George Meredith: A Study

To succeed in qualifying a style so varied and so strange as Mr. Meredith’s, and composed of so many diverse elements, would be difficult even for his peers. Its quality is at the same time rugged and elusive, obscure and dazzlingly brilliant, witty and profound, harsh and most musically tender, light as a summer cloud, majestic as a storm. But his great defect is artificiality. His splendid pages and his matchless dialogues never lose the obtrusive flavour of the midnight oil, and we see most of his characters through a blinding glitter of limelight. This excessive use of artificial illumination, while fascinating us and compelling our admiration for the writer’s extraordinary cleverness, wearies us and irritates us at times, and we long for the mental repose of a whiff of commonplace and a page or two, by way of interlude, of fluent easy prose that rests the eye and the brain. There are so many tricks and surprises bestrewing our path, five-barred gates starting unexpectedly for us to leap; we are deliberately plunged neck and heels into so many swamps, and bowled over all sorts of rocks and stones, with the oddest sensations in conflict, that we more than once pay our debt grudgingly, and, like a peaceable man knocked down by a bludgeon, are amazed at the liberty that has been taken with our understanding. In this exuberant display of his own powers does Meredith show himself to be thoroughly English. He is unapproachable as a wrestler with words and phrases, and infuses dead speech with the vitality of blood and muscles. Words with him are like thoughts—strong, living, tangible to the touch of the soul. They seem to fly, and mount, and flutter round us, to catch our breath forcibly, and hold our imagination in the grasp of blood-warmed fingers. The most ordinary action of life, described by him in a line or two, is not a photograph, but a vivid revelation, a scene stamped not on the vision, but upon the mind. When he is not playing queer tricks with us and keeping every sense insufferably alert, every nerve strained to catch the meaning that dances tantalizingly before us, flying hither and thither upon fantastic figures of speech, until the writer himself seems drunk with his own juggling, he is quieting our baffled senses by these sharp revelations that have no artificial glamour about them. He ceases to be the inhuman metaphorist, and becomes our brother again, and we forget that he ever terrified us. I open ‘Evan Harrington’ at random, and alight on a paragraph where each word is vividly set in a perfect whole. There is no twist or turning here, and as we see the red harvest-moon and the dark water and trees, so we seem to touch the hand of suffering youth:

‘Over a length of the stream the red, round harvest-moon was rising, and the weakened youth was this evening at the mercy of the charm that encircled him. The water curved, and dimpled, and flowed flat, and the whole body of it rushed into the spaces of sad splendour. The clustered trees stood like temples of darkness; their shadows lengthened supernaturally; and a pale gloom crept between them on the sward. He had been thinking some time that Rose would knock at his door and give him her voice, at least; but she did not come; and when he had gazed out on the stream until his eyes ached, he felt that he must go and walk by it. Those little flashes of the hurrying tide spoke to him of a secret rapture and of a joy-seeking impulse—the pouring onward of all the blood of life into one illumined heart, mournful from excess of love.’

In none of his books do such passages abound as in ‘Richard Feverel,’ unless, perhaps, in ‘Harry Richmond.’ These two books, and in a lesser degree ‘Sandra Belloni,’ may best be described as picturesque and melodious. The writer is less a thinker than a poet, and sometimes he sings with a sweetness that troubles our vision and catches us queerly about the throat.

But viewing him upon the ground of the simple story-teller, we must admit that this is a ground either foreign to Mr. Meredith’s original genius, or deliberately shunned by him. The good old fashion, so dear to Scott and Thackeray, of bringing everything to a definite conclusion, either for better or worse, and clearing up all doubts as to the ultimate career of even their minor characters, is a fashion that he, with some cruelty and much contempt for the ordinary reader, utterly discards. He cares not a jot for our sympathy, still less for our judgment. He notes that life is chiefly interrogatory and unsatisfactory—an unfinished drama rarely terminating with the rightful wedding-bells or the merited reward; that choice is rarely justified by results, and that good and evil still remain vexed questions to be decided, as far as definite decision is possible, except upon their broadest issues, by temperament and individuality, by race and sex and training, as faith and love are decided. Look at the end of all his stories, and you will find yourself confronted with the unanswerable question which is sure to fix us in the examination of the lives of each one of us. There is the fatal tide, we know, but can we dare to say at what precise turning of the road of life we missed it?

