GEORGE MEREDITH

[Illustration]




  GEORGE MEREDITH

  _A STUDY_

  BY
  HANNAH LYNCH

  Methuen & Co.
  18, BURY STREET, LONDON, W.C.
  1891

  [_All rights reserved_]




To

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--μηδὲν ἄγαν? 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 understand--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 sunshine 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 remembrance 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 afterwards 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 fountainhead to study for
themselves the novels of Mr. Meredith, curious to see if I had not
overrated his merits, as is the habit of enthusiastic disciples, and
greatly astonished to find their expectations disappointed, and my
estimate unexaggerated.

While still engaged upon this work I received 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 published by Messrs. Chapman and
Hall.

                                                           HANNAH LYNCH.




CONTENTS.


  CHAPTER                                                         PAGE

    I. THE GRADUAL RECOGNITION OF GEORGE MEREDITH AS A NOVELIST      1

   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 THE 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, 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, penetrated life and its meaning
by the road of sympathy rather than reflection, and unconsciously 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 existence, and under the influence of the
personalities 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 completely surprised
than either by the doings 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
impressions. 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. 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 persuasion 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; heedless of the fact that we
may entangle ourselves 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 only, 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 this new way of popularizing philosophy through
fiction and the rose-lights of imagination. 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 consciousness 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 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 beautifying life, than either George Eliot or
Tolstoi. Perhaps he has a healthier conviction 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 remarkable for brilliancy,
nor, to any special degree, has it given evidence of perspicacity.
But nowhere has it shown such an inexcusable 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 masterpiece
after masterpiece, and because he applies some hard knocks to our
understanding, 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 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 superlative praise, and meet
with immediate popularity. It had already been preceded by a volume of
notable poetry, by that 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 asked 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 of Meredith’s that nearly wrecked a
newspaper 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 intellectual isolation, and, to the
artist, can never fill adequately the place of generous and hearty
appreciation. Wrapped in his philosophic cloak, the thinker may make
shift to do without his fellows, and call them by hard names, but
to the artist and the poet, sympathy and the warm praise of living
voices 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, ‘Modern Love,’ the _Spectator_ chose to assail, as
an unfledged beginner, the man who had given such work as his to the
world; whereupon Mr. Swinburne, 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 pronounced 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 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 links 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 questioner by the suggestion that he
doubtless meant _Owen_ Meredith. With Owen Meredith they were familiar
enough, but George 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--understands,
and very few try to understand.’

Five or six years ago I imagined this incredible 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 completion of their intellectual taste; and strange, 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 due to himself, to his obscurities, his ruggedness, 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 Browning 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 anything 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.

  ‘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 fly 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;
  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. Explain it by the unattractiveness of his difficulties,
and what have you to say against the soothing charm and the exquisite
simplicity of such lines as these, that linger in the memory, not only
because of their delicate music, but because of their vividness of
picture and the autumn sadness that 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
unpretentiousness.

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
recognition. 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 production of the one as they
had been by that of the other--being equally unaware of the existence
of either. The book was not extensively reviewed, and only the happy
few congratulated themselves upon the acquisition. Perhaps their
satisfaction in it was increased by the fact that it was not shared
by the crowd, for though the lovers of an unappreciated 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 misunderstood,
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 decided 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 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, imperceptibly. In 1867 ‘Vittoria’ first came out in the
_Fortnightly Review_, a review henceforth 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 1871, we meet him in _Cornhill_
recording 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 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-headedness, this is most certainly a step in advance. But to
his own especial minority, it is not ‘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 impossibility 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 has been made ready to receive the
intelligence 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 be 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 inextinguishable laughter,
nor yet as Thackeray does, in a vein of comic satire. If he calls upon
us to recognise that life is often a sad blunder, and to pity the
blunderers, he is neither sentimental in his claim, nor consciously
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. Brain 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 composed of so many diverse elements, would be
difficult even for his peers. Its quality is at the same time rugged
and elusive, obscure and dazzlingly brilliant, witty and profound,
harsh and most musically tender, light as a summer cloud, majestic as
a storm. But his great defect is artificiality. His splendid pages
and his matchless dialogues never lose the obtrusive flavour of the
midnight oil, and we see most of his characters through a blinding
glitter of limelight. This excessive use of artificial illumination,
while fascinating us and compelling our admiration for the writer’s
extraordinary cleverness, wearies us and irritates us at times, and
we long for the mental repose of a whiff of commonplace and a page
or two, by way of interlude, of fluent easy prose that rests the eye
and the brain. There are so many tricks and surprises bestrewing our
path, five-barred gates starting unexpectedly for us to leap; we are
deliberately plunged neck and heels into so many swamps, and bowled
over all sorts of rocks and stones, with the oddest sensations in
conflict, that we more than once pay our debt grudgingly, and, like a
peaceable man knocked down by a bludgeon, are amazed at the liberty
that has been taken with our understanding. In this exuberant display
of his own powers does Meredith show himself to be thoroughly English.
He is unapproachable as a wrestler with words and phrases, and infuses
dead speech with the vitality of blood and muscles. Words with him
are like thoughts--strong, living, tangible to the touch of the
soul. They seem to fly, and mount, and flutter round us, to catch our
breath forcibly, and hold our imagination in the grasp of blood-warmed
fingers. The most ordinary action of life, described by him in a line
or two, is not a photograph, but a vivid revelation, a scene stamped
not on the vision, but upon the mind. When he is not playing queer
tricks with us and keeping every sense insufferably alert, every nerve
strained to catch the meaning that dances tantalizingly before us,
flying hither and thither upon fantastic figures of speech, until the
writer himself seems drunk with his own juggling, he is quieting our
baffled senses by these sharp revelations that have no artificial
glamour about them. He ceases to be the inhuman metaphorist, and
becomes our brother again, and we forget that he ever terrified us. I
open ‘Evan Harrington’ at random, and alight on a paragraph where each
word is vividly set in a perfect whole. There is no twist or turning
here, and as we see the red harvest-moon and the dark water and trees,
so we seem to touch the hand of suffering youth:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




