WITH GEORGE MEREDITH ON BOX HILL
“Come down,” he wrote to me one day, “and see our Indian summer here. A dozen differently coloured torches you will find held up in our woods, for which, however, as well as for your sensitive skin, we require stillness and a smiling or sober sky.”
This was written in the autumn of 1878, and is drawn from one of many little notes of invitation which used to preface a delightful day with George Meredith on the slopes of Box Hill. Our long rambles filled the afternoon, and were preceded by a simple but thoughtfully chosen lunch, which, when the weather allowed, was set out upon a gravel walk in front of the cottage beside the tall, sheltering hedge that gave shade from the sun. Meredith attached no small importance to the details of these little feasts. He prided himself not a little on his gastronomic knowledge, and was pleased when our climate made it possible to reproduce the impression of a genuine French déjeuner en plein air. In another letter he writes: “The promise of weather is good. Lilac, laburnum, nightingales, and asparagus are your dishes. Hochheimer or dry, still, red Bouzy, Richebourg and your friend to wash all down.” His knowledge of these matters of the table was, perhaps, not very profound, but the appropriate vocabulary which gave the air of the expert was always at his command. And this, I think, was characteristic of the man in respect of many fields of knowledge that lay beyond the arena in which his imaginative powers were directly engaged.
In his art he was never quite content to image only the permanent facts of life, either in their larger or simpler issues, unless he was permitted at the same time to entangle the characters of his creation in the coils of some problem that was intellectual rather than purely emotional. He loved to submit his creations to the instant pressure of their time, and with this purpose it was his business, no less than his pleasure, to equip himself intellectually with garnered stores of knowledge in fields into which the ordinary writers of fiction rarely enter. It was not, of course, to be supposed that he could claim equal mastery in all, although his intellect was so active and so agile that his limitations were not easily discerned. I remember one day at an Exhibition in the New Gallery having introduced him to an old gentleman, whose long life had been spent in a study of the drawings of the old masters, to whom Meredith, with inimitable fluency, was expounding the peculiar virtues of the art of Canaletto. Meredith was eloquent, but the discourse somehow failed to impress the aged student. When they had parted his sole commentary to me was: “Your friend—Mr. Meredith, I think you said—endeavoured to persuade me that he understood Canaletto, but he did not.”
But even if, in this single instance, the criticism be accepted as just, it must be conceded by all who knew him well that Meredith was not often caught tripping in the discussion of any topic in which his intellect had been actively engaged. Sometimes—and then, perhaps, rather in a spirit of audacious adventure and for exercise of his incomparable powers of expression—he would make a bold sortie into realms of knowledge that were only half conquered. But this was, for the most part, only when he had an audience waiting on his words. When he had only a single companion to listen there was no man whose talk was more penetrating or more sincere: and he was at his best, I used to think, in those long rambles that filled our afternoons at Box Hill. The active exercise in which he delighted seemed to steady and concentrate those intellectual forces that sometimes ran riot when he felt himself called upon to dominate the mixed assembly of a dinner table.
No one, assuredly, ever possessed a more genuine or a more exalted delight in nature. His veneration for the earth and for all that sprang from the earth as an unfailing and irrefutable source of the highest sanity in thought and feeling, amounted almost to worship. He never deliberately set out to paint the landscape in set language as we passed along, but a brief word dropped here and there upon our way, telling of some aspect of beauty newly observed and newly registered, showed clearly that every fresh encounter with nature served to add another gem to the hoarded store of beauty that lay resident in his mind. And yet, even here, the research for the recondite, either in the fact observed or in the phrase that fixed it, peeped out characteristically in the most careless fashion of his talk. He loved to signalise an old and abiding love of the outward world by some new token that found expression at once in language newly coined; and he would break away on a sudden from some long-drawn legend of a half-imaginary character that was often set in the frame of burlesque, to note, with a swift change to a graver tone, some passing aspect of the scene that challenged his admiration afresh. And then, when he had quietly added this last specimen to his cabinet, he would as quickly turn again, with boisterous mirth, to complete the caricature portrait of some common friend, which he loved to embellish with every detail of imagined embroidery.
