Mr. Meredith wrote again after the publication of his poems:
Box Hill, Feb. 15, 1888.
Dear Mr. Sharp,
It is not common for me to be treated in a review with so much respect. But your competency to speak on the art of verse gives the juster critical tone.
Of course you have poor J. Thomson’s book. I have had pain in reading it. Nature needs her resources, considering what is wasted of her finest. That is to say, on this field—and for the moment I have eyes on the narrow rather than the wider. It is our heart does us this mischief. Philosophy can as little subject it as the Laws of men can hunt Nature out of women—artificial though we force them to be in their faces. But if I did not set Philosophy on high for worship, I should be one of the weakest.
Let me know when you are back. If in this opening of the year we have the South West, our country, even our cottage, may be agreeable to you. All here will be glad to welcome you and your wife for some days.
Yours very cordially,
George Meredith.
It was the late spring before we could visit Mr. Meredith. The day of our going was doubly memorable to me, because as we went along the leafy road from Burford Bridge station we met Mr. and Mrs. Grant Allen—my first meeting with them—whose home was at that time in Dorking. Memorable, too, was the courteous genial greeting from our host and his charming daughter; and the many delightful incidents of that first week end visit. William and Mr. Meredith had long talks in the garden chalet on the edge of the wood. And in the evenings the novelist read aloud to us. On that occasion I think it was he read some chapters from “One of our Conquerors” on which he was working; another time it was from “The Amazing Marriage” and from “Lord Ormont and his Aminta.” The reader’s enjoyment seemed as great as that of his audience, and it interested me to hear how closely his own methods of conversation resembled, in wittiness and brilliance, those of the characters in his novels. Sometimes he turned a merciless play of wit on his listener; but my husband, who was as deeply attached to the man as he admired the writer, enjoyed these verbal duels in which he was usually worsted. The incident of the visit that charmed me most arose from my stating that I had never heard the nightingale. So on the Sunday afternoon we were taken to a stretch of woodland, “my woods of Westermain” the poet smilingly declared, and there, standing among the tree-boles in the late afternoon sun-glow I listened for the bird-notes as he described them to me until he was satisfied I heard aright.
The Xmas of 1888, and the following New Year’s day we passed at Tunbridge Wells, with Mathilde Blind, in rooms overlooking the common. Many delightful hours were spent together in the evenings listening to one or other of the two poets reading aloud their verse, or parts of the novels they had in process. Mathilde was writing her Tarantella; my husband had recently finished a boys’ serial story for Young Folk’s Paper, with a highly sensational plot entitled “The Secret of Seven Fountains,” and was at work on a Romance of a very different order in which he then was deeply interested, though in later life he considered it immature in thought and expression. The boys’ story was one of adventure, of life seen from a purely objective point of view. The Children of To-morrow was the author’s first endeavour to give expression in prose to the more subjective side of his nature, to thoughts, feelings, aspirations he had hitherto suppressed; it is the direct forerunner of the series of romantic tales he afterward wrote as Fiona Macleod; it was also the expression of his attitude of revolt against the limitations of the accepted social system. The writing of the Monograph on Shelley had rekindled many ideas and beliefs he held in common with the earlier poet—ideas concerning love and marriage, viewed not from the standpoint of the accepted practical standard of morality, nor of the possible realisation by the average humanity of a more complex code of social morality, but viewed from the standpoint held by a minority of dreamers and thinkers who look beyond the present strictly guarded, fettered conditions of married life, to a time, when man and woman, equally, shall know that to stultify or slay the spiritual inner life of another human being, through the radical misunderstanding between alien temperaments inevitably tied to one another, is one of the greatest crimes against humanity. That the author knew how visionary for the immediate future were these ideas, which we at that time so eagerly discussed with a little group of intimate sympathetic friends, is shown by the prefatory lines in the book: