Portraits of the Nineties

by E. T. Raymond

GEORGE MEREDITH.

Concerning that “Egyptian bondage” of journalism, all Meredith’s philosophy could not prevent him expressing himself with extreme bitterness. “No slavery,” he said, “is comparable to the chains of hired journalism.” When a man talks thus it is natural to infer that he is complaining of the injury such work does to his intellect and conscience; obviously from the purely physical viewpoint writing for newspapers, for some hundreds a year in Victorian valuation, is not worse than being an Egyptian fellah, a Chinese coolie, or even an English dustman. But it is hard to believe that even on the moral and intellectual side there was much hardship; for, curiously enough, George Meredith was rather specially free from scruples of the kind which torture some men. Indeed, he was unusually wide-minded in the matter of “writing to order”; in that sense, at least, the chains hung lightly on him. There have always been journalists of great and even boisterous independence, and they were more numerous in Meredith’s time than in our own. Even now, however, the idea of the refined and penniless man of genius working against his convictions under the lash of a brutal and tyrannous proprietor belongs not to Fleet Street, where they produce newspapers, but to the Haymarket, where they produce plays. Doubtless there is a good deal of compliance in matters indifferent, or esteemed indifferent. Men with very red noses have been known to argue eloquently in favour of local option, and nothing but total abstinence is compatible with the coolness of head requisite for some arguments in favour of “the trade.” But, as mere men of business, newspaper proprietors save themselves, wherever possible, the strain of attempting to force a highly individual writer against his convictions. Mr. Massingham has never had to choose between no dinner and the advocacy of causes likely to appeal to the editor of John Bull. Mr. Bottomley has never been compelled by hunger to adopt the views of the United Kingdom Alliance or the Anti-Betting League. But Meredith did indubitably, as a Liberal, write habitually for the political columns of the Conservative Morning Post in London and the Conservative Ipswich Journal in the provinces; as a professed lover of liberty he did indubitably argue in favour of slavery; and, if all the secrets of the files were revealed, it would probably be found that, as a literary critic, he said many things in print which were contrary to his private taste and conviction.

His disgust with journalism was, it may be surmised, less concerned with morals than with money. He complains that the better the work the worse the pay, and the poorer the esteem; and, just as he could not refrain from some envy of the “best sellers” in literature (an envy which found vent in savage criticism of much of Tennyson’s work), so he was not a little disgusted that many journalists far less gifted made better incomes. In truth he was not suited to the trade. The best in journalism is still for the many, and Meredith’s manner, when all is said, was for the few. With the prestige of a name behind his books, the average of men might be induced (if only by the coward fear of being out of the fashion) to begin reading, and, having begun, it was always quite possible that he would go on long enough to find much that he could honestly like. But anonymous writing has no such advantage. Its appeal must be immediate, or the reader turns to the next column. With his peculiar tendencies George Meredith could never have been a journalist of the kind that delights the editorial soul—the man who never under-writes or over-writes either in space or quality, who can always be depended on to produce a first-class trade article, who never uses an expression queried by the printer’s reader. The highest merit of the journalist is to make complicated things clear, and dry things readable; Meredith’s genius lay in the direction of making the simplest things obscure, and the most ordinary things out-of-the-way. The dread of being common-place seems to have inclined him especially to verbal contortions when he was conscious of some thinness or ordinariness of thought. When he has really something to say he often says it strongly and naturally; there are deep things and true things in Meredith which could hardly be better, more shortly, or more lucidly expressed. Browning suffered from much the same disease; with both men it is quite a safe rule to read only so long as one can get on comfortably; skipping the hard parts means a gain altogether out of proportion to the loss. Meredith is never more obscure than when he means to tell one that a man kissed a woman, or that the sky was red at sunset. Men do quite commonly kiss women, and skies are often red at sunset. But Meredith seems to have felt that his men must be different from any other men, their kisses different from any other kisses, and the women kissed different from any other kissed women. And on no account must his sunsets be the sunsets of Tom, Dick, or Harry. Therefore, in dealing with such things, he racked his brain for some verbal violence which sometimes hit the mark, but more often did not. In one of his short poems—published, if I remember rightly, in the Nineties—there occurred the expression, “Hands that paw the naked bush.” I asked a Meredithian exactly what it meant. Pityingly he reminded me that some lines before there were references to winter and snow. “Now,” he said, “if you have closely observed a bush when the leaves are off, you will remember that here and there twigs, to the number of four or five, radiate from a sort of clump which bears a distant resemblance to the human wrist. When these twigs are covered with snow they distinctly suggest a hand with the fingers spread out. The poet saw that, as he saw everything. You, who never use your middle-class eyes except to find misprints, naturally never saw it, and you dare to charge your own insensitiveness and lack of imagination on a great genius.” This, of course, was crushing. But I can imagine an Elizabethan man of taste being equally crushing to any heretic who questioned some elaborate figure of the Ephuists, and appealed from them to the simple delicacy of him who wrote—

“And winking Mary-buds begin

To ope their golden eyes”—

a thing any critic can admire and any coal-heaver can understand.