In a mixed company Meredith did not often lean to the discussion of literature. He inclined rather, if an expert on any subject was present, to press the conversation in that direction, exhibiting nearly always a surprising knowledge of the specialist’s theme, knowledge at any rate sufficient to yield in the result a full revelation of the store of information at the disposal of his interlocutor. But in those long rambles when we were alone he loved to consider and discuss the claims of the professors of his own art, rejecting scornfully enough the current standards of his own time, but approaching with entire humility the work of masters whom he acknowledged. In those days (I am speaking now of the years between 1875 and 1888) he had by no means attained even to that measure of popularity which came to him at a later time, and when the talk veered towards his own work it was easy to perceive a lurking sense of disappointment that left him, however, with an undiminished faith in the art to which his life was pledged.
During the autumn of 1878 I had written to him in warm appreciation of some of his poems, and his reply is characteristic. “There is no man,” he writes, “I would so strongly wish to please with my verse. I wish I had more time for it, but my Pactolus, a shrivelled stream at best, will not flow to piping, and as to publishing books of verse, I have paid heavily for that audacity twice in pounds sterling. I had for audience the bull, the donkey, and the barking cur. He that pays to come before them a third time, we will not give him his name.” I think in regard to all his work, whether in prose or verse, he was haunted at that time by the presence of the bull, the donkey, and the barking cur. But if this had yielded for the moment some sense of bitterness in regard to the results of his own career, his attitude towards life was even then undaunted, and left him generously disposed towards all achievement of true pretensions, either in the present or in the past. Indeed, the true greatness of the man was in nothing better displayed than in the unbroken urbanity of his outlook upon life. His was of all natures I have known the most hopeful of the world’s destiny. The starved and shrivelled pessimism of the disappointed egotist had no part in his disposition. His wider outlook upon life was undimmed by the pain of whatever measure of personal failure had befallen him, and I believe that even if his faith in humanity had not of itself been sufficing and complete, he could have drawn from the earth, and the unfading beauty of the earth, encouragement enough to keep him steadfast in his way.
How admirably has he expressed this joy of full comradeship with nature in the opening lines of the “Woods of Westermain”!
Toss your heart up with the lark;
Foot at peace with mouse and worm,
Fair you fare.
So he cries in invitation; and then a little later, in celebration of the joys that await the wood-wayfarer, he adds:
This is being bird and more,
More than glad musician this;
Granaries you will have a store
Past the world of woe and bliss;
Sharing still its bliss and woe;
Harnessed to its hungers, no.
On the throne Success usurps,
You shall seat the joy you feel
Where a race of water chirps
Twisting hues of flourished steel:
Or where light is caught in hoop
Up a clearing’s leafy rise,
Where the crossing deer-herds troop
Classic splendours, knightly dyes.
Or, where old-eyed oxen chew
Speculation with the cud,
Read their pool of vision through,
Back to hours when mind was mud.
Or yet again towards the close:
Hear that song; both wild and ruled.
Hear it: is it wail or mirth?
Ordered, bubbled, quite unschooled?
None, and all: it springs of Earth.
O but hear it! ’tis the mind;
Mind that with deep Earth unites,
Round the solid trunk to wind
Rings of clasping parasites.
Music have you there to feed
Simplest and most soaring need.
In his prose work Meredith seems often half distrustful of his own inspiration, halting now and then to test the validity of the emotions he has awakened, and at times letting a jet of irony on to the fire he has kindled, as though half suspicious that he had been lured into the ways of the sentimentalist. But in his poetry he owns a larger daring and a higher freedom; there he treads unhampered by these half-conscious fears, and yet there, no less than in his prose, we can recognise his insatiable hunger to find and discover new tokens by which to arrest the vision that he loves.
Meredith’s little cottage at the foot of Box Hill was the fittest home for the writer and for the man. Not so far removed from town as to be beyond the echo of its strife, it enabled him when his duty as reader to Chapman and Hall took him to the office to pass an hour or two at luncheon at the Garrick Club, where he loved in these brief intervals of leisure to rally some of his old friends in laughing and cheerful converse.
These occasional visits served to keep him in touch with the moving problems of his time, towards none of which he affected any kind of indifference; and yet the pungent wit and profound penetration of view with which he handled such mundane themes were won and hoarded, I think, in the long silences and the chosen loneliness of his Surrey home. Hard by Flint Cottage stands the little inn at Burford Bridge, now transformed and enlarged to meet the constant incursions of visitors from the town, but at the time when I first remember it but little changed from the days when it sheltered Keats while he was setting the finishing touches to “Endymion.” The association often led us in our rambles to speak of the work of the earlier poet, for whose faultless art Meredith owned an unbounded admiration. Of the poets I think he spoke more willingly than of the writers of prose, though he was on the alert to recognise genius in any form, and never lacked enthusiasm in appraising the work of a writer like Charlotte Brontë. For George Eliot’s achievement he never professed more than a strictly limited respect. Her more pretentious literary methods failed to impress him, and there were times when the keenness of his hostile criticism bordered upon scorn. I remember when some one in his presence ventured to remark that George Eliot, “panoplied in all the philosophies, was apt to swoop upon a commonplace,” he hailed the criticism with the keenest enjoyment, and half-laughingly declared that he would like to have forged the phrase himself.
