George Meredith: A Study

Like Shakespeare and Scott, Mr. Meredith is uniformly gallant in his romances. With the exception of Richard, his young heroes are generally feeble youths; sometimes pleasant and good-natured, like Harry Richmond and Evan Harrington, and at others bloodless, make-believe men like Wilfred Pole and Percy Dacier. But all, as in the case of Scott’s amiable young men and Shakespeare’s lovers, are merely foils for the greater worth of the heroines. Imogen, Juliet, Beatrice, Miranda, the ladies of the gentlemen of Verona, Portia, and Lady Macbeth are all unworthily mated, and as Mr. Ruskin has said of Scott’s heroes, we are left wondering at the extreme and unmerited good fortune of these various young men who have drawn prizes, apparently as rewards for their amiable and pleasing manners. The fluted tenor of romance is on the whole an ill-treated personage. We invent him to do the love-making instead of ourselves with the different ideals of feminine perfection we imagine. But with his qualifications, his serious merits, we are not concerned. So long as he is handsome, has the art of using his voice, his mouth, and his eyes, carries his doublet and hose gracefully, twangs the guitar of loverhood musically, and recites his sonnets to advantage—behold the virtues we demand of him. He must be picturesque, above all, and the bloom of youth must lie upon his cheek, else as a sonneteer and troubadour is he pronounced unserviceable by the orchestra.

Now, the heroine is quite another matter, as Mr. Meredith, following great examples, shows us. She must claim our sympathy, our love, and our admiration. She must be surpassingly fair, and no less lovely of mind and soul. We are to quit her enamoured and regretful, vividly aware of her attractions, both mental and physical. And this has Mr. Meredith achieved in the case of all his heroines—maidens and widows. They are beautiful, witty, pure, womanly, and most captivating. Each one holds us enslaved as we follow her fortunes. She has but to open her lips, and we are at her feet. In spite of his harshnesses, Mr. Meredith remains great by his generous sympathy with the weak. In the strife between men and women, a strife he never blinks away, or feigns to discredit because his men choose to fall in love with his women, he ranges himself upon the side of women always and inevitably—and what a defence in the ranks of the enemy! He brings no drivelling, one-sided sympathy to bear upon the subject, but clear, logical sense and a keen eye for the weaknesses of the sex he defends. He laughs at woman sometimes, and enjoys a witticism and a taste of cruelty at her expense. But he makes it understood that his laughter is not scoffing and his cruelty is not bitter. On the contrary, they but add flavour to his championship, and make us the prouder of the big blows he directs against her tyrant. The tyranny of his own sex he doubts as little as its selfishness, which he has immortalized past cool endurance for man in the person of Sir Willoughby Patterne. The conventional woman, all horrors and shivers at the aspect of the natural and undecorated, made up of drawing-room theories and lap-dog sentiments, he rejects as unworthy of that which he conceives woman might be, if relieved from the sentimental trammels and restrictions that the selfish grossness of man has imposed upon her. He believes that women would be all the better for living more as men do, and men for meeting them half-way—one sex modified by the other, and mutually ennobled; eating healthily in acknowledgment of all healthy appetites, as opposed to the coarse Byronic view that condemns them to live upon air and the sentiments. Sandra talks freely of potatoes, fine ones too, while her sentimental lover writhes and shivers, feeling pelted by those potatoes, and the founts of love are nearly dried at the root of his heart. Can a young gentleman with a proper respect for himself feel romantically disposed towards a young woman, even if she be divinely beautiful, when she owns to a capacity to dine off potatoes? or ascend to heaven on an aria when the prima-donna refreshes herself with bottled stout? For such types, frequent enough, he suggests that sunlight must be too strong and gross, and wonders why they have not set their wits to invent some soft extract of a shadowy illumination wherewith to diminish the terrors and uglinesses of mere nature.

He acknowledges the influence of woman in no false, Frenchified way, but accepts it as the strong ordeal and revelation of man. ‘Women have us back to the conditions of primitive man, or they shoot us higher than the topmost star.... By their state is our civilization judged; and if it is hugely animal still, that is because primitive men abound and will have their pasture.’

