HARDY AND MEREDITH
We have seen in chapter seventh, how the influence of Balzac
introduced to modern fiction that extension of subject and that
preference for the external fact widely productive of change in
the novel-making of the continent and of English-speaking lands.
As the year 1830 was given significance by him, so, a generation
later, the year 1870 was given significance by Zola. England,
like other lands cultivating the Novel, felt the influence.
Balzac brought to fiction a greater franchise of theme: Zola
taught it to regard a human being--individual or collectively
social--as primarily animal: that is, he explains action on this
hypothesis. And as an inevitable consequence, realism passed to
the so-called naturalism. Zola believed in this view as a theory
and his practice, not always consistent with it, was
sufficiently so in the famous Rougon-Macquart series of novels
begun the year of the Franco-Prussian war, to establish it as a
method, and a school of fiction. Naturalism, linking hands with
l'art pour art--"a fine phrase is a moral action--there is no
other morality in literature," cried Zola--became a banner-cry,
with "the flesh is all" its chief article of belief. No study of
the growth of English fiction can ignore this typical modern
movement, however unpleasant it may be to follow it. The baser
and more brutal phases of the Novel continental and insular look
to this derivation. Zola's remarkable pronunciamento "The
Experimental Novel," proves how honestly he espoused the
doctrine of the realist, how blind he is to its partial view.
His attempt to subject the art of fiction to the exact laws of
science, is an illustration of the influence of scientific
thought upon a mind not broadly cultured, though of unusual
native quality. Realism of the modern kind--the kind for which
Zola stands--is the result in a form of literature of the
necessary intellectual unrest following on the abandonment of
older religious ideals. Science had forced men to give up
certain theological conceptions; death, immorality, God, Man,--these
were all differently understood, and a period of
readjustment, doubt and negation, of misery and despair, was the
natural issue. Man, being naturally religious, was sure sooner
or later to secure a new and more hopeful faith: it was a matter
of spiritual self-preservation. But realism in letters, for the
moment, before a new theory had been formulated, was a kind of
pis aller by which literature could be produced and attention
given to the tangible things of this earth, many of them not
before thoroughly exploited; the things of the mind, of the
Spirit, were certain to be exploited later, when a broader creed
should come. The new romanticism and idealism of our day marks
this return. Zola's theory is now seen to be wrong, and there
has followed a violent reaction from the realistic tenets, even
in Paris, its citadel. But for some years, it held tyrannous
sway and its leader was a man of genius, his work distinctive,
remarkable; at its best, great,--in spite of, rather than
because of, his principles. It was in the later Trilogy of the
cities that, using a broader formula, he came into full
expression of what was in him; during the last years of his life
he was moving, both as man and artist, in the right direction.
Yet naturally it was novels like "Nana" and "L'Assomoir" that
gave him his vogue; and their obsession with the fleshly gave
them for the moment a strange distinction: for years their
author was regarded as the founder of a school and its most
formidable exponent. He wielded an influence that rarely falls
to a maker of stories. And although realism in its extreme
manifestations no longer holds exclusive sway, Zola's impulse is
still at work in the modern Novel. Historically, his name will
always be of interest.
I
Thomas Hardy is a realist in a sense true of no English novelist
of anything like equal rank preceding him: his literary
genealogy is French, for his "Jude The Obscure" has no English
prototype, except the earlier work of George Moore, whose
inspiration is even more definitely Paris. To study Hardy's
development for a period of about twenty-five years from "Under
the Greenwood Tree" to "Jude," is to review, as they are
expressed in the work of one great English novelist, the
literary ideals before and after Zola. Few will cavil at the
inclusion in our study of a living author like Hardy. His work
ranks with the most influential of our time; so much may be seen
already. His writing of fiction, moreover, or at least of
Novels, seems to be finished. And like Meredith, he is a man of
genius and, strictly speaking, a finer artist than the elder
author. For quality, then, and significance of accomplishment,
Hardy may well be examined with the masters whose record is
rounded out by death. He offers a fine example of the logic of
modern realism, as it has been applied by a first-class mind to
the art of fiction. In Meredith, on the contrary, is shown a
sort of synthesis of the realistic and poetic-philosophic
interpretation. Hardy is for this reason easier to understand
and explain; Meredith refuses classification.
The elements of strength in Thomas Hardy can be made out
clearly; they are not elusive. Wisely, he has chosen to do a
very definite thing and, with rare perseverance and skill, he
has done it. He selected as setting the south-western part of
England--Wessex, is the ancient name he gave it--that embraces
Somersetshire and contiguous counties, because he felt that the
types of humanity and the view of life he wished to show could
best be thrown out against the primitive background. Certain
elemental truths about men and women, he believed, lost sight of
in the kaleidoscopic attritions of the town, might there be
clearly seen. The choice of locale was thus part of an attitude
toward life. That attitude or view may be described fairly well
as one of philosophic fatalism.
It has not the cold removedness of the stoic: it has pity in it,
even love. But it is deeply sad, sometimes bitter. In Hardy's
presentation of Nature (a remark applying to some extent to a
younger novelist who shows his influence, Phillpotts), she is
displayed as an ironic expression, with even malignant moods, of
a supreme cosmic indifference to the petty fate of that
animalcule, man. And this, in spite of a curious power she
possesses of consoling him and of charming him by blandishments
that cheat the loneliness of his soul. There is no purer example
of tragedy in modern literature than Mr. Hardy's strongest, most
mature stories. A mind deeply serious and honest, interprets the
human case in this wise and conceives that the underlying
pitilessness can most graphically be conveyed in a setting like
that of Egdon Heath, where the great silent forces of Nature
somberly interblend with the forces set in motion by the human
will, both futile to produce happiness. Even the attempt to be
virtuous fails in "Jude": as the attempt to be happy does in
"Tess." That sardonic, final thought in the last-named book will
not out of our ears: Fate had played its last little jest with
poor Tess.
