CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY PR5U 13 .ri2TW r8 " yLlbrary G ?miX 1 !!!,SI edltn in an ecdote and criticls Cornell University Library The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31 92401 3524529 GEORGE MEREDITH IN ANECDOTE AND CRITICISM From she photogi aph by Thomson George Meredith IN ANECDOTE AND CRITICISM ^ BY J? a\ hammerton AUTHOR OF « STEVENSONIANA ' ILLUSTRATED WITH REPRODUCTIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS AND FROM DRAWINGS ST FAMOUS ARTISTS °. K 'mS'- (\ NEW YORK MITCHELL KENNERLEY LONDON : GRANT RICHARDS 1999 ri L I cTI *\ y*~ ??S W" ' RlCHAKD CLAV AND SONS, LIMITED, BKEAD STREET HILL, E.C., AND BUNGAY, SUFFOLK. 2 2.^7$ PREFACE As each great writer moves to fame, his way is marked and its stages heralded by a succession of critical utterances. These become, as it were, rallying points and battle-cries of his partisans ; discussion crystallises round them ; they strike the key-notes for interpreters. Hence the importance, or the biographer and literary student, of histories of critical opinion. These words, taken from an old review, might very well be allowed to stand as an ' apology ' for the present volume. They give in happy and convincing phrase an excellent reason for such a work as that here attempted. The author's purpose has been to follow the career of a great figure in modern letters with some measure of critical detachment, that the result might be to disengage from the vast mass of contemporary criticism an even-tempered and well-considered estimate of the man and his work. Such an estimate should be at least as important as the personal opinion of any one critic, no matter how brilliant, and, in some ways, more valuable. But it is not for the writer to say whether he has succeeded in hitting the mark at which he has aimed. Criticism represents fully one half of the work ; yet my efforts to present for the first time in orderly narrative some slight account of Meredith's life and friendships may not, I trust, be considered ill-spent. Clearly, a ' life ' of Meredith, in the proper sense of the word, is a matter for some one of his intimate friends or of his own family ; a great undertaking and one to test severely the resources of whoever is called upon to achieve it. But what I have done has seemed to me well worth doing, for while I have strictly confined myself to quotation from and reference to already published matter, I have considered it better thus to present a survey of all that has been printed about George Meredith and his art, than to encroach upon the ground of the ' life ' which must some day be written, by using any of the unpublished matter that has been offered to me or availing myself of ample opportunity to record many unpublished anecdotes. In a word, I have preferred to vi PREFACE attempt a work that would be ' complete ' within the limits set to it, instead of producing a fragmentary biography by attempting some- thing of a more ambitious character. As it is, the present volume has involved not a little labour. This will be apparent to any intelligent reader. The research work and preliminary reading — in some cases the reading of a whole volume is represented by a passing reference of a few lines — to say nothing of the writing, have occupied much of my scanty leisure during the last five years. One who had not examined the Meredithiana of more than half-a-century would hardly credit what an immense amount of printed matter that represents. The constant difficulty, in seeking to capture the spirit of this, was to keep the present work within the compass of a single volume. The hope of the writer is that, to all Meredithians, it may prove a companionable and useful book, entering into competition with no existing work concerned with the great novelist and poet, but filling a niche of its own. To the many eminent authors from whom I have had occasion to quote some passage here or there, sometimes of the briefest, or again of considerable length, I gladly acknowledge my great indebtedness. In every case where I have felt it desirable to quote somewhat more than the average proportion of text I have endeavoured to get into communication with the author and to receive his or her permission — always, I need scarcely say, readily granted. It remains only to add that the completed work had been delivered to the publisher the week before Mr. Meredith was taken with his last illness. In view of his death, it has been necessary to submit the whole to further revision, and certain interesting matters have been touched upon which had previously been ignored, when it was hoped that the present tense would still apply to most that had been written. Although I have now employed the sad tense, there is really no sadness in the passing of George Meredith, whose voice is still strong in his written word. J. A. H. CONTENTS PREFACE 1. OUTLINE OF LIFE AND WORK, 1828-1873 II. OUTLINE OF LIFE AND WORK, 1874-I909 III. THE EIGHTIETH BIRTHDAY . IV. PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS V. FRIENDSHIPS AND HOME LIFE VI. SOME EARLY APPRECIATIONS VII. LITERARY CHARACTERISTICS VIII. IN PARODY AND CARICATURE IX. THE NOVELS IN CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM X. HIS HEROINES AND WOMEN-FOLK XI. HIS POETRY . XII. THE COMIC SPIRIT .... XIII. HIS PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE . XIV. JUDGED BY HIS FELLOW-NOVELISTS XV. HIS PLACE IN LITERATURE XVI. THE CONTINENTAL VIEW OF MEREDITH XVII. ILLUSTRATORS OF THE POEMS AND NOVELS INDEX I'AGE V 28 45 57 85 131 i54 187 198 231 257 290 3°4 327 34o 355 374 383 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Toface page George Meredith Frontispiece Neuweid on the Rhine .... 4 The Drachenfels 8 Meredith at the Parnell Commission .... 32 Meredith at the Eighty Club Banquet . . 32 George Meredith : The Watts' Portrait 4° Returning from his Drive on his Eightieth Birthday . . . 48 Meredith in his Donkey-Chaise, with his Dog ' Sandy ' . . . 72 Sketch- Portrait of Meredith -76 Meredith carried to the Polling Booth . . . . 82 Meredith and his son Arthur in 1861 ... ... 88 Sir William Hardman . . 9° Flint Cottage, Box Hill . . 112 Cotter Morison ... 120 The Swiss Chalet at Box Hill .... .... 128 Roy carrying Harry away from Riversley 136 Harry Richmond's Meeting with the Princess Ottilia . . . . 144 Richmond Roy with his Son in ' High Germany ' . . . 152 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Roy re-introduces Harry to Ottilia at Ostend Richmond Roy meets Squire Beltham Squire Beltham has his Last Innings Janet Ilchester with Harry and his Father Two Caricature Sketches from Punch Caricature : Our First Novelist . Tom and Andrew Cogglesby at the Aurora Tom Cogglesb/s Arrival at Beckley Court Evan's Meeting with Susan Wheedle The Death of ' The Great Mel' . Dr. Alvan : Ferdinand Lassalle Meredith and some of his Famous Creations The Countess de Saldar Evan and Rose on board the Jocasta The Hon. Mrs. Caroline Norton Clara Middleton Rhoda Fleming . Clothilde : Helena von Doenniges Ottilia ... The Head of Bran The Crown of Love The Last Words of Juggling Jerry The Old Chartist The Patriot Engineer To fmce page 1 60 168 176 184 188 192 200 204 208 212 222 . 23O • 234 • 236 240 . 246 . 2 4 S . 252 256 260 . 264 . 270 . 272 2SO LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS xi To /ace page Evan and Rose in the Conservatory ... ... 336 The Meeting 344 The Three Maidens 360 Evan's Encounter with Laxley and Henry ... . . 368 The Song of Courtesy 376 Over the Hills .... 381 OUTLINE OF LIFE AND WORK 1828-1873 Something of the author's aloofness to the personages of his fiction, which one feels in the novels of George Meredith, character- ises also his relations with the tangible world down to the later years of his life. ' Far off, withdrawn ' describes his relativeness to the living world of literature and affairs, certainly until his seventieth birthday is passed. In the later years of his life he seems to have warmed to the touch of his fellow-men in a way that his old-time austerity would never have led us to expect. Newspaper ' inter- viewers, ' curious visitors, pilgrim parties were cordially received, where before one had as lief thought of arranging an interview with the Dalai Lama. It is no part of my business here to account for this change of attitude, but it must be recorded, as his habit of strict and almost defiant seclusion, to all but his few intimates, extending over fifty years of his working life, has given rise to a mass of legend seldom equalled in the lifetime of an author. The remarkable outburst of newspaper comment which accompanied his eightieth birthday made the pages of the newspaper and periodical press to teem with the quaintest fables of his early life. When a man has sought and won public distinction, under his own name, yet persists in wrapping the cloak of mystery around himself, that is little short of a challenge to public curiosity. A certain female writer of our time has gained — no doubt unintention- ally — immense advertisement by this means. Advertisement was the last thought to enter the mind of George Meredith; of that we are all persuaded. But in a friendly age his long-maintained attitude of detachment from the life around him was bound to be mistaken by some for a pose, by others for a challenge, and, denied the facts, behold the fables of the newspaper writers ! I am no apologist for these much-inventing scribes, but I understand them. B 2 GEORGE MEREDITH After all, no man has a right to make a public appeal who is not ready to face the consequences of having- awakened interest in himself. A public writer should be publicly known within the limits of good taste, and all who pretend that the personality of an author is no one's business but his own are either ignorant or posturing critics. As Carlyle reminds us, the book is important, but ' the man behind the book ' is important also. Is he a greater or a less personality than his book suggests? Is his book an honest expression of his individuality, or a performance bearing as much relationship to himself as an actor's part to the man discharging it? Does the book square with the man behind it? These are legitimate questions and all of high importance to the function of literary criticism. If an author pleads for purity and holiness and is himself a libertine, we ought to know him as he is. If another thunders for the strong arm and the thirsty sword and is himself a timid, emasculate, slippered thing of the fireside, it is highly im- portant that we should see him undisguised. Men are more import- ant than books, and the ' superior persons ' who, in a not unnatural revolt against the worser side of the personal journalism of our age, affect to depise all consideration of an author's personality, must not be mistaken for critics of uncommon penetration. On the other hand, we are all at liberty to tell just as much of our inner thoughts or our private affairs as we may care to disclose, and where memory awakens pain we may claim the privilege of sanctuary for these old grey years. Let us then be guiltless of any vulgar curtain-lifting in examining even the lives of those whose careers are full of interest to their fellowr-men. George Meredith has chosen to tell us very little of his own early days, and in the absence of exact knowledge we may profitably dismiss all the stories familiar to most of us who are in touch with the literary world of our time. This we know : he was born in Hampshire on February 12, 1828, of mixed Irish and Welsh parent- age. I have heard him say to a gathering of admirers, ' If I had the eloquence of a true Irishman I should be making an impression now, but I am only half Irish — half Irish and half Welsh — I halt, therefore, rather on one leg. The Welsh are admirable singers, but bad dancers. ' The name Meredith, of course, is Welsh, and a writer in the Manchester Guardian has pointed out that it is invariably pro- nounced incorrectly by Englishmen. ' Nearly all Englishmen place the accent on the first syllable, whereas no Welshman would dream OUTLINE OF LIFE AND WORK, 1828-1873 3 of placing it anywhere but on the second, in accordance with the iron Welsh law that the accent must always be on the penultimate syllable. It would be interesting to know whether our greatest living novelist gives countenance to the popular mispronunciation of his name.' I have never heard any of his intimates accentuate the name differently from the common rendering, and I suspect that the novelist, like a philosopher, had long ago accepted the English pro- nunciation. His case did not call for such self-sacrifice as many Scotsmen have had to bear in adapting their names to English tongues. The poet Mallet, whose name was Malloch, and the inventor Murdock, whose name was Murdoch, are good examples of what I mean. Always proud of his Welsh origin, any appeal to him that had the support of Welsh sentiment never failed to awaken his sym- pathy. Thus in his eightieth year he became the honorary pre- sident of the Cymmrodorion Society, formed at the beginning of 1908, chiefly by professors of the Liverpool University, with the object of ' forwarding and promoting Welsh studies in the University by means of lectures and discussions. ' And on the occasion of the St. David's Day banquet in London, March 2, 1908, the aged novelist wrote as follows to his compatriots : It is one, among many regrets incident to advanced age, that I am unable to be with you. St. David is one of the great bonds holding Welshmen together, and they are of a more fervent blood than men of other races. To them there is no dead past. The far yesterday is quick at their hearts, however heartily they may live in the present. It is a matter for rejoicing, to see that Welsh- men are in all walks of life making their energies more and more felt. Meredith's fondness for Wales and the Welsh is frequently to be noted in his fiction, both in comment and in character. In ' Sandra Belloni,' for example, we have Merthyr and Georgena Powys, two very striking — if somewhat priggish — characters, where many are only partially realised and vague, and these two being Welsh have powers denied to others. ' All subtle feelings are dis- cerned by Welsh eyes when untroubled by any mental agitation,' says their creator. ' Brother and sister were Welsh, and I may observe that there is human nature and Welsh nature.' It is probably true that while his personality declares an ancestry of ' brain and blood,' it also had a strain from the working b 2 4 GEORGE MEREDITH folk, which may be thought, by some, to account for his insight into the homelier types of character, when he cares to treat of them. The parents of George Meredith died when he was still very young, leaving him a ward in chancery. As a boy he was sent by his guardian to the celebrated Moravian schools at Neuwied on the Rhine, about ten miles north-west of Koblenz, and the influence of the training he there received is very present in his work. ' Farina,' of course, is the first effort to use his Rhineland experience for the colouring of his fiction ; but in his subsequent work the feeling of intimacy with German ideas and habits of life and thought is so noticeable that, without being told, it would be plain to the reader the author had early been brought into direct touch with German life. Neuwied, however, did more for him than that. Whatever his relatives may have been in the matter of sectarian religion, the Moravians, to whose care the youth was committed for a time, are unsurpassed for their courageous devotion to their ideals of the Christian life and their liberal education of the young. The late Professor Henry Morley, who preceded Meredith by a few years as a Neuwieder, continued throughout his life to be intensely interested in his old school, and fifty-five years after he had left it he was editing a magazine which kept the scholars, old and new, of the various Moravian schools on the Continent and in England in touch with each other. Speaking at a gathering of ' old Neuwieders ' in London, on January 17, 1889, he paid this beautiful tribute to the school where George Meredith had been educated : ' No formal process of education had acted upon their lives so thoroughly or so much for their good as the little time they had spent at Neuwied. It had taken all the bitterness out of their lives, all envy and hatred and uncharitableness having been so thoroughly removed from them by contact with the gentle spirit of the old Moravians.' We may reasonably assume that Meredith's school-days at Neuwied represent a period of the utmost importance to his after life, and the scene of this early influence on one of the greatest figures in modern literature is worthy of some little notice, for one so observant and vigilant as Meredith must have been, even as a boy, could not have lived there long before he had absorbed the spirit of the place, and doubtless that passion for long walks and hill-climbing, which later characterised his days of lusty manhood, X OUTLINE OF LIFE AND WORK, 1828-1873 5 first awoke among the historic heights along the right bank of the Rhine from Neuwied to the Drachenfels. The Moravian schools at Neuwied have long been famous throughout Europe, and many notable Englishmen have passed through them. Their origin dates from the time of Prince Alexander of Neuwied — the town was formerly the capital of a little principality — who was a shining example of liberalism in an age of bigotry, and who in 1762, during the religious unrest and intolerance of his time, made free of his little town to all the sects that cared for religion sufficiently to stand by their convictions. Lutherans, Calvinists, Catholics, Moravians, Jews, were all allowed in Neuwied the fullest liberty of thought and worship ; being, as an old writer quaintly puts it, ' children of the same Parent, subjects of the same moral government, candidates alike for a future state, they are taught to reflect that the articles in which they agree are of infinitely greater importance than those on which they differ, and that the minutiae and speculative opinions cannot annihilate the primary duty of brotherly love. ' The partisans of each sect were allowed to maintain their own ministers and conform each according to their established convictions, without any form of interference from the state. A little religious Utopia ! Out of this grew up the remarkable educational establishment of the Moravians, whence so many of the famous missionaries of that small but energetic body have gone out to the far places of the earth. Neuwied was happy in its princes, the little town was beautifully laid out, industries encouraged, and life must have flowed along there with melodious and purposeful rhythm for generations. When Meredith became a Neuwieder, the town had a population of about 5,000 ; but to-day it has considerably extended and contains some 11,000 inhabitants. It was the scene of Caesar's crossing of the Rhine and the district was rich in Roman antiquities, which the care of Prince Alexander first brought together in the museum of his palace, still one of the features of the place. We may conclude that something of this spirit of liberalism, which must still have been electrical in the air of Neuwied in the earlier years of last century, entered into the young Meredith and conditioned the shaping of his mind. After his return to England — he left Neuwied when not yet sixteen — he seems to have been engaged for a time on thoughts of a career in the law, the wish of his guardian, it is understood ; but by twenty he was pursuing his study of the law with no very fixed notion of maintaining it to a conclusion. His mind was already 6 GEORGE MEREDITH bent towards authorship, • and his first poem, ' Chillianwallah,' appeared in Chambers's Edinburgh Journal of July 7, 1894. In this by no means remarkable piece of verse, which has never been reprinted, he celebrated the heroism of the British soldiers who, under Lord Gough, on ' the fatal field of Chillianwallah,' fought one of the most sanguinary battles of the second Sikh War, on January 13, 1849, the British losing 2,400 killed and wounded : Chillianwallah, Chillianwallah ! Where our brothers fought and bled ! Oh, thy name is natural music, And a dirge above the dead ! Though we have not been defeated, Though we can't be overcome, Still whene'er thou art repeated I would fain that grief were dumb. Although this poem is the earliest of his published writings which the bibliographers have been able to trace, some ten years ago a letter of his turned up, in which he mentioned that previous to the publication of ' Chillianwallah ' he had published a paper on Kossuth. There seems to be some doubt, however, as to whether this paper was actually printed and, if so, whether it was before or after the poem, as it has been stated on the authority of Chambers's records that the editor of Chambers's had the essay on Kossuth in his hands about the time of the printing of the poem, though it was never published in that journal. This is a point that may be left to the elucidation of some future bibliographer more fortunate than Mr. John Lane, or Mr. A. J. K. Esdaile, whose painstaking work has already been of great advantage to students of Meredith, though incomplete and not free from error. The year 1849 had not only seen the first small beginning of Meredith's literary work, presently to shape itself into a resolution for the literary life rather than for that of the law, but the same fateful year saw the opening of a tragic chapter in his personal history — a chapter which none but himself had any right to read, and if at all, can be written only by one of his own family, to whom the facts may be known. Perhaps it is better that the story of his first unhappy marriage should remain untold. Here, at least, nothing shall be set down concerning it that might give pain to any living person. A young man of one-and-twenty, his career quite unsettled, his future a riddle unread, George Meredith in 1849 became the husband OUTLINE OF LIFE AND WORK, 1828-1873 7 of a young widow, Mary Ellen Nicholls, one of the daughters of Thomas Love Peacock, the poet-novelist and friend of Shelley. His own fiction is not without trace of influence from the satiric, intellectual wit of his father-in-law, and a feeling of literary kinship may possibly have had something to do in bringing about the match. Mrs. Meredith is described as ' a singularly brilliant and witty woman,' but happiness did not characterise their wedded life. There is the poignancy of a personal sorrow in some lines of ' Modern Love ' ; though in no sense else do I suggest that we may look into that wonderful revelation of ' tragic life ' for any confession bearing upon the poet's own experience. Mrs. Meredith lived through the years of her young husband's early attempts to establish himself as a man of letters ; he wrote three of his masterpieces in her lifetime. The first two years of his married life were lean in literary achievement and, from the practical point of view, meant absolutely nothing by way of income to the young poet. He was merely an amateur of letters, in the experimental stage; three other short poems, in addition to ' Chillian wallah,' being the sum total of his contributions to Fraser's Magazine and the Leader, to the end >of 185 1. But in this year his first book of ' Poems,' a thin volume of 159 pages, including the incomparable ' Love in the Valley,' was published by John W. Parker and Son. He had made his first serious appeal for audience as a new writer. The book bore this dedication : ' To Thomas Love Peacock, Esq., this volume is dedicated with the profound admiration and affectionate respect of his son-in-law. Weybridge, May, 1851.' From this it may be judged that the cloud which later overshadowed the union of Peacock's daughter and George Meredith had not yet begun to lower. The Merediths were then in residence at Weybridge, within easy reach of Peacock's home at Chertsey. For forty years Peacock lived in the pretty little Surrey town ; and Meredith also remained true to the county, the duration of his residence at Box Hill having rivalled that of his father-in-law at Chertsey. The reception of ' Poems ' was at least sufficiently warm to encourage the younger author to continue. The Athenceum, for instance, in a fairly prompt critique, over two columns in length, in the -course of which the writer quoted approvingly and in extenso ' Will o' the Wisp ' and ' The Death of Winter,' observed : ' Where the 'prentice hand is so manifest as in this little volume, we accept the signs of care and intention which it exhibits as indications of an artistic tendency in the "singer," and to a certain extent as pledges 8 GEORGE MEREDITH that one day he may become a poet. ' Not a very penetrating judg- ment on a volume containing 'Love in the Valley,' but yet not unkindly. If the poet had not made a hit, he was at least accepted as a writer of promise, as I shall endeavour to show in a later chapter of this work. Charles Kingsley and Mr. W. M. Rossetti were among those who reviewed his ' Poems ' with very considerable enthusiasm, while Alfred Tennyson, who the year before had published ' In Memoriam ' and succeeded Wordsworth as Poet-Laureate, wrote to compliment the young poet upon ' Love in the Valley, ' saying he was so charmed with it that he went about the house reciting it to himself. Mere- dith's friend, Sir William Hardman, who recorded this interesting fact some forty-five years ago, blames him for having mislaid the letter, ' for it would be interesting and valuable in future times. ' Certainly Meredith had a more encouraging reception for his ' Poems ' — and not unnaturally — than Tennyson had for his early efforts, and whatever his feelings may have been, they could scarce be charged with disappointment, in view of what he wrote to Charles Oilier, the veteran publisher and novelist, who had the honour of being publisher to Keats and Shelley. Oilier had complimented him on his first book, and Meredith replied in these words : It is the appreciation you give that makes Fame worth asking for; nor would I barter such communication for any amount of favourable journal criticism, however much it might forward the popularity and sale of the book. I prepared myself, when I pub- lished, to meet with injustice and slight, knowing that the little collection, or rather selection, in my volume was but the vanguard of a better work to come. . . . The poems are all the work of extreme youth, and, with some exceptions, of labour. They will not live, I think, but they will serve their purpose in making known my name to those who look with encouragement upon such earnest students of nature who are determined to persevere until they obtain the wisdom and inspiration and self-possession of the poet. As the foregoing was penned before Kingsley 's or Mr. Rossetti 's reviews had appeared, the writer was evidently expecting no great warmth of welcome from the press, but he must have been persuaded before the end of the year that his first book, however inconsiderable Its sale, had not been printed in vain. That he published it with any notion of making pecuniary profit is, of course, unthinkable; but as eleven years elapsed before he again offered a book of poetry to the world, the ' vanguard ' of his ' better work '—assuming that $ #?SI E : ; 'flHJm'a«T ' Hi ?:-dt^'* : -^^ IB* . 1 iBkPJ ^lil ^M K^.'^l^B^E!s -fi ..".--.- m X i < - O 1 OUTLINE OF LIFE AND WORK, 1828-1873 9 to be in poetry — had presumably not achieved sufficient success for him to hasten up the main body of his forces ; and, changing tactics meanwhile, he turned his thoughts to journalism and prose fiction. Yet the ' Poems ' of 1851 may be said to have achieved all he had hoped for in the concluding sentence of his letter to Oilier. Journalism, ' that grisette of Literature,' as Mr. Barrie has happily put it, so often the resource of those who must contrive to earn a livelihood by the pen ere they succeed in making their books financially profitable, was soon to offer George Meredith some material assistance while he persevered with the production of the literature by which he aimed to establish himself among the notable authors of his time. But we are quite without data as to a period of his life in which literary biography is usually full of interest. In the four years and a half that intervened between the appearance of his first book of poetry and ' Shagpat,' three poems — ' Invitation to the Country,' Fraser's, August, 1851 ; a sonnet 'To Alexander Smith, Author of City Poems,' the Leader, December 20, 1851 ; and ' The Sweet o' the Year,' Fraser's, August, 1852 — represent the sum total of his signed contributions to the periodicals. Not for eight years after the publication of ' Poems ' do we find his name attached to verse or prose in the periodical press, until, in July, 1859, beginning his connection with Once a Week, he became a fairly regular contributor of poetry to the magazines and literary journals of the day. Thus from his twenty-third to his twenty-eighth year the history of George Meredith may be summed up : he published three short poems and wrote ' The Shaving of Shagpat ' ! We know that a son was born to him during this period. No more. His work as a journalist may have begun before the publication of ' Shagpat,' but we are without evidence. How he earned his livelihood, whether he needed to earn a livelihood, we are not told. We only know his emoluments from literature were practically nil. ' The Shaving of Shagpat ' was published by Chapman and Hall at the end of 1855, though dated for 1856, and, among some dozen notices of the work which appeared in the press of the day, George Eliot, who earlier had made the personal acquaintance of the author, wrote two criticisms to which I purpose devoting further attention in the chapter on ' Early Appreciations.' The Athenceum gave a long review of two and a half columns to the book, as undistinguished as its critique of the 1851 volume, but distinctly encouraging. ' It is a work which exhibits power of imagination, ability in expression, and skill in construction.' This was almost enthusiasm from the io GEORGE MEREDITH grudging old Athenceum ! ' Shagpat ' quite certainly did not imme- diately achieve great things for its author, and it is said that this first edition had a poor sale, a considerable part of it being eventually disposed of as a ' remainder. ' It contained a short prefatory note, dated December 8, 1855, and as this is absent from subsequent editions, it is interesting enough to copy here : It has seemed to me that the only way to tell an Arabian story was by imitating the style and manners of the Oriental storytellers. But such an attempt, whether successful or not, may read like a translation : I therefore think it better to prelude this Entertainment by an avowal that it springs from no Eastern source, and is in every respect an original work. A second edition of ' The Shaving of Shagpat ' was not attempted until ten years after the first, when the work was included in Chap- man and Hall's ' Standard Editions of Popular Authors,' with the fine frontispiece engraved from the painting of ' Bhanavar the Beau- tiful ' by the novelist's friend, Frederick Sandys. The third was printed in 1872, in the form of the two-shilling ' yellow-backs,' once so popular on railway bookstalls, but long since obsolete as the ' three-decker ' — Hawley Smart was, I fancy, the novelist whose works sang the swan-song of the yellow-back. Both the second and third editions contained a preface so interesting as a winder to the dull faddists who cannot read a work of pure imagination without suspecting the author of some hidden didactic purpose, that it is a pity the author — perhaps with the feeling that any explanation to intelligent readers was superfluous — dropped it from all later issues of the book. It is important to realise how remarkably Meredith comes among the great Victorians in the chronology of his work. We have heard him so often described as the last of the great figures that gave lustre to the mid-Victorian era, that we are apt to accept the statement without quite appreciating its full import. Swinburne, a greater name in poetry than Meredith, came ten years later with his first book; Mr. Thomas Hardy, certainly as great, perhaps a greater novelist, came twenty years later with his first novel ; so that neither began quite in ' the great days. ' In the year preceding Meredith's ' Poems,' Dickens gave to the world 'David Copperfield,' Kingsley published 'Alton Locke,' Tennyson 'In Memoriam,' and Thackeray ' Pendennis. ' How lean our literary harvests are now, when we think of five such masterpieces OUTLINE OF LIFE AND WORK, 1828-1873 11 issuing from the press in the same year ! George Eliot had still to begin her splendid contributions to our national literature, Tennyson had still to write ' The Idylls of the King,' Thackeray had not yet written 'Esmond,' 'The Newcomes,' or 'The Virginians,' nor Browning his masterpiece, 'The Ring and the Book,' and Kingsley's ' Westward Ho ! ' had still to come. If we extended our survey beyond the limits of imaginative literature, such figures as Carlyle, Ruskin and Darwin would, of course, rise up; but con- fining the view to the great Victorian novelists and poets who were productive in the ' fifties ' of last century the table which I have com- piled and reproduce on the following page forms in itself no unimportant chapter in the history of George Meredith. ' There were giants in those days. ' And the young poet-novelist found himself pitted against accepted writers in both prose and poetry. Is it any great wonder that he did not achieve immediate fame? The question of his difficulties of style does not yet pre- sent itself; that is altogether a later issue. A glance at the table overleaf will show the competition the young writer had to meet during his earlier years, and may induce us to modify our condemna- tion of the public of that day which is so often thoughtlessly blamed for its sheer neglect of his genius. But, to return to the chronology of his work and the progress of his life, we have to note that his connection with journalism began somewhere about the time of the appearance of ' Shagpat. ' Even here no precise dates are available. All that seems certain is that prior to 1856 or 1857 George Meredith was not a profes- sional journalist or man of letters. He must have looked elsewhere for his livelihood. Whether circumstances may have altered and required his writing for a living, we are not told ; but about the period mentioned he became editor of the Ipswich Journal and also correspondent of the Morning Post. By an odd twist of fate these two, the only papers he ever served, were both strongly Conserva- tive, whereas Meredith was in his political opinions an advanced Radical. It is indeed difficult to account for his connection with the Ipswich Journal on any grounds but the need to earn a living. I do not recall any passage of his which would indicate that he considered the journalist might follow the example of the barrister and hire his pen to either side. Yet he was induced to write Tory ' leaders ' and criticise the men he most admired in the public life of the time. I have read with some amusement of late not a few accounts of the novelist by professed admirers who sigh sadly at 00 5o « ] > < CO u i W it u < X a oo co SB 13 fe ^IS S3 '2 _? * 8 5> c P a; «co v > v CU S 3 m oja w « q w HHHH H hJH PPi a* aT Oi >; •z CO co n o o ■* 4) C in H IS »o > o? W \o >> t-. ^" ■*■ c° 2 U H o w M ■J s 5 ■S s .S O CO £ £ H O .2 "0 .3 S S % £ S 2 co Q, M VO CO C H H > o 4J o *S o cc oo ^ CO - o co 1 ^ ^ a H >» *r rt 3 j> 4> 4> fcu g a v < o 3 tf w as ja -a * J3-C v O « H B O OX H H HHCQhJfi 5 o i? °~ \o J to °° M CO w CO „ <3 O 5^o "^ jg copCoo £ 8 yH 1« < W^OcH 13 tf oo a K <* (U rt X fE < 5'S * co « co o g o, o U O « O U O IS 3 S u | i? fa° * -S 1 » o • ° o s; ° m „5 £ £ jgco _. O M Em >; 4) CO *o P- J3 M ^ >, O C <» *T « co ^^„° x «5 a) cc rt E = a> pi H tf •s § g co p 1 3 1 si w co .2 3 I 0, H w < H wft oo ri i, — v oo ft mffi jh o o > o H o ~ in "" tf co "•= 12 | .tj.s> i s CO o a j^ O " 2 "O ^ co (g CO ^" £ « J2 co £.3=3 1^3 Hill '_ CO O M ^ ft £ o g 3 £ rt S.a s f- CO W fxl B o U o rt H o CO J3 M s a o w — £ o ^ Sis (5 ft* H feO WSco^> < m H H 3 < \ GO 00 OUTLINE OF LIFE AND WORK, 1828-1873 13 the thought that his writings in the Ipswich Journal are lost for ever and wish they but knew how these might be recovered. Those gentlemen have not been very wide awake, else they had read, so long ago as March, 1893, Mr. Frederick Dolman's contribution to the New Review on ' George Meredith as a Journalist. ' Mr. Dolman, instead of sighing, took the pains to search the files of the Journal and to institute other researches which provide a contribution of some value to the record of Meredith's life. He was induced to take up the subject because it was rumoured at that time that Mere- dith was engaged upon a novel to be called ' The Journalist. ' 1 Rumour was true to her reputation. If the novelist ever did con- template such a theme, he would have had to rely more on his imagination than on any actual experience of journalism, for his own connection with the newspaper press was quite exceptional, save in the case of the Morning Post. ' The later fifties and the early sixties ' is the period which Mr. Dolman, with unavoidable vagueness, assigns to Meredith's work in journalism. He was in journalism for ' seven or eight years. ' Since we know that his most important experience was obtained as a war correspondent of the Morning Post during the Austro-Italian War of 1866, he evi- dently became an active journalist in 1858 or 1859, and ceased soon after 1866 what must have been to him distasteful task work. The fact that nothing could make him deviate from the ideals of his art in the books he toiled at during these years, while he placed his journalistic pen at the service of causes in which he had no measure of sympathy, admits of no interpretation other than I have given. And we must remember that in those struggling days he was fighting against burdens of debt, not of his own making. ' And you will not expect me to make money by my pen. Above all things I detest the writing for money. Fiction and verse appeal to a besotted public, that judges of the merit of the work by the standard of its taste — avaunt ! And journalism for money is Egyptian bondage. No slavery is comparable to the chains of hired journalism. My pen is my fountain — the key of me ; and I give myself, I do not sell. I write when I have matter in me and in the direction it presses for, otherwise not one word ! ' The editorship of the Ipswich Journal — which we may attribute to some personal influence rather than to the usual process of a county newspaper proprietor advertising for an editor and selecting 1 Mr. Henry Murray asserts with some show of authority that this novel was finished and put aside for posthumous publication ; but the novelist's daughter stated after his death that he had left no finished work of any importance. i 4 GEORGE MEREDITH one from the many who apply — was held by Meredith under curious circumstances. He did not regularly see his paper to press ; the routine of the office was unfamiliar to him. He did his work in his Surrey cottage and posted his ' copy ' to Ipswich, where the editor de facto produced the paper. In short, he was only an editorial writer, his work consisting of one or two leading articles and an average of about two columns of news-notes each week : a sort of running commentary on the events of the week. Mr. Dolman has made a careful study of these editorial writings and extracted much of real interest to us. It is difficult to conceive George Meredith, the apostle of enlightened liberty, in the r61e of journal- istic champion of the South during the American Civil War. Yet how characteristic is this comment on John Bright : ' Mr. Bright, par exemple, spoke at the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce on Tuesday. His speech contained the necessary "vindication " of the North. Mere blockade is perfect, wonderful, their greatness should inspire fear, and so forth. We dub him Yankee and bid him good- bye. ' His editorial enthusiasm for the South was no doubt palatable to the readers of the Ipswich Journal — and he gave them good value for their money — but it must have cost the writer some qualms of conscience. Mr. Dolman considers that it may have been genuine enthusiasm in a wrong cause, but I am inclined to class it with the Tory sentiments which the Journal demanded of him if he had to eat its bread. For, having by fell circumstance been forced to the work, Meredith at least was no shirker, and he wrote for his paper just the best ' leaders ' and the brightest ' notes ' that a brilliant journalist could have written. The work was admirably done, and I shall venture to say that at no time in its existence was the Ipswich Journal better served. It is most interesting to observe in these ephemerae of the press the true touches of what we have long known as the Meredithian style. The politics need engage us no further, but some examples of the humour and satire, gleaned by Mr. Dolman, are certainly worth reproducing, as for instance : It is stated that the Padre Pantaleo, Garibaldi's fighting chap- lain, is in the hands of a British Barnum, who has engaged him to recite the deeds of the hero, by him witnessed, before the day when, like Achilles, he was struck in the heel. This good Padre and most excellent fistic Friar has doubtless been tempted by a mighty sum to come over and make his chieftain small to us. Is it a sign, when the ghostly warrior consents to be farmed out by OUTLINE OF LIFE AND WORK, 1828-1873 15 a Barnum, that the fighting days of the adventurous leader are at an end, and that the Torch of Italy is to smoulder at Pisa? In the following he pursues a fanciful analogy between the Franchise agitation and the celebration of Guy Fawkes' Day : Here is reform coming before us once more with its semi- resuscitated figure, tottering on the shoulders of its lusty supporters. Who cares for it? Do the people shout? It is scarcely possible to picture a more melancholy sight than that presented by the late Reform Conference at Leeds. The veteran, Mr. George Wilson, comes before us with the usual array of figures ... a letter of Mr. Bright 's — a very encouraging and cheerful epistle from that genial reformer — was read. . . . And so Guy was patted on the back, and set up on his right side, and then on his left, and finally made a little blaze, and passed. There is a fine sense of seriousness in his leading article dealing with the rumour that Lord Palmerston was about to be made a co- respondent in a divorce suit, and its closing words might be given as an example of the dignified treatment of a very delicate subject : But rumour is a wicked old woman. Cannot something be done to stop her tongue? Surely one who is an octogenarian might be spared? We are a moral people, and it does not become us to have our Premier, agile though he be, bandied about derisively like a feathered shuttlecock on the reckless battledore of scandal. For ourselves, hearing much, we have nevertheless been discreetly reserved, but now the veil is drawn by a portion of the press, and not so delicately but that the world is taught pretty plainly things concerning the Eternal Youth in office, and the fatal consequences of his toasts to the ladies, which may make some of them blush. We are indeed warned that nothing less than an injured husband has threatened and does really intend to lay an axe to the root of our Premier's extraordinary successes, in a certain awful court. We trust that rumour again lies, but that she is allowed to speak at all, and that men believe her and largely propagate her breathings, is a terrible comment on the sublime art of toasting the ladies as prosecuted by aged juveniles in office. It is a retribution worthy of Greek tragedy. We are determined to believe nothing before it is proved. It is better to belong to the laughed-at minority who decline to admit that the virtue has gone out of our Premier than to confirm a shameful scandal, the flourishing existence of which is sufficient for our moral. Gne more quotation should be given, this time from an article on the Prince and Princess of Wales, the last sentence of which could have been written by no other journalist at that time : 16 GEORGE MEREDITH Our ladies wish, they tell us, and we can more decidedly say that every man living who is not a milliner in spirit devoutly desires, that the Princess Alexandra will relieve them from servitude to the Crinoline Empress. The introduction of the crinoline has been in its effects morally worse than a coup d'e'tat. It has sacrificed more lives ; it has utterly destroyed more tempers ; it has put an immense division between the sexes. It has obscured us, smothered us, stabbed us. The period of Meredith's activity in journalism coincides with the publishing- of ' The Ordeal of Richard Feverel,' ' Evan Harring- ton,' 'Modern Love,' 'Sandra Belloni,' and ' Rhoda Fleming'; that is to say, from 1859 to 1866; the most productive years of his literary career and the most eventful of his life. One of the dearly- cherished fables concerning this period of Meredith's life was thus crystallised into a short paragraph by Mr. Henry Murray, the literary critic, in the course of an address to a London literary circle some years ago : There is a legend current in literary circles that Mr. Meredith first started his career as a writer in the possession of one guinea. This he invested in a sack of oatmeal. Since he was too poor to buy fuel to cook it, during the whole of the time he wrote his first work, ' Evan Harrington,' he subsisted on oatmeal and water, in the form of a most unpalatable drink. Even when he had achieved great fame, he never received more than ^400 for one of his novels. It has been some little diversion to me to trace the travels of this paragraph through the newspaper biographies. The abhorred shears must have been busy at the snip when the paragraph first appeared. Journalists who had never read a book of his, but would gaily write you a paragraph or a column biography of the novelist, had all got this ' legend ' among their clippings, and out it came on birthdays and on any other occasion when the name of Meredith was particularly before the public. Mr. Murray gave it as a ' legend ' ; but the newspaper writers have turned it into history. Of course, the slightest examination of the story is sufficient to expose its improbableness. When Meredith was writing ' Evan Harrington ' ■ — not his first but his fifth book — he was for the first time in his life making money out of journalism. During the year 1859 he was also a frequent contributor to Once a Week, his poems being illustrated there by the greatest artists of the day. His only long contribution in prose, ' A Story-Telling Party : being a Recital of Certain Miserable Days and Nights passed wherewith to warm OUTLINE OF LIFE AND WORK, 1828-1873 17 the Heart of the Christmas Season ' (this is wrongly given in Mr. Esdaile's ' Bibliography ') was founded on some stories told to him by Sir Francis C. Burnand. This contribution was signed ' r,' but is obviously by Meredith, who at this ' oatmeal and water ' time was living in plain comfort in his cottage at Esher, and is spoken of by Sir Francis in his ' Records and Reminiscences ' as ' then a rising star. ' Nay, more, this starveling author of the cheap journalist's maudlin sentiment was able, before ' Evan Harrington ' began appearing in Once a Week, to give young Burnand an introduction to the proprietors of that journal (who were also the owners of Punch), from which began Sir Francis's long association with Bradbury and Evans (later Bradbury, Agnew and Co.). The oatmeal and water fable may be dismissed, even at the loss of a picturesque passage. That Meredith never received more than ^400 for a novel is not at all unlikely and nothing to marvel at ; but even this, so stated, is misleading, as most of his novels must have earned, from first to last, sums far in excess of the amount named, and in some cases well into four figures. A novel may be sold for ^400 down on a royalty basis, and yet in ten or twenty years may earn for its author several times the original ' advance. ' ' Reverting to the chronology of Meredith's life and work, we have now to note that ' Farina ; a Legend of Cologne,' was published by Smith, Elder and Co. in the autumn of 1857 and attracted considerable attention from the press, being reviewed by George Eliot in the Westminster Review of October; but as eight years elapsed before a second edition was included in the publishers' ' Shilling Series of Monthly Volumes of Standard Authors,' that may be sufficient indication of the limited commercial success attending the first publication. In 1859 ' The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, ' which had been written while the author was staying at Halliford, was published by Chapman and Hall in the three-volume form. The second English edition, altered and condensed, did not appear until nineteen years later, being then issued by Kegan Paul ir. one volume. ' Evan Harrington ' was published serially in Once a Week, from February 11 to October 13, i860, admirably illustrated by Charles Keene, and bearing the sub-title, ' or, He would be a Gentleman.' A pirated edition was brought out in America towards the end of the same year, and in January of 1861 Bradbury and Evans issued the novel in three volumes. No early work of the same author received less attention from the c 18 GEORGE MEREDITH critical press. George Parsons Lathrop, the American writer, who was unreliable in his facts, though an able critic, stated that ' Feverel' (obviously an error for ' Evan Harrington ') ' was draw- ing near the end of its publication as a serial in Once a Week, when the conductors of the English periodical made a bid for Hawthorne's "Marble Faun " (then lying finished in MS.) to succeed Meredith's tale. Hawthorne did not accept the offer; but this chance conjunction of the two works in time and place offers an interesting contrast. The romance of the American author, when published, rose to its due place in the monument of his fame which his own genius built for him. The Englishman's novel, published simultaneously, sank into obscurity. ' Whether this is correct or not, as regards the conjunction, I cannot say; but there is no doubt that ' Evan Harrington ' passed almost unnoticed, though in five years a second edition in one volume was called for. It is worthy of note that Mr. Tinsley, the publisher, who was well versed in the commercial side of books at that time, records that ' Evan Harrington ' brought its author ' a fairly large sum of money. ' Here I have to notice a most curious error for which Mr. Arthur Symons, by some strange trick of his memory, usually so correct in its impressions, is evidently responsible. A good many years ago I read in Lathrop 's study of Meredith, just quoted, the startling state- ment that ' his next novel, "Mary Bertrand," is not included in this latest and authoritative edition.' Was it possible, thought I, that it had been left for an American critic to point me to a forgotten novel of George Meredith's with which no Englishman that I knew seemed to be familiar? My efforts to secure a copy of ' Mary Bertrand ' by George Meredith were unsuccessful. Later, I read Mr. Arthur Symons 's critique of ' Evan Harrington ' in Time, the magazine conducted by Edmund Yates from 1879 to 1883, and in the course of this I found Mr. Symons writing : ' "Mary Bertrand," which should come between " Richard Feverel " and " Evan Harring- ton," is absent from the list; on what account I am at a loss to conceive.' As this article preceded Lathrop 's by three years, it was doubtless the source of his information. Mr. Symons may long ago have discovered why ' Mary Bertrand ' was not included. The reason, as I later found for myself, was an excellent one. That novel, published in i860, was written by a lady named Mary Francis Chapman, whose now. de guerre was Francis Meredith ! It is well to correct such errors as these, as no author of our time has been the OUTLINE OF LIFE AND WORK, 1828-1873 19 subject of more misstatements than George Meredith, for reasons which, perhaps, are sufficiently obvious. In i860 Mrs. Meredith died. For a great part of the twelve years of their married life she and her husband had lived separately. Meredith, now residing at Copsham Cottage, Esher, was thus a widower at thirty-two, with one son, Arthur, who had been born four years after the marriage, and his pride and affection for the lad are the subject of remark by the late Sir William Hardman, who had made the novelist's acquaintance at this time, forming a lasting friendship with him. Meredith was now entering the busiest period of his life. If not already ' reader ' to Chapman and Hall, he had certainly acquired that position within a year of this time, on the resignation of John Forster, the friend and biographer of Dickens. He was ' editing ' the Ipswich Journal, as we have seen, and had begun his connection, lasting for at least six years, with the Morning Post, to which he contributed a variety of articles on social and literary subjects. With Swinburne, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Frederick A. Sandys, the artist, and other notable men, as we shall see later, he had also formed friendships, and towards the end of 1861 he entered into an arrangement with Rossetti to rent a sitting- room in his house at 16, Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, intending to make use of this on his weekly visits to London in connection with his literary and journalistic pursuits. But the scheme does not seem to have worked very well, as he made but little use of Rossetti 's house, though his sub-tenancy continued to the end of 1862 at least. In the spring of that year his second book of poetry, ' Modern Love and Poems of the English Roadside, with Poems and Ballads,' had been issued by Chapman and Hall, and dedicated to the poet's friend, the late Admiral Frederick Augustus Maxse, then a Captain R.N., whose remarkable personality was later to provide Meredith with so rich a study for ' Beauchamp's Career,' and one of whose sons, Mr. L. J. Maxse, is now editor of the National Review. The book made even less stir in the world of letters than its predecessor of 1 85 1, and but for the attack upon it appearing in the Spectator of May 24, 1862, we should have to chronicle that, like the poet's novel of the previous year, it passed practically unnoticed. Mr. Swinburne's spirited defence of his friend, the author of ' Modern Love,' in his famous letter to the Spectator, did not even give the book a fillip, and no less than thirty years were to pass before parts of it were reprinted. ao GEORGE MEREDITH Despite his journalistic and literary engagements, and to some extent in consequence of these, Meredith contrived in those days to make occasional stays on the Continent : in France, Germany, Switzerland and Italy. Sir William Hardman has left us notes of a meeting between them at Paris in 1863 when Meredith was on the way to the Dauphine. He was now engaged upon ' Emilia in England ' (later, and not very happily, re-named ' Sandra Belloni '), which was issued in three volumes in the spring of 1864 by Chapman and Hall, no arrangement for a first serial issue having been made. The press gave the novel a little more attention than the two works immediately preceding it, but nothing, of course, in proportion to the importance of the book. Richard Garnett wrote a long and careful review of it in the Reader, a literary journal of that time. But a matter of more moment in Meredith's life than the publica- tion of another of his books is now to be chronicled, in his second marriage. The second Mrs. Meredith — whose charming portrait, done in chalk by Sandys in 1864, was an item of particular interest at the R. A. Winter Exhibition of 1905 — a lady of French descent, named Vulliamy, was happily to prove a worthy companion of the poet-novelist, sympathising with him in every way and fulfilling the need of his strong and steadfast character for a large and satisfying love. An era of joyous, fruitful life now opened for him; the shadows that must hover about the ill-mated and the lonely heart were chased away in the light of this new domestic happiness, and bright children were soon to make Flint Cottage, Box Hill, a very idyll of rural life and happy, successful literary work. ' Rhoda Fleming ' was the first novel written after his second marriage, and it also failed to find a serial opening — supposing that to have been sought — as it was published in the autumn of 1865 by Tinsley Brothers. Mr. William Tinsley tells us that it had ' a very poor sale. ' The fact that its author was literary adviser to another firm, which would in the usual course have issued the novel, may suggest that Tinsley, who was personally acquainted with the novelist, made a bid for the book, and Chapman and Hall, not yet finding the works of their own ' reader ' so profitable as others on their list, had acquiesced. Certainly the tragic tale of ' Rhoda Fleming ' marked no advance in the literary fortunes of its author ; but with the beginning of 1866 ' Vittoria ' made its appearance serially in the Fortnightly Review, with the editor of which, Mr. John Morley, Meredith was now on terms of intimate friendship. During this year, too, he undertook, as we have heard, the most OUTLINE OF LIFE AND WORK, 1828-1873 21 important commission in journalism he ever discharged, going out to the Austro-Italian War as correspondent for the Morning Post. It has been stated many times in biographical sketches that it was while engaged in this enterprise Meredith secured his ' material ' for ' Vittoria ' ; a difficult feat, forsooth, unless he wrote the novel from month to month, in Venice or elsewhere, as the story had begun in the Fortnightly before Italy struck her final blow against Austria by joining forces with Prussia, eventually to secure Venetia by the peace of the Prague. ' Emilia in England ' was but the introduction to ' Vittoria,' as a picture of the Italian revolution of 1848, and when the splendid sequel was ready for the Fortnightly it had the great advantage of a strong topical interest, in dealing with the events of eighteen years earlier which were now culminating in the last struggle between Italy and Austria. The author, of course, must have made close acquaintance with Italian scenes before 1866. I have made it my business to examine his letters to the Morning Post, and, to say truth, I cannot profess to have found his war corre- spondence unique or strongly individual. He did not see a great deal of the actual fighting, though he accompanied the Italian forces in some of their movements and marched and camped with them. Most of his reports are given at second-hand, vivid, gripping stories ; but no better than many a war correspondent has done before and since. Written most likely in haste to catch the courier, they are remarkably direct in style of narrative and free from involutions of phrase, with only occasional faint echoes of the Meredithian manner. There is little, if anything, in them that is worthy of reprinting. At the beginning of 1867, hot upon the closing of the serial issue, ' Vittoria ' came out in three volumes, Chapman and Hall being the publishers; but its reception by press and public was in no way remarkable, the work not being reprinted for nineteen years. In a grudging notice of the novel on its appearance in the Fortnightly, the Spectator had spoken of its author as being ' hitherto known as a novelist of some ability and a rather low ethical tone. ' In June, however, it was very sincerely praised in a study of ' Le Roman anglais contemporain,' which M. E. D. Forgues contributed to, the Revue des Deux Mondes, and this was one of the earliest, if not the first, of the references which were to herald the rising of his European reputation. In the same French review greatly abridged versions of ' Sandra Belloni ' and ' Richard Feverel ' had been published in 1864 and 1865, the former 22 GEORGE MEREDITH being reprinted in book form in 1866. Of these and later evidences of Continental appreciation, I purpose treating at some length in another chapter. The connection which he had thus established with the Fort- nightly in 1866 was to continue for many years. Now shaken free of the Ipswich Journal drudgery, and not writing to any extent, I believe, for the Morning Post, he contributed many reviews and poems to the Fortnightly, which was to have the honour of publish- ing most of his later fiction. He was no longer unable to secure the great financial advantage of a first serial issue for any new novel, and as this evidence of substantial success dates from his thirty-eighth year we may consider that his days of struggle and stress were overpast at that comparatively early age, though he was still some little way from what we may regard as the great landmark of his literary life — the appearance of ' Beauchamp's Career. ' Towards the end of 1866, during the absence in America of Mr. John Morley, then editor of the Fortnightly, Meredith took charge of the review, and his ' Sonnet to ,' which appeared in the issue of June, 1866, as well as ' Lines to a Friend Visiting America ' in the December number, were personal to Mr. Morley. Both these pieces appear in the complete edition of the poems published in 1898, where the blank in the inscription of the sonnet is filled in 'J. M.' The novelist had again become the father of a son, who had been christened William Maxse Meredith, his middle name in honour of the father's staunch friend, who retired from the service with the rank of Admiral in 1867. The country habit of life