“Meredith,” says Lord Morley, “often missed ease.” It might be truer to say that he took the most cruel pains to avoid ease. Macaulay notices how Johnson used sometimes to translate into his own peculiar dialect an observation first made in strong, simple English. Thus he once said that a certain work had not “enough wit to keep it sweet,” and immediately added, “It has not sufficient vitality to preserve it from putrefaction.” One has an uneasy feeling that Macaulay was, as sometimes happened, a little innocent in his earnestness to make a point, and that Johnson was here only playing with himself; his ordinary literary style, though stiff as compared with his table talk, is yet generally muscular and masculine. But Meredith actually did in solemn fashion what Johnson may have done in a spirit of fooling. He did continually think in a natural and write in an unnatural idiom. In his familiar letters one often comes across the germ of a reflection later elaborated in a book; in the one case it is expressed in terse, vigorous English, wholly intelligible and to the point; in the other it is tortured into two pages of Meredithian “epigram,” most of which would be incomprehensible if he did not generally clinch the whole thing with one splendid sentence of quite undoubtful meaning. In these key sentences, indeed, resides the whole value of Meredith—if we exclude a certain embarrassing impression of disorderly opulence, of careless magnificence, which makes one feel rather like a boy with a great jar of “chow-chow” from Canton; he has not a vestige of an idea what he is eating, and hardly knows whether he quite likes it, but it is sweet, obviously expensive, and provocatively curious, and has a certain medicinal suggestion that excuses a little gluttony. Or we might say that a Meredith novel suggests a great firework display, meant to represent “Peace and War,” or “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” or “Grand Attack on a Sleeping City by Ten Thousand Aeroplanes.” One does not pretend to follow the story as if it were a piece on the stage, and much of it seems to be irrelevant; but there are plenty of bombs, squibs and Roman candles, and rockets that go up with a satisfying rush and break into floating glory.

As he was in his books, so was Meredith in society. In the company of an intimate friend or two he could be natural—could talk with easy vigour, expressing views that were often just in language that was always plain and strong. But let a stranger—especially a distinguished stranger—join the circle, and he deviated automatically into “epigram.” He seems to have felt it necessary to be brilliant, and for him brilliance meant effort; he was not content to let the good things come to the surface as they would, but pumped them up from the recesses of his being with an energy which sometimes affected the purity of the flow and not seldom made the machinery creak.

There was, indeed, something a little forced about the whole man. In his youth he was addicted to violent exercise, and especially to throwing the beetle—the great wooden mallet with which foresters split tree-trunks. He used to throw up the beetle and catch it, and this violent business, designed to preserve his health, ended by ruining it; the spinal weakness from which he suffered in later life was the direct consequence of beetle-throwing. This indiscreet athleticism is paralleled in other departments of Meredith’s life. In literature he was perpetually throwing the beetle—juggling in ponderous style with ponderous things; he is a muscular rather than a nimble wit. I remember to have seen an acrobat climb down a table leg, hand over hand, as if he were lowering himself from the Nelson Monument—a difficult feat, no doubt, but a very useless and ungainly one. Meredith’s cleverness gave often the same impression of wasted power and even compromised dignity. In life, again, he tended to this exaggerated strenuousness without adequate object; it might have been better for him, and for others, if there had been more repose. His first marriage was wrecked because he came into contact and conflict with a temperament too like his own, and the sequel proved that his generally benevolent and kindly nature had a core of hardness which might in truth be suspected from his writings. Concerning Carlyle’s matrimonial affairs, he wrote that “a woman of the placid disposition of Milton’s Eve, framed by her master to be an honest labourer’s cook and housekeeper, with a nervous disposition resembling a dumpling, would have been enough for him.” Much the same was true of himself. If, in spite of much domestic sorrow, he reached old age unbroken in his resolute optimism, his deficiencies have perhaps no less credit than his qualities. For, if he sometimes indulged in self-pity regarding small matters, he bore with great stoicism the sterner buffets of fate, and this because of a certain insensibility, illustrated again and again in his career, to the kind of wounds which are commonly most painful. It is not indifference to others, still less hardness of heart; his letters are evidence enough on that point. But one has the same sort of impression one gets from Shakespeare’s sonnets, of a second self quietly watching, and almost jeering at, the sufferings of the first and its mates. “Happily for me,” he wrote during his second wife’s hopeless and painful illness, “I have learned to live much in the spirit.” That was probably the exact truth. Things of the spirit were not always more important than the want of five pounds for a dinner or a holiday, but they did suffice to keep him taut and resolute in the presence of the sterner trials. “There was good reason,” says Lord Morley, “to be sure with him that death too was only a thing in the Natural Order.” It is only fair to add that he himself faced the approach of the “pitch-black king” with full gallantry. “Going quickly down,” he said to his old friend not long before the end, but there was “nothing morbid, introspective, pseudo-pathetic; plenty of hearty laughter; ...” “no belief in a future existence; are our dogs and horses immortal? What’s become of all our fathers?”