But there are mitigations, many and welcome. Hardy has the most
delightful humor. His peasants and simple middle-class folk are
as distinctive and enjoyable as anything since Shakspere. He
also has a more sophisticated, cutting humor--tipped with irony
and tart to the taste--which he uses in those stories or scenes
where urbanites mingle with his country folk. But his humorous
triumphs are bucolic. And for another source of keenest
pleasure, there is his style, ennobling all his work. Whether
for the plastic manipulation of dialogue or the eloquencies and
exactitudes of description, he is emphatically a master. His
mind, pagan in its bent, is splendidly broad in its
comprehension of the arcana of Nature and that of a poet
sensitive to all the witchery of a world which at core is
inscrutably dark and mysterious. He knows, none better, of the
comfort to be got even from the sad when its beauty is made
palpitating. No one before him, not Meredith himself, has so
interfused Nature with man as to bring out the thought of man's
ancient origin in the earth, his birth-ties, and her claims on
his allegiance. This gives a rare savor to his handling of what
with most novelists is often mere background. Egdon Heath was
mentioned; the setting in "The Return of the Native" is not
background in the usual sense; that mighty stretch of moorland
is almost like the central actor of the drama, so potent is its
influence upon the fate of the other characters. So with "The
Woodlanders" and still other stories. Take away this subtle and
vital relation of man to Nature, and the whole organism
collapses. Environment with Hardy is atmosphere, influence,
often fate itself. Being a scientist in the cast of his
intellect, although by temperament a poet, he believes in
environment as the shaping power conceived of by Taine and Zola.
It is this use of Nature as a power upon people of deep, strong,
simple character, showing the sweep of forces far more potent
than the conventions of the polite world, which distinguishes
Hardy's fiction. Fate with him being so largely that impersonal
thing, environment; allied with temperament (for which he is not
responsible), and with opportunity--another element of luck--it
follows logically that man is the sport of the gods. Hardy is
unable, like other determinists, to escape the dilemma of free-will
versus predestination, and that other crux, the imputation
of personality to the workings of so-called natural laws. Indeed
curiously, in his gigantic poem-cycle, "the Dynasts," the
culmination of his life-work, he seems to hint at a plan of the
universe which may be beneficial.
To name another quality that gives distinction to Hardy's work:
his fiction is notably well-built, and he is a resourceful
technician. Often, the way he seizes a plot and gives it
proportionate progress to an end that is inevitable, exhibits a
well-nigh perfect art. Hardy's novels, for architectural
excellence, are really wonderful and will richly repay careful
study in this respect. It has been suggested that because his
original profession was that of an architect, his constructive
ability may have been carried over to another craft. This may be
fantastic; but the fact remains that for the handling of
material in such a manner as to eliminate the unnecessary, and
move steadily toward the climax, while ever imitating though not
reproducing, the unartificial gait of life, Hardy has no
superior in English fiction and very few beyond it. These
ameliorations of humor and pity, these virtues of style and
architectural handling make the reading of Thomas Hardy a
literary experience, and very far from an undiluted course in
Pessimism. A sane, vigorous, masculine mind is at work in all
his fiction up to its very latest. Yet it were idle to deny the
main trend of his teaching. It will be well to trace with some
care the change which has crept gradually over his view of the
world. As his development of thought is studied in the
successive novels he produced between 1871 and 1898, it may
appear that there is little fundamental change in outlook: the
tragic note, and the dark theory of existence, explicit in
"Tess" and "Jude," is more or less implicit in "Desperate
Remedies." But change there is, to be found in the deepening of
the feeling, the pushing of a theory to its logical extreme.
This opening tale, read in the light of what he was to do,
strikes one as un-Hardy-like in its rather complex plot, with
its melodramatic tinge of incident.
The second book, "Under the Greenwood Tree," is a blithe, bright
woodland comedy and it would have been convenient for a cut-and-dried
theory of Hardy's growth from lightness to gravity, had it
come first. It is, rather, a happy interlude, hardly
representative of his main interest, save for its clear-cut
characterizations of country life and its idyllic flavor. The
novel that trod on its heels, "A Pair of Blue Eyes," maugre its
innocently Delia Cruscan title,--it sounds like a typical effort
of "The Duchess,"--has the tragic end which light-minded readers
have come to dread in this author. He showed his hand thus
comparatively early and henceforth was to have the courage of
his convictions in depicting human fate as he saw it--not as the
reader wished it.