was, if possible, growing upon him. Journalism being finally renounced for literature, his need to be in touch with the town might be thought less than ever; his membership of the Garrick Club merely a link to bind him loosely to the thundering metropolis ; though, of course, he continued for upwards of thirty years to be reader to Chapman and Hall, an occupation that would call for regular visits to London. Yet he had good reason to remember the city and to go there whenever the mood took him, for it played a great part in his fiction. Oddly, in all the heaped-up criticism of Meredith there is no feature of his work that has been more neglected than this power of London over his imagination ; this London in which he was at most no more than a regular visitor; never one of its myriad workers, swinging along in the surge of its daily life; but OUTLINE OF LIFE AND WORK, 1828-1873 23 more than any Londoner, better, a clear-sighted, penetrating observer. It has been left to a writer in the Manchester Guardian to touch, most happily, on this aspect of his work, which impinges so considerably on the character of the man and his life. ' More than any novelist save Thackeray,' says the writer in question, ' he pivots his novels in London. ' You do not find in him one-tenth of the painting of London canvases that you have in Dickens, nor one quarter of the wheels and springs of London life that you have in Disraeli. Yet neither of them has Meredith's absolute unconsciousness of any power- generator for life and action, if I may put it so, other than the bubbling of the pot of London — to use his own phrase. Wherever his characters may go, it is London and what their London will think that tweaks them into action — London that pricks Lord Fleet- wood like a gadfly, London that sombres Lord Ormont, London that breaks Victor Radnor, London that fights for the hold upon Sandra Belloni, London that tilts the ground under the feet of Diana, London that drives Richmond Roy a-gallop. Other novelists have made deliberate excursions for characters moulded in the placid importance of the county town or the thoroughly anti-London sufficiency of the big manufacturing towns. But it would be hard to find a first- rank character in Meredith that you could see at home in any town but London. That is the half -conscious, penetrating flavour. The taste can touch the palate more smartly. Take the passage to which the phrase about the London pot is a passing reference. ' London, say what we will of it, is after all the head of the British giant, and if not the liveliest in bubbles it is past competition the largest brothpot of brains anywhere simmering on the hob. ... Its caked outside of grime, and the inward substance incessantly kicking the lid prankish, but never casting it off. ' There are pictures of times of the day in London as classical as Hogarth's. The bluish red of Whitechapel under the north-easter ; London Bridge at that par- ticular hour before lunch when most of all the reflective man can savour there the might and majesty of the City gathered into 'London's unrivalled mezzotint'; late afternoon in the western Strand, with London's wild sunset clouds round the cocked hat of ' the most elevated of admirals ' in Trafalgar Square ; the night (how cunningly chosen !) in the little square of the newspaper world ' where the morrow is manufactured ' ; the morning walk in the Park in ' Feverel ' — these are London possessions, and if Meredith called us also 'the Daniel Lambert of cities,' that is a possession too. Has any one so finely caught the Londoner's pleasure in the Embankment? ' The meeting near mid-winter of a soft warm wind along the Embankment, and dark Thames magnificently coronetted 24 GEORGE MEREDITH over his grimy flow.' His London fog is perhaps best of all, although it does not offer a phrase, except, of course, the description of one gas-lamp as seen from another — •' It was the painting of light rather than light. ' But it was he, too, who said, ' This London is rather a thing for hospital operations than for poetical rhapsody, in aspect too streaked scarlet and pock-pitted under the most cumbrous jewelled tiaras.' In truth he has the genuine Londoner's half-brutal love of the place, and even in these later years, when he could no longer go about London with ease, he has not been able to keep away. In September of 1870 ' The Adventures of Harry Richmond ' began to appear serially in the Cornhill, the romance being illustrated by George du Maurier. For fifteen months the story ran its course — where is the editor now that would accept a serial of more than twelve monthly instalments? — and in the winter of 1871 it was published in three volumes by Smith, Elder and Co. ' Harry Richmond ' had rather more attention from the press than any of its author's previous works, though it did not reach a second edition for fourteen years. But the novelist, never swerving from his determination to give of his best, and in his own way, to literature, resolutely went forward without the slightest concession to public taste, showing no inclination to meet the patrons of the circulating library, however much he may have longed for a multi- tude of readers — and every man that writes would fain have audience of all who read. Of the success of the market-place he himself has said, ' we find we have pledged the better part of ourselves to clutch it, and the handful of our prize cannot redeem it. ' Save for ' The Song of Theodolinda,' which doubtless puzzled many readers of the Cornhill in September, 1872, he published nothing more until ' Beau- champ's Career ' began its sixteen months' course in the Fortnightly of August, 1874. Thus we see him during the years that intervene between ' Harry Richmond ' and this date, closely engaged upon the masterpiece which was to mark the turning-point of his literary fortunes. He has now, we must remember, though popular tradition would have it otherwise, long ceased to be an unsuccessful author. In these far-off days of the three-volume novel second editions were much less common than they are in our own day of single volumes. Apart from the fact that money was scarcer among the reading public, and that public vastly smaller, thirty shillings was somewhat more formidable a price for three volumes than six shillings for one ! The libraries, of course, were almost the only purchasers ; but a OUTLINE OF LIFE AND WORK, 1828-1873 25 single edition of a three-volume romance might be a good deal more profitable than five or six editions of our familiar ' six shilling ' novel. Moreover, serials of fifteen or sixteen issues in the Cornhill and the Fortnightly must have been handsomely remunerated. Assuredly there is no longer occasion to be sentimental over Meredith's literary fortunes after 1870, and we have seen that ten years before that date journalism and literature together, though hard taskmasters both, were by no means barren of recompense to one who was giving them of his best. The return was dispropor- tionate to the service, but the worker would have his own way — not his master's — and though his own way in the end came to be accepted, he suffered only as all self-willed or independent natures must suffer, until he had succeeded in proving that his way was worth having. It is said, but of this I have no proof, that ' Rich- ard Feverel ' and ' Rhoda Fleming ' were even refused circulation by Mudie's on the ground of their indecency ! His reputation on the Continent had already made some little headway; in America, on the other hand, his name was scarcely known, and it is quite incorrect to credit American critics and readers with any exceptional acumen in awakening earlier than they of his own country to a due sense of his genius. The late Grant Allen, writing twenty years later of Meredith's position at this period of his life, in his Fortnightly essay on ' Our Noble Selves,' February 1887, observes : Twenty years ago, George Meredith was by far the greatest artist of character and situation in the English language. But only a few appreciative critics at London clubs had yet taken the trouble to crack the hard nuts he set before them, and extract the rich kernel of epigram and wisdom ; if the world at large begins to know him now-a-days it is because the few who could grasp his enigmatic meaning have preached faith in him with touching fidelity till at last the public, like the unjust judge, for their much impor- tunity, consents to buy a popular edition of ' Beauchamp's Career ' and ' Evan Harrington.' I don't of course mean to say that this deliberate booming was necessary in either case for the recognition of those two great men's real greatness, on the part of the few adapted by nature for duly recognising it. The critics of England would have found out Meredith, the philosophers of the world would have found out Spencer, even without the aid of an occasional laudatory newspaper allusion. But the ' blind and battling ' mass around would never have found them out at all ; and it is the blind and the battling that constitute society. As it has been possible thus to boom Herbert Spencer and George Meredith, so is it possible 26 GEORGE MEREDITH perhaps to boom the hundred best living authors of whose very names the blind and battling are still for the most part contentedly ignorant. Is all this strictly true? We see Meredith at forty-two the author of ten notable books : six very long novels, two shorter volumes of fiction, and two books of poetry. He has written a great deal of verse and some little criticism in the leading periodicals ; he has had three of his longest novels published serially in the best magazines of his day ; yet is he known only to ' a few appreciative critics at London clubs. ' Doubtless it flattered these few some forty years ago to think so ; but it was not strictly true. Even of conditions at the moment of his writing Grant Allen is not more accurate in his account; but we cannot blame him, as his purpose in the article quoted is purely exegetical and he must make his point even thus : Unstinted praise of living authors, however deserved, is avoided with an almost Greek terror of Nemesis. I have heard dozens of people say in private — what is the obvious truth — that ' The Ordeal of Richard Feverel ' is the greatest novel ever written in the English language. But I never saw anybody say so in print, and I know why : because ' Richard Feverel ' still remains half unknown, and they are all afraid of getting laughed at by fools who can only appreciate high merit after it has received the final stamp of popular approbation in illustrated two-shilling paper covers. This was written after Meredith's work had been the subject of the most enthusiastic praise from many writers of greater critical judgment than Grant Allen — James Thomson, W. E. Henley, Richard Garnett, Arthur Symons, W. L. Courtney and others — at a time indeed when excessive and unmeasured laudation was the danger, and not undue reticence. And, by the way, was the state- ment that ' Richard Feverel ' is the greatest novel in the English language not better suited for drawing-room gossip than for the cool deliberation of printed criticism? This, however, is somewhat apart from my present purpose. We have now been able to follow the life-work of George Meredith, as closely as ascertainable facts have permitted, until he is engaged upon the writing of ' Beauchamp's Career,' and we find him then about forty-four years of age, settled in his unpre- tentious little cottage at the foot of Box Hill, Surrey, happy in his domestic life, the son of his second marriage a bright little fellow of five or six, and a daughter but recently arrived. The tide is OUTLINE OF LIFE AND WORK, 1828-1873 2; making for his greatest period of joyous and successful literary labour. Visits abroad, long tramps among the downs of his own homeland, increase of friends, the fireside haven of after-work, love and the glow of good health ; all these now mark his days, and this period of tranquil delight is to continue for a good many years, and out of it shall come the ripest fruits of his genius. II OUTLINE OF LIFE AND WORK I 874- I 909 ' My dear boy, we read Meredith in the early seventies at Oxford,' the late York Powell once wrote to Professor Oliver Elton. Whatever the common public may have been applauding then, Mere- dith was by that time one of the prime favourites of the intel- lectuals : Grant Allen's ' few appreciative critics at London clubs ' were mere flies on the wheel of the novelist's admiring and under- standing public. He had made his way; he had his own public fast, and the flood-gates of the press were about to open before the greatest title of printed criticism that has signalised the work of any English author, since Dickens, in his own lifetime. Oxford was an early stronghold of Meredith's, and long continued staunch to him, as we may gather from this little personal reminiscence by Mr. F. T. Bettany, whose undergraduate days were about one decade later than those of York Powell : We were all madly in love with George Meredith in my under- graduate days at Christ Church, and, thanks to the generosity of a friendly don who presented our Junior Common Room with com- plete sets of Thackeray, Dickens, Reade, and Meredith, we were able to gratify our enthusiasm. I remember well stealing from the shelves to which those books were to be confined the copy of ' The Egoist ' and keeping it a week or more with scandalous selfishness in my own rooms. For us youngsters George Meredith was what Dickens had been to our seniors, and our joy in him was, I fear, just a little enhanced by his being — then, at least— caviare to the general. ' Beauchamp's Career ' came out in the Fortnightly of August, 1874, and ran until December, 1875, the three-volume issue being published by Chapman and Hall immediately the serial was con- cluded, but bearing the date of the following year. A two-volume edition by Tauchnitz for Continental readers, in 1876, indicates the 28 OUTLINE OF LIFE AND WORK, 1874-1909 29 widening of the novelist's public. Unless we are to suppose that the Fortnightly was wasting its space by printing the story, or that its circulation was of no consequence, we must always reckon the readers of that review as a considerable body in Meredith's follow- ing. The published criticism of the book exceeded in volume and appreciation that which had accompanied the issue of any of the author's earlier works. Dating from this time, and covering a period of almost twenty years, follows the most fruitful epoch of Meredith's literary life, which may be said to close with the publication of ' The Amazing Marriage ' in 1895, when he was sixty-seven years of age. Accord- ing to himself, in creative art a man's best work is done by sixty- five. In his own case he had reached that age at the writing of ' The Amazing Marriage, ' a novel that ranks among his best, and what followed from his pen bears out the soundness of his judgment. After the launching of his first line of battleship in 1875, he set himself to a companion work of equal magnitude in the shape of ' The Egoist, ' but in the meanwhile wrote the three shorter tales which, with 'Farina,' make up his collection of 'Short Stories.' Of course the term short story cannot be strictly applied to these; there is nothing more certain in criticism than the inability of Meredith to write a short story. The spirit, no less than the technique, of the conte is utterly foreign to his genius. ' The House on the Beach,' published in the New Quarterly Magazine, of January, 1877; 'The Case of General Ople and Lady Camper,' in the July number, and ' The Tale of Chloe, ' exactly two years later in the same magazine, are all ' little novels. ' His essay on ' The Idea of Comedy,' first given as a lecture — the only one he ever gave — at the London Institution, February 1, 1877, was also printed in the New Quarterly for April, 1877, while the revised and enlarged version of ' Love in the Valley ' was contributed to Mac- millan's Magazine, October, 1878, and the stately verses of ' The Nuptials of Attila ' to the New Quarterly, January, 1879. In the autumn of that year came forth ' The Egoist, ' and behold a great stirring of dry bones! James Thomson (' B.V. ') joyously throws up his cap at the long-delayed acclamation of the great novelist; the splendid critical sense of W. E. Henley is lead- ing the movement for a wider recognition of the genius of George Meredith, and presently there is no author more discussed in the press than the writer of ' The Egoist. ' This may be quoted against my pause in the story of his literary life at the writing of ' Beau- 3 o GEORGE MEREDITH champ's Career,' but while it is true that ' The Egoist ' was the book that spread his fame abroad and extended vastly the horizon of his public, it is also true that the novel which immediately pre- ceded it marked the opening of a new epoch in his history, especially from the point of view of contemporary criticism, which regards ' Beauchamp's Career ' as the first work wherein the novelist reached the height of his power. Grant Allen, himself a brilliant journeyman of letters, scarcely an artist, tells us that it was found possible to ' boom ' Meredith. Surely this is not correct. The cant word implies a certain deliberate resolve on the part of some person or persons to push an author's personality and work upon the public. Nothing that I can detect in the course of Meredith's history justifies this. Henley was no ' boomster ' ; a saner, sounder, more even-handed critic never wrote. Not any single article of his on Meredith — and he wrote many — had the least suspicion of the gush of the log-roller. The volume of criticism, not always appreciative, that now began to pour forth from busy pens had no taint of log-rolling. ' Boom ' is an unhappy word applied here. Meredith had merely, in the fullness of time and his own powers, awakened the attention he deserved. ' The Egoist ' was first published in three volumes by Kegan Paul and Co., and a second edition in one volume was issued by the same firm within a year. It had not appeared in serial form, probably because he was already busy on ' The Tragic Comedians,' of which an abridged version was arranged for the Fortnightly from October, 1880, to February, 1881. That complete work appeared in two volumes in the winter of the latter year, and as evidence of growing popularity a two-shilling edition in Ward Lock's series of ' Select Authors ' and a Tauchnitz edition came out in the same year. In the early summer of 1883 ' Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth ' was published by Macmillan and Co., marking an interlude in the work of the novelist, who had now turned his creative energy to the production of another long novel, ' Diana of the Crossways,' which was to prove perhaps the most popular of all his fictions so far as the taste of the general public is concerned. Little more than half of the story, the first twenty-six chapters, appeared serially in the Fortnightly, June to December, 1884, and the com- plete work in three volumes was issued at the beginning of 1885, ' Inscribed to Frederick Pollock. ' In the course of the same year an undertaking that illustrates far better than anything else the measure of popularity to which OUTLINE OF LIFE AND WORK, 1874-1909 31 Meredith had now attained as a writer of fiction — his poetry con- tinued the delight of the very few for some years longer — was the beginning of the first collected edition of his novels in ten volumes. ' Diana ' was added to this edition only a few months after its appear- ance in three volumes. Three others were published in 1885, five in 1886, and ' Shagpat ' and ' Farina ' together in one volume at the beginning of 1887. But while 1885 was thus a year to be rubricated in his literary history, in his domestic story it was otherwise. In the autumn the shadow of death fell upon his simple home; he stood bereft of a loving and sympathetic wife. The second Mrs. Meredith died on September 17, 1885, and was buried in the churchyard close by Flint Cottage. Her husband's fine epitaph upon her is printed at the end of ' A Reading of Earth ' : ' Who call her Mother and who calls her Wife Look on her grave and see not Death but Life.' For some little time after his great loss he seemed to be growing more of a recluse, the chalet near his cottage, against the fringe of the woods upon Box Hill, had become to him a little haven of medita- tion, work, and rest ; monastic almost. There he pursued the thread of his quiet life, turning again to poetry, the results of which were soon to appear in ' Ballads and Poems of Tragic Life,' published by Macmillan in 1887, and ' A Reading of Earth ' issued by the same house a year later. But he had now his vivacious young daughter of seventeen and his son of twenty-two to comfort him ; the son of his first marriage, at this time some four-and-thirty years of age, being resident in Italy. Mrs. M. R. F. Gilman, one of the first Americans to advance his fame across the Atlantic, writing in the introduction to her excellent compilation, ' The Pilgrim's Scrip, or, Wit and Wisdom of George Meredith,' published by Roberts Bros, of Boston in 1888, remarks, under date September i, 1888 : ' For the sake of his daughter, of whom Mr. Meredith is devotedly fond, he is now trying to come out from his solitary retirement, and is occasion- ally present at social festivities. There is no dinner-table in the county where he is not a welcome and honoured guest. ' Mrs. Gilman is usually so correct in her statements that one hesitates to doubt the inference of that last sentence. Certainly we cannot imagine any decent dinner-table, anywhere, at any time, at which George Meredith had not been welcome; but the picture of him as in any sort a ' diner out ' is less easy to conjure up. His friendships 32 GEORGE MEREDITH and home life, however, are left for further discussion in a later chapter. In the year when Mrs. Gilman's book was published the novelist was a notable guest at a public dinner. This was the banquet to Parnell in May, 1888. Mr. Haldane sat on the left of the Irish leader, and next to him was Meredith, with Mr. Morley on his left. A sketch of this unique meeting of these three friends appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette of May 10, from the pencil of ' F. C. G. ' One interesting item of personalia falls into place here. I have gleaned it from art article in the Western Mail, of Cardiff, for February 12, 1908 : It may not be generally known that some twenty years ago George Meredith paid an extended visit to South Wales, during which time he visited Llanelly, Merthyr, Llandilo, Cardiff, Tenby and Ferndale. At that time Mr. William Maxse Meredith, the son of the novelist, was in partnership with Mr. J. C. Howell, Llanelly, the well-known electrical engineer. During his stay at Llanelly the distinguished novelist paid a visit to the South Wales Steel and Tin- plate Works, then owned by Messrs. E. Morewood and Co. He was intensely interested in what he saw, and his description of the pyrotechnic display from the charging of the steel furnaces is still a vivid memory to Mr. Howell and the other members of the party. A few days later Mr. Meredith visited Ferndale, and while there he went down one of the pits owned by Mr. Fred Davis. The party included the daughter of the novelist and Mr. (now Sir) Frank Edwards, M.P. This was Mr. Meredith's first experience of the miner's life, and he sat down underground and enjoyed a long chat with some of the grimy colliers. At Llandilo he spent a very enjoyable week, and was struck, as he could not help being, with the magnificent scenery of the Vale of Towy. Another pleasant experience was the week at Tenby. A gentle- man belonging to the party says he will never forget dining with the novelist on a Sunday evening at Tenby. Mr. Meredith was in brilliant form, and on that occasion his great conversational powers were heard at their best, and so absorbed were the party in this feast of reason and flow of soul that it was close on eleven o'clock before any one moved from the table. It was subsequent to this visit to South Wales that Meredith wrote ' One of Our Conquerors,' and a diligent student of Meredith discovered in that book the well- known Welsh expression, ' Ach y fi,' so that Meredith evidently took away something from South Wales ! We have seen that the first collected edition of the novels was begun in 1885 and completed in 1887. It is worthy of note that Mr. Meredith studies character at the I'arnell Commission From a sketch by Sydney P. Hall in the ' Graphic,' May iS, i Mr. Meredith at the Kigiiiy Club Banquet to Mr. Parnei.l From a thumb-nail sK; Sir Francis C. Gould. — ' ff-'csi an old note hook of >■ Gazette, ' Ja n. 4, 1909. OUTLINE OF LIFE AND WORK, 1874-1909 33 between these dates America awakened for the first time to George Meredith. Too often are we apt to credit our friends of the United States with ' discovering ' our geniuses for us. As a rule they are quick and keen to claim the credit, and in the flood of writing which signalised Meredith's eightieth birthday the honour was not only fre- quently claimed, but weakly granted by English writers who knew no better. Meredith is not a parallel case with Carlyle, or, let us say, Philip James Bailey. 1 am happy to quote a distinguished American journalist and critic, Mr. William Morton Fullerton, now on the Times staff in Paris, in this connection. He contributed to Mr. Richard Le Gallienne's book about Meredith a chapter entitled ' Some Notes in regard to George Meredith in America,' and from this I excerpt a few passages of interest here : I remember so well when the name of Meredith first became in America a name to conjure with ; and most clearly of all I remember the surprised awakening for some of us when we realised how long this man had been writing, and that we had known nothing of him. Before the appearance of the first uniform American edition George Meredith was scarcely known at all in America. . . . For a long time even the great libraries were without a volume by Meredith, except, perhaps, a small, poorly-printed, Bowdlerised edition of ' Diana,' which did scarcely any service whatever In making him known in America. And then the first uniform one- volume edition appeared from Roberts Bros, in Boston, and the triumphal progress began. Even then it was a long time, however, before George Meredith and ' Owen Meredith ' were quite differentiated in the popular mind. ... At the same time when this edition appeared I happened to be literary editor of the Boston Advertiser. The first volume of the series was ' Richard Feverel,' and it was upon this book that I chanced after a weary passage over a truly barren, unharvested sea of modern fiction. ... I felt that I detected rare qualities of insight and a great and distinguished power of original expression. But the thing was, at that time, to say so. Once at a dinner-party I found within me the temporary courage of my opinions. There were at the table several people of recognised authority as critics, who held the ears of many men. But venturing to say a little of what I thought about Meredith, I met with only an incredulous look, born of an utter ignorance of his work. One man, however, came round with a smile and grasped my hand. The incident was typical of the attitude of the public towards Meredith. Either there was utter ignorance or an enthusiasm equally dense and unworthy. So that when it came to me to notice these books in the Adver- 34 GEORGE MEREDITH User, in somewhat too eulogistic phrase, and I trespassed upon the editorial page instead of disporting myself within the parallel bars of my own more accustomed columns, a mild but waiting scepticism as to my sanity was the least offensive form of a feeling natural enough indeed, but which in its intensity took the shape of absolutely damning belief in my immature and untrained judgment. But the martyrdom was not painfully protracted. With chagrin I soon noticed that I was not to be allowed the selfish pleasure of clinging to an unpopular cause. I had kept the columns as full of allusions to Mr. Meredith, and of editorials upon him, as my editor-in-chief would endure; and as a result had called out a number of responses that kept, as the expression is, the ball rolling. In less than a year in Boston we all read Meredith, and Mr. Niles up there in the bay- window on Beacon Hill would have told you that he was contemplat- ing a new and cheaper edition. Philadelphia, meanwhile, and New York had done themselves the honour of Mr. Meredith's company, and I hope with all my heart that Mr. Meredith had honest practical proof of it. Touching the question of flattering Americans by letting them imagine they discover our great writers for us, even Mr. Fullerton might be thought to fall into an error when he goes on to say : ' Nothing ever written in America upon Mr. Meredith was so opportune or effective, I may say, as Miss Flora Shaw's article in the Princeton Review. ' But is not this lady identical with Lady Lugard, who was then on the staff of the Times? Is she not Irish, and is it not probable that she wrote her most excellent study of Meredith on this side the Atlantic and sent it out to the Princeton Review? Of course, Mr. Fullerton's sentence may be read with that sense. The collected edition to which Mr. Fullerton refers was, of course, an American impression of Chapman and Hall's first col- lected edition, and the cheaper edition was also issued jointly in England and America by the same publishers in 1889-90, ' One of Our Conquerors ' and ' Lord Ormont and His Aminta ' being added to it soon after they appeared in the three-volume form. ' One of Our Conquerors ' had begun its appearance in the Fort- nightly in 1890, when Mr. John Lane published Mr. Le Gallienne's brilliant study of Meredith's art. By that time the tide of Meredith appreciation was flowing strong and sure, though Mr. William Watson had a few months before delivered his memorable attack in the pages of the National Review, which periodical was later to come under the editorship of a son of Meredith's old friend, Admiral Maxse. The seriousness of those who were interesting themselves OUTLINE OF LIFE AND WORK, 1874-1909 35 in the study of Meredith may be gauged by the fact that Mr. Le Gallienne's ' George Meredith : Some Characteristics ' passed through four editions in as many years, and a fifth and revised edition was issued in 1900. In 1891 came the late Miss Hannah Lynch's ' George Meredith : a Study,' and the tide of critical writ- ing has since continued so steadily to rise that there is now some danger of the writings of the master himself being neglected for the writings of his expositors : ' the fate of the classics overtook him in his own lifetime,' may be the verdict of a later day. It must be chronicled of ' One of Our Conquerors ' that not only was this novel published serially in England and America — where it was given in the New York Sun — but that it also appeared as a serial in the Australasian. His compatriots of remotest Britain had at long last come into touch with him. Of course, colonial editions of several of his novels had already appeared, but the opening of the pages of the colonial press was a token that a public for his writings existed there. This was indeed late in the day ; yet there is some excuse for Australia setting him to 'dine late,' and it is something to remember that the little brochure, ' George Meredith: Poet and Novelist,' by Mr. M. W. MacCallum, professor of Modern Literature at Sydney University, originally given as a lecture and published separately in the autumn of 1892, takes no mean place among the mass of criticism which Meredith's works have called forth. In the winter of 1888 it was announced in the newspapers that the novelist was engaged upon a stage version of ' The Egoist. ' It will be remembered that this was a time when the dramatised novel was coming into vogue. Many novelists had, like R. L. Stevenson, awakened suddenly to the fact that ' the stage is the gold mine ' — though R. L. S. did not extract much gold from it — and busied themselves producing stage versions of their stories. Few, indeed, came to anything ; yet every novelist still looks upon the stage as his El Dorado, and is open to face the trials of a Candide to arrive there. Whether Meredith ever seriously contem- plated dramatising ' The Egoist ' I have been unable to ascertain. What we do know is that the play was never produced, and in all likelihood it was never written, as there is little or no evidence in all the works of the great writer that he possessed any genius for dramatic composition. The art of the stage seems as utterly opposed to his slow, deliberate and penetrating method of character- isation as that of the scene-painter to the miniaturist. Instead of D 2 36 GEORGE MEREDITH essaying a stage-play in his sixtieth year Meredith, as we have seen, wrote ' One of Our Conquerors,' which appeared in the spring of 1892, in three volumes, and little more than a year later his sixth book of poetry, ' Poems : the Empty Purse,' etc., was published. In the year 1892 the first of the few public honours ever con- ferred upon the novelist was announced, St. Andrew's University awarding him its honorary degree of LL.D. ; and— a straw only, but indicating the way of the wind — it was in the same year that ' Meredith for the Multitude ' had become a possible theme for a magazine writer, Mr. Le Gallienne contributing a paper on that subject to the Novel Review. The novelist's only appearance in the witness-box — he had been a keen follower of the Parnell case, attending many of the sittings of the Commission in 1889 — took place in December of 1891, in the matter of a libel action by an African merchant against an author who had written a story which Chapman and Hall had published. Meredith, in giving evidence, said that the story in dispute passed through his hands as reader for the publishers. Asked in cross- examination if he thought that the opening of the story relating to the hero's mother did not offend against the canons of good taste, the witness answered that it was the attempt of a writer of a serious mind to be humorous. It might almost be called a stereotype of that form of the element of humour. It was a failure, but still passed with the public. 'A kind of elephantine humour?' asked the judge. ' Quite so,' the witness answered. ' I did not like it, but one would have to object to so much. ' This little incident is not without interest as indicating that Mere- dith the novelist and Meredith the publisher's reader were fully alive to the need of keeping a sharp distinction between the class of fiction which the one cared to write himself and that from different pens which the other knew to be of the kind that ' passed with the public. ' Meanwhile, the novelist had in hand the last of his works to be issued in the old three-volume form, ' Lord Ormont and His Aminta,' which was published by Chapman and Hall in the summer of 1894 — not yet had publishers decreed the summer months as a close time for book production. The book was ' gratefully inscribed to George Buckston Browne, surgeon.' An edition in one volume followed in the succeeding year, when a two-volume Tauchnitz edition was also published, and the novel has, of course, its place in the various collected editions of his works. No sooner could OUTLINE OF LIFE AND WORK, 1874-1909 37 ' Lord Ormont ' have been issued from the press than the author must have taken up, conscious of the fast ebbing years and diminish- ing: vitality, the task of his last novel ; for ' The Amazing Marriage ' began its serial course in Scribner's Magazine of January, 1895, and was published in the winter of the same year by Constable and Co., in which firm the novelist's son, Mr. William Maxse Mere- dith, was now an active partner. Thus ended forty years of novel-writing with singularly little evidence of failing powers, the same high reach of intellectual cheer- fulness and artistic integrity. He was now beyond the limit of age at which, in his own estimation, a man can produce creative work calculated to rank with his best, and save for occasional excursions into the realm of poesy, his pen was now laid aside. The little chalet at Box Hill, where for so many years the good goose quill of the novelist had traced his thoughts by daylight and dusk and far into the solemn rural night, was losing its primal use as a work- shop ; with the ' seventies ' looming over the white head of its occupant, it was becoming rather a little retreat for reflection and twilight ease. For, despite his remarkable vitality of middle life, at sixty-seven he had broken down in health and looked older and more worn than many men of eighty. Certain work concerning his fiction was still to be done, and many could wish it had not been discharged. I refer to the revision of the novels for the splendid edition of his writings in thirty-two volumes published by Constable in 1896-98. The alterations which he chose to make at seven-and-sixty on a masterpiece he had written at thirty were drastic and much to be deplored. It is an old com- plaint this, many notable authors have been equally misguided, and there is no redress but to treasure the early editions. ' Richard Feverel ' is a masterpiece which George Meredith cetat 67 was scarcely capable of writing, and it is a fair contention that he was equally unfitted to alter seriously the work of his dead self. The outlook of a man of thirty and that of the same man at sixty-seven must be so different on many vital points that they are in effect the outlooks of two different persons. Even allowing for a larger measure of consistent and enduring individuality in the character of George Meredith than is usual in most men, he could not have escaped entirely the common lot, and his overhauling of these early novels in his late years is to be regretted, as only less in degree than if some strange hand had done the work. The success of the first collected edition and then of the ' New 38 GEORGE MEREDITH Popular Edition,' in seventeen volumes, which began appearing in 1897, must have been gratifying to the novelist, if under the curling wave of seventy years he had any lingering wish to see his works in demand at the bookshops. Since that was a matter of indifference to him more than thirty years earlier — if we are to accept as auto- biographical certain passages in ' Sandra Belloni ' — it is probable that the success of these collected editions, as well as of the pocket edition of 1901-1905, was a source of greater gratification to his friends than to the veteran novelist himself. Perhaps among the few official honours that came to Meredith he valued most that of President of the Society of Authors, to which he was elected on the death of Lord Tennyson in 1892. After all, the only people who can honour a great author are they who form the Republic of Letters, and the Society of Authors, representa- tive as it is both of the leaders and the rank and file, provides in its presidency the most distinguished position any author can be invited to occupy by the suffrages of his fellow-workers. There was not a moment's hesitation as to who should be asked to accept the office after Death had laid his hand on Tennyson. Six years later Meredith attained his seventieth year and the occasion was marked by the presentation of a congratulatory address signed by a number of men and women of foremost distinction in the arts. The text and signatories arc here given. To George Meredith Some comrades in letters who have long valued your work send you a cordial greeting upon your 70th birthday. You have attained the first rank in literature after many years of inadequate recognition. From first to last you have been true to yourself and have always aimed at the highest mark. We are rejoiced to know that merits once perceived by only a few are now appreciated by a wide and steadily growing circle. We wish you many years of life, during which you may continue to do good work, cheered by the consciousness of good work already achieved, and encouraged by the certainty of a hearty welcome from many sympathetic readers. (Signed) J. M. Barrie. R. B. Haldane. Walter Besant. Thomas Hardy. Augustine Birrell. Frederic Harrison. James Bryce. "John Oliver Hobbes." Austin Dobson. Henry James. Conan Doyle. R. C. Jebb. OUTLINE OF LIFE AND WORK, 1874-1909 39 Edmund Gosse. Andrew Lang. W. E. H. Lecky. Anne Thackeray Ritchie. M. London. Henry Sidgwick. F. W. Maitland. Leslie Stephen. Alice Meynell. Algernon Charles Swinburne. John Morley. Mary A. Ward. F. W. H. Myers. G. F. Watts. J- Payn. Theodore Watts-Dunton. Frederick Pollock. Wolseley. Ten years later, in the midst of all the extraordinary attentions which his eightieth birthday evoked from press and public, it must have been with something of sorrow, mingled with thankfulness for the prolongation of his own quiet eventide of life, that the recipient of that warmly human and unaffected document — in this comparing favourably with the later address — noted that Death had taken toll of no less than eleven out of the thirty who signed the letter, his personal friend, Leslie Stephen, among them. In acknow- ledging the letter, Meredith had written : The recognition that I have always worked honestly to my best, coming from the men and women of highest distinction, touches me deeply. Pray let it be known to them how much they encourage and support me. Nearly twenty years ago a writer who was not without personal knowledge of the novelist said : ' His second wife lies buried in the churchyard close by his cottage, and he speaks with quiet content of soon going to rest beside her.' He had only said good-bye to the ' fifties ' then, and he was to live into the ' eighties ' through many years of serene and honoured leisure. Indeed he seems to have grown younger in spirit as he passed with failing steps through the later years of life, for we find him delivering himself thus to an ' interviewer ' : I suppose I should regard myself as growing old — I am seventy- four. But I do not feel to be growing old either in heart or mind. I still look on life with a young man's eye. I have always hoped I should not grow old as some do — with a palsied intellect, living backwards, regarding other people as anachronisms, because they themselves have lived on into other times, and left their sympathies behind them with their years. Certainly those who saw him at seventy-four saw him as fresh- spirited as he had ever been, saving the unhappy affliction which had stricken his legs and made him, once so given to long walks and athletic exercise, a prisoner of the chair. In the summer of 4 o GEORGE MEREDITH that year — 1902 — he even volunteered an invitation to the members of the Whitefriars Club, a literary fraternity of which he had been elected an honorary member the year before, to pay him a visit at Box Hill, where in July igoo the same literary group had sought and received the privilege of making a pilgrimage to the home of the master. His readiness to entertain such visitors as these — no mere curiosity-hunters, but genuine admirers of the man and artist — seems to have increased in inverse ratio as his strength diminished. Doubtless the feeling that work was done for ever, that the remain- ing years were a contented waiting for the call, and that, after all, there was some genuine pleasure to come thus into personal touch with men and women whom he had long before fascinated with his written word, threw open the door of Box Hill with a hearty Salve ! In the summer following he had a serious illness and many alarmist reports found their way into the papers, always ready to herald the passing of any great contemporary figure and not un- willing to work off their carefully-prepared biographies— already in type, perhaps ! One of the morning papers — doubtless the same authority that assured its readers that the second Mrs. Meredith ' lived only a few months after her marriage ' — asserted that our illustrious countryman had 'periods of partial consciousness,' so critical was his condition. This drew from the invalid a telegram to the sober Westminster, so characteristic that it must be given here : Dorking report of me incorrect ; though why my name should be blown about, whether I am well or ill, I do not know. The difficulty with me is to obtain unconsciousness ; but sleep, on the whole, comes fairly. I am going on well enough. This for friends who will have been distressed by the report. His illness was certainly serious, but it is clear from this that the citadel of his mind was unassailed, as it had ever been, through all the assaults of illness on the body. Humour still dwelt there, and the characteristic phrases came unforced for the telegram, which is at once familiar and literary. Not many months later, his old friend Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton had the pleasure of addressing him in the following beautiful sonnet, printed in the Saturday Review on the occasion of his seventy-sixth birthday : This time, dear friend — this time my birthday greeting Comes heavy of funeral tears — I think of you, And say, ' Tis evening- with him — that is true — But evening bright as noon, if faster fleeting ; Still he is spared — while Spring and Winter, meeting, Photograph : Hollyer George Meredith After the portrait by G. F. Watts, R.A. OUTLINE OF LIFE AND WORK, 1874-1909 41 Clasp hands around the roots 'neath frozen dew — To see the 'Joy of Earth' break forth anew, And hear it on the hillside warbling-, bleating.' Love's remnant melts and melts ; but, if our days Are swifter than a weaver's shuttle, still, Still Winter has a sun — a sun whose rays Can set the young lamb dancing on the hill, And set the daisy, in the woodland ways, Dreaming of her who brings the daffodil. The allusion to ' funeral tears ' arose from the recent death of Francis Hindes Groome, the famous gypsologist and intimate friend of the poet. It was about this time that an old rumour as to his being engaged upon his autobiography was revived. There has never been any show of evidence for such a project, much though every admirer 01 the novelist would have welcomed an autobiographic work. It is likely enough that after seventy the mood of reminiscence had come upon him, but the strength had failed, and all that we have of original work from him in the thirteen years following ' The Amazing Marriage,' save an occasional poem, are ' Odes in Con- tribution to the Song of French History ' and ' A Reading of Life. ' In July 1905 he was appointed by King Edward to the Order of Merit, a distinction which had the whole-hearted approval of the entire literary world, recognising in this a worthier official cachet than the common bourgeoise baronetcy or knighthood. In the October following, the aged novelist met with a serious accident in a very simple way. He was being assisted by his manservant to a chair in his sitting-room when he slipped and broke two bones of his left leg. It was discovered, happily, that the fracture was a simple and not a compound one, and this, together with the calmness and cheerfulness of the patient, whose spirits never drooped under the pain of the fracture or the restraint of the mending, promised a speedy recovery. In consequence of the accident, how- ever — though it is doubtful if he could have gone in any case— he was unable to attend the King's Investiture at Buckingham Palace, so the Registrar and Secretary of the Central Chancery of the Orders of Knighthood proceeded to Leatherhead, by his Majesty's com- mands, and conveyed to the illustrious prisoner of Box Hill the insignia and Warrant of the Order of Merit. By Christmas, although not entirely free from the result of his accident, he was about again in his bath-chair making his old familiar journeys along the friendly roads about the hill. The press had now come to take so keen an interest in the patriarch of 42 GEORGE MEREDITH English letters that his every movement and utterance had been for some time recorded with the detail which is usually reserved for the Prime Minister or a noted murderer or bigamist. It is odd, for instance, to find the Daily Mail growing lyrical, after this fashion, of George Meredith's Christmas Day, 1905 : Bathed in delightful sunshine and favoured with a beautifully mild and clear atmosphere, the neighbourhood of Box Hill yesterday resembled a Riviera resort. It was doubtless these spring-like conditions that tempted Mr. George Meredith, only just convalescent from his broken leg, to spend over an hour of his Christmas in the famous fir-bordered lane which climbs a tortuous way from the Mickleham Road to the summit of the hill. Warmly clad in a rich fur-lined overcoat and a grey cap, the veteran novelist was gently wheeled by feminine bands in an extended bath-chair, and his face betokened joy at being abroad in his sacred Surrey. ' In such a matchless morning both my man and my donkey are spending their Christmas out of harness,' he explained genially to a Daily Mail correspondent, who inquired after his welfare, ' and so, perforce, I had to be wheeled. ' As to his general condition the eminent novelist mentioned that during the past few days he had found sleep an unwilling guest. This fact was chiefly due to his injured limb, which had mended less rapidly than was expected, and which still gave him considerable pain, especially at night. As he himself pointed out, Mr. Meredith will be seventy-eight next year, and the effects of a serious accident at his time of life cannot be easily shaken off. ' But I am glad to be out of doors this Christmas,' he added, drawing himself up in his travelling chair to view the Surrey landscape. ' I should have been sorry to miss a day like this. ' Mr. Meredith continues to take a keen interest in outside affairs, such as the tragic events in Russia and the forthcoming general election. The last paragraph touches a feature of Meredith's later vears that is noteworthy. There was no public question, national or inter- national, engaging the mind of the country, but George Meredith was asked to express his opinion upon it. An episode of the Boer War, the future of Liberalism, the Marriage Question, Anglo-French relationships, the decadence of Athletics, any topic of the day that gave an interviewer an excuse for a run down to Box Hill and a knock at the door of Flint Cottage, and behold the results next morning in a prominent part of his paper. The literary recluse had in his old age become a sort of intellectual umpire to whom both sides applied for counsel, though he did not hesitate to label himself OUTLINE OF LIFE AND WORK, 1874-1909 43 Radical. The very multiplicity and magnitude of many of the interests which had stirred the public in his later years, to say nothing of the splendid issues of his middle life, leave one wonder- ing how he could ever have so misjudged his age as when, with evident approval, he makes Adrian in ' Richard Feverel ' quote Diaper Sandoe, beginning : 'An Age of petty tit for tat, An Age of busy gabble : An Age that's like a brewer's vat, Fermenting for the rabble ! ' and ending : ' From this unrest, lo, early wreck'd, A Future staggers crazy, Ophelia of the Ages, deck'd With woeful weed and daisy ! ' These verses he wrote in the full tide of his lusty manhood, when he was something of a rebel to his age ; but from many utterances of his later years he had unmistakably come to the conclusion that his own age compared well with any that had preceded it, not merely in its magnificent issues, but in its wide and broadening humanism. It is indeed difficult to think that he ever, save for some passing moment, thought of his own time as an age of petty tit for tat, when none was more profoundly interested than he in the great events of European History, to say nothing of the American Civil War, and the freeing of Italy, which last has been so grandly celebrated by him in one of his masterpieces of fiction. Indeed, among the very latest efforts of his pen, written in his eightieth year, were the verses ' For the Centenary of Garibaldi,' appearing exactly forty years after his ' Vittoria. ' Thus his latest note is in praise of liberty and also in praise of nature — the two passions of his life — for to the issue of the Country House, July 1908, a periodical published by his son's firm, one of the latest products of his pen, a characteristic nature poem, was contributed. For the Milton tercentenary in December of the same year he also wrote some noble lines, still holding aloft the banner of Liberty. His eightieth birthday was an event of such historic importance that I purpose dealing with it at some length in the next chapter of this work. He was spared to see another birthday, and though he held to life by the merest thread, his mind remained as vigorous as of yore. A chill contracted at the end of the second week in May proved too much for his enfeebled frame, and in the early 44 GEORGE MEREDITH hours of Tuesday, May 18, 1909, he died of heart failure. He was practically conscious to the last : he had not died ' from the head downwards. ' He ' died facing the dawn and his end came in perfect peace,' says one newspaper account. ' He welcomed death as serenely as he had encountered life, and met the end with calm courage. ' The decision of the Dean and Chapter against his inter- ment in Westminster was generally regretted and not a little resented, though, truly, George Meredith has left so great a monu- ment of his own creation that the Abbey may be left for the enshrining of lesser men. His remains were cremated at Woking and the ashes were interred at Dorking on Saturday, May 22, the funeral being strictly private. On the same day a memorial service was held in Westminster Abbey. Having now outlined the leading features of a long and noble life spent in single devotion to great literature, and for that reason lacking in event and movement, the present chapter may be con- cluded with some words of Meredith's own, in which the aim of his literary life is briefly stated. The passage occurs in a letter to a contributor to the Harvard Monthly, who some years ago wrote in that review a study of the novelist which gave him pleasure. Meredith wrote : When at the conclusion of your article on my works you say that a certain change in public taste, should it come about, wiil be to some extent due to me, you hand me the flowering wreath I covet. For I think that all right use of life and the one secret of life, is to pave ways for the firmer footing of those who succeed us ; and as to my works I know them faulty, think them of worth only where they point and aid to that end. In a note on his eightieth birthday the Spectator put the historic view of his life into happy phrase when it said : ' Mr. Meredith is the last of a great generation, for, intensely modern as he is in so many ways, he began to publish verse before Wordsworth died, and as a novelist he was the contemporary of Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot. His life spanned, indeed, the whole Victorian age. And what an age was that ! Inspired by Tennyson and Browning's songs, and depicted by the brush of Watts, its men, its causes, its discoveries, and its revolutions are unsurpassed in history. ' In this great generation, George Meredith is assuredly one of the great figures. Ill THE EIGHTIETH BIRTHDAY A health, a ringing health, unto the king Of all our hearts to-day ! But what proud song Should follow on the thought, nor do him wrong? Except the sea were harp, each mirthful string The lovely lightning of the nights of Spring, And Dawn the lonely listener, glad and grave With colours of the sea-shell and the wave In brightening eye and cheek, there is none to sing ! Drink to him, as men upon an Alpine peak Brim one immortal cup of crimson wine, And into it drop one pure cold crust of snow, Then hold it up, too rapturously to speak, And drink — to the mountains, line on glittering line, Surging away into the sunset-glow. Alfred Noyes, in the Daily Graphic, February 12, 1908. In recent literary annals there have been two events, each unique in its way, and both significant of the remarkable interest taken by the public of our time in the lives of its leading men of letters. The display of public sympathy with Mr. Rudyard Kipling, when he lay at death's door in New York in 1899, was something quite without parallel in the personal history of our literature. The cable tingled with messages and bulletins concerning the young author, as though he had been a reigning monarch and the fate of a dynasty hung upon his life. Mr. Kipling, by some subtle stroke of genius — for it is futile to deny the tremendous power of the man — had got hold of the mob not less than, by sheer craftsmanship, he had captured the literati, and thus an immense public, coterminous with the Anglo- Saxon peoples, was avid of news about one who had stirred it deeply. Hence, perhaps, that wonderful outburst of international sympathy when he was pasing through a crisis of ill-health. Nine years later the celebration of the eightieth birthday of George Meredith was the occasion of even greater journalistic com- motion. But we must not suppose that none of the authors of past times were the subjects of similar solicitude to their contemporaries, 45 46 GEORGE MEREDITH though incidents equal in significance to those just described are lacking in our literary chronicles. The publicity of the modern press is a new factor that accounts for much in this connection. We know that so keen was the public interest in the development of Richard- son's sluggish romances that when the part of ' Pamela ' containing the account of that tearful creature's wedding was published and circulated throughout England there were villages where the church bells were rung as in celebration of an actual marriage. We know that Scott, Byron, Dickens, Thackeray, Tennyson, and many another famous author received in his lifetime public homage of the most remarkable kind ; but, all that notwithstanding, we may justly describe the celebration of Meredith's eightieth birthday as one of the most notable events in the history of modern letters. Acting under a common impulse, every journalist and man of letters in a position to render homage to the most illustrious of living authors took occasion to do so, with the result that what was doubt- less in each case a spontaneous act of hero-worship assumed in the mass — so widespread was the celebration — the appearance of having been 'engineered,' to quote the phrase of a cynical critic. It was truly ' the event of the week ' ; every daily newspaper, from the Times down to the least provincial evening sheet, consecrated a leading article to the ' grand old man of letters,' who masqueraded for that day in many a quaint and unusual guise, according to the intimacy of the writers with his work and personality. The news columns of the papers were brisk for days with paragraphs and Meredithiana ; the press agencies telegraphed and cabled tiny ' interviews ' with the novelist to the ends of earth ; a motley crowd of reporters haunted the precincts of Box Hill, as keen as if a murder had been committed at Flint Cottage ; the least incident of the birthday of the veteran was telegraphed to head-quarters ; photographers had been busy * snap- ping ' him when he came forth in his donkey-chaise ; pages of illustra- tions — most of them deplorable — were given in the papers ; there were numerous ' special memoirs,' in which every writer contrived to quote that old familiar stanza from ' Love in the Valley,' beginning : Happy, happy hour when the white star hovers and the equally hackneyed lines : Into the breast that gives the rose Shall I with shuddering fall? Never, in sooth, was so much written and printed in the space of one week about any man who had not achieved the distinction of THE EIGHTIETH BIRTHDAY 47 committing a singularly revolting crime. So magnificent a tribute to mere literary genius and intellectual greatness made one feel that the British press had taken leave of its senses. But we all rejoiced, and some of us who had been at pains to study the works and follow the life-story of the master derived a good deal of amusement from reading many a ' special memoir ' that had obviously been written by a journalist whose entire knowledge of his subject was at second-hand. The splendid muddle of indiscriminate praise, the absurdly invidious epithets — such as ' King of Novelists,' ' Last of the Great Victorians,' ' Our One Great Novelist ' — flung abroad with the prodigal hand of the journalist who would to-morrow be ' writing up ' the latest jewel robbery or the art of Phyllis Dare, was all very embarrassing ; but it was a pleasant change. Of course, there was much solid and valuable appreciation amidst all this froth ; all the great London journals of good repute discharg- ing their parts with becoming dignity, and many of the provincial dailies touching the occasion to profitable issue. In short, the press did its duty well by one who in his day had done his duty by the press. If there were any person lingering in darkness as to who and what this George Meredith was, and that person read any news- paper on the 13th of February, 1908, he could not well avoid making some acquaintance with the name at least. My purpose in this chapter is to compile from the forbidding mass of these newspaper criticisms and reports an account of the eightieth birthday that may possess some permanent value in the future as a record of a notable event in the career of a great author whose earlier and middle life had been as barren of public interest as his old age was embarrassed therewith. From the soberer chronicles of such journals as the Times, the Telegraph, the Standard and the Pall Mall Gazette it is possible, I think, to construct a useful record of the event. In several of the newspaper chronicles of the scene at Flint Cottage on the birthday there is to be noted a similarity of phrase, indicating that while the correspondent wrote as though he alone of the representatives of the press had been admitted to the presence of the novelist, he must have been one of a select few who had received that privilege together; a modification of the American custom which enables a celebrity to be ' interviewed ' by a squad of reporters from different papers at the same time. Hence some of the obiter dicta which fell from the white-haired philosopher on his birthday are worded somewhat differently in the various accounts; 48 GEORGE MEREDITH but the Telegraph correspondent, whose long article is in every way excellent and has a richer literary flavour than most of the others, seems to have caught the spirit of the occasion in a way that makes his description worthy of quotation here. After a spirited personal sketch of Meredith, he goes on to say : Mr. Meredith commenced the day with his customary drive, although he had to shorten it in order to be back to receive the friends who had come down to Box Hill to congratulate him. 