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, his own special favourite. 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 situation. 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 indescribable 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 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, defined. 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 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,
resolved 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 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 atonement.’ ‘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 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 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 feelings 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.

Meanwhile, the conspiring Richard, unmindful of Clare, is exciting
profound reflection in the bosom of the wise youth. ‘My respected
chief,’ the latter apostrophizes Sir Austin, ‘combustibles are only
the more dangerous 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 remarks: ‘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 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 captivating 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 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, embraces, 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 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 distressed, 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 introduction of Lucy, the
second of the immortal 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. 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 interviews with Lawyer
Thompson, in his unmasking of that harmless young scamp Master Ripton,
and, above all, in his discovery 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 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 unreasonable 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
probabilities would not have been outraged. But Shakespeare himself may
incur such a reproach and be not less great, and a poignant situation
may be reached by the road of 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 repentance, and his expiation. We are introduced to many
new characters who do not edify us, but only one of whom is nearly
irredeemably bad--one satellite of a worthless 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 depressing 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 very
air of reality about the woman provokes 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 _dénouement_ 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 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 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 gentleman.

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 Phœbus 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 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
reconcilement 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 husband, Lord Montfalcon,
and hurries down to Raynham, where the fatted calf is ready, as well
as numerous open arms, the kisses of 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 consistently
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.

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 _dénouement_.

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 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 without 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 completest of Mr. 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
assisting at his sister’s funeral; nobly offering, in his opinion,
to defray half the funeral expenses. 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 invitation to spend a vacation in Kent, and offered one of his
nieces the post of housekeeper, should she wish to see London, and
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 forebodingly, we believe. It is
like a division of souls for the two sisters so devotedly attached. A
lovely miniature is sent down to Rhoda in secret, who marvels at its
beauty and at the secrecy. And the next paragraph 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 understand the sadness of it
and, unlike her, suspect its meaning. It is the sadder because 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 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 employed as a clerk. Thus had he met Dahlia, to her cost. He
and his cousin Algernon, 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 between 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 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 announcement of the marriage. In reply to
his cry, ‘Dahlia Blank! 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 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 uncompromising 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 miserable, Edward
uncomfortable and protesting. Like young men who embark lightly upon
such perilous waters, he is irritated 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 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
anything to pardon, and when he lamely protests 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 mixture of cynicism and lingering conscience that
he only loses in the fiery ordeal awaiting 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 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 ruthlessly against him, against his offer of atonement,
and poor Dahlia’s cry for his tenderness. 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 barbarous 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. Dahlia’s silence startles him, and he continually
asks for her letters. He cannot help thinking 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 satisfaction 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 tenderness. 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 protectors, is forced
to an abhorred ceremony, where at the church door she is submitted to
the indignity of being flung off by the ruffian who has married her for
money. Is this human retribution? for it is worse even than God’s! 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 happiness. 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.’ 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 performance, 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 mythological 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 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 three lovely ladies and their
brother to conceal 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 exceptional
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 intriguing
to maintain herself in a society to which she had won entrance by her
own unaided genius.