At the close of our afternoon rambles, that in summer time were prolonged to close upon the dinner-hour, we would return at loitering pace down the winding paths to the cottage, and when I was able to stay the night our evenings would be spent in the little châlet that stood on the hill at the summit of his garden. Meredith truly loved the secluded bower that he had fashioned for himself. It was there he worked, and during the summer months it was there he constantly passed the night. It was there I used to leave him when our long talk was over, and descend the garden to the room that had been allotted to me in the cottage. But of talk he never tired, and it was often far into the night before we parted. He loved also, when he found an appreciative listener, to read aloud long passages from his poems. Once I remember he recited to me during a single evening the whole of the body of sonnets forming the poem of “Modern Love.” On occasion—but not, perhaps, quite so willingly—he might be tempted to anticipate publication by reading a chapter or two from an uncompleted story, and I can recall with what admirable effect, not at Box Hill, but at Ightham Moat where we were both the guests of a gracious hostess, whose death long preceded his own, he read aloud to us the remarkable opening chapters of the “Amazing Marriage.”
Meredith greatly enjoyed those occasional visits to his friends, and found himself, I think, especially at home in the house I have named. He did not disdain the little acts of homage there freely offered him, for the guests assembled were always to be counted among his worshippers, and yet he was finely free from the smallest pretence of consciously asserted dignity. As a rule, he spoke but little of his own work, and then only on urgent invitation, content, for the most part, to accept the passing topic, which his high spirits and unflagging humour would quickly lift to illumination. On such occasions he loved to invent and elaborate, for one or other of his more intimate friends, some fancied legend that was absolutely detached from life and reality, and sometimes he so fell in love with the fable of his creation that for weeks or months afterwards his letters would continue to elaborate and to develop a story that had only taken birth in the jesting mood of a moment.
The young people of a country-house always found a welcome from Meredith, and towards women at all times his respect was of a kind that needed no spur of social convention. It sprang of a deep faith in their high service to the world, and a quickened belief in the larger future that was in store for them. In his own home the spirit of raillery, that he could not always curb, sometimes pressed too hardly upon those nearest him; but I think he was scarcely conscious of any pain he may have inflicted—hardly aware, indeed, of the reiterated insistence with which he would sometimes expose and ridicule some harmless foible of character that did not deserve rebuke. But if this fault must be conceded in regard to those who stood in the intimate circle of his home, it certainly implied no failing reverence towards the sex they owned. After all, an artist, who has a full claim to that title, is revealed most truly in his work. If the revelation there can be suspected, the art is false, and it may, I think, be claimed without challenge for Meredith that in the created characters of his work he has done for women what has been accomplished by no other writer since Shakespeare. Over all the mystery that gives them charm, his mastery in delineation was complete, but it is his appreciation of the nobler possibilities of character that lie behind the wayward changes of temperament that sets his portraiture of women beyond the reach of rivalry. I think most women who came to know him were conscious of this in his presence, and it is small wonder that that larger circle who met themselves mirrored in his books should count him among the most fearless champions of their sex.
A few months ago I found myself treading once more the road that leads to his cottage under the hill. Once again a “dozen differently coloured torches” were held up in the woods behind the house, flaming as I saw them first in his company. But there was one torch that burned no more. It had fallen from the hand that held it, and lay extinguished upon the earth his spirit owned and loved. But those days I passed with him there are memorable still, and as I stood beside the cottage gate amid the gathering shadows of evening, his own beautiful lines came back to me from “Love in the Valley”:
Lovely are the curves of the white owl sweeping
Wavy in the dusk lit by one large star.
Lone on the fir-branch, his rattle-note unvaried,
Brooding o’er the gloom, spins the brown eve-jar.
Darker grows the valley, more and more forgetting:
So were it with me if forgetting could be willed.
Tell the grassy hollow that holds the bubbling well-spring,
Tell it to forget the source that keeps it filled.