'Picnic ' was again in the shafts, with Cole at his head, and in the absence of his daughter, Mrs. Sturgis, who is out of England at present, Lady Edward Cecil, who is the daughter of his old friend Admiral Maxse, accompanied him. Shortly before noon Mr. Clement Shorter, with his wife, Dora Siegerson Shorter, and Mr. Edward Clodd, came down from London to present the memorial of con- gratulation on his eightieth birthday, signed by dozens of his old friends and colleagues, not only in poetry and fiction, but in politics, art, the drama and journalism, in England and America. The pre- sentation, needless to say, was a purely informal function, and Mr. Shorter, after a stay of half-an-hour, left with his friends, declaring that he had not for some years seen Mr. Meredith in better health. A little later I was received by Mr. Meredith. He was sitting in an arm-chair between the fire and a window that looks on to his beloved downs, surrounded by his books. On every table were dozens of telegrams of felicitation. In each corner of the room and out in the little hall were bouquets of flowers. A wonderful old leonine man, with a face like Hermes grown old, the long, white hair lying loosely about his ears, with a rug round his knees and his hand to his ear, Mr. Meredith was already engaged in conversation, now listening, now speaking. In repose the face took on an almost feminine grace of expression. When he spoke the deep, rich, resonant voice, and the animation of the countenance, seemed to give added stature to the aged frame. Much of what he said had refer- ence to the many friends who had wired to him on his birthday, and was of a purely personal nature. In everything that concerned him- self and the homage being paid to him on his birthday Mr. Meredith was characteristically modest. ' I have been climbing the stairs for eighty years,' he exclaimed, " and I have done with the pulpit. ' 1 Pointing to the sheaves of telegrams lying about him, he had previously exclaimed, ' They make me think too much of myself. It is a kind of harvest that I wish could have been reaped by a younger man.' But stung, as one might say, by references to affairs of a more 1 Another version of this epigrammatic phrase is as follows : ' When a man has climbed the steps of eighty years he should not use them as a pulpit.' THE EIGHTIETH BIRTHDAY 49 public and less private nature, he launched out with characteristic vigour. ' Suffragists ! ' said the great delineator of the female character. ' I have always stood up for the intellectual capacities of women. I like to see the combative spirit in them. It is as it should be. Cer- tainly they should be given the use of intellectual weapons. But I am not In agreement with anything that is bad taste and bad strategy. These rowdy scenes ! No ! Not that. That is not the way. There is a better. I like to see the combative spirit in men and women. After the Napoleonic wars England settled down to a time of pleasure and ease — too much pleasure, too much contentment to be pleasurable and to forget. An Amyclean case ! England laughed at soldiering. It was ashamed of seeing its officers in their uniforms. We need to be reminded of these times about the Napole- onic wars. It is an ozone. The Territorial Army ! I know my dear friend Mr. Haldane. He is a strong man. But for myself I go further. ' I believe that universal service should be adopted — a nation of soldiers ; the spirit of the soldier in every walk of life. ' Life is a long and continuous struggle. It is necessarily com- bative. Otherwise we cease. Let the struggle go on. Let us be combative ; but let us also be kind. ' As for me, I do not wish to talk about myself. I do not want you to write much about me. Say that I am well, and that you found me sitting in my chair, delivering myself freely of very Radical sentiments.' One would have liked to have put many other ' points ' to the great novelist. . . . But the novelist had a trying afternoon before him, and the habitual calm of his home life was being continuously interrupted with the arrival of telegrams, flowers and visitors. Shortly before four o'clock Mr. Anthony Hope Hawkins, Mr. Israel Zangwill and Mr. Herbert Trench, the author of ' Apollo and the Seaman,' presented themselves at the house to hand the novelist the address of congratulation on behalf of the Society of Authors, of which he is president. Mr. Hawkins and Mr. Trench came from London, Mr. Zangwill from Dorchester. They were asked to tea (Mr. and Mrs. William Meredith also being present), and charmed with another literary causerie. The subject of Mr. Meredith's poetry, of poetry generally, and of the unfinished novel (' The Journalist ') again cropped up, and the novelist outlined a new story, to be called, perhaps, ' The Benefactor of the Race,' or some such title, which should deal with the efforts of a man who wanted to improve humanity and was for ever getting into quarrels in endeavouring to do so, and who could not marry the lady he desired to in fulfilment of his System, etcetera. ' Why don't you write it yourself?' he was asked. Mr. Meredith broke into that genial torrential laugh of his that electrifies every £ 50 GEORGE MEREDITH one who hears him, and which some one has said is the merry brother of his serious voice. ' They would want me to cut out the excrescences,' he replied. 'No, no! Somebody else must write it. I give them the idea. ' 'Let us have it; we want it, "excrescences" and all,' it was persisted. But the great novelist only laughed. Did his hearers fully realise — did they really believe — that the grand old man before them has far exceeded the allotted Three Score Years and Ten? With the afternoon sun now streaming through the window on to the leonine head and locks, colouring it like to ' a shock of corn that cometh in his season,' were they not illusioned into the vision of the Prophet of Sweet Sanity as he was forty years ago? For myself, I felt that my own brief interview with him was of that fleeting but wonderful description that only the true spirit of genius — the very presence of the Spirit of Comedy — could have stamped so indelibly, and yet so intangibly, on the mind of a visitor. It was, after all, only an impression. It was the impression not of a great man, upon whose heart Time had laid its hand to ' deaden its vibrations,' but one to whom the prospect of the near close of life had set up a renewed youthful- ness, a renewed ardour, and a renewed response to that Mother Earth and her Children, which he has loved and written about so well. This is indeed a very pleasant and acceptable picture which the adroit pen of the Telegraph correspondent sketches for us. All who saw the novelist and wrote about him on his eightieth birthday express their surprise at his apparent vigour and his cheerfulness, despite his infirmity. A paragraph that concludes the Daily News' account of the day indicates how sincere was the admiration which the sage of Box Hill had awakened in the heart of many an unknown Student of his works : All day there has been a silent pilgrimage to Box Hill which Mr. Meredith has not seen or heard of — the pilgrimage of those who know the man only through the leaves of his books. They have come by road and rail ; they have stood for a minute or two outside Flint Cottage, registering their tributes in their hearts, and have passed on. The memorial which was presented to Meredith was mounted on vellum and beautifully bound in dark blue crushed Levant morocco, the monogram ' G. M. ' being worked in each corner in gold, while the inside lining was of cream-watered silk. The address read as follows : THE EIGHTIETH BIRTHDAY 51 To GEORGE MEREDITH, O.M. Upon his eightieth birthday. Dear Mr. Meredith, — Many of your fellow-countrymen will join in felicitating you upon this your eightieth birthday. We desire on our own behalf to thank you for the splendid work in prose and poetry that we owe to your pen — to say how much we rejoice in the growing recognition of this work — and to thank you for the example you have set to the world of lofty ideals embodied not only in books but in life. Most heartily do we wish for you a continuance of health and happiness. The names of Meredith's old friends and literary colleagues, A. C. Swinburne, Mr. Thomas Hardy, Viscount Morley and Mr. Frederick Greenwood, were inscribed upon the vellum, and there were some 250 other signatures, of which a classified list was given in the Times. Among these were so many men and women of the highest distinction that the few who did not exactly add to the weight of the memorial were lost, so to say, in the general brilliance of the throng. One could have wished, however, that the phrasing of the address had taken on a somewhat more literary flavour. His own countrymen were not alone in their felicitations of the great writer. Although several distinguished Americans had signed the general memorial when in England, a separate address reached him from the United States, the text of which and the signatories were as follow : To GEORGE MEREDITH The subscribers, American men and women of letters, desire to unite with their English brethren in offering to you upon your eightieth birthday cordial good wishes for your health and happiness. We are grateful to you for the works with which you have enriched our common literature, and we trust that the remainder of your life may be brightened by the knowledge of the admiration and respect of a multitude of friends, unknown as well as known, in both hemispheres. Henry Adams, John Burroughs, G. W. Cable, John W. Cunliffe, Richard Watson Gilder, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Julia Ward Howe, W. D. Howells, Charles Eliot Norton, Agnes Repplier, Charles G. D. Roberts, F. H. Sykes, Edward Clarence Stedman. The birthday was art eminently suitable opportunity for certain of the novelist's fellow-writers to pen some appreciative words on E 2 52 GEORGE MEREDITH the doyen of their craft, and the Daily News gathered a little sheaf of such pleasant mementoes of the occasion, some of which were distinctly interesting. Mr. Thomas Hardy excused himself thus : I have known Mr. Meredith for so long a time — forty years within a few months — and his personality is such a living one to me, that I cannot reach a sufficiently detached point of view to write a critical estimate of his great place in the world of letters. Madam Sarah Grand wrote : George Meredith and age ! The two ideas are incompatible. You cannot reckon him in years. He has come and he will stay for all time. The great virile voice we know so well and love has spoken truth, and truth is everlasting. Sir Gilbert Parker thus : It is given to few men to approach their latter days with an accumulating reputation ; but this has been granted to George Meredith. . . . He has been an inspiration to some of the best intellects of our time, and he must remain a fountain from which pure waters may be drawn for generations of lovers of literature yet to come. He has never been a fashion ; he is a master and is permanent. Of peculiar interest was the letter from Mr. William Michael Rossetti, who had known Meredith at the outset of his career and reviewed the ' Poems ' of 185 1 at the time of their appearance. Thus fifty-seven years after, wrote Mr. Rossetti about the same poet : With some shame I acknowledge that I am not very well ac- quainted with the writings of George Meredith, whether prose or poetry; and I regret to say this all the more because at one period of my life I was rather closely associated with him personally. I was, however, one of the early admirers of his first volume of poems, 185 1, and I then expressed my admiration in print. I know some of his other writings — especially ' Shagpat,' 'Modern Love,' 'The Egoist,' and 'The Tragic Comedians.' It has become almost a commonplace by now to recognise — as I do— the supremacy of Meredith in certain qualities : brilliancy, insight, pungency, incisiveness. His discernment is extreme, perhaps excessive, in that it leads him into the constant exhibition of his own 'cleverness,' and makes him rather the student and the dis- sector of men and women than their sympathetic delineator, and intricates his style into scintillations of epigram, the terms of which are more patent to himself than they always are to his reader. THE EIGHTIETH BIRTHDAY 53 Mr. Edmund Gosse, who had signed both the memorial of 1908 and the congratulatory letter of 1898, touched upon the loss of old friends which the years had brought to the aged author, and went on to say : Inevitably, the long advance of years brings solitude, and Mr. Meredith does not fail to suffer from the glory of his old age. But I rejoice to think that few could suffer less. The friends fall off, but in an imagination so vivid and so fresh as his they follow by his side ; he is attended by them still in a cloud. And if the early companionships withdraw, as withdraw they must, Mr. Meredith has that vitality of genius, that attractive glow of sympathy, which brings new generations around him. He burns in our midst, a steady flame, and more and more the young, with their moth-like spirits, wheel around in adoration and surround him with a palpitating bodyguard. He may be eighty years old to-day, to calculate by the foolishness of mathematics, but in reality he is just so old as, and no older than, the youngest heart that has responded to his fine appeal. But perhaps there was no personal tribute so interesting or so quaintly original in expression as that contributed by Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton to the Daily Graphic. At the outset it must have pleased Meredith himself to find, amid all the ecstatics of the press, that Mr. Watts-Dunton had the sobriety to remind the jour- nalistic world that there was a poet of some eminence, named Algernon Charles Swinburne, who was still alive. Meredith, we may be sure, would have been eager to admit that in European literature his was a name that came second to that of Swinburne. Mr. Watts-Dunton gives a humorous but yet a cogent reason for a certain feeling of dubiety that came upon him as he signed the memorial : Honoured as I must surely feel at being invited to sign such an address, I have to make the confession that I signed it with some dubiety — a dubiety which I should not have felt had the memorial been addressed to an Oriental poet — to a poet of Cathay — to that prince of sonneteers, for instance, the Poet Pin, who, to the great joy of Rossetti, visited London in 1866, and afterwards favoured his guests with his diary. Had the address been to ' the Poet- Laureate and assistant head clerk in the Board of Affairs at Peking, bearing by the honorary licence the button of the third official degree, ' who, while lunching at Woolwich Arsenal, ' composed a couple of sonnets in pentameter during the repast,' I should not, I repeat, have had the least hesitation about the good breeding of signing it. But England and the land of Kubla Khan are two very different 54 GEORGE MEREDITH poetic domains. In the Flowery Land the recipient of such an address would have perfectly understood its import. . . . Through- out Cathay it would have been perfectly understood what such an address meant. For among the Celestials the mere passage of years over any man's head is in itself an honour — in itself a crown of glory. The interest felt in an octogenarian is that of unadulterated reverence. ... It is pleasant to think that on the Parnassus of the Poet Pin, when one bard meets another, the greatest compliment he can show to his fellow is to improvise a sonnet, a rapturous sonnet, exclaiming, ' Brother Bard, how delightfully old you are looking this morning, older than ever ! May your beautiful songs of to-day be worthy of the beautiful ripeness of your years !' . . . The obtuseness of the Anglo-Saxon mind is declared by the way in which English and Americans talk of the old age of a man of genius like Meredith. If it is the fact that no man in health really feels himself to be old, what shall be said about a man of genius like George Meredith, who — as I told one of those who is presenting the memorial — is younger than the youngest now invading his august privacy? The great artist is ever young. . . . All honour then to the youngest writer of our time, except one who is younger still. Yet the younger writer was the first to pass away ; the turf was still loose on Swinburne's grave when the earth was heaped over the coffin of his friend in Dorking churchyard. No useful purpose would be served by preserving a selection of the anonymous ' leading articles ' which appeared in the daily and weekly journals on the eightieth birthday. Most of them met the need of the fleeting hour and were without claim to longer life. But the first paragraph of the Times ' leader ' stated in well- balanced phrase the proper aspect of the occasion, and indeed the whole article was worthy of the best traditions of a journal which, from the first, had been an ardent and reasonable exponent of the genius of George Meredith : Mr. George Meredith is eighty to-day, but still with all the youthfulness of heart and the joy in life and vigorous action which have been the burden of his works for well-nigh sixty years. Those — an ever-growing band — who on the threshold of manhood first felt the thrill of his brave words and drank in the glorious meaning which he gave to earth and all its creatures, will rejoice that he is still with us to learn something of our sense of thankfulness. The debt was for many years felt by only a few ; for long it was but falteringly expressed ; but to-day we all acclaim in him and Mr. Swinburne the two chief glories of our age, the Titans still surviving from that splendid mid-Victorian era of Tennyson and Browning, of Dickens, Thackeray, and William Morris. Moreover, cheap editions of his THE EIGHTIETH BIRTHDAY 55 novels and books written about him bear witness that it is not merely a name that we honour, but that his words, in spite of their difficulty, have made their way home to this English people whom he loves. One little incident of the day is deserving of a record. Mr. W. Clark Russell, the celebrated writer of sea-stories, sent the following letter to the Times : I was not asked to sign the birthday memorial to our great novelist. I should have been proud to do so. Perhaps I did better. I wrote to him a few lines of respectful congratulation. I beg to send you his letter, which I will ask you to return. Mr. Meredith's reference to quantity is a comment upon what I said — that this is the age of words. The publishers ask for words — not ideas, descrip- tion, characterisation, and the like, but words, words, words ; and they get them. I should be sorry not to make one in the vast crowd whose thoughts and affections were with Mr. George Meredith to-day. Meredith's letter in reply to that sent him by Mr. Clark Russell was as follows : Dear Sir, — A kind word to me in my ripe age from a brother of the pen, whose descriptions of bluewater scenes have often given me pleasure, is very welcome. Quantity in production certainly we have, but I notice here and there good stuff, and promise among some of the younger men. Besides, you know the seventh wave. There must be a gathering of the waters before a big surge is thrown on shore. And my observation tells me that the minor work of the present day is altogether superior to that of the mid-Victorian time — and before it. The hour is usually unjust to its own. Yours very truly, George Meredith. Box Hill, Dorking, Jan. 24, 1908. One is glad that Mr. Clark Russell was omitted from those invited to sign the memorial — to which less eminent names than his were attached — since his own letter to the master-novelist drew forth so charming a reply. Old age is seldom the time of generous sympathy with the new generation, and Mr. Watts-Dunton's denial that genius ever experiences old age is supported by this characteristic Mere- dithian letter. On his eightieth birthday the heart of the great writer was obviously with the younger men, those who in their careers were where he had been nearly sixty years before them. And as the hearts of these were with the master who has influenced so many of them — not always, alas ! to the happiest issues, though 56 GEORGE MEREDITH the fault is not with him — Meredith must have experienced on the 12th of February, 1908, the pleasantest of all the emotions described by his disciple Stevenson when he wrote, ' I like to fancy that a grateful spirit gives as good as it gets.' Doubtless he had long got over that fear of becoming a celebrity which, twenty years before, in writing to a correspondent, he had entertained. In every sense, then, was this eightieth birthday memorable : it was worth living for. When we think of the posthumous adulation of great writers, from Dante to Burns, whose lives might have been so sweetened by a mere tincture of the praise and admiration lavished over their ashes, we must conclude that George Meredith was singularly happy in the afterglow of fame which warmed and lighted the long and tranquil evening of his life. Hater of sham and seeker of true worth, Wise with your nine-and-seventy summer-tides, With eye undimmed and youth that still abides To love the dawn and things of tender birth, Be with us still to make that mighty mirth That shook the ass-ear'd crown and cracked his sides And loosed your Shibli from the Hall of Brides, To shave all Shagpat follies from the earth. Still may the loved South-wester fan your face, The lark and nightingale delight you still, And corals braid your holly and your yew ; We need your help who found this earth a place Fit for the training of God's sovereign will, And taught us by your life the love you knew. Canon Rawnsley, in the Daily News. IV PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS Some authors are, in their own personalities, greater than their books ; others there are whose written works are greater than themselves. It is easier to state this than to illustrate it, since we may assume that the best of a man usually gets into his books. Perhaps the explanation is that certain personalities are so opulent that not all their writings can exhaust them, while others of lesser mould contrive to rise above their ordinary selves under the afflatus of creative literature. The work of George Meredith is so eminent, so vast in its horizon, so profound in imagination, insight, philo- sophy, in form so rare and individual, that it might be thought a depreciation of its value to place him among the first-named class of authors ; yet that is his place. Whatever the future will do or leave undone in respect to his poetry and romance, it cannot ignore the man. His personality, had he never written ' Modern Love ' or ' The Egoist, ' would still awaken the interest of posterity as that of a great man who moved with firm, sure and stately tread through a great epoch of British history. He will live because he was George Meredith. Dr. Johnson lives by virtue of his splendid insist- ent personality and not by reason of anything he wrote. How much the greater, then, should Meredith's hold on posterity be, since he has given to it a mass of literature which criticism will never allow it to ignore? Any attempt at character-portraiture of such a man must have to meet unusual difficulties. His personality is mountainous, and who has ever read a description of Mont Blanc or of Vesuvius that would serve for all the seasons or all its phases of one day, one hour even? So is it with Meredith; no study by one hand, how- ever gifted, can paint the man for us. We need many sketches from different points of view by many different artists, that from the mass we may disengage a general, or a composite, portrait which will serve to each of us as the nearest we can come by of the actual man. Such is the purpose of the present chapter. Fortun- 57 58 GEORGE MEREDITH ately the portfolio whence one may choose these sketches is amply stocked, and In the end we can hardly fail to gather some serviceable notion of his remarkable personality. There is about all we have read of George Meredith something of that cleansing breeze that blows across the white cliffs of Eng- land's ' surge vexed shore.' His very name has the power to image in our mind a wind-blown figure, erect on a gusty day, forward reaching, wholesome. Mr. Barrie, who touched off Professor Blackie in a telling phrase — ' Blackie carries his breeze with him,' — might have done as much by Meredith had he known him in his lusty manhood. But I feel that Meredith, too, must have carried his breeze with him. For though he was timid and sensitive as a boy, ' at eighteen,' as he once remarked in conversation, he ' deter- mined not to be afraid again,' and we can well believe he speedily schooled himself to that courageous outlook on life which his clear and steady eye, no less than his written word, suggested. Mr. Justin McCarthy in his ' Reminiscences ' has given us a graphic sketch of him in middle life : I think the first impression which George Meredith made on me was that of extraordinary and exuberant vitality. When I saw him for the first time, he had left his younger days a long way behind him, and yet he had the appearance and the movements of one endowed with a youth that could not fade ; energy was in every movement ; vital power spoke in every gesture. Be loved bodily exercises of all kinds ; he delighted to take long brisk walks — ' spins,' as he called them — along the highways and the byways of the neighbourhood ; and he loved to wander through the woods, and to lie in the grass, and I have no doubt he would have enjoyed climbing the trees. He seemed to have in him much of the tempera- ment of the fawn : he seemed to have sprung from the very bosom of Nature herself. His talk was wonderful, and, perhaps, not the least wonderful thing about it was that it seemed so very like his writing. Now it was Richard Feverel who talked to you, and now Adrian Harley, and then Beauchamp— not that he ever repeated any of the recorded sayings of these men, but that he talked as one could imagine any of them capable of talking on any suggested subject. . . . He was a man of strong likings and dislikings, in letters and in art; his very prejudices had a charm in them because they gave him such admirable opportunities for scattering new and bewildering fancies around his subject. Like Matthew Arnold, he had a strong sympathy with the Celtic spirit in poetry and in literature generally ; but nobody could be less like Matthew Arnold in his manner and in his expression. He could PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 59 rattle off humorous verse, especially of the comic or satirical order, at will ; and I dare say he felt a certain gratification now and then in utterly bewildering his hearers. . . . Meredith, as I have said, loved all manner of bodily exercises ; and, indeed, it amazed me when I first used to visit him, to see a man, no longer young, indulge in such feats of strength and agility. It delighted him to play with great iron weights, and to throw heavy clubs into the air and catch them as they fell, and twirl them round his head as if they had been light bamboo canes. I remember wonder- ing, indeed, sometimes, whether such exercises and such feats of strength were not taxing too far the physical powers of a man who had already passed his prime, and whether over-taxed nature would not some day show that she had been taxed too far. But, at the same time, the general impression which George Meredith gave one was that of the fawn-like creature, the child of Nature who must always be young, as Nature herself is always young. I do not think I ever met a man in whom the physical and the mental forces were such absolute rivals and equals as they seemed to be in George Meredith at the time when I first had the happiness of knowing him. Meredith had already entered his sixtieth year when Miss Flora Shaw's (Lady Lugard) brilliant study of his work was published in the New Princeton Review of March, 1887. This is one of the earliest glimpses of the man— the walker and talker — that appeared in the press : At the foot of Box Hill, in one of the lovely valleys of the Surrey downs, a cottage stands, half hidden by encircling trees. A little space of flowers spreads before it, an old yew hedge screens the garden from curious passing eyes. Within, for the privileged, who pass the gate, an apple-bordered walk leads up the slope to a terrace underneath some hanging woods, where Mr. Meredith has built himself a study. Here, toward sunset, the fortunate may meet Mr. Meredith himself coming down between the apple-trees. He is serviceably shod, he usually carries a stout stick in his hand, the head — iron-grey now — is held erect, the eyes kindle to light beneath thoughtfully knit brows, the mouth, for those who know him, seems ever ready to break into sonorous speech. He has come down prepared to walk and talk. These walks and talks are among the great enjoyments of his friends, and as round the neighbourhood of Rydal Water in an older generation, so round the neighbourhood of Box Hill now must hang many a lasting asso- ciation of intellectual pleasure. It was my good fortune to find my- self in his company on the turf back of Box Hill one brilliant, breezy morning. Our eyes travelled over the valley where park woods, russet with the changing leaf, clustered beneath the box and juniper of surrounding slopes, and threw into vivid contrast the yews of 60 GEORGE MEREDITH Norbury, which are asserted to have held their place for upwards of two thousand years. West of the valley the greens and orange rolled skyward, bearing a tower solitary upon its highest point. Southward, the Weald of Sussex rolled under light October mists to Brighton downs, and legendary glimpses of the sea. And while we mounted, with the horizon widening beneath us, we spoke of the share the intellect has had in human development. Our talk was of the nature of Socratic dialogue, slight and tentative remark on one side serving only to mark the paragraphs of full discourse upon the other. Following Miss Shaw's slight glimpse of Meredith in his outdoor garb, shod for walking and pouring out brilliant talk on every topic, comes the first, and surely the most charmingly written, account of a visit to him at Box Hill. Signed ' W. M. F. ' (William Morton Fullerton), the article appeared in the Boston Advertiser (U.S.A.), December 17, 1888. Mr. Fullerton's most admirable essay, following Miss Shaw's brilliant critical review, introduced Meredith to America twenty years ago. It gives a picture of the novelist in the early years of what we may call his period of world- fame, and a pleasanter picture we could not wish to have : It was an almost Indian summer afternoon which I had taken for this journey, and as we walked down the country road the trees, I noted, had turned colour on the side of the hill. Mr. Meredith met me with his nervous little dachshund at the station. He had his stout walking-stick and his light grey English walking-suit to match, with just a dash of red at the neck, and he was evidently in the midst of the afternoon jaunt which it is his wont to take. Iron- grey hair with ripples in it came out from under his round cloth hat the same material as his coat. A bright eye, a straight nose, a compact, lithe, broad-shouldered figure, a person with fine breezi- ness in all his movements, and a strong step upon the earth without a touch of uncertainty in it, and all confidence that the ground was sufficient to support him, as he measured it with buoyant stride, and chatted on to the swinging of his cane — that was Mr. Meredith as I first saw him. The first impression was certainly striking. The last impression when, at the fire, head uncovered, he sat in a dark coat after dinner, was not less striking. But until I saw him thus I did not discover how exceedingly handsome as well as animated his face is. I was immediately impressed with the splendidly healthy tone and superabundant life of the man. There was vigour and sanity at his way of looking at things, and no sentimentalism. One need not talk with Mr. Meredith to discover his hatred of sham and sentimentality; this is the prominent key-note of his work. But I PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 61 had it anew impressed upon me in a fashion that carried with it at the time all the force of irrefutable demonstration. It is always a nice process, that of moving off from the shore out of the shallows into the full stream of conversation; and in that delicate operation I, when it came to my turn, had done a good deal of futile splash- ing in the water, making some wholly obvious and commonplace reference to the changing leaves, and the sombreness of their colour in comparison with that of our American foliage, thanks to the maples ; and I finished with a platitude about the English hues being more pleasing, as they were less obtrusive and suggestive of the dying year, which meant the flickering of one more series of candles on another Christmas night that would never return. But how axiomatically unfortunate ! Mr. Meredith had no place — and justly too, for I had said what I had said with only a half-hearted sincerity, as some authors pad their books to fill up — Mr. Meredith had no place for sentimentality of that sort. What was there in the thought of the passing years that should be sad? It was life, more life and fuller, for which men should be ever seeking, to be sure. But life was not to be had by whining into a past that had turned tail and fled. Rather, men must look up bravely, planted on the honest present, to the problems of the pressing future, never content to live in a fool's paradise, but always courting activity, and making use of moments as they came, so bravely, so well, that such moments would be quite transformed into the energy of character, not left behind to haunt you like sloughed chrysalises of vanished butterfly hopes and impulses. How eloquently he did crush my poor thought, which was altogether unworthy to be sponsor for such eloquence. I recalled his saying : ' You may start a sermon from stones to hit the stars.' It was refreshing and encouraging. I felt again the full tonic breeze that I had always found blowing through the pages of Mr. Meredith's books. But Mr. Meredith's fancy ran with that little dog, who was undoubtedly very clever and very ugly. It torments me that I cannot now remember his name. I am sure it was not ' Geist. ' He was into everything, like a curious woman with nerves. It was amusing to hear his master talk to him. On the road as we neared the house we met a vagrant fellow, such as we in America would call a ' tramp, ' who begged and expostulated by voice and gestures (it could not be said of one who pressed his suit with ' My good sirs ' as close upon his heels as he did, that he was a non sequitur) that we should give him something. He was on the road to the poor-house, but certainly would not die a natural death on the way; and Mr. Meredith's reply was good political economy : ' I never give to a man I don't know — I never give to a man I don't know.' And so at last the fellow passed us by. The episode was annoying, and there was nothing to do but to whistle up the dog and amuse ourselves with him. 62 GEORGE MEREDITH Since in the present chapter we are confined as closely as practic- able to matters that concern the individuality of the man, even apart from his home-life, to which our attention will turn in due course, I pass over for the moment Mr. Fullerton's reminiscence of a Box Hill evening, after which he goes on to say : A room that has once heard Mr. Meredith's voice dominating, among other friends, the talk, and out of which he has gone, is like a Greek theatre that has sounded to the echoes of ^Lschylean and Aristophanic drama and has lost the voice of the protagonist and the chorus all at the same time. For Mr. Meredith is both of these at once, without stretch of figure. It is not an uncommon thing to say of an author that he talks just as he writes. But that is literally true of Mr. Meredith. If one will recall one of the familiar pages of those novels it will be evident what I mean, and how very remarkable it is that this statement may be made. But more even than this must be said, because the light sparkle on the foam of his chaffing, and the broad gleam of the blue sky reflected on the clear expanse of his deeper utterances, when the conversation is serious and calm, the iterant insistence of an idea by gesture or repeated look, all these qualities can be seen only face to face with this master of eloquent and spontaneous expression. These are the appropriate atmosphere, as it were, through which we look at the most wonderful Gothic structure in England, Mr. Meredith's style. Mr. Meredith's eloquence is simply exhaustless. His memory is as capacious as De Quincey's, and his fund of ideas is almost beyond measure splendid. Drolleries, witticisms, humours, he has, and a wonderful, unique trick of god-like chaffing ; but these are nothing in comparison with his fancy and play of ideas. ... As I look back now upon that evening, one of the chief impressions which I find is left upon me was Mr. Meredith's almost amphitheatrean powers, the prodigality of his genius, like the prodigality of light. Ben Jonson has said of certain obscure writers of his time that ' their writings need sunshine.' Mr. Meredith's writings frequently need sunshine; but his speech never. This is what the personal contact gives, what the voice, the mouth, the eye, and the laugh may assure us — sunshine. Of all the writers who have been privileged to see Meredith in his own home I find that only one has noted his love of children, and that was Miss Anne Wakeman Lathrop, an American lady, who published an account of her visit to Box Hill in the Idler of November, 1893, from which I take this very attractive picture : Mr. Meredith is fond of children. You remember his vigorous sketches of boys in ' The Ordeal of Richard Feverel,' and are ready PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 63 to believe that your entertaining host loves child-life, as he has already admitted that he loves the society of young people. With the appearance of after-dinner coffee in the drawing-room, arrives a group of little girls and boys, with their mother. These small visitors range from eight to twelve years of age. Instantly you observe the gentlest side of Mr. Meredith's nature. He adapts himself to the children, with a mingling of man of the world polish, and frank, almost boyish, ingenuousness. He does not tower above them, but treats them like miniature men and women, and always with attentive gallantry. The effect on the children is to make them the more polite and earnest than is usual with childhood. A proposition is made by the little folk to be shown some wonderful red-berried bushes in an adjoining park, to which the Merediths have access. Alas ! the key to the gate cannot be found. A disap- pointed maiden remarks tentatively, ' We cannot go without the key. ' On this, Mr. Meredith makes a dance step, throws up his long, slim hands above his head, snaps his fingers as a sort of Castanet prelude, and improvises a brief comic ditty, of which the refrain runs, ' But not without the key, says she, oh ! not without the key. ' This so amuses the children that the song has to be repeated, while their rippling laughter fills all the room. Nor does Mr. Meredith forget to substitute some equally enjoyable treat for his young guests, to make up for their temporary disappointment. Reverting to Mr. McCarthy's description of Meredith's violent exercises, it is to be feared there is reason for supposing that these bodily exertions in which he indulged, out of sheer high spirits, at a time of life when most men have to observe physical caution, may have had something to do with the permanent collapse of his physique in later years. But even when he could no longer take his walks abroad with swinging stride, he remained ' an outdoor man ' and continued, by means of his donkey-chaise, to keep ever in touch with the roads and hedgerows he had loved so well. A writer in Fry's Magazine, of November, 1904, made an interesting little study of the novelist from this point of view, in the course of which he wrote : It is fitting that the greatest living novelist in this vigorous and healthy period should be a prophet of the open air. No one has preached the gospel of the open air more eloquently or more successfully. To the young men who gathered about him like a band of disciples in his early manhood — among whom were Mr. John Morley— the great novelist always gave one sovran piece of advice: 'Live in the open, and study nature.' Much of the philosophy of our age derived its inspiration from this advice. And George Meredith is not the worshipper of nature who 64 GEORGE MEREDITH believes only in star-gazing or in mooning walks. Solitude is good, and lonely, deep-thinking walks are also good ; but games and sports — vigorous and joytul games in the open air are good too. He is a great believer in sport. Everybody, he holds, should learn to delight in outdoor games, and should learn to find pleasure in bodily exercise. Sport is not, according to him, an end in itself, but an important part of Nature's wonderful scheme. You cannot leave it with impunity. ' I have always loved the face of Nature,' he told the writer, ' the dreariest, when a sky was over it — and consented to her spirit. She loves us no better than her other productions, but she signifies clearly that intelligence can make her subservient to our needs : and one proof of that is the joy in a healthy body, causing an increased lucidity of the mind. Therefore, exercise of the body is good, and sport of all kinds to be encouraged. Sport will lead of necessity to observation of Nature. Let us be in the open air as much as possible, engaged in healthy rivalry with our fellows, or with the instructive, elusive game we are after. ' This study of Meredith the outdoor man, from which I have quoted, led a writer in the Daily Chronicle — Mr. R. M. Leonard — to pursue the subject further, by examining the works of the novelist to ascertain how far he had expressed his own passion for outdoor life in his fiction. He found, of course, that there is scarcely one of the novels which does not show evidence of sporting tastes and knowledge : No other novelist is so at home on the cricket-field. Some time ago Mr. E. B. V. Christian called attention to the fact that Dickens is hopelessly at sea in his description of the match between Muggieton and Dingley Dell, while even the author of ' Tom Brown's School Days ' fails on examination. (Both Dickens and Meredith were born in Hampshire, ' the cradle of the game. ') Mr. Meredith's triumph is to be found in ' Evan Harrington ' in his description of the match between Fallowfield and Beckley, when the Countess de Saldar, a daughter of the great Mel, asks to be instructed ' in your creeket. ' in ' Diana of the Crossways ' we become spectators of a game at Copsley, and Diana admits, red- dening, that Redworth looks well in flannels. Nothing in ' The Amazing Marriage ' remains more in the memory than the amazing honeymoon, in which the Earl of Fleet- wood drove his bride straight from the church to a prize-fight. Skepsey's creator evidently has a weakness for the little man's enthusiasm for ' the manly art.' ' You are of opinion,' Skepsey is asked (in ' One of Our Conquerors '), ' that the practice of scientific pugilism offers us compensation for the broken bridge of a nose? ' ' In an increase of manly self-esteem,' comes the reply. ' I do, PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 65 sir, yes.' Skepsey is valorous, too, with singlesticks. Mr. Meredith enjoys rustic encounters — perhaps, as in ' Sandra Belloni,' that he may show the great and amazing magnanimity that is in beer. In ' Rhoda Fleming ' he describes a visit to Epsom, and, in the cosy Pilot Inn, Steeve, the Fairly huntsman, expatiates on fox- hunting : ' To kill 'em in cold blood's beast murder, so it is. What do we do ? We give 'em a fair field — a fair field and no favour ! We let 'em trust to the instincts Nature, she's given 'em; and don't the old woman know best? If they get away, they win the day. All's open and honest, and above board. Kill your rats and kill your rabbits, but leave foxes to your betters. Foxes are gentlemen. You don't understand? Be hanged if they ain't! I like the old fox, and I don't like to see him murdered and exterminated, but die the death of a gentleman, at the hands of gentlemen ' ' And ladies,' sneered the farmer. Above all, as evidence of his personal taste, we have his frequent allusions to the Alps in his novels. Surely after his own sweet Surrey he has loved no other part of earth quite so well as the glorious mountain land. He 'cannot seem to do without it,' said Dr. E. Dick in a lengthy article on ' The Alps in George Meredith's Novels,' published in the Alpine Post at the beginning of 1908, from which the following passages may be taken : From ' Richard Feverel ' down to ' The Amazing Marriage,' the Alps come in at some point or other of the story, frequently with mighty effects on its further development. With him, they are a sort of Presence, like Providence, or Fate, now a souvenir, now a longing, always beautiful, great, friendly. Meredith has expressed his idea of the proper use and function of the Alps in ' The Adventures of Harry Richmond ' ; ' Carry your fever to the Alps, you of minds diseased : not to sit down in sight of them ruminating, for bodily ease and comfort will trick the soul and set you measuring our lean humanity against yonder sublime and infinite ; but mount, rack the limbs, wrestle it out among the peaks ; taste danger, sweat, earn rest : learn to discover ungrudg- ingly that haggard fatigue is the fair vision you have run to earth, and that rest is your uttermost reward. ' 'The Amazing Marriage' is Mr. Meredith's last novel; it is the one in which the Alps loom larger than in any other. Mr. Meredith's language is always rich and of a beautiful transparency when it is about his loved mountains — his readers know how veiled it can be on other topics — their inspiration must have sounded unambiguous, clear peals of purest metals. It is this love of open-air exercise, this almost obstreperous F 66 GEORGE MEREDITH rejoicing in physical strength, this truly British admiration of the animal man — incongruously present with the intensest intellectuality — that made Meredith so modern and an essential Briton, despite his Celtic temperament. He was intellectually the last eminent man of his time to whom the epithet ' British ' might be applied ; yet in his outdoor character, he was British and of his time. This is but one of the many perplexities he presents, and it has escaped the attention of most of his critics, with one exception, to which reference will be made when we come to consider his literary characteristics, as this is a matter that concerns more the artist than the man. But there is a gentler side to the open-air Meredith than that of the lusty pedestrian and rambler of the woodland ways. Like his own ' Melampus ' we see him the lover of all the lowly creatures and the simple flowers of the wayside. A charming picture of him as a naturalist is given by the late William Sharp in his chapter on ' The Country of George Meredith,' written for the Pall Mall Magazine in 1904, and reprinted in ' Literary Geography ' : I doubt if any living writer is an intimate with nature-life, with what we mean by ' country-life. ' Certainly none can so flash mani- fold aspect into sudden revelation. Not even Richard Jeffries knew nature more intimately, though he gave his whole thought to what with Mr. Meredith is but a beautiful and ever-varying background. I recollect Grant Allen, himself as keen and accomplished a student of nature as England could show, speaking of this singular intimacy in one who had no pretension to be a man of science. And that recalls to me a delightful afternoon illustrative of what has just been said. Some twelve or fourteen years ago, when Grant Allen (whom I did not then know) was residing at The Nook, Dorking, I happened to be on a few days' visit to Mr. Meredith at his cottage- home near Burford Bridge, a few miles away. On the Sunday morning I walked over the field-ways to Dorking, and found Grant Allen at home. It was a pleasant meeting. We had friends in common, were colleagues on the staff of two London literary 'weeklies,' and I had recently enjoyed favourably reviewing a new book by this prolific and always interesting and delightful writer. So, with these ' credentials, ' enhanced by the fact that I came as a guest of his friend Mr. Meredith, I found a cordial welcome, and began there and then with that most winsome personality a friend- ship which I have always accounted one of the best things that literary life has brought me. After luncheon, Grant Allen said he would accompany me back to Box Hill ; as, apart from the pleasure of seeing Mr. Meredith, he particularly wanted to ask him about some disputed point in natural history (a botanical point of some PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 67 kind, in connection, I think, with that lovely spring flower, ' Love- in-a-Mist ' — for which Mr. Meredith has a special affection, and had and still has fine slips of it in his garden) which he had not been able to observe satisfactorily for himself. I frankly expressed my surprise that a specialist such as my host should wish to consult any other than a colleague on a matter of intimate knowledge and observation ; but was assured that there were ' not half-a-dozen men living to whom I would go in preference to Meredith on a point of this kind. He knows the intimate facts of countryside life as very few of us do after the most specific training. I don't know whether he could describe that greenfinch in the wild cherry yonder in the terms of an ornithologist and botanist — in fact, I'm pretty sure he couldn't. But you may rest assured there is no ornithologist living who knows more about the finch of real life than George Meredith does — its appearance, male and female, its song, its habits, its dates of coming and going, the places where it builds, how its nest is made, how many eggs it lays and what- like they are, what it feeds on, what its song is like before and after mating, and when and where it may best be heard, and so forth. As for the wild cherry . . . perhaps he doesn't know much about it technically (very likely he does, I may add ! . . . it's never safe with "our wily friend" to take for granted that he doesn't know more about any subject than any one else does !) . . . but if any one could say when the first blossoms will appear and how long they will last, how many petals each blossom has, what variations in colour and what kind of smell they have, then it's he and no other better. And as for how he would describe that cherry-tree . . . well, you've read "Richard Feverel " and "Love in the Valley," and that should tell you everything ! ' Next to the aggressive vitality of Meredith in the prime of his life, which was the subject of marvel to every one who met him before his physical powers had suffered defeat, was his talk : a gift that years and invalidism would seem but to have enhanced. Among the great talkers he must ever have place ; for if we may believe all we have been told by his intimates his conversation was always as distinguished as his writing; indeed more brilliant, the play of the eye and face illuminating the quick-flying and ever-changing metaphor in a way impossible to the written word. It is curious to note how every one that has written of Meredith's talk com- pares his conversation to his writing. We have seen Mr. Justin McCarthy do so in his 'Reminiscences,' and Mr. Fullerton, also. In a privately printed journal Mr. John A. Steuart, author of ' The Minister of State,' writes thus of a meeting with the master: As he writes, so he talks, brilliantly. Not the tongue alone, F2 68 GEORGE MEREDITH but the whole countenance speaks. The eager spiritualised face seems to express the flashing thought, before it can form itself on the tongue, and the eyes, light blue-grey and clear as a child's, look up smilingly and shrewdly. They are worth studying, for they are the keenest eyes of this generation. They look through man and especially through woman (since Shakespeare's there have been no women comparable to Meredith's) as if humanity, the darkest thing on earth, were diaphanous ; but they look humorously, sympathetic- ally, and therein lies the secret of their power. The voice is as characteristic as the eye. Carlyle long ago remarked how wonder- fully physiognomic is the voice. Hostlers flocked just to hear Burns speak ; and one feels there must have been enchantment in the mere tones of Shakespeare. Mr. Meredith's voice is the exquisite instrument of a teeming brain and a great heart. He speaks and your attention is instant. As Johnson said of Burke, if one were by chance to go at the same time with Mr. Meredith ' under a shed to shun a shower,' one would say, ' here is an extraordinary man.' I hope it will not be thought impertinent if I add that the head has the Shakespearian bumps, the bump of sheer intellect no less than the bump of creative imagination — a rarer combination than some good people imagine. Thought transfused by imagination, or imagination transfused by thought — put it as you like — must always be the basis of great, that is to say lasting, work in literature. Goethe said of Byron that when he tried to think, he was a child. If Byron was a child how many noted novelists are babes ! In thought, as in imagination, Mr. Meredith is a giant. One feels his strength even in his casual conversation. The present writer, probably under the flattering delusion that he was the first to describe the likeness between the conversation of Meredith and the colloquies of his fiction, wrote to this effect in a personal sketch of the novelist which was published when its subject was in his seventy-fourth year : Judging the author of ' Modern Love ' from the standpoint of the ordinary reader, I find his poetry presenting a clearness and grace of diction, a simple beauty of words, to which his prose manner is so often foreign. The late Ashcroft Noble has observed with much truth that ' his speaking voice is an affair of organisation ; his singing voice is the result of careful training. ' In other words, Meredith the novelist tells his story in a manner natural to the man, but in his poetry the conscious artist, under the restraints of his medium, has to rid himself of the perplexing involutions of meta- phorical thought which are natural to him and characterise his work in prose. To hear the great novelist talk is to realise the justice of Noble's criticism, though it may come as a surprise to many to be told that PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 69 his spoken words resemble curiously his written phrases, with their unexpected epithets and surprising association of thoughts, so that what he has written of his peerless Diana may aptly be said of himself : ' This was like her, and that was like her, and here and there a phrase gave him the very play of her mouth, the flash of her eyes.' Indeed, to have listened to the talk of George Meredith for but one brief hour is to have abandoned entirely the thought that nobody was ever so brilliant in speech as he makes many of his characters to be. We often hear the criticism, ' Nobody in real life sparkles like that.' When this is advanced against the truth of Meredith's personages, let the answer be that the author himself is as brilliant in conversation as any of his heroes or heroines. Mr. Meredith's face, probably the least familiar among those of our famous authors, as he has ever been shy of the camera, is of that fresh colour which comes from a life spent in the open air. The features are very sharply defined, the mouth large, the forehead wide and square, but the eyes, of a wonderful dark grey, gleaming with tenderness and humour, form the most striking feature. His hair, which is still abundant, is silver white on head and beard, and by contrast with the high, clear colour of his face, produces that fragile look which one had noted long ago in his best-known portrait. Yet, when he speaks, the full volume of his voice, resonant, soft, rich in tone, carries no suggestion of physical weakness. His words are spoken with a relish of the lips not unlike the satisfied smack of the connoisseur sampling a rare vintage. His laugh, too, is lusty and heartsome. He talks with a touch of that old-fashioned manner which sounds to-day almost like affectation, but none could be freer from a sus- picion of such than George Meredith, for the lasting impression which the man leaves on one's mind is that the child's heart has never changed in him, and that he is as lacking in self-consciousness as a boy of twelve. After we have searched laboriously for that unknown, elusive something which constitutes genius, we shall find that it is nothing more than the power to keep in our old age the spirit of our youth, and to retain to the end the great gift of wonder. Assuredly George Meredith has done those things. In his seventy-fourth year we find him as buoyant of spirit, as full of wonder as he can ever have been. Tested further by the severest of tests to which we can put the personality of a man, he comes out triumphant — he can laugh at his own jokes and infect you with his laughter ! ' The aim of my work,' he says, ' has been to make John Bull understand himself.' ' And do you think John Bull has the gift of humour?'' ' I find but little humour in Anglo-Saxons.' ' You will admit, however, that John has good humour? ' ' Ah, you naughty man, you are playing with my words ! ' and 70 GEORGE MEREDITH the hearty laugh rings out again and the grey eyes gleam with delight. He then goes on to tell a story of how, together with the late W. G. Wills and another friend, he went into the Garrick Club during his early days in London ; the three determined for one evening to import a little fun into the dull atmosphere of what was then supposed to be the most amusing club in town. They joked and laughed with so much gusto that at length their fellow-members, drowsing over the Times, the Saturday, and Punch, were whipped into life, and one old fogey declared that he had passed quite a lively evening. This little recollection illustrates well the Celtic character of the man : ' But,' he will say with a merry twinkle of his eyes, and dropping voice, ' I am only half Irish, the other half being Welsh. My mother was an Irishwoman ; my father came from Wales. ' If it be true that all great men owe most to their mothers, then surely the better part of George Meredith is Irish; and certainly he is all Celt. From a privately-printed record of a meeting with Meredith in the summer of 1900, written by Mr. Coulson Kernahan, I take this vivid impression of his personal characteristics : Mr. Meredith's portraits (I had well-nigh written the word in the singular, for the one man every aspect of whose face we all wish to know is the one man who has most set his face against letting his face be known to us) give one no idea of his personality. They are likenesses, it is true. The noble shaping and carriage of the head, the commanding presence, the stern beauty of the features, the touch of hauteur, and even of what I may paradoxically call ' gentle severity,' are all to be seen in his portraits. But, compared with Mr. Meredith himself, the best of his portraits is but a beautiful mask. Never before have I seen a face at once so strong and so sensi- tive. It seemed carved in cold steel, but nerved like the nostrils of a racehorse. In moments of repose it struck me as strangely melan- choly. Then something was said that brought back the smile — a smile that seemed caused by a light upon the face rather than by the play of the features. The lines which, an instant ago, had been set and severe were now all tenderness — stern tenderness, it is true, as of one who had infinite compassion for humanity, but in whose pity no element of weak laxity could enter. Judgment, self-control, and humour, these are the characteristics which to me seemed most plainly writ upon the face of George Meredith. Humour I take to be the very essence of his being — humour that is touched with gaiety, and humour which deepens into sadness ; for though the lips of Humour may smile at the sight of human folly, yet when we look into her eyes we see them sad at the thought of human sorrow. The PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 71 quality of one's humour is so often a matter of nationality, that some remarks which Mr. Meredith made in my hearing should be recorded. One of our party was, like myself, an