Of his men, it is the old and oldish young that he draws best. His social epigrammatists and his grave, elderly gentlemen, or his caustic, elderly humorists, like Sir Austin Feverel, the immortal wise youth whose wit never goes to sleep, the gigantic fraud, Richmond Roy, and his fidus Achates; Tracy Runningbrook, Stukely Culbrett, Seymour Austen, and a host of such others. We must not forget Clara Middleton’s Irish colonel, a very pleasant figure in ‘The Egoist,’ the German princess’s father and Everard Romfrey. All these men have a point in common. Their wits are keenly alert, and they know not how to be dull. They are also gentlemen. Not that all, or many of Mr. Meredith’s male characters of high social standing, can lay claim to this qualification. There is in him, as in Thackeray, a singularly strong flavour of democracy, and a tendency to reveal us the snob concealed by the varnish of breeding. The young gentlemen in ‘Evan Harrington’ are the exact reverse of our ideal of the article. Harry Jocelyn borrows money from the tradesman he insults before repaying it; gets money from him to give to a wretched girl betrayed by him, and does not apply it to the purpose for which it has been given; conducts himself in all circumstances as an offensive boor and an abject cur. The young lords and squires around him do likewise. Some of the gentlemen and peers in ‘Richard Feverel’ are very unpleasant and shady company, and in ‘Rhoda Fleming,’ Mr. Algernon Blancove would find the average clerk in the back streets of a manufacturing town his superior in manners and morals. We get some queer specimens of upper-class snobocracy in ‘Harry Richmond,’ and what, pray, is Sir Willoughby Patterne if he is not a wondrously decorative and polished snob, contemplating complacently his own superiority in the mirror of his mind’s eye?

On the whole, Mr. Meredith is hard on his own sex. Sometimes he draws a young fool like Lord Palmet in ‘Beauchamp’s Career,’ who can be a lord, a fool, and a gentleman at the same time; who makes us laugh and holds our sympathies, there is something so extremely natural in his idiocy and something so very engaging in his candour; and then we feel that the author is not hard on him, and has no desire to excite our contempt. But this tenderness to young men of gentle birth is rare in Mr. Meredith’s volumes. His laughter at them is not usually soft-hearted, but grim, as in the case of the youth who bought cigars to save himself from excesses in charity, and who, after an ill-digested dinner and wine, sat so long without moving a leg that he indulged in the belief that he had reflected profoundly, and woke up with the philosophic intent to forget himself; being under some doom, nobody caring for him, happiness unknown to him, born under a bad star, and ‘following his youthful wisdom, the wounded hart dragged his slow limbs toward the halls of brandy and song.’

As an apology for his somewhat merciless dissection of fools like these young men, Mr. Meredith adds:

‘One learns to have compassion for fools, by studying them; and the fool, though nature is wise, is next door to nature. He is naked in his simplicity; he can tell us much, and suggest more. My excuse for dwelling on him is that he holds the link of my story. Where fools are numerous, one of them must be prominent, now and then, in a veracious narration. There comes an hour when the veil drops on him, he not being always clean to the discreeter touch.’

And so he diligently leads us through the unshadowy mental recesses of the fool in question, as a sample of others abounding, not compassionately by any means, with perhaps too pointed a suggestion of sneer on the tip of his caustic pen. He shows him awaking to the conviction that England is no place for him to dwell in—a conviction we cordially share, with the consciousness that England alone could have produced him—with visions of himself married to a wife who in the colonies would make butter or cheese while he rode on horseback through space; saw himself rejoicing her with a declaration of love, astounding her with a proposition of marriage, and in little more than a week sailing on the high seas, newborn; ‘nothing of civilization about him, save a few last very first-rate cigars, which he projected to smoke on the poop of the vessel, and so dream of the world he left behind.’

If this is compassionate treatment of the fools, we wonder what Mr. Meredith would be likely to regard as severe handling of the genus. Indeed, Algernon Blancove, as the typical brainless young English gentleman, of no morals and less manners, runs in several varied editions throughout the author’s works. We come upon him under different names, sometimes more of a boor, as in the case of Harry Jocelyn; sometimes more of a gentleman, as in the person of Ferdinand Laxley, but ever drawn from the same persistently objectionable type.

His older men, like Major Waring and Seymour Austen, he touches with a truly remarkable kindliness; a gentle sadness and reasonableness pervade the atmosphere in which he steeps their picture, and such is their humane influence upon him, that he drops, or nearly drops, metaphor, and adopts the language of commonplace but cultivated humanity. If, as has been said by M. Taine, George Sand makes us wish to be in love and the English novelists aim to make us wish to be married, Mr. Meredith may be accused of a desire to prove to us that in men middle-age is more attractive and lovable than youth, and that the sedate sadness that accompanies it but adds to the dignity of life, its thoughtful measure never exceeding a refined and placid geniality, and knowing no other discord than a very mild sense of disapprobation. In his men of this period, and even beyond it, he indeed portrays us thorough gentlemen, patient and honourable men of dignified habits of life and of keenly alert wits. Sometimes they have just a flavour of fire and brimstone unconsumed in an anterior stage, as in the case of Beauchamp’s delightful uncle. He is a sort of twelfth-century baron pleasantly masquerading as a nineteenth-century country gentleman, and more than one romantic young person would be indisposed to hesitate upon the side of youth, if ordered to make her choice between this elderly gentleman and his fiery nephew. Nearly on the first page he enchants us with the honest wholesomeness and vigour of his talk, when, in reply to something Beauchamp has said, he exclaims:

