London Days: A Book of Reminiscences

by Arthur Warren

We sat at table all the evening talking, George Meredith, John Burns, and I. Of all the men one had ever heard talk, I can't remember one who had a charm of voice and speech excelling Meredith's. I can feel its fascination now across the interval of nearly thirty years. It was, I have said, a musical voice, but it was more than that. It was rich and deep and delicate. The enunciation was perfect with a perfection that was rare and individual; his voice was an instrument with many banks of keys. Charm was its characteristic, charm that no one could describe, although many have tried to do so. And his eyes, you could say, were bluish-grey, or grey-blue, but you could not say—as they twinkled, or flashed, or seemed at rest like little lakes, pellucid, undisturbed, or lighted instantly as some humorous or sympathetic thought moved behind them—you could not say how, or why they held you, or had the power, a pleasant power, of searching you, looking through you. There was nothing that you could describe in so many words, but there was much that you could feel and like. Even when Meredith spoke of man, or woman, or deed that he did not like, and spoke with dramatic force, his gaze would not blaze or harden. He seemed to be searching serenely beyond the surface for the element of comedy, searching with sympathy and humour for the thing that he could understand, and understand better than any one else in the world. You could always touch him with a sympathetic humour. He did not like wise owls, or rather the owlishness which the run of humans take for wisdom.

His strength, George Meredith's strength, was in his perceptions, his appreciations; physically he was frail, or was frail then! You would n't have supposed him ever to have been a great walker and a man of athletic tendencies. But he had been. Now he walked rather slowly, with a stick, and seemed glad to stop every few minutes. His face made me think of a cameo, by the delicacy of its carving. There was exquisite beauty in it, and the voice enhanced that. But even the most delicate lines were firmly carved. If you handled him roughly you might bend him, but you could not break his spirit. At the time I speak of, he was beyond his years, far beyond them; physically, but in no other way, he seemed an old and fragile man. And yet neither voice nor eyes suggested anything of the kind. In spirits and outlook he retained the keenness of mighty youth. When he talked with us he was of no age at all, the agelessness of the eternal; it was only when he walked with us about his garden, or over Box Hill, that the flesh betrayed, now and then, its limitations. If you had had his eyes, you might have looked through his body. A strong wind might have carried him away. But he lived sixteen years after that, and, for all his touch of melancholy, they were happy years.

Others could tell other tales of him and have done so; have said, for one thing, that he was quick and tempery. What they meant was that his highly sensitive make-up had n't its times or seasons, but were on and off quite unexpectedly, as is usually the case with highly sensitive folk. Men do not study such sensitive creatures with the object of avoiding trouble; they blunder and thunder on and then are amazed, when they have struck a nerve centre, to find that it has its own method of reacting. And then George Meredith had been more than half his life a reader for publishers. And all his life he was writing poetry and novels! Now if there is any act less likely than another to insure peace of mind, it is the reading of other persons' manuscripts. And to do that regularly, professionally, for several decades, while you prefer to be a poet and love to be a novelist, is to give oneself to occupations which not only jar upon each other, but upon the nerves of him that undertakes the triple task. Meredith must have had a rare power of concentration to preserve his own authorship from saturation in the flood of manuscripts in which he swam for forty years. His experiences would have paralysed the creative capacity in most men.

I can suppose only that they who found his talk "artificial" must have touched some spring in him that Burns and I did not press. We found him entirely free from artificiality. No pair of strangers could have been more agreeably entertained. And yet we inflicted upon him a long day. They say he was "gey ill to live wi'." Perhaps he was; perhaps he was not. But why should n't he have been? Most writers are. And why should n't they be? They are of a sensitive sort, in greater degree, or less. Their business is mainly to observe, to consider, to speak with ink. These things require concentration of mind. And while the world is running in and out, and kindly intentioned persons are making suggestions which have no relation to the business in hand, or wondering why their wish cannot have precedence, or why their opinion is not the most important thing in the universe, the poet's work, or train of thought, has to get on, or the novelist's, or the reader of manuscripts'. It may be true that no creative gentleman has a right to moods, but at least he has a right to tenses. No such plea is put forth for the rest of mankind. Probably the fact is that the person criticising considers his own mood the more important of the two. Artistic sensibilities are as difficult for their possessors to endure all the time as they can possibly be for any one else to encounter a part of the time. But who ever thinks of that?

We talked on through the evening, without leaving the dining room. I caught Burns looking apprehensively at the clock. "Yes," said I, "we can catch it if we go at once. It's the last train." There was a hurried leave-taking, and we were off. We left the kind old gentleman standing in the doorway, holding a lamp which lighted us down the path and shone full upon his face.

"Well?" said Burns, when we were seated in the train.

"A glorious day!" I answered.

"Never a better," said Burns.

Surely we never went through a better day together, and we went through many.

Late one afternoon in 1907, I was crossing the outer lobby of the House of Commons just as John Burns was crossing it in the opposite direction. He saw me first and called out to me.