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GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 A STUDY 
 
 HANNAH LYNCH 
 
 1 8, BURY STREET, LONDON, W.C. 
 1891 
 
 \AU rights reserved^ 
 
 k^ 
 
 
h-3^'^ 6o3 <i 
 
ROSAMOND VENNING. 
 
 My dear Miss Venning, 
 
 Will you, when you read this little book of mine, 
 find fault with my unmeasured Hibernian enthusiasms 
 and antipathies, and quote your favourite Greek advice — 
 fi'^&iv &yav ? So that you bring to the reading of it some 
 surrender of your reserve and a break in that classic 
 moderation that we poor barbarians do not quite under- 
 stand — violently tinctured as we are by nature — it will 
 be a fresh debt added to the life-long debt I gladly owe 
 destiny for that memorable first meeting in Athena's 
 charming little city. 
 
 The thought of it waves memory back into broad sun- 
 shine untravelled by clouds, among sun-stained marble 
 pillars and rose and mauve tinted hills, girdling purple 
 waters, and the long silver olive plain of Attica. Do you 
 remember still our first walk along the cactus-bordered 
 path to the Acropolis? Was it not of 'Tragic 
 Comedians ' that we talked ? 
 
 So now, years after, I offer you in grateful remem- 
 brance this little gathering of ideas you may not wholly 
 share, but will not wholly reject, through affection for 
 your friend, to whom so wide a difference would be 
 nothing less^than a real misfortune. 
 
 HANNAH LYNCH. 
 Paris, February, 1891. 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 A COUPLE of months ago I was asked to give 
 a lecture in Paris on a modern English 
 writer, and I naturally selected my favourite, 
 the subject of this little book. It was after- 
 wards suggested to me that the lecture would 
 bear expansion, a task I the more readily 
 undertook because I was happy enough to 
 learn that my humble effort had sent at least 
 three intellectual foreigners to the fountain- 
 head to study for themselves the novels of 
 Mr. Meredith, curious to see if I had not 
 overrated his merits, as is the habit of enthu- 
 siastic disciples, and greatly astonished to 
 find their expectations disappointed, and my 
 estimate unexaggerated. 
 
X Preface, 
 
 While still engaged upon this work I re- 
 ceived from London Mr, Le Gallienne's book, 
 ' George Meredith,' and not having by me 
 copies of ' Modern Love ' or the other poems 
 of Mr, Meredith, I availed myself of his 
 quotations of the famous sonnet and 'A 
 Meeting,' I have also taken from Mr. 
 Lane's Bibliography, added to Mr. Le 
 Gallienne's book, the dates of the appearance 
 of each of the novels, as my own copies all 
 belong to the recent uniform editions pub- 
 lished by Messrs. Chapman and Hall. 
 
 HANNAH LYNCH. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. THE GRADUAL RECOGNITION OF GEORGE 
 
 MEREDITH AS A NOVELIST . . I 
 
 II. Meredith's style and influence . -25 
 
 III. the NOVELS OF GEORGE MEREDITH: 'RICHARD 
 
 FEVEREL' and 'RHODA FLEMING' . 53 
 
 IV. 'EVAN HARRINGTON,' 'THE ADVENTURES OF 
 
 HARRY RICHMOND,' 'SANDRA BELLONI,' 
 AND 'BEAUCHAMP'S CAREER' . .89 
 
 V. 'THE EGOIST,' 'DIANA OF JHE CROSSWAYS,' 
 'TRAGIC COMEDIANS,' AND 'SHAVING OF 
 SHAGPAT' . . . 117 
 
 VI. GEORGE MEREDITH'S MEN AND WOMEN . 153 
 
GEORGE MEREDITH. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 THE GRADUAL RECOGNITION OF GEORGE 
 MEREDITH AS A NOVELIST. 
 
 It is our habit to class under the name of 
 light literature all fiction, from that of 
 Richardson to the ephemeral stories of the 
 latest London favourite, though, as a matter 
 of fact, even that historic bore, Gibbon, is 
 not heavier reading than the novels of 
 Richardson. We accept the term ' light ' 
 literature in a high sense as well as in a low 
 one, and to the high class of light writers 
 belong our old English masters and friends. 
 Fielding, Scott, and Thackeray. These 
 writers were purely and simply novelists, 
 
 I 
 
2 George Meredith. 
 
 and if they showed themselves to the 
 thinkers in their just interpretation of the 
 motives whence actions and complications 
 arise, and the consequences to which they 
 lead us, it was hardly because they thought 
 so much as that they observed exactly, and, 
 with the exquisite intuition of genius, pene- 
 trated life and its meaning by the road of 
 sympathy rather than reflection, and uncon- 
 sciously gave the colour of philosophy to 
 their reproduction of observations. 
 
 Men of wide sympathies and humorous 
 observers, which are the two most truthful 
 qualities of portraiture, they were able to 
 enter into all, or nearly all, phases of exist- 
 ence, and under the influence of the per- 
 sonalities and the scenes they portrayed, give 
 us what I take to be a false impression — 
 that of having deliberately thought out each 
 one. The falseness of this impression is 
 proved by the confession of Thackeray and 
 Dickens, that no one could be more com- 
 pletely surprised than either by the doings 
 
George Meredith. 3 
 
 and sayings of their various characters. And 
 this confession is borne out by the mixture 
 of exuberant spirits and sentiment that 
 colours all the works of these novelists. 
 Serious thinkers are neither prone to exhibit 
 high spirits^ like schoolboys let loose among 
 pens and paper and a reckless abundance of 
 ink, nor tears of sentiment, like a distraught 
 heroine recording her melancholy impres- 
 sions. Writers of this sort, however great 
 and universal, are 'light,' because their 
 double aim — for which we cannot be too 
 grateful — is to touch us by the tragic or 
 homely sorrows of existence, or to amuse us 
 by the absurdities and tricks of our fellows, 
 and if, by chance, they should happen to 
 instruct us through the great lessons of life 
 they unconsciously teach us, it is due to the 
 simplicity and directness of their genius. And 
 this is the estimate we English readers will 
 ever preserve of Thackeray, in spite of the 
 severe pronouncement against him beyond 
 the Channel by our more artistic brethren. 
 
 I — 2 
 
4 George Meredith. 
 
 He may preach, as the eminent French 
 critic, M. Taine, complains ; but we are 
 glad to be so sermonized, and return to 
 him as to a friend who can never fail us. He 
 may digress, but we are thankful for such 
 digressions as his, and feel that we would not 
 yield his faults for the more acrid greatness 
 of Balzac. 
 
 But this latter half of the nineteenth century 
 has produced quite a different sort of novelist; 
 one whose mission is deliberately chosen, 
 heavily weighed, and unweariedly fulfilled. 
 Not in the least anxious is he to amuse us, 
 or rouse soft and pleasurable emotions in us. 
 The artistic exactions of the dilettanti are 
 unregarded by him, and his voice carries 
 far other than the note of caressing per- 
 suasion in it. He does not court our suffrage, 
 rather does he seek to break and bend us 
 before the sweeping storm of thought, and 
 carry us through new paths into a world 
 where no word is idle, no action or instinct 
 without its most serious consequences ; heed- 
 
George Meredith. 5 
 
 less of the fact that we may entangle our- 
 selves inextricably in the briars and brambles 
 of a strange phraseology, indifferent to what 
 may be our mental suffering in endeavouring 
 to follow him, and decipher his oddly-clothed 
 meaning. 
 
 This kind of writer is a thinker first and a 
 novelist afterwards, and not a thinker onlj', 
 but a scientific psychologist. The novel is to 
 him the sum of his mental labour, as the 
 system is that of the metaphysician. The 
 simple art of the first story-teller, Homer, and 
 of Scott, no less differs from his method than 
 from Kant's 'Kritik.' His appearance, taking 
 into account the materials of which his peculiar 
 genius is composed, and the bewildering use 
 he makes of them, is rare ; and if, happily, 
 he should obtain a hearing, after long strife 
 with the general stupidity of the blockheads 
 and patient endurance of the bites and barks 
 of literary puppydom at his heels, he is sure 
 to create a revolution in the world which 
 subsists on amusement and distraction by 
 
6 George Meredith. 
 
 his new way of popularizing philosophy 
 through fiction and the rose-lights of imagi- 
 nation. His chance, of course, very much 
 depends upon diction, and this explains to 
 us George Eliot's immediate recognition. 
 As the first of the modern analytical novelists 
 in England, she had the good fortune to start 
 by a simple and facile style, within reach of 
 the least intellectual reader. Hence, those 
 who did not want to be compelled to think, 
 could, without twist or turning, without 
 racking their brains, or grasping a distracted 
 head in their palms, follow her story even 
 when they ignored the profound mental con- 
 sciousness from which it sprang. But picture 
 the catastrophe, the wide convulsion and 
 fright her first appearance as the author of 
 ' Daniel Deronda ' would have created ! She 
 would have had to wait, at least, as long for 
 recognition and admiration as her great and 
 inadequately appreciated successor. 
 
 Remote from her in point of style, though 
 still of her school, by reason of severe 
 
George Meredith. 7 
 
 thought worked to a conclusion, oftener than 
 hers an unanswerable interrogation, is the only 
 living master in English literature — George 
 Meredith. He stands beside her and 
 Tolstoi in the rank of serious intellectual 
 workers, though we may doubt if foreign 
 nations will ever reach the glib acquaintance 
 with his name and the titles of his books 
 that they are pleased to boast with those of 
 the Russian master. Mr. Meredith is above 
 and beyond all a thinker, less simple and 
 direct, less wholly preoccupied with the 
 mission of improving humanity and beau- 
 tifying life, than either George Eliot or 
 Tolstoi. Perhaps he has a healthier con- 
 viction that the world is very well as it is, 
 and that in the main it is all the better that 
 we are neither so muddy nor so pink as 
 realists and sentimentalists would have us 
 believe, but are just comfortably spotted and 
 well-meaning to escape excess of censure or 
 admiration. 
 
 The British race, we know, has never been 
 
8 George Meredith. 
 
 remarkable for brilliancy, nor, to any special 
 degree, has it given evidence of perspicacity. 
 But nowhere has it shown such an inex- 
 cusable and comical consistency of stupidity 
 as in its slow recognition of Mr. Meredith, 
 and its blundering acceptance of him when 
 once a few laudatory reviews have revealed 
 to it the existence of a prophet in its midst. 
 We have had among us for more than thirty 
 years a giant, and a race of pigmies, noted 
 for nothing but the absence of genius, of 
 even marked individuality in their stream of 
 literary production, that flows on continuously 
 and uneventfully, gape and blink at the odd 
 sound of his voice, and persist in regarding 
 him as a grotesque monster. He brings us 
 the fruits of his colossal intellect in master- 
 piece after masterpiece, and because he 
 applies some hard knocks to our understand- 
 ing, never bright and always fearful of the 
 new, we either turn from him in cold neglect, 
 or else we grow witty with the wit of 
 pigmies, at his expense, and accuse him ' of 
 
George Meredith. 9 
 
 breaking his shins over his own wit.' That 
 which we do not understand, we decide, with 
 the superiority of the inane and the ignorant, 
 to be not worthy the understanding. Used 
 as we have been to the lucid prose of 
 Thackeray and the brilliant vulgarity and 
 homeliness of Dickens, spoiled as our literary 
 talent has been more recently by the flood of 
 bloodless fiction poured into the circulating 
 libraries and fast bringing the monthly 
 magazines to a deadlock of incompetency 
 and unimaginative drivel, can we wonder, 
 though we may deplore, that the taste for 
 excellence and vigour has diminished ? 
 
 That his first novel, ' Richard Feverel,' 
 should have passed unheeded, in spite of the 
 remarkable review which the Times gave it 
 in 1859, is something to wonder at, for surely 
 such a book might have been expected to 
 startle the best of his country into super- 
 lative praise, and meet with immediate 
 popularity. It had already been preceded 
 by a volume of notable poetry, by that 
 
lo George Meredith. 
 
 extraordinary tour de force, ' The Shaving 
 of Shagpat,' and by ' Farina, a Legend of 
 Cologne.' Yet these were not sufficient to 
 convince his fellows that in their presence 
 stood mighty genius claiming the poor return 
 it is in our power to make it — the hospitality 
 and welcome of our minds. Does such 
 denseness deserve pity or blame ? For 
 churlishness it cannot be called, as the 
 neglect shown the great is never deliberate. 
 Two years were we left to sharpen our wits 
 upon the pages of ' Richard Feverel,' and, 
 mayhap, acquire a taste for qualities utterly 
 novel to the age and, in a measure, to the 
 nation — for something more than English 
 characteristics go to the forming of a writer 
 like Mr. Meredith — and in 1861 we were 
 sked to make what we could of ' Evan 
 Harrington.' The story appeared in Once a 
 Week, and was illustrated by the late Charles 
 Keene, under, the title of ' Evan Harrington; 
 or, He Would be a Gentleman.' Mr. 
 Stevenson makes doleful mention of a serial 
 
George Meredith. 1 1 
 
 of Meredith's that nearly wrecked a news- 
 paper financially, and presumably this was 
 the unlucky experiment, from which it may 
 be gathered that ' Evan Harrington ' had no 
 greater success than ' Richard Feverel,' and 
 that the hour of recognition had not yet 
 dawned. Explain it who can. Was there 
 not a grain of perversity at the bottom of it ? 
 And can there be a more thankless task than 
 that of labouring against the tide of fatal 
 dulness, or an unkinder solitude than that of 
 a man who is a head and a half above the 
 tallest of his fellows, and can neither lift 
 them up to his level nor descend to theirs ? 
 There are compensations, certainly, but these 
 only serve to mitigate the sufferings of intel- 
 lectual isolation, and, to the artist, can never 
 fill adequately the place of generous and 
 hearty appreciation. Wrapped in his philo- 
 sophic cloak, the thinker may make shift to 
 do without his fellows, and call them by hard 
 names, but to the artist and the poet, sym- 
 pathy and the warm praise of living voices 
 
12 George Meredith. 
 
 is like sunshine to the human frame. But 
 reliable, if rare, critics had begun to find 
 him out. In 1862, when his second book 
 of poetry appeared, ' Mbdern Love,' the 
 Spectator chose to assail, as an unfledged 
 beginner, the man who had given such work 
 as his to the world ; whereupon Mr. Swin- 
 burne, wrathful, though not invective — rare 
 chance! — wrote a letter that all disciples of 
 Meredith remember with gratitude. But it 
 is still hard for us to understand how the 
 career of any man of letters could be so slow, 
 and appreciation so long grudged him, as has 
 been the case with a penman of so pro- 
 nounced a type. That he should excite 
 hostility, being himself of no tender fabric, 
 is comprehensible and easily explained by the 
 impatience and sense of irritation that he 
 often rouses in the breasts of his admirers. 
 But we can recognise the qualities and 
 greatness of the writer who provokes our 
 hostility, and generously give him that which 
 is his due, while not withholding that which 
 
George Meredith. 13 
 
 he excites. Writing of ' Modern Love,' Mr. 
 Swinburne, who is certainly upon his own 
 ground in criticising a brother poet, says, 
 ' Every section of this great progressive poem 
 is connected with the other by Hnks of the 
 finest and most studied workmanship,' and 
 that ' a more perfect piece of writing no man 
 alive has ever turned out' than the noble 
 sonnet beginning, 
 
 ' We saw the swallows gathering in the skies.' 
 
 Bear in mind this was written by the third 
 living English poet in the year 1862, of 
 a comparatively unknown poet, while yet 
 Browning and Tennyson were writing their 
 best. And then explain how it is that 
 Meredith the poet is still less known than 
 Meredith the novelist, and that until very 
 lately reading people, if asked about George 
 Meredith, invariably corrected the rash ques- 
 tioner by the suggestion that he doubtless 
 meant Owen Meredith. With Owen Mere- 
 dith they were familiar enough, but George 
 
14 George Meredith. 
 
 Meredith ? They would shake their heads 
 and tell you that they never heard of him, 
 or if, perchance, they had, invariably added 
 the rumour that they had also heard : ' A 
 perfectly unreadable writer, I believe, whom 
 nobody — possibly not even himself — under- 
 stands, and very few try to understand.' 
 
 Five or six years ago I imagined this in- 
 credible ignorance to be exclusive to Dublin, 
 where we are not very assiduous in the 
 pursuit of literature, or of anything else but 
 the fortunes of the political heroes of the 
 hour. But upon crossing the Channel, and 
 finding myself in the blessed atmosphere of 
 literary fervour and progress, I was amazed 
 to see how few were the literary persons I 
 met who knew much more of Mr. Meredith 
 than his name, and even here I was more 
 than once confronted with the inevitable 
 Owen Meredith. That the lovers of Mr. 
 Rider Haggard and John Strange Winter 
 should not read his works is but the com- 
 pletion of their intellectual taste; and strange, 
 
George Meredith. 15 
 
 indeed, would it be to see a copy of ' Diana 
 of the Crossways' in the hands of these 
 worthy persons ; but that the readers of 
 Shakespeare and Thackeray and George 
 Eliot should shun him — this is where the 
 incredible and inexplicable eccentricity of 
 public taste displays itself. And yet in 1862 
 he had written : 
 
 ' We saw the swallows gathering in the sky, 
 And in the osier isle we heard their noise. 
 We had not to look back on summer joys. 
 Or forward to a summer of bright dye. 
 But in the largeness of the evening earth 
 Our spirits grew as we went side by side. 
 The hour became her husband and my bride. 
 Love that had robb'd us so, thus bless'd our dearth ! 
 The pilgrims of the year wax'd very loud 
 In multitudinous chatterings, as the flood 
 Full brown came from the west, and, like pale blood 
 Expanded to the upper crimson cloud. 
 Love that had robb'd us of immortal things. 
 This little moment mercifully gave, 
 And still I see across the twilight wave 
 The swan sail with her young beneath her wings.' 
 
 It may be argued that the long delay in 
 the acknowledgment of his sovereignty is 
 
1 6 George Meredith. 
 
 due to himself, to his obscurities, his rugged- 
 ness, his enormous intellectual difficulties 
 offered the reader, like five-barred gates, to 
 leap, and, in the event of failure, fall against, 
 stunned and aching, all over from the force 
 of big mental bruises. But Browning is 
 fifty times more obscure, more rugged, more 
 difficult. It is true, Browning's apotheosis, 
 in somewhat ironical form, lies in a Browning 
 Society that, perhaps, may achieve a glossary 
 and a full compilation of notes. Whereas, 
 all the poet asks us to bring to him is a 
 little thought and some brains. As Brown- 
 ing has his lucid and melodious words, when 
 the simplest may understand him upon a first 
 reading, so has Mr. Meredith — a fact that 
 does not seem to have served him to such 
 popularity as Browning enjoyed. Can any- 
 thing be sweeter, softer, more musical than 
 this little poem ' The Meeting ' ? — 
 
 ' The old coach-road thro' a common of furze, 
 With knolls of pine, ran white : 
 Berries of autumn, with thistles and burrs, 
 And spider-threads droop'd in the light. 
 
George Meredith. 17 
 
 ' The light in a thin blue veil peer'd sick ; 
 
 The sheep grazed close and still ; 
 The smoke of a farm by a yellow rick 
 
 Curl'd lazily under a hill. 
 
 ' No &y shook the round of the silver net ; 
 
 No insect the swift bird chased ; 
 Only two travellers moved and met 
 Across that hazy waste. 
 
 ' One was a girl with a babe that throve, 
 Her ruin and her bliss ; 
 One was a youth with a lawless love, 
 Who claspt it the more for this. 
 
 ' The girl for her babe humm'd prayerful speech ; 
 
 The youth for his love did pray j 
 Each cast a wistful look on each, 
 And either went their way.' 
 
 And still are we confronted with the 
 mystery of such a poet's unpopularity. Ex- 
 plain it by the unattractiveness of his diffi- 
 culties, and what have you to say against 
 the soothing charm and the exquisite sim- 
 plicity of such lines as these, that linger 
 in the memory, not only because of their 
 delicate music, but because of their vivid- 
 ness of picture and the autumn sadness that 
 
 2 
 
1 8 George Meredith. 
 
 lies upon it. In workmanship the poem is 
 equal to the best of its sort, and Heine, in 
 his matchless songs, has never touched us 
 with a pathos more searching from its unpre- 
 tentiousness. 
 
 Two years after the appearance of ' Modern 
 Love,' ' Emilia in England ' was published, 
 and in the same year M. E. D, Forgues 
 translated an adaptation of it for the Revue 
 des Deux Mondes, under the title of ' Sandra 
 Belloni, Roman de la Vie Anglaise.' This 
 looks like progress in public opinion. At 
 least, it may be thought, after thirteen years 
 of neglected labour in strife with feeble and 
 vitiated taste, the author of so much brilliant 
 work is upon the point of enthusiastic re- 
 cognition. Not so at all. 'Emilia' created 
 as little sensation as ' Richard,' and we may 
 believe that the subscribers to the circulating 
 libraries were as little fluttered by the pro- 
 duction of the one as they had been by that 
 of the other — being equally unaware of the 
 existence of either. The book was not ex- 
 
George Meredith. 19 
 
 tensively reviewed, and only the happy few 
 congratulated themselves upon the acquisi- 
 tion. Perhaps their satisfaction in it was 
 increased by the fact that it was not shared 
 by the crowd, for though the lovers of an un- 
 appreciated novelist may ardently desire to 
 bestrew their paths with converts, it is not 
 unusual in them to cover themselves in a 
 sort of fierce and holy pride with a bit of his 
 cloak of isolation. If he is miserably mis- 
 understood, do not they share to some extent 
 his misfortunes ? And is there not a very 
 decided superiority — sad, if you will, for 
 none but the churlish and carping few desire 
 to keep salvation and paradise exclusively 
 for themselves — in the fact of their mutual 
 want of appreciation ? 
 