Irishman, and when he was introduced to our host, Mr. Meredith exclaimed : ' He bears a name which is surely Irish, and I see, too, that he hath the true Irish eye. Am I mistaken in supposing you to be an Irishman?' ' I am so fortunate,' replied the Irishman. ' You put it well ! You put it well ! ' was Mr. Meredith's com- ment. ' And I, too, am fortunate in being of Irish blood.' ' Is that so? ' replied the Irishman. ' We are proud, indeed, to know that we may claim Mr. George Meredith as a countryman.' ' Ah, but you can only claim the half of me,' was our host's laughing rejoinder. ' My mother was an Irishman, but my father was Welsh. ' Mr. Haldane MacFall did a highly-finished pen-portrait of Mere- dith for the Canadian Magazine of May, 1904. We might call it Meredith's laughing portrait, as laughter is the note of it : George Meredith faces life a mighty laugher, glad to be alive, glad to walk the fresh, sweet earth, glad to breathe the south-west winds that blow health into the lungs of the race of which he is so proud a being, glad of this splendid wayfaring amid the adventures that make up the journey of life. And what a mighty laugh it is ! Right from the deep chest — setting one chuckling at the very merri- ment of it. The finely-chiselled nose, with the sharp, pugnacious tilt at the end, betrays eagerness for the duel of wit, eagerness to know all, eagerness to be at the very front of life. The leaping energy that lurks behind the dreamy eyelids finds interest in every- thing. Meredith sees life too exquisitely to be afraid of being accused of regarding small things. His pointed grey beard gives the suggestion to the strong, clean-shaped head of an admiral of our day. He is of the type of the man of action. To hear Meredith talk of the coming youngsters of to-day, asking his keen questions about their personal attainments, their appearance, their promise, his nervous face all alert to know, is to be in the feverish company of an eager youth. His feet no longer pace the long walk up the grassy slope of the majestic hill that sweeps from his doors upwards into the clouds, but the keen brain is as passionately inquisitive of the world as in the years when his youth took him blithely walking along its ways. There is in the bearing of the man a distinction, a splendour of manners, a perfection of the carriage of the body, as of a great man saying and doing the simple thing with an air that realises the word aristocrat in human shape more vividly than in any living man. He gives a more profound sense of greatness than any one I have ever met. 72 GEORGE MEREDITH Mr. Henry W. Nevinson is a journalist of that select class to which Meredith would certainly have belonged had he continued his connection with the craft : a wandering scholar, ever afield for new interests to describe, let the times make for peace or war. In his peaceful and bookish days in England he has had the privilege of several meetings with Meredith at Box Hill, and no one has por- trayed the features of the novelist with such cameo clearness of detail as Mr. Nevinson in certain contributions to the press. To the Book Monthly of March, 1904, he contributed an article, reprinted in ' Books and Personalities,' from which I take these graphic and noteworthy passages : It is essentially a Greek head. It might have been modelled upon those statues of mature and powerful manhood which, in the museums of the world, are now vaguely labelled 'a poet ' or ' an orator.' If it is a poet's head, it is a Greek poet's. There is no trace of the weakness, the conscious melancholy, or petulant emo- tionalism which, unhappily, have been too often associated with the modern idea of poetic appearance. It is the head of a man who, like Sophocles, could have commanded a fleet as easily as write a tragedy, and as well. When we see it, we cease to wonder that the Athenians should have expected their great poet to do both as a matter of course. It is the symbol of a tempered intellect, in which there is no flaw of softness or languor — the intellect of a man, and even of a man of action. There are men of letters who wear a shut-up, indoor look. Their faces are like the windows of a sick chamber; we dimly divine the invalid and delicately-curtained soul within. But the very look of Meredith tells of the open sky, where the sun marches, and the winds pipe, and the thunderclouds mass their battalions. His is the head of an orator, too — a Greek orator, like Pericles, whose words the historian might have enregistered as an everlasting possession. The great mouth opens almost four-square. It is an Attic mask, a magician's cave. A spirit seems to be speaking, not with it, but through it, and on a broad scale of sound comes the voice, full, unhesitating, and distinct to the last letter, like the voice of one who has spoken much among the waves. We feel that, as Mendelssohn said of Goethe, he should shout like a hundred warriors. Perhaps his slowly increasing deafness had made his utterance even more remarkable when last I saw him ; but in earlier days also his words fell rather in superb monologue than in conversation. There is no effort about the language ; the great sentences are thrown out with lavish opulence — the careless opulence of nature at her kindest. There is no pausing for figures, wit, or epigrams; they come of themselves, as water follows water from a spring. It is the style of his books. There is the same concentration, the same Meredith in his Donkey-Chaise, with his dog 'Sandy' PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 73 fulness, and the same irony; but it is all simpler because more unstudied ; and whereas some pages of the books have become diffi- cult and dark, the effect of the spoken word when first it is uttered is wholly illumination and delight. Mr. T. P. O'Connor's thumb-nail sketch does not help greatly but is interesting for its reference to the portrait by the Duchess of Rutland, which, so far as I can ascertain, has never been published in any form : He is a noticeable man wherever you may see him. Not very tall ; not very robust in appearance — rather of the thin and wiry type of physique — with a certain thinness of face, you have to realise the beauties of his eyes before you understand how much of his genius is revealed by his exterior. The only likeness of him I ever saw which gave you a good idea of the wistfulness, the eeriness, and the uniqueness of the face and the expression was that done by the Marchioness of Granby — as she was, the Duchess of Rutland as she now is. The beautiful white hair ; the short but beautiful beard ; but, above all, that strange, wistful eerie expression of the whole face — all this is brought out with wonderful fidelity and, at the same time, imagination. There is a vivid touch of actuality in this little pen-picture of Meredith written by M. Charles Legras, the French critic, for the Journal des Ddbats in 1900, and reprinted in ' Chez nos Contem- porains d'Angleterre ' : When we enter, Mr. Meredith raises his tall figure from a roomy easy-chair that is stuffed with cushions, and supports himself feebly with two walking-sticks, his hands twitching and trembling : like Daudet he has been struck by ataxy. Over his forehead, square and very wide, falls a mass of hair cut a la chien; the profile of the face is sharply cut, the eyes of a dark grey, suffused at times by tenderness. His mouth is large and he speaks with much use of gesture. This silhouette of the great writer at the end of his career appears to me to harmonise with his works — long, unrestful, nervous, but still dignified of mien all the same. The late Moncure D. Conway in his autobiography makes a brief mention of Meredith's conversation. ' In the few times that I have met him,' he writes, 'he was delightful, his imagination putting out his fancy to represent it in sparkling talk that could hardly prepare one for the depth and passion of his poetry. For I always love Meredith's poetry better than his novels, these impress- ing me as too often containing involved intimations of vital things in order to escape the deletions of Mrs. Grundy, to whom all proofs 74 GEORGE MEREDITH must be submitted.' A curious judgment on the novels, but a just comparison of the talk and the poetry. Mr. W. T. Stead wrote a brilliant character sketch of him in the Review of Reviews for March, 1904, in which this passage occurs : ' People talk about me,' he said, ' as if I were an old man. I do not feel old in the least. On the contrary,' he went on, in his humorous, sardonic fashion, ' I do not believe in growing old, and I do not see any reason why we should ever die. I take as keen an interest in the movement of life as ever, I enter into the passions of youth, and I watch political affairs and intrigues of parties with the same keen interest as of old. I have seen the illusion of it all, but it does not dull the zest with which I enter into it all, and I hold more firmly than ever to my faith in the constant advancement of the race. ' My eyes are as good as ever they were, only for small print I need to use spectacles. It is only in my legs that I feel weaker. I can no longer walk, which is a great privation to me. I used to be a keen walker ; I preferred walking to riding ; it sent the blood coursing to the brain, and besides, when I walked, I could go through the woods and footpaths, which I could not have done if I had ridden — now I can only walk about my own garden. It is a question of nerves. If I touch anything, however slightly, I am afraid that I shall fall — that is my only loss, my walking days are over. ' Meredith was then seventy-six, and, as we have seen, his optimt- ism was undimmed when, four years later, the interviewers were inducing the aged master of Flint Cottage to speak to them on the last subject he would have chosen — himself ! It is worthy of note, by the way, that there seems to be no evidence of moodiness on the part of Meredith as a talker. About many great men stories are told which would suggest some degree of affectation and even boorish- ness. Tennyson and Carlyle are often accused of conduct to friends or chance acquaintances that was scarcely in keeping with good manners ; Meredith never. There is just one anecdote, which I believe to be authentic, hinting at the possibility of his fountain of talk being sealed at times. A lady who had friends in Surrey who were on terms of some intimacy with the novelist was greatly charmed on one occasion when visiting there to find that Meredith was to be one of the guests at dinner. She prepared herself for a rich ingathering of his celebrated flowers of witty talk, but he was singularly silent throughout the visit, and the only Meredithian phrase the lady could carry away with her was his remark, when PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 75 reaching across his neighbour for the salt, ' Excuse the pic-nic stretch. ' The first ' interviewer ' who sought out the sage at Box Hill was, as we have noted, a literary journalist from Boston. Among the last were two Americans, and in both cases the results were interesting enough to bear some record here. Mr. Charles Frederic Goss does not give a date to his visit, but it was most likely in the summer of 1907, certainly before 1908, as his little account of ' A Visit to George Meredith ' was published in the Book News Monthly of Philadelphia for March, 1908. After describing the oft-pictured scene of Flint Cottage and the famous chalet, he says : It was with a sort of reverence that I entered this sequestered spot and rang the bell. An elderly housekeeper answered my summons, took my letter, and left me standing on the steps. ' Well, show him in,' I heard a loud voice say at last — not just as hospitably as I could wish ; but a good deal more so than I had expected, from what I had been told of its owner's solitary life. Entering a narrow hall I passed into one of the brightest and most cheerful sitting-rooms that I had ever seen. The morning sun was shining through the window and falling upon the back of the big, grey head of the old man, turning his hair to a silver aureole. Laying down his morning paper, my host extended his hand, and said, with a deaf man's raucous voice, ' I am always glad to see Americans ; among them I have found some of my best and most abiding friends.' And then, without giving me an instant's chance to offer my apologies, he launched into a charming disquisition on the beauties of the region where he lived. From this as a starting-point he began swinging about a vast circle of observations on affairs and men, with the ease and power of a great ship coming around an immense curve. Here are fragments of his talk for those who care to hear them second-hand : ' I do not produce any longer ; or rather, only verse and not for print. I am getting too old. The imagination cools, you know. And then the veterans ought to leave the field to younger men ! ' I take a hopeful view of the progress of civilisation, in general ; but not so much of Great Britain, at least in the near future. She has been too greedy for power, empire, wealth. She has seized more than she can hold and administer. ' The trouble with society is — the lack of conversational power. Card-playing has stultified, or stupefied, its members. ' The literary outlook seems to me encouraging. There may not be any first-class writers ; but the second and third classes are full. There is a great elevation of the rank and file of those who are making books. Multitudes of the very same people who, a few 76 GEORGE MEREDITH years ago, could not write at all, are writing now with skill, if not with art. In your own country there are many novelists who deserve all praise, among them, Gertrude Atherton, Edith Wharton, and my dear friend Weir Mitchell, a prince of men. ' President Roosevelt is a splendid fellow, but has made a misr take about spelling ! He is too absolutely democratic. Democracy is good in politics, but bad in literature. The roots of literature are buried so deeply in the past that they cannot be rudely pulled up. He tries in vain to play the school-master. We need castiga- tion, and the man with the birch-rod will come; but the President is not that man, nor his big stick that birch-rod ! It must be a colossal man and a colossal stick. ' It requires a great deal of self-denial to leave such a man before you are ejected by the valet or the coachman ! I went unaided, but most reluctantly. There is a characteristic American ' snap ' about this little episode that seems to endow Meredith himself with a touch of that Trans- atlantic quality ; but, as the interview was evidently of the shortest and the veteran contrived to say so much and touch so many topics, the little account is valuable as indicating the ready flow of his ideas and the quick-rising flood of his talk at his advanced age. The other American interviewer was a lady, Miss Catharine Welch, who visited him about his eightieth birthday and wrote a short sketch of her visit in the Daily Chronicle, from which the following passages are taken : ' Your being an American,' said he, ' gives you a sure road to my favour. I like Americans, and they have always liked me over there. ' What a man's living to be eighty means,' he went on, ' is, of course, that he is either greedily tenacious of life or else that he is so insignificant the fates have passed him by. ... It is a misfortune to live to be eighty. A man's life ought to finish when he is five- and-sixty. He must stop working then, or else do work that is inferior. People will praise it at the time and write articles about it, but posterity will know better and see its weakness. You can't fool posterity. . . . No ; when a man stops working, nature is finished with him, and when nature is finished with him he ought to go.' At the conclusion of this gloomy little speech Mr. Meredith chuckled happily, and I realised that he was amusing himself by saying something he did not altogether mean. He returned to the subject of America. ' I wish I had gone there when I was younger. I had many invitations. I suppose they would have given a lot of dinners to me, and,' he added quaintly, ' the mass of refection would have served to carry out my By permission of the ' Daily Chronicle' The Last Sketch of Meredith From a sketch by the well-known French artist, M. Noel Dorville, who visited England some months before the novelist's death and made a series of sketches of distinguished persons for an Entente Cordial Album issued in France. PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 77 theory and to remove me before I was sixty-five. I suppose, too, I should have had to make speeches. I never spoke in public in my life. I can't talk standing up. The formality of it kills my ideas and my legs betray my brains. But if people will let me speak to them from my chair, I am very happy to talk — and I never stop.' Mr. Meredith gave me some information as to the modern writers he found most interesting — Americans in particular. Amongst the novelists he likes Mrs. Wharton and Mrs. Atherton. ' They both write a good, flowing style,' said he. Mr. Henry James he mentioned also. The two men are great friends, and Mr. Mere- dith spoke of the younger writer as ' my dear Henry James. ' It appears that the physical labour of writing has grown tire- some to him, though he still writes letters to his intimate friends and allows himself now and then to be plagued by his admirers into putting his name in the front of his books. He tells, by the way, very amusing stories about the methods adopted by these enthusiasts to secure his autograph, accompanied by ' a few words. ' He has sometimes tried to dictate. 'But,' said he, 'to write novels you must put your whole self into them. I found dictating therefore to be impossible, and have never been able to get beyond the fourth or fifth chapter. ' In the Chronicle of the same day there was a little word-portrait of Meredith from an unknown hand. It may be quoted, not only for its graphic truth, but as an example of the way in which the mannerisms of the master are unconsciously adopted by those who write about him. It was the same with Stevenson. There is not one of the many critics who have written much about Stevenson but makes use of his ' disengage. ' This was a favourite word of his, used in such wise as, let us say : A striking and original personality ' disengages ' itself from the mass of anecdote gathered about Meredith. The Chronicle writer got his ' leaps at you, ringing like a bell,' nowhere but from Meredith : You catch the flash of that eye immediately you see him, whether that be indoors, in his arm-chair, or out of doors, in his donkeyt- chaise. The hair and beard are white, and they suggest the patriarch, and indeed Mr. Meredith has always been a prophet. The face is furrowed, too, but youth — perennial youth — gleams from the eyes. And then Mr. Meredith's voice — it has the very sound and melody of youth. It has a great-heartedness which is captivat- ing and infective — it leaps at you, ringing like a bell. To hear Mr. Meredith talk is to recall Gladstone's rich voice, and do not other points occur to one as linking the two men? Some notice must be taken of Meredith's political convictions, and here seems to be a fitting place since his opinions on affairs 78 GEORGE MEREDITH may be regarded as a purely personal matter, scarcely affecting- his art and, except in later years, evidently without interest to the world at large. He has often, and truthfully enough, been described as a life-long unswerving Radical, and one intelligent writer who mentioned this in February, 1908, spoke of the service he had rendered to the cause as the editor of the Ipswich Journal! It was not until he had ceased to be a productive novelist that his opinions on politics of the day began to be courted by the newspapers and his name to assume a political significance it had never before possessed. ' If you meddle with politics you must submit to be held up on the prongs of a fork, soaped by your backers and shaved by the foe,' he writes in one of his novels. But as he did not meddle with politics until he had earned the respect of all men by his literary achievement, he never had to submit to this ordeal, the Conservar tive press being as urbane to him and considerate of his views as he had been an exponent of its own principles. His genuine Im- perialism may account for this friendliness of his political opposites. His eightieth birthday was made the occasion of a little note of political praise by the Westminster Gazette, as follows : Liberalism owes much to him; and, while the world of letters is uniting in offering homage to the greatest of living novelists, his services to the Liberal Party may be recalled. The lifelong friend of Mr. John Morley, his political faith is akin to that of the Indian Secretary, and to this we may ascribe his steadfastness at that time of great storm and stress, the Home Rule period. Mr. Swinburne, Radical and Republican — so he liked to style himself — forgot his principles in the passion aroused by Mr. Gladstone's proposals. The mild, academic, Liberalism of Huxley, Tyndall and Tennyson were all lost in the battle of words ; but George Meredith stood firm. Considering his long career, the novelist's consistency has been remarkable, for the faith he championed as a political writer in the sixties he is championing to-day. That is the estimate of a very sober journal of the Liberal faith, but it is doubtful if the invidious comparisons which it makes are altogether justifiable. While Meredith in his later years may have been very pronounced in his utterances and at the election of 1906 had himself conveyed to the polling-booth to record his vote, his Liberalism might also be described as of the academic sort, but not mild. A man of his cast of mind could be nothing else than a Liberal, his very literary style meant Radicalism; but essentially in the way of intellect. ' Beauchamp's Career ' is perhaps his greatest service to Radicalism, and even there do we not detect the Celtic PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 79 note of failure, like the ' sough ' of the bagpipe at the end of a rousing slogan? A Liberal thinker Meredith must surely be reckoned, but to say that intellectually he was more consistent than Swinburne is scarcely just to the latter. Apart from the abundance of Radical sentiment which is to be found in every one of the novels since ' Evan Harrington ' — where it is first felt in fullest measure — a political student of Meredith would have little else to work upon until he came to the last ten years of his life. In other words, George Meredith the politician, as distinct from the novelist, is past seventy when we find him ' meddling with politics. ' There is preserved a letter of his, written at sixty, which indicates that among his friends, and especially to the younger men, he was then, as at eighty, ' delivering himself of certain very Radical sentiments. ' That short-lived genius, J. K. Stephens, who attempted to establish in 1888 a high-class weekly journal under the title of the Reflector, had met Meredith, as he seems to have met and impressed most of the notable men of his day. They had discussed politics, and the result is seen in a humorous announcement printed in the advertisement columns of the Reflector for January 29, 1888 : The gentleman who recently asked a younger man what the dickens he expected to come to if he started in life as a Tory, is referred to the precedent of Mr. Gladstone. ' That " the gentleman " and " the younger man " were Mr. Mere- dith and the editor of the Reflector respectively,' says Mr. Charles Strachey, ' appears from the next issue of the paper, which contains a poem of eight stanzas by Mr. Meredith, called "A Stave of Roving Tim," prefaced by the following characteristic letter. The reference to "the triolets of the French piano" is an allusion to the large number of poems in triolet form which had appeared in the Reflector. ' Sir, — The senior (see your advertisement columns) who met that young Joseph Hofmann of politics, with the question as to the future of the youthful Tory, is impressed by the Reflector's repartee, in which he desires to find a very hopeful promise, that may presently dispel strange images of the prodigy growing onionly, and showing a seedy head when one appears. Meanwhile, he sends you a lyric out of many addressed encouragingly to certain tramps, who are friends of his, for the purpose of driving a breath of the country through your pages, though he has no design of competing with the exquisite twitter of the triolets of the French piano which accom- panied your birth, and bids fair to sound your funeral notes. Yours, etc., George Meredith. 80 GEORGE MEREDITH The first really serious political pronouncement in his own person which we have from Meredith is so recent in date as February 2, 1903, when the Manchester Guardian published a long article signed ' H. O.,' in which his opinions on the national position and especially the fortunes and future of the Liberal Party were conveyed in the form of an ' interview. ' If any one had ever doubted that in the sage of Box Hill we had a keen and well-informed student of current politics this remarkable article, which was quoted extensively in the press, must have settled the matter, as there was no phase of the political situation on which he had not some illuminating opinion to give, and his Radicalism was whole-hearted. He urged a more democratic ideal for the Liberal Party. ' " Forward " must be the cry if the Liberals wish to recapture the heights they once held ! ' Any defection of the party from Home Rule he deplored. ' I have very little doubt that Home Rule will come, nor do I see any reason why it should not,' were his words. His estimate of Lord Rosebery, in particular, showed how closely he must have followed the per- plexing path of that remarkable man. Of Mr. John Morley, Mr. Haldane, and Mr. John Burns, all personal friends of his, he spoke in terms of warm admiration. John Burns has (he said), I believe, done more good amongst his class than any man in England. In a future Liberal Parliament he should have a voice in the inner council as well as in the party. He would, I think, strengthen any cabinet — a man of infecting energy, and, I believe, absolutely honest. And, not least, John Burns 1 believe to be a sincere patriot. I had a talk with him once, and I happened to be saying in rather a depressed tone that I thought we were being beaten in the commercial race by other nations, and he said : ' I don't care what you believe. I will bring you instance after instance to show that that is not the case, but that we are holding our own. ' Oh yes, John Burns is extremely vigorous in that respect — the fear of contradiction is never before him. There is hope for British democracy when it can produce such men as he. . . . It was in the course of this same interview that Meredith made the memorable reference to his age which has been so often quoted since, and, somewhat differently phrased and elaborated, we have already read in Mr. Stead's account of a later conversation : I suppose I should regard myself as growing old — I am seventy- four. But I do not feel to be growing old either in heart or mind. I still look on life with a young man's eye. I have always hoped I should not grow old as some do — with a palsied intellect, living backwards, regarding other people as anachronisms because they PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 81 themselves have lived on into other times and left their sympathies behind them with their years. After this famous manifesto it became a stereotype of journalism to have an ' interview ' with Meredith whenever some matter of unusual interest was engaging the public mind, while all sorts of Liberal associations took to consulting the oracle of Box Hill. He, who had so long advocated the rights of women, was the ideal man from whom to secure an awakening letter to be read at a meeting of the Dorking Women's Liberal Association in May, 1904. A ' silly season ' correspondence in the Daily Mail, in the autumn of that year, on ' The Marriage Handicap, ' was quite excuse enough to ' draw ' the philosopher who, not so long before, could have been induced by no newspaper editor in England to grant an interview for such a purpose. He advocated, as all remember, the modification of our marriage laws, whereby some system of renewable terms might be established between contracting parties; that is to say, a couple might agree to live as man and wife for a period of ten years or so, and each be free to renew the agreement or discontinue it at the end of the time, the State granting all necessary legal protection to the children. ' There will be a devil of an uproar before such a change can be made ! ' he said. ' It will be a great shock, but look back and see what shocks there have been, and what changes have nevertheless taken place in this marriage business in the past ! ' 'Love upon a mortal lease,' forsooth! It is difficult to believe Meredith was speaking seriously on this subject ; certainly he cannot have looked ahead — his complaint against the English people — to the hopelessness of such a modified marriage law. It would be a case in which the second condition were worse than the first. A month after this interview had the public by the ears, there was the unhappy affair of the Dogger Bank, and of course the oracle of Box Hill had to be consulted for ' a message to the nation. ' Like everybody else, he considered that there had ' never been such justification for an appeal to arms.' In January of 1905 poor Russia is in trouble again ; this time at home. There is ' Red Sunday ' and the abortive revolution. Down goes the Chronicle man to Burford Bridge Station, and next day behold a column beginning : 'In his study at the Cottage at Box Hill yesterday afternoon Mr. George Meredith talked about Russia and the revolution.' Excellent ' copy,' for no leader-writer seemed to focus the situation with any- thing of the power and direct vision of this old man who protested : G 82 GEORGE MEREDITH ' I live out of the world. Why should people listen to me? I know what is going on only by the newspapers. ' Yet his living out of the world had been to some purpose when we read such common- sense criticism as this : Russia cannot, it is certain, long escape the spirit of Liberalism that has swept over Europe. The sympathy of the British people with the brave fellows who are fighting an uneven, an almost hope- less, battle as it seems, is very great. And it should be practical. Denunciation is useless. . . . Everybody should spare what he can, and the money should be telegraphed immediately to one of the leaders who are not in prison. We must help them, and this is our only way. They cannot expect much help from Germany. Germany ever since 1870 has been an armed camp, waiting behind a fortress to be attacked. But no doubt the German people will sympathise with these poor fellows. France is in a difficult position. She was forced into an alliance with Russia by the Triple Alliance, before she came to a good understanding with us. Her people were attracted by the undeveloped riches of Russia to invest their money in that country. And France has her bondholders to consider. But she has a great spirit of humanity. I do not like the word humanity, but it will be understood — and the French people also will have much sympathy with the aims of the Russian revolutionaries. His hope that the Russian bureaucracy would have fallen in the course of a year was vain. ' The Fall of the Tsar ' was the favourite newspaper heading of the day. The Tsar and the bureaucracy still stand and Russia is still in chains. A month or two later, and a correspondent — Mr. H. W. Strong, of Newcastle — induces him to a fresh pronouncement on the question of femininism in a letter from which this is a quotation : Since I began to reflect I have been oppressed by the injustice done to women, the constraint put upon their natural aptitudes and their faculties, generally much to the degradation of the race. I have not studied them more closely than I have men, but with more affection, a deeper interest in their enfranchisement and development, being assured that women of the independent mind are needed for any sensible degree of progress. They will so educate their daughters that these will not be instructed at the start to think themselves naturally inferior to men because less muscular, and need not have recourse to particular arts, feline chiefly, to make their way in the world. In the same letter the novelist adds that he has no special choice among the women of his books. ' Perhaps,' he says, ' I gave more George Meredith carried to the Polling Booth at Leatherhead, January 26, 1906 Conveyed the three-and-a-half miles Irom Hox Hill to T.eatherhead, in his little donkey-chaise, the venerable novelist recorded, his vole agaitiM what he called ' ihe curse ot Protection.' PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 83 colour to " Diana of the Crossways " and Clara Middleton of the "Egoist," and this on account of their position.' Next comes the Fiscal Question and a scathing criticism of its great protagonist, in which Meredith asks us to observe in Mr. Chamberlain's ' lean, long head and adventurous nose,' a man who is from time to time possessed of one idea and advances it with tremendous energy. He will have none of his Protection : ' it would be a demented country that believed him.' If the journalistic advo- cates of tariff reform had been able to lay hands on certain very anti-Cobdenite sentiments which appeared in the editorial columns of the Ipswich Journal somewhere about i860 they might have had some sport at the expense of Mr. Chamberlain's unsparing critic ! Russia is still an anxiety to Europe when a disciple of Tolstoy — Mr. G. H. Perris — goes down to Box Hill, and one more interview on the situation comes out in the Westminster Gazette of February 9, 1905. Then comes the General Election of 1906 and more letters to Liberals. He is even conveyed in his little donkey-chaise all the way from Box Hill to Leatherhead on Friday, January 26, that he may vote for the Liberal candidate for Epsom. ' I hope it will be the last time I shall have to vote against Protection,' he says, when he gets home, after his remarkable and much-applauded undertaking. In April of the same year the annual dinner of the Rationalist Press Association, with Meredith's close friend, Mr. Edward Clodd, in the chair, is honoured with a long letter in praise of George Jacob Holyoake, recently dead ; a month or two later he is writing to the Speaker about the Russian Duma ; in short, Meredith the invalid recluse of Box Hill seemed to be far more in the public eye and busier delivering himself of opinions than some of our active politicians ! Only a few of many instances have been chosen for mention; but sufficient surely to prove what I have written about the curious publicity of his old age, and one is also left with the impression that, despite his protests, this was not altogether distasteful to the aged man of letters. In a long and noteworthy talk to Mr. Henry W. Nevinson, reported in the Daily Chronicle of July 5, 1904, we find him saying : Since my last illness I have felt a peculiar disinclination for work of all kinds. The thought of taking up a pen is quite abhorrent. I am as receptive as ever. I read and enjoy hearing of new things. But my mind seems now as if it could not give out any more. As I wrote to our dear friend Clodd, whom I call Sir Reynard, for his trick in beguiling me to my first and only speech in public, a visit G 2 84 GEORGE MEREDITH to me now will give you but a wizened old hen instead of the plump pullet he looks for whenever his sagacious nose is laid to earth. Besides, who really cares for what I say? The English people know nothing about me. There has always been something antipa- thetic between them and me. With book after book it was always the same outcry of censure and disapproval. The first time or two I minded it. Then I determined to disregard what people said alto- gether, and since that I have written only to please myself. But even if you could tell the world all I think, no one would listen. This, of course, must not be taken too literally. The best minds in England have always been ready to listen to Meredith, and if the multitude has been slower in giving him its ear, the blame does not rest entirely with it. FRIENDSHIPS AND HOME LIFE While many lesser men in the history of letters seem to cut a more considerable figure in the popular eye by reason of their dis- tinguished and well-chosen friendships, it is only natural that in the case of George Meredith we do not find him deriving anything of fame from such connections. It is the other way round ; for there are not a few who will be remembered chiefly because they have had the good fortune to be reckoned among his intimates. He gives all and receives nothing — nothing, that is to say, except friendship, which is all he ever asked for. Perhaps he has not always received that, as we find that every great man of letters attracts to him certain of the parasitic breed, whose sole desire it is to be esteemed one of his circle. With all such the question of true friendship does not arise. ' Certain tramps, who are friends of his,' wrote Meredith of himself in 1888, and we may suppose that in his earlier prime he had many a friendship with the vagrom folk of his countryside worthy of chronicling. But the pose of rustic friendships for later biographical effect, not unknown to some gentle- men of the pen, was the last notion to enter Meredith's mind. Until the last ten or fifteen years of his life he did his work and lived his own life, never studying the public effect of his doings, so that such records of his friendships as we may gather from legitimately accessible sources reveal to us a man and not a mirror- watching actor. So little did he care for ' literary friendships,' as such, that William Davis Ticknor, the celebrated Boston publisher and man of letters, who died in 1864, and who was one of his early friends, did not know for some years after the beginning of their acquaint- ance that Meredith had written a book ! The friendship of tramps is a wholesome corrective to the friendships of the drawing-room and the club. It signifies character on the search for character. It is what we would naturally look for in the prophet of Mother Earth ; but it is the unrecorded part of his friendships, and we must turn 85 86 GEORGE MEREDITH to his relationship of a more conventional kind to discover this phase of his life. Even so we find the life of Meredith rich in true and memorable friendships, though the merest tittle of what might be told of these has, so far, been put on record. We have seen that one of his earliest friends was Thomas Love Peacock, whose daughter he married ; but no account of their inter- course exists, nor are we likely to have any information on this connection of his early life, unless at some distant date there may be letters forthcoming. The friends of his youth are unknown to us, and none but himself could have recalled them. This he has not chosen to do. He is a man of thirty, the author of ' Poems ' (1851), ' The Shaving of Shagpat ' and ' Farina,' before his circle of friends begins to take shape in the available personalia of his life. Already Mr. William Michael Rossetti is friendly with him, George Eliot and G. H. Lewes are among his acquaintance. Doubtless Mr. Rossetti 's greater brother had by this time come into touch with the young poet-novelist, though it is a little later that we have evidence of their intimacy. But the great and enduring friendship of his early life was formed with a man, as remarkable as Meredith himself, and five years his junior. In any account of his friendships, Frederick Augustus Maxse (1833-1900), to whom ' Modern Love ' was ' affectionately dedicated ' on its appearance in 1862, must have the first place. But, above all, does not Maxse live for ever as the hero of ' Beauchamp's Career '? He entered the navy as a lieutenant in 1852, becoming captain three years later, and retiring with the rank of admiral in 1867. He was a political thinker and writer of an advanced type, and, though the younger of the two, his personality must have had some influence on the mind of Meredith. Very little indeed has been put on record concerning this notable man, but Mr. T. P. O'Connor has penned a graphic little sketch of him, which helps us to realise the personality of Meredith's old comrade : Here was one of the remarkable and yet little appreciated and little known figures of his own time ; who would have been for- gotten — even now, but a few years after his death — if George Meredith had not given him immortality by painting his portrait in his book. But there was a time when there was no name better known or more honoured in England. He was a sailor during the Crimean War ; did a deed of tremendous daring ; and all the world echoed with it; and everybody naturally expected that he was beginning a glorious career. There was nothing that he was not considered capable of doing, and of reaching. FRIENDSHIPS AND HOME LIFE 87 But Admiral Maxse lived and died in something like obscurity, or in a certain notoriety that was almost as killing as death and obscurity. He began by becoming a politician, and of an advanced Radical type, which in the ' sixties ' was regarded as scarcely reput- able — especially in one that was an officer in the Navy. I remember stdl the mild horror with which people spoke of this man who, while wearing the officer's uniform of Her Majesty's Navy, spoke with such merciless disrespect of so many things then held in honour; many of them have since passed away, to everybody's relief. Indeed, so advanced were Admiral Maxse 's views that he never was able to get into Parliament. Then, when possibly his chance was coming, he suddenly turned round ; left the Liberal Party over Home Rule; quarrelled, and even bitterly, with an old friend like John Morley; and, in short, ended a forlorn and rather desolate figure. Even in his profession, in which he had had such a magnificent start, Admiral Maxse never did much after his first year ; he gained his title ultimately by seniority rather than by service. I remember seeing him at Carlsbad, and often, of course, in London — a thin, rather sickly, though distinguished-looking man, with a certain air of detachment and of disappointment. The story of Beauchamp's career is sad and touching as it is told by George Meredith ; it would have been even more touching, and certainly sadder, if it had been described as it was in the original from whom the story was drawn. It is to the late Sir William Hardman, for eighteen years editor of the Morning Post and Recorder of Kingston, that we owe the most intimate knowledge we have of Meredith's home-life and friendships at the beginning of the ' sixties. ' Hardman, engrossed though he was in literary life and public service, contrived to find the leisure for keeping a diary and gathering materials for his memoirs, from which some appetising passages, edited by Mr. Frederick Dolman, were published in To-day at the end of 1893 and the beginning of 1894. As Hardman was one of the novelist's most intimate friends for close on thirty years, some notes of his career may be set down before we proceed to his Meredithian reminiscences. He was a grandson of the William Hardman of Bury Hall, Lancashire, who was associated with Sir Robert Peel, the father of the statesman, in his great industrial enterprise. Although, after quitting Cambridge, he studied for the bar at the Inner Temple, and was called in due course, he did not practise professionally. But he found a highly useful channel for his legal knowledge as Chairman of the Surrey Sessions in criminal cases, which onerous and unpaid 88 GEORGE MEREDITH office he filled from about 1865 until his death, September 12, 1890. He was knighted in 1885 for his valuable public service in this position, and not for his political work, as one sometimes finds it stated, distinguished though that had been. For a number of years Hardman was the owner of Norbiton Hall, Kingston, but in 1872, when he accepted the editorship of the Morning Post, he settled again in London, and until his death was eminent in the higher literary and political circles of the metropolis. His friend- ship with Meredith had begun in 1861, when, being the occupant of Littleworth Cottage, Esher, he discovered himself a near neighbour of the author of ' The Shaving of Shagpat, ' for which book he had so intense an admiration that the offer of a common friend to introduce him to the creator of the immortal Shibli was eagerly accepted, and so began one of Meredith's closest friendships. Sir William Hardman was the original of Mr. Blackburn Tuckham, in ' Beauchamp's Career,' and a glance at his portrait will show how vivid is the novelist's humorous description of his friend : It was amusing to find an exuberant Tory in one who was the reverse of the cavalier type. Nevil and he seemed to have been sorted to the wrong sides. Mr. Tuckham had a round head, square flat forehead, and ruddy face ; he stood as if his feet claimed the earth under them for his own, with a certain shortness of leg that detracted from the majesty of his resemblance to our Eighth Harry, but increased his air of solidity ; and he was authoritative in speaking. ' Let me set you right, sir,' he said sometimes to Colonel Halkett, and that was his modesty. . . . On the question of politics, ' I venture to state,' he remarked, in anything but the tone of a venture, ' that no educated man of ordinary sense who has visited our colonies will come back a Liberal. ' As for a man of sense and education being a Radical, he scouted the notion with a pooh sufficient to awaken a vessel in the doldrums. Let us turn now to Sir William's reminiscences, which yield us the richest store of Meredithiana and are here quoted by kind per- mission of Lady Hardman, to whom I am indebted for a number of valuable notes. Owing to the entire lack of dates in the published passages, the time of their writing can only be fixed by certain references which occur in them. The character of the man that may be caught up from Hardman's impressionist pages is most engaging, in every sense our hero. The first meeting of Meredith and Hardman is thus described, and took place in some time in 1861, when ' Evan Harrington ' was appearing serially : George Meredith with his son Arthur in* i86i. This rare photograph, here published for the first lime, was taken by Sir William Hardman in 1861. and is reproduced by permission of Lady Hardman. FRIENDSHIPS AND HOME LIFE 89 During our stay at Esher we have made the acquaintance of George Meredith, the author of 'The Ordeal of Richard Feverel,' fc.van Harrington,' etc. He is very clever, original, and amusing. We soon became great allies. He is a widower of thirty-two, with a boy of eight years— one of the finest lads I ever saw. I shall probably enclose you copies of the portraits I took of himself and his ' little man,' as he calls him. He is immensely proud of this boy, and the boy is well worthy of his father's pride and affection. Your father and sister met Meredith at dinner at our country retreat, and were much amused by him; for, contrary to the usual habit of authors, he is not a silent man, and when he is present con- versation goes glibly enough. Although only a new chum, he is quite like an old one. He showed me the place where he composed and wrote the poem beginning as follows — it was on an eminence surrounded by pines on the St. George's Hill estate: Now from the meadow floods the wild duck clamours, Now the wood-pigeon wings a rapid flight, Now the homeward rookery follows up its vanguard, And the valley mists are curling up the hills. Meredith and I had an argument as to whether he ought not to have made the second and fourth line to rhyme, and I think he convinced me that the plan he had adopted was the better one. Besides being a Surrey man, Hardman was something of an open-air enthusiast, delighting in country rambles, and hence the quick growth of his friendship with Meredith. He has many references to their wayfaring, and, as we shall see later on, describes one of these rambles at considerable length. The following passage may be dated January, 1862 ; the ' life ' of Cobbett to which Hardman refers was never published, I believe : Meredith chaffs me, and says I resemble in many ways the man (Cobbett) whose biography I have undertaken. The reason of his opinion is, that I come down in the midst of his many poetical rhapsodies with frequent morsels of hard common-sense. I interrupt him with a stolid request to define his terms. I point out dis- crepancies between his most recent sentence and some previous one. The consequence of this is that we get into long arguments, and it was only last Sunday, during one of our country rambles, that, in spite of the raw, inclement January day, we stopped a long time at a stile, seated on the top of which he lectured me, quite in- effectually, on his views of the future destinies of the human race. I should so like you to know him, you would like him immensely, and disagree with him constantly. Somewhat later, but possibly to the same year, belongs this go GEORGE MEREDITH pleasant anecdote of Meredith in his playful humour : ' Tuck ' was his nickname for Hardman — hence, perhaps, ' Blackburn Tuckham ' : George Meredith has a fancy for writing to me the wildest letters you ever read. Not infrequently they contain a short poem, as in the following example. This was written in consequence of having been obliged to postpone a promised visit to Copsham Cottage. (Mem. ' The Mound,' line 6, is a conspicuous eminence hard by the cottage.) Since Tuck is faithless found, no more I'll trust to man or maid ; I'll sit me down, a hermit hoare, Alone in Copsham shade. The sight of all I'll shun, Far spying from the mound, I'll be at home to none, Since Tuck is faithless found. I told him I would immortalise the words by setting them to music, but he begged me not to as he would rather write me something fit to read. No, I would not be persuaded, and I have yesterday composed the music in madrigal style for three voices. In 1861 the friendship between Rossetti and Meredith was bud- ding, as we shall learn presently from the reminiscences of Mr. W. M. Rossetti. The painter-poet evidently esteemed the novelist as something of a celebrity, for we find him writing to Alexander Gilchrist, the art critic and author of the ' life ' of Blake, under date November 19, 1861, eleven days before poor Gilchrist died : My dear Gilchrist : Two or three (friends) are coming here on Friday evening at eight or so — George Meredith I hope for one. Can you look in? I hope so — nothing but oysters, and of course the seediest of clothes. Meredith had evidently introduced Hardman into the Rossetti circle about this time. Indeed the particular evening mentioned in Rossetti 's invitation to Gilchrist was most probably identical with that to which Hardman refers in the following passage : Yesterday I went with George Meredith to see Rossetti, the celebrated pre-Raphaelite painter. He had, unfortunately, no finished works in his studio, but his collection of sketches and studies was most interesting and beautiful. He is a very jolly fellow, and we had a most amusing visit. I am going on Friday to his place again, to a social re-union of artists and literary men, short pipes and beer being, I am given to understand, the order of the day. FRIENDSHIPS AND HOME LIFE 91 Though the date and certain other details of the following anecdote are lacking, the story is perhaps the most charming of the many rescued from oblivion by Sir William Hardman, to whose memory all Meredithians owe a kindly thought for what his diligence has preserved of the personal portraiture of the master : The widow of Andrew Crosse, the celebrated electrician, was there, a very lively and talkative lady, who chaffed Meredith immensely about a passage in ' Richard Feverel ' which had pre- judiced her against our friend. M. A. overheard this conversation, but did not catch the words of the offending passage, so, when the ladies retired to the drawing-room, she boldly asked Mrs. Crosse what it was. She was somewhat surprised at the reply. It was, ' Kissing won't last, but cookery will,' as a piece of advice to ' persons about to marry. ' On the drive home we discussed it with Mrs. Meredith (George riding outside, smoking a cigar), and she said that when she was going to be married, an old aunt wrote her a letter of discouragement and encouragement, saying inter alia that she had read somewhere, years ago, in a book whose title she had forgotten, that ' kissing won't last, but cookery will.' Was not this singular, when she was going to be married to the very man who had written it? We may venture to date Hardman 's next sketch of a visit to Copsham Cottage in the early spring of 1862, as the poem, ' Grand- father Bridgman,' which he mentions, is one appearing in the collection of 1862, published in the month of May : We have just returned from a charming little country run of two days and one night. Yesterday morning we left the Waterloo Station at 9.15 for Esher. All our mutual requirements were condensed into a little black bag, which I carried, and we started from the station at Esher triumphantly, regardless of vehicles, for a walk of two and a half miles to Copsham Cottage. We were going to stay all night with our good friend George Meredith. The heartiest of welcomes awaited us at the really humble cottage — for it makes no pretensions to anything, but performs a vast deal more than many great houses that promise so much. Meredith is a man who abhors ceremony, and 'the conventionalities.' After our first greetings were over, we turned out for an hour and a half before lunch. We had exhausted all our superlatives in extolling the day and the walk between the station and the cottage, but we had to begin again now. The scent of the pine-woods, the autumn tints on the elms and beeches, the brilliant sunlight exalted us to a climax of ecstasy. We were children again. Luncheon on our return consisted chiefly of home-made products — bread, honey, jams, marmalade, etc., most delicious. Then came a general lighting of 92 GEORGE MEREDITH pipes and cigars, and off we started for another walk through lanes and wood to Cobham, a good six-mile business. We got back at five o'clock and dined at six. What appetites we had ! Gracious goodness ! Meredith's two other guests left at eight, to walk home to Walton-on-Thames, and then we put a log of wood on the fire and sat down for a cosy talk. Meredith read some poems which are to form part of a volume shortly to be published. So passed the time till 10.30, when to bed we went, thoroughly prepared to. sleep soundly, as you may easily imagine. Up at seven, and away went Meredith and myself for a brisk walk of three or four miles, after taking a tea-cup of hot soup and a slice of bread. After breakfast Meredith retired to work at his book of poems, while we went to call on some friends in the neighbourhood. On our return he read to me the result of his morning's work — portion of a very pretty idyll called ' Grandfather Bridgman. ' . . . We left Estier by the four o'clock train, carrying with us a pot of honey for consumption in Gordon-street. Hadn't we enjoyed ourselves! It was evidently on the occasion of the visit just described that Meredith gave Hardman the book and the story concerning it with which he deals in the following anecdote : Meredith insisted upon giving me a copy of ' Over the Straits,' by Mrs. Meredith — no relation of his whatever — but he gets all books published by Chapman and Hall for nothing, being in some way connected with that firm. This Mrs. Louisa Meredith resides in Tasmania, and wrote to our friend asking if he was not her husband's long-lost brother; she was with difficulty persuaded that this was not the case. Her letters were impassioned and full of entreaty ; she and her husband were dying to take him into their arms. At last our friend favoured them with a sketch of his life and origin by way of explanation. This settled the doubts, and extinguished the hopes of the Tasmanian Merediths, and the correspondence terminated with a hope that if they were not relations they might at least be friends. I should not say ' terminated,' for he still hears occasionally from Mrs. Meredith. How much would not some Meredith collectors give to-day for that letter in which he has told his own story of his origin ! It is possibly still in existence and the matter of it may be attainable, for it would certainly be regarded as a treasure by the lady who received it six and forty years ago, and by her relatives to-day, if Mrs. Lousia Meredith be no more. The most important of Sir William Hardman's records of his intercourse with Meredith is a spirited sketch of ' A Country Walk with George Meredith ' which took place in the second last week- FRIENDSHIPS AND HOME LIFE 93 end of May, 1862, the date being fixed by the Spectator of May 24, 1862, which contained the attack on the newly-issued ' Modern Love ' volume. It is an ideal picture of wholesome, happy friend- ship that Hardman's sketch brings before us; the two robust and hearty Englishmen, footing it along these Surrey roads and lanes as merry and care-free as children, yet every now and then breaking into discussion of graver things — sober in their mirth. The refer- ence to aphorism-making for ' The Pilgrim's Scrip ' is somewhat puzzling, as ' The Ordeal of Richard Feverel ' had been published three summers before. It could not be until the altered edition of 1878, or just sixteen years later, that Meredith would be able to work in these aphorisms he had composed in 1862 : After dining together at his cottage at Copsham, Meredith and I started about seven o'clock one May evening, intending if we failed to obtain beds at Mickleham, to walk on to Burford Bridge. I had no bag or pack of any kind, carrying all my necessaries in the capacious pockets of a shooting jacket. Meredith had what the Germans call, I believe, a ' ruck sack,' a sort of bag slung by a strap over the back and hanging under the left arm — a most con- venient article. In it he carried, besides toilet necessaries, a ' Murray's Handbook to Surrey,' and some capital brandy. I may as well mention here that we never addressed each other by our real names. He called me ' Tuck,' and I called him ' Robin.' Having enjoyed a good dinner before starting, we walked at a pace befitting the victuals, steady and sober, enlivening the way with snatches of song, reminiscences of overtures, frequent bursts of laughter, and absurd rhymes, as occasion suggested. The even- ing looked dubious and stormy, and the sunset was red and lower- ing, but on we went, nevertheless. We avoided Leatherhead by a cut across the fields, coming into the main road by the church. It was quite dark when we reached Mickleham, about twenty minutes past nine. The landlady of the inn was most obliging, and promised us the accommodation we required. After making arrange- ments, we strolled out to listen to the nightingales in the meadows on the banks of the Mole. While enjoying the cool air, drinking in their music, ' the monotonous clattering of the brown eve-jar,' and all the varied sounds of a summer night, Meredith recited Keats' ' Ode to the Nightingale,' one of Robin's favourite poems. We returned to our inn, singing my music to Robin's madrigal addressed to myself, ' Since Tuck is faithless found,' amid peals of laughter. After large potations of soda-water, flavoured with the brandy afore- said, we retired to rest about eleven o'clock. Our bedrooms com- municated by a passage, and we lay shouting to each other, and joking about the joviality of the whole affair, neither of us getting to sleep for an hour or so. Nevertheless, at 5.30 a.m. Meredith 94 GEORGE MEREDITH enters my room with a suggestion that we should get up. I recom- mended him to go to bed again, and he did so. We eventually got up about seven, and strolled out to see the immediate neighbour- hood while breakfast was being got ready. The church is nearly opposite the inn, and into the churchyard we went. A pet lamb came to us, expecting, as Robin put it, a gratuity of some kind, but got nothing, as we had nothing to give it. Beyond the churchyard a stile-road leads across some meadows up the Mickleham Downs. Meredith declares that here may be obtained one of the most perfect bits of rustic scenery in this country, and consequently in any other. The church spire is seen embedded in rich foliage, backed by the hills crowned by Norbury Hall, with all the noble trees placed by dear old Evelyn, of the ' Diary. ' The most critical artist — and Meredith has an artist's appreciation of landscape — need not modify one iota of the view ; every tree in its place, and the spire of the church just where it should be. Higher up the scene broadens, and with all the varied greens of May made another view of great beauty. In the midst of our enthusiasm the church clock chimed eight, and warned us of our waiting breakfast. After breakfast I wrote a short note to my wife (' Demitroia,' as we call her), for which I was duly chaffed by Meredith, who called me ' an uxorious old Tuck,' and finally wrote a note to her himself to tell her that I never thought of writing till I had eaten I know not how many chops, kidneys, eggs and the etceteras. I posted the letter at nine, and on we went for our day's walk. Striking into the meadows by the Mole we crossed the bridge near the ' Swallows,' and so back into the road near Burford Bridge, revelling in the glory of the morning and the lovely scenery. We followed the high-road to Dorking for some distance, and then struck into a by-path across the fields into the town. After making vain efforts to obtain a Saturday Review or any other ' weekly,' we went on towards Guild- ford. Presently a sudden descent brought us to ' The Rookery, ' the birthplace of Malthus, a quaint old house embedded deep in foliage. Soon after this we lost our way, but Meredith made inquiry of certain tillers of the field, and by dint of scrambling over hedge and ditch we at length found ourselves on the right road. Our mishap occurred in consequence of the interest taken by Robin in Malthus 's birthplace. In order to get a better view of the house we had turned into a lane which passed quite close to ' The Rookery. ' Coming to the little village of Shere, we turned into the inn for a rest, and some ale and bread and cheese. Soon after leaving Shere we began an abrupt descent into a place called Combe Bottom, one of the most lovely spots in creation. It is in the shape of a basin hollowed out of the chalk, with almost precipitous sides, covered with short grass at the base, but crowned with the most luxurious foliage in every variety of tint. On a bare projecting knob we lay down and smoked our pipes while enjoying FRIENDSHIPS AND HOME LIFE 95 the surroundings. Here Robin overhauled his note-books and read to me a number of aphorisms hereafter to be published in ' The Pilgrim's Scrip,' by Sir Austin Feverel, edited by Adrian Harley. We discussed them at our ease, for such terse sayings naturally provoke conversation. As Sir Austin says, ' A proverb is the half- way house to a thought.' Having finished our aphorisms and our pipes we descended to the bottom and crossed to the opposite side, on to the Merrow Downs, along which we walked as far as New- land's Corner. Immediately on our left lay Albury, where, as Meredith reminded me, the author of ' Proverbial Philosophy ' resides. Getting once more on to the main road we made for Guildford, where, on arriving, we ordered a cold dinner and proceeded to the railway station to get copies of the Saturday Review, Public Opinion, and The Spectator (May 24, 1862). The last-named journal contained an article on Meredith's Poems and ' Modern Love,' etc. , and a regular stinger it was ! Robin was naturally annoyed, for the review was most unreasonable, and was, in my opinion, written with decidedly personal feeling. Meredith did not agree with me in this, and eventually concluded that the review was written by a woman. The disagreeable topic did not interfere much with our pleasure, we were too much determined to enjoy ourselves, and Robin's annoyance soon passed off. After our cold collation we started again for Godalming, intend- ing to pass through that town and sleep at a place two miles beyond. The evening was very fine, and defying the critic of the Spectator, we found the walk most exhilarating. In passing through Godal- ming we could not help noticing the number of patriarchal dogs lying about on the doorsteps ! Robin was much tickled by my styling one in particular as an ' ancient dog,' he said it sounded so very old. At a small inn near the village of Milford we found a civil and obliging hostess, who recollected Meredith, he having stayed there the summer before with Maxse. She said she could give us beds, so we ordered tea, and took a stroll to an eminence on the wild common adjoining, from which we obtained a fine but desolate view. It was now nine o'clock, and as we had been on our feet for twelve hours we were not sorry to rest. The house filled with hilarious rustics, who sang old tunes with very dolorous choruses. It was Saturday night. They kept it up till midnight. Our bedrooms were very plain, for the house was a small and poor one, but they were clean, and the beds aired. The following morning (Sunday) we were both up by seven o'clock, took a stroll in the garden, and awaited our coffee, chops, and unlimited bread and butter. Our hostess was very reasonable in her bill, only 35. 