In considering the books that subsequently appeared, to
strengthen Hardy's place with those who know fine fiction, they
are seen to have his genuine hall-mark, just in proportion as
they are Wessex through and through: in the interplay of
character and environment there, we get his deepest expression
as artist and interpreter. The really great novels are "Far From
the Madding Crowd," "The Return of the Native," "The Mayor of
Casterbridge" and "Tess of the D'Urbervilles": when he shifts
the scene to London, as in "The Hand of Ethelberta" or
introduces sophisticated types as in the dull "Laodicean," it
means comparative failure. Mother soil (he is by birth a
Dorchester man and lives there still) gives him idiosyncrasy,
flavor, strength. That the best, most representative work of
Hardy is to be seen in two novels of his middle career, "Far
From the Madding Crowd" and "The Return of the Native" rather
than in the later stories, "Tess" and "Jude," can be
established, I think, purely on the ground of art, without
dragging cheap charges of immorality into the discussion. In the
last analysis, questions of art always become a question of
ethics: the separation is arbitrary and unnatural. That "Tess"
is the book into which the author has most intensely put his
mature belief, may be true: it is quiveringly alive, vital as
only that is which comes from the deeps of a man's being. But
Hardy is so much a special pleader for Tess, that the argument
suffers and a grave fault is apparent when the story's climax is
studied. There is an intrusion of what seems like factitious
melodrama instead of that tissue of events which one expects
from a stern necessitarian. Tess need not be a murderess;
therefore, the work should not so conclude, for this is an
author whose merit is that his effects of character are causal.
He is fatalistic, yes; but in general he royally disdains the
cheap tricks of plot whereby excitement is furnished at the
expense of credulity and verisimilitude. In Tess's end, there s
a suspicion of sensation for its own sake--a suggestion of
savage joy in shocking sensibilities. Of course, the result is
most powerful; but the superior power of the novel is not here
so much as in its splendid sympathy and truth. He has made this
woman's life-history deeply affecting and is right in claiming
that she is a pure soul, judged by intention.
The heart feels that she is sinned against rather than sinning
and in the spectacle of her fall finds food for thought "too
deep for tears." At the same time, it should not be forgotten
that Tess's piteous plight,--the fact that fate has proved too
strong for a soul so high in its capacity for unselfish and
noble love,--is based upon Hardy's assumption that she could not
help it. Here, as elsewhere in his philosophy, you must accept
his premise, or call Tess (whom you may still love) morally
weak. It is this reservation which will lead many to place the
book, as a work of art, and notwithstanding its noble
proportions and compelling power, below such a masterpiece as
"The Return of the Native." That it is on the whole a sane and
wholesome work, however, may be affirmed by one who finds
Hardy's last novel "Jude the Obscure" neither. For there is a
profound difference between two such creations. In the former,
there is a piquant sense of the pathos and the awesomeness of
life, but not of its unrelieved ugliness and disgust; an
impression which is received from the latter. Not only is "Jude"
"a tragedy of unfulfilled aim" as the author calls it; so is
"Tess"; but it fills the reader with a kind of sullen rage to be
an eye-witness of the foul and brutal: he is asked to see a
drama develop beside a pig-sty. It is therefore, intensely
unesthetic which, if true, is a word of condemnation for any
work of art. It is deficient in poetry, in the broad sense;
that, rather than frankness of treatment, is the trouble with
it.
And intellectually, it would seem to be the result of a bad
quarter of an hour of the author: a megrim of the soul. Elements
of greatness it has; a fine motive, too; to display the
impossibilities for evolution on the part of an aspiring soul
hampered by circumstances and weak where most humanity is Weak,
in the exercise of sex-passion. A not dissimilar theme as it is
worked out by Daudet in "Le Petite Chose" is beautiful in its
pathos; in "Jude" there is something shuddering about the
arbitrary piling-up of horror; the modesty of nature is
overstept; it is not a truly proportioned view of life, one
feels; if life were really so bad as that, no one would be
willing to live it, much less exhibit the cheerfulness which is
characteristic of the majority of human beings. It is a fair
guess that in the end it will be called the artistic mistake of
a novelist of genius. Its harsh reception by critics in England
and America was referred to by the author privately as an
example of the "crass Philistinism" of criticism in those lands:
Mr. Hardy felt that on the continent alone was the book
understood, appreciated. I imagine, however, that whatever the
limitations of the Anglo-Saxon view, it comes close to the
ultimate decision to be passed upon this work.
One of the striking things about these Novels is the sense that
they convey of the largeness of life. The action moves on a
narrow stage set with the austere simplicity of the
Elizabethans; the personages are extremely commonplace, the
incidents in the main small and unexciting. Yet the
tremendousness of human fate is constantly implied and brought
home in the most impressive way. This is because all have
spiritual value; if the survey be not wide, it sinks deep to the
psychic center; and what matters vision that circles the globe,
if it lacks grasp, penetration, uplift? These, Hardy has. When
one calls his peasants Shaksperian, one is trying to express the
strength and savor, the rich earthy quality like fresh loam that
pertains to these quaint figures, so evidently observed on the
ground, and lovingly lifted over into literature. Their speech
bewrays them and is an index of their slow, shrewd minds.
Nor is his serious characterization less fine and representative
than his humorous; especially his women. It is puzzling to say
whether Hardy's comic men, or his subtly drawn, sympathetically
visualized women are to be named first in his praise: for power
in both, and for the handling of nature, he will be long
remembered. Bathsheba, Eustacia, Tess and the rest, they take
hold on the very heart-strings and are known as we know our very
own. It is not that they are good or bad,--generally they are
both; it is that they are beautifully, terribly human. They
mostly lack the pettiness that so often fatally limits their sex
and quite as much, they lack the veneer that obscures the broad
lines of character. And it is natural to add, while thinking of
Hardy's women, that, unlike almost all the Victorian novelists,
he has insisted frankly, but in the main without offense, on
woman's involvement with sex-passion; he finds that love, in a
Wessex setting, has wider range than has been awarded it in
previous study of sex relations. And he has not hesitated to
depict its rootage in the flesh; not overlooking its rise in the
spirit to noblest heights. And it is this un-Anglo-Saxon-like
comprehension of feminine humanity that makes him so fair to the
sinning woman who trusts to her ruin or proves what is called
weak because of the generous movement of her blood. No one can
despise faithful-hearted Fannie Robin, dragging herself to the
poorhouse along Casterbridge highway; that scene, which bites
itself upon the memory, is fairly bathed in an immense,
understanding pity. Although Hardy has thus used the freedom of
France in treatment, he has, unlike so much of the Gallic
realism, remained an idealist in never denying the soul of love
while speaking more truthfully concerning its body than the
fiction-makers before him. There is no finer handling of sex-love
with due regard to its dual nature,--love that grows in
earth yet flowers until it looks into heaven--than Marty's oft-quoted
beautiful speech at her lover's grave; and Hardy's belief
rings again in the defense of that good fellowship--that
camaraderie--which can grow into "the only love which is as
strong as death--beside which the passion usually so-called by
the name is evanescent as steam." A glimpse like that of Hardy's
mind separates him at once from Maupassant's view of the world.