This is the philosophy that ‘Richard Feverel’ exposes—conjectural, questioning; a drawn game between reason and impulse, between nature and intellect, between a philosopher’s system and a young man’s first love. Neither win, because, though a mighty fighter and a Homeric wrestler with words, Meredith is not of the definite school, and will not pander to his readers’ tastes either way. Are you for the mismanaged poor hero, or for the disappointed philosopher, gazing in the last page upon the system fondly built upon sand, and laid in ruins by the first breath of purely human disaster? Mr. Meredith resolves that your sympathies shall be balanced, as his own are soundly balanced. He leaves you with a question upon your lips, and your childish reproach is chidden by his silence.

Richard is the strongest and best hero the writer has drawn, before he fell in love with the more intricate complexities of woman, and delighted in her intellectual surprises, her social difficulties and struggles with iron fate and masculinity. We part with him as he rises from a sick-bed, widowed and broken upon the outset of brilliant manhood, enshadowed in a tragic gloom, and who is to explain to us the evolution of middle-age in this youth of burning hope and rash promise? Not the creator, certainly. The throes of commonplace speculation into which he may thrust the ordinary reader trouble him not, and he is less merciful to him even than Tolstoi. He takes us from that strong Shakespearean scene, in which Richard reads the diary of Clare Doria Forey, unveiling her unconscious and reticent love, only fully measured by her on the threshold of a loveless marriage, while overhead the candles are burning in her mortuary chamber, and flickering lugubriously upon the lips that have spoken to him from ‘behind the hills of death’; and without giving us time to clear our throats of the gathered sensations of pity and pain, he hurls us into fresh emotions, equally painful, by the death of Lucy, Richard’s young wife. And after that we learn nothing more of Richard, and are at liberty to decide for ourselves whether Sir Austin, the broker system-creator, and Lady Blandish married, like any other pair of middle-aged lovers, or preferred to continue in the less definite and secure path of platonic sentimentalities—the one studying the pilgrim’s scrip, the other adding to its wisdom.

The fault is perhaps to be laid to our complex, inquiring, and unrobust age, that men like Tolstoi and Meredith should both be incomplete as artists and as thinkers. Completeness in art belongs to simplicity of thought and directness of vision, and these are the attributes of the real story-teller, who is never diverted from his task by philosophic conjecture or by psychological problems. Mr. Meredith’s incompleteness is shown in an affectation of oddness and an artificial glamour that leave the reader with senses and wits perturbed, anxiously questioning the gravity of the writer, apprehensive of being laughed at, and not altogether sure that he has not been assisting at the marvellous performance of a juggling metaphorist, instead of the discoveries and exposition of a serious philosopher. This artificial glamour is more sparingly used in ‘Richard Feverel’; hence, perhaps, its larger popularity than any of his other works. But it is hardly, as a whole, so great as ‘The Egoist,’ ‘Rhoda Fleming,’ or ‘Diana of the Crossways.’ In it the quality of tenderness, noticeably absent in the rest, abounds, and also a lovely freshness and a visible delight in youth and in youthful joys. It is a work pre-eminently human, with all the defects and qualities of humanity strongly marked. Had it been written in blood, it could not be redder with life. Vitality is its captivating charm and melody its voice. As a work of art, it may be far from perfect, and we recognise that it is marred by many impossible situations, errors of taste and judgment, and a tendency, in the portrayal of the famous Mrs. Berry, to gross caricature. Nevertheless, we love it, faults and all, with that strong personal love and a wish for frequent dipping at its sources that it is the unshared privilege of truly great and original productions to inspire. How many are the writers we turn to in all moods, knowing we shall ever find something new, something helpful in their familiar pages! Shakespeare for the English mind and for a very few foreigners; Montaigne, and perhaps Molière, for others. Others, again, decide between Scott, Thackeray, and George Eliot. Add to this limited sphere a half-dozen of the world’s best poets, and the circle of comforters and permanent friends is formed. In such choice company may Meredith present himself with ‘Richard Feverel’ in his hand, and his place will be no mean one in their midst. Shakespeare himself might offer him the cordial hand-clasp of brotherhood, and assure him that since the appearance of Beatrice and Portia, no such women as Diana, Emilia, and his German princess had ever shot upon the dull world from masculine brains.

