GEORGE MEREDITH.
Art and artists are continually suffering at the hands of “belletristic triflers.” Phrase-making is the passion of the day; and as a falsity or a half-truth concerning literary matters is so much easier of utterance than the awkward whole truth, that demands lengthy qualifications, we seldom find the latter gaining in the race with glittering mendacities. It is not, for instance, the saner body of Matthew Arnold’s criticism that has been generally absorbed; it is his more or less questionable catch-words and airy brevities of characterization. These seem apt to the understanding because they fit so well the tongue; their convenience gives them their fatal persuasion. The world likes a criticism in little, a nut-shell verdict, something of intellectual color that can readily be memorized for dinner-table parlance, the vague generalization that conceals the specific ignorance. Macaulay’s “rough pistolling ways and stamping emphasis,” Scott’s “bastard epic style,” and the conception of Shelley as “a beautiful and ineffectual angel beating in the void his luminous wings in vain” have thus come to be solemn verities with many who care more to talk literature than to read it. A whilom gaiety of journalism served to convince the public that Whitman’s voice was a “barbaric yawp”; and consequently his “Leaves of Grass” is seldom glimpsed save in a spirit of derision. These are some of the unhappy results of our latter-day strain after “a pregnant conciseness” of language.
George Meredith like many of his predecessors has suffered much from the thumb-nail criticism of the day. His judges are apt to insist upon his mannerisms and to insist on nothing else. The generality of readers hearing so much about the “mereditherambic style” rest under the belief that this writer is a tripod of frenzied incoherence; that he lacks, especially as a poet, both style and substance. That this is far from being the truth about Meredith’s verse anyone who has read it with attention well knows. Not only does much of it fulfil the requisites of orthodox style, but it contains, even more than his novels, the vital convictions of his mind. Indeed, it is in his verse we come nearest the real teacher, as we come nearest the man in his relation to life at large—to the general scheme of things.
A realization of George Meredith’s poetical virtues by the reader of real literature is due a writer who has proved his claim to genius in a monumental series of novels, a writer who, while not acceptable to all, has yet many admirers that regard him as one of the strongest towers of modern thought. One can, however, scarcely hope for more than a limited acceptance of his poems; that he should be popular in the ordinary meaning of the word, as some poets are taken to heart by the sons of men, is indeed scarcely conceivable. Such popularity, which is after all an equivocal tribute for the most part, Mr. Meredith has never aimed to secure. His has been a life of remoteness from profane ambitions, a life steadfast to the standard early set for himself—a standard of the highest kind.
And yet, while Mr. Meredith may not exercise the attraction of many other poets for the general reader, few will deny that in his fruits of song one tastes the flavor of an original, deep-seeing mind; that there is in the character of many of his poems what well rewards the serious attention necessary to their complete comprehension. Difficult in part they may seem in the casual reading, owing to combined entanglement of rhetoric and ideas, but few who press their inquiry past the line of a first natural discouragement of perusal can fail totally to be affected by the spell they cast over the mind. Beauty there is unquestionably lurking beneath what seems often a wilful obscuration of theme. Coming here and there upon some apparently dry metrical husk of thought, there falls, as from some frost-bitten flower-pod, a shower of fairy seeds that lodge as a vital donation within the remembrance. Groping in the midst of a Meredithian mystery, even the less sensitive ear catches a ritornello of exquisite, wholly seductive sound. For it is not so infrequently that like his “The Lark Ascending.”
