Such was the strength of the man. But oddly mingled with the intrepid assurance that could mock at invalidism and decay, and look with untroubled eye into the dark unknown, was a strange sensitiveness which he himself would have been the first to satirise in another. All his life he was tortured with the consciousness that his father and grandfather had been tailors, and oppressed with a fear that somebody would discover the dread secret. He made of his origin a mystery which might pique but always baffled curiosity; and he was continually wondering whether people considered him a gentleman de facto, and still more whether they suspected that he had not always been one de jure. “H—— is a good old boy,” he writes on one occasion. “He has a pleasant way of being inquisitive, and has already informed me, quite agreeably, that I am a gentleman, though I may not have been born one.” “In origin,” he says again, “I am what is called here a nobody, and any pretensions to that rank have always received due encouragement.” He not only kept silence about his birth—which was assuredly his own affair—but he took active steps to prevent the truth being known. His father—a handsome, shiftless person who made a failure of his life—was described in Meredith’s first marriage certificate as “Esquire,” and in a census paper “near Petersfield” was given as the author’s place of birth. The Merediths were, in fact, naval outfitters at Portsmouth, and had none of the “Celtic blood” to which the novelist was fond of making vague claim. George’s mother died when he was five; the father followed after various ineffective wanderings; and the boy was left a ward in Chancery, to be educated and articled to a solicitor out of the poor remnant of the family fortunes. From all this part of his life he shrank with a horror at once grotesque and pathetic. There was nothing specially ignominious in his childhood. There was certainly no ill-treatment; he was rather petted than otherwise. But he resented the environment thrust on him by the accident of birth, and, when free of it, avoided all touch with his remaining relatives.
These facts would not be worth mentioning but for their influence on Meredith’s life and work. They placed him in general society rather on the defensive, and perhaps encouraged that haughty shyness which in the presence of strangers was apt to take the form of an aggressive and self-conscious brilliance. They explain the peculiar impression given by so many of his novels, the impression of a man fascinated by aristocracy and yet a little angry at being fascinated. Despite his Liberalism and his Democratic professions, this was the thing he liked; he had an almost sensual pleasure in good company; the very titles of his great people suggest enjoyment. He himself was an aristocrat in physique; he had a kingly head and carried it like a king. He was an aristocrat also in intellect, though here not of the highest rank, which takes its distinction for granted; it was, no doubt, a dread of commonness that led him to refine excessively, and no one who dreads to be common wholly escapes being so. But all this was not solely Meredith’s fault, it was also the fault of his country. In the France of the fleur-de-lis or the France of the tricolour the lack of birth would not have irked such a nature; in Victorian England it became a fact of real importance. It was the one little insanity of a rather specially sane mind; the one want of humour in a richly humorous temperament; the one absurd weakness in one perhaps even too confident in his own strength.
CHAPTER VI
LORD SALISBURY
In the Berlin Conference days Bismarck described Lord Salisbury as “a lath painted to look like iron.” By the Nineties the sneer had lost point in every particular. To the dullest it was clear that Lord Salisbury had not painted himself or got himself painted; whatever the man might or might not be, he was genuine, incapable himself of pose, and equally incapable of inspiring others to spread a legend concerning himself. It was equally clear (though perhaps only to the more discerning) that he did not “look like iron.” There was not wanting strength of a kind, but it was a flexible and not a rigid strength. The coarsest of all mistakes it is possible to make concerning Lord Salisbury is that of regarding him as an Imperialistic swashbuckler and gambler, ready for all risks in the pursuit of a “spirited foreign policy.” The Victorian Burleigh was, in fact, much like the Burleigh of Elizabeth, decisive enough in some domestic matters, but even excessively cautious in the conduct of foreign affairs. Though he adopted the Disraelian tradition, his methods were the very opposite of Mr. Disraeli’s. That great man really enjoyed having the eyes of all men directed on him in hope or fear. “A daring pilot in extremity,” he seemed actually pleased with waves that went high, and, though he might accept “peace with honour,” gave always the impression of disappointment of a born political artist that it was not reserved to him to play the part of a second Chatham.
LORD SALISBURY.