In Meredith’s very faults there is an excess of strength. It is this superabundance and an impatience of drivelling sentiment that lead him so frequently to shock our nineteenth-century taste. I think he shocks us with deliberate aim, deeming our taste questionable and unrobust, and our fastidiousness unhealthy. These blows directed against our temple of false modesty are in no book fiercer and more astounding than in ‘Richard Feverel,’ and in no other book has he risen to such supreme heights. Here you have at its best the matchless splendour and majesty of his prose, and pages of prolonged beauty. You have ample scope to realize the vividness of his interpretation of nature, and the delight of young love so magically unveiled by him in those three beautiful chapters on the opening romance of Richard and Lucy—‘Ferdinand and Miranda,’ ‘Diversions played on a Penny Whistle,’ and ‘Time-honoured Treatment of a Dragon by a Hero.’ Which of these three chapters to choose it would be difficult to say, for there is nothing like them in all English literature for sweetness, melody, and pulse-moving charm. If I had to pronounce, I should be disposed to give the preference to the ‘Penny Whistle’ chapter, though, from the fact that the first meeting between Richard and Lucy is oftenest quoted, I judge it to be the most popular.

Match me this exquisite picture in prose or poetry: ‘The sun is coming down to earth, and the fields and the waters shout to him golden shouts. He comes, and his heralds run before him, and touch the leaves of oaks and planes and beeches lucid green, and the pine-stems redder gold; leaving brightest footprints upon thickly-weeded banks, where the foxgloves’ last upper-bells incline, and bramble shoots wander amid moist rich herbage. The plumes of the woodland are alight; and beyond them, over the open, ’tis a race with the long-thrown shadows; a race across the heaths and up the hills, till, at the farthest bourne of mounted eastern cloud, the heralds of the sun lay rosy figures and rest.’

Or yet again, this other: ‘The tide of colour has ebbed from the upper sky. In the west the sea of sunken fire draws back, and the stars leap forth and tremble, and retire before the advancing moon, who slips the silver train of cloud from her shoulders, and, with her foot upon the pine-tops, surveys heaven.’

In these three chapters we have Mr. Meredith not only at his best, but better than many of the best poets upon their own ground. He sings rather than speaks. He neither wants to astonish nor affright us, but solely to enchant us. And who can read him and remain unmoved—withstand the spell he casts upon us? Shelley was never more musical, more thrilling, and never so strong.

But there is much else in the novels of this remarkable writer besides music and poetry, and the soft showery joys and sorrows of young love. There are the qualities and deficiencies of his tragic and his mighty side as a pendant for the grace and charm of the mood we have seen. Everything in him is pronounced. He has a taste for strong lights and shadows, for grotesque asides and interruptions; is sometimes crude, always complex, and often incomplete. His coarseness is akin to the coarseness that shakes us to amazement in the tragedies and comedies of Shakespeare, where ribaldry and lovely delicacy go hand-in-hand; where, swift upon the most fanciful play of thought and scenes of pathetic beauty, and images as exquisite as a Theocritan idyl, come a burst of clownish mirth and hideous joking.

Shakespearean is the word to describe Meredith, both in his defects and in his qualities. In each is he great, with something of the unapproachable greatness, the originality, the blood and brains and nerve, of the Stratford poet, towering over his fellows to-day as Shakespeare, alive, towered over his. Human to the heels, a seer and a psychologist in one, no word is lightly written, no character lightly drawn. He delights in humanity, and almost wickedly revels in its eccentricities. Hence his tendency to exaggeration. He seizes a queer character, such as old Tom Cogglesby, John Raikes, or Mrs. Berry, and, not content with their natural oddities, like Dickens, he must steep them in the colours of his own imagination; with the result that they come out of the process caricatures, and we find it exceedingly hard to divest them of their comic garb, and trace them back to the elemental, whence they started on their devious wanderings through their creator’s mind. This characteristic, as M. Taine observes, is peculiarly English. Since Rabelais’ days the French writers are too hampered by laws and rules in art, inalterable, like those of the Medes and Persians, to dare play such tricks with reality and human nature as Dickens, Thackeray, and Meredith, in their jesting moods, permit themselves. Scott’s moods had no such promptings, perhaps because he was a better story-teller than any of the three, and found the humour of life quite sufficient without the aid of exaggeration. But then there was no satire or hardness in all Scott’s nature, and manly tenderness and sympathy were his predominant traits. He wrote stories for the pleasure of writing them, not to belabour or ridicule poor worn humanity, in which he kept his faith green and unquestioning as a child’s.