“He rises and begins to round,
He drops the silver chain of sound,
Of many links without a break,
In chirrup, whistle, slur and shake—”
The lark-note is not, however, the leading characteristic of Mr. Meredith’s muse, although quite within the scope of it. It is rather the lark’s joy in nature clothed with the more artificial vocalism of man. Mr. Meredith is pantheist in large measure when he attunes his lute-strings to the demands of Mother Earth. For him the gods of Greece do not live only in the pages of Lempriere, as most modern poets would have us believe, but they still maintain, albeit in more subtle form, their old supreme habitation in lawn and sylvan hollow, or mix with the familiar miracle of grey eve and rose-red dawn. In his verse Mr. Meredith hastens to undo the harness of that worldly wisdom that binds him in his novels. He re-baptizes himself to the graces of nature pure, rejoices in all that belongs to the idealism of primitive life. The poet can pipe as rustically as a faun when he is so minded. He can pay a moving tribute to young love and the romance of vernal feeling, as proved by that beautiful lift of minstrelsy, “Love in the Valley,” with its limpid, ecstatic meter, its delicious imagery and spiritual sweetness of thought; not to speak of many other lyrics of the same sort. These lighter pleasures and profits of George Meredith, together with his more serious efforts, like “Ode to the Spirit of Earth and Autumn,” a magnificent color-poem, uniquely accenting the bacchic abandon of October and trumpeting mightily the note of triumphant manhood, and “The Nuptials of Attila,” full of a haunting rush of language, ought to afford substantial relish to the general admirers of high art.
Has George Meredith’s vigorous, almost massive harp a message for humanity? is the natural inquiry of those who reading Wordsworth or Tennyson find in their works sure faiths and consolatory teaching. And is such message so abeyant that only those of his readers who are endowed with power of subtle divination may find it? Certainly in the case of the seer the debt of clear utterance is obligatory, just as from the lyricist we look for delight and tears and mellifluence; it is a responsibility that falls from heaven with the mantle of inspiration, only a congenital inceptitude for lucidity excuses it. Too often, it must be confessed, it is only the ghostly sense of a message that trails through Mr. Meredith’s work, glimpsing and disappearing in will-o’-wisp fashion. The thirsting traveller chasing such mirages of meaning over the sands of obscurity may be pardoned if he conclude that to only the very privileged few does the Fata Morgana of his muse grant a kindly haven of specific instruction. But while this is true of passages and poems, it is not true of all his poems. There is much in his volumes of verse that state distinctly his philosophical principles. The ground-work of Mr. Meredith’s philosophy is the worth of nature as distinct from the artificial institutions of man. In nature pure exists the true temple of wisdom; it is the tribunal whereat all knowledge and sentiment must finally receive its endorsement or its condemnation. In nature we open the real book of life. It is, therefore, that in his verse we find continually a worship of the liberty of the forest, a recognition of its power to promote the vital growth of heart and head. Mr. Meredith would not have us forget that the mind and spirit are integral elements of nature. Particularly in “The Woods of Westermain,” beginning,
“Enter these enchanted woods,
You who dare—”
is this philosophy stated forcibly and at length. Naturalness in all things is the keynote of his utterance. It is from his poetry that we gain the clue to that humorous and seemingly harsh, satirical attitude towards worldliness which distinguishes his novels and has occasioned the frequent outcry that Mr. Meredith is a heartless epigrammatist. The truer criticism is that he derides the artifices, the sham decencies and mawkish sentimentality of society as the earnest champion of the natural. Thus we find Sir Willoughby Patterne in “The Egoist” demonstrating the pursuit of a spurious worldly philosophy, as we find the hero of “Richard Feverel” proving the mistake of yoking nature to an artificial system, while his women, such as Clara in “The Egoist,” Nataly in “One of Our Conquerors,” and Diana in “Diana of the Crossways,” are clear, protesting voices against masculine prejudices and feminine bondage. This is also the teaching of his remarkable poem entitled “Modern Love.” George Meredith has within the last few months added to his poetical works a work called “Odes in Contribution to the Song of French History” (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons), which while having a Pindarian sublimity of intent, a plentitude of rapt and fiery passages is too involved and vague to constitute a real master-work. Whatever be said of Meredith’s faults, a serious reading of his verse cannot but persuade one that he is a poet who is distinctly virile and worth while. Though much that he has written may have the mark of mortality, there is much also that wears the amaranthine wreath of eternal life, either for beauty of phrase or for profundity of philosophic truth.