Contrast the genial spirit in which the writer records the adventures
and difficulties of this splendid charlatan with the spirit in which
Thackeray has painted us his wonderful 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 deliberately does in the portrayal
of Rebecca, he leaves it impossible for us to judge her more harshly
than he himself does. Wherever she is, we know that we cannot be dull,
and we are amused and captivated enough to be willing to dispense
with the chill atmosphere of perfect morality and candour. He does
not pursue her with a relentless exposure 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 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
ambition. 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 respectively 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 becomes the hope of the family, and it is on his
fortunes, his efforts to appear a gentleman, 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 management 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 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 himself as the
only gentleman, and those born to the title as cads--not an uncommon
exchange of _rôles_. 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 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 countess’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. Unfortunately, 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 expected. 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 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 protection 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, 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 melodious novels. Pictures and song abound in them, and
breathless vivifying races with passion. Writers are not uncommonly
enamoured of their heroines, and while none of his can claim a lack of
sympathy and admiration 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 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 entrancing 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. 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 that novel when it appears, 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 lowlands and highlands of Scotland
as to the mountains and bogs of Ireland. May unlimited 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 mountain 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 that pride 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; 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 impoverished 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 there are Italian politics--a
favourite theme with the writer--an attractive Welsh brother and
sister, and several unforgettable 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 compunctious 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 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
unparalleled; not the exuberance of Dickens or Lever, but a quaint and
original exuberance 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, 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 imagination? 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 misfortunes. Molière himself never devised a broader farce than his
_rôle_ 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, 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 boyhood, 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 witching of serious
little maids--and Harry’s father. The story is like real life, too
complicated, 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 individually 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 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 prince (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 personality
tops him, and lends the element of the grotesque to the gravity of his
adventures. 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 sensation about the throat. The glamour of purity that makes
no parade of coldness, of divine unselfishness, of uncomplaining,
scarcely-felt suffering envelopes her like a veil of glory, through
which we rather define than perfectly see her. She passes through the
book a beautiful ghost of pale womanhood, shedding 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 mediæval times. Harry marries the squire’s heiress, his
cousin Janet, and deserves repose for the rest of his days.

Mr. Meredith has written one dull book. ‘Beauchamp’s Career’ would be
almost unreadable, other than patiently read as an exhaustive political
treatise, if it were not for Mr. Romfrey and the face of Renée, 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 gondoliers; 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, 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 his extraordinary 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 Renée 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 conscientious
readers for the useful art of skipping. 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
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 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 Renée 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 Renée, and Renée holding back. At another Renée running off
to Beauchamp, and Beauchamp virtuously holding back. Again, Cecilia
awaits his proposal, and he is inexplicably 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
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 expecting 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, 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 exposing 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 psychologist 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 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,
fortune and birth. Nothing in him courts rejection of our sympathies.
He is not a villain, and he is a polished, perfect gentleman, 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 £20,000, 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
punishment and humiliation of the lightest nature pursue a youth in
whom no vicious taste, no fixed vice, is pronounced? And who but a
dissector so utterly merciless as Mr. Meredith could find courage to
drive his dissecting-knife straight to the heart of the conventional
system, and qualify the unrevealed disease of this graceful ornament
of county society by the ugly name of egoism? the malady of the Ego?
Who else but this 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 ‘Richard
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 perceptions;
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 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 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
warm blood and variable moods, as befits her age and sex, but never
once untrue to the finest instincts of maidenhood, and unerring in her
judgment. She is not perfect, her accomplishments 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 pronounce 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 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 personæ_. 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 endeavour 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 tastes, the eye of whose soul is turned ceaselessly 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 garment; not one single young man whom we
meet and part with in fiction, but the large pervading personality of
human existence 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 metaphor.

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
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 something 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 familiar 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 barbaric, is directed by the wheels
of male selfishness. Feminine selfishness has quite another direction.
It affects the domestic circle, the persons and interests immediately
within its scope. It may bring added discomfort 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.

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 deviations and mannerisms. Perhaps oppressively
witty, though much less so than ‘Diana,’ striking none but the
delicately 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 occasional odd effect--a queer simile, a bit
of isolated poetry lapsed into prose, a bar of pure melody dropped into
speech--we recognise 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
philosophic, he is much more scientific. The play of wit is less
sparkling and more penetrative. It shines, a soft luminous light, with
undiminished radiance throughout the book, lending itself less easily
to quotation, baffling even the memory by the quality of the flying
phrases. Upon all subjects of daily life has 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 dismayed 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, wholesomeness 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 a mountain echo with the eyes 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 Phœbus-Apollo turned fasting
friar,’ and the poetess, Lætitia Dale, upon her vivid stroke, ‘coming
with a romantic tale upon her eyelashes.’ 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. In general it is the fault of his characters to talk too
brilliantly, and he forgets that men and women in their commonplace
moods are not habitually metaphorical and literary.