But, like Dickens, Meredith is a poet, and, like him, has all a poet’s extravagances and excesses. Scott, as a poet, is never excessive, never exuberant, and always exact. His strength is employed with a Scotch perception of its just value, whereas his Saxon brothers waste theirs with an endless profusion. Not that I would compare Meredith with Dickens, except in his tendency to caricature, which in Dickens is a vice, and in his poetical excesses. He tortures metaphor at times, and lacks measure. This is the complaint French artists bring against their English brethren. Perhaps their greater physical strength, added to the Teutonic strain that flows through their blood from the early ages, runs to excess in imagination, and produces a conception of the grotesque unapprehended by the French. Certain it is that the latter escape our violent emotions in literature, and cannot arrive at an understanding of them. Our sensibilities, strung to common themes, and unexcited by lawless love and cerebral complications, rouse their wonder; and the mixture of buffoonery and satire in our great writers incurs their indignation. For this they say we are not artists, and ignore the classical limitations of art. And doubtless they are right. Upon the whole, our works of art are less artistic than theirs, and are produced in a lesser quantity, while our greatest works sin frequently against every known canon of art.

In shedding a double ray of ridicule upon his comic characters, Mr. Meredith so envelops and twists them in metaphor, now mildly sarcastic, now a joyous shout of laughter, we cannot tell with or at us, for we are not in the secret of his comic moods; and at times so bitingly ironical that we are puzzled and astray. Fain would we know whether he feels tenderly towards us at our worst, or cherishes an inalterable contempt for us at our best. For, unlike Thackeray, he is no moralist. Here, at least, is an English novelist whom M. Taine cannot accuse of laying down hard and fast rules for our moral benefit. His two most cynical characters attract some of our sympathy. Whereas we are ordered to loathe and condemn Becky Sharpe, and feel how much her railing creator despised her, Meredith allows us to be glad of his Countess’s acquaintance, and shows us that a cynical, intriguing woman, full of vulgar pride and not illegitimate ambition, may be interesting, and not unloved by her creator. He invites us to wonder at her, and not condemn, and though he may laugh at her weaknesses, and take a wicked pleasure in exposing them, he cannot be said, on the whole, to show her any harshness. As an adventuress, she is unsurpassed, and, unlike poor Becky, lives and dies, we imagine, a fine lady, driven by ambition to duplicities, but not consciously mean or dishonest. Though a virtuous woman, her morals are crooked, and her sense of honour is the reverse of keen. We have seen how such a character in Thackeray’s hands would develop, and to what lengths in heartlessness his satire carried him. Meredith’s Countess is possible; but Becky Sharpe is impossible.

The same may be said of his male villains. Indeed, he has none. There is something eminently human in the egoism of the wise youth Adrian Harley. We greet him ever with a cheerful smile, and for one of his witty remarks would have no, or only a very slight, objection to part with our last five-pound note. Contrast him with Barnes Newcome, and you have all the difference between black and gray. All Thackeray’s bad people are irredeemably bad, and all his good people hardly want wings to fit them for the angelic sphere. It is true, his female angels do not inspire us with a very ardent yearning for the joys of Paradise, if they are to be shared in such extremely insipid and melancholy society. Eternity with Amelia and Laura Pendennis and Lady Castlewood could not be described as a captivating perspective.

But Mr. Meredith must not be acquitted of any pronounced sins against reality. English taste is such, and its restrictions and exuberances are so little in accordance with life as it is lived by even those who paint it falsely, that it is impossible for the English novelist to escape sins of the sort. In general, Meredith is sufficiently just to humanity in its faults and in its virtues; it is only when its oddities catch hold of his fancy that he runs riot, and surpasses nature; only then is he apt to overdraw his account upon the bank of credulity.

Take, for example, Mrs. Berry, whom Mr. Le Gallienne, in a recent interesting study of Mr. Meredith, describes as a character that would have been a feather in Dickens’ cap. Doubtless, but that is not a compliment to Mr. Meredith, for what might do honour to Dickens cannot be said to be worthy of him. Mrs. Berry is witty and original to an alarming degree. She is a sort of compromise between Mrs. Quickly and Juliet’s nurse; not quite so coarse as either, perhaps, but more exhaustively garrulous and obtrusive. In the fifteenth century she might have been possible and pleasant, but not so in ours. She is an anachronism that we resent. The fault may be with us, but the fact remains, that we could not tolerate a Mrs. Berry in the flesh. Of such a servant a man of genius, or one of a humorous turn, might be glad as a study; but can we imagine lending a patient ear to her free speech, a stately and solemn old English gentleman, if capable of understanding what we call humour, only in its highly starched and faultlessly correct form? A student of mankind, certainly, after a certain prejudiced fashion, especially convinced of the inferiority of woman, as it behoves a poor gentleman who has suffered grievous wrong at the hands of a daughter of Eve; but one whose collar laughter is never likely to wrinkle or crush, and whose features under no temptation can relax into anything broader than a grim stiff smile. Picture this paternal prig and polished library philosopher being entertained by Juliet’s nurse and Falstaff’s landlady, and pronouncing both to be excellent women!