 ' Rhoda Fleming' appeared in 1865, and 
 this book seems to have made a more de- 
 cided impression, though the writer still 
 remained in the background among well- 
 known men of letters, and his name, like his 
 presence, was on the whole ignored. It was 
 
 2 — 2 
 
20 George Meredith. 
 
 published by Messrs. Tinsley, in itself an 
 instructive lesson in the author's popularity. 
 But there can be no doubt that the tide was 
 changing, slowly, it is true — indeed, imper- 
 ceptibly. In 1867 'Vittoria' first came out 
 in the Fortnightly Review, a review hence- 
 forth devoted to the fiction of Mr. Meredith, 
 and to which he seems to have contributed a 
 good many reviews and short poems. After 
 this, in 1 87 1, we meet him in Cornhill re- 
 cording the brilliant and ever-delightful 
 adventures of ' Harry Richmond,' and this, 
 coupled with the fact that Mr. George Du 
 Maurier illustrated the story, and that it ran 
 through two editions in the same year, gives 
 us breathing-space in our long vent of 
 indignation. We may now conclude that a 
 portion, at least, of the British public had 
 awaked, and were capable of relishing such 
 entrancing novels as ' Richard Feverel,' 
 ' Sandra Belloni ' and ' Harry Richmond,' in 
 which we hardly read so much as we drink 
 in life, vividly, eagerly — life with all its 
 
George Meredith, 21 
 
 sharp, sweet thrills and poignant aversions, 
 its breathless alternation of mood and swift 
 race of the passions. 
 
 ' Beauchamp's Career' followed in 1876, 
 first in the Fortnightly Review, between 
 1874 and 1876, and afterwards in Messrs. 
 Chapman and Hall's collected editions of 
 1886 and 1889. Although Mr. Meredith's 
 career cannot be said to have been crowned 
 with anything like a wide acknowledgment, 
 or even anything approaching a fair reward, 
 until he wrote ' Diana of the Crossways ' in 
 1885, which brought him his first taste of 
 substantial and general success, and cast a 
 retrospective glamour upon its predecessors, 
 people from the date of ' Harry Richmond ' 
 began to know that there was a novelist 
 named George Meredith who was not Owen 
 Meredith. 
 
 Considering all that the writer has had to 
 contend with in the way of block-headed- 
 ness, this is most certainly a step in advance. 
 But to his own especial minority, it is not 
 
2 2 George Meredith, 
 
 ' Diana,' with all its charm and its perilous 
 brilliancy, that crowns Mr. Meredith's career, 
 but that unique masterpiece, ' The Egoist,' 
 which was published in 1879. Here was a 
 memorable triumph of art, at which we have 
 not yet ceased to wonder, and which we hold 
 apart from all other books that we have read. 
 After it he may write ' Tragic Comedians,' 
 ' Diana of the Crossways,' and volumes of 
 poems. Anything he writes we are prepared 
 to welcome with cordial delight and gratitude, 
 but we do not expect another Sir Willoughby 
 Patterne. We are satisfied with the im- 
 possibility of the repetition of such an 
 achievement. It is not given to many 
 artists to produce one flawless work, and to 
 expect a second from even such a mighty 
 one as this would be to prove one's self 
 insatiable. 
 
 From this time forward, reviews, articles, 
 criticisms — hostile, humorous, and eulogistic 
 — begin to abound ; and by the time of 
 ' Diana's ' appearance, the British public 
 
George Meredith. 23 
 
 has been made ready to receive the intelli- 
 gence that a master is in their midst — a 
 living, breathing master, such as Tennyson 
 and Browning, and from whom work may 
 happily still be expected. What effect this 
 announcement may have had upon the 
 British public cannot b? perfectly defined. 
 Being unenthusiastic, except in the matter 
 of low and familiar literature, it is to be 
 feared that such news has but moderately 
 moved it, and in the matter of taste, has not 
 influenced it at all. This new master is 
 unfamiliar to them in his speech and in his 
 ideas. He does not dwell upon sordid scenes 
 with visible pleasure ; he claims them with 
 a voice that is not of their common tongue, 
 and faces them without the old-fashioned 
 twinkle of the grave jester's glance. If he 
 caricatures humanity, it is not as Dickens 
 caricatures it, to tickle us into inextinguish- 
 able laughter, nor yet as Thackeray does, 
 in a vein of comic satire. If he calls 
 upon us to recognise that life is often a 
 
24 George Meredith. 
 
 sad blunder, and to pity the blunderers, he 
 is neither sentimental in his claim, nor con- 
 sciously pathetic. He indulges neither in 
 the mawkish sentiment of Dickens, nor in 
 the sentimental tenderness of Thackeray, 
 and as little courts our tears as our laughter. 
 Srain is what he asks of us, and its use 
 in reading him. 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 Meredith's style and influence. 
 
 To succeed in qualifying a style so varied 
 and so strange as Mr. Meredith's, and com- 
 posed of so many diverse elements, would 
 be difficult even for his peers. Its quality 
 is at the same time rugged and elusive, 
 obscure and dazzlingly brilliant, witty and 
 profound, harsh and most musically tender, 
 light as a summer cloud, majestic as a 
 storm. But his great defect is artificiality. 
 His splendid pages and his matchless 
 dialogues never lose the obtrusive flavour 
 of the midnight oil, and we see most of 
 his characters through a blinding glitter of 
 limelight. This excessive use of arti- 
 ficial illumination, while fascinating us and 
 
26 George Meredith. 
 
 compelling our admiration for the writer's 
 extraordinary cleverness, wearies us and irri- 
 tates us at times, and we long for the mental 
 repose of a whiff of commonplace and a page 
 or two, by way of interlude, of fluent easy 
 prose that rests the eye and the brain. 
 There are so many tricks and surprises 
 bestrewing our path, five-barred gates start- 
 ing unexpectedly for us to leap ; we are 
 deliberately plunged neck and heels into so 
 many swamps, and bowled over all sorts of 
 rocks and stones, with the oddest sensations 
 in conflict, that we more than once pay our 
 debt grudgingly, and, like a peaceable man 
 knocked down by a bludgeon, are amazed 
 at the liberty that has been taken with our 
 understanding. In this exuberant display 
 of his own powers does Meredith show him- 
 self to be thoroughly English. He is un- 
 approachable as a wrestler with words and 
 phrases, and infuses dead speech with the 
 vitality of blood and muscles. Words with 
 him are like thoughts — strong, living, tangible 
 
George Meredith. 27 
 
 to the touch of the soul. They seem to fly, 
 and mount, and flutter round us, to catch our 
 breath forcibly, and hold our imagination in 
 the grasp of blood- warmed fingers. The most 
 ordinary action of life, described by him in a 
 line or two, is not a photograph, but a vivid 
 revelation, a scene stamped not on the vision, 
 but upon the mind. When he is not playing 
 queer tricks with us and keeping every 
 sense insufferably alert, every nerve strained 
 to catch the meaning that dances tantalizingly 
 before us, flying hither and thither upon 
 fantastic figures of speech, until the writer 
 himself seems drunk with his own juggling, 
 he is quieting our baffled senses by these 
 sharp revelations that have no artificial 
 glamour about them. He ceases to be the 
 inhuman metaphorist, and becomes our 
 brother again, and we forget that he ever 
 terrified us. I open ' Evan Harrington ' at 
 random, and alight on a paragraph where 
 each word is vividly set in a perfect whole. 
 There is no twist or turning here, and as we 
 
28 George Meredith. 
 
 see the red harvest-moon and the dark 
 water and trees, so we seem to touch the 
 hand of suffering youth : 
 
 ' Over a length of the stream the red, 
 round harvest-moon was rising, and the 
 weakened youth was this evening at the 
 mercy of the charm that encircled him. The 
 water curved, and dimpled, and flowed flat, 
 and the whole body of it rushed into the 
 spaces of sad splendour. The clustered trees 
 stood like temples of darkness; their shadows 
 lengthened supernaturally ; and a pale gloom 
 crept between them on the sward. He had 
 been thinking some time that Rose would 
 knock at his door and give him her voice, at 
 least ; but she did not come ; and when he 
 had gazed out on the stream until his eyes 
 ached, he felt that he must go and walk by it. 
 Those little flashes of the hurrying tide spoke 
 to him of a secret rapture and of a joy-seeking 
 impulse — the pouring onward of all the blood 
 of life into one illumined heart, mournful from 
 excess of love.' 
 
George Meredith. 29 
 
 In none of his books do such passages 
 abound as in * Richard Feverel,' unless, per- 
 haps, in ' Harry Richmond.' These two 
 books, and in a lesser degree ' Sandra Bel- 
 loni,' may best be described as picturesque 
 and melodious. The writer is less a thinker 
 than a poet, and sometimes he sings with a 
 sweetness that troubles our vision and catches 
 us queerly about the throat. 
 
 But viewing him upon the ground of the 
 simple story-teller, we must admit that this 
 is a ground either foreign to Mr. Meredith's 
 original genius, or deliberately shunned by 
 him. The good old fashion, so dear to Scott 
 and Thackeray, of bringing everything to a 
 definite conclusion, either for better or worse, 
 and clearing up all doubts as to the ultimate 
 career of even their minor characters, is a 
 fashion that he. with some cruelty and much 
 contempt for the ordinary reader, utterly dis- 
 cards. He cares not a jot for our sympathy, 
 still less for our judgment. He notes that 
 life is chiefly interrogatory and unsatisfactory 
 
30 George Meredith. 
 
 — an unfinished drama rarely terminating with 
 the rightful wedding - bells or the merited 
 reward ; that choice is rarely justified by 
 results, and that good and evil still remain 
 vexed questions to be decided, as far as 
 definite decision is possible, except upon their 
 broadest issues, by temperament and indi- 
 viduality, by race and sex and training, as 
 faith and love are decided. Look at the 
 end of all his stories, and you will find your- 
 self confronted with the unanswerable ques- 
 tion which is sure to fix us in the examination 
 of the lives of each one of us. There is the 
 fatal tide, we know, but can we dare to say 
 at what precise turning of the road of life 
 we missed it ? 
 
 This is the philosophy that ' Richard 
 Feverel' exposes — conjectural, questioning; 
 a drawn game between reason and impulse, 
 between nature and intellect, between a 
 philosopher's system and a young man's first 
 love. Neither win, because, though a mighty 
 fighter and a Homeric wrestler with words, 
 
George Meredith. 31 
 
 Meredith is not of the definite school, and 
 will not pander to his readers' tastes either 
 way. Are you for the mismanaged poor 
 hero, or for the disappointed philosopher, 
 gazing in the last page upon the system 
 fondly built upon sand, and laid in ruins by the 
 first breath of purely human disaster .'' Mr. 
 Meredith resolves that your sympathies shall 
 be balanced, as his own are soundly balanced. 
 He leaves you with a question upon your 
 lips, and your childish reproach is chidden by 
 his silence. 
 
 Richard is the strongest and best hero the 
 writer has drawn, before he fell in love with 
 the more intricate complexities of woman, 
 and delighted in her intellectual surprises, her 
 social difficulties and struggles with iron fate 
 and masculinity. We part with him as he 
 rises from a sick-bed, widowed and broken 
 upon the outset of brilliant manhood, en- 
 shadowed in a tragic gloom, and who is to 
 explain to us the evolution of middle-age in 
 this youth of burning hope and rash promise ? 
 
32 George Meredith. 
 
 Not the creator, certainly. The throes of 
 commonplace speculation into which he may 
 thrust the ordinary reader trouble him not, 
 and he is less merciful to him even than 
 Tolstoi. He takes us from that strong 
 Shakespearean scene, in which Richard reads 
 the diary of Clare Doria Forey, unveiling 
 her unconscious and reticent love, only fully 
 measured by her on the threshold of a love- 
 less marriage, while overhead the candles are 
 burning in her mortuary chamber, and flicker- 
 ing lugubriously upon the lips that have 
 spoken to him from ' behind the hills of 
 death '; and without giving us time to clear 
 our throats of the gathered sensations of pity 
 and pain, he hurls us into fresh emotions, 
 equally painful, by the death of Lucy, 
 Richard's young wife. And after that we 
 learn nothing more of Richard, and are at 
 liberty to decide for ourselves whether Sir 
 Austin, the broker system creator, and Lady 
 Blandish married, like any other pair of 
 middle-aged lovers, or preferred to continue 
 
George Meredith. 33 
 
 in the less definite and secure path of platonic 
 sentimentalities — the one studying the pil- 
 grim's scrip, the other adding to its wisdom. 
 
 The fault is perhaps to be laid to our 
 complex, inquiring, and unrobust age, that 
 men like Tolstoi and Meredith should both 
 be incomplete as artists and as thinkers. 
 Completeness in art belongs to simplicity of 
 thought and directness of vision, and these 
 are the attributes of the real story-teller, who 
 is never diverted from his task by philo- 
 sophic conjecture or by psychological pro- 
 blems, Mr. Meredith's incompleteness is 
 shown in an affectation of oddness and an 
 artificial glamour that leave the reader with 
 senses and wits perturbed, anxiously question- 
 ing the gravity of the writer, apprehensive of 
 being laughed at, and not altogether sure 
 that he has not been assisting at the marvel- 
 lous performance of a juggling metaphorist, 
 instead of the discoveries and exposition of a 
 serious philosopher. This artificial glamour 
 is more sparingly used in ' Richard Feverel '; 
 
 3 
 
34 George Meredith. 
 
 hence, perhaps, its larger popularity than any 
 of his other works. But it is hardly, as a 
 whole, so great as ' The Egoist,' ' Rhoda 
 Fleming,' or ' Diana of the Crossways.' In 
 it the quality of tenderness, noticeably absent 
 in the rest, abounds, and also a lovely fresh- 
 ness and a visible delight in youth and in 
 youthful joys. It is a work pre-eminently 
 human, with all the defects and qualities of 
 humanity strongly marked. Had it been 
 written in blood, it could not be redder with 
 life. Vitality is its captivating charm and 
 melody its voice. As a work of art, it may 
 be far from perfect, and we recognise that it 
 is marred by many impossible situations, 
 errors of taste and judgment, and a tendency, 
 in the portrayal of the famous Mrs. Berry, to 
 gross caricature. Nevertheless, we love it, 
 faults and all, with that strong personal love 
 and a wish for frequent dipping at its sources 
 that it is the unshared privilege of truly great 
 and original productions to inspire. How 
 many are the writers we turn to in all moods. 
 
George Meredith. 35 
 
 knowing we shall ever find something new, 
 something helpful in their familiar pages ! 
 Shakespeare for the English mind and for a 
 very few foreigners ; Montaigne, and perhaps 
 Moliere, for others. Others, again, decide 
 between Scott, Thackeray, and George Eliot. 
 Add to this limited sphere a half-dozen of 
 the world's best poets, and the circle of com- 
 forters and permanent friends is formed. In 
 such choice company may Meredith present 
 himself with ' Richard Feverel ' in his hand, 
 and his place will be no mean one in their 
 midst. Shakespeare himself might offer him 
 the cordial hand-clasp of brotherhood, and 
 assure him that since the appearance of 
 Beatrice and Portia, no such women as 
 Diana, Emilia, and his German princess had 
 ever shot upon the dull world from masculine 
 brains. 
 
 In Meredith's very faults there is an ex- 
 cess of strength. It is this superabundance 
 and an impatience of drivelling sentiment 
 that lead him so frequently to shock our 
 
 3—2 
 
36 George Meredith. 
 
 nineteenth-century taste. I think he shocks 
 us with deliberate aim, deeming our taste 
 questionable and unrobust, and our fastidious- 
 ness unhealthy. These blows directed against 
 our temple of false modesty are in no book 
 fiercer and more astounding than in ' Richard 
 Feverel/ and in no other book has he risen 
 to such supreme heights. Here you have at 
 its best the matchless splendour and majesty 
 of his prose, and pages of prolonged beauty. 
 You have ample scope to realize the vivid- 
 ness of his interpretation of nature, and the 
 delight of young love so magically unveiled 
 by him in those three beautiful chapters on 
 the opening romance of Richard and Lucy — 
 ' Ferdinand and Miranda,' ' Diversions 
 played on a Penny Whistle,' and ' Time- 
 honoured Treatment of a Dragon by a 
 Hero.' Which of these three chapters to 
 choose it would be difficult to say, for there 
 is nothing like them in all English literature 
 for sweetness, melody, and pulse-moving 
 charm. If I had to pronounce, I should be 
 
George Meredith. 2)7 
 
 disposed to give the preference to the ' Penny 
 Whistle ' chapter, though, from the fact that 
 the first meeting between Richard and Lucy 
 is oftenest quoted, I judge it to be the most 
 popular. 
 
 Match me this exquisite picture in prose 
 or poetry : ' The sun is coming down to 
 earth, and the fields and the waters shout to 
 him golden shouts. He comes, and his 
 heralds run before him, and touch the leaves 
 of oaks and planes and beeches lucid green, 
 and the pine-stems redder gold ; leaving 
 brightest footprints upon thickly - weeded 
 banks, where the foxgloves' last upper-bells 
 incline, and bramble shoots wander amid 
 moist rich herbage. The plumes of the 
 woodland are alight ; and beyond them, over 
 the open, 'tis a race with the long-thrown 
 shadows ; a race across the heaths and up 
 the hills, till, at the farthest bourne of 
 mounted eastern cloud, the heralds of the 
 sun lay rosy figures and rest.' 
 
 Or yet again, this other : ' The tide of 
 
3^ George Meredith. 
 
 colour has ebbed from the upper sky. In 
 the west the sea of sunken fire draws back, 
 and the stars leap forth and tremble, and 
 retire before the advancing moon, who slips 
 the silver train of cloud from her shoulders, 
 and, with her foot upon the pine-tops, sur- 
 veys heaven.' 
 
 In these three chapters we have Mr. 
 Meredith not only at his best, but better than 
 many of the best poets upon their own 
 ground. He sings rather than speaks. He 
 neither wants to astonish nor affright us, but 
 solely to enchant us. And who can read 
 him and remain unmoved — withstand the 
 spell he casts upon us ? Shelley was never 
 more musical, more thrilling, and never so 
 strong. 
 
 But there is much else in the novels of 
 this remarkable writer besides music and 
 poetry, and the soft showery joys and sorrows 
 of young love. There are the qualities and 
 deficiencies of his tragic and his mighty side 
 as a pendant for the grace and charm of the 
 
George Meredith. 39 
 
 mood we have seen. Everything in him is 
 pronounced. He has a taste for strong 
 lights and shadows, for grotesque asides and 
 interruptions; is sometimes crude, always 
 complex, and often incomplete. His coarse- 
 ness is akin to the coarseness that shakes us 
 to amazement in the tragedies and comedies 
 of Shakespeare, where ribaldry and lovely 
 delicacy go hand-in-hand ; where, swift upon 
 the most fanciful play of thought and scenes 
 of pathetic beauty, and images as exquisite as 
 a Theocritan idyl, come a burst of clownish 
 mirth and hideous joking. 
 
 Shakespearean is the word to describe 
 Meredith, both in his defects and in his 
 qualities. In each is he great, with some- 
 thing of the unapproachable greatness, the 
 originality, the blood and brains and nerve, of 
 the Stratford poet, towering over his fellows 
 to-day as Shakespeare, alive, towered over 
 his. Human to the heels, a seer and a 
 psychologist in one, no word is lightly written, 
 no character lightly drawn. He delights in 
 
40 George Meredith. 
 
 humanity, and almost wickedly revels in its 
 eccentricities. Hence his tendency to ex- 
 aggeration. He seizes a queer character, 
 such as old Tom Cogglesby, John Raikes, or 
 Mrs. Berry, and, not content with their 
 natural oddities, like Dickens, he must steep 
 them in the colours of his own imagination; 
 with the result that they come out of the 
 process caricatures, and we find it exceedingly 
 hard to divest them of their comic garb, and 
 trace them back to the elemental, whence 
 they started on their devious wanderings 
 through their creator's mind. This charac- 
 teristic, as M. Taine observes, is peculiarly 
 English. Since Rabelais' days the French 
 writers are too hampered by laws and rules 
 in art, inalterable, like those of the Medes 
 and Persians, to dare play such tricks with 
 reality and human nature as Dickens, Thack- 
 eray, and Meredith, in their jesting moods, 
 permit themselves. Scott's moods had no 
 such promptings, perhaps because he was a 
 better story-teller than any of the three, and 
 
George Meredith. 41 
 
 found the humour of life quite sufficient with- 
 out the aid of exaggeration. But then there 
 was no satire or hardness in all Scott's 
 nature, and manly tenderness and sympathy- 
 were his predominant traits. He wrote 
 stories for the pleasure of writing them, not 
 to belabour or ridicule poor worn humanity, 
 in which he kept his faith green and un- 
 questioning as a child's. 
 