6d. each. We gave sixpence to the little maid who waited upon us, and she was greatly pleased. We stopped only once in our ramble from Milford to Haslemere. We lay down on the summit of Hindhead, smoking several pipes, 9 6 GEORGE MEREDITH and enjoying a prospect of from fifteen to thirty miles in every direc- tion. About noon we started down towards Haslemere, so as to get there by one o'clock, when folks would be out of church and inns open. We knocked at the hostel of the White Horse about ten minutes to one, and had a cut at the family dinner, a breast of veal, washed down by copious draughts of the best pale ale Meredith and I had ever tasted. After dinner we sat on a wall in the garden and smoked. About three we started — ' ignominiously,' as Robin would have it — in a four-wheel chaise for Godalming to catch the train at 5.15, there being no train from Haslemere before 7.20. I arrived in town about seven o'clock, having dropped Meredith at Esher. Another very attractive glimpse of Meredith is afforded by Hard- man's description of a visit to Drury Lane pantomime on Boxing Night of 1862. Here again the date can be fixed with certainty, as Edmund Falconer, the actor-dramatist, began his management at Drury Lane on that day : George Meredith comes up to-morrow morning with his son to spend Christmas Day with us, and go to a pantomime on Boxing Night. He says, ' Arthur is ardent for a jolly clown, a pantaloon of the most aged, the most hapless, a brilliant columbine, and a harle- quin with a waving wand. ' The father is ' for Drury Lane or Covent Garden, for uproar, a pit reeking with oranges, gods that flourish pewter-pots, and picks that stick and show their mortality at starting. ' Falconer, who opens the theatre on Boxing Night, is said to have spent ^10,000 on his pantomime and decoration, etc. . . . We went to Drury Lane on Boxing Night, and such a pandemonium I have rarely witnessed. The first piece was acted in dumb show, not a word could we hear. The fights in pit and gallery were frequent. The shower of orange peel from the gods into the pit was quite astounding. The occupants of the latter place made feeble efforts to throw it back again, but, of course, never got it any further than the first tier of boxes. I was glad to see the thing once, but you won't catch me there again. The last of Hardman's reminiscences of Meredith end with August of 1863 and take the form of some jottings of three days in Paris : Paris, August 21. — Letter from George Meredith announcing his approach. He left via Newhaven last night, and ought to have been in Paris about 11.30. He stopped at Rouen to see the Joan of Arc, and to call on an author who had submitted certain work to the Chapmans. He arrived about 2.30. Joyful greetings. We dined by Robin's request at Vefour's, a great mistake. Between Vefour's and the Trois Freres there's as much difference as between the Uni- HHHMi- > Sir William Hardman. Editor of the Morning Post, 1872-1890. An intimate friend of Meredith's, and the original of Blackburn Tuckham in ' Beauchamp's Career.' FRIENDSHIPS AND HOME LIFE 97 versity Club and the ' London ' (corner of Chancery Lane). Mere- dith and I strolled along the Champs Elysees in the evening — very pleasant, and not offensive, like our Haymarket. He brought me Once a Week, containing my article on ' America : An Imaginary Tour,' published August 15, and also put Renan's ' Life of Jesus ' into his bag for me. We think him not looking well — his son Arthur's accident has naturally been a matter of great anxiety. Paris, August 22. — Chartered two carriages, and drove about, visiting the Louvre and other places. Dined at Trois Freres', Robin and I going first to order the dinner, and then returning to our hotel. We were the merriest of parties. Charles, the waiter, was an admirable type of the aristocracy of waiters. We have nothing of the kind in England. The tender interest which he displayed in every dish, the manner in which he delicately urged M. A. to have a morsel of dishes which she would fain have let pass, the respectful way in which he offered advice and suggestions, all concurred in proving that we had before us the very acme and pinnacle of waiters. We arranged for a carriage to take us to Versailles to-morrow — which is a fete day — and we afterwards all had a walk up the Champs Elysees. Meredith is going to-morrow evening to Grenoble to meet ' Poco. ' They then proceed to Dauphine, and eventually to Chamouni. Paris, August 23 (Sunday). — We went to Versailles by the Avenue de Passy, through Sevres, and arrived safely at eleven o'clock. Could not get Meredith past the more modern French pictures of battles. . . . We had a delightful drive back through St. Cloud and the Bois de Boulogne. Expressions of admiration at the beauty of the drive were exhausted. Truly the Emperor is a wonderful CEdile. Meredith left us at 6.15 for Grenoble. Sir William Hardman died in 1890, and it is clear from these reminiscences that by his death Meredith lost a true friend and admirer. There is the gusto of the hero-worshipper in many of his references to the novelist, and in the little circle of those who were loyal to Meredith long before it had become fashionable to admire him, Hardman must always have an eminent place. But we suspect that Sir William, who was probably nothing of a Bohemian, did not grow into any intimacy with the Rossetti segment of Meredith's circle, for although the novelist's relations with Rossetti had ripened during the years covered by Hardman 's reminiscences, we find only one slight reference to Rossetti in his jottings. Meredith had been on terms of increasing acquaintance with Rossetti for some three years before 1861, but it was in this year that they became intimate. Frederick A. Sandys, the artist, who did the fine decorative picture of ' Bhanavar among the serpents of Lake Karatis ' and painted H g8 GEORGE MEREDITH Mrs. Meredith's portrait, also came into the Rossetti group about the same time ; and of course there were Swinburne and Mr. W. M. Rossetti, and, somewhat later, I fancy, Mr. Theodore Watts- Dunton and Burne-Jones. Joseph Knight, in his ' Life of Rossetti,' thus describes the cir- cumstances of the taking of the house at 16, Cheyne Walk (Tudor House), where, towards the close of 1862, Meredith became one of Rossetti 's sub-tenants : After the death of his wife, Rossetti found the chambers he occu- pied with her too charged with painful memories to be tolerable. He went for a short period to stay with his friend, Mr. Madox Brown, at Highgate Rise; then, after a brief residence in Lincoln's Inn Fields, he took a lease of the house at No. 16, Cheyne Walk, possession of which he retained until his death. Though unprovided with a studio that fully answered his requirements, this fine old building, with its handsome iron gates, its frontage commanding the river, and its extensive garden, formed an almost ideal residence for him. The conditions under which it had been taken had, how- ever, no element of possible permanency. Joint occupants with Rossetti were Mr. Swinburne, Mr. George Meredith, and Mr. William Rossetti. That four men of individualities so potent, and, in some senses, so aggressive, or at least assertive, as those of the men named, should be able to live together in closeness of continuous intimacy, from which there was scarcely an escape, was barely con- ceivable. Mr. George Meredith, accordingly, made no long stay. Next after him Mr. Swinburne departed. The two brothers held on, as was natural, for some time longer, the younger, in this, as in every other case, assisting the elder with counsel, not always followed, and in the early days with money. There are numerous stories as to the cause of Meredith's de- parture, chiefly designed to reflect on the habits of Rossetti — the artist's breakfast of ' five poached eggs that had slowly bled to death on five slabs of bacon,' which he ' devoured like an ogre,' is an example — but we may dismiss these as mere gossip, for, as we shall see, though far from uncritical of the man, Meredith remained loyal to Rossetti. Indeed ' A Note on Cheyne Walk ' which he wrote to the editor of the English Review in January, 1909, proves this amply. He there admits the grain of truth contained in the story, for Rossetti 's habits were prejudicial to his health, but not to friendship. ' Devo- tion to his work in contempt of our nature killed him. ' He adds, ' No other subject have I spoken of this dear fellow but with the affec- tion I felt. ' One thing is certain : that Meredith was a somewhat irregular visitor at Cheyne Walk even when paying his share of the FRIENDSHIPS AND HOME LIFE 99 expenses, as we find Rossetti himself, in a letter to Mrs. Anne Gilchrist, January 3, 1863, writing : By the bye, I have been a martyr to unsatisfactory servants here, and have been asking all my friends if they know any desirable ones. Our household consists of four men, two of whom only, myself and Mr. Swinburne, are at all constant inmates. But Mr. William Rossetti in the ' Letters and Memoirs ' naturally devotes considerable attention to this period of Rossetti 's life, and here we find Meredith's association with the historic group at Cheyne Walk described with the accuracy and detail of one who was privy to all that happened. He writes : For the Cheyne Walk house a new plan had meanwhile been determined. Rossetti was to be the tenant, paying a rent (assuredly a very moderate one) of ^,"100 a year, besides — if I remember right — a premium of .£225 upon entry. As his sub-tenants for defined portions of the building there were to be three persons — Mr. Swin- burne, George Meredith, and myself. Of course, each of us three was to pay something to Dante; though the latter did not wish me, and in fact did not allow me, to continue any such payment after affairs had got into their regular course. We were all to dine together, if present together in the house. Mr. Swinburne was generally present, Mr. Meredith much less constantly. I came on three fixed days of the week, but not on any others unless some particular occasion arose. Swinburne, and I think Meredith, had their respective sitting-rooms, in which they received their personal visitors. I had, and required, a bedroom only. Dante Rossetti was by this time familiar with Mr. Meredith, whom he had seen increas- ingly for some three years past, and whose talents and work he seriously, though not uncritically, admired ; familiar, yet by no means so much so as with Mr. Swinburne. . . . Mr. Meredith and Rossetti entertained a solid mutual regard, and got on together amicably, yet without that thorough cordiality of give-and-take which oils the hinges of daily intercourse. It would have been difficult for two men of the literary order of mind to be more decisively unlike. The reader of their works — not to speak of the students of Rossetti 's paintings — will not fail to per- ceive this. Rossetti was not at all a mere recluse, incapable of taking very good care of himself in the current transactions of life ; he had, on the contrary, a large share of shrewdness and of business aptitude, and a quick eye for ' the main chance ' in all contingencies where he chose to exercise it. He understood character, and (though often too indulgent to its shadier side) he knew how to deal with it, and had indeed a rather marked distaste for that inexpert class of persons who waver on the edge of life without ever throwing h 2 ioo GEORGE MEREDITH themselves boldly into it, and gripping at the facts. But Mr. Mere- dith was (or I should rather say, is) incomparably more a man of the world and man of society, scrutinising all sorts of things, and using them as his material in the commerce of life and in the field of intellect. Even in the mere matter of household routine, he found that Rossetti's arrangements, though ample for comfort of a more or less off-hand kind, were not conformable to his standard. Thus it pretty soon became apparent that Mr. Meredith's sub-tenancy was not likely to stand much wear and tear, or to outlast the temporary convenience which had prompted it. I could not now define pre- cisely how long it continued — perhaps up to the earlier days of 1864. It then ceased, without, I think, any disposition on either side that it should be renewed. Friendly intercourse between the two men continued for some few years, and gradually wore out without any cause or feeling of dissension. In Mr. Joseph Knight's pleasant ' Life of Dante Gabriel Rossetti ' I find some observations made by a 'friend, himself a poet,' which I unhesitatingly (let me hope not rashly) attribute to our pre-eminent novelist. I quote them here less as throwing light on the character of Rossetti — highly deserving though they are of attention in that regard — than as pointing to the sort of relation which subsisted between the two during their joint sojourn in Cheyne Walk : ' I liked him much, though I was often irritated by his prejudices, and his strong language against this or that person or subject. He was borne too, somewhat, in his interests, both on canvas and in verse, and would not care for certain forms of literature or life which he admitted were worth caring for. However, his talk was always full of interest and of rare knowledge ; and he himself, his pictures, and his house, altogether, had I think an immense influence for good on us all, and on English art and work — being not insular, yet not un-English, and bringing into our world new and delightful subjects, and a personal character very striking and unusual and lovable. ' Mr. Swinburne remained in Tudor House for some considerable while after Mr. Meredith had left. The most lasting monument of the companionship of Tudor House is, perhaps, Swinburne's famous letter to the Spectator of June 7, 1862, in reply to the criticism of ' Modern Love ' men j tioned above by Hardman in his account of his week-end ramble with Meredith. Swinburne is valiant in defence of a friend as few men could be, and whenever the friendships of poets are in dis- cussion this spirited protest of his against a stupid and unjust criticism of his friend's great poem must be remembered : Sir, — I cannot resist asking the favour of admission for my pro- FRIENDSHIPS AND HOME LIFE 101 test against the article on Mr. Meredith's last volume of poems in the Spectator of May 24. That I personally have for the writings, whether verse or prose of Mr. Meredith, a most sincere and deep admiration, is no doubt a matter of infinitely small moment. I wish only, in default of a better, to appeal seriously on general grounds against this sort of criticism as applied to one of the leaders of English literature. To any fair attack Mr. Meredith's books of course lie as much open as another man's; indeed, standing where he does, the very eminence of his post makes him perhaps more liable than a man of less well-earned fame to the periodical slings and arrows of publicity. Against such criticism no one would have a right to appeal, whether for his own work or for another's. But the writer of the article in question blinks at stating the fact that he is dealing with no unfledged pretender. Any work of a man who had won his spurs and fought his way to a foremost place among the men of his time, must claim at least a grave consideration and respect. It would hardly be less absurd, in remarking on a poem by Mr. Meredith, to omit all reference to his previous work, and treat the present book as if its author had never tried his hand at writing before, than to criticise the Ldgende des Siecles, or (coming to a nearer instance) the Idylls of the King, without taking into account the relative position of the great English or the greater French poet. On such a tone of criticism as this, any one who may chance to see or hear of it has a right to comment. But even if the case were different, and the author were now at his starting-point, such a review of such a book is surely out of date. Praise or blame should be thoughtful, serious, careful, when applied to a work of such subtle strength, such depth of delicate power, such passionate and various beauty, as the leading poem of Mr. Meredith's volume; in some points, as it seems to me (and in this opinion I know that I have weightier judgments than my own to back me), a poem above the aim and beyond the reach of any but its author. Mr. Meredith is one of the three or four poets now alive whose work, perfect or imperfect, is always as noble in design, as it is often faultless in result. The present critic falls foul of him for dealing with ' a deep and painful subject on which he has no conviction to express. ' There are pulpits enough for all preachers in prose ; the business of verse-writing is hardly to express convic- tions ; and if some poetry, not without merit of its kind, has at times dealt in dogmatic morality, it is all the worse and all the weaker for that. As to subject, it is too much to expect that all schools of poetry are to be for ever subordinate to the one just now so much in request with us, whose scope of sight is bounded by the nursery walls ; that all Muses are to bow down before her who babbles, with lips yet warm from their pristine pap, after the dang- ling delights of a child's coral, and jingles with flaccid fingers one knows not whether a jester's or a baby's bells. We have not too 102 GEORGE MEREDITH many writers capable of duly handling a subject worth the serious interest of men. As to execution, take almost any sonnet at random out of this series, and let any man, qualified to judge for himself of metre, choice of expression and splendid language, decide on its claims. And, after all, the test will be unfair, except as regards metrical or pictorial merit ; every section of this great progressive poem being connected with the other by links of the finest and most studied workmanship. Take, for example, that noble sonnet, beginning : We saw the swallows gathering in the skies, a more perfect piece of writing no man alive has ever turned out ; witness these three lines, the grandest perhaps of the whole book : And in the largeness of the evening earth, Our spirit grew as we walked side by side ; The hour became her husband, and my bride ; but in transcription it must lose the colour and effect given it by its place in the series ; the grave and tender beauty, which makes it at once a bridge and a resting-place between the admirable poems of passion it falls among. As specimens of pure power, and depth of imagination at once intricate and vigorous, take the two sonnets on a false passing reunion of wife and husband ; the sonnet on the rose ; that other beginning : I am not of those miserable males Who sniff at vice, and daring not to snap, Do therefore hope for Heaven. And, again, that earlier one : All other joys of life he strove to warm. Of the shorter poems which give character to the book I have not space to speak here ; and as the critic has omitted noticing the most valuable and important (such as the ' Beggar's Soliloquy,' and the ' Old Chartist,' equal to BeVanger for completeness of effect and exquisite justice of style, but noticeable for a thorough dramatic insight, which Beranger missed through his personal passions and partialities), there is no present need to go into the matter. I ask you to admit this protest simply out of justice to the book in hand, believing as I do that it expresses the deliberate unbiassed opinion of a sufficient number of readers to warrant the insertion of it, and leaving to your consideration rather their claims to a fair hearing than those of the book's author to a revised judgment. A poet of Mr. Meredith's rank can no more be profited by the advocacy of his admirers than injured by the rash or partial attack of his critics. A. C. Swinburne. FRIENDSHIPS AND HOME LIFE 103 I make no apology for giving Swinburne's letter in full; it is of such literary importance, even apart from its great personal interest to the present narrative, that no reader can reasonably object to the full text of it here, even if he is already familiar with it. We are told, moreover, that had not Swinburne written his spirited protest another, whose name is inseparable from Swin- burne's, would have plied his pen to the same purpose. Mr. James Douglas in his work on Mr. Thecfdore Watts-Dunton writes : Not in the least interesting among the beautiful friendships between Mr. Watts-Dunton and his illustrious contemporaries is that between himself and George Meredith. Mr. William Sharp can speak with authority on this subject, being himself the intimate friend of Mr. Meredith, Mr. Swinburne, and Mr. Watts-Dunton. Speaking of Swinburne's championship, in the Spectator, of Mere- dith's first book of poems, Mr. Sharp, in an article in the Pall Mall Magazine of December, 1901, says : ' Among those who read and considered ' (Meredith's work) ' was another young poet, who had, indeed, already heard of Swinburne as one of the most promising of the younger men, but had not yet met him. ... If the letter signed " A. C. Swinburne " had not appeared, another signed "Theodore Watts" would have been pub- lished, to the like effect. It was not long before the logic of events was to bring George Meredith, A. C. Swinburne, and Theodore Watts into personal communion. ' The first important recognition of George Meredith as a poet was the article by Mr. Watts-Dunton in the Athenaeum on ' Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth.' After this appeared articles appre- ciative of Meredith's prose fiction by W. E. Henley and others. But it was Mr. Watts-Dunton who led the way. The most touch- ing of all the testimonies of love and admiration which Mr. Meredith has received from Mr. Watts-Dunton, or indeed, from anybody else, is the beautiful sonnet addressed to him on his seventy-fourth birthday. In the course of time, and for no positive reason, Meredith's intimacy with the Pre-Raphaelite circle gradually lessened, until, even while all the members of the original group remained alive, it had ceased to be more than the occasional renewal of an old acquaint- anceship. In the ' Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones,' for instance, we read : In the course of this year (1897) he and George Meredith met again, having seldom seen each other since the Rossetti days, and their meeting was thus described by Edward : ' I met Meredith the other day. "What shall we talk of," said he, "politics or art?" 104 GEORGE MEREDITH "Politics I never think of," said I, "and art I never talk of." "Let's begin on Epps' cocoa," said he, and so we started and had a fine time of it. ' The likelihood is that Meredith began to drift away from the Rossetti circle early in 1864, largely because he was becoming an extremely busy man, with very little time for the social side of life, and none at all for artistic Bohemia. He was finishing ' Sandra Belloni,' planning ' Rhoda Fleming,' and also doing a good deal for the Morning Post, in addition to his work for the publishing house to which he was ' reader. ' But there was another reason : his home was at Esher ; London he visited only once a week on business, and that did not afford much opportunity for maintaining relations with the Chelsea group. The Cheyne Walk scheme must have been impracticable from the first, so far as Meredith was concerned. But it is his one London landmark ; all other reminis- cences of him are to be looked for in Surrey : at Esher and Box Hill. It was at Esher that Sir Francis C. Burnand first made his acquaintance, as he narrates in his own jaunty style in his ' Records and Reminiscences.' This must have been in i860, if Sir Francis is correct in thinking it was at the time when ' Evan Harrington ' was appearing in Once a Week. The future editor of Punch was then a young man of twenty-four, reading law at Lincoln's Inn, but full of enthusiasm for the drama. He was a friend of Maurice Fitzgerald, younger brother of the better-known Gerald, and nephew of the famous Edward. Maurice lived then at Esher and was on intimate terms with Meredith, though Sir Francis is not supported by the novelist himself in suggesting that the ' Wise Youth ' was studied from the brilliant young Fitzgerald. It was through a visit to Fitzgerald at Esher that Sir Francis became acquainted with Meredith, the circumstances being thus vivaciously pictured : ' I thought, ' he (Maurice Fitzgerald) observed, breaking off in the midst of a vivid description of the beauties of the Box Hill and Dorking country, ' I thought we should have met George. ' ' Who is George? ' I asked. ' George Meredith,' he answered. ' I forgot to tell you that he is stopping with me, or I am with him. It doesn't much matter. We've been together for some time. You know him? ' No, I didn't. 'You know,' Maurice put it to me inquiringly, 'his "Shaving of Shagpat " and his poems? ' I regretted to say that, owing to my studies having been for the last year or more on subjects removed far away from modern FRIENDSHIPS AND HOME LIFE 105 literature, I had scarcely looked at any new books for the past eighteen months. ' Ah ! ' said Maurice reflectively ; ' you must read his " Richard Feverel." I've got it and the others at home.' Then we saw a figure standing in front of a white gate on our left, about a quarter of a mile distant, waving to us. ' There he is,' said Maurice quietly (he was always quiet); 'we shall meet him where the roads join at the corner.' As we neared the ' crossways ' (no ' Diana ' there as yet), George Meredith was shaking hands with a stoutish, jovial-looking, rubicund-visaged, white-haired gentleman, who, if he had only been attired in gaiters, might there and then have been easily taken for the original of Phiz's delineation of the immortal Mr. Pickwick. George Meredith and this genial elderly gentleman waved their hands encouragingly to one another as the latter disappeared within the gate, and George strode towards us. George Meredith never merely walked, never lounged ; he strode, he took giant strides. He had on a soft, shapeless wide-awake, a sad-coloured flannel shirt, with low open collar turned over a brilliant scarlet necker- chief tied in loose sailor's knot; no waistcoat; knickerbockers, grey stockings, and the most serviceable laced boots, which evidently meant business in pedestrianism ; crisp, curly, brownish hair, ignorant of parting; a fine brow, quick, observant eyes, greyish — if I remember rightly — beard and moustache, a trifle lighter than the hair. A splendid head ; a memorable personality. Then his sense of humour, his cynicism, and his absolutely boyish enjoyment of mere fun, of any pure and simple absurdity. His laugh was some- thing to hear; it was of short duration, but it was a roar; it set you off — nay, he himself, when much tickled, would laugh till he cried (it didn't take long to get to the crying), and then he would struggle with himself, hand to open mouth, to prevent another outburst. Two more- delightful companions for a young man, trembling on the brink of literature and the drama, it would be difficult to imagine. They were both my hosts. I was at home at once. ' Who were you talking to as we came up? ' asked Maurice. 'That,' said George, 'why, you've met him' — no, Maurice didn't remember — 'that's Evans, dear old "Pater" Evans.' And it was in this company, in these circumstances, that I first set eyes on Mullet Evans, second partner in the old publishing firm of ' Bradbury and Evans,' then known all over the world as 'the proprietors of Punch.' At this time they had among other ventures started Once a Week as a rival to Dickens's All the Year Round, and George Meredith was writing for this opposition his ' Evan Harrington.' George scouted the suggestion that his novel should be called ' Bradbury-and-Evans Harrington. ' Our near neighbours were the Duff-Gordons, at whose house 106 GEORGE MEREDITH George was a persona grata. As Maurice did not affect society, and as I was ' a person of no importance,' neither of us, though formally introduced, was included in the invitations sent to George Meredith, then a rising star, by Sir Alexander and Lady Duff- Gordon. A far more congenial person to our Bohemian tastes was Frederick Chapman, who had taken a small house in the meadows by the little river Mole, not far from Cardinal Wolsey's tower. Very pleasant company we met there, and it was a delightful summer-time walk from Esher Common to this cottage. Through this association I obtained my first introduction to the Bouverie Street publishers. Thus it happened. I had told George Meredith some stories which he found sufficiently amusing to warrant him in placing them, told in his own inimitable language and style, before the public in the pages of Once a Week. Now George never informed me of his design, and made use of them without a ' with your leave, or bv vour leave. ' It was after our trio at Esher was broken up that I found these stories of mine in Once a Week, whereupon, seeing a point to be scored for myself, I wrote to George, asking him, as a set-off against the ' honorarium ' he had received for my stories (' only infinitely better told '), to recommend a story of mine to the editor. George replied, expressing his regret, excusing himself by saying that he never thought I was efoing to make capital out of them (here he was right), and that he would have great pleasure in submitting my story to the Once a Week editor. Ainsi dit, ainsi fait, and my first appearance in magazine form was as the author of a story about a practical joke (its title I have forgotten), admirablv illustrated by Charles Keene, whose acquaintance, years afterwards, I was to make at the 'Punch Table.' So George and myself cried quits. This introduction was of some use to me as acquainting Mark Lemon, who, as Mr. Punch's editor, was au courant with all the Once a Week affairs, with my name, of which, indirectly, he was soon to hear from a totally different quarter. Mark Lemon, as he long afterwards informed me, had been very much amused by the story. Sir Francis Burnand, who continued for many years on the most cordial relations with Meredith and must be numbered among the lifelong friends of the novelist, has another anecdote to relate which illustrates Meredith's delight in the jovial humour of the song with a ' lilt ' to it, as we have already seen from Sir William Hard- man's recollections of their country walks. Sir Francis writes : I had just come from hearing the new burlesque ' The Lady of Lyons ' at the Strand Theatre, written by Henry J. Byron, and one of the songs had got hold of me so fast that I found myself con- stantly humming the tune and singing a verse or two. During our FRIENDSHIPS AND HOME LIFE 107 country walks, and in the quiet evenings, George Meredith would ' call ' for this song, and I used to comply with the request by giving, as I fear, a rather maimed version of it. What, however, used to delight George was the ' swing and go ' of it, and the catch of the rhythm. It was sung, through his nose, by Clarke as Beausdant, and ran thus : I've hit on a trick they can't see through, not were they Argus-eyed, Oh ! As soon as possife/ Miss Deschapc/fe shall be my lovely bride, Oh ! And the lilt of this to some old American jingle called ' Skid-a-ma- lik ' used to take George Meredith's fancy. I should doubt whether at any time George Meredith cared much for the drama, that is the stage representation of it, even in its highest comedy or its deepest tragedy, while as for farce or burlesque I should not be very much surprised to learn that he had never seen either one or the other. A few years later than the time recalled in Sir Francis Burnand's reminiscences, Meredith formed a friendship of which there is no published record, but concerning which we would fain hope some- thing may yet be forthcoming. We know that Leslie Stephen was one of his intimates from about the year 1865 to the time of his death, yet in the ' Life and Letters ' of Stephen this is all that his brilliant biographer, the late Professor F. W. Maitland, has to say about Stephen's friendship with the novelist, a friendship that inspired one of the most lovable and attractive of Meredith's characters : At Vienna there is not much to be seen, except Mr. George Meredith: an exception of importance to Stephen, for then began a friendship that lasted until his death ; an exception of importance also to those who would know Stephen, for, though the Comic Spirit creates and never copies, there is no denying that she had looked with kindly eyes at Leslie Stephen when she created Vernon Whitford. Fortunately Meredith himself wrote a brief appreciation of Stephen in the Author of April, 1904, from which we can catch a fleeting glimpse of both of them, with other select companions, on their wayside ramblings : When that noble body of scholarly and cheerful pedestrians The Sunday Tramps, were on the march, with Leslie Stephen to lead them, there was conversation which would have made the presence of a shorthand writer a benefaction to the country. A pause to it came at the examination of the leader's watch and Ordnance map under the western sun, and word was given for the strike across country to catch the tail of a train offering dinner in London, at 108 GEORGE MEREDITH the cost of a run through hedges, over ditches and fallows, past proclamations against trespassers, under suspicion of being taken for more serious depredators in flight. The chief of the Tramps had a wonderfully calculating eye in the observation of distances and the nature of the land, as he proved by his discovery of untried passes in the higher Alps, and he had no mercy for pursy followers. I have often said of this lifelong student and philosophical head that he had in him the making of a great military captain. Perhaps the most familiar of Meredith anecdotes is that con- necting his name with Carlyle which is given thus in a letter of the late York Powell to Professor Elton in 1896 : The story is that Mrs. Carlyle begged Carlyle to read ' Richard Feverel.' He did so, and said, 'Ma dear, that young man's nae fule. Ask him here. ' When he came, as Meredith himself told me, he talked long with him on deep things, and begged him to come often. He said, ' Man, ye suld write heestory ! Ye hae a heestorian in ye ! ' Meredith answered that novel-writing was his way of writing history, but Carlyle would not quite accept that. He did not argue about it, but rather doubted over it, as if there were more in it than he had thought at first. Mr. J. M. Barrie had told the same story, in part at least, some years earlier, and it is, no doubt, quite an authentic anecdote. Meredith's acquaintance with Tennyson was a little more intimate than that with Carlyle, which was of the most casual nature. It has also yielded a story which the late L. F. Austin, in his post- humous volume, ' Points of View,' thus relates: Mr. George Meredith tells an amusing story of a walk he took with Tennyson one day when the bard was very silent and gloomy. They walked several miles, and suddenly Tennyson growled ' Apollodorus says I am not a great poet.' This critic was a Scottish divine, and neither his name nor his opinion was of much consequence. Mr. Meredith said something to that effect ; and Tennyson retorted, ' But he ought not to say I am not a great poet.' This was the entire conversation. Apollodorus was, of course, the Scottish divine and critic, George Gilfillan, and there is little doubt that the story is authentic. It has long been current among literary gossips, varying somewhat in detail and perhaps to the heightening of its humour; but as Austin has told it we may let it pass, though not without protest against his slight to Gilfillan, who was no dolt in criticism. FRIENDSHIPS AND HOME LIFE 109 It was after settling at Box Hill that the late William Tinsley, the shrewd old publisher who issued ' Rhoda Fleming ' in 1865, spent a day with Meredith, which he describes in his ' Random Recollections ' as follows : It was in the spring time. ... I remember I went down by an early train, because it was agreed we should have a good walk before an early dinner ; I never was a strong or a fast walker, but Master Meredith at that time seemed able to walk any distance, and in quick time. After some light refreshment, we started to climb Box Hill ; that was a task for me, and about as far as I wanted to go. However, after looking down upon Dorking and some very pictur- esque places under the hill and around, my guide proposed we should strike off the hill to the left, where there was some very pretty scenery and peeps into the distance, and one way and another Master Meredith enticed me several miles away from his house, and he was still as fresh as paint when I was a good deal knocked up ; now and then I sat down on a bank to rest, and he walked on, and when some distance away called out, ' Come on, Tinsley.' However, in time we came in sight of his house, and then I said, ' You go on ; I shall be with you in time for dinner, be sure of that. ' It was a lovely walk, but on such occasions the two pedestrians should be about equal in walking powers. Mr. Justin McCarthy would also seem to have come into personal touch with the mighty walker about this time, but in his ' Reminis- cences ' he presents to us the indoor man rather than the breezy creature of the downs, when he writes : A more genial host never entertained the passing stranger. George Meredith loved to make his guests happy in his house, and was never tired at his table of suggesting to them new qualities in food and drink to give their palates a fresh chance of satisfaction. He had an exquisite fancy for dainty dishes of all kinds, and could create a new and refined taste in the system of even a city alderman by the manner in which he dilated on the peculiar delicacy of this or that article of food. To dine with George Meredith was to find dinner converted into a feast of intellect and fancy, and no longer left to be either a mere satisfaction of physical craving or the indul- gence of an epicure's appetite. He had a charming little chalet in his grounds, which he used as a study when he wanted to be quite alone with his work, and where he sat and talked with a friend now and then when his work was put away for the moment and he and his companions could smoke and talk, and watch the clouds in the sky, and the shadows on the grass, and only a very prosaic person could fail to find something of the poetic in himself under such an influence. no GEORGE MEREDITH Mr. Comyns Carr's friendship with Meredith dates back to 1876, and in that most engaging; volume of reminiscence, ' Some Eminent Victorians,' which Mr. Carr issued in 1908, there is a modest refer- ence to his intimacy with the great writer that calls for quotation in this record of friendships : The hours that I have spent with George Meredith in and around his simple home at Box Hill count among the most delightful of my life. I met him first at the house of a dear friend of both, Frederick Jameson, in the year 1876, and it was, I think, about that time that I had published in the Saturday Review a criticism of his novel, ' Beauchamp's Career,' which I think must have pleased him, for I find a phrase of his in a letter written to me at that date in which he says, ' Praise of yours comes from the right quarter.' It was not long after that that we became intimate friends, and it was his hospitable custom to invite me to breakfast with him on the little lawn in front of his cottage, and then, after the repast, light and dainty after the fashion of the French dejeuner, wc would start for a long ramble over Box Hill, returning, often but just in time for dinner, to continue or to renew the talk that had made the afternoon memorable. Meredith could talk and walk after a fashion that I have known in no one else. Sometimes he would occupy the whole of our ramble in a purely inventive biography of some one of our common friends, passing in rather burlesque rhapsody from incident to incident of a purely hypothetical career, but always preserving, even in the most extravagant of his fancies, a proper relevancy to the character he was seeking to exhibit. On one occasion I remember he traced with inimitable humour, and with inexhaustible invention, a supposed disaster in love encoun- tered by an amiable gentleman we both knew well ; and as he rambled on, with an eloquence that never halted, he became so in love with his theme that I think he himself was hardly conscious where the record of sober fact had ended and where the innocent mendacity of the novelist had begun. And then, at the immediate summons of some beauty in the landscape around us that arrested his imagination, he would pause in the wild riot of the imagined portrait and pass, in a moment, to discourse, as eloquent but more serious, on some deeper problem of life or art. Not that he ever sought, either in the lighter or the deeper vein, to talk so as to absorb the conversation. In single companionship there was no better talker, as, indeed, there was no better listener; and in either mood he was singularly stirring and inspiring. From the strictly literary point of view, perhaps, the friendship with R. L. Stevenson is the most interesting of the associations of Meredith's middle life; for none with whom we associate his name in the way of friendship has shown such distinct evidence of the FRIENDSHIPS AND HOME LIFE m master's influence in his work and his ideals of art. Stevenson was a young man of twenty-eight when first he sat at the feet of Mere- dith, as we learn from an article by Mrs. J. E. H. (Alice) Gordon in the Bookman, January, 1895 : Some time in the ' seventies ' (1878) Robert Louis Stevenson came with his mother and took up his abode for a summer at the romantic little inn at the foot of Box Hill known as the Burford Arms. At that time we were living about ten minutes' walk from the little hostel, and among our most honoured and best beloved friends was the sage of Box Hill, George Meredith. A publisher friend wrote to us from London and begged my mother to make the acquaintance of Mr. Louis Stevenson, requesting her if possible to invite him to meet George Meredith. Thus it came to pass that Robert Louis Stevenson, then entirely unknown to fame, would occasionally drop into our garden and sit at the feet of the philo- sopher and listen with rapt attention and appreciative smiles to his conversation. I well remember the eager, listening face of the student Steven- son, and remember his frank avowal that from henceforth he should enrol himself ' a true-blue Meredith man. ' He was an inspiring listener, and had the art of drawing out the best of Mr. Meredith's brilliant powers of conversation, so that those were halcyon days. . . . My sister, I remember, was much interested in Stevenson, and even in those early days expected great things from him in the future. And I well remember her satisfaction one afternoon when, after he had taken his departure from'our circle, and one of us was idly wondering why our friend, the publisher, was so hopeful about young Stevenson's future, Mr. Meredith trumpeted down our feeble utterances by informing us that some day he felt sure we should all be proud to have known him, and prophesied success and fame for him in the future. The acquaintance thus begun quickly ripened into a friendship that endured to the end, though mountains divided and ' the waste of seas.' Stevenson was indeed a ' true-blue Meredith man,' as we have ample proof in his letters, and also in his essay on ' Books which have influenced me.' There was nothing in literature he thought to be beyond the range of his master. In the ' Vailima Letters,' for instance, we find him writing in this strain about the difficulty of dealing in any unhackneyed and dignified way with love in fiction : The difficulty in a love yarn which dwells at all on love is the dwelling on one string; it is manifold, I grant, but the root fact is there unchanged, and the sentiment being very intense, and ii2 GEORGE MEREDITH already very much handled in letters, positively calls for a little pawing and gracing. With a writer of my prosaic literalness and pertinacity of point of view, this all shoves toward grossness — posi- tively even towards the far more damnable closeness. This has kept me off the sentiment hitherto, and now I am to try : Lord ! Of course, Meredith can do it, and so could Shakespeare. The sequence of the names of the two master-writers may be remarked ! It indicates the superlative degree of his faith in Meredith, but he was rather inclined to superlatives ; for although the music of ' Love in the Valley ' haunted him and the stanzas beginning ' When her mother tends her ' made him ' drunk like wine ' and he could remember ' waking with them all the hills about Hyeres ' — this was early in the ' eighties ' — he could confess to W. E. Henley some years later, after reading a new book of poetry by his old friend and collaborateur, that he had not received the same thrill of poetry since Meredith's ' Joy of Earth ' and ' Love in the Valley,' adding: 'I do not know that even that was so intimate and deep. ' Praise from Meredith was as much like wine to Stevenson as the poetry of his hero. Mr. Graham Balfour in the ' Life ' writes : Soon after the issue of ' Prince Otto ' (October, 1885), Stevenson wrote to Mr. Henley : ' I had yesterday a letter from George Meredith, which was one of the events of my life. He cottoned (for one thing), though with differences, to Otto; cottoned more than my rosiest visions had inspired me to hope ; said things that (from him) I would blush to quote.' Mr. Meredith's letter unfor- tunately has disappeared, but in another from the same source there occur these words : ' I have read pieces of " Prince Otto," admiring the royal manner of your cutting away of the novelist's lumber. Straight to matter is the secret. Also approvingly your article on style. ' Mr. W. M. Fullerton, who visited Box Hill, as we have heard, in the winter of 1888, mentions R. L. S. and Mr. Henry James as the subjects of some talk with Meredith : Going up the footpath across the slope we got upon the subject of Mr. James and Mr. Stevenson. For Mr. James, both as man and writer, Mr. Meredith has a very warm regard ; but Mr. Stevenson, who was undoubtedly a sort of protege of Meredith, he thinks a very great artist. ' I knew Stevenson,' he said, ' '. ">g before he was known to you all. I saw what was in him and kn ^ that he would do good work. ' Mr. and Mrs. Stevenson are frequent visitors at the Box Hill Cottage, where Mr. Stevenson's favourite point of vantage, I understand, is the steps in front of the door. Flint Cottage, Boxhill FRIENDSHIPS AND HOME LIFE 113 There are several interesting' photographs of him in the home; and they evidently like to have him there as much as he enjoys coming. There is one particular letter of Stevenson's that should be included; it was written in the last year of his life and after his friendship with Meredith had endured for fully twenty years : Vailima, Samoa, April 17, 1894. My dear Meredith, — Many good things have the gods sent to me of late. First of all there was a letter from you by the kind hand of Mariette, if she is not too great a lady to be remembered in such a style; and then there came one Lysaght with a charming note of introduction in the well-known hand itself. We had but a few days of him, and liked him well. There was a sort of geniality and inward fire about him at which I warmed my hands. It is long since I have seen a young man who has left in me such a favourable impression,; and I find myself telling myself, ' O, I must tell this to Lysaght,' or, ' This will interest him,' in a manner very unusual after so brief an acquaintance. The whole of my family shared in this favourable impression, and my halls have re-echoed ever since, I am sure he will be amused to know, with ' Widdicombe Fair. ' He will have told you doubtless more of my news than I could tell you myself; he has your European perspective, a thing long lost to me. I heard with a great deal of interest the news of Box Hill. And so I understand it is to be enclosed ! Allow me to remark, that seems a far more barbaric trait of manners than the most barbarous of ours. We content ourselves with cutting off an occasional head. I hear we may soon expect ' The Amazing Marriage. ' You know how long, and with how much curiosity, I have looked forward to the book. Now, in so far as you have adhered to your intention, Gower Woodsere will be a family portrait, age twenty-five, of the highly respectable and slightly influential and fairly aged ' Tusitala. ' You have not known that gentleman ; console yourself, he is not worth knowing. At the same time, my dear Meredith, he is very sincerely yours — for what he is worth, for the memories of old times, and in the expectation of many pleasures still to come. I suppose we shall never see each other again ; flitting youths of the Lysaght species may occasionally cover these unconscionable leagues and bear greetings to and fro. But we ourselves must be content to converse with an occasional sheet of notepaper, and I shall never see whether you have grown older, and you shall never deplore that Gower Woodsere should have declined into the pantaloon ' Tusitala. ' It is perhaps better so. Let us continue to see each other as we were, and accept, my dear Meredith, my love and respect. Robert Louis Stevenson. P.S. — My wife finds joins me in the kindest messages to yourself and Mariette. ii4 GEORGE MEREDITH The lady referred to by Stevenson at the beginning of the letter and in the postscript is Meredith's daughter, now Mrs. Sturgis, and Mr. Sidney R. Lysaght is, of course, the novelist and poet, author of 'The Marplot,' which had just appeared before his visit to Vailima, and ' One of the Grenvilles,' published in 1898. As regards the portraiture of Gower Woodsere in ' The Amazing Marriage,' that is no doubt modelled upon Stevenson in the earlier chapters, but later the modifications do not in any way leave the finished character ' a family portrait. ' Poor Tusitala, who had looked forward so eagerly to Meredith's last novel, was dead before it began to appear serially in Scribner's Magazine. Touching the portrait of Stevenson in 'The Amazing Marriage,' an anonymous writer in the Sketch of November 27, 1895, has an interesting note on the subject, from which I quote the following : Gower is the son of a cobbler, and his Bohemianism is all to match. Perhaps Gower 's hat is not worse than the one which Mr. Gosse was so anxious to abolish from the head of ' R. L. S. ' ; but his shirts ! Indeed, it must not be the plural. ' Gower's one shirt ' (when he was staying with Admiral Fakenham) ' was passing through the various complexions, and had approached the Nubian, on its way to the negro. ' Gower himself, by the way, describes his shirt as ' resembling London snow. ' To the housekeeper who promises him one ' more resembling country snow,' he retorts, ' it will save me from buttoning so high up. ' And in that retort, if not in that shirt, you discern the ownership of ' R. L. S. ' It is the Stevenson of the donkey journey that Mr. Meredith has repro- duced, with his own transformings ; but, despite the transformings, the vital Stevenson is there. He is met, a youth of twenty-three, upon a mountain, with a sprain in his leg which ' at each step pronounced a negative to the act of walking,' and so you get the word from his own lips, 'this donkey leg.' Gower's profession of faith is soon made : ' I slept beside a spring last night, and I shall never like a bedroom so well. ' The landladies of the ' Inland Voyage,' who were always taking the Voyager and Cigarette, his companion, for pedlars, have their counterparts in the pages of Mr. Meredith. When, with Lord Fleetwood for comrade, Gower responds to that ' invitation of the road ' for ever singing in Steven- son's ears, it is Mr. Meredith's British baronet, Sir Meeson Corby, who is abashed by the spectacle of a peer ' tramping the road, pack on back, with a young nobody for his comrade, who might be a cut-throat, and was avowedly next to a mendicant. Hundreds of thousands a year, and he was tramping it like a pedlar, with a beggar for his friend.' When Woodsere calls at a great house, the butler ' refused at first to take his name to his master,' and FRIENDSHIPS AND HOME LIFE 115 when he relents, he relents ' in spite of the very suspicious, glib, good English spoken by a man wearing such a hat ' — of course, the very hat which Mr. Gosse wanted to destroy, when he lured Stevenson into the hatter's, and, turning round, found him not. You have everything but the episode in the pages of ' The Amazing Marriage. ' Another of Meredith's literary friendships, but by no means so intimate as any we have been concerned with so far, was that with ' B. V.,' the ill-fated James Thomson, a countryman of Stevenson's and author of ' The City of Dreadful Night. ' From Mr. H. S. Salt's excellent ' Life ' of Thomson we may glean some interesting details of the intercourse between Meredith and ' B. V.,' which was chiefly in the way of correspondence, as Thomson only met his hero twice : In July, 1879, through Mr. Foote's introduction, Thomson became engaged in a correspondence with Mr. George Meredith, for whose genius he had long felt and expressed the utmost respect and admiration ; and he had now the great satisfaction of learning that his own writings were held in high esteem by one whose good opinion he probably valued above that of any living critic. ' I am glad,' wrote Mr. Meredith, 'to be in personal communication with you. The pleasant things you have written of me could not be other than agreeable to a writer. I saw that you had the rare deep love of literature; rare at all times, and in our present congestion of matter almost extinguished ; which led you to recognise any effort to produce the worthiest. But when a friend unmasked your initials, I was flattered. For I had read "The City of Dreadful Night," and to be praised by the author of that poem would strike all men able to form a judgment upon eminent work as a distinction. ' Meredith must have read Thomson's great poem in the National Reformer, where it was first printed in four parts in the year 1874, and in 1879, when the poet was at work revising it for issue in book form, Meredith wrote to him : The reviewers are not likely to give you satisfaction. But read them, nevertheless, if they come in your way. The humour of a situation that allots the pulpit to them, and (for having presumed to make an appearance) the part of Devil to you, will not fail of consolation. My inclination is to believe that you will find free- thoughted men enough to support you. The reception of ' The City of Dreadful Night, ' when it came out in book form at the beginning of 1880, proved the wisdom and 1 2 n6 GEORGE MEREDITH prescience . of Meredith's opinion. He himself wrote to Thomson from Box Hill, under date April 27, in terms of warmest praise and frank admiration. My friends could tell you (he wrote) that I am a critic hard to please. They say that irony lurks in my eulogy. I am not in truth frequently satisfied by verse. Well, I have gone through your volume, and partly a second time, and I have not found the line I would propose to recast. I have found many pages that no other poet could have written. Nowhere is the verse feeble, nowhere is the expression insufficient ; the majesty of the line has always its full colouring, and marches under a banner. And you accomplish this effect with the utmost sobriety, with absolute self-mastery. I have not time at present to speak of the City of Melancholia. There is a massive impressiveness in it that goes beyond Diirer, and takes it into upper regions where poetry is the sublimation of the mind of man, the voice of our highest. What might have been said contra poet, I am glad that you should have forestalled and answered in your ' Philosophy ' — very wise writing. I am in love with the dear London lass who helped you to the ' Idyll of Cockaigne. ' You give a zest and new attraction to Hampstead Heath. So far the two poets had not met each other, and fifteen months later they had yet to meet ; but Meredith was evidently anxious to know the poet of pessimism more closely than by correspondence, as we gather from the following letter of Thomson's to his good friend Miss Barrs, under date August 6, 1881 : Finding, when I called at Reeves' (my publisher), that George Meredith had been there lately and inquiring after me, I took occa- sion to write him a note on Thursday about a little matter I had before lazily thought of writing about. My conscience, which, as you have doubtless perceived already, is always my only law, forbade me conclude without putting in some lines to the following effect (words pretty exact) : ' I found a man in Leicester who has all the works of yourself and Browning, and appreciates them. Need I say that I gave him the grasp of friendship. I preached you to the dearest little lady (What impudence ! you cry), and fairly fascinated her with Lucy and Mrs. Berry. Richard she heartily admired in the headlong im- periousness of his love, and you will be as grieved as I was to learn that she could not be brought to even the faintest moral reprobation of his unscrupulous fibbing (as in the cases of going to hear the popular preacher, and introducing to his uncle " Miss Lsetitia Thom- son ") ; while she exulted heartlessly in the tremendous thrashing of poor faithful Benson. Such are women, even the best ! But FRIENDSHIPS AND HOME LIFE 117 neither she nor any other woman, and scarcely any man, will ever forgive you the cruel, cruel ending.' Such is the judgment your own wicked judgment has brought upon you. As I have no reply this morning, Mr. M. may be off holiday-making (people have the queerest infatuation for holidays in these times : they ought to know that work is so much pleasanter as well as nobler than idleness— see my moral essays on ' Indolence ' and ' A National Reformer in the Dog-Days ') ; but even if he is now in vacation (i. e. emptiness !) your punishment can be delayed only for a month or two. Therefore tremble in the