(1) THE EGOIST
George Meredith, as his friends used to tell one with amusement, was a
vain man. Someone has related how, in his later years, he regarded it as a
matter of extreme importance that his visitors should sit in a position
from which they would see his face in profile. This is symbolic of his
attitude to the world. All his life he kept one side of his face hidden.
Mr. Ellis, who is the son of one of Meredith's cousins, now takes us for a
walk round Meredith's chair. No longer are we permitted to remain in
restful veneration of "a god and a Greek." Mr. Ellis invites us--and we
cannot refuse the invitation--to look at the other side of the face, to
consider the full face and the back of the head. He encourages us to feel
Meredith's bumps, and no man whose bumps we are allowed to feel can
continue for five minutes the pretence of being an Olympian. He becomes a
human being under a criticizing thumb. We discover that he had a genius
for imposture, an egoist's temper, and a stomach that fluttered greedily
at the thought of dainty dishes. We find all those characteristics that
prevented him from remaining on good terms first with his father, next
with his wife, and then with his son. At first, when one reads the full
story of Meredith's estrangements through three generations, one has the
feeling that one is in the presence of an idol in ruins. Certainly, one
can never mistake Box Hill for Olympus again. On the other hand, let us
but have time to accustom ourselves to see Meredith in other aspects than
that which he himself chose to present to his contemporaries--let us begin
to see in him not so much one of the world's great comic censors, as one
of the world's great comic subjects, and we shall soon find ourselves back
among his books, reading them no longer with tedious awe, but with a new
passion of interest in the figure-in-the-background of the complex human
being who wrote them.
For Meredith was his own great subject. Had he been an Olympian he could
not have written _The Egoist_ or _Harry Richmond_. He was an egoist and
pretender, coming of a line of egoists and pretenders, and his novels are
simply the confession and apology of such a person. Meredith concealed the
truth about himself in his daily conversation; he revealed it in his
novels. He made such a mystery about his birth that many people thought he
was a cousin of Queen Victoria's or at least a son of Bulwer Lytton's. It
was only in _Evan Harrington_ that he told the essentials of the truth
about the tailor's shop in Portsmouth above which he was born. Outside his
art, nothing would persuade him to own up to the tailor's shop. Once, when
Mr. Clodd was filling in a census-paper for him, Meredith told him to put
"near Petersfield" as his place of birth. The fact that he was born at
Portsmouth was not publicly known, indeed, until some time after his
death. And not only was there the tailor's shop to live down, but on his
mother's side he was the grandson of a publican, Michael Macnamara.
Meredith liked to boast that his mother was "pure Irish"--an exaggeration,
according to Mr. Ellis--but he said nothing about Michael Macnamara of
"The Vine." At the same time it was the presence not of a bar sinister but
of a yardstick sinister in his coat of arms that chiefly filled him with
shame. When he was marrying his first wife he wrote "Esquire" in the
register as a description of his father's profession. There is no
evidence, apparently, as to whether Meredith himself ever served in the
tailor's shop after his father moved from Portsmouth to St. James's
Street, London. Nothing is known of his life during the two years after
his return from the Moravian school at Neuwied. As for his hapless father
(who had been trained as a medical student but went into the family
business in order to save it from ruin), he did not succeed in London any
better than in Portsmouth, and in 1849 he emigrated to South Africa and
opened a shop in Cape Town. It was while in Cape Town that he read
Meredith's ironical comedy on the family tailordom, _Evan Harrington; or
He Would be a Gentleman_. Naturally, he regarded the book (in which his
father and himself were two of the chief figures) with horror. It was as
though George had washed the family tape-measure in public. Augustus
Meredith, no less than George, blushed for the tape-measure daily.
Probably, Melchizedek Meredith, who begat Augustus, who begat George, had
also blushed for it in his day. As the "great Mel" in _Evan Harrington_ he
is an immortal figure of genteel imposture. His lordly practice of never
sending in a bill was hardly that of a man who accepted the conditions of
his trade. In _Evan Harrington_ three generations of a family's shame were
held up to ridicule. No wonder that Augustus Meredith, when he was
congratulated by a customer on his son's fame, turned away silently with a
look of pain.