 But, like Dickens, Meredith is a poet, and, 
 like him, has all a poet's extravagances and 
 excesses. Scott, as a poet, is never exces- 
 sive, never exuberant, and always exact. 
 His strength is employed with a Scotch 
 perception of its just value, whereas his 
 Saxon brothers waste theirs with an endless 
 profusion. Not that I would compare Mere- 
 dith with Dickens, except in his tendency to 
 caricature, which in Dickens is a vice, and in 
 his poetical excesses. He tortures metaphor 
 at times, and lacks measure. This is the 
 complaint French artists bring against their 
 English brethren. Perhaps their greater 
 
42 George Meredith. 
 
 physical strength, added to the Teutonic 
 strain that flows through their blood from 
 the early ages, runs to excess in imagina- 
 tion, and produces a conception of the gro- 
 tesque unapprehended by the French. 
 Certain it is that the latter escape our 
 violent emotions in literature, and cannot 
 arrive at an understanding of them. Our 
 sensibilities, strung to common themes, and 
 unexcited by lawless love and cerebral com- 
 plications, rouse their wonder ; and the 
 mixture of buffoonery and satire in our 
 great writers incurs their indignation. For 
 this they say we are not artists, and 
 ignore the classical limitations of art. And 
 doubtless they are right. Upon the whole, 
 our works of art are less artistic than theirs, 
 and are produced in a lesser quantity, while 
 our greatest works sin frequently against 
 every known canon of art. 
 
 In shedding a double ray of ridicule upon 
 his comic characters, Mr. Meredith so en- 
 velops and twists them in metaphor, now 
 
George Meredith. 43 
 
 mildly sarcastic, now a joyous shout of 
 laughter, we cannot tell with or at us, for 
 we are not in the secret of his comic moods ; 
 and at times so bitingly ironical that we are 
 puzzled and astray. Fain would we know 
 whether he feels tenderly towards us at our 
 worst, or cherishes an inalterable contempt 
 for us at our best. For, unlike Thackeray, 
 he is no moralist. Here, at least, is an 
 English novelist whom M. Taine cannot 
 accuse of laying down hard and fast rules 
 for our moral benefit. His two most cynical 
 characters attract some of our sympathy. 
 Whereas we are ordered to loathe and con- 
 demn Becky Sharpe, and feel how much her 
 railing creator despised her, Meredith allows 
 us to be glad of his Countess's acquaintance, 
 and shows us that a cynical, intriguing 
 woman, full of vulgar pride and not illegiti- 
 mate ambition, may be interesting, and not 
 unloved by her creator. He invites us to 
 wonder at her, and not condemn, and though 
 he may laugh at her weaknesses, and take 
 
44 George Meredith. 
 
 a wicked pleasure in exposing them, he 
 cannot be said, on the whole, to show her 
 any harshness. As an adventuress, she is 
 unsurpassed, and, unlike poor Becky, lives 
 and dies, we imagine, a fine lady, driven by 
 ambition to duplicities, but not consciously 
 mean or dishonest. Though a virtuous 
 woman, her morals are crooked, and her 
 sense of honour is the reverse of keen. We 
 have seen how such a character in Thacke- 
 ray's hands would develop, and to what 
 lengths in heartlessness his satire carried 
 him. Meredith's Countess is possible ; but 
 Becky Sharpe is impossible. 
 
 The same may be said of his male villains. 
 Indeed, he has none. There is something 
 eminently human in the egoism of the wise 
 youth Adrian Harley. We greet him ever 
 with a cheerful smile, and for one of his 
 witty remarks would have no, or only a very 
 slight, objection to part with our last five- 
 pound note. Contrast him with Barnes 
 Newcome, and you have all the difference 
 
George Meredith, 45 
 
 between black and gray. All Thackeray's 
 bad people are irredeemably bad, and all his 
 good people hardly want wings to fit them 
 for the angelic sphere. It is true, his female 
 angels do not inspire us with a very ardent 
 yearning for the joys of Paradise, if they 
 are to be shared in such extremely insipid 
 and melancholy society. Eternity with 
 Amelia and Laura Pendennis and Lady 
 Castlewood could not be described as a 
 captivating perspective. 
 
 But Mr. Meredith must not be acquitted 
 of any pronouncd sins against reality. 
 English taste is such, and its restrictions 
 and exuberances are so little in accordance 
 with life as it is lived by even those who 
 paint it falsely, that it is impossible for 
 the English novelist to escape sins of the 
 sort. In general, Meredith is sufficiently 
 just to humanity in its faults and in its 
 virtues ; it is only when its oddities tatch 
 hold of his fancy that he runs riot, and 
 surpasses nature ; only then is he apt to 
 
46 George Meredith. 
 
 overdraw his account upon the bank of 
 credulity. 
 
 Take, for example, Mrs. Berry, whom 
 Mr. Le Gallienne, in a recent interesting 
 study of Mr. Meredith, describes as a char- 
 acter that would have been a feather in 
 Dickens' cap. Doubtless, but that is not a 
 compliment to Mr. Meredith, for what might 
 do honour to Dickens cannot be said to be 
 worthy of him. Mrs. Berry is witty and 
 original to an alarming degree. She is a sort 
 of compromise between Mrs. Quickly and 
 Juliet's nurse ; not quite so coarse as either, 
 perhaps, but more exhaustively garrulous and 
 obtrusive. In the fifteenth century she might 
 have been possible and pleasant, but not so 
 in ours. She is an anachronism that we 
 resent. The fault may be with us, but the 
 fact remains, that we could not tolerate a 
 Mrs. Berry in the flesh. Of such a servant 
 a man of genius, or one of a humorous turn, 
 might be glad as a study ; but can we 
 imagine lending a patient ear to her free 
 
George Meredith. 47 
 
 speech, a stately and solemn old English 
 gentleman, if capable of understanding what 
 we call humour, only in its highly starched 
 and faultlessly correct form ? A student of 
 mankind, certainly, after a certain prejudiced 
 fashion, especially convinced of the inferiority 
 of woman, as it behoves a poor gentleman 
 who has suffered grievous wrong at the hands 
 of a daughter of Eve ; but one whose collar 
 laughter is never likely to wrinkle or crush, 
 and whose features under no temptation can 
 relax into anything broader than a grim 
 stiff smile. Picture this paternal prig and 
 polished library philosopher being entertained 
 by Juliet's nurse and Falstaff's landlady, and 
 pronouncing both to be excellent women ! 
 
 A gentleman who loved his Lamb and 
 relished his Dickens would put up with her 
 for the sake of her wit and originality, accept- 
 ing her as a possible character, which I am 
 not disposed to do. But no young girl, with 
 even less of Lucy's refinement, could submit 
 to her gross indelicacy in that scene between 
 
48 George Meredith, 
 
 them in the Isle of Wight. We know how 
 reticent and shy young girls have become 
 since Juliet's day ; still more so young brides 
 with the most intimate of their sex — their 
 mothers and their sisters ; how easily affronted 
 are their susceptibilities by the slightest 
 trending towards ground that they so 
 savagely regard as sacred. It is as much as 
 one's life is worth almost to speak to a very 
 young bride about her married life ; above all, 
 if she be deeply enamoured of her husband, 
 and for her mother to seek to unveil it would 
 be a sacrilege. Mr. Meredith, who makes 
 straight for nature divested of the swaddling 
 clothes of sentimentality, and prefers her 
 mud to the sentimentalist's spangles and 
 pink clouds, will perhaps say that the excess 
 of delicacy to which naturally sensitive and 
 fastidious womanhood has let itself be trained 
 is artificial, unhealthy, and absurd. I do not 
 dispute that a little more of savage candour 
 would be an improvement to women, and 
 that excessive delicacy leads them by a very 
 
George Meredith. 49 
 
 apparent slope into pruriency. But honesty 
 and candour, with modesty, are surely better 
 than either without it, and if, for the sake of 
 honesty and candour, we show ourselves 
 willing to dispense with an excessive, modesty 
 for that of naturalness, surely we must lose 
 one of the nameless, and not the least, charms 
 of maidenliness ! This reproach I make to 
 Lucy is not only in the case of her tolerance 
 of Mrs. Berry's coarse talk, but in the occu- 
 pation it enters her mind to allot her unde- 
 clared lover. Lord Montfalcon. I reproach, 
 in fact, Mr. Meredith, with the entire crea- 
 tion, all the more so as she is the only girl 
 he has drawn upon the old wearisome lines of 
 masculine taste, of the eternal old-fashioned 
 ivy-type, common-place, loving and pretty, 
 without character or interest apart from her 
 second in the immortal duet with his breath- 
 less hero. She is charming, as all creatures 
 lovely to look upon and purely natural must be 
 charming ; but the freshness of youth and the 
 pleasant daisy-and-buttercup flavour vanished 
 
 4 
 
50 George Meredith. 
 
 with the years and increasing domestic cares, 
 what would there have remained in her to 
 interest us and satisfy a soaring nature like 
 Richard's ? The affair of the cookery-book 
 irritates and displeases us as much as it did 
 her husband in the period of the moon of 
 bliss, and the only satisfaction we extract 
 from it is the inimitable wise youth's witty 
 description of it in his letter to Lady Blan- 
 dish. Bret Harte's speculative vision em- 
 braced a disastrous sequel to the union of 
 the Judge and Maud Muller of Whittier's 
 poem, and we may be permitted to picture 
 Lucy twenty years after, with a bunch of 
 keys at her waist, still studying the cookery- 
 book, strong in the fabrication of preserves 
 and home-made medicines, superintending her 
 children's studies, and arching mournful and 
 uncomprehending brows at the moral and in- 
 tellectual vagaries a man like Richard would 
 be certain to develop. An admirable wife 
 and mother, but an inadequate study. 
 
 It has been remarked that for Mr. Mere- 
 
George Meredith. 51 
 
 dith's readers there is no half-way house 
 between uncompromising hostility and dis- 
 cipleship. You either bend before him as 
 your master — imperfect at times, genius 
 having its limitations as all things else that 
 are human, but great in his very imper- 
 fections — or you reject him utterly. How 
 those who reject him can manage to 
 reconcile it to their conscience, I am at a loss 
 to understand. But this proves the texture 
 and quality of his influence. It is immense or 
 it is nought. And by this pronounced feeling 
 he evokes may he be classed as the founder 
 of a school. He has introduced a new 
 element into English literature — a healthy 
 and purely philosophic realism, which differs 
 as widely from the realism of Fielding as it 
 does from that of Zola. To French wit he 
 brings German profundity of thought, the 
 whole wrought into a thoroughly Saxon 
 setting. Vividness of conception, intensity 
 of vision, and strength of diction — combine 
 these qualities, and you have English such as 
 
 4—2 
 
52 George Meredith. 
 
 no other writer has given us. It is beautiful, 
 with a beauty all its own, and there seems to 
 be no feat of which it is not capable. He 
 has ransacked our language until he has 
 wrought it, through a process of bewilder- 
 ing originality, into a flexibility, a forcible 
 simplicity, a majesty and rhythm that, in his 
 prose, surpass poetry. Never before have 
 we received such a lesson in the unimagined 
 resources of language. Never before did we 
 so understand how written words may be 
 made to seize us, fell us, captivate us, make 
 vivid and tangible to our mind every image, 
 every trick of person, every hue and aspect 
 of nature. He does not describe or paint : 
 he simply vitalizes inanimate objects. And 
 if he had not made us his debtor in any 
 other way, we must thank him for his great 
 and perfect disciple, Mr. Robert Louis 
 Stevenson. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 THE NOVELS OF GEORGE MEREDITH : ' RICHARD 
 FEVEREL ' AND ' RHODA FLEMING.' 
 
 As this little book is written for those who 
 have the misfortune not to be acquainted 
 with the novels of Mr. Meredith, I do not 
 think it will be inadvisable to add to my 
 essay a slight sketch of each one, hoping 
 thereby to send readers to the head source. 
 Those who allow themselves to be persuaded 
 thereto will have reason to thank me, even 
 should they be among the common majority, 
 unable to appreciate to its full value the new 
 chapter in English literature offered them. 
 
 Much mention has been made of ' Richard 
 Feverel,' the novel of Mr. Meredith's youth, 
 and, we are told, hii own special favourite. 
 
54 George Meredith, 
 
 The plot of this powerful story turns from a 
 mixture of graceful mirth, delicious wit, and 
 profound reflection, to tragedy, upon what I 
 humbly conceive to be an impossible situa- 
 tion. And this is the sudden separation of 
 Richard from his young bride. But after 
 noting the crudities and errors of taste and 
 judgment, which are frequent enough in the 
 book, and which never once hide from us 
 the lambent flame of genius that steadily 
 burns through the whole, our fear is lest our 
 desire to praise adequately should drop us 
 into hyperbole. It is so much easier to 
 blame than to praise with taste — above all, to 
 praise judiciously. Our wits will always 
 devise fresh methods for a successful use of 
 the whip of censure, but in admiration it is 
 less easy to get beyond the exclamatory 
 period, and the end of simple epithets is soon 
 reached. 
 
 The stamp of a breathless originality lies 
 upon each character, however minor, and 
 commingled in their creation is an indescrib- 
 
George Meredith. 55 
 
 able mixture of weight and delicacy, of solid, 
 massive strength and finish to a hair's 
 breadth — the finish of a purely-cut cameo. 
 Of the wise youth, that delightful cynic, 
 turning to obesity, and devoted to his 
 stomach, it would be impossible to say 
 enough. Every sentence, long and short, 
 that he utters is a gem of matchless and 
 irresistible wit. Adrian Harley's wit is 
 unique, and beside him Sheridan himself 
 must be content with a lower place. If he 
 breeds a sceptical thought in our breast, it is 
 the doubt that any man in real life could be 
 so continuously and unpremeditatedly witty 
 throughout a reasonably long record of 
 utterances. Though not purposely a leading 
 character, he becomes so by force of his own 
 individuality, and the pronounced part he 
 plays in the development of Richard's career. 
 The story opens with a description of the 
 inmates of Raynham Abbey, the seat of Sir 
 Austin Feverel, the hero's father. This 
 quaint individual is introduced to us as the 
 
56 George Meredith. 
 
 anonymous author of a notable book, ' The 
 Pilgrim's Scrip,' with one aphorism of which 
 we are startled on the first page : ' I expect 
 that woman will be the last thing civilized by- 
 man.' We see at once that we have to deal 
 with a gentleman who, like Plato and 
 Schopenhauer, and a long list of intervening 
 philosophers, holds the amiable sex in scorn. 
 Here we have ' the imperfect animal ' of the 
 one and ' the ugly sex ' of the other more 
 courteously, but not less contemptuously, de- 
 fined. There is no pretension to novelty, for 
 he admits that ' our new thoughts have 
 thrilled dead bosoms." 
 
 Reading further, we discover the clue to 
 his scorn of woman. The poor gentleman 
 has been wronged upon his hearth, and is a 
 widower while yet his wife lives. He once 
 had a wife he loved devotedly, and a friend, 
 a poet, whom he trusted. The one betrayed 
 his love and the other his confidence. The 
 story is not new, but novel indeed is its effect 
 upon Sir Austin Feverel. Bankrupt in love 
 
George Meredith. 57 
 
 and friendship, he fell upon bitterness. To 
 keep his heart alive, while presenting a mask 
 of indifference to intimates and relatives, he 
 concentrated all his hopes upon his baby boy, 
 and, for the child's ultimate misfortune, re- 
 solved to found a system for his benefit. But 
 he wishes his paternal tenderness to remain 
 unsuspected by others, and dismisses the 
 nurse who caught him sobbing over his son's 
 cradle. 
 
 The inmates of Raynham are certainly a 
 queer collection of specimens : Hippias, once 
 thought to be the genius of the family, but a 
 premature victim to strong appetites and a weak 
 stomach, living in the embraces of dyspepsia, 
 and engaged in a perpetual contention with 
 his dinner. Algernon Feverel, whose career 
 as a gentleman of the Guards lay in his legs, 
 until it was irrevocably cut short by the loss 
 of one on a cricket-ground, when he devoted 
 himself to the direction of his nephew's 
 animal vigour ' with a melancholy vivacity.' 
 A venerable lady, known as Great-Aunt 
 
58 George Meredith. 
 
 Grantley, who spent the day preparing for 
 dinner and the night in remembering it. 
 Mrs. Doria Forey, the baronet's eldest sister, 
 who fixed herself at the Abbey with the 
 intention of marrying her only daughter, 
 Clare, to the Hope of Raynham. There are 
 two other Feverel ladies, known as the 
 mothers of two remarkable sons, one our 
 delightful wise youth, Adrian Harley, and 
 the other, Austin Wentworth, a noble youth, 
 who had nobly redeemed a common fault in 
 the lives of young men, by marriage, and 
 ■ was condemned to undergo the world's harsh 
 judgment, not for the fault — for its atone- 
 ment.' 'Adrian was noted for his sagacity, 
 which carried the world, but brought him no 
 friends. His problem for life was to satisfy his 
 appetites without rashly staking his character.' 
 He was polished, luxurious, and happy at the 
 cost of others, and, while pursuing the maids 
 of earth, enjoyed a reputation for virtue. 
 The world declared him moral and wise, 
 ' and the pleasing converse every way of his 
 
George Meredith. 59 
 
 disgraced cousin Austin.' And we ever greet 
 him cordially, for all his vices, and the 
 ' edge to his smile, which cuts much like a 
 sneer.' 
 
 In this varied domestic circle Richard is 
 brought up, the victim of a system. He was 
 carefully kept from the corruption of public 
 schools, and destined to enter upon manhood 
 immaculate and perfect. On his fourteenth 
 birthday we meet him in revolt against the 
 system, and flying with his serf, Ripton, from 
 a medical examination proposed by his father, 
 who understands physical perfection to be 
 wedded to moral perfection. Ripton tells 
 him that his sentiments are those of a girl, 
 whereupon the lads quarrel, as only boys and 
 other barbarians quarrel, and make it up in 
 gallant fashion when they hear voices coming 
 in their search. Their running leads them to 
 trespass, and brings them into ugly collision 
 with one Farmer Blaize, who gives them a 
 taste of the whip, and thus rouses a passion 
 of indignation in Richard's breast. He 
 
6o George Meredith. 
 
 threatens to shoot the farmer, and instead 
 conspires for revenge by arson. Here we 
 are introduced to a silent and unobtrusive 
 little maid, Richard's cousin Clare, who 
 passes through the book a maidenly phantom, 
 only tragically revealed to Richard and to us 
 by her death and sorrowful little diary. Her 
 offence with Richard on his birthday for his 
 neglect of her, and her penetration at night 
 into his chamber, is the second occasion in 
 her short life for departing from the curious 
 negation and reserve of her character. She 
 drifts with circumstances, guided by her 
 mother, and holds her tongue. Of her feel- 
 ings and sentiments we are in the dark, until 
 the despair of silence stretches her upon her 
 deathbed in search of rest. Silent, white, 
 not understood, she remains for us the most 
 pathetic figure in the book. Neither she nor 
 the author choose to court our sympathies 
 by any of the ordinary sensational methods, 
 and her cold pride and his reserve are equally 
 powerful in securing them. 
 
George Meredith. 6i 
 
 Meanwhile, the conspiring Richard, un- 
 mindful of Clare, is exciting profound reflec- 
 tion in the bosom of the wise youth. ' My 
 respected chief,' the latter apostrophizes Sir 
 Austin, ' combustibles are only the more dan- 
 gerous for compression. This boy will be 
 ravenous for earth when he is let loose, and 
 very soon make his share of it look as foolish 
 as yonder game-pie !' Hearing Sir Austin 
 make the round of the house at night, he re- 
 marks : ' A monomaniac at large, watching 
 over sane people in slumber.' 
 
 Sir Austin, marching onward, hears strange 
 talk, between his son and Master Ripton, of 
 fire and delay, and violence and vengeance, 
 when Sir Austin condescends to play the 
 spy. He discovers that the Hope of 
 Raynham has embarked in his own vessel 
 upon the waters of life. A sensation of 
 infinite pity overcomes the poor baronet, 
 asking himself what the years will do when 
 one day has done so much ; but he is 
 consoled by the consciousness of his own 
 
62 George Meredith. 
 
 part of Providence to his son. Baited and 
 worried by his sagacious cousin, who 
 shrewdly suspects his guilt, Richard takes 
 refuge in lies. He lies upon a gigantic scale, 
 to the horror of his father and the amusement 
 of his cousin. But there is a fine and cap- 
 tivating manliness in his lies. He is a 
 perfect boy in all his moods — an English boy, 
 barbaric, brave, and pure. Observing him, 
 Adrian says : ' Boys are like monkeys, the 
 gravest actors of farcical nonsense that the 
 world possesses ' — which philosophizing leads 
 him to Hamlet and Ophelia. ' She, poor 
 maid ! asks for marriage and smiling babes, 
 while my lord lover stands questioning the 
 Infinite and rants to the Impalpable.' And 
 when reminded of his responsibilities as 
 Richard's tutor, he replies : ' I take my young 
 prince as I find him : a Julian or a Caracalla, 
 a Constantine or a Nero. Then if he will 
 play the fiddle to a conflagration, he shall 
 play it well ; if he must be a disputatious 
 apostate, at any rate he shall understand logic 
 
George Meredith, 63 
 
 and men, and have the habit of saying his 
 prayers.' 
 