The traditions of English fiction, which he has insisted on
disturbing, have, after all, been strong to direct his work, as
they have that of all the writers born into the speech and
nourished on its racial ideals.
Another reason for giving the stories of the middle period, such
as "The Return of the Native," preference over those that are
later, lies in the fact that the former have no definite,
aggressive theme; whereas "Tess" announces an intention on the
title page, "Jude," in a foreword. Whatever view of life may be
expressed in "The Mayor of Casterbridge," for example, is
imbedded, as it should be, in the course of the story. This
tendency towards didacticism is a common thing in the cases of
modern writers of fiction; it spoiled a great novelist in the
case of Tolstoy, with compensatory gains in another direction;
of those of English stock, one thinks of Eliot, Howells, Mrs.
Ward and many another. But however natural this may be in an age
like ours, the art of the literary product is, as a rule,
injured by the habit of using fiction as a jumping-board for
theory. In some instances, dullness has resulted. Eliot has not
escaped scot-free. With Hardy, he is, to my taste, never dull.
Repellent as "Jude" may be, it is never that. But a hardness of
manner and an unpleasant bias are more than likely to follow
this aim, to the fiction's detriment.
It is a great temptation to deflect from the purpose of this
work in order to discuss Hardy's short stories, for a master in
this kind he is. A sketch like "The Three Strangers" is as truly
a masterpiece as Stevenson's "A Lodging for The Night." It must
suffice to say of his work in the tale that it enables the
author to give further assurance of his power of atmospheric
handling, his stippling in of a character by a few strokes, his
skill in dramatic scene, his knowledge of Wessex types, and
especially, his subdued but permeating pessimism. There is
nothing in his writings more quietly, deeply hopeless than most
of the tales in the collection "Life's Little Ironies." One
shrinks away from the truth and terror of them while lured by
their charm. The short stories increase one's admiration for the
artist, but the full, more virile message conies from the
Novels. It is matter for regret that "Jude the Obscure," unless
the signs fail, is to be his last testament in fiction. For such
a man to cease from fiction at scarce sixty can but be deplored.
The remark takes on added pertinency because the novelist has
essayed in lieu of fiction the poetic drama, a form in which he
has less ease and authority.
Coming when he did and feeling in its full measure the tidal
wave from France, Hardy was compelled both by inward and outward
pressure to see life un-romantically, so far as the human fate
is concerned: but always a poet at heart (he began with verse),
he found a vent for that side of his being in Nature, in great
cosmic realities, in the stormy, passionate heart of humanity,
so infinite in its aspirations, so doughty in its heroisms, so
pathetic in its doom. There is something noble always in the
tragic largeness of Hardy's best fiction. His grim determinism
is softened by lyric airs; and even when man is most lonesome,
he is consoled by contact with "the pure, eternal course of
things"; whose august flow comforts Arnold. Because of his art,
the representative character of his thought, reflecting in
prose, as does Matthew Arnold in verse, the deeper
thought-currents of the time; and because too of the personal
quality which for lack of a better word one still must call genius,
Thomas Hardy is sure to hold his place in the English fiction of
the closing years of the nineteenth century and is to-day the
most distinguished living novelist using that speech and one of
the few to be recognized and honored abroad. No writer of
fiction between 1875 and 1900 has more definitely had a strong
influence upon the English Novel as to content, scope and choice
of subject. If his convictions have led him to excess, they will
be forgiven and forgotten in the light of the serene mastery
shed by the half dozen great works he has contributed to English
literature.
II
Once in a while--a century or so, maybe,--comes an artist who
refuses to be classified. Rules fail to explain him: he makes
new rules in the end. He seems too big for any formula. He
impresses by the might of his personality, teaching the world
what it should have known before, that the personal is the life-blood
of all and any art. Some such effect is made upon the
critic by George Meredith, who so recently has closed his eyes
to the shows of earth. One can find in him almost all the
tendencies of English fiction. He is realist and romanticist,
frank lover of the flesh, lofty idealist, impressionist and
judge, philosopher, dramatist, essayist, master of the comic and
above all, Poet. Eloquence, finesse, strength and sweetness, the
limpid and the cryptic, are his in turn: he puts on when he
will, like a defensive armor, a style to frighten all but the
elect. And they who persist and discover the secret, swear that
it is more than worth the pains. Perhaps the lesson of it all is
that a first-class writer, creative and distinctive, is a
phenomenon transcending school, movement or period. George
Meredith is not, if we weigh words, the greatest English
novelist to-day--for both Hardy and Stevenson are his superiors
as artists; but he is the greatest man who has written fiction.
