, with a
nervous disposition resembling a dumpling, would have been enough for
him.” Much the same was true of himself. If, in spite of much domestic
sorrow, he reached old age unbroken in his resolute optimism, his
deficiencies have perhaps no less credit than his qualities. For, if he
sometimes indulged in self-pity regarding small matters, he bore with
great stoicism the sterner buffets of fate, and this because of a certain
insensibility, illustrated again and again in his career, to the kind
of wounds which are commonly most painful. It is not indifference to
others, still less hardness of heart; his letters are evidence enough
on that point. But one has the same sort of impression one gets from
Shakespeare’s sonnets, of a second self quietly watching, and almost
jeering at, the sufferings of the first and its mates. “Happily for me,”
he wrote during his second wife’s hopeless and painful illness, “I have
learned to live much in the spirit.” That was probably the exact truth.
Things of the spirit were not always more important than the want of
five pounds for a dinner or a holiday, but they did suffice to keep him
taut and resolute in the presence of the sterner trials. “There was good
reason,” says Lord Morley, “to be sure with him that death too was only
a thing in the Natural Order.” It is only fair to add that he himself
faced the approach of the “pitch-black king” with full gallantry. “Going
quickly down,” he said to his old friend not long before the end, but
there was “nothing morbid, introspective, pseudo-pathetic; plenty of
hearty laughter; ...” “no belief in a future existence; are our dogs and
horses immortal? What’s become of all our fathers?”
Such was the strength of the man. But oddly mingled with the intrepid
assurance that could mock at invalidism and decay, and look with
untroubled eye into the dark unknown, was a strange sensitiveness which
he himself would have been the first to satirise in another. All
his life he was tortured with the consciousness that his father and
grandfather had been tailors, and oppressed with a fear that somebody
would discover the dread secret. He made of his origin a mystery which
might pique but always baffled curiosity; and he was continually
wondering whether people considered him a gentleman _de facto_, and
still more whether they suspected that he had not always been one _de
jure_. “H—— is a good old boy,” he writes on one occasion. “He has a
pleasant way of being inquisitive, and has already informed me, quite
agreeably, that I am a gentleman, though I may not have been born one.”
“In origin,” he says again, “I am what is called here a nobody, and any
pretensions to that rank have always received due encouragement.” He not
only kept silence about his birth—which was assuredly his own affair—but
he took active steps to prevent the truth being known. His father—a
handsome, shiftless person who made a failure of his life—was described
in Meredith’s first marriage certificate as “Esquire,” and in a census
paper “near Petersfield” was given as the author’s place of birth. The
Merediths were, in fact, naval outfitters at Portsmouth, and had none
of the “Celtic blood” to which the novelist was fond of making vague
claim. George’s mother died when he was five; the father followed after
various ineffective wanderings; and the boy was left a ward in Chancery,
to be educated and articled to a solicitor out of the poor remnant of the
family fortunes. From all this part of his life he shrank with a horror
at once grotesque and pathetic. There was nothing specially ignominious
in his childhood. There was certainly no ill-treatment; he was rather
petted than otherwise. But he resented the environment thrust on him by
the accident of birth, and, when free of it, avoided all touch with his
remaining relatives.
These facts would not be worth mentioning but for their influence on
Meredith’s life and work. They placed him in general society rather on
the defensive, and perhaps encouraged that haughty shyness which in the
presence of strangers was apt to take the form of an aggressive and
self-conscious brilliance. They explain the peculiar impression given by
so many of his novels, the impression of a man fascinated by aristocracy
and yet a little angry at being fascinated. Despite his Liberalism and
his Democratic professions, this was the thing he liked; he had an
almost sensual pleasure in good company; the very titles of his great
people suggest enjoyment. He himself was an aristocrat in physique;
he had a kingly head and carried it like a king. He was an aristocrat
also in intellect, though here not of the highest rank, which takes its
distinction for granted; it was, no doubt, a dread of commonness that
led him to refine excessively, and no one who dreads to be common wholly
escapes being so. But all this was not solely Meredith’s fault, it was
also the fault of his country. In the France of the fleur-de-lis or the
France of the tricolour the lack of birth would not have irked such a
nature; in Victorian England it became a fact of real importance. It was
the one little insanity of a rather specially sane mind; the one want of
humour in a richly humorous temperament; the one absurd weakness in one
perhaps even too confident in his own strength.