The comedy of the Meredith family springs, of course, not from the fact
that they were tailors, but that they pretended not to be tailors. Whether
Meredith himself was more ashamed of their tailoring or their
pretentiousness it is not easy to decide. Both _Evan Harrington_ and
_Harry Richmond_ are in a measure, comedies of imposture, in which the
vice of imposture is lashed as fiercely as Molière lashes the vice of
hypocrisy in _Tartuffe_. But it may well be that in life Meredith was a
snob, while in art he was a critic of snobs. Mr. Yeats, in his last book
of prose, put forward the suggestion that the artist reveals in his art
not his "self" (which is expressed in his life), but his "anti-self," a
complementary and even contrary self. He might find in the life and works
of Meredith some support for his not quite convincing theory. Meredith was
an egoist in his life, an anti-egoist in his books. He was pretentious in
his life, anti-pretentious in his books. He took up the attitude of the
wronged man in his life; he took up the case of the wronged woman in his
books. In short, his life was vehemently pro-George-Meredith, while his
books were vehemently anti-George-Meredith. He knew himself more
thoroughly, so far as we can discover from his books, than any other
English novelist has ever done.
He knew himself comically, no doubt, rather than tragically. In _Modern
Love_ and _Richard Feverel_ he reveals himself as by no means a laughing
philosopher; but he strove to make fiction a vehicle of philosophic
laughter rather than of passionate sympathy. Were it not that a great
poetic imagination is always at work--in his prose, perhaps, even more
than in his verse--his genius might seem a little cold and
head-in-the-air. But his poet's joy in his characters saves his books from
inhumanity. As Diana Warwick steps out in the dawn she is not a mere
female human being undergoing critical dissection; she is bird-song and
the light of morning and the coming of the flowers. Meredith had as great
a capacity for rapture as for criticism and portraiture. He has expressed
in literature as no other novelist has done the rapturous vision of a boy
in love. He knew that a boy in love is not mainly a calf but a poet. _Love
in a Valley_ is the incomparable music of a boy's ecstasy. Much of
_Richard Feverel_ is its incomparable prose. Rapture and criticism,
however, make a more practical combination in literature than in life. In
literature, criticism may add flavour to rapture; in life it is more than
likely to destroy the flavour. One is not surprised, then, to learn the
full story of Meredith's first unhappy marriage. A boy of twenty-one, he
married a widow of thirty, high-strung, hot and satirical like himself;
and after a depressing sequence of dead babies, followed by the birth of a
son who survived, she found life with a man of genius intolerable, and ran
away with a painter. Meredith apparently refused her request to go and see
her when she was dying. His imaginative sympathy enabled him to see the
woman's point of view in poetry and fiction; it does not seem to have
extended to his life. Thus, his biography is to a great extent a
"showing-up" of George Meredith. He proved as incapable of keeping the
affection of his son Arthur, as of keeping that of his wife. Much as he
loved the boy he had not been married again long before he allowed him to
become an alien presence. The boy felt he had a grievance. He
said--probably without justice--that his father kept him short of money.
Possibly he was jealous for his dead mother's sake. Further, though put
into business, he had literary ambitions--a prolific source of bitterness.
When Arthur died, Meredith did not even attend his funeral.
Mr. Ellis has shown Meredith up not only as a husband and a father, but as
a hireling journalist and a lark-devouring gourmet. On the whole, the poet
who could eat larks in a pie seems to me to be a more shocking "great man"
than the Radical who could write Tory articles in a newspaper for pay. At
the same time, it is only fair to say that Meredith remains a sufficiently
splendid figure in. Mr. Ellis's book even when we know the worst about
him. Was his a generous genius? It was at least a prodigal one. As poet,
novelist, correspondent, and conversationalist, he leaves an impression of
beauty, wit, and power in a combination without a precedent.
