George Meredith: A Study

by Hannah Lynch

But Lucy is Farmer Blaize’s niece, and consequently no match for a baronet’s son. Sir Austin has gone up to London in search of a bride worthy the high gift of his son’s untainted youth. His adventures are inimitably recorded. We delight in his interviews with Lawyer Thompson, in his unmasking of that harmless young scamp Master Ripton, and, above all, in his discovery of a suitable bride, when a few years have been added, in the daughter of one Mrs. Caroline Grandison, a female system-creator, whom the author presents as less amiable than her brother-perfecter of humanity. ‘A perfect woman mirrored in her progeny,’ Adrian describes her, and admits that he would prefer her to her progeny. The fates and his father conspire awhile against Richard, and after separation, illness and other discomposing events, he outwits his enemies and runs off with a bride of his own choice—Lucy, the rustic maid.

Up to this point the book is perfect. But here comes the stumbling-block. Would a youth, whose purity and innocence would be sure to give added strength to his first sweeping passion, in the middle of an ideal honeymoon, still bewildered by his bliss, allow himself, upon such a flimsy pretext as his father’s indirectly-conveyed wish, to be separated from his bride? To be kept for months in London through the shallowest subterfuges? Would either of this passionate pair, seeing with the eyes of instinct that never errs, submit to this absurd and unreasonable separation? The Richard we know would have found a way to balk his elders and keep his bride by his side, or he would have seen through the plot, and would have flown back to her after a week’s fretting and fuming in town. This would mean the loss of a great and tragic scene—his last parting with Lucy—though the probabilities would not have been outraged. But Shakespeare himself may incur such a reproach and be not less great, and a poignant situation may be reached by the road of gross inconsistency and thrill us not the less.

Having so far assisted at the launching of youth upon the waters of happiness, we are invited to assist at something still more interesting—Richard’s undertaking in the reform of spotted woman, his fall, his repentance, and his expiation. We are introduced to many new characters who do not edify us, but only one of whom is nearly irredeemably bad—one satellite of a worthless but not inhuman peer, the Hon. Peter Brayder. We have met the famous Berry, anciently the dismissed nurse, who caught Sir Austin sobbing, and own to finding her Dickensonian volubility and humour depressing in the extreme. We greet her with a grimace that does duty for a smile, which broadens into cheerfulness upon her exit. Much of the society of Mrs. Berry would, we own, fit us for Bedlam. The book is so living that it breeds the strong aversions and preferences of actual existence. The very air of reality about the woman provokes an added weariness. We endure her and listen to her as a living bore, wondering when and where she will stop, without the least inclination to skip a line devoted to her prolonged and disconnected utterances. The humour of her matrimonial differences and of the final dénouement escapes us, but we tolerate it as we tolerate the rest of the infinite trials of life. In feeling that the book would be better without her, we feel it just as we feel that our sojourn in a certain place, where we spent the summer or winter, would have been the better for the absence of some other tiresome sojourner, that is all. We cannot remember the place without remembering the obnoxious visitor. So we cannot remember ‘Richard Feverel’ without recalling Mrs. Berry—an excellent woman, in the main, and an instrument of reconciliation between Sir Austin and his daughter-in-law; devoted, as bores usually are, and full of all the virtues. Mr. Meredith loves her, and for that reason we make shift to put up with her. But we could wish her less obtrusive, and, above all, less garrulous and gross.

Richard’s experiences in town, illuminated by the mild lamp of Adrian’s wit, carry us along with him. He claims our undivided sympathies whenever he appears, and we are not sorry to have him to ourselves without his bride. Lucy may conquer the wise youth by the cookery-book, but as we are not invited to eat of her dinners, we prefer the unedifying sight of Richard upon the Thames and dining with guardsmen and light ladies at Richmond, or escorting his Sir Julian by way of conversion of that indecorous lady to the path of virtue. We like less Lady Judith, the ardent female Radical who married a decrepit lord to carry out her principles, and took Richard in hand, until he succumbed, upon champagne and song, into the arms of the siren. The father who had given him to the world an immaculate youth was the first instrument of his fall. He desired him to see what Adrian calls the ‘demi, or damned monde,’ before entering upon housekeeping—an amiable desire on the part of a virtuous old gentleman.

After his fall, Richard awakes to a state of desperate remorse, and disappears to a remote part of Germany. He has found his mother, as well as perversion where he had intended to convert, had discovered the sad little secret of his cousin Clare in her death, and now ‘he is trying the German waters, preparatory to his undertaking the release of Italy from the subjugation of the Teuton,’ in company with the sentimental politician, Lady Judith Felle. When questioned about him, Adrian says ‘he was going to reform the world—unfortunately he began with the feminine side of it. Cupid, proud of Phœbus newly slain, or Pluto, wishing to people his kingdom, put it into the soft head of one of the guileless, grateful creatures to kiss him for his good work. Oh horror! he never expected that. Conceive the system in the flesh, and you have our Richard. The consequence is that this male Peri refuses to enter his paradise, though the gates are open for him, the trumpets blow, and the fair unspotted one awaits him fruitful within.’ He views his fault as a pure woman would, and though knowing of Sir Austin’s reconcilement to his marriage and his bride, learning, too, of his paternity, he shrinks from returning to her as unworthy. The scene in the German forest, after he learns the news, is most beautiful, and a worthy prelude to that grandly tragic last scene between Richard and Lucy, when, upon his return, he discovers the plot to ruin his wife, in which the baleful enchantress proves the most respectable and honest of the actors. Richard has challenged her husband, Lord Montfalcon, and hurries down to Raynham, where the fatted calf is ready, as well as numerous open arms, the kisses of wife and child. The strength of this parting scene is awful. We feel the wrench of it, and the horror, and sorrow itself seems too full for tears. After it the catastrophe of the last chapter is smoothly bridged, and the sadness of Lucy’s death and Richard’s rise from a sick-bed, numbed with grief, is but a softly-appropriate drop-scene.