meantime. Should he demand your name in order to publicly denounce you, of course I shall feel conscientiously bound to give it. And if he has not yet gone off, or, having been off, has returned, I may have to spend a day with him : and then what a terrible tale I shall have to tell by word of mouth ! Thomson's first meeting with Meredith took place a month later, as described in a letter to Miss Barrs, dated Thursday, September i S , 1881 : Tuesday I spent with George Meredith at Box Hill ; a quiet, pleasant day, cloudy but rainless, with some sunshine and blue sky in the afternoon. We had a fine stroll over Mickleham Downs, really park-like, with noble yew-trees and many a mountain-ash (' rowan,' we Scots call it) glowing with thick clusters of red berries, — but you have some at Forest Edge. . . . We had some good long chat, in which you may be sure that Forest Edge and its inmates, as well as certain Leicester people, figured. M. read me an unpublished poem of considerable length, which, so far as I can judge by a single hearing (not like reading at one's leisure), is very fine, and ought to be understood even by that laziest and haziest of animals, the general reader. He says that, having suspended work on a novel, poems began to spring up in his mind, and I am glad that he thinks of bringing out a new collection. Ever ready to exert himself on behalf of any friend, Meredith set about to secure for poor Thomson a proper opening for his great literary powers, so much of which had been spent on mere hack work for Cope's Tobacco Plant, and that had ceased publica- tion early in 1881. He introduced him to Mr. John Morley, then editing the Pall Mall Gazette and the Fortnightly Review ; but, alas ! it was too late, for the irregularities of Thomson's life had become so pronounced that he could not be relied upon to discharge with punctuality any literary commission for a daily paper, and the good offices of Meredith were in vain. A few months later — June 3, 1882 —the tragic life of James Thomson had closed. Meredith's estimate n8 GEORGE MEREDITH of the unfortunate genius, whose late years had been brightened by the friendship and appreciation of him whom Thomson revered above all the authors of his day, must be quoted in any record of his friendships : I had full admiration of his nature and his powers. Few men have been endowed with so brave a heart. He did me the honour to visit me twice, when I was unaware of the extent of the tragic affliction overclouding him, but could see that he was badly weighted. I have now the conviction that the taking away of poverty from his burdens would in all likelihood have saved him, to enrich our litera- ture ; for his verse was a pure well. He had, almost past example in my experience, the thrill of the worship of moral valiancy as well as of sensuous beauty; his narrative poem, ' Woddah and Om-el- Bonain,' stands to witness what great things he would have done in the exhibition of nobility at war with evil conditions. He probably had, as most of us have had, his heavy suffering on the soft side. But he inherited the tendency to the thing which slew him. And it is my opinion that, in consideration of his high and singularly elective mind, he might have worked clear of it to throw it off, if circumstances had been smoother and brighter about him. Some three years after the death of Thomson another Scotsman 'of pairts ' had settled in London, and was soon to win universal fame as the interpreter of the lowly life of his native land, and later to become the most successful of contemporary writers for the stage. Mr. J. M. Barrie was a Meredithian from the first, and one of the finest studies of the novels which have been published was that con- tributed by him to the Contemporary Review in 1888. He, too, in due time became a friend of the great author whose work he so warmly admired, and among the few privileged ones who dined with the veteran on his eightieth birthday was the author of ' A Window in Thrums. ' Mr. Barrie is credited with a quaint story of his first sight of Meredith, which may or may not be true. His enthusiasm for the works of the master took him down to Box Hill, soon after he had settled in London, in the hope of catching a glimpse of the novelist. ' He sat down outside the house and waited,' so the story goes. ' Presently the fine face appeared at the window. Mr. Barrie trembled. A few moments and the door opened. George Meredith himself appeared and walked down to the garden gate. Consternation seized Mr, Barrie ; in utter panic he fled — back to London, ' FRIENDSHIPS AND HOME LIFE ng But of all the friendships of Meredith it is on that with Mr. John Morley we should most care to have some light, and some day there may be much that is of deep interest to tell us concerning the long relationship of two men who have had so marked an influence on the thought of their time. Meanwhile we know almost nothing but the baldest facts of what must have been one of the most interesting of all literary friendships. Mr. John Morley— the pen is somehow rebel to ' Viscount Morley ' — had made friends with Meredith in the ' sixties,' and, as we have seen, it was so long ago as 1867 that Meredith acted as his locum tenens on the Fortnightly, where, in June of that year, he printed the sonnet to ' J. M. ', which breathes the spirit of true admiration and confidence in his friend : Thou, fighting for poor humankind, wilt feel The strength of Roland in thy wrist to hew A chasm sheer into the barrier rock, And bring the army of the faithful through. In the character sketch of Mr. Morley which Mr. W. T. Stead, who was his colleague and successor on the Pall Mall Gazette and knows him intimately, contributed to the Review of Reviews for November, 1890, the influence exerted by the novelist on the mind of the statesman is noted : No living person would hold a higher place in the list of those who had contributed to fashion his mind than Mr. George Meredith. In the early days, before he became famous, Mr. George Meredith, then himself neither so popular nor so widely known as he is to-day, took him with a friendly hand. He used to stay with Mr. Meredith in a remote country village, and in the evening Mr. Meredith would read over the work he had done in the day — the chapter or the poem. It was Mr. Meredith who awoke in him the feeling for nature which has ever since remained as one of the great pleasures of his exist- ence, as well as imparting to him a larger concern for the wisdom of life. For many years the long walks across the Surrey commons, where the south-west wind blows, and when Mr. Meredith's genius was at its best, were the delight of Mr. Morley's life. ' Much, and very much,' Mr. Morley once told me, ' did he owe to the wise and stimulating friendship of George Meredith in the impressionable times. ' When Mr. Morley was a candidate for the lord-rectorship of Glasgow University in 1902, Meredith penned a brief, personal tribute to the integrity and statesman-like qualities of his old friend. There is a sentence in it of curious interest in view of the most familiar complaint against the writer's own literary style : 120 GEORGE MEREDITH As an orator and as an author Mr. Morley is comprehensible to the simplest of minds (he wrote), while he satisfies the most exact- ing- critical taste and adds to our stores of great speeches and good literature. It is not too much to say of such a candidate that in receiving a distinction he confers one." With the name of Lord Morley among the friends of Meredith that of Morley's intimate and ally, James Cotter Morison, should be mentioned. Morison had been at Lincoln College, Oxford, with Morley, and the two friends became very frequent visitors at Cop- sham Cottage. The author of ' The Life and Times of St. Bernard,' that masterpiece of the dusty shelves, was also an intimate of the Hardmans. Morison, though something of a visionary, was a delightful talker, so, what with the sparkling wit and gusty laughter of their host and the brilliant qualities of the three visitors named, their parties carries at Copsham must have been ambrosial nights. Here I would introduce some interesting extracts from the writ- ings of two French visitors to Box Hill — the late Marcel Schwob and Madame Daudet. Marcel Schwob, who died in the spring of 1905, was one of the rarest spirits of modern French letters, though but little known to the ordinary reading public, even in his own country. A man of vast learning and the most remarkable command of languages, his was a great talent, perhaps, rather than genius. Stevensonians will recall his brilliant essay on ' R. L. S. ,' unrivalled among the many that have been devoted to the study of that author. He visited Meredith in 1895, most likely, as ' Spicilege,' the book in which he records his impressions of the novelist, was published in 1896. From his most charming and characteristic chapter I translate the following : Near Dorking, at the foot of Box Hill, facing the golden Surrey meadows, sown over with thick-set trees, dotted here and there with tiny eminences of a soft emerald green, amidst elms and ash trees, nestles the house of George Meredith, close by the fertile slope. Higher up, on the side of the hill, above groups of cornflowers and wild poppies, there stands a small two-roomed cottage. It is in this cottage that Mr. Meredith does all his work. In times gone by he used even to sleep there. He shuts himself up in it from ten o'clock in the morning till six at night. On pain of his greatest displeasure, he has forbidden any one to disturb him during these hours of the day. Even Cole, his faithful valet, ' the best in Eng- land,' who has served him for thirty years, would not dare to face the storm resulting from an intrusion. If there is really need for him, some one from his house gives Mr. Meredith particulars by means of an electric bell and a telephone, Jamf.s Cotter Morison. Author of ' The Life and 1 lines of St. Bernard.' FRIENDSHIPS AND HOME LIFE 121 When I saw Mr. Meredith coming- towards me immediately on leaving the page he had just begun, I was struck with the physical traces of his mental efforts. Mr. Meredith is tall, his hair and beard are grey, his head is erect, handsome and impressive, his eyes are deep blue; but these wonderful eyes of his, I noticed in the first few seconds of our interview, were literally ivrSs de pensie. While he was leading me towards his 'cell,' Mr. Meredith remarked to me : ' People say that the brain grows jaded. Don't believe them. The brain never grows weary. It is one's stomach that overrides feeling. And I, unfortunately, was born with a weak stomach,' he added, laughing. In the room in which he works there is a large bay-window opening out on to the wide pastures and clusters of thick low trees characteristic of the fat land of Surrey; facing another small win- dow, from which one can see a dark coppice of pine trees on the hill- side, stands Mr. Meredith's writing-table. ' The brain needs darkness so that thought may spring forth and grow freely,' he said to me. He had been closely watching a bird which was flying tirelessly, hither and thither, across the sky. ' Look at that bird,' Mr. Mere- dith said. ' It interests me very greatly ; every day it flutters about, never alighting, never stopping : we call it a swift. Whenever I see it I think that its restless movement is like the indefatigable flitting of the brain, which never ceases, never rests.' In some casual way I began to speak about the old castle at Utrecht whose bell tolls only on the death of a king. ' And I wouldn't have them toll even then,' cried Meredith. ' I loathe the bells, with their persistent monotony. At Bruges, I remember, they kept me from thinking the whole night long; oh, I loathe them ! ' When we think of his mind so constantly at tension, we cannot fail to understand how his characters and their voices are vividly realistic to him. Balzac had tears in his eyes when he broke the news of the death of his Lucien de Rubempre to his visitors. Mr. Meredith has lived in his cottage in an actual existence with the persons who have sprung from his imagination. In that cloistral solitude, seated before that dark window, he wrote long ago at their dictation. ' When Harry Richmond's father first met me,' he said to me, ' when I heard him tell me in his pompous style about the son of a duke of royal blood and an actress of seventeen years of age, I perfectly roared with laughter ! ' Again, when we were discussing Rendein ' Beauchamp's Career,' he asked me, ' Was she not a sweet girl ? I think I am a little in love with her yet. ' ' Death ? ' Mr. Meredith said to me. ' I have lived long enough ; I am not afraid : it's only the inside and the outside of the door.' And I shall always hold in my mind the picture of George Meredith's tall figure, with his fine face and his grey hair, as he stood at the door of his charming little house, and watched the carriage that took me away along the green roadway from Box Hill. 122 GEORGE MEREDITH It was less than three years before his death, which occurred on December 16, 1897, that Alphonse Daudet paid his first and only visit to England. He was accompanied by his wife and family, and despite the paralysis of his legs he contrived to meet many of our celebrities. Whether he was of the party that visited Meredith at Box Hill does not appear from Madame Daudet's narrative, but he was probably present at the Piccadilly dinner party which she also describes. In any case, .Madame Daudet's vivacious ' Notes sur Londres ' in the Revue de Paris, of January 1, 1896, contain no more interesting pages than those in which she pictures the life at Flint Cottage and the characteristics of its master as observed by her during her fleeting visit in the spring of 1895. I translate the following : There were several of us who visited George Meredith, the poet and novelist, in a certain county of England, which resembles greatly our Dauphinc, with its peaceful green valleys, its gently-sloping hollows. He himself was waiting for us at the station, attired in light holiday suit. His appearance is that of a poet and gentleman, his manners are perfect, his face is distinguished-looking and mobile. His eyes are of a clear keen blue, Saxon eyes ; his step, though, is now not so free, and so that we might not notice that he was tired and perhaps suffering in consequence of his fatigue, he was humming almost cheerfully an improvised tune. We noticed from our carriage that his garden, surrounded by tall trim box trees, was sheltered from the strong wind, cold but healthy, which blew from the north. It is a well-kept garden on a sloping piece of ground, and in it were growing in this particular English spring, which is more backward than ours, clusters of yellow laburnum and lilac, while some lilies of the valley, of a milky whiteness, showed from amidst their tender green. At the end of our visit the ladies of our party were presented with bouquets of these lilies, as sweet if quickly-perishing souvenirs of our short stay. There is a wonderful energy shown in Mr. Meredith's fine artist face, sunken, perhaps, but so lighted up by his eyes, whose depths are often pierced by his flashes of wit and the sparkling of little lights. His daughter was there in the narrow drawing-room, also the daughter of Admiral Maxse, Lady C. (Edward Cecil), daughter- in-law of Lord S. (Salisbury) — two pretty types of fair-haired beauty, with clear velvety skins, both of whom stay in the neighbourhood. Leaving his residence, we climbed the hill to the chalet where he works : it contains two small rooms. In these rooms the books are everywhere, piled on the table, overflowing the bookshelves, books English and foreign; among them are ' Mireille ' and ' Calendau,' well worn, showing the delight taken by one poet in the works of FRIENDSHIPS AND HOME LIFE 123 a brother poet. The other room contains a small iron bedstead in case his work is specially exacting and necessitates some rest. My feeling of awe as I entered this privileged sanctuary was tinged with curiosity, as I mused on his habits of thought, the pauses in his dreaming or his reading, and of those characters who have engaged his mind. I thought of Zola's study, with its florid candelabra, reminiscent of glowing Catholic altars, with its precious and rare trinkets, and of Edmond de Goncourt's library with its ceiling decorated in Japanese relief, its shelves packed with the rarest editions of rare books, from his windows a glimpse of roses and the choice greenness of his Auteuil garden, — or again, of Mistral's home, from which one looks out to a horizon of cypress trees across borders of evergreens and Alpine blues, — I thought of these other places and of what the rest of the eyes and a methodical abode contribute to inspiration. What strikes me in Meredith's case is his need of solitude, his shelter on the little hill overlooking his house, and literature aside from life. From the chalet we climb to the top of a hillock, covered with that short fine turf, yielding to the touch, which is so common in England. We could see, as the wind dispersed the clouds, rolling away deep shadows or bright lights on the near neighbourhood, a village, with clustering houses, on the land opposite. Then we descended with Meredith, and after tea and the mild excitement which followed as our chat became brisker and more animated, we took leave of the writer, carrying away with us the most delightful impression of him. Of her later meeting with Meredith at a fashionable mansion of the West-end, Madame Daudet relates : In response to a kind invitation, and to see Meredith once more, we went to dine with the family of a rich manufacturer whose works we had seen a few days previously not far from the Crystal Palace. These friends live in a Piccadilly mansion. We were cordially and magnificently received ; the table, set for fifteen, was ablaze with every variety of rose — among which ' La France ' roses reared their heavy heads, beautiful proud roses. ' La France roses in honour of Madame Daudet,' the owners of the house said several times. The young hostess was handsome and kindly, robed in black velvet ; her dress was cut low over an under-vest of lace, which made her round curl-crowned head like one from an old Italian picture. She had magnificent eyes, frank, blue, and very slightly uneven. She paid great attention to Meredith, in a way that showed she was in full sympathy with this great man of genius. We lost none of our admiration for the poet as seen at an even- ing party, though I had first seen him in the rustic setting of his ' cottage. ' He had the same brave simplicity, the same smile, in which we can discern triumph over suffering. We then had a little 124 GEORGE MEREDITH talk, and some music in a cheerfully-furnished drawing-room, with rounded windows. A talented violinist played, one whom my children soon after met again at Lord B 's house, the manager of the Morning Post, one of the leading London dailies [the late Lord Glenesk, of course] ; a house which is a meeting-place for all the nobility, and in which Lord Byron once lived — a door is shown even now through which he escaped, not only from the building, but from marriage itself, and fled towards that life which was to be free but stormy for him in after years. In some notes with which the Tablet commented upon Meredith and Catholicism on the occasion of the eightieth birthday celebra- tion, I find a reference to a meeting between the novelist and Cardinal Manning that should be preserved, though it can scarcely be classed under the head of ' Friendships.' The Tablet, by the way, did not consider Meredith had done justice to the resumed importance of Catholicism in the life of his time ; but went on to say : One sonnet of Mr. Meredith's shows, however, his alert appre- ciation of Catholic actuality as presented by the career of Cardinal Manning. It is the sonnet beginning : I, wakeful for the skylark voice in men, which he addressed to Cardinal Manning at the time of the London Dock strike. Novelist and Cardinal were strangers personally when that noble tribute to nobility was offered ; but an exchange of letters followed ; and one of the many memories which cling to old Arch- bishop's House, and one which adds to our regret in its going, is lhat of a meeting, within its ever friendly walls, between the Cardinal and the greatest literary creator of his time. To follow all the friendships of George Meredith would be to contemplate a work of greater proportions than the present under- taking, — considerable though this promises to be, — despite the fact that the chronicles are so meagre where they might be so rich. I must therefore content myself by mentioning mere names where I should have liked to pursue my researches after something more substantial. To those whose names appear in the present chapter we must add Mr. Frederick Greenwood, long a favoured visitor at Box Hill, Mr. Edward Clodd, Mr. Haldane, Mr. John Burns, Lady Lugard, and, of course, the family of Admiral Maxse. Grant Allen was an intimate friend of the novelist, as we would gather from William Sharp's reminiscence, and Sharp himself, when his wander- ings brought him back to England, was a welcome guest at Box Hill. W. E. Henley was probably never on terms of great intimacy, FRIENDSHIPS AND HOME LIFE 12$ but as both had a common friend in Stevenson, Henley was bound to come into some friendly relations with Meredith, though I have found no record of these. There exists, however, a beautiful memorial to Henley, in the shape of the tribute written by Meredith and read at the unveiling of the bust by Rodin in the crypt of St. Paul's Cathedral, July 11, 1907. This is perhaps the best evidence of friendship we could wish to have. Henley is therein described as ' one of the main supports of good literature in our time,' and the tribute concludes in these words : Deploring we have lost him, we may marvel that we had him with us so long. What remains is the example of a valiant man ; the memory of him in poetry that will endure. Mention has just been made of Mr. Edward Clodd. It was this old friend of Meredith who beguiled him into his one and only speech, — for his lecture on Comedy at the London Institution in 1877 could hardly be regarded as a ' speech. ' The occasion of Meredith's only after-dinner speech was a dinner of the Omar Khayyam Club, held at Burford Bridge Hotel, near Box Hill, in July, 1895. Dr. Robertson Nicoll described the event at some length in his ' London Letter ' to the New York Bookman of August. Mr. Meredith was too feeble in health at the time to attend the dinner, but he joined the company of distinguished literary men after the meal, being ' received by the company standing, and with every demonstration of enthusiasm and respect.' Dr. Nicoll writes as follows: . As Mr. Meredith came into the room he graciously recognised several of his old friends. Mr. Shorter conducted him to the seat of honour on the right hand of the chairman, and he made a striking figure against the sunshine streaming through a window half-covered with green boughs. He exchanged hearty greetings with Mr. Hardy, who was on Mr. Clodd 's left hand, and after a little the President welcomed him in the name of the Club. Mr. Clodd 's speech was singularly happy, light, and graceful, but with more than a trace of deep feeling. We hardly ventured to expect a formal reply, and were taken by surprise when Mr. Meredith, with a very good grace, rose to his feet and informed us that he was now making his maiden speech. He did not say much, but what he said was exquisite in form, and benignant in feeling. It must have cheered the veteran after his long, hard fight to have such an emphatic proof of the affection and veneration with which he is regarded by literary England. . . . We then had speeches from Mr. Hardy and Mr. Gissing. Both of them made the same speech, although each in his own way, 126 GEORGE MEREDITH Mr. Hardy told us Mr. Meredith read the manuscript of his first book, and gave him friendly encouragement. Mr. Meredith was at that time reader for Messrs. Chapman and Hall, and a more con- scientious, patient, and encouraging reader never lived. What a treasure his reports on manuscripts would make ! Mr. Hardy modestly described his first attempt as 'very wild,' on which Mr. Meredith ejaculated ' Promising. ' Mr. Hardy went on to say that if it had not been for the encouragement he received then from Mr. Meredith he would never have devoted himself to literature, and that from the time of their first meeting he and Mr. Meredith had been friends. It is well known that Mr. Meredith firmly believes that Mr. Hardy is beyond comparison our best novelist. Mr. Gissing had a similar experience to relate. His first novel, ' The Unclassed,' was read by Mr. Meredith. Mr. Gissing told us how he had an appointment with the reader of Messrs. Chapman and Hall, who amazed him with his accurate knowledge of the manuscript. He did not know at the time that his critic was no less a man than George Meredith. Touching the ' promising ' first effort of Mr. Hardy's, there are more stories than one ; but it is generally understood that the book was strongly tinged with satire and unlikely to be popular with the public. It is said to have been entitled ' The Poor Man and the Lady,' but, whatever it was, its author did not hesitate to accept the judgment of Meredith upon it and into the fire it went, Mr. Hardy then producing 'Desperate Remedies,' in 1871, the same year that ' Harry Richmond ' was published. The home life of the novelist has been reflected indirectly in many preceding passages, since it is always difficult to detach a man entirely from his environment. But some aspects of the domestici- ties of Box Hill remain to be noted, especially certain glimpses into the famous chalet that stands on the terrace above Flint Cottage. Describing a pilgrimage of the Whitefriars Club to Box Hill, Mr. John A. Steuart gives this little vignette of the chalet : The visit to the famous chalet, where ' The Egoist ' and half- a-dozen other masterpieces were written, had a particular interest. The cottage conforms to Mr. Ruskin's idea of a work-place; small, with a pleasant outlook. Standing high on the hill-side, it affords wide views of green heights and valleys. Below, embowered in flowers and trees, is the dwelling-house, a minute's walk away. The library in the chalet is a workman's library, and the writing-table bears the same practical appearance. The books, as might be expected, are pleasantly cosmopolitan; classics of all ages and countries, not excluding English. French works are conspicuous, FRIENDSHIPS AND HOME LIFE 127 and there is more than a tincture of German philosophy. But one thinks less of the books than of the brooding hours and joyous flights of the creative spirit in that lonely wind-swept garden-house. Many a midnight hour has the great novelist and poet spent there, giving ' to airy nothings a local habitation and a name ' that must remain to fascinate long, long after the shaping hand shall have vanished. In that time to come, say, a century hence, when the Whitefriars of the day, tempted, perhaps, by curiosity, turn over musty records to read our unremembered names, the love of Richard and Lucy and the folly of Sir Willoughby will still be potent to charm and warn and purify. One can fancy, too, those remote successors going to Box Hill and saying ' Here and here walked, and talked, and worked, the novelist of his age,' and for a certainty they will envy us the privilege of holding converse with him in the flesh. Mr. Meredith says he will write no more novels, so that already the ch&let belongs to history. Of the same occasion Mr. Coulson Kernahan has this souvenir to offer us : I shall not soon forget my first glimpse of the home where so much of his life has been passed. One of Mr. Meredith's contem- poraries speaks of that sense of human story which haunts the mind when one looks upon some quiet English country house and remembers its human associations. ' Many a simple home will move one's heart like a poem, many a cottage like a melody.' If one can feel so at sight of a cottage, the very name of whose tenant is unknown to us, how much more must we be moved when we look, for the first time, upon the walls which have sheltered him whose words have so long made their home in our hearts ! That there should have been to us anything of strangeness in what, to him, has been so familiar, seemed to me almost incongruous. 'Surely I know that "wet bird-haunted English lawn!"' I said to myself. ' And that shoulder of green upland where, even now, two lovers stand out clearly against the line of sky— it must be that I have looked upon it before.' The present writer gave a very slight but somewhat more detailed picture of the chilet in a magazine article some five years ago, from which the following may be reprinted : Flint Cottage lies in a hollow by the roadside, around it spreads its owner's well-loved gardens, and perched on the hill behind is the chalet in which most of his writing for over thirty years has been done. This is a plain little structure of two rooms, one formerly equipped as a bedroom so that he might sleep here when writing into the night, the other and larger used as a study. The well-stocked bookshelves are heavy with what the literary man would call working 128 GEORGE MEREDITH books, but a large proportion are the familiar paper-bound French novels, of which Mr. Meredith has been a great reader. Here and there one notes presentation copies from admirers, one of these being an autograph copy of ' A Window in Thrums. ' The poets are in abundance on these shelves, and the interest of the novelist in his father's people is indicated by a Welsh dictionary. There are few adornments, no luxuries at all, and among the few fading photographs over the mantelpiece are those of James Russell Lowell and John Morley. In a corner stands the desk whereon the master- hand has written so long, but the quills lie dry, the ink-bottle empty. From the window is obtained a spacious view of the green hills of Surrey, gentle in outline, soft and peaceful, strangely unsugges- tive of the rugged grandeur of the master's work, and yet this scene, noted daily by his eye in all the changing moods of nearly two score years, must have played its part in the moulding of his mind. Mr. W. T. Stead, who must be numbered among the friends of Meredith, has on several occasions written with some intimacy of his causeries with the veteran at Box Hill. Thus, we find him writing in the lengthy character-sketch which he published in the Review of Reviews for March, 1904 : From his eyrie on the hill-side Mr. Meredith ever keeps a keen look-out upon the world and its affairs, and there are few things occurring at home or abroad in which he does not take a keen, sympathetic interest. From old time he has ever been a diligent student and a great admirer of French literature. The day I was there a copy of the Journal des Debats was lying on his table; and the literary side of French journalists, with its peculiar delicate irony, appeals to him much more than the less urbane and more bludgeon- like methods of their English confreres. . . . But Mr. Meredith has ever been on intimate terms with the editors who have from time to time conducted the journal which was first of all Greenwood's Fall Mall Gazette. Mr. Frederick Greenwood has been, and is still, one of the favoured visitors at Box Hill. Mr. Morley, of course, may be said to be, in one sense, one of George Meredith's disciples, and he still remains an intimate friend. For myself, from the time I succeeded Mr. Morley at Northumberland Street, I found in Mr. Meredith the kindest and most encouraging of sympathising friends. He frequently con- tributed to the Fall Mall Gazette, and I count among the golden days of my editorial experiences the times when we drove over to Box Hill, and spent some delightful hours in listening to the large and luminous discourse of Mr. Meredith, who combines the acumen of the philosopher with the quick intuition and insight of the poet. A charming anecdote illustrating the simplicity of the novelist's life in his later days is told by Mr. T. P. O'Connor as follows : H G 5 O FRIENDSHIPS AND HOME LIFE ng His son's wife, who was staying at the house, was recovering from an illness, and during the period of convalescence she used to take drives in a little donkey-chaise. It would hardly be thought that in this could be found a source of amusement for a man of genius, but I am told that Mr. Meredith used to take the greatest delight in having the little army of donkeys, from which the selection was made, brought outside his house in order that he might watch them grazing, while at the same time, leaning over his gate, he conversed with the lads who had charge of the animals. In turning from the personal aspect of George Meredith I cannot better conclude the present chapter than by drawing upon the very able but anonymous writer in the Daily Telegraph who was charged with the description of the eightieth birthday, for a final sketch of the veteran's home life in the evening of his days : Old age has planted no wrinkle in Mr. Meredith's mind, howbeit it has wrinkled his face and whitened his hair. Deprived of the use of his limbs, he still, as he has done for forty years past, goes for his morning outing up the Box, with its mounting ridge of firs, to a point where the panorama of Surrey — one of the finest in England — spreads itself before him, to the gap of Shoreham and the half-distinguished Sussex coast. Years ago he walked the journey — a matter of four or five miles — but for some years past he has perforce enjoyed the outing in his donkey-chaise. Every morning alike, be the weather wet or fine, cold or sunny, Mr. Meredith may be seen leaving Flint Cottage promptly at 10.40, driven by ' Picnic,' the donkey he rescued from less easeful labour, and led by Cole — his faithful attendant for thirty years — with, on most occasions, his kindly nurse, Miss Nicholls, walking at the side of the little car. Every day, at ten minutes to one, the party returns to the cottage for lunch. Then follow books and newspapers and letters, and the calls of friends, till tea-time and early supper and bed. The week-end is still an institution; but the accommodation of the cottage is so restricted that the novelist's friends for the most part put up at the well-known Burford Bridge Hotel near by. His friends in art and literature are legion. To one and all the fascina- tion is the same. His company is a feast of vivacity, humour, and satire, rich with worldliness and unworldliness. To hear him speak is to be alternately dazzled by his eloquence, amazed at his know- ledge, or to be irresistibly shaken into laughter by his pure, boyish lightheartedness and mirth. Our last look at the man is thus well calculated to infect us with something of his ardent and unwavering optimism. If a man is to be judged by his own gospel, how splendidly does the prophet of the K 130 GEORGE MEREDITH joy of earth stand the test ! The personal life of him is attuned so clearly to the virile ring of his philosophy that we cannot but suppose a full and intimate account of his friendships and home life, written with the necessary authority and the ' inner knowledge,' would be an immensely valuable contribution to literary history. It is sincerely to be hoped that such a work may be undertaken. If John Morley had not been swallowed up into politics and the peerage, he had possibly given us a monograph on Meredith that would have ranked high in his literary achievement. This we may be sure, that though Meredith's works are his best biography, there is bound to be in the future an immense and deepening interest in his personal character; the man himself is fully as worthy of study as his work. VI SOME EARLY APPRECIATIONS There is good excuse if one repeats that George Meredith met with appreciation from the first ; for the fable of his ' long years of neglect ' survives lustily to-day in newspaper offices and places where men write, and his own words have encouraged it. Seldom does a journalist pen a paragraph about Meredith into which he does not contrive to weave ' long years of neglect ' ; a catchy phrase. More than most authors, Meredith had intelligent and cordial appreciation from the beginning, and that from the critics whose opinion he had best reason to value. Though an anonymous writer in the Spectator did describe him in 1862 as ' an author with a somewhat low ethical tone,' that was a mere incident in the rough- and-tumble of criticism, which every author, great and small, must experience; his prose and poetry had already been the subject of numerous sane and satisfactory reviews in the critical journals. Moreover, was the Spectator stupidity not well worth having for the sake of Swinburne's splendid reply? Meredith was only thirty-four at the time, and the attack ruffled him for a moment, according to Sir William Hardman ; but he had to face far more drastic criticism in his later years of ' popularity ' than he' ever met in his days of ' neglect. ' To secure serial publication in a high-class weekly in i860, when ' Evan Harrington ' appeared in Once a Week, was a much greater distinction to a novelist than it would be to- day ; to have a long novel published in the Fortnightly Review in 1866, when ' Vittoria ' ran through that review, also implied more honour to the writer than it would to-day. Meredith was not yet forty, and literary success before that age was then rarer than it is to-day. Briefly, from his first publication of ' Poems ' in 1851 he never lacked appreciation, and if he never caught the ruck of readers he never set out to catch them. Far too much has been made, parrot-wise, of the thoughtless story about the frosty reception his earlier works met with at the hands of critics and readers. In this chapter my purpose is not to examine all the early K 2 131 i 3 2 GEORGE MEREDITH appreciations of his prose and poetry. It is doubtful whether a review of these long-forgotten reviews would be a profitable under- taking, though I have studied them for my own satisfaction. Anonymous criticism is, on the whole, of so little value, that it deserves the dusty tomb of the back-number as thoroughly as the other unidentified remains reposing there. In compiling a contem- porary estimate of any noteworthy person or event, anonymous criticism, except in rare instances, and these chiefly where the criticism is bellicose and brutal, has astonishingly little to contribute. Hence I pass over here all such early writings on Meredith and his works, and that the more willingly as there exists material of the greatest possible interest, by reason of its writers no less than its subject, which must engage our attention. It is no mean distinction to have been the first writer in the press to welcome into the republic of letters so worthy a citizen as George Meredith. But that fifty-seven years after the publication of a famous book, the author and his first appreciative critic should still be surviving, is surely a fact unique in literary history. The lives of literary journals are brief, however, and the medium of Mr. William Michael Rossetti's criticism of George Meredith's ' Poems ' is long since dead. It was to the Critic of November 15, 1851, that the younger brother of Dante Gabriel contributed the first signed article on Meredith's poetry. In later years Mr. Rossetti may have re-read his little study with misgivings, for it has some of those faults of youth which he discovers in the poet — it is not without amusement that we may note the paternal air of the critic in referring to the author, the one being twenty-two years old at the time and the other twenty-three ! — but allowing for the limited range of the work under review, the criticism shows genuine insight and sound apprecia- tion. It begins in the somewhat stiff and formal style of the period, now curiously suggestive of the literary debating society, essaying to establish a definition of ' the full poet ' as a ' thoroughly balanced compound of perception and intellect,' Keats being quoted as the perfect example of the perceptive poet, who ' saw loveliness in nature; or found it the incentive to lovely thoughts,' and ' rested in the effect. ' Meredith is a ' kind of limited Keats ' ; an estimate which the young critic endeavours to make good on these grounds : Scarcely a perceptive, but rather a seeing or sensuous poet. He does not love nature in a wide sense as Keats did ; but nature delights and appeals closely to him. In proportion, however, as his sympathies are less vivid, excitable, and diffusive, he concentrates SOME EARLY APPRECIATIONS 133 them the more. He appropriates a section of nature, as it were ; and the love which he bears to it partakes more of affection. View- ing Mr. Meredith as a Keatsian, and allowing for (what we need not stop to assert) the entire superiority of the dead poet — we think it is in this point that the most essential phase of difference will be found between the two : and it is one which, were the resemblance in other respects more marked and more unmixed than it is, would suffice to divide Mr. Meredith from the imitating class. The love of Keats for nature was not an affectionate love : it was minute, search- ing, and ardent ; but hardly personal. He does not lose himself in nature, but contemplates her, and utters her forth to the delight of all ages. Indeed, if we read his record aright, he was not, either in thought or in feeling, a strongly affectionate man ; and the passion which ate into him at the last was a mania and infatuation, raging like disease, a symptom and a part of it. It is otherwise with Mr. Meredith. In his best moments he seems to sing, because it comes naturally to him, and silence would be restraint, not through exuber- ance or inspiration, but in simple contentedness, or throbbing of heart. There is an amiable and engaging quality in the poems of Mr. Meredith, a human companionship and openness, which make the reader feel his friend. Mr. Rossetti then goes on to speak of Keats 's treatment of women as lacking ' the language of individual love,' and seems inclined to the same view of Meredith, though he quotes at length the first version of ' Love in the Valley,' which appeared in the book under review. Striving, I fear, after the manner of the youthful critic, to display great subtlety of analysis, Mr. Rossetti leads us by a somewhat tangled track to a conclusion that is reasonable enough. But as the first noteworthy criticism of ' Love in the Valley,' his words call for quotation at some length : Surely, it may be said, there is passion enough here, and of a sufficiently personal kind. True, indeed : this is not a devotion which sins through lukewarmth, and roams uncertain of an object. It will not fail to obtain an answer, through dubiousness of quest : and if it shocks at all, it shocks the delicacy, not the amour-propre. But its characteristics are, in fact, the same at which exception was taken in the case of Keats. The flame burns here, which there only played, darting its thin, quick tongue from point to point ; but the difference is of concentration only. The impressionable is changed for the strongly impressed — the influence being similar. Here, again, the love, like our poet's love of nature, has the distinct tone of affection. It is purely and unaffectedly sensuous, and in its utterance as genuine a thing as can be. We hear a clear voice of nature, with no falsetto notes at all ; as spontaneous and intelligible as the wooing of a bird, and equally a matter of course. 134 GEORGE MEREDITH The main quality of Mr. Meredith's poems is warmth — warmth of emotion, and, to a certain extent, of imagination, like the rich mantling blush on a beautiful face, or a breath glowing upon your cheek. That he is young will be as unmistakably apparent to the reader as to ourself ; on which score various shortcomings and crudities, not less than some excess of this attribute, claim indulgence. To ' The Rape of Aurora,' ' Daphne,' and ' Angelic Love,' the young critic takes exception, but the graceful lyric ' Under Boughs of Breathing May ' he classes with ' Love in the Valley,' quoting the whole of it, and ' The Daisy now is out ' he copies in full, to illustrate the poet in one of his ' most exclusively descriptive pieces,' observing that the emotional quality is stronger than the descriptive. His estimate of the new poet, based on the quality of his first book of verse, is thus summed up : We have assigned Mr. Meredith to the Keatsian school, believing that he pertains to it in virtue of the more intrinsic qualities of his mind, and of a simple enjoying nature; and as being beyond doubt of the perceptive class in poetry. In mere style, however, he attaches himself rather to the poets of the day ; the pieces in which a particular bias is most evident being in a Tennysonian mould — as the ' Olive Branch,' and the ' Shipwreck of Idomeneus ' — while some of his smaller lyrics smack of Herrick. He has a good ear for melody, and considerable command of rhythm ; but he seems sometimes to hanker unduly after novelty of metre, attaining it, if there be no other means to his hand, by some change in length or interruption of rhyme, which has a dragging and inconsequent effect. That his volume is young is not his fault : nor are we by any means sure that it is its misfortune. Some jingle-pieces there are, indeed — mere commonplace and current convention, which mature judgment would exclude : but the best are those whose spirit is the spirit of youth, and which are the fullest of it. We do not expect ever quite to enrol Mr. Meredith among the demi-gods or heroes ; and we hesitate, for the reason just given, to say that we count on greater things from him ; but we shall not cease to look for his renewed appearance with hope, and to hail it with extreme pleasure, so long as he may continue to produce poems equal to the best in this first volume. On the whole, it will be admitted this was no unworthy review of George Meredith's ' Poems,' allowing for precisely those qualities in the critic which he allowed for in the poet. That he was too timid in his estimate of the promise held out by the little volume we have all known for many years, but he was in no sense ungenerous. SOME EARLY APPRECIATIONS 135 He was not so enthusiastic about Meredith as the latter was about Alexander Smith, a lesser man, in his sonnet in the Leader of December 20, 185 1. But enthusiasm is not the highest attribute of the critic. In that same December, however, a writer already of high distinction, with the ' Saints' Tragedy ' and ' Alton Locke ' to his credit and ' Yeast ' but newly issued, heralded the coming of the new poet with greater confidence, yet with more searching criticism, being in his riper judgment surer of the weak places and quicker to discern the strength of the young writer. Charles Kingsley contributed to Fraser's Magazine of December, 1851, a review of the poetry of the year, under the title of ' This Year's Song Crop,' and a considerable part of his paper was devoted to Meredith's 'Poems.' The article is of so great interest to every student of the poet, and so characteristic of the lusty, wholesome, kindly author of ' Westward Ho ! ' that I purpose quoting in entirety all the passages touching the subject in hand : This, we understand, is his first appearance in print; if it be so, there is very high promise in the unambitious little volume which he has sent forth as his first-fruits. It is something, to have written already some of the most delicious little love-poems which we have seen born in England in the last few years, reminding us by their riches and quaintness of tone of Herrick ; yet with a depth of thought and feeling which Herrick never reached. Health and sweetness are two qualities which run through all these poems. They are often over-loaded — often somewhat clumsy and ill-expressed — often wanting polish and finish ; but they are all genuine, all melodiously conceived, if not always melodiously executed. One often wishes, in reading the volume, that Mr. Meredith had been thinking now and then of Moore instead of Keats, and had kept for revision a great deal which he has published ; yet, now and then, form, as well as matter, is nearly perfect. [Here he quotes the songs, ' The Moon is Alone in the Sky ' and ' I cannot lose Thee for a Day. '] In Mr. Meredith's Pastorals, too, there is a great deal of sweet, wholesome writing, more like the real pastorals than those of any young poet whom we have had for many a year. . . . Care- less as hexameters ; but honest landscape-painting ; and only he who begins honestly ends greatly. Kingsley next quotes the first three stanzas of ' Love in the Valley,' and continues : What gives us here hope of the future, as well as enjoyment on the spot, is, that these have evidently not been put together, but have grown of themselves ; and the one idea has risen before his 136 GEORGE MEREDITH mind, and shaped itself into a song ; not perfect in form, perhaps, but as far as it goes, healthful, and consistent, and living, through every branch and spray of detail. And this is the reason why Mr. Meredith has so soon acquired an instinctive melody. . . . To such a man any light which he can gain from aesthetic science will be altogether useful. The living seed of a poem being in him, and certain to grow and develop somehow, the whole gardener's art may be successfully brought to bear on perfecting it. For this is the use of aesthetic science — to supply, not the bricklayer's trowel, but the hoe, which increases the fertility of the soil, and the pruning- knife, which lops off excrescences. For Mr. Meredith — with real kindness we say it, for the sake of those love poems — has much to learn, and, as it seems to us, a spirit which can learn it ; but still it must be learnt. One charming poem, for instance, ' Daphne,' is all spoilt, for want of that same pruning-knife. We put aside the question whether a ballad form is suitable, not to the subject — for to that, as a case of purely objective action, it is suitable — but to his half-elegiac, thoughtful handling of it. Yet we recommend him to consider whether his way of looking at the Apollo and Daphne myth be not so far identical with Mr. Tennyson's idea of ' Paris and ^Enone,' as to require a similar Idyllic form, to give the thoughtful element its fair weight. If you treat external action merely (and in as far as you do so, you will really reproduce those old sensuous myths) you may keep the ballad form, and heap verse on verse as rapidly as you will ; but if you introduce any subjective thought, after the fashion of the Roman and later Greek writers, to explain the myth, and give it a spiritual, or even merely allegorical, mean- ing, you must, as they did, slacken the pace of your verse. Let Ovid's ' Fasti ' and ' Epistles ' be your examples, at least in form, and write slowly enough to allow the reader to think as he goes on. The neglect of this rule spoilt the two best poems in ' Reverbera- tions,' 'Balder' and 'Thor,' which, whatever were the faults of the rest of the book, were true and noble poems, and the neglect of it spoils ' Apollo and Daphne. ' Mr. Meredith is trying all through to mean more than the form which he has chosen allows him. That form gives free scope to a prodigality of objective description, of which Keats need not have been ashamed ; but if he had more carefully studied the old models of that form — from the simple Scotch ballads to Shakespeare's ' Venus and Adonis ' — a ballad and not an idyll, — he would have avoided Keats' fault of too>- muchness into which he has fallen. Half the poem would bear cut- ting out; even half of those most fresh and living stanzas, where the woodland springs into life to stop Daphne's flight — where Running ivies, dark and lingering', Round her light limbs drag and twine ; Round her waist, with languorous tendrils Reels and wreathes the juicy vine, SOME EARLY APPRECIATIONS 137 Crowning- her with amorous clusters ; Pouring down her sloping back Fresh-born wines in glittering rillets, Following her in crimson track. Every stanza is a picture in itself, but there are too many of them and therefore we lose the story in the profusion of its acci- , ] nt L Tner . e is a truly Correggiesque tone of feeling and drawing aI * v/r° U8;l1 this P oem > which is very pleasant to us. But we pray Mr Meredith to go to the National Gallery and there look steadily and long, with all the analytic insight he can, at the ' Venus and Mercury or the ' Agony in the Garden ' ; or go to the Egyptian Hall and there feast, not only his eyes and heart, but his intellect and spirit also, with Lord Ward's duplicate of the ' Magdalen '— the greatest Protestant sermon on ' free justification by faith ' ever yet preached; and there see how Correggio can dare to indulge in his exquisite lusciousness of form, colour, and chiaroscuro, with- out his pictures ever becoming tawdry or overwrought — namely, by the severe scientific unity and harmonious gradation of parts which he so carefully preserves, which make his pictures single glorious rainbows and precious stone — that Magdalen one living emerald — instead of being, like the jewelled hawk in the Great Exhibition, every separate atom of it beautiful, yet as a whole utterly hideous. One or two more little quarrels we have with Mr. Meredith — and yet they are but amantium irce, after all. First, concerning certain Keatsian words — such as languorous, and innumerous, and such like, which are very melodious, but do not, unfortunately, belong to this our English tongue, their places being occupied already by old and established words ; as Mr. Tennyson has conquered this fault in himself, Mr. Meredith must do the same. Next, concerning certain ambitious metres, sound and sweet, but not thoroughly worked out, as they should have been. Mr. Meredith must always keep in mind that the species of poetry which he has chosen is one which admits of nothing less than perfection. We may excuse the roughness of Mrs. Browning's utterance, for the sake of the grandeur and earnest- ness of her purpose ; she may be reasonably supposed to have been more engrossed with the matter than with the manner. But it is not so with the idyllist and lyrist. He is not driven to speak by a prophetic impulse ; he sings of pure will, and therefore he must sing perfectly, and take a hint from that microcosm, the hunting- field ; wherein, if the hounds are running hard, it is no shame to any man to smash a gate instead of clearing it, and jump into a brook instead of over it. Forward he must get, by fair means if possible, if not, by foul. But if, like the idyllist, any gentleman ' larks ' his horse over supererogatory leaps at the coverside, he is not allowed to knock all four hoofs against the top bar ; but public opinion (who, donkey as she is, is a very shrewd old donkey, never- theless, and clearly understands the difference between thistles and 138 GEORGE MEREDITH barley) requires him to ' come up in good form, measure his dis- tance exactly, take off neatly, clear it cleverly, and come well into the next field. ' . . . And even so should idyllists with their metres. In the foregoing there is wise and kindly counsel of a sort that young poets of promise have seldom received, and had Meredith taken this advice to heart we cannot but think his later poetry had benefited appreciably ; but his is a rebel spirit, and neither friendly criticism nor unfriendly was likely to affect him ; certainly neither did. Kingsley's counsel was even more needful forty years later than at the time it was first given. But it is clear that Kingsley felt the ichor of greatness pulsing in those early poems of Meredith, and his words to-day sound almost prophetic : ' Only he who begins honestly ends greatly. ' On the whole, George Meredith had no reason to be disappointed by the reception of his first volume of verse at the hands of the critics, and if the public was cold, when, since the palmy days of Byron and Moore, has it been otherwise to the new poet? Four years had passed before the poet offered himself again to the critics, and now it was with a work in which poetry and prose intermingle and render the task of criticism none too easy. ' The Shaving of Shagpat,' published at the end of 1855, but dated 1856, received almost as much attention from the critical press of the time as any other new work of note. It was by no means ' neglected. ' Of chief interest to us, however, is the fact that the author's friend and admirer, George Eliot, was the writer of two of the criticisms — an early and mild example of ' multiple reviewing. ' One of her reviews appeared in the Leader, January 5, 1856, and the other in the Westminster Review, April, 1856. George Eliot had been assist- ant editor of the latter periodical from 185 1 to 1853 and was still a contributor ; but, of course, she had not yet made her pen-name a household word, as it was only in 1856 that she wrote the first of her 'Scenes of Clerical Life,' which, appearing in Blackwood's in 1857, was the beginning of her literary fame. Her journal bears the entry: 'Dec. 30, 1855. — Read "The Shaving of Shagpat" (George Meredith's).' So she must have penned her appreciation hot foot on her reading, in order that it might be printed in the Leader of January 5. No act of religious symbolism (she wrote) has a deeper root in nature than that of turning with reverence towards the East. For almost all our good things — our most precious vegetables, our noblest animals, our loveliest flowers, our arts, our religious and SOME EARLY APPRECIATIONS 139 philosophical ideas, our very nursery tales and romances have travelled to us from the East. In an historical as well as in a physical sense, the East is the land of the morning. Perhaps the simple reason of this may be that when the earth first began to move on her axis, her Asiatic side was towards the sun — her Eastern cheek first blushed under his rays. And so this priority of sunshine, like the first move in chess, gave the East the precedence, though not the pre-eminence in all things ; just as the garden slope that fronts the morning sun yields the earliest seedlings, though these seedlings may attain a hardier and more luxurious growth by being transplanted. But we leave this question to wiser heads. Felix qui potent rerum cognoscere causas. (Excuse the novelty of the quotation.) We have not carried our reader's thoughts to the East that we may discuss the reason why we owe it so many good things, but that we may introduce him to a new pleasure, due, at least indirectly, to that elder region of the earth. We mean 'The Shaving of Shagpat,' which is indeed an original fiction just produced in this western island, but which is so intensely Oriental in its conception and execution, that the author has done wisely to guard against the supposition of its being a translation, by prefixing the statement that it is derived from no Eastern source, but is altogether his own. ' The Shaving of Shagpat ' is a work of genius, and of poetical genius. It has none of the tameness which belongs to mere imita- tions manufactured with servile effort or thrown off with sinuous facility. It is no patchwork of borrowed incidents. Mr. Meredith has not simply imitated Arabian fictions, he has been inspired by them, he has used Oriental forms, but only as an Oriental genius would have used them who had been ' to the manner born. ' Goethe, when he wrote an immortal work under the inspiration of Oriental studies, very properly called it West-ostliche — West-eastern — be- cause it was thoroughly Western in spirit, though Eastern in its forms. But this double epithet would not give a true idea of Mr. Meredith's work, for we do not remember that throughout our reading we were once struck by an incongruity between the thought and the form, once startled by the intrusion of the chill north into the land of the desert and the palm. Perhaps more lynx-eyed critics, and more learned Orientalists, than we, may detect dis- crepancies to which we are blind, but our experience will at least indicate what is likely to be the average impression. In one particular, indeed, Mr. Meredith differs widely from his models, but that difference is a high merit; it lies in the exquisite delicacy of his love incidents and love scenes. In every other characteristic — in exuberance of imagery, in picturesque wildness of incident, in significant humour, in aphoristic wisdom, ' The Shaving of Shagpat ' HO GEORGE MEREDITH is a new Arabian Night. To two-thirds of the reading world this is sufficient recommendation. According to Oriental custom the main story of the book — ' The Shaving of Shagpat ' — forms the setting to several minor tales, which are told on pretexts more or less plausible by the various dramatis personce. We will not forestall the reader's pleasure by telling him who Shagpat was, or what were the wondrous adventures through which Shibli Bagarag, the wandering barber, became Master of the Event and the destroyer of illusions, by shaving from Shagpat the mysterious identical which had held men in subjection to him. There is plenty of deep meaning in the tale for those who cannot be satisfied without deep meanings, but there is no didactic thrusting forward of moral lessons, and our imagina- tion is never chilled by a sense of allegorical intention predominating over poetic creation. Nothing can be more vivid and concrete than the narrative and description, nothing fresher and more vigorous than the imagery. Are we reading how horsemen pursued their journey? We are told that they ' flourished their lances with cries, and jerked their heels into the flanks of their steeds, and stretched forward till their beards were mixed with the tossing manes, and the dust rose after them crimson in the sun.' Is it a maiden's eyes we are to see? They are ' dark, under a low arch of darker lashes, like stars