Although he was alive but yesterday, the novel frequently
awarded first position among his works, "The Ordeal of Richard
Feverel," was published a good half century ago. Go back to it,
get its meaning, then read the latest fiction he wrote--(he
ceased to produce fiction more than a decade before his death)
and you appear to be in contact with the same personality in the
substantials of story-making and of life-view. The only notable
change is to be found in the final group of three stories, "One
of Our Conquerors," "Lord Ormont and His Aminta" and "The
Amazing Marriage." The note of social protest is louder here,
the revolt against conventions more pronounced. Otherwise, the
author of "Feverel" is the author of "The Amazing Marriage."
Much has occurred in the Novel during the forty years between
the two works: realism has traveled to an extreme, neo-idealism
come by way of reaction, romanticism bloomed again, the Novel of
ingenious construction, the Novel of humanitarian meaning, the
Novel of thesis and problem and the Novel that foretells the
future like an astrologer, all these types and yet others have
been practised; but Meredith has kept tranquilly on the tenor of
his large way, uninfluenced, except as he has expressed all
these complexities in his own work. He is in literary evolution,
a sport. Critics who have tried to show how his predecessors and
contemporaries have influenced him, have come out lamely from
the attempt. He has been sensitive not to individual writers,
but to that imponderable yet potent thing, the time-tendency in
literature. He throws back to much in the past, while in the van
of modern thought. What, to illustrate, could be more of the
present intellectually than his remarkable sonnet-sequence,
"Modern Love"? And are not his women, as a type, the noblest
example of the New Woman of our day--socially, economically,
intellectually emancipated, without losing their distinctive
feminine quality? And yet, in "The Shaving of Shagpat," an early
work, we go back t the Arabian Nights for a model. The satiric
romance, "Harry Richmond," often reminds of the leisured episode
method of the eighteenth century; and while reading the unique
"Evan Harrington" we think at times of Aristophanes.
Nor is much light thrown on Meredith's path in turning to his
personal history. Little is known of this author's ancestry and
education; his environment has been so simple, his life in its
exteriors so uneventful, that we return to the work itself with
the feeling that the key to the secret room must be here if
anywhere. It is known that he was educated in youth in Germany,
which is interesting in reference to the problem of his style.
And there is more to be said concerning his parentage than the
smug propriety of print has revealed while he lived. We know,
too, that his marriage with the daughter of Thomas Love Peacock
proved unhappy, and that for many years he has resided, almost a
recluse, with his daughter, in the idyllic retirement of Surrey.
The privacy of Boxhill has been respected; next to never has
Meredith spoken in any public way and seldom visited London.
When he was, at Tennyson's death, made the President of the
British Society of Authors, the honor sought the man. The rest
is silence; what has appeared since his death has been of too
conflicting a nature for credence. We await a trustworthy
biography.
The appeal then must be to the books themselves. Exclusive of
short story, sketch and tale, they include a dozen novels of
generous girth--for Meredith is old-fashioned in his demand for
elbow-room. They are preeminently novels of character and more
than any novelist of the day the view of the world embodied in
them is that of the intellect. This does not mean that they are
wanting in emotional force or interest: merely, that in George
Meredith's fiction men and women live the life of thought as it
is acted upon by practical issues. Character seen in action is
always his prepossession; plot is naught save as it exhibits
this. The souls of men and women are his quarry, and the test of
a civilization the degree in which it has developed the mind for
an enlightened control over the emotions and the bodily
appetites. Neither does this mean, as with Henry James, the
disappearance of plot: a healthy objectivity of narrative
framework is preserved; if anything the earlier
books--"Feverel," "Evan Harrington," "Rhoda Fleming" and the duo
"Sandra Belloni" and "Vittoria"--have more of story interest
than the later novels. Meredith has never feared the use of the
episode, in this suggesting the older methods of Fielding and
Smollett. Yet the episodic in his hands has ever its use for
psychologic envisagement. Love, too, plays a large role in his
fiction; indeed, in the wider platonic sense, it is constantly
present, although he is the last man to be called a writer of
love-stories. And no man has permitted himself greater freedom
in stepping outside the story in order to explain his meaning,
comment upon character and scene, rhapsodize upon Life, or
directly harangue the reader. And this broad marginal
reservation of space, however much it is deplored in viewing his
work as novel-making, adds a peculiar tonic and is a
characteristic we could ill spare. It brings us back to the
feeling that he is a great man using the fiction form for
purposes broader than that of telling a story.
Because of this ample personal testimony in his books it should
be easy to state his Lebensanschauung, unless the opacity of his
manner blocks the way or he indulges in self-contradiction in
the manner of a Nietzsche. Such is not the case. What is the
philosophy unfolded in his representative books?
It will be convenient to choose a few of those typical for
illustration. The essence of Meredith is to be discovered in
such works as "The Ordeal of Richard Feverel," "Evan
Harrington," "Harry Richmond," "The Egoist," "Diana of the
Crossways." If you know these, you understand him. "Lord Ormont
and his Aminta" might well be added because of its teaching; but
the others will serve, with the understanding that so many-sided
a writer has in other works given further noble proof of his
powers. If I allowed personal preference to be my sole guide,
"Rhoda Fleming" would be prominent in the list; and many place
"Beauchamp's Career" high, if not first among his works;--a
novel teeming with his views, particularly valuable for its
treatment of English politics and certainly containing some of
his most striking characterization, in particular, one of his
noblest women. Still, those named will fairly reflect the
novelist and speak for all.