 After the arson adventure, the shifts and 
 lies, the failure of a scheme to help Tom 
 Bakewell out of prison for his own crime, 
 confession, and the bitter cup of an apology 
 to Farmer Blaize, forced upon him by his 
 father, Richard comes through the first stage 
 of his ordeal a wiser and a better youth. 
 There is a solemn reconciliation between him 
 and the ruffled system-creator ; tears, em- 
 braces, and a new aphorism on the part of 
 Sir Austin: 'Expediency is man's wisdom; 
 doing right is God's.' Reviewing affairs in 
 an ingenuous letter to his fellow-conspirator, 
 Richard says of his future divinity: 
 ' Wherever there's mischief, there are girls, 
 I think. She had the insolence to notice 
 my face, and ask me not to be unhappy. 
 I was polite, of course (British-boy fashion), 
 but I would not look at her.' 
 
 This brings us to the blossoming and 
 critical season of the system. Behold him 
 
64 George Meredith. 
 
 on the edge of youth, beautiful and strong 
 in body, guileless and pure. He takes to 
 blushing, long vigils, and consumes paper — 
 all dangerous signs. The father is dis- 
 tressed, and orders him to burn his poetic 
 effusions, deciding, since the mention of love 
 is dangerous at this age, to put everyone 
 at Raynham on their guard. Servants in 
 love are dismissed, the others are ordered to 
 be discreet and avoid kissing. The visits of 
 a hopeless curate, in love with Mrs. Doria, 
 are interdicted, and this excellent lady is 
 ordered to remove her daughter from the 
 Abbey. In this virtuous solitude Richard 
 becomes wayward and miserable, rides like 
 fire about the country, and has discovered the 
 nothingness of all things. Adrian reports 
 him as extraordinarily cynical. He startles 
 Sir Austin in sentimental fooling with Lady 
 Blandish's hand, and finds he has discovered 
 the secret of life. He discourses pensively 
 with other stricken males about women's 
 names, and here we come upon the beautiful 
 
George Meredith. 65 
 
 introduction of Lucy, the second of the im- 
 mortal duet of Meredith. Who does not 
 remember that lovely passage beginning ? — 
 
 ' Above' green, flashing plunges of a weir, 
 and shaken by the thunder below, lilies, 
 golden and white, were swaying at anchor 
 among the reeds.' This preludes the divine 
 love-scenes, the sweet romance of boy and 
 maid, in a setting of fair landscape, described 
 as no other pen can describe English scenery. 
 To analyze these chapters, or select any 
 passages by preference, were as idle as to 
 attempt to catch a sunray or sketch a flying 
 cloud. They are written in sunlight to the 
 music of love. To quote from them would 
 be to spoil their beauty. As we read, it is 
 not only on Richard that the gracious glory 
 of heaven has fallen. We, too, are under 
 the spell, and, while we read on, remember 
 all we had thought forgotten and dead in the 
 fold of forgotten years. 
 
 But Lucy is Farmer Blaize's niece, and 
 consequently no match for a baronet's son. 
 
 5 
 
66 George Meredith. 
 
 Sir Austin has gone up to London in search 
 of a bride worthy the high gift of his 
 son's untainted youth. His adventures are 
 inimitably recorded. We delight in his inter- 
 views with Lawyer Thompson, in his un- 
 masking of that harmless young scamp 
 Master Ripton, and, above all, in his dis- 
 covery of a suitable bride, when a few years 
 have been added, in the daughter of one 
 Mrs. Caroline Grandison, a female system- 
 creator, whom the author presents as less 
 amiable than her brother - perfecter of 
 humanity. * A perfect woman mirrored in 
 her progeny,' Adrian describes her, and 
 admits that he would prefer her to her 
 progeny. The fates and his father conspire 
 awhile against Richard, and after separation, 
 illness and other discomposing events, he 
 outwits his enemies and runs off with a 
 bride of his own choice — Lucy, the rustic 
 maid. 
 
 Up to this point the book is perfect. But 
 here comes the stumbling-block. Would a 
 
George Meredith. 67 
 
 youth, whose purity and innocence would be 
 sure to give added strength to his first 
 sweeping passion, in the middle of an ideal 
 honeymoon, still bewildered by his bliss, 
 allow himself, upon such a flimsy pretext as 
 his father's indirectly-conveyed wish, to be 
 separated from his bride ? To be kept for 
 months in London through the shallowest 
 subterfuges ? Would either of this passionate 
 pair, seeing with the eyes of instinct that 
 never errs, submit to this absurd and un- 
 reasonable separation ? The Richard we 
 know would have found a way to balk his 
 elders and keep his bride by his side, or 
 he would have seen through the plot, and 
 would have flown back to her after a week's 
 fretting and fuming in town. This would 
 mean the loss of a great and tragic scene — his 
 last parting with Lucy — though the proba- 
 bilities would not have been outraged. But 
 Shakespeare himself may incur such a re- 
 proach and be not less great, and a poignant 
 situation may be reached by the road of 
 
 5—2 
 
68 George Meredith. 
 
 gross inconsistency and thrill us not the 
 less. 
 
 Having so far assisted at the launching of 
 youth upon the waters of happiness, we are 
 invited to assist at something still more 
 interesting — Richard's undertaking in the 
 reform of spotted woman, his fall, his re- 
 pentance, and his expiation. We are intro- 
 duced to many new characters who do not 
 edify us, but only one of whom is nearly 
 irredeemably bad — one satellite of a worth- 
 less but not inhuman peer, the Hon. Peter 
 Brayder. We have met the famous Berry, 
 anciently the dismissed nurse, who caught 
 Sir Austin sobbing, and own to finding her 
 Dickensonian volubility and humour depress- 
 ing in the extreme. We greet her with a 
 grimace that does duty for a smile, which 
 broadens into cheerfulness upon her exit. 
 Much of the society of Mrs. Berry would, 
 we own, fit us for Bedlam. The book is so 
 living that it breeds the strong aversions 
 and preferences of actual existence. The 
 
George Meredith. 69 
 
 very air of reality about the woman pro- 
 vokes an added weariness. We endure her 
 and listen to her as a living bore, wondering 
 when and where she will stop, without the 
 least inclination to skip a line devoted to 
 her prolonged and disconnected utterances. 
 The humour of her matrimonial differences 
 and of the final denouement escapes us, but 
 we tolerate it as we tolerate the rest of the 
 infinite trials of life. In feeling that the 
 book would be better without her, we feel 
 it just as we feel that our sojourn in a 
 certain place, where we spent the summer or 
 winter, would have been the better for the 
 absence of some other tiresome sojourner, 
 that is all. We cannot remember the place 
 without remembering the obnoxious visitor. 
 So we cannot remember ' Richard Feverel ' 
 without recalling Mrs. Berry — an excellent 
 woman, in the main, and an instrument of 
 reconciliation between Sir Austin and his 
 daughter-in-law ; devoted, as bores usually 
 are, and full of all the virtues. Mr. Meredith 
 
yo George Meredith, 
 
 loves her, and for that reason we make shift 
 to put up with her. But we could wish her 
 less obtrusive, and, above all, less garrulous 
 and gross. 
 
 Richard's experiences in town, illuminated 
 by the mild lamp of Adrian's wit, carry us 
 along with him. He claims our undivided 
 sympathies whenever he appears, and we are 
 not sorry to have him to ourselves without 
 his bride. Lucy may conquer the wise 
 youth by [the cookery-book, but as we are 
 not invited to eat of her dinners, we prefer 
 the unedifying sight of Richard upon the 
 Thames and dining with guardsmen and 
 light ladies at Richmond, or escorting his 
 Sir Julian by way of conversion of that 
 indecorous lady to the path of virtue. We 
 like less Lady Judith, the ardent female 
 Radical who married a decrepit lord to carry 
 out her principles, and took Richard in hand, 
 until he succumbed, upon champagne and 
 song, into the arms of the siren. The 
 father who had given him to the world an 
 
George Meredith. 71 
 
 immaculate youth was the first instrument of 
 his fall. He desired him to see what Adrian 
 calls the 'demi, or damned monde,' before 
 entering upon housekeeping — an amiable 
 desire on the part of a virtuous old gentle- 
 man. 
 
 After his fall, Richard awakes to a state of 
 desperate remorse, and disappears to a 
 remote part of Germany. He has found his 
 mother, as well as perversion where he had 
 intended to convert, had discovered the sad 
 little secret of his cousin Clare in her death, 
 and now ' he is trying the German waters, 
 preparatory to his undertaking the release of 
 Italy from the subjugation of the Teuton,' 
 in company with the sentimental politician, 
 Lady Judith Felle. When questioned about 
 him, Adrian says ' he was going to reform 
 the world — unfortunately he began with the 
 feminine side of it. Cupid, proud of Phoebus 
 newly slain, or Pluto, wishing to people his 
 kingdom, put it into the soft head of one of 
 the guileless, grateful creatures to kiss him 
 
72 George Meredith. 
 
 for his good work. Oh horror ! he never 
 expected that. Conceive the system in the 
 flesh, and you have our Richard. The 
 consequence is that this male Peri refuses to 
 enter his paradise, though the gates are 
 open for him, the trumpets blow, and the 
 fair unspotted one awaits him fruitful within.' 
 He views his fault as a pure woman would, 
 and though knowing of Sir Austin's recon- 
 cilement to his marriage and his bride, 
 learning, too, of his paternity, he shrinks 
 from returning to her as unworthy. The 
 scene in the ^German forest, after he learns 
 the news, is most beautiful, and a worthy 
 prelude to that grandly tragic last scene 
 between Richard and Lucy, when, upon 
 his return, he discovers the plot to ruin his 
 wife, in which the baleful enchantress proves 
 the most respectable and honest of the 
 actors. Richard has challenged her hus- 
 band. Lord Montfalcon, and hurries down 
 to Raynham, where the fatted calf is ready, 
 as well as numerous open arms, the kisses of 
 
George Meredith." Ts 
 
 wife and child. The strength of this parting 
 scene is awful. We feel the wrench of it, 
 and the horror, and sorrow itself seems too 
 full for tears. After it the catastrophe of the 
 last chapter is smoothly bridged, and the 
 sadness of Lucy's death and Richard's rise 
 from a sick-bed, numbed with grief, is but a 
 softly-appropriate drop-scene. 
 
 As a story, ' Rhoda Fleming ' is, perhaps, 
 the simplest and strongest work of Mr. 
 Meredith. Certainly it is the best-told story 
 from the artistic point of view. Like 
 ' Richard Feverel,' it ends tragically, only 
 here the tragic effects are not concentrated 
 upon the end. They pervade the entire 
 book, and the termination is led up to con- 
 sistently almost from the beginning, where 
 we meet the two sisters, with minds and 
 beauty above their sphere, and see them 
 silently watched by two young gentlemen. 
 The foreboding is unanalyzable, but it is a 
 foreboding, and we apprehend storm and 
 contention and sombre lights. 
 
74 George Meredith. 
 
 Sombre the book is throughout, and we 
 regard it as almost impertinent to yield to 
 the occasional pricks of humour that tickle 
 us into quiet laughter. How can we bear to 
 laugh at the oddities of mankind, even at the 
 bidding of such a master, when we see a 
 sweet and pure girl's life going to ruin, and 
 understand that the very nature of her is 
 such that there is no return from the wreck, 
 no after-sunshine to restore the ravages of 
 storm ? Here is no picturesque mingling of 
 lights and shadows, no lyrical romance, no 
 melodies of the upper spheres, to imperil the 
 dark remembrance of the denouement. 
 
 The very opening is shadowed. At a 
 village feast, when children danced upon a 
 mirthful May Day on a green, lapped in the 
 soft beauty of Kentish landscape, appeared a 
 young woman, who had left her home with a 
 spotted name, and who was left in silence 
 humbly apart. Dahlia Fleming, pitying her, 
 expresses to her father a wish to speak to 
 her. The father stoutly forbade her, and 
 
George Meredith. 75 
 
 when Rhoda, the stronger, defied him, and 
 went and stood by the poor girl, he punished 
 her by not speaking to her for a week. And 
 the girls, reflecting on this, marvelled at the 
 cruelty of even the kindest men to offending 
 or repentant women. This is where Mr. 
 Meredith is so original and so just. It is 
 impossible to go far on the road of life with- 
 out being frequently confronted with the 
 unrecognised fact that it is men, and not 
 women, who are hardest and most cruel to 
 fallen women. It is they in their capacity 
 of householder who pronounce the verdict 
 of damnation, as this Kentish farmer did, and 
 it is soft and innocent women who, like these 
 country maidens, would fain offer them the 
 hand of sympathy and sisterhood. Mr. 
 Meredith never follows the beaten track of 
 generalities. When he gives us a generality, 
 it is one of his own discovery, and you may 
 depend upon finding a very sound truth at 
 the bottom of it. 
 
 One of the drollest and completes! of Mr. 
 
76 George Meredith. 
 
 Meredith's odd characters is the uncle of 
 these girls, Anthony Hackbut, a mythical 
 millionaire, understood by the rustic mind to 
 be vaguely residing in London, and amassing 
 quantities of gold and genial banknotes. 
 The family look to him for elevation and 
 fortune. He passes for a miser because he 
 refused to advance the farmer one hundred 
 pounds in times of difficulties, and sowed 
 ill-will upon the death of the girl's mother by 
 urging as plea his position of great trust in a 
 wealthy bank that prevented him from assist- 
 ing at his sister's funeral ; nobly offering, in 
 his opinion, to defray half the funeral ex- 
 penses. He referred to funds as worldly 
 things, and hoped to meet his family in 
 heaven, ' where brotherly love, as well as 
 money, was ready made, and not always in 
 the next street.' He ended by a hint of 
 susceptibility to the friendliness of an in- 
 vitation to spend a vacation in Kent, and 
 offered one of his nieces the post of house- 
 keeper, should she wish to see London, and 
 
George Meredith. T] 
 
 make acquaintance with the world. The 
 seductions were fruit at stalls, oysters and 
 whelks and winkles, pictures in shops, sights 
 of muslin and silks, and rides on omnibuses, 
 with an occasional glimpse of the military 
 on horseback. 
 
 Dahlia is surpassingly fair, and the 
 question of her departure is submitted to 
 grave deliberation in an assembly composed 
 of Farmer Fleming, held between a desire 
 to secure the miser's money and a dread of 
 London for his daughter ; Robert, the sedate 
 and handsome assistant, in love with the 
 dark Rhoda ; Mrs. Sumfit, the cook, a very 
 fat and loving woman ; and Master Gammon, 
 an aged foreman, with the cast of eye 
 of an antediluvian lizard, who remarked 
 ' that he never had much opinion of London.' 
 Policy and Dahlia's entreaties prevail, and 
 the fair girl goes up to the great city fore- 
 bodingly, we believe. It is like a division 
 of souls for the two sisters so devotedly 
 attached. A lovely miniature is sent down 
 
78 George Meredith, 
 
 to Rhoda in secret, who marvels at its beauty 
 and at the secrecy. And the next para- 
 graph brings down to Kent old Anthony 
 Hackbut. The scene is inimitable. The 
 queer old fellow, with a disconcerting reserve, 
 tosses Dahlia off upon a charge of giddiness, 
 drinks his beer, because he has not paid for 
 it, propounds an arithmetical problem to 
 Master Gammon, who retorts ' that he is 
 paid to work, and not to think,' and continues 
 to eat his dumplings to the fret of nerves 
 of the watchers impatiently waiting for news 
 of Dahlia. We learn of vestiary elegances 
 and temper, and of an old man left to take 
 his tea alone; and, like Rhoda, we under- 
 stand the sadness of it and, unlike her, 
 suspect its meaning. It is the sadder be- 
 cause of the farmer's pride in his handsome 
 daughters, so greatly superior to their station, 
 and of a conviction that he will prove a 
 cruel judge when the hour for mercy comes. 
 Rhoda goes to London to rejoin her darling, 
 her one fear lest this sumptuously-attired 
 
George Meredith. 79 
 
 young woman should be ashamed of her 
 rustic garb. Robert, a very masterful and 
 extraordinary young farmer, the intimate 
 friend of a major and a polished English 
 gentleman, the prize drinker in his own 
 village and a water-drinker here, a man of 
 double life and double character, and at the 
 same time single and truthful in both, has 
 already sharpened her acute sensibilities for 
 the penetration of doubt of Dahlia. She is 
 dropped into a bitter depth of brooding by 
 the fact that Dahlia is not there to meet her 
 when she arrives. It is late at night when 
 Dahlia comes to fetch away her mother's 
 Bible, and finds her sister. The surprise 
 decides her destiny for that night. She stays 
 with her sister, and sends away the young 
 man waiting for her on the pavement 
 below. 
 
 This young man is the son of Sir William 
 Blancove, in whose bank Anthony is em- 
 ployed as a clerk. Thus had he met Dahlia, 
 to her cost. He and his cousin Algernon, 
 
8o George Meredith. 
 
 son of the neighbouring squire at Wrexham, 
 were the youths who stood watching the 
 girls one May Day feast. Algernon is a 
 flippant sinner of the well - known school, 
 generally beset with debts, and not much 
 troubled with morals. Edward, Dahlia's 
 lover, is of other texture — of a perilous 
 superiority, cold-brained, legal, sharp, and 
 unyouthfully serious. They have a cousin, 
 Mrs. Margaret Lovell, whose part in the 
 story it is difficult to define. She does harm, 
 and sometimes appears to wish to do well. 
 Fabulously fair, brilliant and proud, she plays 
 with both young men, and seems to play the 
 mischief all round. In the first scene be- 
 tween the youths we are dashed from a 
 conviction of Edward's cynicism by a very 
 human and sincere cry : ' Virtue, by heaven ! 
 I wish I were entitled to preach it to any 
 man on earth.' And yet this cry and the 
 flush are contradicted by his cold perusal of 
 Dahlia's heart-broken letter explaining why 
 she sent him away alone. ' The poor child 
 
George Meredith. 8i 
 
 threatens to eat no dinner if I don't write,' 
 he says, and we pity the girl doubly. 
 
 After this it' is no surprise to find Dahlia 
 abroad, and writing home letters breathing 
 frantic worship of the husband she does not 
 name. Rhoda's trusting joy in the news is 
 pitiful — more pitiful still her loyal endeavour 
 to shield her beloved sister when the farmer's 
 wrath explodes over an unsigned announce- 
 ment of the marriage. In reply to his cry, 
 ' Dahlia Blank 1 Who's her husband ? Has 
 he got a name ?' she protests : ' She was 
 very hurried, father. I have a letter from 
 her, and I have only " Dahlia " written at 
 the end — no other name.' ' And you suspect 
 no harm of your sister ?' ' Father, how can 
 I imagine any harm ?' And then the man 
 in his wretched perplexity appeals to Robert, 
 to whom he had hoped to marry Dahlia : 
 ' I'm shut in a dark room with the candle 
 blown out. I've a sort of fear you have in 
 that dilemma, lest you should lay your finger 
 on edges of sharp knives ; and if I think a 
 
 6 
 
82 George Meredith, 
 
 step, if I go thinking a step, and feel my way, 
 I do cut myself, and I bleed, I do. Robert, 
 does this look like the letter of a married 
 woman ? I can't think for myself. She 
 ties my hands.' To please Rhoda Robert 
 would have lied, and said it did. ' Her 
 face was like an eager flower straining for 
 life,' but all he could reply was, ' She says 
 she's married, and we're bound to accept 
 what she says.' His answer is remembered 
 wrathfully by Rhoda. 
 
 Hearing that Edward is married to Dahlia, 
 Mrs. Lovell exclaims, ' Impossible ! Edward 
 has more heart than brains.' She resolves 
 not to forsake him in his folly, which means 
 disaster for Dahlia, and ultimately for him. 
 A letter from Dahlia in London brings up 
 Rhoda to her, accompanied by this uncom- 
 promising father. Lugubrious portent, Dahlia 
 is not visible to them when they call at her 
 lodgings. Her letter shows that she saw 
 them from the window. The next chapter 
 unfolds the mystery. Dahlia is weeping and 
 
George Meredith. 83 
 
 miserable, Edward uncomfortable and pro- 
 testing. Like young men who embark 
 lightly upon such perilous waters, he is irri- 
 tated by the discovery that women are 
 ' pieces of machinery that, for want of proper 
 oiling, creak, stick, threaten convulsions, and 
 are tragic and stir us the wrong way.' By 
 way of medicine he suggests champagne and 
 the theatre. To the same theatre Algernon 
 and Dahlia's family have gone, and we may 
 imagine the sensation of their recognition of 
 Dahlia in a box where Algernon has joined 
 his cousin to help the fainting girl. Algernon 
 only is seen, and is believed to be Dahlia's 
 seducer. There is sorrow and the face of 
 stricken and humbled pride in the Kentish 
 farm upon their return. The farmer's sole 
 aim now is to marry his remaining daughter 
 respectably and forget the sinner. The scene 
 between Rhoda and Robert, in which she 
 still implores him to say that he thinks Dahlia 
 innocent, is unforgettable — sharp, strong, and 
 conflicting. He is sorry for Dahlia, and 
 
 6—2 
 
84 George Meredith. 
 
 ready to marry the woman he loves if she 
 will have him, Rhoda heard him not, ' her 
 brain was beating at the mystery and misery 
 wherein Dahlia lay engulphed.' She will 
 not marry a man who fancies he has any- 
 thing to pardon, and when he lamely pro- 
 tests that Dahlia has nothing to do with her, 
 she bursts out : ' We are one, and will be till 
 we die. I feel my sister's hand in mine, 
 though she's away and lost. She's my darling 
 forever and ever. We're one.' 
 