on the skirts of storm. ' Sometimes the images are exquisitely poetical, as when Bhanavar looks forth ' on the stars that were above the purple heights and the blushes of inner heaven that streamed up the shy,' sometimes ingenious and pithy: for example, ' she clenched her hands an instant with that feeling which knocketh a nail in the coffin of a desire not dead.' Indeed, one of the rarest charms of the book is the constant alternation of passion and wild imaginativeness with humour and pithy, practical sense. Mr. Meredith is very happy in his imitation of the lyrical fragments which the Eastern tale-tellers weave into their narrative, either for the sake of giving emphasis to their sententiousness, or for the sake of giving a more intense utterance to passion, a loftier tone to description. George Eliot then goes on to quote many of the lyrics from the story of ' Bhanavar the Beautiful, ' which she describes as ' the brightest gem among the minor tales, and perhaps in the entire book. ' She also gives most of the tale of ' The Punishment of Khipil ' to illustrate the author's ' skill in humorous apologue,' and concludes: We hope we have said enough to do justice to ' The Shaving of Shagpat,' enough to make our readers desire to see it. They will find it, compared with the other fictions which the season has provided, to use its own Oriental style, ' as the apple tree among the trees of the wood. ' SOME EARLY APPRECIATIONS 141 Writing to Miss Sara Hennell, on January 18, 1856, George Eliot makes a reference to her article in the Leader, saying, ' If you want some idle reading get "The Shaving of Shagpat," which I think you will say deserves all the praise I gave it.' George Eliot's second notice of ' The Shaving of Shagpat ' was rather incidental than particular, occurring in a twenty-five page article on 'Art and Belles Lettres,' contributed to the Westminster Review of April, 1856, in the course of which she dwelt on Wilkie Collins's ' After Dark,' Kingsley's ' Heroes,' ' Noctes Ambrosianae,' and a variety of French and German books. It is a very graceful and generous tribute, well worthy of a place in any collection of Meredithiana. I quote the reference in full : We turn from the art which most of us must leave our homes to get even a glimpse of, to that which has at least the advantage of visiting us at our own firesides — the art of the romancer and novelist; and the first work of fiction that presents itself as worth notice is ' The Shaving of Shagpat, ' an admirable imitation of Oriental tale-telling, which has given us far more pleasure than we remember to have had even in younger days from reading ' Vathek ' — the object of Byron's enthusiastic praise. Of course, the great mass of fictions are imitations, more or less slavish and mechanical — imitations of Scott, of Balzac, of Dickens, of Currer Bell, and the rest of the real ' makers ' ; every great master has his school of followers, from the kindred genius down to the feeble copyist. ' The Shaving of Shagpat ' is distinguished from the common run of fictions, not in being an imitation, but in the fact that its model has been chosen from no incidental prompting, from no wish to suit the popular mood, but from genuine love and mental affinity. Perhaps we ought to say that it is less an imitation of the ' Arabian Nights ' than a similar creation inspired by a thorough and admiring study. No doubt, if a critical lens were to be applied, there would be found plenty of indications that the writer was born in Western Europe, and in the nineteenth century, and that his Oriental imagery is got by hearsay ; but to people more bent on enjoying what they read than on proving their acumen, ' The Shaving of Shagpat ' will be the thousand and second night which they perhaps longed for in their childhood. The author is alive to every element in his models : he reproduces their humour and practical sense as well as their imaginativeness. Shibli Bagarag, the barber, carries a great destiny within him : he is to shave Shagpat the clothier, and thus to become Master of the Event. The city of Shagpat, unlike the city of London, regards shaving, and not the beard, as the innovation; and Shagpat is a ' miracle of hairiness, black with hair as he had been muzzled with it, and his head, as it were, a berry in a huge bush by reason of it,' 142 GEORGE MEREDITH and when the countenance of Shagpat waxed fiery it was as ' a flame kindled by travellers at night in a bramble bush, and he ruffled and heaved and was as when dense jungle-growths are stirred violently by the near approach of a wild animal.' Moreover, among the myriad hairs of Shagpat is the mysterious ' Identical ' which some- how holds the superstition of men in bondage, so that they bow to it without knowing why — the most obstinate of all bowing, as we are aware. Hence, he who will shave Shagpat, and deliver men from worshipping his hairy mightiness, will deserve to be called Master of the Event; and the story of all the adventures through which Shibli Bagarag went before he achieved this great work — the thwackings he endured, the wondrous scenes he beheld, and the dangers he braved to possess himself of the magic horse Garaveen, the Lily of the Enchanted Sea, and other indispensable things, with his hairbreadth escapes from spiteful genii — all this forms the main action of the book. Other tales are introduced, serving as pleasant landing-places on the way. The best of these is the story of Khipil the Builder, a humorous apologue, which will please readers who are unable to enjoy the wilder imaginativeness of Oriental fiction ; but lovers of the poetical will prefer the story of Bhanavar the Beautiful. We confess to having felt rather a languishing interest towards the end of the work ; the details of the action became too complicated, and our imagination was rather wearied in following them. But where is the writer whose wing is as strong at the end of his flight as at the beginning? Even Shakespeare flags under the artificial necessi- ties of a denouement. ' Farina; a Legend of Cologne,' being published the year after ' The Shaving of Shagpat,' George Eliot was again the critic of her friend's work in the pages of the Westminster, her review of ' Farina ' appearing in the issue of October, 1857. Naturally the book did not move her to the enthusiasm which the author's former work had produced in his admirer, and in her estimate of the story we can see personal liking struggle with the critical sense, the latter proving the stronger in the result. Where she accuses the novelist of sacrificing ' euphony and almost sense, to novelty and force of expression,' we have one of the earliest expressions of what has grown into a volume of adverse criticism of style, unexampled in the case of any other famous writer of prose or poetry. George Eliot was certainly no blind admirer, but her sane and tempered praise, coming at so critical a period in the fortunes of the young author, and from one whose judgment he must have respected, could hardly fail to be heartening to him. An abridgement of the review by George Eliot is here given : SOME EARLY APPRECIATIONS 143 The author of ' Farina ' has exposed himself to a somewhat try- ing ordeal. Last year he treated us to a delightful volume of well- sustained Oriental extravagance, and we remember our friend Shibli Bagarag too well to be easily satisfied with any hero less astonish- ing. It was refreshing to leave the actual and the probable for a time, and follow Mr. Meredith's lead into the bright world of imagination. The hope of such another enchanted holiday prepared us to welcome his new tale with all due honour and cordiality. It was with something like disappointment, therefore, that we found ourselves brought down to the vulgar limits of time and place, and our appetite for the marvellous entirely spoilt by scenes which chal- lenge prosaic considerations of historical truth and the fitness of things. The title, ' Farina ; a Legend of Cologne, ' will naturally carry the reader's mind to those ungainly-shaped bottles, with which the British tourist is sure to return laden from the city of evil smells. Mr. Meredith is pleased to bestow a high antiquity on the famous distillation, and his hero, doubtless the first of all the Jean Maries, is invested with the dubious honours of a dealer in the black art, on account of his suspicious collection of bottles and vases, pipes and cylinders. But when the Devil is beaten in single combat on the Drachenfels, and returns from whence he came, entering to his kingdom under the Cathedral Square, and leaving behind him a most abominable stench, Farina's perfumed water does good service. The kaiser, six times driven back by the offence to his nostrils, is enabled to enter the good city of Cologne, and then and there reward the restorer of a pure atmosphere with the hand of his long-loved bride. For the rest, the story is sufficiently slight. We have the blonde and bewitching heroine, Margarita, and her troop of lovers, who prove their devotion by such strenuous interchange of blows in her honour, that there is not one of them who is not black and blue ; and we have the lover, Farina, tender and true, brave as Siegfried, and worshipping his ' Frankinne ' with such fanatical homage, as ' Conrad the Pious ' might have sung. Margarita's father, Gottlieb Groschen, the rich Cologne citizen, is a characteristic specimen of the prosperous mediaeval Rhinelander. . . . Much clever and vigorous description is to be found in the narra- tive, and Mr. Meredith has been very successful in setting before us a vivid picture of the coarse, rough manners, the fierce, warlike habits, and the deep-seated superstition of the ' good old times ' of chivalry. The character of the jovial Squire Guy the Goshawk is especially well done. As a whole, we think ' Farina ' lacks completeness, and the ghostly element is not well worked in. The combat between Saint Gregory and the Devil is made ludicrous by its circumstantiality. It was not as a jeering satirist that the old monkish legends set forth 144 GEORGE MEREDITH Sathanas, and there is a clumsiness in the whole affair which accords ill with the boldness and skill displayed in other portions of the tale. We must also protest against Father Gregory's use of the nominative case 'ye' instead of accusative 'you,' monk though he be, and privileged, doubtless, to speak bad grammar at will ; nor can we admire many passages in which the author has sacrificed euphony, and almost sense, to novelty and force of expression. With these blemishes, ' Farina ' is both an original and an entertaining book, and will be read with pleasure by all who prefer a lively, spirited story to those dull analyses of dull experiences in which the present school of fiction abounds. When an author has ' arrived,' and particularly when his sun is setting in a peaceful glory, there are always many ready to claim that they had first given him a friendly greeting in the chill, grey dawn of his rising, and we cannot find fault with this very human weakness ; next to being a great man is the acumen of knowing one when you see him. Thus the Times not unnaturally found occasion to observe in its ' leader ' on Mr. Meredith's eightieth birthday : ' This journal may perhaps claim a special pleasure in bearing testi- mony to-day to Mr. Meredith's achievements, inasmuch as we believe the first public attempt to appreciate him was in a three- column review which we'gave to " The Ordeal of Richard Feverel " in 1859.' Whether this is strictly correct may be left to the judgment of my readers with the facts of the earliest appreciations now before them. The Times article was certainly worthy of those traditions which are still the glory of that journal. In any case, this is further evidence in favour of my contention that Meredith was not coldly eyed in the high places of journalism in the early stages of his career. A three-column article in the Times on a writer of a new book was supposed to be good for the sale of a whole edition fifty years ago. Reference has already been made to A. C. Swinburne's very spirited and characteristic letter to the Spectator of June 7, 1862, defending his friend Meredith from the attack of an anonymous writer in that journal on the appearance of ' Modern Love. ' That letter has further value as indicating the position to which Meredith had attained in the year 1862, when Swinburne himself had only published ' The Queen Mother and Rosamund. ' ' One of the leaders of English literature,' ' the very eminence of his post,' ' a man who has won his spurs and fought his way to a foremost place among the men of his time ' ; these and like phrases applied to Meredith by a writer so intimate with the literary world of his day as Swinburne 5. H u 5 - O E u a;' « ?» SOME EARLY APPRECIATIONS 145 in 1862, should be noted, for memory is apt to play strange tricks in late years, which may account for some of the stories of Mere- dith's long period of obscurity. Thus I find Mr. Justin McCarthy, an early and valued friend of Meredith, writing in his most engaging ' Reminiscences ' : I think I was among the earliest of those into whose minds it was borne as a fact that with George Meredith an entirely new and original force had arisen in English literature. If I am not greatly mistaken, I think 1 am entitled to boast of the fact that I contributed the first long and elaborate study of the genius of George Meredith to the pages of a regular quarterly review. Of course, I do not mean to say that other writers had not contributed articles on George Meredith full of appreciation and rapture, to the pages of weekly and" of daily journals, and, probably, too, of monthly magazines ; but I hope I am entitled to claim the distinction of having been the writer of the first essay concerning him which appeared in one of the quarterlies. The essay which I wrote was for the Westminster Review, then edited by my friend the late Dr. John Chapman. Chapman knew George Meredith intimately, had an immense admiration for him, and a thorough appreciation of his genius, and yet it was not without some hesitation that he accepted my suggestion to write an article altogether, or almost altogether, about a man at that time so little known to the general public. The article to which Mr. McCarthy here refers is ' Novels with a Purpose,' which appeared in the Westminster, July, 1864, and was reprinted in the author's volume of essays ' Con Amore,' four years later. Quotation from it would be quite in place here, but I have preferred to utilise it in other chapters of this work, and chiefly as the estimate of a fellow-novelist. Mr. McCarthy is correct in thinking himself the first to write of Meredith in one of the quarterlies ; indeed he is too modest in his claim, for, prior to 1864, though numerous articles had appeared in periodicals of all kinds, none dealt with Meredith's prose as a whole ; all had some particular reference to his latest book ; but what sounds strange, and where Mr. McCarthy's memory may conceivably have given back a some- what blurred impression, is the recollection of Chapman's hesitancy to publish an article largely, but not exclusively, devoted to Meredith's novels. Under Chapman's editorship the Westminster had already published four reviews of Meredith's works, including those by George Eliot, and had one of ' Emilia in England ' in the same issue as Mr. McCarthy's own contribution, indicating that the novelist's name was far from unknown to its readers, and, L 146 GEORGE MEREDITH unless Swinburne's epithets of two years earlier date were greatly exaggerated, or were merely the affected knowledge of the literary elect — which we have no reason for supposing them to be — Meredith was, even in 1864, and apart from Chapman's personal friendship, an entirely suitable subject for the Westminster. All honour to Mr. McCarthy for his first weighty article, but was the ' general public ' of 1864 really more ignorant of Meredith and his work than that of to-day? Even at the time of his death he was no more than a name to the ' general public ' ; the intelligent reading public is larger, but hardly better informed, than it was forty-five years ago ; and it has never been the business of quarterly reviews to choose their topics on the principle of interesting any but the select public of readers, to whom I have endeavoured to show Meredith has always been familiar, if not as an author whom they have read, at least as one with a reputation commanding their respect. My contention seems to receive further support from the opening passages of the thoughtful criticism of ' Emilia in England ' which the late Dr. Richard Garnett contributed to the Reader, April 23, 1864. Dr. Garnett was clearly addressing a public that was aware of the eminence of George Meredith when he wrote in this strain : The announcement of a new work by Mr. George Meredith is necessarily one to provoke much curiosity and expectation, since even a modest approximation to the end he has been wont to pro- pose to himself implies ability of an unusual description. Mr. Meredith belongs to that select band of humorists who mainly rely for effect upon the pungency and piquancy of their diction, whether uttered in their own character or placed in the mouths of their dramatis persona. Few writers, indeed, could dispose of resources adequate to so sustained a display of intellectual pyrotechnics as that which has now lasted Mr. Meredith through nine volumes. It is comparatively easy to devise humorous situations ; but this is farce. Mr. Meredith's works are the best modern representatives of the genteel comedy of a hundred and fifty years since. Incident and character are not neglected ; but both are subordinate to dialogue. The personages have their prototypes in nature, but are still some- what idealised : they are like and not like people we have seen. They are rather types of character than individuals. Maskwell in Congreve's comedy, for example, is a really scientific combination of the chief traits of a designing villain ; but we may perceive at once that these have been ingeniously put together in the study, not copied from the living model. It is a significant circumstance that all Congreve's plays were composed at an age when Mr. Meredith had hardly begun to write. The latter's experience of life SOME EARLY APPRECIATIONS 147 is consequently much wider, and there is that in the genius of his time which causes him to be more solicitous about the truth of things. Nevertheless, next to the intellectual brilliancy of his writings, their most salient feature is their artificial aspect. A principle of intelligent selection seems to have presided over their genesis and development. The story is carefully chosen for the sake of some favourite idea snugly bedded in the centre of it — a Psyche- germ, swathed in a rich cocoon of illustration. The personages are all selected with a similar view, and their sayings and doings meted out with the nicest accuracy. The style again is highly recherchd, spiced with epigram, and elaborated even to obscurity. It might easily be surmised that Mr. Meredith experienced considerable difficulty in arraying his thoughts in their appropriate garment of speech, and that the frequent harshness of his exposition was the evidence of a victory won by a vigorous growth over an unkindly soil. Thus rich, original, strained, and artificial, the general effect of one of Mr. Meredith's novels is very much that of a fine land- scape seen through tinted glass — a pleasing variety, so long as there are plain windows in the house. To read Mr. Meredith in his turn is to season the feast of literature with an exquisite condiment; to read nobody but Mr. Meredith would be like making a dinner of salt — Attic, of course. ' Emilia in England ' is fully equal to the author's former works in humour and power, and only less remarkable in so far as it is less original. The plot is a variation on the theme of ' Evan Harrington. ' The comedy of that admirable novel turned on the struggle of three sisters, upheaved into a higher than their natural sphere, with the demon of Tailordom ; their frantic efforts to entomb the monstrous corpse of their plebeian origin beneath the highest available heaps of acted and spoken lies ; the vigorous resistance of that ghastly being to this method of disposing of him, and his victorious assertion of his right to walk the earth. The more serious interest arose from the entanglement of their straightforward brother in their web of imposition, not without the participation of the mischievous deity of Love. In ' Emilia ' we have three sisters again — the Misses Pole — Pole, Polar, and North Pole, or, as the profane have entitled them, Pole, Polony, and Maypole. The situation is fundamentally the same, but so far varied that the ladies have no chance of concealing their mercantile origin, of which, indeed, to do them justice, they are not ashamed. They simply wish to get higher, and, by way of justifying their ambition to themselves, have set up a fanciful code of feelings supposed to be proper to the highest circles, to which, by way of demonstrating their fitness for the same, they make it the study of their lives to conform. That is, they lived by a conventional rule, just as the baronet in Mr. Meredith's first novel brought up his own son upon system. Mr. Meredith appears to entertain a special detestation l 2 148 GEORGE MEREDITH for anything cut and dried, and the gist of his present work is a sarcastic but quiet exposure of the evil these ladies wrought against their better nature. Emilia Belloni, the heroine, is an entire contrast to the Miss Poles. She is in some respects the repetition of Rose Jocelyn in ' Evan Harrington ' — a pattern of pure nature, perfect guilelessness, absolute unreserve, and entire surrender to self-oblivious passion. She combines the unembarrassed purity of an antique statue with the fire of a painting of the modern school. She is most pathetic in her confiding simplicity — in her frankness perfectly irresistible. This complete self-abandonment is powerfully contrasted with Wilfrid Pole's merely sentimental feeling for the beautiful stranger, and paralleled with Merthyr Powys' devotion to the cause of Emilia's country. Here are the materials of an excellent drama ; and, though the interest of the book does not mainly depend upon the incidents, there are sufficient to prevent it from flagging to any great extent. The chief obstacles to its success will probably be found in the peculiarity of the style, the quaintness (so pleasant to those who have once learned to relish it) of Mr. Meredith's habits of thought, and the idealisation of the characters. There is a soul of truth in them all ; but it is sometimes rather grotesquely incarnated. A hostile criticism might enlarge on their unlikeness to ordinary mortals. The reply must be that they are meant to embody certain types of thought and feeling, and consequently rather made to order than sketched from life. This employment of Mr. Meredith's talents is perfectly legitimate, especially after the proofs he has given of his ability to reproduce actual character with unimpaired effect. Observation alone could have furnished material for such vivid delineations as those of Mrs. Chump, in whose vicinity sentiment is barely possible, and Mr. Pericles, Greek millionaire, musical bear, and beneficent ogre. Perhaps the scenes where he appears are the richest in a work scintillating throughout with wit and humour. In strict point of time we may have travelled some distance beyond the ; early ' appreciations of the poet and novelist. When an author has produced seven notable works, three of them unusually long three-volume novel's — the ' nine volumes ' to which Dr. Garnett refers — and has been acknowledged by the best judges of his time a leading figure in contemporary letters, it is scarcely correct to qualify further criticism of him with the epithet ' early ' ; especially when we remember that in 1864 ' The Ordeal of Richard Feverel ' had been published for five years. But as Meredith's last novel was not written until thirty years later, we may be permitted to characterise a longer period of his earlier work as ' early ' than would apply in the case of one whose literary life had been less SOME EARLY APPRECIATIONS 149 protracted. Even so, I can hardly urge that an article written so late as 1876 would naturally fall within this chapter of the present work. But James Thomson, the author of ' The City of Dreadful Night,' has some claim to be regarded as one of the early admirers of Meredith's genius, though others had anticipated him in the printed expression of their opinions. Touching this point, I find the following entries in Thomson's diary for the year 1879: Saturday, Nov. 1. — Athenceum ; openg. article on Egoist. The first critique on any of George Meredith's books I have ever come across, in which the writer showed thorough knowledge of his works, and anything like an adequate apprec. of his wonderful genius. Saturday, Nov. 8. — Athenceum, advt. of Egoist: cordial praise from Athemn., Pall Mall, Spectr., Examr. At length! Encourg. ! A man of wonderful genius and a splendid writer may hope to obtn. something like recogn. after working hard for thirty years, dating from his majority ! There is something here of the natural exaggeration of a warm- hearted admirer, not unmixed with a suspicion of the pride of one who supposes himself to have long appreciated a pearl to which the grosser mob is indifferent. Thomson's earliest appreciation of Meredith did not appear until June, 1876, in Cope's Tobacco Plant, and in the Secularist about the same time he also wrote his ' Note on George Meredith, on the occasion of Beauchamp's Career,' which is reprinted in his ' Essays and Phantasies.' Now, in the opening passage of this ' note,' which I reprint below, he indicates quite clearly what we all know : how thoroughly Meredith's genius was appreciated by those best qualified to judge : whereas, in his diary three years later we have seen him making one of these somewhat rash statements so curiously common among writers on Meredith. He had not been sufficiently wide-awake, else he had ' come across ' many a critique of earlier date than November 1, 1879, in which no grudging praise and no blundering judgment was passed on the object of his literary idolatry. In some way the present chapter has been designed to prove this, but had I cared to quote at length from the considerable mass of anonymous criticism, dating from 1 85 1 to 1879, there had been no difficulty in showing how wrong was Thomson's impression — an impression that has become a tradi- tion of modern literature and is like to last as long as the fame of Meredith. Certainly no critic before Thomson, and none since, has written «?f Meredith with greater insight, but in admitting thus much one 150 GEORGE MEREDITH does not homologate his every statement, nor in reading his critique do we fail to detect something of the haughty spirit of the ' superior person ' disengaging itself from the swinging rhythm of his invec- tive, when he speaks of the dolts who are not wearing out their knees before the Meredithian shrine. His ' note ' here follows : George Meredith stands among our living novelists much as Robert Browning until of late years stood among our living poets, quite unappreciated by the general public, ranked with the very high- est by a select few. One exception must be made to this com- parison, an exception decidedly in favour of the novelists and novel readers ; for whereas Tennyson, the people's greatest poet, is im- measurably inferior to Browning in depth and scope and power and subtlety of intellect, George Eliot, the public's greatest novelist, is equal in all these qualities, save, I think, the last, to her unplaced rival, while having the advantage in some deservedly popular qualities, and the clear disadvantage in but one, the faculty of con- ceiving and describing vigorous or agonistic action, — in the fateful crises her leading characters are apt to merely drift. The thoughtful few have succeeded in so far imposing their judg- ment of Browning upon the thoughtless many, that these and their periodical organs now treat him with great respect, and try hard to assume the appearance of understanding and enjoying him, though doubtless their awkward admiration is more genuine in the old sense of wonder or astonishment than in the modern of esteem or love. But the thoughtful few are still far from succeeding to this extent in the case of George Meredith. Even literary men are unfamiliar with him. For having in some freak of fun or irony specified only two of his other books, and these among the earliest, on his title-page, leaving etc's. to represent ' Farina,' ' Evan Harrington,' ' Rhoda Fleming,' 'The Adventures of Harry Richmond,' 'Modern Love and Other Poems,' with his great masterpieces, ' Emilia in Eng- land ' and its sequel ' Vittoria ' ; he has reaped the satisfaction of learning that many of his well-informed reviewers manifestly know nothing of these obscure writings. For the rest, the causes of his unpopularity are obvious enough, and he himself, as he more than once lets us know, is thoroughly aware of them. . . . Not only does he appeal to the conscience residing in thoughtfulness, he makes heavy and frequent demands on the active imagination — monstrous attempts at extortion which both the languid and the sentimental novel reader bitterly resent, and which, indeed, if they grew common with authors (luckily there is not the slightest fear of that !) would soon plunge the circulating libraries into bankruptcy. The late Charles Dickens, who coincided at all points with the vulgar taste as exactly as two triangles of the fourth proposition of the first book of ' Euclid ' with one another, carried to perfection the Low-Dutch or exhaustive style of description, which may be termed SOME EARLY APPRECIATIONS 151 artistic painting reduced to artful padding ; minutely cataloguing all the details, with some exaggeration or distortion, humorous or pathetic, of each to make them more memorable, so that every item can be checked and verified as in an auctioneer's inventory, which is satis- factory to a business-like people. George Eliot, with incomparably higher art, paints rich and solid pictures that fill the eyes and dwell in the mind. But George Meredith seldom does this, either in the realm of Nature or in that of Humanity, though the achievement is well within his power, as none of our readers can doubt who studied, being fit to study, those magnificent selections from his ' Vittoria ' in the Secularist (No. 10, March 4), entitled ' Portrait of Mazzini ' and ' Mazzini and Italy. ' He loves to suggest by flying touches rather than slowly elaborate. To those who are quick to follow his suggestions he gives in a few winged words the very spirit of a scene, the inmost secret of a mood or passion, as no other living writer I am acquainted with can. His name and various passages in his works reveal Welsh blood, more swift and fiery and imaginative than the English. And he says in ' Emilia, ' with fair pride of race : ' All subtle feelings are discerned by Welsh eyes when untroubled by any mental agitation. Brother and sister were Welsh, and I may observe that there is human nature and Welsh nature. ' If his personages are not portrayed at full length, they are clear and living in his mind's eye, as we discern by the exquisitely appro- priate gesture or attitude or look in vivid moments : and they are characterised by an image or a phrase, as when we are told that the profile of Beauchamp ' suggested an arrow-head in the up- flight ' ; and of Renee : ' her features had the soft irregularities which run to varieties of beauty, as the ripple rocks the light ; mouth, eyes, brows, nostrils and blooming cheeks played into one another languidly ; thought flew, tongue followed, and the flash of meaning quivered over them like night-lightning. Or oftener, to speak truth, tongue flew, thought followed : her age was but newly seventeen, and she was French. ' And as with the outward so with the interior nature of his personages. Marvellous flashes of insight reveal some of their profoundest secrets, detect the mainsprings and trace the movements of their most complete workings, and from such data you must complete the characters, as from certain leading points a mathematician defines a curve. So with his conversations. The speeches do not follow one another mechanically adjusted like a smooth pavement for easy walking : they leap and break, resilient and resurgent, like running foam-crested sea waves, impelled and repelled and crossed by under-currents and great tides and broad breezes ; in their restless agitations you must divine the immense life abounding beneath and around and above them ; and the Mudie novice accustomed to saunter the level pavements finds that the heaving and falling are sea-sickness to a queasy stomach. More- over, he delights in elaborate analysis of abstruse problems, whose 152 GEORGE MEREDITH solutions when reached are scarcely less difficult to ordinary appre- hension than are the problems themselves ; discriminating countless shades where the common eye sees but one gloom or glare, pursuing countless distinct movements where the common eye sees only a whirling perplexity. As if all these heavy disqualifications were not enough, as if he were not sufficiently offensive in being original, he dares also to be wayward and wilful, not theatrically or overween- ingly like Charles Reade, but freakishly and humoristically, to the open-eyed disgust of our prim public. Lastly, his plots are too carelessly spun to catch our summer flies, showing here great gaps and there a pendent entanglement ; while his catastrophes are wont to outrage that most facile justice of romance which condemns all rogues to poverty and wretchedness, and rewards the virtuous with wealth and long life and flourishing large families. In exposing his defects for the many I have discovered some of his finest qualities for the thoughtful and imaginative few, and need now only summarise. He has a wonderful eye for form and colour, especially the latter ; a wonderful ear for music and all sounds ; a masterly perception of character, a most subtle sense for spiritual mysteries. His dialogue is full of life and reality, flexible and rich in the genuine unexpected, marked with the keenest distinctions, more like the bright-witted French than the slow and clumsy English. He can use brogue and baragouinage with rare accuracy and humorous effect ; witness the Irish Mrs. Chump and the Greek Pericles in ' Emilia. ' Though he seldom gives way to it, he is great in the fier}' record of fiery action ; thus the duel in the Stelvio Pass, in ' Vittoria,' has been scarcely equalled by any living novelist save by Charles Reade in that heroic fight with the pirates in ' Hard Cash. ' He has this sure mark of lofty genius, that he always rises with his theme, growing more strenuous, more self-contained, more magistral, as the demands on his thought and imagination increase. His style is very various and flexible, flowing freely in whatever measures the subject and the mood may dictate. At its best it is so beautiful in simplest Saxon, so majestic in rhythm, so noble with noble imagery, so pregnant with meaning, so vital and intense, that it must be ranked among the supreme achievements of our literature. A dear friend said well when reading ' Vittoria ' : ' Here truly are words that if you pricked them would bleed. ' For integral grandeur and originality of conception, and for perfectness of execution, the heroine of his ' Emilia ' appears to me the sovereign character of our modern fiction : in her he has discovered a new great nature, whom he has endowed with a new great language. In fine, I am aware of no other living English writer so gloriously gifted and so little known and appreciated except Garth Wilkinson : and Garth Wilkinson has squandered his superb genius in most futile efforts to cultivate the spectral Sahara of Swedenborgianism, and, infinitely worse, the Will-o'-the-Wisp Slough of Despond of Spiritism ; < s «■** « o x) g X C * a i SOME EARLY APPRECIATIONS 153 while George Meredith has constantly devoted himself to the ever- fruitful fields of real living nature and Human Nature. Apart from its intrinsic value as a contribution to the contem- porary appreciation of Meredith, the foregoing critique is of especial interest regarded merely as the opinion of one man of genius con- cerning another ; but where it lacks the touch of logic, characteristic of Thomson's countrymen with less of the Celtic strain than he had, is in its fulmination against the patrons of the circulating library for neglecting Meredith, while assuring us that Meredith cares not a jot for such brainless readers ! This is an attitude com- mon to many of Meredith's expositors. It could even be argued that Thomson's criticism places Bunyan and Scott, both of whom are not altogether unworthy to rank with Meredith, among the authors who have written for the common herd and so partake of its grossness. Dickens he thrusts forthright into the gutter ; yet Dickens was not quite a blockhead. George Eliot he seems to con- sider the exception that proves his rule. But we need not pursue this subject here, as it will present itself for more extended treat- ment in another chapter ; and enough has been accomplished if we have realised that in the earlier years of his literary career George Meredith was neither destitute of friends, nor denied the solace and inspiration of appreciative and intelligent criticism. VII LITERARY CHARACTERISTICS If we have not been greatly embarrassed with personal details of George Meredith, it is far otherwise when we turn to criticism of his work. Embarrassment is here a pale and feeble word. For we find ourselves smothered in a veritable avalanche of writing, and how to force a passage through to daylight is a puzzle to exercise the most ingenious mind. That I shall win through to daylight I dare not hope, but, struggling dimly lightwards, I may yet succeed in presenting, in this and the following chapters, some serviceable notion of how Meredith's art has been regarded by the criticism of his own time. Six books have been published, devoted exclusively to the exposition of his art ; magazine and newspaper articles in hundreds have had the same end in view ; and there are numerous works on modern prose or poetry in which at least one chapter is consecrated to Meredith. In short, the mass of critical writing about him is appalling, and it has been no light task to examine it with care and consideration. ' Thank God I have never written a word to please the public,' Meredith once said to York Powell. We know very well that he never pleased the public and that he never will. Let us then discover whom it is he has pleased, and by what qualities. It is also a moot question whether he could have pleased the public had he greatly tried. Here and there in his novels we seem to see him just a little envious of the lesser men who have the knack of pleasing the public. Do not let us be party to the detestable affectation that he scorned to see his works passing into new editions. No professional author ever wrote a book who did not hope to sell as many copies as people could be induced to buy, and we have no reason for supposing that Meredith was superbly superior to all considerations of the publishing department before or after he had produced his new manuscript for its exploitation. The iron fact of his lack of popularity is simply that he had been denied by the fairies, who had given him so many other gifts, the power of writing ' a tale which holdeth children from 154 LITERARY CHARACTERISTICS 155 play and old men from the chimney corner.' Among the writers of his own time there are scores with not a fraction of his genius who possess this gift and use it to excellent purpose. There is manly recognition of this, and none of the puling bitterness some of his ' appreciators ' display in their gibes at the public, in this passage from ' Beauchamp's Career ; : We will make no mystery about it. I would I could. Those happy tales of mystery are as much my envy as the popular narra- tives of the deeds of bread-and-cheese people, for they both create a tideway in the attentive mind ; the mysterious pricking our credulous flesh to creep, the familiar urging our obese imagination to constitutional exercise. And oh, the refreshment there is in deal- ing with characters either contemptibly beneath us or supernaturally above ! My way is like a Rhone island in the summer drought, stony, unattractive and difficult between the two forceful streams of the unreal and the over-real, which delight mankind — honour the conjurors ! My people conquer nothing, win none ; they are actual, yet uncommon. It is the clockwork of the brain that they are directed to set in motion, and — poor troop of actors to vacant benches ! — the conscience residing in thoughtfulness which they would appeal to; and if you are there impervious to them, we are lost : back I go to my wilderness, where, as you perceive, I have contracted the habit of listening to my own voice more than is good. Are we not to infer from this frank confession that Meredith lacks the story-telling gift? Surely. Twenty years after he penned these words he concluded his last novel with a final avowal that he was not a teller of tales. Thus ends ' The Amazing Marriage ' : So much I can say : the facts related, with some regretted omissions, by which my story has so skeleton a look, are those that led to the lamentable conclusion. But the melancholy, the pathos of it, the heart of all England stirred by it, have been — and the panting excitement it was to every listener — sacrificed in the vain effort to render events as consequent to your understanding as a piece of logic, through an exposure of character ! Character must ever be a mystery, only to be explained in some degree by conduct ; and that is very dependent upon accident : and unless we have a perpetual whipping of the tender part of the reader's mind, interest in invisible persons must needs flag. For it is an infant we address, and the story-teller whose art excites an infant to serious attention succeeds best ; with English people, assuredly, I rejoice to think, though I pray their patience here while that philosophy and exposure of character block the course along a road inviting to traffic of the most animated kind. 156 GEORGE MEREDITH Let Mr. Thomas Lloyd (in the Evening Standard), and many another who sought to flatter the veteran on his eightieth birthday by assuring him that, an he would, he could have made himself the most popular novelist of his time, digest the foregoing. Thus Mr. Lloyd : By choosing simpler weapons, stones instead of lightning and light, he could have made an impression on the forces arrayed against him. By forfeiting the respect of the few, who could not produce him a large income, he might have brought the multitude to his feet, rich offerings in their hands. To stories, plain stories, they would have succumbed, and occasionally the temptation to win at once must have been dazzling. For here was a writer who could have told a plain story with the best, only he desired to give some- thing more. Nothing less than the putting of ' brain stuff ' into fiction was his aim — ' brain stuff ' the weapon with which he desired to strike. He persisted along his own line. The victory was deferred. What the postponement meant in sacrifice of ease and prosperity, in loyalty to conviction and inspiration, Mr. Meredith, and he alone, knows. What Meredith knew was that he couldn't do it. In one of Edmund Kean's great scenes, when he was acting with his son Charles, and had the whole theatre breathless with excitement, he whispered, ' We're doing the trick, Charlie ! ' Meredith had never been able to ' do the trick,' and perhaps his good sense is seen in the fact that he never attempted it. He once said : ' Capacity for thinking should precede the art of writing. It should. I do not say it does. Capacity for assimilating the public taste and reproducing it is the commonest. ' But he himself lacked this common capacity : Shakespeare had it, Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot had it. Hence the universality of their appeal. Now, we have to settle in our own minds a point of some per- plexity to criticism before we go one step further in the considera- tion of this great writer, who is so honest a critic of himself. All who are familiar with the modern French drama and its criticism will know how Francisque Sarcey maintained for well-nigh forty years a consistent and unfailing fight for la piece bien faite. He set himself up a standard of what a drama should be, a convention, a sort of machine-made model from which any departure in form meant falseness to his ideal and merited his condemnation ; yet all the while men of great gifts were producing plays which did not conform to his model, but were instinct with qualities immensely greater than mere form. They were not des pieces bien faiies, and LITERARY CHARACTERISTICS 157 so to the dogs with them ! It is precisely this one-eyed criticism, which often comes, as in Sarcey's case, of an insensate devotion to the classic models, that condemns Meredith as ' an artist, but no novelist.' But it is a narrow convention that insists that a novel must be a story ' with a beginning , a middle, and an end. ' The most flexible of all literary forms, as we are pleased to regard the novel, is to become, forsooth, a rigid mould for the man of genius who makes use of it ! And the journeyman hack who conforms to its conventions, and brightens his tale with never one little flash of intellect or observation, is the real right novelist ! So would hide- bound criticism have it. None the less, it is so that popularity may be achieved, and the man of genius who either disdains to conform or cannot, try as he may, conform to the convention, must discover some other way of fascinating ' the infant ' he addresses, and if he does not hold that infant from play the blame is with him. As Meredith's substitute for story is the minute analysis of character, long sustained and remorselessly inquisitive, it is scarcely surprising that the children have not been holden from play, and that the old men have dozed by the chimney corner, while his ' poor troop of actors to vacant benches ' have played their parts to here and there a spectator who can understand and appreciate life in symbolism. For, being inspired of the comic muse, Meredith has to present his reading of life not in actual characters, deftly exaggerated, as Dickens did, but in types and symbols. That is the ineluctable method of comedy, and Meredith is nothing if not a writer of comedy. Here and there we find a Mrs. Berry, or a Tom Cogglesby — essentially Dickensian characters — but how curiously do his chief personages pale into abstractions, and leave the mind with the sense of having grasped some aspect of life rather than having made friends with a group of characters, who will live with us as Dugald Dalgetty, Sam Weller, Micawber, Becky Sharp, and so many others, live with us. On the score of exaggeration, which the ' superior ' critics find such a barrier to their appreciation of Dickens, what about Mrs. Chump, that impossible buffoon, whose preposterous figure can raise not ' laughter of gods,' but only melancholy, ' in the background ' of high comedy? While character is the concern of Meredith, it is not character for its own sake, but in the bulk, as interpretive of life. And here we touch another of the reasons for failure with the public. The ' infant ' does not care a straw for character in the abstract, it asks for persons, 'quaint and curious,' good or bad, but interesting as 158 GEORGE MEREDITH persons. The writer of comedy troops out his symbols of Egoism, of Youthful Conceit, of Social Ambition, of Intellectual Wit, of Parental Unwisdom, and 'the infant,' though these all bear names far more alluring than Christian, Faithful, Giant Despair or Mr. Worldly Wiseman, finds Bunyan's actual characters, though labelled with the names of abstractions, more fascinating than Meredith's abstractions labelled with the names of persons. It is also because his personages are parts of a philosophy of life rather than our fellow-creatures that Meredith himself seldom seems to warm into friendship with them. Now and then he is obviously writing of them with gusto ; he likes Nevil Beauchamp, Mrs. Mel, Dr. Shrapnel, Diana and a few more, but it is note- worthy that he is apt to be most in love with his most artificial characters. We can understand his liking Diana and Beauchamp, but Mrs. Mel or Shrapnel ! It is no injustice to say that he is, broadly speaking, aloof from his own personages, and this is fatal to all illusion, which is surely of the essence of great fiction. This aloofness has, in my judgment, been better explained on tempera- mental grounds by Mr. W. C. Brownell, the talented American critic, in his ' Victorian Prose Masters,' than by any other writer, and I turn to him at this stage for a valuable contribution to Meredithian criticism. The defect one feels most sensibly in Mr. Meredith's organisation is his lack of temperament (writes Mr. Brownell). It is this that extracts the savour from his originality. ... It is through tem- perament that character organises its traits into a central and coherent efficiency. Temperament, in a word, is energy accentuat- ing personality. Original — and indubitable — as Mr. Meredith's genius is, his personality is what we never feel in it. . . . Distinc- tion is so marked and constant a quality of Mr. Meredith that to ascribe inferiority of any kind to him would be ludicrous — except in so far as, for example, his particular order of critical implies an inferiority of constructive talent. He is the ideal dilettante in virtue of the completeness and the catholicity of his devotion to the delect- able. He finds it everywhere — everywhere, that is to say, where it exists in intellectual combination. And this, I think, gives him his extraordinary relief against his English environment, in which his temper and interests are rarely to be encountered. He has inex- haustible curiosity. What he calls ' the human mechanism ' attracts him distinctly as a mechanism. Within certain limits he explores its intricacies with wonderful ardour. He treats an eccentric type a little as if it were a new toy. . . . Note that his detachment is not that of an artist. It is a de- LITERARY CHARACTERISTICS 159 tachment of spirit, not objectivity in treatment. He is often enough on the stage himself. His observations in propria persona are con- stant. He is never absorbed either in his subject or in its delineation. On the contrary, he keeps it at arm's length when he is most inter- ested in it, and speculates copiously about it. He gives the reader his impression of it — often pungent, generally prolix. His tongue submits to no objective restraint in uttering the thoughts that arise in him regarding it. If these thoughts were sufficiently charged with feeling he would appear as a moralist or a sentimentalist, but as they have no temperamental alloy, no purpose, it is less obvious that his attitude is not artistically, but only emotionally, detached. We are accustomed, in other words, to the artist whose presentation of his subject is supplemented by his personal commentary, but not to him whose commentary, though constant, is thoroughly impersonal. The latter is the case with Mr. Meredith ; and it constitutes no small part of his originality that even his essential aloofness should be no help to him in the artistic presentation of his subject uncon- fused with talk about it. . . . He turns his subject round and exhibits it as a collector does an interesting possession — a bit of cloisonne or a figurine. Except that he does so in large fashion, without pettiness or partisanship or other limitation, and that his ' specimens ' have indubitable signi- ficance, the parallel would be perfect. But in his large and pene- trating way he lectures at great length on his finds. . . . Mr. Meredith's world, however, is not a real world. It is a fantastic one treated realistically. It is not simple enough to be real ; he is not simple enough. It is so little representative that it lacks illusion. Any one who should base upon it his notion of the world of English society- — society in the large sense, I mean — would get not only an incomplete but a distorted idea, though Mr. Mere- dith's world is as multifarious as it is populous. It is, like his genius, thoroughly sui generis, and it is peopled for the most part with figures of which the large or piquant conception is far more definite than the realisation. Dickens's world, too, is sui generis. But it is everywhere intensely real and definite. You recall his characters vividly often without remembering in which books they occur. In the case of Mr. Meredith, you recall the books, not the characters. Mr. Brownell then goes on at some length, and with perfect con- viction, to show us how Meredith fails to enthral the reader, leaving him with a disheartening sense of the author's tyranny over his characters and his determination to do with them what he chooses, instead of allowing them to work out their own salvation ; so that they become puppets foredoomed to their creator's caprice and not personages with whom he is on terms of intimacy and to whom he must allow such freedom of action as will bring them humanly 160 GEORGE MEREDITH through the mazes of his plot. The American critic also points out with some subtlety that the Meredithian characters do not suffer solely because they are so often symbolic of certain well-defined qualities, just as I have chosen above Bunyan's everlasting, because living realities, by way of contrast. Mr. Brownell writes : George Eliot's genius for generalisation is, considering its scope and its seriousness, certainly not inferior to Mr. Meredith's, but she is mistress of it, and though it limits the elasticity of her characters, it is never allowed to dilute their individuality. On the contrary, it intensifies it. Tito illustrates an idea as completely, as exclusively, as Mr. Meredith's ' Egoist ' does, for example; but he incarnates it also. You get so much of the idea that you would perhaps be glad of a diversion, but it is because Tito himself is so interpenetrated with it that it is an idea active, moving and alive. Patterne is in comparison a symbol. Setting aside the fact that the whole question is begged by describing him as vastly more winning than he is shown to be, half his psychology is commentary, and before long the reader is admiring the penetration of the author into human character in general, his detection of egoism under its multifarious disguises, the justice he renders the quality even in exposing it, and so on. Tito, on the other hand, has the actual, almost palpable force of the traditional ' awful example. ' As for Maggie Tulliver or any of George Eliot's notablest successes, none of Meredith's are at all in the same class with them any more than they are with Thackeray's. His discursiveness and his kind of discursiveness are fatal obstacles. In short, we have in Meredith the curious spectacle of a novelist who, rightly enough, has decided that the telling of a straightforward story is not the sole purpose of the novel — which is a literary form that may legitimately be made to do the work of the philosopher, using character as the medium of his philosophy — failing to grip the reader on the very issue he has chosen for his appeal to him : the interest of character. And this because the author himself does not always warm to the character he is portraying. Some such opinion as this seems to run through all that has been written in criticism of the novels, though, of course, it is a proposition that is subject to numerous exceptions in detail. Even the least temperate applauders of his genius make so many reservations as to his dis- tinct failures in character that the weight of their opinion does not disturb the balance of the general proposition more than all general- isations may be disturbed by advancing particular cases which weigh to the contrary. Mr. W. L. Courtney in his careful study of the novels, in the LITERARY CHARACTERISTICS 161 Fortnightly Review, June, 1886, was inclined to insist on the telling of a story as the novelist's first duty, giving second place to the psychological instinct, on the ground that ' the first is creative, spontaneous, original, while the second is introverted and critical.' This may be held to colour somewhat Mr. Courtney's attitude to Meredith's fiction, whereas no such discount could be taken from Mr. Brownell's criticism, which, as I read it, accepts Meredith's own notion of fiction as its basis. But Mr. Courtney's judgment is unassailable on any other ground, and he arrives at precisely the same destination as Mr. Brownell by a different route. So far the criticism has been scarcely of the ' appreciative ' order. There has been so much of that, and we shall yet have so many occasions to indulge in it, that we need not be impatient to give the signal to the orchestra of praise, always so ready to energise with drum and cymbal, and not always wisely. No; rather let us regard our Meredith as a veritable island of a man, with tangled forests, swamps and waste places, as well as a domed and glittering citadel, and make our way to that citadel through prickly paths and over rough wastes. But here I quote a eulogistic passage from Pro- fessor M. W. MacCallum's lecture on Meredith (published at Sydney in 1892), not with approval, but for a purpose that will presently appear : His material is not only spiritual and intellectual, it is mind in the fullest sense of the term ; he is concerned with the brains as well as with the hearts of his persons, he traces not only their feelings but their thoughts. ' Be wary,' he tells us in Diana, ' of the disrelish of brainstuff. Brainstuff is not lean stuff; the brain- stuff of fiction is not internal history, and to suppose it dull is the profoundest of errors. ... A great modern writer of clearest eye and head, now departed, groaned over his puppetry — that he dared not animate them, flesh though they were, with the fires of positive brainstuff. ' Meredith has had no such timidity as he here attributes to Thackeray — if Thackeray it be, — and in the face of thirty years' neglect, persevered at his Shakespearian task of portraying men and women in the whole of their conscious life. When we remember that the phenomena of consciousness are just the most complex and intricate of all, we need not wonder that he is often hard ; nor, for the most part, does he resemble George Eliot, who may be said to have attempted something of a similar kind, in helping us with explanatory disquisitions on his characters. He studies them in activity, not in repose ; he does not dissect them motionless before him while the narrative is motionless too, but shows us thought following thought in the rapids of the mind. His analysis is given M i6a GEORGE MEREDITH in, not apart from, the story. He seldom forgets that the duty of a narrator is to narrate; even his apparent pauses, like the reflec- tive passages in Shakespeare, generally help on the plot; like all good story-tellers he avoids preaching, avoids even unprogressive description, and the story itself is his first care. But as the story is less of physical event than of mental process, this very obedience to his art increases the difficulties of his readers. His objects are remote from our ordinary points of view, and it is hard to see remote objects distinctly ; but when these will not stay still, but are ever on the wing, it becomes a great deal harder. Professor MacCallum is, in the main, a sound critic, but like the late Miss Hannah Lynch he is quite capable of allowing his admiration for Meredith to lead him into assertions utterly un- supportable. Could anything be more incorrect than the statement that the novelist ' seldom forgets that the duty of a narrator is to narrate'? If there is any 'duty' incumbent upon the novelist which Meredith is apt to forget it is precisely this one. He never hesitates to hang up his story when he wishes to deliver his opinions on any subject under or in the heavens. This is ' as plain as way to parish church,' yet a good critic is ready in the interest — as he conceives it — of his admired writer, to deny the fact. It needs no apology, for a novelist who does not submit himself to the public merely as a narrator is entitled to do as he chooses, to be a law unto himself — but not to complain if the public prefers writers who observe other laws. No good purpose is served by claiming for Meredith qualities which he does not possess, and instead of taking us straight through to the aforesaid citadel, Professor MacCallum has only landed us into another prickly place ; for we pass naturally from the question of narration to that of construction, and here assuredly is one of the tangled forests of the Island Meredith. I find that Mr. Ernest Newman, in a temperate and closely-reasoned Study of the novels, in the Free Review, August, 1894, has devoted his attention to Meredith's shortcomings in the matter of con- struction. His excellences (writes Mr. Newman) are mainly excellences of detail ; the novels would come under the Voltairean characterisa- tion of ' some fine moments, but some bad quarters of an hour.' In ' Beauchamp's Career' anti-climax after anti-climax weakens the interest of the novel, and the ending is lamentably feeble. It reminds us of the sudden descent to bathos in the old Scotch popular legend of 'The Shifty Youth,' who, after many admirable adven- tures, one day died accidentally, without any apparent reason for LITERARY CHARACTERISTICS 163 such an abrupt proceeding. ' Richard Feverel, ' though not a well- constructed