"Richard Feverel," which had been preceded by a book of poems,
the fantasia "The Shaving of Shagpat" and an historical
novelette "Farina," was the first book that announced the
arrival of a great novelist. It is at once a romance of the
modern type, a love-story and a problem book; the tri-statement
makes it Meredithian. It deals with the tragic union of Richard
and Lucy, in a setting that shifts from sheer idyllic, through
worldly and realistic to a culmination of dramatic grief. It
contains, in measure heaped up and running over, the poetry, the
comedy and the philosophy, the sense of Life's riddle, for which
the author is renowned. But its intellectual appeal of theme--aside
from the incidental wisdom that stars its pages--is found
in the study of the problem of education. Richard's father would
shape his career according to a preconceived idea based on
parental love and guided by an anxious, fussy consulting of the
oracles. The attempt to stretch the son upon a pedagogic
procustean bed fails disastrously, wrecking his own happiness,
and that of his sweet girl-wife. Love is stronger than aught
else and we are offered the spectacle of ruined lives hovered
over by the best intentions. The hovel is an illustration of the
author's general teaching that a human being must have
reasonable liberty of action for self-development. The heart
must be allowed fair-play, though its guidance by the intellect
is desirable.
It has been objected that this moving romance ends in
unnecessary tragedy; that the catastrophe is not inevitable. But
it may be doubted if the mistake of Sir Austin Feverel could be
so clearly indicated had not the chance bullet of the duel
killed the young wife when reconciliation with her husband
appeared probable. But a book so vital in spirit, with such
lyric interludes, lofty heights of wisdom, homeric humor,
dramatic moments and profound emotions, can well afford lapses
from perfect form, awkwardnesses of art. There are places where
philosophy checks movement or manner obscures thought; but one
overlooks all such, remembering Richard and Lucy meeting by the
river; Richard's lonesome night walk when he learns he is a
father; the marvelous parting from Bella Mount; father and son
confronted with Richard's separation from the girl-wife; the
final piteous passing of Lucy. These are among the great moments
of English fiction.
One gets a sense of Meredith's resources of breadth and variety
next in taking up "Evan Harrington." Here is a satiric character
sketch where before was romance; for broad comedy in the older
and larger sense it has no peer among modern novels. The purpose
is plain: to show the evolution of a young middle-class
Englishman, a tailor's son, through worldly experience with
polite society into true democracy. After the disillusionment of
"high life," after much yeasty juvenile foolishness and false
ideals, Evan comes back to his father's shop with his lesson
learned: it is possible (in modern England) to be both tailor
and gentleman.
In placing this picture before the spectator, an incomparable
view of genteel society with contrasted touches of low life is
offered. For pure comedy that is of the midriff as well as of
the brain, the inn scene with the astonishing Raikes as central
figure is unsurpassed in all Meredith, and only Dickens has done
the like. And to correspond in the fashionable world, there is
Harrington's sister, the Countess de Saldar, who is only second
to Becky Sharp for saliency and delight. Some find these comic
figures overdrawn, even impossible; but they stand the test
applied to Dickens: they abide in affectionate memory, vivid
evocations made for our lasting joy. As with "Feverel," the book
is a piece of life first, a lesson second; but the underlying
thesis is present, not to the injury of one who reads for
story's sake.
An extraordinary further example of resourcefulness, with a
complete change of key, is "The Adventures of Harry Richmond."
The ostensible business of the book is to depict the growth from
boyhood to manhood and through sundry experiences of love, with
the resulting effect upon his character, of the young man whose
name gives it title. It may be noted that a favorite task with
Meredith is this, to trace the development of a personality from
immaturity to a maturity gained by the hard knocks of the
master-educator, Love. But the figure really dominant is not
Harry nor any one of his sweethearts, but that of his father,
Roy Richmond. I must believe that English fiction offers nothing
more original than he. He is an indescribable compound of
brilliant swashbuckler, splendid gentleman and winning
Goodheart. Barry Lyndon, Tarascon, Don Quixote and Septimus go
into his making--and yet he is not explained;--an absolute
original. The scene where, in a German park on an occasion of
great pomp, he impersonates the statue of a Prince, is one of
the author's triumphs--never less delightful at a re-reading.
But has this amazing creation a meaning, or is Roy merely one of
the results of the sportive play of a man of genius? He is
something more, we feel, when, at the end of the romance, he
gives his life for the woman who has so faithfully loved him and
believed in his royal pretensions. He perishes in a fire,
because in saving her he would not save himself. It is as if the
author said: "Behold, a man by nature histrionic and Bohemian,
and do not make the mistake to think him incapable of nobility.
Romantic in his faults, so too he is romantic in his virtues."
"And back of this kindly treatment of the lovable rascal (who
was so ideal a father to the little Richmond!) does there not
lurk the thought that the pseudo-romantic attitude toward Life
is full of danger--in truth, out of the question in modern
society?"
"The Egoist" has long been a test volume with Meredithians. If
you like it you are of the cult; if not, merely an amateur. It
is inevitable to quote Stevenson who, when he had read it
several times, declared that at the sixth reading he would begin
to realize its greatness. Stevenson was a doughty admirer of
Meredith, finding the elder "the only man of genius of my
acquaintance," and regarding "Rhoda Fleming" as a book to send
one back to Shakspere.