(2) THE OLYMPIAN UNBENDS
Lady Butcher's charming _Memoirs of George Meredith_ is admittedly written
in reply to Mr. Ellis's startling volume. It seems to me, however, that it
is a supplement rather than a reply. Mr. Ellis was not quite fair to
Meredith as a man, but he enabled us to understand the limitations which
were the conditions of Meredith's peculiar genius. Many readers were
shocked by the suggestion that characters, like countries, must have
boundaries. Where Mr. Ellis failed, in my opinion, was not in drawing
these as carefully as possible, but in the rather unfriendly glee with
which, one could not help feeling, he did so. It is also true that he
missed some of the grander mountain-peaks in Meredith's character. Lady
Butcher, on the other hand, is far less successful than Mr. Ellis in
drawing a portrait which makes us feel that now we understand something of
the events that gave birth to _The Egoist_ and _Richard Feverel_ and
_Modern Love_. Her book tells us nothing of the seed-time of genius, but
is a delightful account of its autumn.
At the same time it helps to dissipate one ridiculous popular fallacy
about Meredith. Meredith, like most all the wits, has been accused of
straining after image and epigram. Wit acts as an irritant on many people.
They forget the admirable saying of Coleridge: "Exclusive of the abstract
sciences, the largest and worthiest portion of our knowledge consists of
aphorisms; and the greatest of men is but an aphorism." They might as well
denounce a hedge for producing wild roses or a peacock for growing tail
feathers with pretty eyes as a witty writer for flowering into aphorism,
epigram and image. Even so artificial a writer as Wilde had not to labour
to be witty. It has often been laid to his charge that his work smells of
the lamp, whereas what is really the matter with it is that it smells of
the drawing-room gas. It was the result of too much "easy-goingness," not
of too much strain. As for Meredith, his wit was the wit of an abounding
imagination. Lady Butcher gives some delightful examples of it. He could
not see a baby in long robes without a witty image leaping into his mind.
He said he adored babies "in the comet stage."
Of a lady of his acquaintance he said: "She is a woman who has never had
the first tadpole wriggle of an idea," adding, "She has a mind as clean
and white and flat as a plate: there are no eminences in it." Lady Butcher
tells of a picnic-party on Box Hill at which Meredith was one of the
company. "After our picnic ... it came on to rain, and as we drearily
trudged down the hill with cloaks and umbrellas, and burdened with our tea
baskets, Mr. Meredith, with a grimace, called out to a passing friend:
'Behold! the funeral of picnic!'"
If Meredith is to some extent an obscure author, it is clear that this was
not due to his over-reaching himself in laborious efforts after wit. His
obscurity is not that of a man straining after expression, but the
obscurity of a man deliberately hiding something. Meredith believed in
being as mysterious as an oracle. He assumed the Olympian manner, and
objected to being mistaken for a frequenter of the market-place. He was
impatient of ordinary human witlessness, and spoke to his fellows, not as
man to man, but as Apollo from his seat. This was probably a result of the
fact that his mind marched much too fast for the ordinary man to keep pace
with it. "How I leaped through leagues of thought when I could walk!" he
once said when he had lost the power of his legs. Such buoyancy of the
imagination and intellect separated him more and more from a world in
which most of the athletics are muscular, not mental; and he began to take
a malicious pleasure in exaggerating the difference that already existed
between himself and ordinary mortals. He dressed his genius in a
mannerism, and, as he leaped through his leagues of thought, the flying
skirts of his mannerism were all that the average reader panting
desperately after him could see. Shakespeare and the greatest men of
genius are human enough to wait for us, and give us time to recover our
breath. Meredith, however, was a proud man, and a mocker.
In the ordinary affairs of life, Lady Butcher tells us, he was so proud
that it was difficult to give him even trifling gifts. "I remember," she
says, "bringing him two silver flat poached-egg spoons from Norway, and he
implored me to take them back with me to London, and looked much relieved
when I consented to do so!" He would always "prefer to bestow rather than
to accept gifts." Lady Butcher, replying to the charge that he was
ungrateful, suggests that "no one should expect an eagle to be grateful."
But then, neither can one love an eagle, and one would like to be able to
love the author of _Love in a Valley_ and _Richard Feverel_. Meredith was
too keenly aware what an eagle he was. Speaking of the reviewers who had
attacked him, he said: "They have always been abusing me. I have been
observing them. It is the crueller process." It is quite true, but it was
a superior person who said it.
