None of Meredith’s novels lacks an intellectual theme, and it was this that he himself regarded as most important. In the very last one he says:[420]
“But the melancholy, the pathos of it, * * * have been sacrificed in the vain effort to render events as consequent to your understanding as a piece of logic, through an exposure of character!”
At the same time he surpasses all others in the treatment of love. Contemporary readers, who had had to be content with David and Dora, Pen and Laura, Rochester and Jane, Adam and Dinah, were vouchsafed a revelation,—which, however, they apparently did not at once appreciate,—in Richard and Lucy, Evan and Rose, Redworth and Diana, Dartrey and Nesta. To them all Meredith would say approvingly what he said warningly to a more unfortunate cavalier,—“You may love, and warmly love, so long as you are honest. Do not offend reason.”[421] And in them all he illustrates the higher hedonism voiced by Lady Dunstane to her Tony, though from the negative side,—“The mistake of the world is to think happiness possible to the senses.”[422]
In addition to these, Meredith gives us pictures of other than the purely romantic devotion. There is the brooding tenderness of maturity for childhood and youth: of Sir Austin, Lady Blandish, Wentworth, and Mrs. Berry, for Richard and later, Lucy; of Clara Middleton for Crossjay; of Rosamund for Beauchamp. This relationship is enhanced by a more intimate comradeship in the case of Lady Jocelyn and Rose, of Natalia Radnor and Nesta, and, in a happy-go-lucky fashion, of Roy Richmond and Harry. Nesta and Rose illustrate respectively Meredith’s genuine and exquisite sentiment, and the omnipresent common sense which preserved it from sentimentality. When Nesta felt the first chill of the shadow on her life,—[423]
“She sent forth her flights of stories in elucidation of the hidden; and they were like white bird after bird winging to covert beneath a thundercloud; until her breast ached for the voice of the thunder: harsh facts: sure as she was of never losing her filial hold of the beloved.”
When Rose determined to appeal their case to her mother, she said to Evan,—[424]
“You know she is called a philosopher; nobody knows how deep-hearted she is, though. My mother is true as steel. * * * When I say kindness, I don’t mean any ‘Oh, my child,’ and tears and kisses and maundering, you know. You mustn’t mind her thinking me a little fool.”
Then there is the sisterly attachment between Rhoda and Dahlia Fleming that leads Rhoda’s puritanic nature into a dictatorial fanaticism as disastrous in its results as Sir Austin’s; there is friendship masculine between Beauchamp and Dr. Shrapnel; and friendship feminine between Lady Dunstane and Diana. It is not that Meredith has a monopoly on the portrayal of human affection. Lytton has to his credit the Chillinglys[425] and the Caxtons; Gaskell has the Gibsons; Dickens, Amy Dorrit, and Joe Gargary; Brontë, Caroline Helstone and her mother; Trollope, Lily Dale and hers; in Barry Lyndon, Thackeray gives us a base soul redeemed by love for a child, and in Colonel Newcome, Helen Pendennis, and Amelia Osborne, he presents a rather one-sided devotion, as does Eliot in Mrs. Transome,—though the latter does not feel called upon to exclaim, “By Heaven, it is pitiful, the bootless love of women for children in Vanity Fair!” But it is true that Meredith through the richness of his well-rounded nature was more able than the others to lift emotion fearlessly to a height of intensity, preserved there from any danger of a fall into bathos, because supported by intellect on the one hand and humor on the other.
Any final alignment must be left flexible, because of the numerous factors in the test. Writers may excel in one way or another. When, however, the same author reappears on every count, it begins to look suspicious, and the suspicion falls most heavily on Meredith. Others may come to the top twice or even thrice, but he alone is never wholly submerged, and is nearly always dominant. When Arnold Bennett declared that “Between Fielding and Meredith no entirely honest novel was written by anybody in England,” he was merely following the twentieth century fad of depreciating the nineteenth,—any smart miss of sixteen being naturally more modern and sophisticated than her middle-aged mother. But in saying that “The death of George Meredith removes, not the last of the Victorian novelists, but the first of the modern school,” he mentions an obvious fact, not really discredited by the chronological situation. This does not necessarily argue, be it said, that Meredith casts the forward shadow of coming events. His strong individuality did not lend itself to imitation, or even a prompt appreciation. Moreover, he had in him no germ either of fin de siècle decadence or of its flaunting iconoclasm. In his own mountain range he is simply a preëminent peak, as in theirs were Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dryden, Johnson.
As to the lower plateaus and the foothills, the only thing of interest that develops through examining their juxtaposition, is the resultant effect on Thackeray. While the others stand firmly up to their own normal height, making no attempt to add a cubit to their stature, he seems constantly to be taking thought; nor is it thought that leads to conclusions of much moment. “His depth,” like Lytton’s, “is fathomable,” but his air is of the most profound and meditative. It must be this, together with his Snobs and Vanity Fair (to both of which, acknowledgments are due) that has bewitched his critics and persuaded his readers into ranking him as the foremost Victorian satirist. That he is among the elect is undeniable, even to being “more long-winded than Horace and bitterer than Juvenal,”[426] but to place him above them in any absolute way is to ignore the greater range of Dickens, the keener wit of Peacock and Butler, the rarer charm of Mrs. Gaskell and Trollope, and above all, the superior penetration and insight of George Eliot and Meredith.