That "The Egoist" is typical--in a sense, most typical of the
fictions,--is very true. That, on the other hand, it is
Meredith's best novel may be boldly denied, since it is hardly a
novel at all. It is a wonderful analytic study of the core of
self that is in humanity, Willoughby, incarnation of a
self-centeredness glossed over to others and to himself by fine
gentleman manners and instincts, is revealed stroke after stroke
until, in the supreme test of his alliance with Clara Middleton,
he is flayed alive for the reader's benefit. In this power of
exposure, by the subtlest, most unrelenting analysis, of the
very penetralia of the human soul it has no counterpart; beside
it, most of the psychology of fiction seems child's play. And
the truth of it is overwhelming. No wonder Stevenson speaks of
its "serviceable exposure of myself." Every honest man who reads
it, winces at its infallible touching of a moral sore-spot. The
inescapable ego in us all was never before portrayed by such a
master.
But because it is a study that lacks the breadth, variety,
movement and objectivity of the Novel proper, "The Egoist" is
for the confirmed Meredith lover, not for the beginner: to take
it first is perchance to go no further. Readers have been lost
to him by this course. The immense gain in depth and delicacy
acquired by English fiction since Richardson is well illustrated
by a comparison of the latter's "Sir Charles Grandison" with
Meredith's "The Egoist." One is a portrait for the time, the
other for all time. Both, superficially viewed, are the same
type: a male paragon before whom a bevy of women burn incense.
But O the difference! Grandison is serious to his author, while
Meredith, in skinning Willoughby alive like another Marsyas, is
once and for all making the worship of the ego hateful.
It is interesting that "Diana of the Crossways" was the book
first to attract American readers. It has some of the author's
eccentricities at their worst. But it was in one respect an
excellent choice: the heroine is thoroughly representative of
the author and of the age; possibly this country is sympathetic
to her for the reason that she seems indigenous. Diana furnishes
a text for a dissertation on Meredith's limning of the sex, and
of his conception of the mental relation of the sexes. She is a
modern woman, not so much that she is superior in goodness to
the ideal of woman established in the mid-Victorian period by
Thackeray and Dickens, as that she is bigger and broader. She is
the result of the process of social readjustment. Her story is
that of a woman soul experiencing a succession of unions and
through them learning the higher love. First, the marriage de
convenance of an unawakened girl; then, a marriage wherein
admiration, ambition and flattered pride play their parts;
finally, the marriage with Redbourne, a union based on tried
friendship, comradeship, respect, warming into passion that,
like the sudden up-leap of flame on the altar, lifts the spirit
onto ideal heights. Diana is an imperfect, sinning, aspiring,
splendid creature. And in the narrative that surrounds her, we
get Meredith's theory of the place of intellect in woman, and in
the development of society. He has an intense conviction that
the human mind should be so trained that woman can never fall
back upon so-called instinct; he ruthlessly attacks her
"intuition," so often lauded and made to cover a multitude of
sins. When he remarks that she will be the last thing to be
civilized by man, the satire is directed against man rather than
against woman herself, since it is man who desires to keep her a
creature of the so-called intuitions. A mighty champion of the
sex, he never tires telling it that intellectual training is the
sure way to all the equalities. This conviction makes him a
stalwart enemy of sentimentalism, which is so fiercely satirized
in "Sandra Belloni" in the persons of the Pole family. His works
abound in passages in which this view is displayed, flashed
before the reader in diamond-like epigram and aphorism. Not that
he despises the emotions: those who know him thoroughly will
recognize the absurdity of such a charge. Only he insists that
they be regulated and used aright by the master, brain. The
mishaps of his women come usually from the haphazard abeyance of
feeling or from an unthinking bowing down to the arbitrary
dictations of society. This insistence upon the application of
reason (the reasoning process dictated by an age of science) to
social situations, has led this writer to advise the setting
aside of the marriage bond in certain circumstances. In both
"Lord Ormont and his Aminta" and "One of our Conquerors" he
advocates a greater freedom in this relation, to anticipate what
time may bring to pass. It is enough here to say that this
extreme view does not represent Meredith's best fiction nor his
most fruitful period of production.
Perhaps the most original thing about Meredith as a novelist is
the daring way in which he has made an alliance between romance
and the intellect which was supposed, in an older conception, to
be its archenemy. He gives to Romance, that creature of the
emotions, the corrective and tonic of the intellect "To preserve
Romance," he declares, "we must be inside the heads of our
people as well as the hearts ... in days of a growing activity
of the head." Let us say once again that Romance means a certain
use of material as the result of an attitude toward Life; this
attitude may be temporary, a mood; or steady, a conviction. It
is the latter with George Meredith; and be it understood, his
material is always realistic, it is his interpretation that is
superbly idealistic. The occasional crabbedness of his manner
and his fiery admiration for Italy are not the only points in
which he reminds one of Browning. He is one with him in his
belief in soul, his conception of life is an arena for its
trying-out; one with him also in the robust acceptance of earth
and earth's worth, evil and all, for enjoyment and as salutary
experience. This is no fanciful parallel between Meredith and a
man who has been called (with their peculiarities of style in
mind) the Meredith of Poetry, as Meredith has been called the
Browning of Prose.
Thus, back of whatever may be the external story--the Italian
struggle for unity in "Vittoria," English radicalism in
"Beauchamp's Career," a seduction melodrama in "Rhoda Fleming"--there
is always with Meredith a steady interpretation of life, a
principle of belief. It is his crowning distinction that he can
make an intellectual appeal quite aside from the particular
story he is telling;--and it is also apparent that this is his
most vulnerable point as novelist. We get more from him just
because he shoots beyond the fiction target. He is that rare
thing in English novel-making, a notable thinker. Of all
nineteenth century novelists he leads for intellectual
stimulation. With fifty faults of manner and matter, irritating,
even outrageous in his eccentricities, he can at his best
startle with a brilliance that is alone of its kind. It is
because we hail him as philosopher, wit and poet that he fails
comparatively as artist. He shows throughout his work a sublime
carelessness of workmanship on the structural side of his craft;
but in those essentials, dialogue, character and scene, he rises
to the peaks of his profession.