‘Damned fine speech! Now you get out of that trick of prize-orationing. I call it snuffery, sir, it’s all to your own nose! You’re talking to me, not to a gallery. Cæsar wraps his head in his robe; he gets his dig in the ribs for all his attitudinizing. It’s very well for a man to talk like that who owns no more than his bare bodkin life. Tall talk’s his jewellery; he must have his dandification in bunkum. You ought to know better. Property and titles are worth having, whether you are worthy of them or a disgrace to your class. The best way of defending them is to keep a strong fist, and take care you don’t draw your fore-foot back more than enough.’

Such he walks the book, a stout and resolute old gentleman, with words of sense upon his lips, capable of manly tenderness and dignified concessions, and the embodiment of all virile virtues as well as those belonging to his class. While the charming French girl and the sweet English maiden hold our senses thrilled, it is this mediæval baron that soundly raps our nodding judgment, and keeps our wits awake.

Sometimes, as in the case of Edward Blancove, Mr. Meredith wheels us round from cold dislike into sympathy and admiration. But not often. His unpleasant young men are not more susceptible of conversion than they are usually to be found in real life, and he is not fond of playing such tricks as this one, wherein we get from the lips of a coldly argumentative and sharply legal young gentleman, who has, hitherto, conducted himself as something of a well-bred knave, such honest words as these:

‘Plainly, sir, in God’s name, hear me out. She’s—what shall I call her? my mistress, my sweetheart, if you like—let the name be anything—“wife” it should have been and shall be—I left her, and have left her, and have not looked on her for many months. I thought I was tired of her—I was under odd influences—witchcraft, it seems. I could believe in witchcraft now. Brutal selfishness is the phrase for my conduct. I have found out my villainy. I have not done a day’s sensible work, nor had a single clear thought, since I parted from her. She has had brain-fever. She has been in the hospital. She is now prostrate with misery. While she suffered, I—I can’t look back on myself. If I had to plead before you for more than manly consideration, I could touch you. I am my own master, and am ready to subsist by my own efforts; there is no necessity for me to do more than say I abide by the choice I make, and my own actions. In deciding to marry her, I do a good thing, I do a just thing. I will prove to you that I have done a wise thing.’

Such words as these would redeem a stormier and a shabbier youth than Edward Blancove’s; they toss him up from the brink of common rascality upon the verge of quiet heroism. We are forced by them, not into condonation only, but into respect and admiring amazement, and we are almost glad of a fault that has been so nobly redeemed.

Apart from any other claim he may have upon his generation, Mr. Meredith’s greatest and most original will ever remain his marvellous knowledge of woman. All young girls upon the verge of womanhood should be recommended an exhaustive study of him upon this subject, as a healthy antidote against the nauseous and abominable travesties of themselves and their species circulated by the libraries, in which volumes, however bad the men may be drawn, the women are ten times worse, fifty times more unnatural, and at least a hundred times more corrupting to the sane judgment. From him, instead of the current inanities in which the typical heroine of the circulating libraries is enveloped past recognition of human sisterhood (thank Heaven! for a fraternity with the monstrous doll would be a greater grievance than any we owe unkind nature), will they learn much upon their sex that will give them material for long and profound reflection. They will learn that the eggshell appearance of woman upon the boards of experience is a gross exaction, the remnant of a grosser stage in man—that the demand is the reverse of a compliment to her. Instead of that ragged aphorism (clothing of a lie), ‘that the hardest on women are women themselves,’ they will be offered a higher and juster estimate of their own natural mercy, and will hear ‘that a woman in the pillory restores the original bark of brotherhood to mankind,’ a remark to give them pause and set their brains in another direction. They will also learn, what they can never sufficiently appreciate, that ‘what a woman thinks of women is the test of her nature;’ that ‘in their judgments upon women, men are females, voices of the present sexual dilemma,’ and that in their desire to have a ‘a still woman who can make a constant society of her pins and needles,’ ‘they create by stoppage a volcano, and are amazed at its eruptiveness,’ and a word upon which we cannot too insistently weigh, a gallant word from a male pen, ‘that the motive life with women must be in the head, equally with men.’

THE END.

BILLING AND SONS, PRINTERS, GUILDFORD