Meredith, however, among his friends and among the young, loses this air
of superiority, and becomes something of a radiant romp as well as an
Olympian. Lady Butcher's first meeting with him took place when she was a
girl of thirteen. She was going up Box Hill to see the sun rise with a
sixteen-year-old cousin, when the latter said: "I know a madman who lives
on Box Hill. He's quite mad, but very amusing; he likes walks and
sunrises. Let's go and shout him up!" It does Meredith credit that he got
out of bed and joined them, "his nightshirt thrust into brown trousers."
Even when the small girl insisted on "reading aloud to him one of the
hymns from Keble's _Christian Year_," he did not, as the saying is, turn a
hair. His attachment to his daughter Mariette--his "dearie girl," as he
spoke of her with unaffected softness of phrase--also helps one to
realize that he was not all Olympian. Meredith, the condemner of the
"guarded life," was humanly nervous in guarding his own little daughter.
"He would never allow Mariette to travel alone, even the very short
distance by train from Box Hill to Ewell; a maid had always to be sent
with her or to fetch her. He never allowed her to walk by herself." One
likes Meredith the better for Lady Butcher's picture of him as a "harassed
father."
One likes him, too, as he converses with his dogs, and for his
thoughtfulness in giving some of his MSS., including that of _Richard
Feverel_, to Frank Cole, his gardener, in the hope that "some day the
gardener would be able to sell them" and so get some reward for his
devotion. As to the underground passages in Meredith's life and character,
Lady Butcher is not concerned with them. She writes of him merely as she
knew him. Her book is a friend's tribute, though not a blind tribute. It
may not be effective as an argument against those who are bent on
disparaging the greatest lyrical wit in modern English literature. But it
will be welcomed by those for whom Meredith's genius is still a bubbling
spring of good sense and delight.
(3) THE ANGLO-IRISH ASPECT
Meredith never wrote a novel which was less a novel than _Celt and Saxon_.
It is only a fragment of a book. It is so much a series of essays and
sharp character-sketches, however, that the untimely fall of the curtain
does not greatly trouble us. There is no excitement of plot, no gripping
anxiety as to whether this or that pair of lovers will ever reach the
altar. Philip O'Donnell and Patrick, his devoted brother, and their
caricature relative, the middle-aged Captain Con, all interest us as they
abet each other in the affairs of love or politics, or as they discuss
their native country or the temperament of the country which oppresses it;
but they are chiefly desirable as performers in an Anglo-Irish fantasia, a
Meredithian piece of comic music, with various national anthems, English,
Welsh, and Irish, running through and across it in all manner of guises,
and producing all manner of agreeable disharmonies.
In the beginning we have Patrick O'Donnell, an enthusiast, a Celt, a
Catholic, setting out for the English mansion of the father of Adiante
Adister to find if the girl cannot be pleaded over to reconsider her
refusal of his brother Philip. He arrives in the midst of turmoil in the
house, the cause of it being a hasty marriage which Adiante had
ambitiously contracted with a hook-nosed foreign prince. Patrick, a
broken-hearted proxy, successfully begs her family for a miniature of the
girl to take back to his brother, but he falls so deeply in love with her
on seeing the portrait that his loyalty to Philip almost wavers, when the
latter carelessly asks him to leave the miniature on a more or less public
table instead of taking it off to the solitude of his own room for a long
vigil of adoration.
In the rest of the story we have an account of the brothers in the London
house of Captain Con, the happy husband married to a stark English wife of
mechanical propriety--a rebellious husband, too, when in the sociable
atmosphere of his own upper room, amid the blackened clay pipes and the
friendly fumes of whiskey, he sings her praises, while at the same time
full of grotesque and whimsical criticisms of all those things, Saxon and
more widely human, for which she stands. There is a touch of farce in the
relations of these two, aptly symbolized by the bell which rings for
Captain Con, and hastens him away from his midnight eloquence with Patrick
and Philip. "He groaned, 'I must go. I haven't heard the tinkler for
months. It signifies she's cold in her bed. The thing called circulation
is unknown to her save by the aid of outward application, and I'm the
warming-pan, as legitimately as I should be, I'm her husband and her
Harvey in one.'"