 Pushed by admiration and love, Robert 
 unmasks himself. Some of his phrases have 
 a Shakesperean ring. He half conquers 
 the fierce, proud girl by a promise to help 
 Dahlia. He shows himself still stronger 
 in his interview with Squire Blancove, when 
 the farmer calls to accuse Algernon and beg 
 to have his daughter found ; and still more 
 startlingly when he returns to his birth- 
 place, and dodges the young men, flinging 
 written and public insolences at them. Edward, 
 returned to his natural element, shows a 
 
George Meredith. 85 
 
 mixture of cynicism and lingering conscience 
 that he only loses in the fiery ordeal await- 
 ing him, when to his and our surprise he 
 finds himself in possession of a passionately- 
 stirred heart. In Robert's native village, 
 where Edward is staying, we meet one 
 slimy wretch called Sedgett, who is destined 
 to be the hero of a horrid conspiracy against 
 Dahlia. Everyone seems to be more or less 
 mixed up in it — Robert, Rhoda, and Farmer 
 Fleming with a sense of duty, Algernon in 
 idle villainy, Mrs. Lovett through intrigue, 
 and Edward as a door of escape from his 
 own responsibilities. Was ever one poor 
 unhappy girl so beset by friends and foes and 
 cruel circumstances to drive her to madness .'' 
 On the part of her family, strength and 
 stern tenderness resolve for her greater 
 misery ; on that of Edward, vanity and 
 cowardice. Abandoned, she falls ill, goes 
 to a hospital, and comes out a broken flower, 
 permanently bent by the storm. What 
 refuge in the eyes of those who unkindly 
 
86 George Meredith, 
 
 desire her good is there for her but marriage 
 — with any man whose name she may bear ? 
 As for Edward, in his profound remorse and 
 repentance, all Kentish faces are turned ruth- 
 lessly against him, against his offer of atone- 
 ment, and poor Dahlia's cry for his tender- 
 ness. Rhoda is his fiercest and most pitiless 
 enemy. Dahlia's letters to him have been 
 suppressed by Algernon, who himself has 
 pleasurable visions of marriage with the 
 victim's sister, and the wild ramping life of 
 the colonies. The general decision is that 
 Dahlia shall marry the loathsome yokel 
 Sedgett, without any thought of the bar- 
 barous sacrifice, worse than death for her. 
 And the ruffian is to get a thousand pounds 
 for taking this tarnished jewel — such is the 
 morality of the majority. Pass a woman 
 straight from illegal arms into those of a 
 husband, and you wash her white. The legal 
 repetition transforms the position into virtue. 
 Edward himself, though desirous of the 
 conclusion, is wounded and astonished by it. 
 
George Meredith. 87 
 
 Dahlia's silence startles him, and he continually 
 asks for her letters. He cannot help think- 
 ing of her while seeking the distractions of 
 Paris to forget her. Never for one moment 
 does he alienate our sympathies completely, 
 and we understand from the beginning that 
 he is neither a vulgar sinner nor cynic. 
 Indeed, it is with a sense of personal satis- 
 faction that we greet his return to England, 
 resolved upon a courageous and manly 
 atonement — a changed man, unable to get 
 the thought of his unfortunate victim out of 
 his head. In that fine interview with his 
 father we are proud that he has surpassed 
 our predictions of him, and we wish he 
 would be left to warm the poor heart he 
 has chilled to stone. 
 
 But Rhoda is there to shield her sister 
 from what she regards as perfidious tender- 
 ness. Nothing will induce her to believe in 
 the sincerity of Edward's repentance, nor 
 accept his atonement. The unhappy girl, 
 between all these ill-advised friends and 
 
88 George Meredith. 
 
 protectors, is forced to an abhorred ceremony, 
 where at the church door she is submitted 
 to the indignity of being flung off by the 
 rufifian who has married her for money. Is 
 this human retribution ? for it is worse even 
 than God's 1 When later Sedgett comes 
 down to Kent to claim his scorned wife. 
 Dahlia, to escape him, drinks poison, and 
 when Edward comes, showing upon his pallid 
 face the touch of wasting grief for all the 
 wringing sorrows brought about by his own 
 temporary baseness, and Rhoda, melted to 
 him, calls her sister down to happiness, 
 Dahlia is found by the side of the bed, 
 ' inanimate and pale as a sister of death.' 
 She is brought back to life, but not to happi- 
 ness. Wasted and weak, passion in her was 
 extinguished, and neither the touch of her 
 lover's hand nor his voice could ever again 
 thrill her. Robert and Rhoda marry, but 
 neither Edward nor Dahlia marry. Her 
 heart was among the ashes, and her last 
 words to Robert are, ' Help poor girls !' 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 ' EVAN HARRINGTON,' ' THE ADVENTURES OF 
 HARRY RICHMOND,' ' SANDRA BELLONI,' 
 AND 'BEAUCHAMP'S CAREER.' 
 
 The atmosphere of ' Evan Harrington ' is 
 neither that of sombre passion nor poignant 
 pain. It has none of the lyrical outbursts* 
 that thrill us in ' Richard Feverel,' and we 
 are spared in it any violent shaking of the 
 soul. We are allowed to view life more 
 temperately, and follow the fortunes of the 
 characters with an undisturbed exercise of 
 philosophic calm and judgment. A delicious 
 humour colours it throughout, and we are- 
 back upon the old sea of metaphors that the 
 writer had nearly drifted from in the simple, 
 undecorated strength of ' Rhoda Fleming.' 
 
90 George Meredith. 
 
 We are tossed about upon its topmost 
 sprays, that sometimes drench us and leave 
 us in wonder whether the author will 
 suddenly get serious and, to use one of his 
 own figures, announce that the curtain has 
 fallen upon this particular part of his per- 
 formance, and expect us to cry, 'What an 
 exciting game it has been !' Could anything 
 be more boisterous than the description of 
 the great Mel, the tailor of Lymport ? . 
 There is a Homeric exaggeration about him 
 that fascinates while it bewilders. Was ever- 
 such a man drawn since the days of mytho- 
 logical heroes ? Great ladies loved him ; he 
 dressed himself up as a footman, and thought 
 nothing of setting a house on fire for the 
 privilege of carrying in his arms a titled 
 beauty. He was the guest and boon fellow 
 of lords, and he measured them ; he was a 
 tailor, and he kept horses ; he had gallant 
 adventures, was preposterously handsome 
 and big and glorious ; he shook hands with 
 his customers, and was never known to have 
 
George Meredith. 91 
 
 sent in a bill. The writer remarks : 
 ' Such a personage comes but once in a 
 generation, and when he goes, men miss the 
 man as well as their money.' 
 
 We do not make the acquaintance of the 
 great Mel, but his spirit haunts the scenes of ' 
 his turbulent career, and we learn of him 
 through fabulous reports and a family of 
 handsome and distinguished daughters, and 
 one son, Evan. All inherit their father's 
 physical and natural superiority. They pass, 
 as to the manner born, into the upper sphere, 
 and comport themselves in that select circle 
 with dignity and ease. Behind them in the 
 town of Lymport the tailor's shop, with the 
 name of Harrington upon the door, exists, 
 carried on by the great man's widow as a means 
 of liquidating his debts. It is the successes 
 and disturbances, the intrigues and exposure 
 of this superior family — born for greatness but 
 not to it — that the book records ; and never 
 was genius more untiringly and extravagantly 
 used than in the combined efforts of these 
 
92 George Meredith. 
 
 three lovely ladies and their brother to con- 
 ceal the family origin and pass for people of 
 blood. The partial success that crowns their 
 efforts is but an inadequate return for such 
 an expenditure of brain in well -conceived 
 and audacious contrivances. People born 
 with a soul above buttons cannot be blamed 
 for every laudable effort to find their way 
 into their natural element ! Imagine a 
 single rose-bush bearing flowers of excep- 
 tional beauty in a cabbage-garden, and you 
 will have the incongruous effect of the 
 tailor's daughter, the Countess de Saldar, in 
 a middle-class drawing-room. Grand manners . 
 and aristocratic habits were hers, not by 
 right of breeding or blood, but simply by 
 right of nature. So we sympathize with her 
 in all her graceful and unapproachable in- 
 triguing to maintain herself in a society to 
 which she had won entrance by her own un- 
 aided genius. 
 
 Contrast the genial spirit in which the 
 writer records the adventures and difficulties 
 
George Meredith. 93 
 
 of this splendid charlatan with the spirit in 
 which Thackeray has painted us his wonder- 
 ful Becky Sharpe — the broad, half-smiling 
 approval of the more modern satirist, with 
 the ferocity of hate of his great predecessor. 
 Not only does Mr. Meredith admire the 
 woman's genius for intrigue, but he brings 
 sympathy and affection to the task of making 
 her intelligible to us. So far from seeking 
 to make her odious to us, as Thackeray de- 
 liberately does in the portrayal of Rebecca, 
 he leaves it impossible for us to judge her 
 more harshly than he himself does. Where- 
 ever she is, we know that we cannot be dull,- 
 and we are amused and captivated enough to 
 be willing to dispense with the chill atmo- 
 sphere of perfect morality and candour. He 
 does not pursue her with a relentless expo- 
 sure of her inmost vices. He preaches no 
 moral after the fashion of the English 
 novelist, and he takes his intriguing heroine 
 as he finds her — an excellent study in which 
 he delights. She is no vulgar hypocrite, like 
 
94 George Meredith. 
 
 Becky, under the mask of a fine lady. Born 
 in the sphere to which she feels she justly 
 belongs, she would simply have been a great 
 lady with uncommon diplomatic abilities and 
 with a genius in the shading and splitting of 
 social niceties. Forced to play the part of 
 adventuress, she plays it grandly, and never 
 shabbily. All her marvellous capacities are 
 directed to the concealment of the family 
 shame and to the maintaining of her sisters 
 and brother in the eminence to which they 
 have risen. She is a generous schemer, for 
 her family are included in her enormous am- 
 bition. It is not for herself individually, but 
 for the family of the Harringtons, for their 
 united glory and stable position that she so 
 unweariedly plots and intrigues and lies. The 
 three daughters of the great tailor have re- 
 spectively married a major, a wealthy brewer, 
 and a Portuguese count. Caroline, the 
 beauty, is unhappy as the major's wife, and 
 finally reaches the climax in exaltation by 
 making the conquest of a duke. Evan now 
 
George Meredith. 95 
 
 becomes the hope of the family, and it is on 
 his fortunes, his efforts to appear a gentle- 
 man, seconded by his sister's (the countess's) 
 efforts to penetrate into English aristocratic 
 society, and secure an heiress for her brother, 
 that the story runs. 
 
 The heiress in whose pursuit Evan is 
 carried off to Portugal to learn the manage- 
 ment of his mouth, how to dress his shoulders 
 and to direct his eyes, is Miss Rose Jocelyn, 
 one of Mr. Meredith's brave and loyal girls, - 
 with a sweet spice of naturalness in her 
 virtues and in her defects, if she can honestly 
 be said to possess any. In her train we find 
 Evan returning to England, clad like a 
 wandering don in sombrero and cloak. 
 Rose's expressed dislike of tradespeople 
 gives him a hankering to announce himself 
 as such, which honest intention the countess 
 resolves to thwart, and is herself thwarted by 
 Providence in the shape of a brother tailor, 
 who comes aboard the Jocasta to announce 
 the great Mel's death, and both ruins and 
 
gS George Meredith. 
 
 saves the situation by mention of a shop and 
 a uniform, Evan's experiences on the road 
 and in the shop are drawn in Mr. Meredith's 
 best style, and we are introduced to one of 
 his oddities, Tom Cogglesby, and also to the 
 suffering countess in low society. On his 
 way up to London Evan is engaged in an 
 ugly fight in an inn, where he comports him- 
 self as the only gentleman, and those born to 
 the title as cads — not an uncommon exchange 
 of rS/es. He meets Rose, and instead of 
 London he, with his guide and protectress, 
 the incomparable countess, turns to Beckley 
 Court, the. home of Rose's parents. Here 
 the countess has a field worthy her great 
 talents. To keep her footing firm, to guide 
 Evan through the briars of a false position, 
 and help him to win Rose, whom he honestly 
 loves — this is no small undertaking with such 
 combined forces against her. Lady Jocelyn 
 calls her ' a female euphuist, euphuism in 
 woman being the popular ideal of a duchess.' 
 The pronounced comedian in a book where 
 
George Meredith. 97 
 
 all the characters pertain more or less to 
 comedy, is Mr. John Raikes. The tricks 
 that are played on this young man by fortune 
 and by men are innumerable, and there is 
 perhaps a flavour of Dickens about him in 
 the prolonged burlesque he plays. His 
 burlesque lovers' quarrels and the coun- 
 tess's intrigues fill the middle of the book, 
 until Evan breaks his neck in a breakneck 
 leap. 
 
 Here is an opportunity for the countess, 
 which she uses to some purpose. Unfor- 
 tunately, she is felled by a stroke of fate, and 
 her origin is exposed at a dinner-table with 
 the duke. The little shadow of tragedy 
 peeps here in the married misery of Caroline, 
 the most beautiful of the sisters, and beloved 
 of the duke. The fortunes of hero and 
 heroine are fluctuating, and on the whole 
 better for Evan than might have been ex- 
 pected. He is known to be a tailor, and 
 yet the half-engaged lover of a beautiful 
 heiress, and the guest of her parents. It is 
 
 7 
 
98 George Meredith. 
 
 true, the widow of the great Mel, bent upon 
 honesty, imperils the situation, and Evan 
 completes the work by taking upon himself 
 one of the countess's crimes, is rejected by 
 Lady Jocelyn, and leaves Beckley Court 
 under a cloud, only believed in by Juliana, 
 Rose's rival. The fifth act finds him in 
 London studying tailordom, offered the pro- 
 tection of Caroline's duke. Juliana, the 
 heiress of Beckley, desperately and vainly in 
 love with him, dies leaving him Beckley 
 Court and all her possessions. Here is a 
 comical reversal of things, and an opportunity 
 for clearing away all doubts of him by one 
 sweeping act of generosity. Rose is engaged 
 to his rival, Laxley, and when her father 
 hears that Evan renounces the estate, and 
 exclaims, ' He must have the soul of a 
 gentleman ! There's nothing he can expect 
 in return, you know,' cuttingly retorts, ' One 
 would think, papa, you had always been 
 dealing with tradesmen.' The end may be 
 anticipated : marriage for Rose and Evan, 
 
George Meredith. 99 
 
 and the consolations of the Church of Rome 
 for the dear countess. 
 
 ' Sandra Belloni ' and ' Harry Richmond ' 
 are two of Mr, Meredith's pictorial and melo- 
 dious novels. Pictures and song abound in 
 them, and breathless vivifying races wich 
 passion. Writers are not uncommonly 
 enamoured of their heroines, and while none 
 of his can claim a lack of sympathy and ad- 
 miration on Mr. Meredith's part, there are 
 three that stand out as rivals for the post of 
 his heart's beloved. In different ways, all 
 leading to the one source, like the various 
 roads to Rome, is he equally the recording 
 lover of Emilia or Sandra, Clara Middleton 
 and Diana. These are his trio of perfect 
 and bewitching women — not perfect in the 
 wooden or puppet sense, but perfect with 
 the lovely perfection of nature steeped, in the 
 case of two, in the unanalyzable social charm 
 which he so well knows how to make us feel 
 and thrill to. Clara is the exquisite maiden 
 of upper England, who could never be imaged 
 
 7—2 
 
loo George Meredith. 
 
 out of her social surroundings ; Diana brings 
 to breeding an exhilarating dash of rebellious 
 Irish blood and a purity of body and mind no 
 less superlative than her younger sister's ; 
 and Emilia, unlike both, is all passion and 
 flame mounting on the swell of song. 
 
 It is a long time since I read this en- 
 trancing novel, and here in Paris, where I 
 write, it is not attainable for reperusal. 
 Hence many of the names of the characters 
 have escaped my memory, though I can 
 recall their personalities and actions vividly. 
 I am still impressed with the acquaintance 
 of a wonderful Greek — a Mr. Pericles, a 
 wandering millionaire, ready upon hearsay to 
 traverse Europe in the trail of undiscovered 
 musical genius. Staying at the country 
 house of one vulgar wealthy merchant, Mr. 
 Pole, he unearths something like it in the 
 voice of Emilia. The Pole family consists 
 of three of those inimitable, ambitious, and 
 diplomatic ladies that only Mr. Meredith 
 hitherto has drawn us. I forget their names. 
 
George Meredith. ioi 
 
 There is a brother, Wilfred Pole, a cornet, 
 one of those limp and flaccid jeunes premiers 
 novelists and opera- composers are fond of 
 selecting to sing the sweetest tenor in duet 
 with the heroines. The hero of the novel, 
 as of the opera, is usually the heroine's foil, 
 his unworthiness the shade against which 
 her splendour and strength shine. There 
 is a dreadful Irish widow, whose name I 
 certainly remember — Mrs. Chumps. This 
 awful creature is, like the Irishman of 
 English comedy, purely the result of Saxon 
 imagination dwelling upon our island without 
 the illumination of personal knowledge of the 
 race or the country. I have here in Paris 
 met a Scotchwoman who gravely informed 
 me that she was gathering materials for an 
 Irish novel, though she admitted she had 
 never been in Ireland, and her acquaintance 
 of Irish people is exclusively confined to 
 the few specimens of the race she had had 
 the misfortune to meet with abroad. I shall 
 be curious to see tha,t novel when it appears, 
 
I02 George Meredith. 
 
 and fancy she is not the first Britisher to 
 represent us to posterity upon materials for 
 observation so slight and so misguiding. 
 The only sympathy the lady mentioned 
 appears to bring to her gigantic task is a 
 partiality for a liquid as peculiar to the low- 
 lands and highlands of Scotland as to the 
 mountains and bogs of Ireland. May un- 
 limited quantities of whisky enlighten her 
 and enliven us ! for she is bitten by a mighty 
 hatred of the nameless Celt. Under such 
 circumstances, barring the stimulus of moun- 
 tain distillery, the widow Chumps seems to 
 have been drawn. Her brogue savours more 
 of the Thames than of the banks of the Suir. 
 Such an Irish brogue is nowhere to be heard 
 in Ireland. And there is something curiously 
 alien to that country in her denseness and 
 want of sensitiveness, for we know thatfpride 
 and sensitiveness are the curses of the race. 
 She is an old flame of Pole's — ' me Pole ' she 
 perpetually calls him, to the horror of the 
 refined daughters and the elegant cornet ; 
 
George Meredith, 103 
 
 and as Mr. Pole has squandered her money 
 entrusted to him, he is obliged to endure her 
 overt tendernesses and force his children to 
 bow to her. This contest produces several 
 lively scenes, including the sequel when the 
 widow finds she is betrayed and cheated and 
 her Pole a bankrupt. Mr. Pericles adds to 
 the liveliness, and also one Lady Something, 
 who is almost in love with Wilfred, and plays 
 an ugly trick on him and on Emilia by 
 getting him to declare his passion for her 
 and his indifference to Emilia within the 
 latter's hearing. The curtain drops on the 
 degradation of the gallant cornet and the 
 sorrowful enlightenment of Emilia. There is 
 also a tragic figure of an organist and im- 
 poverished baronet, who loves one of the 
 ladies of the Pole establishment, and commits 
 suicide because she, loving him, must marry 
 for her family, and several lively social youths 
 and maidens and matrons, who act chorus, 
 wittily, epigrammatically, and sprightlily, as 
 Mr. Meredith's chorus ever does. Then 
 
I04 George Meredith. 
 
 there are Italian politics— a favourite theme 
 with the writer — an attractive Welsh brother 
 and sister, and several unforgetable love- 
 scenes ; notably, one great passionate love- 
 scene at Wilming Weir by moonlight, worthy 
 to rank with those matchless chapters in 
 ' Richard Feverel.' The lover himself is 
 weaker and more pitiable than the average 
 young gentleman elected by the novelist to 
 pipe fluted sentimentalities to the sweet 
 thrilling note of the heroine ; a man — or a 
 make-believe of man, which is by far the 
 commoner article, for true and real men are 
 rarer than true and real women, rare as these 
 be — who could doubt the delicacy of Sandra's 
 passionate cry, ' My lover !' and who ' could 
 pledge himself to eternity, but shrank from 
 being bound to eleven o'clock on the morrow 
 morning.' Writers are sometimes com- 
 punctious for the abasement to which they 
 have submitted their heroines, and spare 
 them the wedding-ring. Sandra does not 
 marry Wilfred, and we hear of ' the mellowed 
 
George Meredith. 105 
 
 depth, the soft human warmth, which marriage 
 had lent to her voice,' afterwards in Italy. 
 I forget whom she married, but I daresay 
 it was her Welsh lover, the noble Italian 
 enthusiast, blessed with a noble sister. 
 