As the essence of self-made man, it may be thought that Sir Willoughby
is meant to represent an unpleasant and an unusual type. Not so at
all. If it had not been for Meredith, he might have gone tranquilly
down to the grave, and not even his worst enemy would have had very
obvious cause to scent the wolf within him. We meet him first upon
his majority--a very fascinating and fastidious young Englishman whom
we gradually understand is the letter ‘I’ vivified and made human,
mentally as well as physically straightened to its erectness, and
as uncompromisingly personal. We heedlessly learn of his dallying
with Lætitia 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 satisfaction 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 Lætitia and seeks distraction in three years’ travel.
Meredith makes us understand that he is a youth of spurious niceness,
who objected to his betrothed talking freely about male cousins and
friends, and considered the pursuit of competing admirers a stain upon
her. Cloistral purity was his demand in the market; woman emerging from
an eggshell, ‘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 showing 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 off 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 listen to the criticisms of our fellow-countrymen 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 choice reduced to ashes or incense, and transmuted by
love until they literally become ‘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 the 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 desperate 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 Phœbus-Apollo turned fasting friar to whom Sir Willoughby,
meditating revenge, intends to hand her over upon granting her the
freedom she claims, rejoicing 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, Lætitia,
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, 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 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 deprecation 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, rejoicing 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 substantial sum to a London editor, Mr. Meredith
simply follows her as an admiring 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 of
British opinion, and being deeply enamoured 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 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
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 seeking expression through
her ardent soul. He makes her enemies his enemies. He wears her colours
nobly, gallantly, as behoves a gentleman in whom the mediæval 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 behind her in the mire lies the crushed marital form,
unutterably mean and shabby and foolish with his absurd ‘Yah, yah,’ on
his lips.

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, sniffing
menacingly at conventionality, audacious 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 shame and reproach, and he
reviles them as starched officials and stiff-necked Britons. Whereas
another and a less partial biographer would mildly commend them to
our pity, because of their undeniable sufferings 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 newspaper 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 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’ naturalness, 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 pyrotechnics. The most beautiful thing in this remarkable
book--next to Meredith’s generous defence of his heroine,--the
tenderest, 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 capabilities 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 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. 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 irretrievable 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
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 continue to wish she had not visited that newspaper
office.

Equally artificial and brilliant, and of a fascinating brevity, is
‘Tragic Comedians.’ Limelight plays blindingly upon the characters,
and Clotilda and Alvan seem to flash before us like a couple of
splendid 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 fireworks. 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 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 comedians 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 interesting. This is the ‘Shaving of Shagpat.’ George Eliot
described it as pleasant light reading. This reads like a joke, if so
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 anything 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 atmosphere 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 cities and plains and sunlit and
moonlit landscape; impassioned Oriental songs, gorgeous metaphor
richly massed through a wearisome 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
Théophile Gautier. Conceive, in fact, every strong imaginative effect
heaped in reckless profusion, till, from sheer fatigue of overwrought
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 prefer his human comedy and his home comic muse to this
parody of distant literature. 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 unsuspected 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 Richmond
and Evan Harrington, and at others bloodless, make-believe men like
Wilfred Pole and Percy Dacier. But all, as in the case of Scott’s
amiable young men and Shakespeare’s lovers, are merely foils for the
greater worth of the heroines. Imogen, Juliet, Beatrice, Miranda, the
ladies of the gentlemen of Verona, Portia, and Lady Macbeth are all
unworthily mated, and as Mr. Ruskin has said of Scott’s heroes, we
are left wondering at the extreme and unmerited good fortune of these
various young men who have drawn prizes, apparently as rewards for
their amiable and pleasing manners. The fluted tenor of romance is on
the whole an ill-treated personage. We invent him to do the love-making
instead of ourselves with the different ideals of feminine perfection
we imagine. But with his qualifications, his serious merits, we are not
concerned. So long as he is handsome, has the art of using his voice,
his mouth, and his eyes, carries his doublet and hose gracefully,
twangs the guitar of loverhood musically, and recites his sonnets to
advantage--behold the virtues we demand of him. He must be picturesque,
above all, and the bloom of youth must lie upon his cheek, else as
a sonneteer and troubadour is he pronounced unserviceable by the
orchestra.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


THE END.


BILLING AND SONS, PRINTERS, GUILDFORD




TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:


  Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

  Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

  Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.