As a story, ‘Rhoda Fleming’ is, perhaps, the simplest and strongest work of Mr. Meredith. Certainly it is the best-told story from the artistic point of view. Like ‘Richard Feverel,’ it ends tragically, only here the tragic effects are not concentrated upon the end. They pervade the entire book, and the termination is led up to consistently almost from the beginning, where we meet the two sisters, with minds and beauty above their sphere, and see them silently watched by two young gentlemen. The foreboding is unanalyzable, but it is a foreboding, and we apprehend storm and contention and sombre lights.

Sombre the book is throughout, and we regard it as almost impertinent to yield to the occasional pricks of humour that tickle us into quiet laughter. How can we bear to laugh at the oddities of mankind, even at the bidding of such a master, when we see a sweet and pure girl’s life going to ruin, and understand that the very nature of her is such that there is no return from the wreck, no after-sunshine to restore the ravages of storm? Here is no picturesque mingling of lights and shadows, no lyrical romance, no melodies of the upper spheres, to imperil the dark remembrance of the dénouement.

The very opening is shadowed. At a village feast, when children danced upon a mirthful May Day on a green, lapped in the soft beauty of Kentish landscape, appeared a young woman, who had left her home with a spotted name, and who was left in silence humbly apart. Dahlia Fleming, pitying her, expresses to her father a wish to speak to her. The father stoutly forbade her, and when Rhoda, the stronger, defied him, and went and stood by the poor girl, he punished her by not speaking to her for a week. And the girls, reflecting on this, marvelled at the cruelty of even the kindest men to offending or repentant women. This is where Mr. Meredith is so original and so just. It is impossible to go far on the road of life without being frequently confronted with the unrecognised fact that it is men, and not women, who are hardest and most cruel to fallen women. It is they in their capacity of householder who pronounce the verdict of damnation, as this Kentish farmer did, and it is soft and innocent women who, like these country maidens, would fain offer them the hand of sympathy and sisterhood. Mr. Meredith never follows the beaten track of generalities. When he gives us a generality, it is one of his own discovery, and you may depend upon finding a very sound truth at the bottom of it.

One of the drollest and completest of Mr. Meredith’s odd characters is the uncle of these girls, Anthony Hackbut, a mythical millionaire, understood by the rustic mind to be vaguely residing in London, and amassing quantities of gold and genial banknotes. The family look to him for elevation and fortune. He passes for a miser because he refused to advance the farmer one hundred pounds in times of difficulties, and sowed ill-will upon the death of the girl’s mother by urging as plea his position of great trust in a wealthy bank that prevented him from assisting at his sister’s funeral; nobly offering, in his opinion, to defray half the funeral expenses. He referred to funds as worldly things, and hoped to meet his family in heaven, ‘where brotherly love, as well as money, was ready made, and not always in the next street.’ He ended by a hint of susceptibility to the friendliness of an invitation to spend a vacation in Kent, and offered one of his nieces the post of housekeeper, should she wish to see London, and make acquaintance with the world. The seductions were fruit at stalls, oysters and whelks and winkles, pictures in shops, sights of muslin and silks, and rides on omnibuses, with an occasional glimpse of the military on horseback.

Dahlia is surpassingly fair, and the question of her departure is submitted to grave deliberation in an assembly composed of Farmer Fleming, held between a desire to secure the miser’s money and a dread of London for his daughter; Robert, the sedate and handsome assistant, in love with the dark Rhoda; Mrs. Sumfit, the cook, a very fat and loving woman; and Master Gammon, an aged foreman, with the cast of eye of an antediluvian lizard, who remarked ‘that he never had much opinion of London.’ Policy and Dahlia’s entreaties prevail, and the fair girl goes up to the great city forebodingly, we believe. It is like a division of souls for the two sisters so devotedly attached. A lovely miniature is sent down to Rhoda in secret, who marvels at its beauty and at the secrecy. And the next paragraph brings down to Kent old Anthony Hackbut. The scene is inimitable. The queer old fellow, with a disconcerting reserve, tosses Dahlia off upon a charge of giddiness, drinks his beer, because he has not paid for it, propounds an arithmetical problem to Master Gammon, who retorts ‘that he is paid to work, and not to think,’ and continues to eat his dumplings to the fret of nerves of the watchers impatiently waiting for news of Dahlia. We learn of vestiary elegances and temper, and of an old man left to take his tea alone; and, like Rhoda, we understand the sadness of it and, unlike her, suspect its meaning. It is the sadder because of the farmer’s pride in his handsome daughters, so greatly superior to their station, and of a conviction that he will prove a cruel judge when the hour for mercy comes. Rhoda goes to London to rejoin her darling, her one fear lest this sumptuously-attired young woman should be ashamed of her rustic garb. Robert, a very masterful and extraordinary young farmer, the intimate friend of a major and a polished English gentleman, the prize drinker in his own village and a water-drinker here, a man of double life and double character, and at the same time single and truthful in both, has already sharpened her acute sensibilities for the penetration of doubt of Dahlia. She is dropped into a bitter depth of brooding by the fact that Dahlia is not there to meet her when she arrives. It is late at night when Dahlia comes to fetch away her mother’s Bible, and finds her sister. The surprise decides her destiny for that night. She stays with her sister, and sends away the young man waiting for her on the pavement below.