A gentleman who loved his Lamb and relished his Dickens would put up with her for the sake of her wit and originality, accepting her as a possible character, which I am not disposed to do. But no young girl, with even less of Lucy’s refinement, could submit to her gross indelicacy in that scene between them in the Isle of Wight. We know how reticent and shy young girls have become since Juliet’s day; still more so young brides with the most intimate of their sex—their mothers and their sisters; how easily affronted are their susceptibilities by the slightest trending towards ground that they so savagely regard as sacred. It is as much as one’s life is worth almost to speak to a very young bride about her married life; above all, if she be deeply enamoured of her husband, and for her mother to seek to unveil it would be a sacrilege. Mr. Meredith, who makes straight for nature divested of the swaddling clothes of sentimentality, and prefers her mud to the sentimentalist’s spangles and pink clouds, will perhaps say that the excess of delicacy to which naturally sensitive and fastidious womanhood has let itself be trained is artificial, unhealthy, and absurd. I do not dispute that a little more of savage candour would be an improvement to women, and that excessive delicacy leads them by a very apparent slope into pruriency. But honesty and candour, with modesty, are surely better than either without it, and if, for the sake of honesty and candour, we show ourselves willing to dispense with an excessive modesty for that of naturalness, surely we must lose one of the nameless, and not the least, charms of maidenliness! This reproach I make to Lucy is not only in the case of her tolerance of Mrs. Berry’s coarse talk, but in the occupation it enters her mind to allot her undeclared lover, Lord Montfalcon. I reproach, in fact, Mr. Meredith, with the entire creation, all the more so as she is the only girl he has drawn upon the old wearisome lines of masculine taste, of the eternal old-fashioned ivy-type, commonplace, loving and pretty, without character or interest apart from her second in the immortal duet with his breathless hero. She is charming, as all creatures lovely to look upon and purely natural must be charming; but the freshness of youth and the pleasant daisy-and-buttercup flavour vanished with the years and increasing domestic cares, what would there have remained in her to interest us and satisfy a soaring nature like Richard’s? The affair of the cookery-book irritates and displeases us as much as it did her husband in the period of the moon of bliss, and the only satisfaction we extract from it is the inimitable wise youth’s witty description of it in his letter to Lady Blandish. Bret Harte’s speculative vision embraced a disastrous sequel to the union of the Judge and Maud Muller of Whittier’s poem, and we may be permitted to picture Lucy twenty years after, with a bunch of keys at her waist, still studying the cookery-book, strong in the fabrication of preserves and home-made medicines, superintending her children’s studies, and arching mournful and uncomprehending brows at the moral and intellectual vagaries a man like Richard would be certain to develop. An admirable wife and mother, but an inadequate study.

It has been remarked that for Mr. Meredith’s readers there is no half-way house between uncompromising hostility and discipleship. You either bend before him as your master—imperfect at times, genius having its limitations as all things else that are human, but great in his very imperfections—or you reject him utterly. How those who reject him can manage to reconcile it to their conscience, I am at a loss to understand. But this proves the texture and quality of his influence. It is immense or it is nought. And by this pronounced feeling he evokes may he be classed as the founder of a school. He has introduced a new element into English literature—a healthy and purely philosophic realism, which differs as widely from the realism of Fielding as it does from that of Zola. To French wit he brings German profundity of thought, the whole wrought into a thoroughly Saxon setting. Vividness of conception, intensity of vision, and strength of diction—combine these qualities, and you have English such as no other writer has given us. It is beautiful, with a beauty all its own, and there seems to be no feat of which it is not capable. He has ransacked our language until he has wrought it, through a process of bewildering originality, into a flexibility, a forcible simplicity, a majesty and rhythm that, in his prose, surpass poetry. Never before have we received such a lesson in the unimagined resources of language. Never before did we so understand how written words may be made to seize us, fell us, captivate us, make vivid and tangible to our mind every image, every trick of person, every hue and aspect of nature. He does not describe or paint: he simply vitalizes inanimate objects. And if he had not made us his debtor in any other way, we must thank him for his great and perfect disciple, Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson.