But, like Dickens, Meredith is a poet, and, like him, has all a poet’s extravagances and excesses. Scott, as a poet, is never excessive, never exuberant, and always exact. His strength is employed with a Scotch perception of its just value, whereas his Saxon brothers waste theirs with an endless profusion. Not that I would compare Meredith with Dickens, except in his tendency to caricature, which in Dickens is a vice, and in his poetical excesses. He tortures metaphor at times, and lacks measure. This is the complaint French artists bring against their English brethren. Perhaps their greater physical strength, added to the Teutonic strain that flows through their blood from the early ages, runs to excess in imagination, and produces a conception of the grotesque unapprehended by the French. Certain it is that the latter escape our violent emotions in literature, and cannot arrive at an understanding of them. Our sensibilities, strung to common themes, and unexcited by lawless love and cerebral complications, rouse their wonder; and the mixture of buffoonery and satire in our great writers incurs their indignation. For this they say we are not artists, and ignore the classical limitations of art. And doubtless they are right. Upon the whole, our works of art are less artistic than theirs, and are produced in a lesser quantity, while our greatest works sin frequently against every known canon of art.
In shedding a double ray of ridicule upon his comic characters, Mr. Meredith so envelops and twists them in metaphor, now mildly sarcastic, now a joyous shout of laughter, we cannot tell with or at us, for we are not in the secret of his comic moods; and at times so bitingly ironical that we are puzzled and astray. Fain would we know whether he feels tenderly towards us at our worst, or cherishes an inalterable contempt for us at our best. For, unlike Thackeray, he is no moralist. Here, at least, is an English novelist whom M. Taine cannot accuse of laying down hard and fast rules for our moral benefit. His two most cynical characters attract some of our sympathy. Whereas we are ordered to loathe and condemn Becky Sharpe, and feel how much her railing creator despised her, Meredith allows us to be glad of his Countess’s acquaintance, and shows us that a cynical, intriguing woman, full of vulgar pride and not illegitimate ambition, may be interesting, and not unloved by her creator. He invites us to wonder at her, and not condemn, and though he may laugh at her weaknesses, and take a wicked pleasure in exposing them, he cannot be said, on the whole, to show her any harshness. As an adventuress, she is unsurpassed, and, unlike poor Becky, lives and dies, we imagine, a fine lady, driven by ambition to duplicities, but not consciously mean or dishonest. Though a virtuous woman, her morals are crooked, and her sense of honour is the reverse of keen. We have seen how such a character in Thackeray’s hands would develop, and to what lengths in heartlessness his satire carried him. Meredith’s Countess is possible; but Becky Sharpe is impossible.
The same may be said of his male villains. Indeed, he has none. There is something eminently human in the egoism of the wise youth Adrian Harley. We greet him ever with a cheerful smile, and for one of his witty remarks would have no, or only a very slight, objection to part with our last five-pound note. Contrast him with Barnes Newcome, and you have all the difference between black and gray. All Thackeray’s bad people are irredeemably bad, and all his good people hardly want wings to fit them for the angelic sphere. It is true, his female angels do not inspire us with a very ardent yearning for the joys of Paradise, if they are to be shared in such extremely insipid and melancholy society. Eternity with Amelia and Laura Pendennis and Lady Castlewood could not be described as a captivating perspective.
But Mr. Meredith must not be acquitted of any pronounced sins against reality. English taste is such, and its restrictions and exuberances are so little in accordance with life as it is lived by even those who paint it falsely, that it is impossible for the English novelist to escape sins of the sort. In general, Meredith is sufficiently just to humanity in its faults and in its virtues; it is only when its oddities catch hold of his fancy that he runs riot, and surpasses nature; only then is he apt to overdraw his account upon the bank of credulity.
Take, for example, Mrs. Berry, whom Mr. Le Gallienne, in a recent interesting study of Mr. Meredith, describes as a character that would have been a feather in Dickens’ cap. Doubtless, but that is not a compliment to Mr. Meredith, for what might do honour to Dickens cannot be said to be worthy of him. Mrs. Berry is witty and original to an alarming degree. She is a sort of compromise between Mrs. Quickly and Juliet’s nurse; not quite so coarse as either, perhaps, but more exhaustively garrulous and obtrusive. In the fifteenth century she might have been possible and pleasant, but not so in ours. She is an anachronism that we resent. The fault may be with us, but the fact remains, that we could not tolerate a Mrs. Berry in the flesh. Of such a servant a man of genius, or one of a humorous turn, might be glad as a study; but can we imagine lending a patient ear to her free speech, a stately and solemn old English gentleman, if capable of understanding what we call humour, only in its highly starched and faultlessly correct form? A student of mankind, certainly, after a certain prejudiced fashion, especially convinced of the inferiority of woman, as it behoves a poor gentleman who has suffered grievous wrong at the hands of a daughter of Eve; but one whose collar laughter is never likely to wrinkle or crush, and whose features under no temptation can relax into anything broader than a grim stiff smile. Picture this paternal prig and polished library philosopher being entertained by Juliet’s nurse and Falstaff’s landlady, and pronouncing both to be excellent women!