 ' Harry Richmond ' is truly a delightful 
 novel, and, next to ' Richard Feverel,' ought 
 to be the most popular of George Meredith's 
 books. It is all wild adventure, bubbling, 
 bursting fun and lyrical outbursts. Impossible 
 to catch and analyse its charm. It is a 
 book written to weave a spell about youth 
 and sober age. Its exuberance is un- 
 paralleled ; not the exuberance of Dickens 
 or Lever, but a quaint and original exuber- 
 ance of the metaphysician and the poet taken 
 suddenly to football and nonsense verses. 
 He brings a relish quite other than that 
 of the habitual jester, fetches from his chest 
 wilder shouts of laughter, flings his ball, and 
 tosses off his verses with a sincerity and 
 ardour not known to those to whom such 
 things are in the ordinary way of life. Or, 
 
io6 George Meredith, 
 
 at least, we are at liberty to imagine he 
 would, for few of us have had the privilege 
 of observing such a mixture as metaphysician 
 and poet at play. Who can ever forget the 
 inimitable and arch-impostor, Harry's father, 
 Richmond Roy — his captivating personality, 
 his eccentricities, his feats, and his comet- 
 like passage across the sky of our imagina- 
 tion ? His life is a splendid comedy, though 
 occasionally the comic muse drops us into 
 farce as broad as any to be found in the 
 early English dramatists. We are not even 
 allowed to preserve a decorous gravity at the 
 recital and exposure of his woes and mis- 
 fortunes. Moliere himself never devised a 
 broader farce than his role in the German 
 prince's court and his expulsion therefrom. 
 And Shakespeare himself, had he written 
 nineteenth -century prose, could never have 
 given us a lovelier picture of a little German 
 princess and her English boy-lover, with all 
 the proper scenic effects and landscape 
 beauty. And what, pray, are the rough, 
 
George Meredith. 107 
 
 swearing old grandfather and Julia's husband 
 if they be not English to the backbone, 
 brutally, faithfully English, like Squire 
 Western and a host of that school ? They 
 are imaged to us pure eighteenth-century — 
 barbaric, powerful, big drinkers, and men of 
 mighty physique, with whom there is no 
 temporizing upon the domestic hearth nor 
 elsewhere. This is not comedy, but life. 
 English, too, are the scenes of Harry's boy- 
 hood, his life in the farm and in school, 
 where he makes the acquaintance of Walter 
 Heriot, in love with Julia, the schoolmaster's 
 daughter, and his life-long boy-friend ; and 
 afterwards the little wild gipsy girl, whom 
 Heriot betrays. All these pictures, vivid 
 and humorous, carry us irresistibly. 
 
 Afterwards we touch a new chord when 
 the religious sea-captain carries off the lads 
 for the good of their souls, and one fine 
 morning we find them straying through a 
 lovely German forest, where they meet the 
 little German princess — divinest and most 
 
io8 George Meredith. 
 
 witching of serious little maids — and Harry's 
 father. The story is like real life, too com- 
 plicated, varying, and plotless for a brief 
 summary. Light and air and warm life- 
 blood quiver and flow through the chapters. 
 With the writer, we are mounted upon a winged' 
 steed, and carried breathlessly through space. 
 The characters are too numerous for naming, 
 and yet all have their distinct and special 
 parts. If they are minor at all, it is simply as 
 the constant succession of faces through our 
 personal experiences are minor — that is, to us 
 — but not, we feel, in the part they individ- 
 ually play. We understand acutely that 
 they are not there solely to please their 
 creator, and do his bidding like puppets. 
 They are not introduced to teach a moral or 
 propound a theory, or even consciously to 
 act as chorus. They are men and women, 
 rustics, clowns, and society men and women, 
 who have their distinct tastes, their distinct 
 utterances, and their distinct capacities. The 
 epigrammatist is never absent, and we are 
 
George Meredith. 109 
 
 always delighted to meet him or her. Of 
 course, an English commoner, however 
 wealthy, cannot marry the daughter of an 
 hereditary prince of Germany, and after many 
 adventures, heart -sorrows, and joys, the 
 countless intrigues of his father, a duel with an 
 Austrian prinqe (his rival), and the single kiss 
 of blessedness bestowed on him as upon Herr 
 Teufelsdroch, poor Harry returns to England 
 in the pursuance of an equally breezy career, 
 made up of wind and wave, of storm and 
 soft English sunshine. His father's per- 
 sonality tops him, and lends the element 
 of the grotesque to the gravity of his ad- 
 ventures. We cannot take him seriously 
 with such a background. 
 
 But Mr. Meredith does not wish us to 
 laugh unrestrainedly, and so he presents us 
 with a figure of exquisite unblemished pathos 
 in Harry's sweet Aunt Dorothy, a lady we 
 can never remember without an odd sensa- 
 tion about the throat. The glamour of 
 purity that makes no parade of coldness, of 
 
no George Meredith, 
 
 divine unselfishness, of uncomplaining, scarcely- 
 felt suffering envelopes her like a veil of glory, 
 through which we rather define than per- 
 fectly see her. She passes through the book 
 a beautiful ghost of pale womanhood, shed- 
 ding beneficent rays upon her path. As 
 a girl, finding her lover beloved of a weaker 
 sister, she pleads with him for her, and makes 
 an altar of her happiness for the younger 
 one. When the sister dies, after unhappy 
 wedded experiences, leaving a little boy, 
 Dorothy is the boy's mother and the father's 
 secret benefactor. She never marries, and 
 all her money is devoted to the anonymous 
 discharge of the arch-impostor's debts, which, 
 in this spurious offshoot of royalty, we may 
 imagine were royal enough. The scene in 
 which this fact is revealed is, for fiction, of 
 superhuman strength — not the restrained 
 sense of modern art, but the battle-axe 
 strength of mediaeval times. Harry marries 
 the squire's heiress, his cousin Janet, and 
 deserves repose for the rest of his days. 
 
George Meredith. i i i 
 
 Mr. Meredith has written one dull book. 
 ' Beauchamp's Career ' would be almost un- 
 readable, other than patiently read as an 
 exhaustive political treatise, if it were not for 
 Mr. Romfrey and the face of Rende, that 
 brings the soft radiancy of a dream to bear 
 upon its intolerable dulness. Would not this 
 charming description make amends for much ? 
 
 'A brunette of the fine lineaments of 
 the good blood of France. She chattered 
 snatches of Venetian caught from the gon- 
 doliers ; she was like a delicate cup of crystal 
 brimming with the beauty of the place . . . 
 Her features had the soft irregularities which 
 run to rarities of beauty, as the ripple rocks 
 the light ; mouth, eyes, brows, nostrils, and 
 bloomy cheeks played into one another 
 liquidly ; 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.' 
 
 Beauchamp himself is an impossible fellow, 
 
112 George Meredith. 
 
 too wearisomely in earnest, of a single note, 
 which he twangs in a monotonous variety of 
 tones from morning until night. We fancy 
 at the start, after the ominous prologue, that 
 we are fronting a humorous adventure when 
 we find him a sailor lad, addressing his 
 challenge to the gentlemen of the French 
 guard. But unhappily we are not shown the 
 French guardsmen reading his missive, and 
 the episode falls flat. We feel we have been 
 deceived, and resent the deception. To 
 make up for it, we give our sympathies, such 
 as they are, to the uncle, a mixture of twelfth- 
 century baron and unintelligible Whig. He 
 relieves us of the monotony of Beauchamp's 
 lance-breaking with society, and bis extra- 
 ordinary conduct in his heart affairs. No 
 sympathy is due to a man who could go 
 prating politics through drawing-rooms and 
 missing two such women as Ren6e and 
 Cecilia Halkett to fall upon Jenny Denham. 
 Indeed, there are some chapters in the book 
 that provoke a sigh in the bosom of the con- 
 
George Meredith. 113 
 
 scientious readers for the useful art of skip- 
 ping. Noticeably those dealing with that 
 unmitigated old bore, Dr. Shrapnel, and his 
 everlasting letters. Mr. Romfrey suggested 
 that his speechifying nephew should be sent 
 into his element over in Ireland. But no Irish 
 speech-maker of the most pronounced stage 
 in the disease could ever match Beauchamp 
 by reason of the latter's want of humour. 
 Irish orators off the Parliamentary stage and 
 the public platform are ready to laugh' at 
 themselves and at each other, whereas 
 Beauchamp is in deadly earnest from six 
 o'clock in the morning until twelve o'clock 
 at night. Surely it can have been nothing 
 else but sheer weariness that forced the 
 writer to pitch his hero unexpectedly into 
 the Channel, and bring his career to an 
 untimely end. Never was catastrophe more 
 inexplicable, and from the artistic point of 
 view less justifiable, than Beauchamp's death. 
 We wake as from a prolonged nightmare 
 with a gasp. Having failed to understand 
 
1 14 George Meredith. 
 
 why he was there at all, we fail still less 
 to comprehend why he is knocked into 
 eternity in a single last page, and instead 
 of being touched, we are simply astounded. 
 Of a truth, the drawback to the book is its 
 politics incessantly harped upon. The 
 subject, treated in the high colours of 
 Dumas, of the plumed and sabred days, 
 carries a scent of intrigue and romance to 
 interest us ; or the song and chapters of 
 revolt, conspiracy and revolution have our 
 hearts for a nod. What should we have 
 done had we waded through all this truly 
 English stuff of Whiggery, Toryism and 
 Radicalism, without the sweet refreshment 
 of those Venetian days — the night on the 
 Adriatic, and the lovely morning at sea 
 under the Alps ? Or canvassing with this 
 tiresome hero without the society of that 
 amiable and amusing idiot. Lord Palmet, 
 whose mind runs to women, and who 
 murmurs before a virtuous voter in a local 
 institute, ' Capital place for an appointment 
 
George Meredith. 115 
 
 with a woman '? This is the key of his mind 
 and his moods, but it is refreshing after the 
 dance young Mr. Beauchamp has led us, 
 and promises to lead us, to the end sans 
 intermission. 
 
 He is not returned for Parliament, happily 
 for the country, and again we are rewarded 
 for our trials and patient endurance of them 
 by another glimpse, all too brief, of Renee 
 in her Norman home at Tourdestelle. This 
 is a delightful break, but the inconsequence 
 of Mr. Meredith's characters ! None of them 
 seem to know their own mind, neither the 
 men nor the women. At one moment we 
 find Beauchamp wanting to run away with 
 Ren6e, and Rende holding back. At another 
 Rende running off to Beauchamp, and Beau- 
 champ virtuously holding back. Again, 
 Cecilia awaits his proposal, and he is in- 
 explicably silent, though pushed to claim 
 her by inclination, interest and friends ; when 
 he makes up his mind to propose, she is 
 off to Italy, engaged to a man she does not 
 
 8—2 
 
ii6 George Meredith. 
 
 love, knowing the man she loves was to 
 arrive the day of her departure to claim 
 her. Do some people act in this way out 
 of such a novel ? We are constantly ex- 
 pecting Beauchamp to wreck society and 
 create a revolution. Yet at the end his 
 uncle, the quaint, twelfth -century baron, 
 says : ' He hasn't marched to London with 
 a couple of hundred thousand men, and he 
 escapes what Stukely calls his nation's scourge, 
 in the shape of a statue turned out by an 
 English chisel. No, we haven't had much 
 public excitement out of him. But one thing 
 he did do : he got me down on my knees' 
 He married Jenny Denham and left a son 
 behind him. This is all he did besides. 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 ' THE EGOIST,' ' DIANA OF THE CROSSWAYS,' 
 ' TRAGIC COMEDIANS,' AND ' SHAVING OF 
 SHAGPAT.' 
 
 But however great and individual ' Richard 
 Feverel' and the other novels of George 
 Meredith may be, and however high a place 
 some of us may accord them in the collection 
 of books that, once read, become our daily 
 companions — a sort of mental sustenance 
 upon which we speedily learn to fall back 
 from sheer force of habit — not even ' Richard ' 
 can be described as the most individual of 
 Meredith's works. In it is no hint given 
 of the peculiar stand this new genius was 
 to take among modern writers. In it we 
 were not led to scent the great champion, 
 
II 8 George Meredith, 
 
 the mighty swordsman of woman, by his 
 commonplace Lucy and his silent Clare. 
 ' Richard Feverel ' was like a sun-burst, 
 broken with storm and strife, flashed upon 
 the insipidity of latter-day fiction and ex- 
 posing its perishableness. Of such a writer 
 anything and everything might justly be 
 expected, but even from him was ' The 
 Egoist ' a surprise from which we have not 
 yet had time to recover. 
 
 Here this subtle psychologi st concerns 
 himself neither with plot nor passion; neither 
 with tragedy nor romance, nor with any of 
 what may be called the passional springs 
 of action and will. If ' Richard Feverel ' 
 was an original and bewildering canter along 
 the highway of fiction, ' The Egoist ' may be 
 described as a breathless charge into the 
 unknown, a direct and forcible challenge of 
 
 A 
 
 the unsuspected. Here we see mercilessly 
 unveiled civilized man, as he thinks and 
 feels, in the person of a handsome young 
 squire enjoying every advantage of nature, 
 
George Meredith. 119 
 
 fortune and birth. Nothing in him courts 
 rejection of our sympathies. He is not a 
 villain, and he is a polished, perfect gentle- 
 man, well informed, well mannered, well 
 groomed, and exceedingly well mounted for 
 a more than spirited ride through the plains 
 and over the hills of experience. Such a 
 man as Sir Willoughby Patterne, of Patterne 
 Hall, in command of a rent-roll of ;^20,ooo, 
 the ordinary novelist, or even our old friends, 
 the great Immortals, could only conceive as 
 playing a successful and a triumphant part 
 through life. Why, in fact, should punish- 
 ment and humiliation of the lightest nature 
 pursue a youth in whom no vicious taste, 
 no fixed vice, is pronounced ? And who bu 
 a dissector so utterly merciless as Mr. Mere 
 dith could find courage to drive his dis- 
 secting-knife straight to the heart of the 
 conventional system, and qualify the unre- 
 vealed disease of this graceful ornament of 
 county society by the ugly name of egoism ?i 
 the malady of the Ego? Who else but this 
 
I20 George Meredith, 
 
 captain of woman could draw us maidens' 
 bold enough to read the man and reject him, 
 in spite of the big social bribes he carries in 
 his hand ? Ah, this is Mr. Meredith's great 
 and original note, once he has relieved his 
 youthful soul of the romance of ' Ridiard 
 \ Feverel.' Woman is his study, especially 
 young militant womanhood, and what a 
 study he has made of her! Upon this 
 theme not a single male writer, living or 
 dead, since Shakespeare, can approach him, 
 and to it he brings modern subtle penetration 
 added to Shakespeare's purely natural instinct. 
 Not only has he caught the bloom and poetry 
 of womanhood, and made her visible to us 
 to the soul — this were the achievement of the 
 poet and the artist of very exquisite per- 
 ceptions ; but he has got at the very root 
 of her nature — quite another thing. Women 
 reading him gasp at his revelations, such as 
 they would never dare to make or dream, 
 so completely hedged round are they by the 
 conventionalities of fiction. When they take 
 
George Meredith. 121 
 
 to writing stories, they either set themselves 
 limitations in the portrayal of their female 
 characters stricter than their brothers, or to 
 hide their own ignorance of themselves (a 
 mystery for us as much as for men) set off 
 at a galloping pace into the realms of 
 improbability. 
 
 In all fiction there is not another girl so 
 enchanting and healthily intelligent as Clara 
 Middleton — none described like her. In 
 addition to the attractions of birth, breeding, 
 and beauty which the writer thoroughly 
 relishes, are those of sensibilities that can 
 be delicate without affectation, a delightful 
 wit untainted by smartness, singular good 
 i taste and tact, and honesty of soul. Here 
 is a sparkling young woman as clear as 
 daylight, as fresh as the morning dew, 
 beautiful to look upon, as Meredith's women 
 always are, sweet and bewitching without 
 any shabby tricks of mind or habit, who at 
 the same time thinks for herself, a rare virtue 
 in the male novelist's heroine. She is all 
 
122 George Meredith. 
 
 warm blood and variable moods, as befits 
 her age and sex, but never once untrue to 
 the finest instincts of maidenhood, and un- 
 erring in her judgment. She is not perfect, 
 her accomph'shments are not enumerated, we 
 never find her playing Beethoven or reading 
 the stars, and somehow, without one word 
 having been said upon the subject, we get 
 the impression that she is a young woman of 
 intellectual resources, and qualified to pro- 
 nounce upon subjects that engage the minds 
 of sages and artists, while the music of 
 youth runs blithely through her veins, and 
 her feet are nimble in a race with a school- 
 boy. It is her struggle with her lover, the 
 Egoist, that completes the interest of the 
 book. 
 
 Here we have Mr. Meredith purified, 
 polished, complete, without any break in the 
 unity of his work, or any awkward twist in 
 the even flow of narrative, based solely upon 
 subtle and most delicate analysis. The 
 durability of such work is quite as obvious as 
 
George Meredith. 123 
 
 that of the best that has already withstood 
 the test of centuries, and when to-day's 
 literature comes to be old-fashioned, ' The 
 Egoist ' will still hold its place as a lasting 
 monument of psychological diagnosis. 
 
 Of the story itself little need be said, as 
 it hangs upon a single situation unfolded in 
 one act after a short prologue introducing us 
 to the chief dramatis personee. And can one 
 possibly hope to explain how this situation 
 is worked and twisted and unfolded — how 
 illuminated and ransacked to its most hidden 
 depths for the undiscovered clue of self, for 
 the unrevealed spring which prompts even 
 our everyday ' yea ' or ' nay ' ? To en- 
 deavour to do so would be to undertake a 
 task only second to that of the writing of 
 ' The Egoist." Meredith, I should imagine, 
 would shrink from it. It is simply an 
 analysis of the Ego. The universal Ego 
 takes the polished and affable form of a 
 young English squire, the pink of perfection, 
 and highly commendable to ladies of fastidious 
 
124 George Meredith. 
 
 tastes, the eye of whose soul is turned cease- 
 lessly upon self. There he walks and sits 
 
 *and talks before our newly-illuminated vision, 
 naked to the soul, each beat of the heart 
 discovered without its protection of flesh or 
 jgarment ; not one single young man whom 
 we meet and part with in fiction, but the 
 large pervading personality of human exist- 
 ence crystallized to one permanent shape — 
 
 (not Sir Willoughby Patterne, of Patterne 
 Hall, but the soul of selfishness endowed 
 with a form that might just as well have been 
 yours or mine or our next-door neighbour's. 
 This is Meredith's most absolute triumph of 
 
 /art, to which he brought all the resources 
 
 /of his scientific knowledge of humanity — 
 his powerful phraseology and marvellous 
 
 imetaphor. 
 
 Other writers have drawn us pictures 
 Enough of selfish men and selfish women. 
 
 /They abound in the literature of all races, 
 selfishness being one of our commonest 
 defects. But Meredith has given a heart and 
 
George Meredith. 125 
 
 soul and mind to the vice ; in fine raiment 
 and graceful proportions, smiled upon by the 
 undiscerning, he makes it tread the boards of | 
 our common experience, with the blood and ; 
 nerves and muscles of manhood. This is an | 
 achievement of which even a man of such 
 singular genius as his may be proud. Other, 
 writers are happy when they succeed in| 
 drawing a type — in immortalizing a single 
 character ; but this one has done somethingl 
 greater, more unique and more imperishable^ 
 still. Into space he enables us to stare, 
 marvelling, at something hitherto barely 
 suspected, now a tangible form with familiai;/ 
 lineaments and unforgettable tones of voice, 
 a something that we dimly understand 
 rises up with us and lies down with us, gives 
 the stamp of meanness to our best endeavours, 
 and misleads us in our noblest aspirations. 
 Sir Willoughby is the personality of self that 
 floats subtly round us and centres all our 
 thoughts. It takes a masculine shape because 
 the course of the world, both civilized and 
 
126 George Meredith. 
 
 barbaric, is directed by the wheels of male 
 j selfishness. Feminine selfishness has quite 
 another direction. It affects the domestic 
 circle, the persons and interests immediately 
 within its scope. It may bring added dis- 
 comfort to the immediate victims, but it 
 leaves the world without merrily indifferent, 
 conscious of superior strength that can always 
 laugh it down, with a vitality that cannot be 
 sapped and a confidence in laws that form a 
 barrier against its encroachments. Not so 
 male egoism. This makes straight for the 
 whole race of women, mercilessly potent by 
 reason of physical force, and backed by all 
 the laws, written and unwritten, of its own 
 making. 
 
 It is this crushing exposure of the wide- 
 spread plague, the extension and mingling 
 of its fibres, the crudity and coarseness of 
 its very refinement and super-fastidiousness, 
 that gives ' The Egoist ' a scientific as well 
 as an artistic value, and commands for it in 
 English literature a place apart. 
 
George Meredith. 127 
 
 As a work of art, it is, indeed, the most 
 complete and perfect thing that Meredith has 
 done — a flawless masterpiece without any 
 of the writer's eccentric deviatiorns and 
 mannerisms. Perhaps oppressively witty, 
 though much less so than ' Diana,' striking 
 none but the delic?.tely comic chord, and 
 turning to pathos upon the point of a 
 smiling curl of the lip, it carries us through 
 a few weeks' comedy at a pleasant canter to 
 the accompaniment of fanciful humour and 
 polished irony. If we come upon an occa- 
 sional odd effect — a queer simile, a bit of 
 isolated poetry lapsed into prose, a bar of 
 pure melody dropped into speech — we re- 
 cognise with pleasure and delight the author 
 of ' Richard Feverel,' and we greet him with a 
 cordial smile. This other writer is new to us, 
 but not the less welcome — less serious, more 
 polished and more fanciful ; and while less of 
 a poet, he is more of an artist — less philo- 
 sophic, he is much more scientific. The play 
 of wit is less sparkling and more penetrative. 
 
128 George Meredith. 
 
 It shines, a soft luminous light, with un- 
 diminished radiance throughout the book, 
 lending itself less easily to quotation, bafifling 
 even the memory by the quality of the flying 
 phrases. Upon all subjects of daily life bias 
 he something original to say, and he can 
 even be poetical and fresh, and compel our 
 senses to delighted thrills upon the worn-out 
 theme of woman's dress — a theme that 
 wrecks other writers and leaves them dis- 
 mayed by the dulness and insipidity of their 
 own description. Read those lines in ' The 
 Egoist,' upon. Clara's dress in a breeze. 
 
 The characters, as I have said, are few. 
 Clara, the heroine, described by Vernon 
 Whitford, that scholar and student of equable 
 temper, as ' a mountain echo ' — an idea that 
 still lingers with us when we have closed the 
 book as the sum of her sweetness, whole- 
 someness and natural charm — and by Mrs. 
 Mountstuart less felicitously as ' a dainty 
 rogue in porcelain.' Here we gather an 
 \ added something of her exterior, and look at 
 
George Meredith, 129 
 
 a mountain echo with the ej'es of fashion, 
 just as we see through the same sharp and 
 unimaginative eyes ' the sunken brilliancy 
 of the lean long-walker and scholar in a 
 Phoebus- A polio turned fasting friar,' and the 
 poetess, Laetitia Dale, upon her vivid stroke, 
 ' coming with a romantic tale upon her eye- 
 lashes.' This is one of Meredith's tricks — 
 the uttering of pointed phrases by the tongues 
 of sharp, clever women. Sometimes they are 
 far-fetched ; always are they too carefully 
 trimmed and edged, as hasty phrases have 
 not often the felicity of being *edged. IiTl 
 general it is the fault of his characters to talk 1 
 too brilliantly, and he forgets that men and 
 women in their commonplace moods are not 
 habitually metaphorical and literary. _J 
 
 As the essence of self-made man, it may 
 be thought that Sir Willoughly is meant to 
 represent an unpleasant and an unusual type. 
 Not so at all. If it had not been for Mere- 
 dith, he might have gone tranquilly down to 
 the grave, and not even his worst enemy 
 
 9 
 
130 George Meredith, 
 
 would have had very obvious cause to scent 
 the wolf within him. We meet him first upon 
 his majority — a very fascinating and fastidious 
 oung Englishman whom we gradually under- 
 tand is the letter ' I ' vivified and made 
 uman, mentally as well as physically 
 straightened to its erectness, and as uncom- 
 promisingly personal. We heedlessly learn 
 of his dallying with Lsetitia Dale, of the 
 silent and unexacting worship of this soft 
 rhyming representative of ' starving women ' 
 who endure their hunger uncomplainingly, 
 and are too proud to offer themselves for the 
 sensational pity of a world ever in demand of 
 dramatic situations. We enjoy a secret satis- 
 faction in his discomfiture when Constantia 
 Durham leaves him in the lurch and runs off 
 With the more cheerful military figure, and 
 yet we still hardly realize what manner of 
 man he is when he in turn plants Lsetitia 
 and seeks distraction in three years' travel. 
 Meredith makes us understand that he is a 
 youth of spurious niceness, who objected to 
 
 t. 
 
J 
 
 George Meredith. 131 
 
 his betrothed talking freely about male 
 cousins and friends, and considered the pur- 
 suit of competing admirers a stain upon her. 
 Cloistral purity was his demand in the 
 market ; woman emerging from an egg-shell, 
 ' somewhat more astonished at things than a 
 chicken . , . and seeing him, with her sex's 
 eyes, first of all men.' 
 
 How much we thank Meredith for show- 
 ing us the 'infinite grossness' of this demand! 
 And how we relish his quiet laughter at Sir 
 Willoughby's loathing of the ' dust of the 
 world ' touching the privileged object of his 
 choice. We conclude that Miss Durham 
 was a young person of spirit and sense when 
 she ran oft with Captain Oxford, and heartily 
 wish her good luck upon her wedding-tour, 
 while Sir Willoughby abroad is holding an 
 * English review of his Maker's, grotesques.' 
 What a delightful stroke that is against the 
 British tourist! Thackeray never matched 
 it. If you would measure it fully, you have 
 but to stand apart and watch the faces and 
 
 9—2 
 
132 George Meredith. 
 
 listen to the criticisms of our fellow-country- 
 men abroad. Everything that is not British 
 is grotesque. 
 
 As the Creator is just as responsible for 
 foreign countries and foreign races as for 
 Great Britain, these criticisms, as Meredith 
 wittily points out, comprise a review of His 
 grotesques. It is in such light and inimitable 
 pen-strokes, to be found on every page, that 
 he shows us the man made bare to the very 
 /heart. All his social virtues are ruthlessly 
 traced to the meanest source : his wish for 
 cloistral purity in woman, his regarding the 
 presence of competing admiration as a soil, 
 to its true Oriental origin, the monster 
 egoism of his prayer that even beyond 
 / death his bride should be his alone, and 
 of his desire to shape her character to 
 the feminine of his own, without any 
 consideration for her natural and healthy 
 preference to be herself. All young men 
 who think it part of the poetry of love 
 to wish to see the unhappy maiden of their 
 
George Meredith. 133 
 
 choice reduced to ashes or incense, and 
 transmuted by love until they literally be- 
 come ' the man they are to marry,' cannot 
 do better than study the Egoist, and see 
 for themselves the manner of man they are. 
 The study will fill them with a sense of 
 horror of themselves and of the accepted 
 notion of the infinity of love which Clara, 
 listening gravely, conceived as ' a narrow 
 dwelling where a voice droned and ceased 
 not.' In her sharp apprenticeship as th6 
 betrothed of this amiable young squire she 
 learned to become an attentive listener 
 Little else was expected of her. But it was 
 the destiny of this intelligent and impulsive 
 girl to give Sir Willoughby many a rude 
 lesson in the sex she represented, that left 
 Constantia's elopement and free talk of male 
 cousins and friends in the shade as minor 
 offences against taste and cloistral reserve. 
 After the preliminary descriptive pages, the 
 book is completely given up to Clara's 
 struggle for freedom and her lover's despe- 
 
 \ 
 
134 George Meredith. 
 
 rate efforts to retain her, fearful of ridicule 
 and the ignominy of a second jilting. She 
 rashly compromises herself with a brilliant 
 Irishman, while unconsciously her heart is 
 given to the Phoebus Apollo turned fasting 
 friar to whom Sir Willoughby, meditating 
 revenge, intends to hand her over upon 
 granting her the freedom she claims, re- 
 joicing privately in the fact that his own 
 choice had irredeemably spotted her for 
 another. There is something pathetic in^ 
 the poor Egoist's delusion, and while we 
 heartily despise him, we are against our 
 judgment forced to pity him when in the 
 strife his true character is exposed even to 
 his life-long silent worshipper, Lsetitia, and 
 we see the unhappy gentleman upon his 
 knees to that discarded devotee imploring 
 her to marry him, so that the county 
 should not say that he had been despised 
 and rejected by three women, one of them 
 poor and his inferior. His misfortune and 
 abasement are contemptible in their cause, 
 
George Meredith. 135 
 
 and contemptibly borne, nevertheless the 
 something in us which responds to this 
 terrible monster within him begets the 
 pity of brotherhood. Degraded, shrunken, 
 stripped of the glory of success, we see in 
 him a monstrous image of ourselves, of all 
 mankind, so that we are afraid to turn from 
 him and wring hands with the wretch in 
 a kind of shamed sympathy. We readily 
 admit the pure comedy of this sublime 
 absurdity in human form reduced to such 
 shabby dimensions and exposed for the 
 ridicule of posterity, but we cannot laugh 
 very joyously at the exposure. There is 
 too much truth in it for the comic muse, 
 and the pathos is too apparent. 
 
 As Sir Willoughby is Meredith's typical 
 analysis of the male's character, so is Diana 
 Warwick his chief type of woman, and just 
 so ruthlessly as he is drawn is she drawn 
 mercifully — too mercifully, perhaps, for she 
 is painted in all the glowing colours of 
 love. Mr. Meredith is not the analyzer of 
 
136 George Meredith. 
 
 Diana ; he is her ardent lover. He adores 
 her unscrutinizingly, as it behoves the true 
 lover to adore his lady. He paints her 
 very faults upon worshipping knees, and 
 does not think it necessary to apologize 
 for her or urge one word of excuse or depre- 
 cation when, following fact, she stoops to 
 a shabby breach of confidence worthy the 
 lowest new journalist. She is Diana to 
 him in all her moods, a bewildering and 
 adorable creature, and as such he expects 
 the reader to swallow her thankfully, re- 
 joicing in her as he does, wondering at 
 the stupidity and evilness of the world 
 that condemns her, censuring the meanness 
 of the recreant lover who deserts her upon 
 discovery of her unexplainable betrayal of 
 his confidences. If his lady chooses to start 
 out at midnight, fresh from a love-scene in 
 which she has learnt from her lover a great 
 political secret, to sell it for a very sub- 
 stantial sum to a London editor, Mr. Mere- 
 dith simply follows her as an admiring 
 
George Meredith. 137 
 
 recorder, and finds it sufficient explanation 
 to tell us pityingly that she was a child in 
 this world's affairs, that she was as ignorant 
 as a child in business matters, and had no 
 idea of the gravity of her action. This last 
 plea we accept willingly, for impulsive women 
 like Diana rarely have any notion of the 
 weight of actions, and never can measure 
 their consequences ; but for a simpleton in 
 worldly affairs she showed a pretty accurate 
 knowledge of the value of her secret and 
 of its market price, and for a lady to sell 
 secret information learnt in a love- scene 
 seems to us an unmistakable fall which, 
 however much 'we may deplore, we hold 
 ourselves exempt from admiring, or even 
 condoning, as Diana's apologist desires us 
 to do. 
 
 As an Irishwoman I cannot but be 
 grateful to this big Saxon giant for his 
 generous advocacy of a famous country- 
 woman whom posterity persists in holding 
 spotted. He has taken her up in the teeth 
 
138 George Meredith. 
 
 of British opinion, and being deeply ena- 
 moured of the splendid creature, he is not 
 satisfied in proceeding to whitewash her, 
 which would have been a simple enough 
 task, but he has clothed her in soft cloud 
 and fine radiance, he has all but sketched 
 her wings, and shown her standing tip-toe 
 on hard, solid earth with glance strained 
 ethereally upward. Not by any means an 
 angel, but a young goddess, half woman, 
 a creature of exquisite freshness, originality, 
 bewildering wit and soaring intellect, as 
 lovely as Aurora, and as cold, purer still, 
 and more remote from the contamination 
 of gross masculine admiration, than Diana. 
 Her mind flies upon barbed phrases. Her 
 commonest words take the shape of pointed, 
 illuminated arrows. She is the beautiful 
 Egeria of a young minister of state, the 
 immaterial soul of a polished old statesman, 
 by whom she almost loses her social head, 
 and is only saved from the block by the 
 stout defence of her devoted friends. She 
 
George Meredith. 139 
 
 is sunshine in a delicate and not happy 
 lady's life, carrying a whiff of Irish mirth 
 and wit with her delightful presence into 
 the stately and decorous gloom of English 
 town and, country existence, a mental draught 
 of champagne wherever she goes, all impulse 
 and brightness and warmth of heart. And 
 how this masterful knight of hers, turned 
 biographer, lashes those who were stupid 
 and wicked enough to misjudge her ! For 
 every tear, every painful contraction of brow, 
 they forced her to in life, are they punished 
 by his unsparing pen. He uses it in her 
 defence like a true crusader's sword. He 
 reviews her enemies in an almost passionate 
 anger, names them, notes every conventional 
 trick and fault, lays bare the tiniest spot 
 upon which to point his dreadful lamp of 
 ridicule, and then proceeds to shiver their 
 self-respect to atoms, to disperse their 
 highly-prized, respectable prejudices, and 
 leaves them divested of all but heavy 
 British stupidity, that prevents them from 
 
140 George Meredith. 
 
 seizing the charm and comprehending the 
 personality of this brilliant young star shot 
 from the Sister Isle into their astonished 
 midst. Her freshness is the eternally vernal 
 freshness of the shamrock, her faults and 
 impulses the voice of a generous race seek- 
 ing expression through her ardent soul. He 
 makes her enemies his enemies. He wears 
 her colours nobly, gallantly, as behoves a 
 gentleman in whom the medieeval strain 
 still runs. He carries her gloriously through 
 the divorce courts, leaving her wooden Saxon 
 husband, of narrow, official soul, utterly 
 abased and shrunken, instead of triumphant 
 in her fall. We behold her after this crucial 
 ordeal clearer, whiter, more radiant than 
 ever; nearer to the immortal Diana she 
 images by reason of her new freedom ; 
 clear - eyed as a maiden returned to the 
 forest-mists of unsullied imagination ; and be- 
 hind her in the mire lies the crushed marital 
 form, unutterably mean and shabby and foolish 
 with his absurd ' Yah, yah,' on his lips. 
 
George Meredith. 141 
 
 In the case of her English husband and 
 her recreant English lover, her defender has 
 no worse fault to urge against them than the 
 stiff-necked prejudices of race. Both we see 
 like respectable carriage-horses in harnessed 
 strife with a young war-steed ready for 
 dangerous speed and nerve-upsetting tricks 
 — a potent, self- willed young creature, 
 snififing menacingly at conventionality, auda- 
 cious from excess of purity, perilously poised 
 upon every incalculable impulse, and in spite 
 of a powerful intellect, scatter-brained upon 
 all the ugly brinks in her career. No 
 wonder the unhappy Saxon gentlemen allied 
 to this wild and too lovely Hibernian lost 
 their heads and turned tail when it came to a 
 choice of swallowing her whole and entire 
 and following meekly in her wake, the 
 obedient satellites Mr. Meredith thinks they 
 ought to have been, with heart filled with 
 gratitude, and eyes full of love and 
 admiration. 
 
 That they did not do so is their lasting 
 
142 George Meredith. 
 
 shame and reproach, and he reviles them 
 as starched officials and stiff-necked Britons. 
 Whereas another and a less partial bio- 
 grapher would mildly commend them to 
 our pity, because of their undeniable suffer- 
 ings at the expense of a female engine 
 that ran them down and left them in 
 fragments upon her path, he is only content 
 in piecing the fragments in order the more 
 powerfully to hold the feeble creatures up to 
 our ridicule. If it had not been for that fatal 
 newspaper episode, we should have been 
 more than disposed to share his ardent 
 sympathy, and range ourselves as warmly as 
 he upon his heroine's side. But the news- 
 paper episode is an exceedingly big camel to 
 be asked to swallow without as much as a 
 wry face, above all to swallow and preserve 
 intact our ideal of a persecuted, disinterested, 
 and very noble woman. Though not the 
 most artificial of his books, the atmosphere 
 of ' Diana ' carries a heavier scent of the 
 midnight oil than even that garishly brilliant 
 
George Meredith, 143 
 
 study of a pair of tragic comedians. There 
 are dialogues in ' Diana ' that only stop 
 short of requiring a key — noticeably one 
 after-supper scene when the air is charged 
 with electricity, and wit oppressively polished 
 flies hither and thither, broken confusedly 
 upon rainbow sparkles of thought. Though 
 we are sick of commonplace chatter, the 
 intensity of self-consciousness and prolonged 
 mental effort involved in such a game of 
 battledore and shuttlecock, such a desperate 
 intellectual race for the prize for barbed 
 phrases and skilfully-managed metaphor, are 
 surely exhausting. Diana and her numerous 
 satellites seem never in the course of their 
 lives to have enjoyed five minutes' natural- 
 ness, and never to have known the luxury of 
 mental dressing-gown and night-cap. Like 
 the sun, their intellects never sleep, know 
 not even the charm of drowsiness ; and it is 
 frequently a strain upon lazy, easy-going 
 readers, used to Thackeray and Dickens, to 
 follow the unceasing play of intellectual 
 
144 George Meredith. 
 
 pyrotechnics. The most beautiful thing in 
 this remarkable book — next to Meredith's 
 generous defence of his heroine, — the ten- 
 derest, most naturally, humanly painted, 
 is the sweet and faithful friendship between 
 two intellectual women, one a soft-hearted, 
 delicate Englishwoman with the milder and 
 more clinging sentiments of her race, and the 
 other our vivid Diana, made up of Irish 
 cloud and Irish laughter, with her robuster 
 and more ardent temperament. This is a 
 fresh debt that women owe their mighty 
 champion — the recognition of their capa- 
 bilities for mutual friendship, faithful love 
 and generous admiration, which the cynical 
 male habitually denies them. Emma 
 Dunstane married, loves her bright Tony, as 
 she fondly calls Diana, above all the world; 
 and Tony, tossed upon a sea of amatory 
 difficulties, in turn beloved, rejected, and 
 divorced, faithfully loves her friend Emma 
 above even her faithless and her faithful 
 lovers, of which Heaven knows she has 
 
George Meredith. 145 
 
 choice enough. One of them, Mr. Sullivan 
 Smith, is a sensational and finely - natured 
 Irishman, too apparently created after Lever 
 to be of value as a serious study. 
 
 The story is well known. A beautiful, 
 witty, young Irishwoman marries a wooden 
 English official of docketed opinions well 
 phrased. She is loved by many, notably 
 one other Englishman, Redworth, a fine 
 contrast with her husband, and Lord 
 Dannisburgh, whose admiration excites her 
 husband's jealousy and leads to divorce. 
 Her faithful friends throughout are Lady 
 Dunstane and Redworth ; afterwards Percy 
 Dacier, at first suspecting and coldly 
 scrutinizing, goes over to her and finally 
 succumbs. He is a stiff and starched young 
 Englishman, faultlessly correct and attractive 
 after his fashion, which is the reverse of a 
 warm one. Diana loves him, but there is 
 a sort of Diana mist thrown over her love, 
 which shows it as burning a cold clear light 
 like ineffectual sunbeams upon a glacier. 
 
 10 
 
146 George Meredith. 
 
 The young minister of state and she are 
 engaged, and he returns late one night to 
 breathe a state secret into her ears. This 
 is the blot upon her character, the irre- 
 trievable blot upon her life. When he has 
 kissed her for the first time — though no 
 word so barbaric and indelicate as ' kiss ' 
 has been written in the record by the writer, 
 fastidiously sensitive in preserving the snowy 
 plumage of his paragon — explaining that he 
 is but a mortal lover after all, she says the 
 fault was hers that she was degraded. 
 This is straining at gnats to swallow an 
 enormous camel. She goes forth from this 
 first embrace to sell his political news to a 
 leading editor. Fact or fiction, we cannot 
 get the unutterable ugliness of it out of our 
 minds. But whether Dacier was justified 
 in throwing her over for the action is for 
 male judges to say. Great and passionate 
 love, the sort of love such a woman should 
 excite, would, I imagine, have found a ready 
 road to pardon. Dacier is a cold-blooded 
 
George Meredith. 147 
 
 politician, with whom we have not much 
 sympathy, and are not sorry to see him 
 degraded in his creator's eyes, and, beside 
 his brilliant betrayer, shrunken to shabby 
 dimensions. He goes straight off — marries 
 a pious and virtuous young heiress, and 
 drops out of view. The stricken lady, 
 reduced to a state of suicidal prostration, 
 about whom the voices of rumour are for 
 a second time busily and unkindly engaged, 
 is not without her champions. Mr. Sullivan 
 Smith and Arthur Rhodes meet on their 
 way to propose for her, and eventually 
 her faithful lover, Redworth, wins what he 
 gallantly and manfully regards as a prize, 
 and thus the end is saved from tragedy. 
 We leave Tony too dazzled to know if her 
 views of life are brighter, and bearing love 
 for a dower to her husband. Only we con- 
 tinue to wish she had not visited that 
 newspaper office. 
 
 Equally artificial and brilliant, and of a 
 fascinating brevity, is ' Tragic Comedians.' 
 
 10 — 2 
 
148 George Meredith. 
 
 Limelight plays blindingly upon the cha- 
 racters, and Clotilda and Alvan seem to 
 flash before us like a couple of splen- 
 did meteors, to faint and fade in their 
 own exhausted light. We blink and gaze 
 after them, thrilled, startled, and subdued 
 by their resplendency, with a keen sense of 
 the theatrical in their portraits and in their 
 actions. Garish the book is, but most vivid, 
 of a fascination not to be coldly analyzed, 
 of a charm indescribable. It is simply the 
 short story of the wooing of a royal lover, 
 of his lady's betrayal of his love, and of her 
 marriage with his rival. Never was a wooing 
 like Alvan's, never such a lover. That is 
 why we doubt the reality, and dream of the 
 footlights. We listen to him and read his 
 telegrams, and in spite of the Alpine sunlight 
 and the cool mountain air, we think of fire- 
 works. We read of Clotilda's golden hair, 
 and we picture her flying through the clouds, 
 chased by her fellow-meteor and fronted by 
 the black night of marriage that extinguishes 
 
George Meredith. 149 
 
 her after his decent burial. Some of their 
 sayings seem written across the memory in 
 letters of dancing light, and we dream of the 
 scenes enacted by this pair of tragic come- 
 dians long after we have left them. Of all 
 Mr. Meredith's lovers, Alvan is the one who 
 fascinates and thrills us most. 
 
 Taking a general survey of his qualities, 
 we may note that Meredith the writer and 
 man is always more interesting than even 
 his best characters. It is how he develops 
 them, what he thinks of them, his inimitable 
 asides and epigrams, that we look for most. 
 In this he is not Shakespearian, for whereas 
 we get nothing of Shakespeare in any of his 
 plays, in all of his books do we get much 
 of Mr. Meredith, And in none of them too 
 much. The one in which he sinks himself 
 completely is, to my thinking, except as a 
 remarkable tour de force, the least interest- 
 ing. This is the ' Shaving of Shagpat.' 
 George Eliot described it as pleasant light 
 reading. This reads like a joke, if so 
 
150 George Meredith. 
 
 illustrious and serious a personage as George 
 Eliot could be deemed guilty of perpetrating 
 a joke so mild. The story and its abounding 
 verses are more Eastern than probably any- 
 thing in Oriental literature, and if we had 
 not ' Vathek ' as a precedent, we should be 
 disposed to regard the feat as an incredible 
 one. For after ' The Shaving of Shagpat,' 
 ' The Arabian Nights ' reads as a model of 
 sober commonplace and the epitome of 
 everyday experience. Not only is the style 
 Oriental, but facts and colouring and atmo- 
 sphere are fabulously so. The impression 
 left upon the bewildered reader is that of a 
 kind of dazed passage beaten through a mass 
 of broken jewels in a soft artificial light, 
 richly perfumed with the heavy odours of 
 Eastern flowers and scents. Houris and 
 genii ; roses, lilies, nightingales ; diamonds, 
 opals, rubies, and sapphires ; jets of flame 
 starting into illuminated fountains from the 
 heart of lilies set in opal lakes ; winged 
 voyages through the pure Eastern air, over 
 
George Meredith. 151 
 
 cities and plains and sunlit and moonlit land- 
 scape ; impassioned Oriental songs, gorgeous 
 metaphor richly massed through a weari- 
 some brilliance of colours and imagery ; wild 
 amorous speech and tales, and descriptions 
 of feminine beauty to turn the head of a sage 
 and awaken a throb of envy in the breast of 
 Theophile Gautier. Conceive, in fact, every 
 strong imaginative effect heaped in reckless 
 profusion, till, from sheer fatigue of over- 
 wrought senses, we hail with delight and 
 relief the seizure of the Identical, the final 
 triumph of the barber, and the shaving of 
 Shagpat. There are many beautiful passages 
 in it, and the humour of the parody is both 
 subtle and exquisite, but it is too luscious for 
 a single reading, though we may agree with 
 the poet : 
 
 ' Ripe with oft telling, and old is the tale, 
 But 'tis of the sort that can never grow stale.' 
 
 This is Mr. Meredith, un-English and 
 impersonal, and he pleases us less. We 
 
152 George Meredith. 
 
 prefer his human comedy and his home 
 comic muse to this parody of distant litera- 
 ture. We like best to feel his Saxon iron 
 grasp and his deep glance ransacking 
 humanity, as it lives and breathes, to its 
 uttermost depth, and twisting it to every 
 unimaginable revelation. We feel then in 
 the presence of our prose Browning, earnest 
 even in his laughter ; Titanic, with an un- 
 suspected softness of heart beneath a rugged 
 and untender manner, and upon a homely 
 shaft of mother-wit ready to shade from us 
 the scientific penetration of his inward vision 
 of us. His wit is like a rainbow lighting up 
 a stormy sky, and his mocking carries no 
 baleful suggestion of a sneer. 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 GEORGE Meredith's men and women. 
 
 Like Shakespeare and Scott, Mr. Meredith 
 is uniformly gallant in his romances. With 
 the exception of Richard, his young heroes 
 are generally feeble youths ; sometimes 
 pleasant and good-natured, like Harry Rich- 
 mond and Evan Harrington, and at others 
 bloodless, make-believe men like Wilfred 
 Pole and Percy Dacier. But all, as in the 
 case of Scott's amiable young men and 
 Shakespeare's lovers, are merely foils for 
 the greater worth of the heroines. Imogen, 
 Juliet, Beatrice, Miranda, the ladies of the 
 gentlemen of Verona, Portia, and Lady 
 Macbeth are all unworthily mated, and as 
 Mr. Ruskin has said of Scott's heroes, we 
 
154 George Meredith, 
 
 are left wondering at the extreme and un- 
 merited good-fortune of these various young 
 men who have drawn prizes, apparently as 
 rewards for their amiable and pleasing man- 
 ners. The fluted tenor of romance is on 
 the whole an ill - treated personage. We 
 invent him to do the love-making instead 
 of ourselves with the different ideals of 
 feminine perfection we imagine. But with 
 his qualifications, his serious merits, we are 
 not concerned. So long as he is handsome, 
 has the art of using his voice, his mouth, 
 and his eyes, carries his doublet and hose 
 gracefully, twangs the guitar of loverhood 
 musically, and recites his sonnets to ad- 
 vantage — behold the virtues we demand of 
 him. He must be picturesque, above all, 
 and the bloom of youth must lie upon his 
 cheek, else as a sonneteer and troubadour is 
 he pronounced unserviceable by the orchestra. 
 Now, the heroine is quite another matter, 
 as Mr. Meredith, following great examples, 
 shows us. She must claim our sympathy, 
 
George Meredith. 155 
 
 our love, and our admiration. She must 
 
 be surpassingly fair, and no less lovely of 
 
 mind and soul. We are to quit her 
 
 enamoured and regretful, vividly aware of 
 
 her attractions, both mental and physical. 
 
 And this has Mr. Meredith achieved in the 
 
 case of all his heroines — maidens and 
 
 widows. They are beautiful, witty, pure, 
 
 womanly, and most captivating. Each one 
 
 holds us enslaved as we follow her 
 
 fortunes. She has but to open her lips, 
 
 and we are at her feet. In spite of 
 
 his harshnesses, Mr. Meredith remains 
 
 great by his generous sympathy with the 
 
 weak. In the strife between men and 
 
 women, a strife he never blinks away, or 
 
 feigns to discredit because his men choose 
 
 to fall in love with his women, he ranges 
 
 himself upon the side of women always and 
 
 inevitably — and what a defence in the ranks 
 
 of the enemy ! He brings no drivelling, 
 
 one-sided sympathy to bear upon the subject, 
 
 but clear, logical sense and a keen eye for 
 
156 George Meredith, 
 
 the weaknesses of the sex he defends. He 
 laughs at woman sometimes, and enjoys a 
 witticism and a taste of cruelty at her 
 expense. But he makes it understood that 
 his laughter is not scoffing and his cruelty 
 is not bitter. On the contrary, they but 
 add flavour to his championship, and make 
 us the prouder of the big blows he directs 
 against her tyrant. The tyranny of his own 
 sex he doubts as little as its selfishness, 
 which he has immortalized past cool en- 
 durance for man in the person of Sir 
 Willoughby Patterne. The conventional 
 woman, all horrors and shivers at the aspect 
 of the natural and undecorated, made up 
 of drawing-room theories and lap-dog senti- 
 ments, he rejects as unworthy of that which 
 he conceives woman might be, if relieved 
 from the sentimental trammels and restric- 
 tions that the selfish grossness of man has 
 imposed upon her. He believes that women 
 would be all the better for living more as 
 men do, and men for meeting them half- 
 
George Meredith. 157 
 
 way — one sex modified by the other, and 
 mutually ennobled ; eating healthily in ac- 
 knowledgment of all healthy appetites, as 
 opposed to the coarse Byronic view that 
 condemns them to live upon air and the 
 sentiments. Sandra talks freely of, potatoes, 
 fine ones too, while her sentimental lover 
 writhes and shivers, feeling pelted by those 
 potatoes, and the founts of love are nearly 
 dried at the root of his heart. Can a young 
 gentleman with a proper respect for himself 
 feel romantically disposed towards a young 
 woman, even if she be divinely beautiful, 
 when she owns to a capacity to dine off 
 potatoes ? or ascend to heaven on an aria 
 when the prima-donna refreshes herself with 
 bottled stout ? For such types, frequent 
 enough, he suggests that sunlight must be too 
 strong and gross, and wonders why they have 
 not set their wits to invent some soft extract 
 of a shadowy illumination wherewith to 
 diminish the terrors and uglinesses of mere 
 nature. 
 
158 George Meredith. 
 
 He acknowledges the influence of woman 
 in no false, Frenchified way, but accepts it 
 as the strong ordeal and. revelation of man. 
 ' Women have us back to the conditions 
 of primitive man, or they shoot us higher 
 than the topmost star. ... By their state 
 is our civilization judged ; and if it is hugely 
 animal still, that is because primitive men 
 abound and will have their pasture.' 
 
 Of his men, it is the old and oldish 
 young that he draws best. His social 
 epigrammatists and his grave, elderly gentle- 
 men, or his caustic, elderly humorists, like 
 Sir Austin Feverel, the immortal wise youth 
 whose wit never goes to sleep, the gigantic 
 fraud, Richmond Roy, and \i\^fidus Achates; 
 Tracy Runningbrook, Stukely Culbrett, Sey- 
 mour Austen, and a host of such others. We 
 must not forget Clara Middleton's Irish 
 colonel, a ^ very pleasant figure in ' The 
 Egoist,' the German princess's father ^and 
 Everard Romfrey. All these men have a 
 point in common. Their wits are keenly 
 
George Meredith. 159 
 
 alert, and they know not how to be dull. 
 They are also gentlemen. Not that all, or 
 many of Mr. Meredith's male characters of 
 high social standing, can lay claim to this 
 qualification. There is in him, as in Thack- 
 eray, a singularly strong flavour of democracy, 
 and a tendency to reveal us the snob con- 
 cealed by the varnish of breeding. The 
 young gentlemen in ' Evan Harrington ' are 
 the exacf reverse of our ideal of the article. 
 Harry Jocelyn borrows money from the 
 tradesman he insults before repaying it ; 
 gets money from him to give to a wretched 
 girl betrayed by him, and does not apply 
 it to the purpose for which it has been 
 given ; conducts himself in all circumstances 
 as an offensive boor and an abject cur. The 
 young lords and squires around him do like- 
 wise. Some of the gentlemen and peers 
 in ' Richard Feverel ' are very unpleasant 
 and shady company, and in ' Rhoda Flem- 
 ing,' Mr. Algernon Blancove would find the 
 average clerk in the back streets of a manu- 
 
i6o George Meredith, 
 
 facturing town his superior in manners and 
 morals. We get some queer specimens of 
 upper-class snobocracy in ' Harry Rich- 
 mond,' and what, pray, is Sir Willoughby 
 Patterne if he is not a wondrously decorative 
 and polished snob, contemplating compla- 
 cently his own superiority in the mirror of 
 his mind's eye ? 
 
 On the whole, Mr. Meredith is hard on 
 his own sex. Sometimes he draws a young 
 fool like Lord Palmet in ' Beauchamp's 
 Career,' who can be a lord, a fool, and a 
 gentleman at the same time ; who makes us 
 laugh and holds our sympathies, there is some- 
 thing so extremely natural in his idiocy and 
 something so very engaging in his candour ; 
 and then we feel that the author is not hard 
 on him, and has no desire to excite our con- 
 tempt. But this tenderness to young men 
 of gentle birth is rare in Mr. Meredith's 
 volumes. His laughter at them is not 
 usually soft-hearted, but grim, as in the case 
 of the youth who bought cigars to save 
 
George Meredith. i6i 
 
 himself from excesses in charity, and who, 
 after an ill-digested dinner and wine, sat so 
 long without moving a leg that he indulged 
 in the belief that he had reflected profoundly, 
 and woke up with the philosophic intent to 
 forget himself; being under some doom, 
 nobody caring for him, happiness unknown 
 to him, born under a bad star, and ' following 
 his youthful wisdom, the wounded hart 
 dragged his slow limbs toward the halls of 
 brandy and song.' 
 
 As an apology for his somewhat merciless 
 dissection of fools like these young men, 
 Mr. Meredith adds : 
 
 ' One learns to have compassion for fools, 
 by studying them ; and the fool, though 
 nature is wise, is next door to nature. He 
 is naked in his simplicity ; he can tell us 
 much, and suggest more. My excuse for 
 dwelling on him is that he holds the link 
 of my story. Where fools are numerous, 
 one of them must be prominent, now and 
 then, in a veracious narration. There 
 
 II 
 
1 62 George Meredith. 
 
 comes an hour when the veil drops on him, 
 he not being always clean to the discreeter 
 touch.' 
 
 And so he diligently leads us through the 
 unshadowy mental recesses of the fool in 
 question, as a sample of others abounding, 
 not compassionately by any means, with 
 perhaps too pointed a suggestion of sneer on 
 the tip of his caustic pen. He shows him 
 awaking to the conviction that England is no 
 place for him to dwell in — a conviction we 
 cordially share, with the consciousness that 
 England alone could have produced him — 
 with visions of himself married to a wife who 
 in the colonies would make butter or 
 cheese while he rode on horseback through 
 space ; saw himself rejoicing her with a 
 declaration of love, astounding her with a 
 proposition of marriage, and in little more 
 than a week sailing on the high seas, new- 
 born ; ' nothing of civilization about him, 
 save a few last very first-rate cigars, which 
 he projected to smoke on the poop of the 
 
George Meredith. 163 
 
 vessel, and so dream of the world he left 
 behind.' 
 
 If this is compassionate treatment of the 
 fools, we wonder what Mr. Meredith would 
 be likely to regard as severe handling of the 
 genus. Indeed, Algernon Blancove, as the 
 typical brainless young English gentleman, 
 of no morals and less manners, runs in 
 several varied editions throughout the 
 author's works. We come upon him under 
 different names, sometimes more of a boor, 
 as in the case of Harry Jocelyn ; sometimes 
 more of a gentleman, as in the person of 
 Ferdinand Laxley, but ever drawn from the 
 same persistently objectionable type. 
 
 His older men, like Major Waring and 
 Seymour Austen, he touches with a truly 
 remarkable kindliness ; a gentle sadness and 
 reasonableness pervade the atmosphere in 
 which he steeps their picture, and such is 
 their humane influence upon him, that he 
 drops, or nearly drops, metaphor, and adopts, 
 the language of commonplace but cultivated 
 
 II — 2 
 
164 George Meredith. 
 
 humanity. If, as has been said by M. 
 Taine, George Sand makes us wish to be in 
 love and the English novelists aim to make 
 us wish to be married, Mr, Meredith may 
 be accused of a desire to prove to us that in 
 men middle-age is more attractive and lovable 
 than youth, and that the sedate sadness that 
 accompanies it but adds to the dignity of life, 
 its thoughtful measure never exceeding a 
 refined and placid geniality, and knowing no 
 other discord than a very mild sense of 
 disapprobation. In his men of this period, 
 and even beyond it, he indeed portrays us 
 thorough gentlemen, patient and honourable 
 men of dignified habits of life and of keenly 
 alert wits. Sometimes they have just a 
 flavour of fire and brimstone unconsumed in 
 an anterior stage, as in the case of 
 Beauchamp's delightful uncle. He is a sort 
 of twelfth-century baron pleasantly mas- 
 querading as a nineteenth century country 
 gentleman, and more than one romantic 
 young person would be indisposed to hesitate 
 
George Meredith. 165 
 
 upon the side of youth, if ordered to make her 
 choice between this elderly gentleman and 
 his fiery nephew. Nearly on the first page 
 he enchants us with the honest wholesome- 
 ness and vigour of his talk, when, in reply to 
 something Beauchamp has said, he exclaims : 
 
 ' Damned fine speech I Now you get out 
 of that trick of prize-orationing. I call it 
 snuffery, sir, it's all to your own nose ! 
 You're talking to me, not to a gallery. 
 Caesar wraps his head in his robe ; he gets 
 his dig in the ribs for all his attitudinizing. 
 It's very well for a man to talk like that who 
 owns no more than his bare bodkin life. 
 Tall talk's his jewellery ; he must have his 
 dandification in bunkum. You ought to 
 know better. Property and titles are worth 
 having, whether you are worthy of them or a 
 disgrace to your class. The best way of 
 defending them is to keep a strong fist, and 
 take care you don't draw your fore-foot back 
 more than enough.' 
 
 Such he walks the book, a stout and 
 
1 66 George Meredith. 
 
 resolute old gentleman, with words of sense 
 upon his lips, capable of manly tenderness 
 and dignified concessions, and the embodi- 
 ment of all virile virtues as well as those 
 belonging to his class. While the charming 
 French girl and the sweet English maiden 
 hold our senses thrilled, it is this mediaeval 
 baron that soundly raps our nodding judg- 
 ment, and keeps our wits awake. 
 
 Sometimes, as in the case of Edward 
 Blancove, Mr. Meredith wheels us round 
 from cold dislike into sympathy and 
 admiration. But not often. His unpleasant 
 young men are not more susceptible of 
 conversion than they are usually to be found 
 in real life, and he is not fond of playing such 
 tricks as this one, wherein we get from the 
 lips of a coldly argumentative and sharply 
 legal young gentleman, who has, hitherto, 
 conducted himself as something of a well- 
 bred knave, such honest words as these : 
 
 ' Plainly, sir, in God's name, hear me out. 
 She's — what shall I call her ? my mistress, 
 
George Meredith. 167 
 
 my sweetheart, if you like — let the name be 
 anything — " wife " it should have been and 
 shall be — I left her, and have left her, and 
 have not looked on her for many months. I 
 thought I was tired of her — I was under odd 
 influences — witchcraft, it seems. I could 
 believe in witchcraft now. Brutal selfishness 
 is the phrase for my conduct. I have found 
 out my villainy. I have not done a day's sen- 
 sible work, nor had a single clear thought, since 
 I parted from her. She has had brain-fever. 
 She has been in the hospital. She is now 
 prostrate with misery. While she suffered, 
 I — I can't look back on myself. If I had 
 to plead before you for more than manly 
 consideration, I could touch you. I am my 
 own master, and am ready to subsist by my 
 own efforts ; there is no necessity for me to 
 do more than say I abide by the choice I 
 make, and my own actions. In deciding to 
 marry her, I do a good thing, I do a just 
 thing. I will prove to you that I have done 
 a wise thing.' 
 
1 68 George Meredith. 
 
 Such words as these would redeem a 
 stormier and a shabbier youth than Edward 
 Blancove's ; they toss him up from the brink 
 of common rascality upon the verge of quiet 
 heroism. We are forced by them, not into 
 condonation only, but into respect and 
 admiring amazement, and we are almost 
 glad of a fault that has been so nobly 
 redeemed. 
 
 Apart from any other claim he may have 
 upon his generation, Mr. Meredith's greatest 
 and most original will ever remain his marvel- 
 lous knowledge of woman. All young girls 
 upon the verge of womanhood should be 
 recommended an exhaustive study of him 
 upon this subject, as a healthy antidote against 
 the nauseous and abominable travesties of 
 themselves and their species circulated by 
 the libraries, in which volumes, however bad 
 the men may be drawn, the women are ten 
 times worse, fifty times more unnatural, and at 
 least a hundred times more corrupting to the 
 sane judgment. From him, instead of the 
 
George Meredith, 169 
 
 current inanities in which the typical heroine 
 of the circulating libraries is enveloped past 
 recognition of human sisterhood (thank 
 Heaven ! for a fraternity with the monstrous 
 doll would be a greater grievance than any 
 we owe unkind nature), will they learn much 
 upon their sex that will give them material 
 for long and profound reflection. They will 
 learn that the eggshell appearance of woman 
 upon the boards of experience is a gross 
 exaction, the remnant of a grosser stage in 
 man — that the demand is the reverse of a 
 compliment to her. Instead of that ragged 
 aphorism (clothing of a lie), ' that the hardest 
 on women are women themselves,' they 
 will be offered a higher and juster estimate 
 of their own natural mercy, and will hear 
 'that a woman in the pillory restores the 
 original bark of brotherhood to mankind,' a 
 remark to give them pause and set their 
 brains in another direction. They will also 
 learn, what they can never sufficiently ap- 
 preciate, that 'what a woman thinks of women 
 
lyo George Meredith. 
 
 is the test of her nature ;' that ' in their 
 judgments upon women, men are females, 
 voices of the present sexual dilemma,' and 
 that in their desire to have a ' a still woman 
 who can make a constant society of her pins 
 and needles,' 'they create by stoppage a 
 volcano, and are amazed at its eruptiveness,' 
 and a word upon which we cannot too 
 insistently weigh, a gallant word from a male 
 pen, ' that the motive life with women must 
 be in the head, equally with men.' 
 
 THE END. 
 
 BILLING AND SONS, PRINTERS, GUILDFORD" 
 
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