Probably more readers are offended by his mannerisms of style
than by any other defect; and they are undeniable. The opening
chapter of "Diana" is a hard thing to get by; the same may be
said of the similar chapter in "Beauchamp's Career." In "One of
our Conquerors," early and late, the manner is such as to lose
for him even tried adherents. Is the trouble one of thought or
expression? And is it honest or an affectation? Meredith in some
books--and in all books more or less--adopts a strangely
indirect, over-elaborated, far-fetched and fantastic style,
which those who love him are fain to deplore. The author's
learning gets in his way and leads him into recondite allusions;
besides this, he has that quality of mind which is stimulated
into finding analogies on every side, so that image is piled on
image and side-paths of thought open up in the heat of this
mental activity. Part of the difficulty arises from surplusage
of imagination. Sometimes it is used in the service of comment
(often satirical); again in a kind of Greek chorus to the drama,
greatly to its injury; or in pure description, where it is
hardly less offensive. Thus in "The Egoist" we read: "Willoughby
shadowed a deep droop on the bend of his neck before Clara," and
reflection shows that all this absurdly acrobatic phrase means
is that the hero bowed to the lady. An utterly simple occurrence
and thus described! It is all the more strange and aggravating
in that it comes from a man who on hundreds of occasions writes
English as pungent, sonorous and sweet as any writer in the
history of the native literature. This is true both of dialogue
and narrative. He is the most quotable of authors; his Pilgrim's
Scrip is stuffed full of precious sayings, expressing many moods
of emotion and interpreting the world under its varied aspects
of romance, beauty, wit and drama. "Strength is the brute form
of truth." There is a French conciseness in such a sentence and
immense mental suggestiveness. Both his scenic and character
phrasing are memorable, as where the dyspeptic philosopher in
"Feverel" is described after dinner as "languidly twinkling
stomachic contentment." And what a scene is that where Master
Gammon replies to Mrs. Sumfit's anxious query concerning his
lingering at table with appetite apparently unappeasable:
"'When do you think you will have done, Master Gammon?'
"'When I feels my buttons, Ma'am.'"
Or hear John Thrasher in "Harry Richmond" dilate on Language:
'There's cockney, and there's country, and there's school.
Mix the three, strain and throw away the sediment. Now
yon's my view.'
Has any philologist said all that could be said, so succinctly?
His lyric outbursts in the face of Nature or better yet, where
as in the moonlight meeting of the lovers at Wllming Weir in
"Sandra Belloni," nature is interspersed with human passion in a
glorious union of music, picture and impassioned sentiment,--these
await the pleasure of the enthralled seeker in every book.
To encounter such passages (perhaps in a mood of protest over
some almost insufferable defect) is to find the reward rich
indeed. Let the cause of obscurity be what it may, we need not
doubt that with Meredith style is the man, a perfectly honest
way of expressing his personality. It is not impossible that his
unconventional education and the early influence of German upon
him, may come into the consideration. But in the main his
peculiarity is congenital.
Meredith lacked self-criticism as a writer. But it is quite
inaccurate to speak of obscure thought: it is language, the
medium, which makes the trouble when there is any. His thought,
allowing for the fantasticality of his humor in certain moods,
is never muddled or unorganized: it is sane, consistent and
worthy of attention. To say this, is still to regret the
stylistic vagaries.
One other defect must be mentioned: the characters talk like
Meredith, instead of in their own persons. This is not true
uniformly, of course, but it does mar the truth of his
presentation. Young girls show wit and wisdom quite out of
keeping; those in humble life--a bargeman, perhaps, or a
prize-fighter--speak as they would not in reality. Illusion is by
so much disturbed. It would appear in such cases that the thinker
temporarily dominated the creative artist.
When all is said, pro and con, there remains a towering
personality; a writer of unique quality; a man so stimulating
and surprising as he is, that we almost prefer him to the
perfect artist he never could be. No English maker of novels can
give us a fuller sense of life, a keener realization of the
dignity of man. It is natural to wish for more than we have--to
desire that Meredith had possessed the power of complete control
of his material and himself, had revised his work to better
advantage. But perhaps it is more commonsensible to be thankful
for him as he is.
As to influence, it would seem modest to assert that Meredith is
as bracingly wholesome morally as he is intellectually
stimulating. In a private letter to a friend who was praising
his finest book, he whimsically mourns the fact that he must
write for a living and hence feel like disowning so many of his
children when in cold blood he scrutinizes his offspring. The
letter in its entirety (it is unpublished) is proof, were any
needed, that he had a high artistic ideal which kept him nobly
dissatisfied with his endeavor. There is in him neither pose nor
complacent self-satisfaction. To an American, whom he was
bidding good-by at his own gate, he said: "If I had my books to
do over again, I should try harder to make sure their influence
was good." His aims, ethical and artistic, throughout his work,
can be relied upon as high and noble. His faults are as honest
as he himself, the inherent defects of his genius. No writer of
our day stands more sturdily for the idea that, whereas art is
precious, personality is more precious still; without which art
is a tinkling cymbal and with which even a defective art can
conquer Time, like a garment not all-seemly, that yet cannot
hide an heroic figure.