A gentleman who loved his Lamb and relished his Dickens would put up with her for the sake of her wit and originality, accepting her as a possible character, which I am not disposed to do. But no young girl, with even less of Lucy’s refinement, could submit to her gross indelicacy in that scene between them in the Isle of Wight. We know how reticent and shy young girls have become since Juliet’s day; still more so young brides with the most intimate of their sex—their mothers and their sisters; how easily affronted are their susceptibilities by the slightest trending towards ground that they so savagely regard as sacred. It is as much as one’s life is worth almost to speak to a very young bride about her married life; above all, if she be deeply enamoured of her husband, and for her mother to seek to unveil it would be a sacrilege. Mr. Meredith, who makes straight for nature divested of the swaddling clothes of sentimentality, and prefers her mud to the sentimentalist’s spangles and pink clouds, will perhaps say that the excess of delicacy to which naturally sensitive and fastidious womanhood has let itself be trained is artificial, unhealthy, and absurd. I do not dispute that a little more of savage candour would be an improvement to women, and that excessive delicacy leads them by a very apparent slope into pruriency. But honesty and candour, with modesty, are surely better than either without it, and if, for the sake of honesty and candour, we show ourselves willing to dispense with an excessive modesty for that of naturalness, surely we must lose one of the nameless, and not the least, charms of maidenliness! This reproach I make to Lucy is not only in the case of her tolerance of Mrs. Berry’s coarse talk, but in the occupation it enters her mind to allot her undeclared lover, Lord Montfalcon. I reproach, in fact, Mr. Meredith, with the entire creation, all the more so as she is the only girl he has drawn upon the old wearisome lines of masculine taste, of the eternal old-fashioned ivy-type, commonplace, loving and pretty, without character or interest apart from her second in the immortal duet with his breathless hero. She is charming, as all creatures lovely to look upon and purely natural must be charming; but the freshness of youth and the pleasant daisy-and-buttercup flavour vanished with the years and increasing domestic cares, what would there have remained in her to interest us and satisfy a soaring nature like Richard’s? The affair of the cookery-book irritates and displeases us as much as it did her husband in the period of the moon of bliss, and the only satisfaction we extract from it is the inimitable wise youth’s witty description of it in his letter to Lady Blandish. Bret Harte’s speculative vision embraced a disastrous sequel to the union of the Judge and Maud Muller of Whittier’s poem, and we may be permitted to picture Lucy twenty years after, with a bunch of keys at her waist, still studying the cookery-book, strong in the fabrication of preserves and home-made medicines, superintending her children’s studies, and arching mournful and uncomprehending brows at the moral and intellectual vagaries a man like Richard would be certain to develop. An admirable wife and mother, but an inadequate study.
It has been remarked that for Mr. Meredith’s readers there is no half-way house between uncompromising hostility and discipleship. You either bend before him as your master—imperfect at times, genius having its limitations as all things else that are human, but great in his very imperfections—or you reject him utterly. How those who reject him can manage to reconcile it to their conscience, I am at a loss to understand. But this proves the texture and quality of his influence. It is immense or it is nought. And by this pronounced feeling he evokes may he be classed as the founder of a school. He has introduced a new element into English literature—a healthy and purely philosophic realism, which differs as widely from the realism of Fielding as it does from that of Zola. To French wit he brings German profundity of thought, the whole wrought into a thoroughly Saxon setting. Vividness of conception, intensity of vision, and strength of diction—combine these qualities, and you have English such as no other writer has given us. It is beautiful, with a beauty all its own, and there seems to be no feat of which it is not capable. He has ransacked our language until he has wrought it, through a process of bewildering originality, into a flexibility, a forcible simplicity, a majesty and rhythm that, in his prose, surpass poetry. Never before have we received such a lesson in the unimagined resources of language. Never before did we so understand how written words may be made to seize us, fell us, captivate us, make vivid and tangible to our mind every image, every trick of person, every hue and aspect of nature. He does not describe or paint: he simply vitalizes inanimate objects. And if he had not made us his debtor in any other way, we must thank him for his great and perfect disciple, Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson.
CHAPTER III.
THE NOVELS OF GEORGE MEREDITH: ‘RICHARD FEVEREL’ AND ‘RHODA FLEMING.’
As this little book is written for those who have the misfortune not to be acquainted with the novels of Mr. Meredith, I do not think it will be inadvisable to add to my essay a slight sketch of each one, hoping thereby to send readers to the head source. Those who allow themselves to be persuaded thereto will have reason to thank me, even should they be among the common majority, unable to appreciate to its full value the new chapter in English literature offered them.
Much mention has been made of ‘Richard Feverel,’ the novel of Mr. Meredith’s youth, and, we are told, his own special favourite. The plot of this powerful story turns from a mixture of graceful mirth, delicious wit, and profound reflection, to tragedy, upon what I humbly conceive to be an impossible situation. And this is the sudden separation of Richard from his young bride. But after noting the crudities and errors of taste and judgment, which are frequent enough in the book, and which never once hide from us the lambent flame of genius that steadily burns through the whole, our fear is lest our desire to praise adequately should drop us into hyperbole. It is so much easier to blame than to praise with taste—above all, to praise judiciously. Our wits will always devise fresh methods for a successful use of the whip of censure, but in admiration it is less easy to get beyond the exclamatory period, and the end of simple epithets is soon reached.