novel, is not a noticeably ill-constructed one ; but ' Evan Harrington ' is truly deplorable. It shows Mr. Meredith at his worst in everything that is worst in him — his bad social sentiment, his feeble construction, his dummy characters, and an evident attempt to rival Dickens on his own ground in the characters of Mr. Raikes and the Cogglesby brothers. But the entire work is a mass of bad articulation. The whole handling of the two brothers, the fictitious devices by which Evan is maintained in ease and idle- ness, the sudden and inexplicable elevation of Mr. Raikes to fortune, the intercepting of a letter from Evan to Rose, the contents of which are communicated to her by Evan himself a few pages after, thus rendering the whole episode futile; the fictitious bankruptcy of the brothers, the inconceivably clumsy scheming to have the Harrington family under the one roof in Lymport, in order that the final scenes may be brought about — are only some of the worst faults of the book. The jerkiness and inarticulation of the novels as a whole reappear in the individual characters. Setting aside the obviously dummy characters, whom not even Mr. Meredith's brilliant writing can galvanise into life, it is evident at times that his hold on his main personages is by no means certain. A careful tracing of their springs of action shows that they change inexplicably; sometimes, like the caterpillar, they commence as one being and end as another. This weakness is undoubtedly due to Mr. Meredith's small power of organic construction. His novel grows together from many peripheral points, so that having developed one set of characters with fair consistency, he finds that the exigencies of construction at this point compel him to make certain other characters act in a way for which there is no warrant from their previous conduct. Yet so skilful is he in psychologising that he can frequently almost persuade us against our better judgment that the character is compact and consistent. To see the process of change clearly, however, and the preparatory psychologising by which Mr. Meredith paves the way for the change, an excellent example may be had in the episode of the robbery of the gold by Anthony Hackbut in ' Rhoda Fleming. ' It it utterly inconceivable that the Anthony of the previous chapters should act in such a way; he only does it because Mr. Meredith wants him to do it for the sake of his story. And, conscious that the change of character is wholly unjustifiable, Mr. Meredith tries to cover his retreat by writing a preparatory dissertation on ' A Freak of the Money-Demon,' and does it so dexterously that only on second thoughts do we detect the device, and the purpose it is meant to serve. . . . Mr. Meredith is always weak in the ' jineing of his flats.' If we mean to be perfectly honest with ourselves, there is no blinking the fact that the critic who wrote the above puts his finger 164 GEORGE MEREDITH unerringly on Meredith's cardinal sin as a novelist, judged by the canon of criticism we must apply to the writing of fiction. We may, therefore, without more ado, decide that among his literary characteristics the writing of fiction according to established notions of the art does not appear, and the sources of his literary pre- eminence are to be looked for elsewhere. Nowhere in his novels do we feel a great and inevitable catastrophe impending ; we often enough are aware oppressively, as of thunder in the air, that some- thing is bound to happen presently, but we know it is something he will himself make to happen, like the writer of melodrama, not necessarily the inevitable, as we have experienced so many of his arbitrary ' catastrophes ' that we have long since ceased to expect the inevitable or to guess even dimly what it may be. He will step in whenever he feels inclined and dispose of his people, perhaps only to continue the play by hauling up the curtain again forth- with, as he has thought of something more he would like his ' poor actors to vacant benches ' to say for him. The late George Parsons Lathrop, another American critic who wrote of Meredith with insight that rivals the best of his English critics, has a notable passage on this subject in his study in the Atlantic Monthly, February, 1888, which I am constrained to add to Mr. Newman's indictment: A cardinal fault in Meredith's novels is that they are lame in movement. He lacks, on the whole, narrative and dramatic skill, although he shows, in places, that he can command it. He is too much like a biographer. We look for a novelist, and find an annal- ist. The mere bulkiness of his novels cannot wholly account for our disappointment; because some of George Eliot's books are just as bulky, but do not oppress us so severely by their size. The difficulty consists rather, I think, in the fact that Meredith tries to give an epic largeness to every history that he undertakes. The result is a want of proportion ; just as it is when painters choose a canvas too large for their composition, or, conversely, paint figures which are too large for the canvas on which they are placed. This was the case with Madox Brown's ' Work,' and with the ' Rest ' of George Watts. It was also the case with some of the Russian Verestcha- gin's early paintings. The effect of disproportion found in these paintings of the Russian, and of two English artists representing a certain school, meets with a curious correspondence in the dispropor- tion of Meredith. We discover the same thing again in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. Russian and English ! It is curious that these two peoples, so opposed politically, should develop the same uncouth disproportion artistically. One does not perceive the defect in LITERARY CHARACTERISTICS 165 Daudet or Zola, however heavy their outlines or gross their delinea- tion may be. They, at least, preserve the sense of proportion. In Tolstoy the waste of space and material is less annoying, because it seems to proceed from unsophistication. Meredith sins like Tolstoy ; but it is not through unsophistication. Nor is it through wilfulness entirely, but rather by the weakness of a too great self-consciousness, the pride of a brilliant, superior mind, which wants to make itself instantly felt by squandering superfluous treasures of diction and of sententious statement, instead of waiting to be slowly recognised at last. The crudities and disproportion in Meredith seem, at first glance, to ally him with the extreme so-called Realists, who believe that nature stunted and dwarfed is truer than nature carried to the largest development. He says, somewhere, ' Romances are the destruction of human interest. ' But, in fact, Meredith, while realistic in certain ways, is highly romantic. He never hesitates to give a free rein to the impulses of human nature, however sentimental or extravagant they may be. He is also very romantic in his manner of heightening effects and idealising emotions or actions. Possibly it is just this mixture of the two tendencies in him which has led to his missing popular approbation in his day. He is like a richly-freighted boat that, launched on an eddy formed by the meeting of two rivers, is stranded at the very point of junction, and loses the momentum of both currents. As Mr. Courtney has said, ' If only Mr. Meredith had sometimes followed the advice of his admirable Mrs. Berry ! What a comfort it would be if he would allow us sometimes to picture him as praying God and walking forward ! ' This is assuredly the feeling of his genuine admirers when they return critically to his works after the first glamour of his philosophical comedy has passed away. One of Meredith's characteristics which accounts for the delight with which the literary man may read him while it bores the ordinary patron of the circulating library, is his evident delight in being ' literary.' He seems never to have mastered the art that conceals art. He is always conscious that he is a literary man with a pen in his hand, pleased that less clever labourers in the same field should see how he does his work. The machinery of his novel interests him a great deal too much, and he invites us to examine it, as some news- paper publishers allow their patrons to come into their printing works to see how the newspaper is produced. The ordinary reader of the newspaper has only the vaguest notion of how the thing is made : type, formes; matrices, stereo-plates, and rotary machines are mean- ingless terms to him, and remain so even after he has been admitted to the mystery of the actual production, but it flatters him to think 166 GEORGE MEREDITH he knows how his morning sheet is printed, and he is delighted to have a peep at the mysteries. It is not so with a story. He wants the novelist to tell his story and not to be pausing ever and again to explain how difficult is the task, or to invite inspection of his machinery. ' Cut the cackle and cotton to the narrative ' is his senti- ment, and Meredith refuses to ' cut the cackle. ' Take ' Sandra Belloni,' for example. The jerks and spasms of the story must be intolerable to any reader who is not intimate enough with the novelist to discount his mannerisms, as one makes allowance for the foibles of a dear friend. There is the absurdly inartistic chapter entitled ' A Chapter interrupted by the Philosopher,' in which that stage-property figure is introduced, as elsewhere, when the author is in a fix, and allowed his say, after which the novelist goes on in propria persona : Now this is good teaching : it is indeed my Philosopher's object — his purpose — to work out this distinction ; and all I wish is that it were good for my market. What the Philosopher means, is to plant in the reader's path a staring contrast between my pet Emilia and his puppet Wilfrid. It would be very commendable and service- able if a novel were what he thinks it : but all attestation favours the critical dictum, that a novel is to give us copious sugar and no cane. I, myself, as a reader, consider concomitant cane as an adulteration of the qualities of sugar. My Philosopher's error is to deem the sugar, born of the cane, inseparable from it. The which is naturally resented, and away flies my book back at the heads of the librarians, hitting me behind them a far more grievous blow. Such is the construction of my story, however, that to entirely deny the Philosopher the privilege he stipulated for when, with his assistance, I conceived it, would render our performance unintelligible to that acute and honourable minority which consents to be thwacked with aphorisms and sentences and a fantastic delivery of the verities. While my Play goes on, I must permit him to come forward occasionally. We are indeed in a sort of partnership, and it is useless for me to tell him that he is not popular, and destroys my chance. It will be noted that the Philosopher does not protest against the novelist's splitting his infinitive, and the whole device is artificial and ruinous to illusion. Again, in the chapter which ' Contains a Further Anatomy of Wilfrid,' where ' the Philosopher ' has another innings, and is really the novelist in excelsis, running to confused and impene- trable wordiness about the tremendous subtleties of Wilfrid's char- acter, the novelist pretends to intervene after this fashion ; LITERARY CHARACTERISTICS 167 This waxes too absurd. At the risk of breaking our partnership for ever, I intervene. My Philosopher's meaning is plain, and, as usual, good; but not even I, who have less reason to laugh at him than anybody, can gravely accept the juxtaposition of suffering and cigars. And, moreover, there is a little piece of action in store. How futile is this make-believe ! I have italicised a phrase that indicates the legitimate fear which has arisen — too late, alas ! — in the mind of the novelist. ' Little pieces of action ' doled out now and then, after long slabs of soliloquy and chapters of stagnation, are not sufficient to move a great novel along to a heart-searching climax. Perhaps Meredith is nowhere so artificial as in the novel in question and its sequel, ' Vittoria,' though in the latter there are numerous passages of great power and beauty, flooded with sun- shine, moving in description and intense in passion, which bring it within sight of what a great novel should be. But there is no gain- saying the fact that Meredith never masters the art of telling a story in a natural and forceful style, which a novelist of far inferior powers, such as Wilkie Collins, could do to perfection. And this matter of well-knit narrative surely touches the question of art, leaving the great writer who has been unable to master it so much less the artist. In the case of Meredith, his other qualities are so great that the discount is the less. There is, however, a certain kind of unity in all the Meredith novels, which Mr. Brownell has pointed out and defined in this passage : Each book is the elaboration of an idea, the working out of some theme taken on its intellectual side. Sometimes this is very specific, as in ' Diana ' or ' Feverel,' but it is always perfectly defined. The book is a series of deductions from it. Its essential unity, there- fore — spite of excrescent detail — is agreeably unmistakable. But it is hardly necessary to point out that it is not the unity of a sympa- thetic image of life immediately beholden in its entirety. It is a mathematical, that is to say an artificial, unity. While that is not the unity that makes for popular favour, it is at least a characteristic of Meredith's fiction which must be recog- nised in endeavouring to get at the novelist's own point of view, the mark he aims at, without which endeavour criticism can only be partial. But the difficulties of arriving at any clear notion of Meredith's literary characteristics seem to increase the closer we inquire into them. He is weak in construction, lame in narrative, he 168 GEORGE MEREDITH relies largely upon character for interest, yet he pursues analysis of character and motive to issues so fine that sometimes, indeed often, the broad, telling effects are ruined. Though character is so eminent a feature of his work, romance is there hardly less, and the two are not always friends : the one or the other absent and a step had been taken towards simplicity or unity of form. George Meredith's, however, being a personality in which a dozen other personalities seem to flash like the darting to and fro of swallows over an evening, shining pool of summer, his works have to take on this inevitable complexity which is so characteristic of the man ; it is mentally impossible for him to be simple and direct, as Bunyan and Defoe are simple and direct ; he sees too clearly in detail every character he is portraying, and in his effort to force up his description to the minutely-lighted details of his vision he is apt to raise only confusion where a less laboured and a simple outline would have realised a far more enduring result. He gets his picture out of focus, so to say, by insisting upon these crannies of character which none but his all-searching vision would ever have noticed. All this refers to his novels as analysis of character. But, of course, they are not deficient in drama, which springs from character; though it is not the splendidly-sustained drama that characterises Mr. Hardy's novels, but rather episodic or spasmodic, as it is, perhaps, in life itself. Readers of R. L. Stevenson will recall this passage from ' A Gossip on Romance,' which he wrote in Longman's Magazine, November, 1892 : The last interview between Lucy and Richard Feverel is pure drama ; more than that, it is the strongest scene, since Shakespeare, in the English tongue. Their first meeting by the river, on the other hand, is pure romance ; it has nothing to do with character; it might happen to any other boy and maiden, and be none the less delightful for the change. And yet I think he would be a bold man who should choose between these passages. Thus, in the same book, we may have two scenes, each capital in its order : in the one, human passion, deep calling unto deep, shall utter its genuine voice; in the second, according circumstances, like instruments in tune, shall build up a trivial but desirable incident, such as we love to prefigure for ourselves ; and in the end, in spite of the critics, we may hesitate to give the preference to either. The one may ask more genius — I do not say it does ; but at least the other dwells as clearly in the memory. We may not be willing to endorse Stevenson's superlatives, but the reason for quoting this passage is to illustrate how appreciative LITERARY CHARACTERISTICS 169 criticism of Meredith nearly always turns on praise of episodes and not on dramatic entities. One could give whole pages of such laudation of scenes and episodes from the novels, in which no novel as a whole is bepraised. In a letter to his biographer, Professor Elton, York Powell says, ' Mention the early morning walk in "The Amazing Marriage," the splendid scene in the Scala, of "Vittoria," the voice in the wood at even in "Sandra." ' It is always so; from the novels certain scenes detach themselves and, standing away from all context, become in the memory the novel itself, or at least we must think of them before we can remember anything of the novel, whereas it should be exactly the reverse. We seem to remem- ber ' Pendennis ' as a whole, ' Adam Bede,' even ' Jane Eyre,' with all its melodrama, leaves in the mind the impression of an organic whole, yet it is doubtful if they are more so than ' The Egoist,' 'Richard Feverel,' ' Beauchamp's Career,' 'Evan Harrington,' or ' Rhoda Fleming,' though in the case of each of these novels there are parts that do not seem to foreshorten properly but attract the eye of the mind before the picture as a whole can be recalled. The explanation may be that the glory of the whole is apt to be dimmed by the greater glory of the parts ! But the fact remains and must be recognised in any study of Meredith's literary characteristics. Another perplexing feature of his fiction is touched upon by the late Miss Hannah Lynch in a short study contributed to the Bookman, November, 1899, though she is in no way perplexed by it. She writes : There is one distinctive feature in Mr. Meredith's work which, while common in that of a great many writers in different degree, reaches in him an absolute supremacy. Landscape lights up most English fiction and English poetry, but where will you find it so richly, vividly, variously portrayed as in the unique work of this writer? Whether it be in verse or prose, you can never forget the world of nature into which you have entered under his magic guid- ance. All his books glow and throb with the love and perfect understanding of nature. It is not mere landscape painting, which any one may try his hand at, the sort of thing William Black did by the yard, with all the skill and originality and diversity of the signboard painter. It is the very life of the earth made visible to us ; its mysteries and secrets are seized and unrolled before us with the utmost cunning of design, an amazing precision of eye, of ear, of senses. Mr. Meredith does not drag in sunset effects into a novel as a suitable background for a flirtation, nor are woods solely described that the lovers may wander in them. Whether he invites us out of doors at home or abroad, he will make us see and under- stand scenery by means of a vigorous beauty of description, and such 170 GEORGE MEREDITH an intensity and originality of revelation as no other writer I can think of ever has achieved. Here he drops all affectation and obscurity of utterance. The wild cheery tree he arrests us under blooms and scents the air about us. We stand with Dacier and' Diana among' the rocks and roaring waters of Italian hills, and we are filled with envy of Dacier 's bath in those sunny solitudes, so quick and vital is the landscape to our vision. We enter the enchanted woods of verse, and hold our breath for awe. Yes, here is the magician, here is the poet, here is the writer of splendid prose. Elsewhere he may exasperate ; here only does he enchant. Else- where the persistently blinding quality of his brilliance leaves us ill at ease, but here we surrender ourselves gladly to his charm. In his company out of doors we are at home with George Meredith, no longer doubtful of his meaning, afraid of the ferocity of his intuition, of the eagerness and mercilessness of his intellect. All this is perfectly true, but the strangeness behind the truth is the fact that no novelist of our day has less attachment to place. If we except ' Sandra Belloni ' and its sequel, and ' The Tragic Comedians,' to what extent can we localise any of the other novels? We feel that they might have happened anywhere. Have we any absolute vision of Wilming Weir, or Oxshott Woods, or Lymport? The action might have taken place anywhere, so little does environ- ment affect the drama. Yet Miss Lynch does not overrate the per- fection of Meredith's ' landscape.' Come fresh from Italy and read ' Vittoria,' how the book lights up with the soft glow of evening sunshine memory's pictures of that enchanting land, but all the landscape might be deleted without detracting in any degree from the story as a whole. Again we seem to touch Meredith's indiffer- ence to, or incapacity for organising, his 'material.' No great writer is so deficient in ' local colour. ' Perhaps that may be accounted an attribute of his greatness; certainly some critics praise him for less praiseworthy characteristics. But if we talk of perplexity in regard to the landscape of Mere- dith's fiction, what shall we say of the naturally perplexing subject of love? His treatment of the passion is essentially characteristic, no other novelist is remotely like him in his attitude towards the love of man and woman. Yet to set down in any general terms what that attitude is would baffle the shrewdest critic. Mr. W. C. Brownell comes nearest to the mark, I think, when he writes : There is infinite talk in Mr. Meredith's books about love. He has written a sonnet series on ' Modern Love,' indeed, most inter- esting in its intricacies. But love as a passion he treats mainly, LITERARY CHARACTERISTICS 171 one may say, in trituration. There are express experiments in the other direction. The idyl of Richard Feverel and Lucy is as pretty, as charming as its slightly eighteenth-century atmosphere, its Fer- dinand and Miranda conceits, the playful but palpable aloofness of the author, will permit. The gondola courtship of Nevil Beauchamp is more than promising, but the experienced reader of Meredith is not surprised to encounter later even less than non-fulfilment. The love of Rosamund Culling for her husband's nephew is caressingly sketched because it is recondite, but it is distinctly a minor and incidental element of the story. In general, anything properly to be called passion is presented with diluting playfulness. Even in seriousness, its weakness, not its force, is the side most emphasised. Mr. Meredith seems to care rather more for Nevil Beauchamp than for most of his characters, but he is so interested in preserving him from heroism, in his theoretic fashion, that he makes his passion not only the least persistent but the least intense phase of his energy, which is otherwise depicted as extravagant. Through the repre- sentativeness of Nevil's character, which is much insisted on, one is made to reflect on the transience and lack of depth in the passion of the average young man, however ebullient he may be. Can any- thing be tamer than the love-making of ' Diana,' or more debonair than that in ' Harry Richmond,' or more insubstantial than that in ' The Egoist ' ? But ' The Tragic Comedians ' furnishes the most striking of Mr. Meredith's disposition to psychologise love out of all passionate intensity. If ' The Tragic Comedians ' had been sustained to the end it would assuredly have been the fine thing it just misses being. This means, in effect, that Meredith's craving for ' brain stuff ' has led him away from the heart ; the relationship is always one where intellect enters more than passion, to which intellect should be subordinated. As. Mr. Ernest Newman says, ' his women with brains are sometimes so intolerable as to make men even long again for the old ideal of woman — the "veiled virginal doll " of the senti- mentalists. ' But it is Meredith, and we must take him with his ' brain stuff ' if we wish to have him at all, and we do wish most heartily to have him, with all his impedimenta. He cannot ' get rid of the baggage of his own psychology,' and if he could perhaps we should care for him the less. What we have to realise is that he is great in spite of many inequalities and not because of them, as certain perfervid advocates of his would have us believe. We have touched upon many of these loose stones in his structure, and before we turn to the consideration of the most remarkable of his literary characteristics, his extraordinary style, we may look for a moment at his points of strength. 172 GEORGE MEREDITH The two great weapons in which Meredith excels are satire and humour (writes Dr. W. J. Dawson). The satire is never less than excellent, for in the mere literary finish of his biting- epigrams he is unsurpassed by any writer of English, either past or present. The fault of the satire is that it is not kindly, and it can be cruel. It is as keen as a surgeon's knife, and as cold. It lays bare all the hidden disease of the human soul, and cuts relentlessly, and almost savagely, through the intervening filaments. . . . But when it is allied with humour it is delightful. It is then the smack of the sea-salt that gives edge to the sunny breeze. His humour . . . runs through a hundred variations, from the keenest to the broadest; it smacks of Jingle and of Falstaff ; it is sometimes roaring farce, at others finished comedy ; it is acute, genial, caustic ; it is now hilarious with boyish buoyancy and good spirits, now the product of masculine good sense and piercing insight, now a shaft of laughter playing round a fountain of tears : and, widely as it differs, running through the gamut from the verbal quip to the profoundly human delineation, from merely comic to half tragic laughter, it is a persuasive element with which all his books are lavishly endowed. As a mere humorist Meredith is as superior to those ephemeral writers who pass as such to-day as is Shakespeare to Douglas Jerrold. Further on we shall have occasion to dwell at some length on the aspect of Meredith as inspired of the Comic Muse, which is in truth the countervailing quality that makes up and over for all the literary graces we have so far sought in vain. Had he been less intellectual his comedy had been still greater, for the worst of all his faults, if, indeed, it be not father of them all, is his excessive activity in matters of pure intellectuality, keeping him always at more than arm's length from us, away from the love we give so readily to lesser men of warm heart and homely voice. Miss Lynch expresses this very successfully in the following passage from her Bookman study, from which I have quoted already : In music Mr. Meredith's tastes are old-fashioned and Italian, which is odd, seeing how opposed his genius is to that of the dulcet conventional school of Italian music. To be consistent, Mr. Mere- dith should be a furious Wagnerite. I would not have it thought that I could compare, except in a very relative degree, the operas of Wagner with the novels of George Meredith. The influence of the former is universal, while that of the latter is purely local. But there are unmistakable links between the two natures. Take, for instance, that incomparable masterpiece of gaiety and fantastic humour, the ' Meistersingers. ' Has not Mr. Meredith in many in- stances caught a like large spirit of mirth? Might not Beckmester shake hands in fraternity with many of Meredith's grotesque char- LITERARY CHARACTERISTICS 173 acters? There is in the ' Meistersingers ' an interpretation of the fun and the quaintness of things that alone among living writers George Meredith reveals in his work. And many of the orchestral surprises of Wagner have their equivalent in the rare and astounding utterances of the novelist. But where resemblance ceases is in the tragic note. Mr. Meredith is too intellectual to sink into the extreme and moving depths of simplicity and poignant, naked passion that Wagner reaches in the glorious death-scene of Tristan. He could never send us to Rome with conviction so sincere and soul so naively penitent as Wagner does when we hear the great pilgrims' march of the ' Tannhauser. ' For that is Mr. Meredith's great vice. He is too ruthlessly intellectual. He soars too obviously above us and above the life he portrays. He is too witty, too laboured, too satirical, too humorous. He dwells with too much gusto on the failings of his characters. From very force of understanding human nature so well, he is too aloof from us, too little part of ourselves to inspire us with confidence. We are afraid of him, and when we meet the man in the flesh, we remember the writer, and still continue to be afraid of him. Speaking from personal experience, I know this too well. The mere presence of Mr. Meredith, and the fact that he was addressing me, sufficed to turn me into a complete idiot. I was like Heine in the presence of Goethe, who thought he ought to talk Greek, and when he hunted for an inspired phrase, could find nothing to say but that the Saxony plums were fine. I do not think I men- tioned the Saxony plums or even Jersey pears, but I found it impos- sible to lift myself out of a state of mental hebetude, in my frightful anxiety to utter only appropriate speech. Genius should be more simple and more sincere. I do not say that the work of Mr. Mere- dith is not sincere. It is too generous and too just not to be sincere, and then it is the expression of the man himself. But simple it is not, and hence the kind of inexplicable terror it inspires in us. It was in his review of ' The Egoist ' in the Athenaum of November 1, 1879, afterwards revised and reprinted in ' Views and Reviews,' that the late W. E. Henley, at once Meredith's frankest critic and sanest advocate, began in earnest that discussion of his literary style, to which there has been no end, nor is there like to be an end. Mention of Meredith is almost equivalent to mention of literary style in general and his own in particular. But before we see what Henley had to say, let us discover Meredith's own con- victions in the matter of style, for 'manner is a great matter,' as Philip James Bailey observes. To Mr. George Bainton, who in 1890 compiled a work on ' The Art of Authorship, ' consisting of letters written to him by eminent authors of the day, for reading to a group of young men in a course of lectures on literary art, Meredith wrote : 174 GEORGE MEREDITH ... I have no style, though I suppose my work is distinctive. I am too experimental in phrases to be other than a misleading guide. I can say that I have never written without having clear in vision the thing put to paper ; and yet this has been the cause of roughness and uncommonness in the form of speech. Your theme is well chosen. Impress on your readers the power of the right use of emphasis, and of the music that there is in prose, and how to vary it. One secret is, to be full of meaning, warm with the matter to be delivered. The best training in early life is verse. That serves for the management of our Saxon tongue. . . . Explain that we have, besides a Saxon, a Latin tongue in our English, and indicate where each is to be employed, and the subjects which may unite them ; as, for example, in the wonderful sweep of a sentence of Gibbon, from whose forge Macaulay got his inferior hammer. Warn against excessive antithesis — a trick for pamphlet- eers. Bid your young people study the best French masters. I think it preferable, especially in these days of quantity, to be largely epigrammatic rather than exuberant in diction ; therefore I would recommend the committing to memory passages of Juvenal. And let the description of a battle by Cassar and one by Kinglake be contrasted for an instance of the pregnant brevity which pricks imagination and the wide discursiveness which exhausts it. Between these two, leaning to the former, lies the golden mean. I note with personal satisfaction the last sentence of the first paragraph, which may be held to confirm the opinion advanced earlier in this chapter, as to the very intensity of Meredith's vision and his valiant effort to make the reader see it with his own clear- ness of detail being, at times, the actual cause of confusion in the reader's mind. The obscurity is nearly always in the reader's mind only, as a second and closer study of the words will show him, when the meaning of the author will come up suddenly and beauti- fully as the partly-developed picture on a sensitised plate appears suddenly perfect after it has been dipped again into the bath. But perhaps his style has never been better described than in his words, wherewith, in ' Beauchamp's Career,' he describes the style of Carlyle : His favourite author was one writing on Heroes, in (so she esteemed it) a style resembling either early architecture or utter dilapidation, so loose and rough it seemed ; a wind-in-the-orchard style, that tumbled down here and there an appreciable fruit with uncouth bluster; sentences without commencements running to abrupt endings and smoke, like waves against a sea-wall, learned dictionary words giving a hand to street-slang, and accents falling on them haphazard, like slant rays from driving clouds; all the LITERARY CHARACTERISTICS 175 pages in a breeze, the whole book producing a kind of electrical agitation in the mind and joints. This was its effect on the lady. And that is the effect of Meredith on his intelligent readers — ' a kind of electrical agitation in the mind and joints.' His style has this tonic quality ; those who have once been electrified by it are keen to have further experiments, knowing they will be the better for them, despite certain shocks that may set their teeth on edge for a moment. It is not a style that makes for popularity, but that is rather to its credit, for while the public is right in demanding a ' story, ' it has no sense of literary fitness and will accept the style of a William Le Queux or a Marie Corelli as readily as that of a Hawthorne or a Stevenson. In a message to a Liberal Colonial Club a few years before his death Meredith wrote : ' The mother of a young giant must learn to take pride in her, but she relapses into timidity, i. e. Conservatism. / use the metaphorical to avoid the long-winded.' The phrase I have italicised might stand as the novelist's reason for his prose style ; but whether he succeeds in avoiding the long-winded is a point on which there may conceivably be two opinions. We shall see. Thus writes W. E. Henley in ' Views and Reviews ' : Mr. Meredith is one of the worst and least attractive of great writers as well as one of the best and most fascinating. He is a sun that has broken out into innumerable spots. The better half of his genius is always suffering eclipse from the worst half. He writes with the pen of a great artist in his left hand and the razor of a spiritual suicide in his right. He is the master and the victim of a monstrous cleverness which is neither to hold nor to bind, and will not permit him to do things as an honest, simple person of genius would. . . . He is tediously amusing ; he is brilliant to the point of being obscure ; his helpfulness is so extravagant as to worry and confound. That is the secret of his unpopularity. His stories are not often good stories and are seldom well told ; his ingenuity and intelligence are always misleading him into treating mere episodes as solemnly and elaborately as main incidents ; he is ever ready to discuss, to ramble, to theorise, to dogmatise, to indulge in a little irony or a little reflection or a little artistic misdemeanour of some sort. . . . Not infrequently he writes page after page of English as ripe and sound and unaffected as heart could wish ; and you can but impute to wantonness and recklessness the splendid impertinences that intrude elsewhere. To read him at the rate of two or three chapters a day is to have a sincere and hearty admira- tion for him and a devout anxiety to forget his defects and make much of his merits. But they are few who can take a novel on 176 GEORGE MEREDITH such terms as these, and to read your Meredith straight off is to have an indigestion of epigram. While the foregoing was suggested to Henley after a reading of ' The Egoist,' the following, written eight years later, appeared originally in his Athenceum review of ' Ballads and Poems of Tragic Life': On the whole, I think, he does not often say anything not worth hearing. He is too wise for that; and, besides, he is strenuously in earnest about his work. He has a noble sense of the dignity of art and the responsibilities of an artist ; he will set down nothing that is to his mind unworthy to be recorded ; his treatment of his material is distinguished by the presence of an intellectual passion (as it were) that makes whatever he does considerable and deserving of attention and respect. But unhappily the will is not seldom unequal to the deed ; the achievement is often leagues in rear of the inspiration ; the attempt at completeness is too laboured and too manifest — the feat is done but by a painful and ungraceful process. There is genius, but there is not felicity. . . . But he has charm as well as power, and, once his rule is accepted, there is no way to shake him off. The position is that of the antique tyrant in a commonwealth once republican and free. You resent the domina- tion, but you enjoy it too, and with or against your will you admire the author of your slavery. The paradox of George Meredith has never been better explained. Henley was probably the greatest critic that ever wrote upon Meredith and his art, and in his own virile, clear-eyed way he states the case with irresistible force. His ' appreciation ' is the real stuff ; no slobber of unctuous praise, but a manly recognition of the defects to which criticism cannot honestly turn a shut eye, and a no less manly admission that, spite these grave defects, there is a mighty personality working through all the writings of Meredith which commands our respect and holds us in thrall, even when it may irritate. It is useless to speculate how mightily Meredith would have moved his generation had he purged himself of the literary sins which Henley so unerringly lays bare. We have to take the rose with its thorns. Mr. Andrew Lang has in a few sentences summed up the charge against Meredith, laid so candidly by Henley, and shown how the novelist was himself to blame for limiting his audience : Mr. Meredith may err in a wilful obscurity, in a too eager search for points and epigrams, in the leaps and bounds of too agile a wit, ^ J c.i H 0-= a 2 /O 1 'S~~ •0 **S ^ =; .y^ » ^ ;.- o ■5 z c £ u u "*"' ■S z ijt J) wsr i •- >-l ■_, -u ~ t/3 *? ■^ C — -73 ■ W -' '-■J ^ c/i c rt v ;. ^ "^ -' - S ^ o " c: o a.: 1 2* C/3 « LITERARY CHARACTERISTICS 177 and these things have harmed, and will harm, his popularity. But, like the crudeness of Mr. Browning, they only endear him more to an inner circle of admirers. The fairies of literature gave him all good gifts, but added a Celtic wilfulness. We do not read him to pass away the hour, as many read Mr. Besant, always a skilled, occasionally a humorous story-teller, or as more read Miss Braddon, or wander by the stream-side and kill grilse with Mr. William Black. But it has been left to Mr. George S. Street, in his ' Quales Ego,' to say a new thing of Meredith's style, which goes to show that while we may admire an ideal widely different from what seems to be the 'mark' with which Meredith would 'wed,' we can still find delight and stimulus, as well as artistic satisfaction, in prose that first repels us : Mr. Meredith is often neither musical nor easy. But as a mani- pulator of words to express complexity of thought he has no peer. It was by this complexity, this subtlety of penetration of his, that he was valuable to me when first I read him. I imagine there must be many in my case, to whom he was, above all things, an educator. It was his very obscurity — another name, so often, for a higher intelligence — that was the stimulating force in him for such as my- self. Youth can rarely appreciate an achievement of art as such. But youth is keen to grind its intellect on the stone of the uncom- prehended. That was the service of Mr. Meredith to those in my case. We puzzled and strove, and were rewarded by the discovery of some complexity of thought or some subtlety of emotion imagined aforetime. Fortunately for us, advance of years and multiplying editions had not yet earned him the homage of the average reviewer ; for youth is conceited, and does not care to accept the verdict of the mass of its contemporaries. Mr. Meredith was sometimes an affecta- tion in us, and sometimes the most powerful educator we had. In the passage of years, as we grew from conceit of intelligence into appreciation, in our degrees, of things artistic, we perceived that he was also a great artist, and sympathy was merged in admiration. Coventry Patmore was another friendly critic who, in his essay on ' Distinction ' in the Fortnightly, June, 1890, had to admit that the monstrous cleverness of Meredith detracted from the distinction of his style. Distinction (he wrote) is also manifest in the prose of Mr. George Meredith when the cleverness is not too overwhelming to allow us to think of anything else; but, when the nose of epigram after epigram has no sooner reached the visual nerve than the tail has whisked away from it, so that we have had no time to take in the N 178 GEORGE MEREDITH body, our wonder and bedazement make it sometimes impossible for us to distinguish the distinction, if it be there. ' Epigram after epigram ' is certainly not an ideal of English prose, nor does the art of the epigram rank high among literary values. Oddly enough his dexterity in this direction is often chosen by writers on Meredith as the chief proof of his distinction. Even Viscount Morley in the very few words he has ever penned for print on his old friend makes his aphoristic ingenuity the subject of his praise. ' One living writer of genius, ' he says in his lecture on 'Aphorisms,' published in 1887, 'has given us a little sheaf of subtly-pointed maxims in "The Ordeal of Richard Feverel," and per- haps he will one day divulge to the world the whole contents of Sir Austin Feverel's unpublished volume, "The Pilgrim's Scrip."' Though not entirely apropos to the matter in hand, Viscount Morley's only other printed remark upon Meredith, with which I am familiar, may be given here. It occurs in his essay in the Fort- nightly, April, 1873, on the Poems of Walter Pater, where he says : ' We have one man of genius who is as great a master of subtle insight into character as Mr. Pater is of analysis of beautiful im- pressions ; Mr. Meredith, like Mr. Pater, is not always easy to follow, and for the same reason. After all, the plain men are at least as much in fault as those who touch them with perplexity.' Mr. J. M. Barrie shows the sound judgment which those of us who are familiar with his essays in criticism always expect from him in his reference to Meredith's style in the article he contributed on ' Mr. George Meredith's Novels ' to the Contemporary Review of October, 1888 : Mr. Stevenson has said that if Shakespeare could have read ' Rhoda Fleming ' he would have cried, ' Here's a fellow ! ' Car- lyle, I happen to know, was acquainted with ' Richard Feverel ' ; his wife read it aloud to him, and he was so pleased that he said, ' This man's no fule. ' This is not the whole story. First Mrs. Carlyle read the book herself, and many times she flung it aside in irritation before becoming reconciled to Mr. Meredith's yoke. Such is the common experience of readers, who fall back before the showers of epigrams or resent the fantastic phraseology. It is the law of the land that novels should be an easy gallop, but Mr. Meredith's readers have to pant uphill. He reaches his thoughts by means of ladders which he kicks away, letting his readers follow as best they can, a way of playing the game that leaves him comparatively free from pursuit. Too sluggish to climb, the public sit in the rear, flinging his jargon at his head, yet aware, if they have heads themselves, that one of the great intellects of the age is on in front. LITERARY CHARACTERISTICS 179 Phrase-making is Mr. Meredith's passion. His books are as over-dressed as fingers hidden in rings. . . . Were I to pick out Mr. Meredith's triumphs in phrase-making I could tattoo the Con- temporary with them — to use one of his own phrases. He has made it his business to pin them to his pages as a collector secures butter- flies. He succeeds, I believe, in this perilous undertaking as often as he fails. He must have the largest vocabulary of any living man. ... If to avoid the conventional in phrases he puts words to fantastic uses, he shows that language which had become cold may still be beaten red-hot, and in the process he strikes out number- less sparks of thought. This thinking over words puts new life into literature. Mr. Zangwill, another novelist who has the critical faculty in no mean measure, is not so judicial as Mr. Barrie, for in ' Without Prejudice ' he remarks : The two great writers of our day who have sinned most against the laws of writing are Browning and Meredith, the one in verse, the other in prose. I speak not merely of obscurities, to perpetrate which is in every sense to stand in one's own light, but of sheer fatuities, tweakings-of-the-nose to our reverend mother-tongue, as either might have expressed it. Since every real admirer of Meredith has well-grounded reasons for the faith that is in him, and more especially as his friendly critics have been the least sparing in exposing his eccentricities, no apology is needed for giving some examples of the extremes to which his tireless and so often successful search for the new, image-awakening phrase, has led him at times. I quote from Mr. Ernest Newman's careful study in the Free Review: The quickly-concentrative imagination of Keats is possessed by Mr. Meredith, and is answerable for some of his woeful distortions of language. Mannerisms he displays in abundance. His ladies never walk : they swim. Mrs. Doria swims to meet Richard Feverel ; Mrs. Mount swims ' wave-like to the sofa ' ; Lady Rosely swims ' sweetly ' into the room ; Mrs. Lovell ' swims into the general conversation'; Madame d'Auffray swims to meet Beauchamp ; Diana is always swimming, — on one occasion she swims ' to the tea-tray. ' Still more extraordinary are some of his other expres- sions. There is a ' combustible silence ' in ' Farina ' ; when Hippias Feverel is asleep, his door is a ' somnolent door ' ; a hooked fish comes, we are told, to ' the gasping surface ' ; Adrian ' opens his mouth to shake out a coil of laughter ' ; when Mrs. Berry weeps we hear that ' the black-satin bunch careened to a renewed deluge ' ; the Countess de Saldar ' rambles concentrically ' ; Caroline sits down n 2 180 GEORGE MEREDITH ' with her hands joined in pale dejection ' ; Cornelia's eyelids ' shed a queenly smile ' ; Dahlia ' eyes ' Edward ' a faint sweetness ' ; Robert Eccles ' flings a lightning at him. ' As time went on this tendency in Mr. Meredith became almost irresistible. When he wishes to convey to us the idea of a woman in the days before she became man-like, he tells us, ' Yet was there an opening day when nothing of us moustached her. ' When she does become somewhat mascu- line, we are ' amazed by the flowering up of that hard rough jaw from the tender blooming promise of a petticoat. ' Sometimes the very artificiality of the style is not without a charm, as in the descrip- tion of Sir Willoughby about to embrace Clara : ' the gulf of a caress hove in view like an enormous billow hollowing under the curled ridge. She stooped to a buttercup, the monster swept by. ' But gradually we come to the thoroughly distorted style that dominates the later works. It begins on the opening page of ' The Egoist,' although that novel as a whole is of remarkable purity of phrase : ' Who, says the notable humorist, in allusion to this book, who can studiously travel through sheets of leaves now capable of a stretch from the Lizard to the last few pulmonary snips and shreds of leagues dancing on their toes for cold, explorers tell us, and catching breath by good luck, like dogs at bones about a table, on the edge of the Pole. ' In ' One of Our Conquerors ' the degenera- tion is complete. Not to mention the celebrated phrase of Dr. Peter Yatt about ' feeling a rotifer astir in the curative compartment of a homoeopathic globule,' we have expressions of such elegance as this : ' The word " Imposter " had smacked her on both cheeks from her own mouth ' ; and this : ' She called on bell-motion of the head to toll forth the utter night-cap negative.' In the face of so much perversity and affectation, can we sum Mr. Meredith up better than in his own chastened and elegant sentence : ' A fantastical plangun- cula enlivened by the wanton tempers of a nursery chit ! ' It would be difficult to better this collection of verbal mon- strosities, though easy to extend it. Yet the critic who has been at pains to compile it is careful to remind us that Meredith's ' defects are the almost inevitable correlatives of his qualities, the peculiarly vivid imagination that has empowered him to write pages of the most virile and suggestive prose in the language, is the same imagin- ation that has decoyed him into some of his deplorable experiments with our tongue. ' And he further points out that ' his excellences and beauties of style are so great and so many that quotation is almost a work of supererogation. ' Which unnecessary work he proceeds to discharge with as much success as he has just acquitted himself with, in an opposite direction. All this really weighs for Meredith's greatness, as none but a veritable giant in literary power LITERARY CHARACTERISTICS 181 could offend as he does and still command our homage. As Mr. James Oliphant puts it in his ' Victorian Novelists,' ' no one has ever tried to make words convey so much meaning as Meredith, and very few have had so much meaning to express.' It is this effort to compress so much into his phrases that Mr. W. C. Brownell considers to be the weakness and not the strength of his style. His perversity is a natural bent toward the artificial (writes Mr. Brownell). Its delight is in disappointing the reader's normal expectations. Simplicity is its detestation. If the idea is simple, its statement is complicated. If it is particularly subtle, its expres- sion is correspondingly succinct. . . . But his style is not obscure in the general sense of the word. He has a wonderful gift of expression, and can not only say clearly the most recondite things, but give a recondite turn to things essentially quite commonplace. He does not love the obscure, but hates the apparent. He has that ' horror of the obvious ' so long ago as Longinus censured as hostile to the sublime. And as one cannot always avoid the obvious, especially if one is also extremely prolix, he does his best to obscure it. His vocabulary is never at a loss for a telling word when one is really called for. He can be crispness or curtness itself at need, often indeed wonderfully vivid, sometimes within and sometimes without and sometimes on the verge of the confines of taste, in his pursuit of vividness ; for example, ' He read and his eyes became horny ' — of Dacier's horror and amazement at the evidence of Diana's treachery. He makes few phrases that one remembers, however. He loads a phrase with meaning, but it is apt to be compression without pith, and often, in greater extension, it becomes rhetorical rather than pungent, though rhetoric that is never tinctured with insincerity. But where he cannot be telling, and even in cases where he might so easily be that he has an opportunity perversely to disappoint you by not being, he is exasperatingly evasive. Dr. Robertson Nicoll seems to incline to Mr. Brownell's notion as to the perversity of Meredith's style being deliberate, though he does not say this in so many words in his ' Notes on English Style in the Victorian Period ' which he contributed to the Bookman of New York, December, 1899. In this way he submits what he regards as ' the problem on the solution of which Meredith's future among English authors depends ' : That his is a personality singularly rich, complicated, intense, and outstanding, the most careless reader will perceive. Does that personality find its true expression in his style, or has the artist deliberately set himself to bewilder readers? If the style is a natural 182 GEORGE MEREDITH style, it will always be studied, and will always repay study. If it is not, then in spite of the immense treasures in his works they will be on the whole neglected, discovered every now and then by some shrill and eager spirit, but as a whole they will be sealed books. Let me put the question in a concrete form. I take no account of his later books, because the acquired style becomes the natural style. But if — remember I say if — in his earlier days Meredith wrote two versions of his books, the first easy, clear and Thackerayan, and then translated this into Meredithese, this would put him among the second rank of writers. We have, I regret to say, one example at least where we can trace this process at work. In his volume of poems, published in 1851, Mr. Meredith wrote one of the most charming, rhythmical and melodious of love songs, ' Love in the Valley. ' For months after he read it Tennyson could not get the lines out of his lips. For a long time they were, hidden, and then not many years ago they were republished in Meredithese. Even in the present form some vestige of their former beauty may now and then be seen, but they are intolerable to any reader fortunate enough to possess the first copy. The caution and poise of Dr. Nicoll's words add to the seriousness of this critical judgment, which, even less guardedly phrased, would still have been important as coming from so ripe a student of literary style. Even so ardent a Meredithian as Mr. James Douglas, in his critical biography of Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton, has to write on the same subject with misgivings, for in the end this question of style will be the determining factor in the permanence of Meredith's works. No one adores the work of Mr. Meredith more than I do (says Mr. Douglas), though my admiration is not without a certain leaven of distress at his literary self-consciousness. I say this with all reverence. Great as Meredith is, he would be greater still if, when he is delivering his priceless gifts to us, he would bear in mind that immortal injunction in ' King Henry the Fourth ' — ' I prithee now, deliver them like a man of this world. ' I can imagine how the great humorist must smile when the dolt, who once found ' obscurity ' in his most lucid passages, praises him for the defects of his qualities, and calls upon all other writers to write Meredithese. To be a classic — to be immortal — it is necessary for an imagina- tive writer to deliver his message like ' a man of this world. ' Shakespeare himself, occasionally, will seem to forget this, but only occasionally, and we never think of it when falling down in worship before the shrine of the greatest imaginative writer that has ever lived. Dr. Johnson said that all work which lives is without eccentricity. Now, entranced as I have been, ever since I was a boy, by Meredith's incomparable romances, I long to set my LITERARY CHARACTERISTICS 183 imagination free of Meredith and fly away with his characters, as I can fly away with the characters of the classic imaginative writers from Homer down to Sir Walter Scott. But I seldom succeed. Now and then I escape from the obsession of the picture of the great writer seated in his chalet with the summer sunshine gleaming round his picturesque head, but illuminating also all too vividly his ink- stand, and his paper and his pens ; but only now and then, and not for long. If it had pleased Nature to give him less intellectual activity, less humour and wit and literary brilliance, I feel sure that he would have lived more securely as an English classic. Perhaps the most searching examination of Meredith's style is to be found in Mr. J. M. Robertson's study in ' Preciosity ' in the Yellow Book, April, 1897, where he writes : There can be no dispute, I think, over the judgment that Mr. Meredith's style is the most pronounced outbreak of preciosity in modern English literature. There, if ever, we may allow ourselves a quasi-Pantagruelian protest. It is indeed impossible for a reader who respects Mr. Meredith's genius to read him — or at least his later works — without irritation at his extraordinary ill-usage of language. Old admirers, going back to his earlier works, never free from the sin of preciosity, recognise that there has been an almost continuous deterioration — the fatal law of all purposive preciosity. In the earlier novels there were at times signal beauties of phrase, sentences in which the strain towards utterance was transmuted into fire and radiance, sentences of the fine poet who underlay and even now underlies that ever-thickening crust of preciosity and verbal affectation. Even in ' One of Our Conquerors ' there seemed, to the tolerant sense, to be still some gleams of the old flame, flashing at long intervals through the scoriae of unsmelted speech. But in ' Lord Ormont and his Aminta ' neither patience nor despair can discover in whole chapters aught but the lava and cinders of language. . . . With the exception of Zola's ' La Terre ' — hard reading for a different reason — ' One of Our Conquerors ' was the hardest novel to read that I ever met with ; but I have found ' Lord Ormont and his Aminta ' easy enough. After a few chapters I no longer sought to read Mr. Meredith. I made a hand- to-mouth prdcis of nearly every page, and soon got over the ground, only pausing at times to reassure myself that all was ill. Hardly once, so far as I have read, do we find an important sentence really well written ; never a paragraph ; for the perpetual grimace of expression, twisting the face of speech into every shape but those of beauty and repose, is in no sense admirable. Simple statements, normal reflections, are packed into the semblance of inspired fancies and brilliant aphorisms. Yet notwithstanding this vigorous denunciation of the Mer?.- 1 84 GEORGE MEREDITH dithian sins, Mr. Robertson is by no means blind to the virtues. He considers Meredith ' a novelist, if not of the very first rank, yet so powerful and so independent that to apply to him the term second-rate is not allowable, ' and he declares that he must be classed by himself ' as a master with not worse limitary prejudices than those of Balzac ; with more poetic elevation than any novelist of his day ; a true modern in many things, despite a fundamental unrealism in his characters and an almost puerile proclivity to old- world devices of circumstantial plot. ' Admitting thus much, he next sets himself to explaining ' the egregious vice of style ' on the grounds of ' individual self-will, defiance of censure, persistence in eccentricity, and self-absorption in isolation. ' It seems to me, how- ever, when Mr. Robertson argues that Meredith pushed his natural mannerisms to unnatural extremes as a sort of defiance of those who failed to appreciate him, he is leaving criticism for speculation and advancing a charge of wilful pettiness against an author in whom he has discovered certain large and splendid qualities. If Meredith is an artist he could never have behaved like a spoilt child. To say that an author, out of spite at lack of appreciation, ' put an antic disposition on ' in his later writings, is to raise doubts of his sanity. Why seek to get away from Buffon's ' le style c'est I'hffmme '? It is, and Meredith's style is Meredith, for good or ill. None the less Mr. Robertson's theory is of interest to all students of the master and we may follow it further, when he writes : The prompt appreciation of the few good Readers did not teach him to look on the reading-public as what it is, a loose mass of ever-varying units, in which even the dullards have no solidarity ; he entrenched himself in the Carlylean and Browningesque manner, personifying the multitude as one lumpish hostile entity, or organised body of similar entities. Thus when, after an interval of silence, he produced ' The Egoist, ' and the accumulating units of the new generation, the newer minds, appreciated the novelty of the problem and the solution so generally as to make the book the success of its year, he was understood to be cynical over the praise given to a work which was in his opinion inferior to its predecessors. The new generation has since proceeded to read those earlier works ; but Mr. Meredith had fixed his psychological habits, and no sense of community with his generation could now avail to make him treat language as a common possession, which any one may rightly improve, but which no one may fitly seek to turn into impenetrable jungle for his own pleasure. Ill health may have had something to do with Mr. Meredith's aesthetic deviation from ' the general deed of man ' ; and his contemporaries have their share of responsibility ; but we must recognise in him what we have recognised behind all u e ■« v? « - S J! < -2 11 -■- 4) =s ■x, C m 1 H ^ i> < En ^ 5 '-Ti rt ■3 Cfl o.ti - ffi «1 .-" a ^ ia .* 5- < oS i ■V u ^s rtt) $ ~ < •— » = '; $1 HH §i c -' « -3 I 03 '£ ■ a >, o ^ ~. H *Z> rf r ~ w - S ■^ *> ■*- .-. *i ^ ~n ""* ? -c-d £ ° « K ^ ** 8