It is in the house of Captain Con, it should be added, that Philip and
Patrick meet Jane Mattock, the Saxon woman; and the story as we have it
ends with Philip invalided home from service in India, and Jane, a victim
of love, catching "glimpses of the gulfs of bondage, delicious,
rose-enfolded, foreign." There are nearly three hundred pages of it
altogether, some of them as fantastic and lyrical as any that Meredith
ever wrote.
As one reads _Celt and Saxon_, however, one seems to get an inkling of the
reason why Meredith has so often been set down as an obscure author. It is
not entirely that he is given to using imagery as the language of
explanation--a subtle and personal sort of hieroglyphics. It is chiefly, I
think, because there is so little direct painting of men and women in his
books. Despite his lyricism, he had something of an X-ray's imagination.
The details of the modelling of a face, the interpreting lines and looks,
did not fix themselves with preciseness on his vision enabling him to pass
them on to us with the surface reality we generally demand in prose
fiction.
It is as though he painted some of his men and women upon air: they are
elusive for all we know of their mental and spiritual processes. Even
though he is at pains to tell us that Diana's hair is dark, we do not at
once accept the fact but are at liberty to go on believing she is a fair
woman, for he himself was general rather than insistently particular in
his vision of such matters. In the present book, again, we have a glimpse
of Adiante in her miniature--"this lighted face, with the dark raised eyes
and abounding auburn tresses, where the contrast of colours was in itself
thrilling," "the light above beauty distinguishing its noble classic lines
and the energy of radiance, like a morning of chivalrous promise, in the
eyes"--and, despite the details mentioned, the result is to give us only
the lyric aura of the woman where we wanted a design.
Ultimately, these women of Meredith's become intensely real to us--the
most real women, I think, in English fiction--but, before we come to
handshaking terms with them, we have sometimes to go to them over bogs and
rocky places with the sun in our eyes. Before this, physically, they are
apt to be exquisite parts of a landscape, sharers of a lyric beauty with
the cherry-trees and the purple crocuses.
Coming to the substance of the book--the glance from many sides at the
Irish and English temperaments--we find Meredith extremely penetrating in
his criticism of John Bullishness, but something of a foreigner in his
study of the Irish character. The son of an Irishwoman, he chose an
Irishwoman as his most conquering heroine, but he writes of the race as
one who has known the men and women of it entirely, or almost entirely, in
an English setting--a setting, in other words, which shows up their
strangeness and any surface eccentricities they may have, but does not
give us an ordinary human sense of them. Captain Con is vital, because
Meredith imagined him vitally, but when all is said and done, he is
largely a stage-Irishman, winking over his whiskey that has paid no
excise--a better-born relative of Captain Costigan.
Politically, _Celt and Saxon_ seems to be a plea for Home Rule--Home Rule,
with a view towards a "consolidation of the union." Its diagnosis of the
Irish difficulty is one which has long been popular with many intellectual
men on this side of the Irish Sea. Meredith sees, as the roots of the
trouble, misunderstanding, want of imagination, want of sympathy. It has
always seemed curious to me that intelligent men could persuade themselves
that Ireland was chiefly suffering from want of understanding and want of
sympathy on the part of England, when all the time her only ailment has
been want of liberty. To adapt the organ-grinder's motto,
Sympathy without relief
Is like mustard without beef.
As a matter of fact, Meredith realized this, and was a friend to many
Irish national movements from the Home Rule struggle down to the Gaelic
League, to the latter of which the Irish part of him sent a subscription a
year or two ago. He saw things from the point of view of an Imperial
Liberal idealist, however, not of a Nationalist. In the result, he did not
know the every-day and traditional setting of Irish life sufficiently well
to give us an Irish Nationalist central figure as winning and heroic, even
in his extravagances, as, say, the patriotic Englishman, Neville
Beauchamp.
At the same time, one must be thankful for a book so obviously the work of
a great abundant mind--a mind giving out its criticisms like flutters of
birds--a heroic intellect always in the service of an ideal liberty,
courage, and gracious manners--a characteristically island brain, that was
yet not insular.