And still are we confronted with the mystery of such a poet’s unpopularity. Explain it by the unattractiveness of his difficulties, and what have you to say against the soothing charm and the exquisite simplicity of such lines as these, that linger in the memory, not only because of their delicate music, but because of their vividness of picture and the autumn sadness that lies upon it. In workmanship the poem is equal to the best of its sort, and Heine, in his matchless songs, has never touched us with a pathos more searching from its unpretentiousness.
Two years after the appearance of ‘Modern Love,’ ‘Emilia in England’ was published, and in the same year M. E. D. Forgues translated an adaptation of it for the Revue des Deux Mondes, under the title of ‘Sandra Belloni, Roman de la Vie Anglaise.’ This looks like progress in public opinion. At least, it may be thought, after thirteen years of neglected labour in strife with feeble and vitiated taste, the author of so much brilliant work is upon the point of enthusiastic recognition. Not so at all. ‘Emilia’ created as little sensation as ‘Richard,’ and we may believe that the subscribers to the circulating libraries were as little fluttered by the production of the one as they had been by that of the other—being equally unaware of the existence of either. The book was not extensively reviewed, and only the happy few congratulated themselves upon the acquisition. Perhaps their satisfaction in it was increased by the fact that it was not shared by the crowd, for though the lovers of an unappreciated novelist may ardently desire to bestrew their paths with converts, it is not unusual in them to cover themselves in a sort of fierce and holy pride with a bit of his cloak of isolation. If he is miserably misunderstood, do not they share to some extent his misfortunes? And is there not a very decided superiority—sad, if you will, for none but the churlish and carping few desire to keep salvation and paradise exclusively for themselves—in the fact of their mutual want of appreciation?
‘Rhoda Fleming’ appeared in 1865, and this book seems to have made a more decided impression, though the writer still remained in the background among well-known men of letters, and his name, like his presence, was on the whole ignored. It was published by Messrs. Tinsley, in itself an instructive lesson in the author’s popularity. But there can be no doubt that the tide was changing, slowly, it is true—indeed, imperceptibly. In 1867 ‘Vittoria’ first came out in the Fortnightly Review, a review henceforth devoted to the fiction of Mr. Meredith, and to which he seems to have contributed a good many reviews and short poems. After this, in 1871, we meet him in Cornhill recording the brilliant and ever-delightful adventures of ‘Harry Richmond,’ and this, coupled with the fact that Mr. George Du Maurier illustrated the story, and that it ran through two editions in the same year, gives us breathing-space in our long vent of indignation. We may now conclude that a portion, at least, of the British public had awaked, and were capable of relishing such entrancing novels as ‘Richard Feverel,’ ‘Sandra Belloni’ and ‘Harry Richmond,’ in which we hardly read so much as we drink in life, vividly, eagerly—life with all its sharp, sweet thrills and poignant aversions, its breathless alternation of mood and swift race of the passions.
‘Beauchamp’s Career’ followed in 1876, first in the Fortnightly Review, between 1874 and 1876, and afterwards in Messrs. Chapman and Hall’s collected editions of 1886 and 1889. Although Mr. Meredith’s career cannot be said to have been crowned with anything like a wide acknowledgment, or even anything approaching a fair reward, until he wrote ‘Diana of the Crossways’ in 1885, which brought him his first taste of substantial and general success, and cast a retrospective glamour upon its predecessors, people from the date of ‘Harry Richmond’ began to know that there was a novelist named George Meredith who was not Owen Meredith.
Considering all that the writer has had to contend with in the way of block-headedness, this is most certainly a step in advance. But to his own especial minority, it is not ‘Diana,’ with all its charm and its perilous brilliancy, that crowns Mr. Meredith’s career, but that unique masterpiece, ‘The Egoist,’ which was published in 1879. Here was a memorable triumph of art, at which we have not yet ceased to wonder, and which we hold apart from all other books that we have read. After it he may write ‘Tragic Comedians,’ ‘Diana of the Crossways,’ and volumes of poems. Anything he writes we are prepared to welcome with cordial delight and gratitude, but we do not expect another Sir Willoughby Patterne. We are satisfied with the impossibility of the repetition of such an achievement. It is not given to many artists to produce one flawless work, and to expect a second from even such a mighty one as this would be to prove one’s self insatiable.
From this time forward, reviews, articles, criticisms—hostile, humorous, and eulogistic—begin to abound; and by the time of ‘Diana’s’ appearance, the British public has been made ready to receive the intelligence that a master is in their midst—a living, breathing master, such as Tennyson and Browning, and from whom work may happily still be expected. What effect this announcement may have had upon the British public cannot be perfectly defined. Being unenthusiastic, except in the matter of low and familiar literature, it is to be feared that such news has but moderately moved it, and in the matter of taste, has not influenced it at all. This new master is unfamiliar to them in his speech and in his ideas. He does not dwell upon sordid scenes with visible pleasure; he claims them with a voice that is not of their common tongue, and faces them without the old-fashioned twinkle of the grave jester’s glance. If he caricatures humanity, it is not as Dickens caricatures it, to tickle us into inextinguishable laughter, nor yet as Thackeray does, in a vein of comic satire. If he calls upon us to recognise that life is often a sad blunder, and to pity the blunderers, he is neither sentimental in his claim, nor consciously pathetic. He indulges neither in the mawkish sentiment of Dickens, nor in the sentimental tenderness of Thackeray, and as little courts our tears as our laughter. Brain is what he asks of us, and its use in reading him.
CHAPTER II.
MEREDITH’S STYLE AND INFLUENCE.
To succeed in qualifying a style so varied and so strange as Mr. Meredith’s, and composed of so many diverse elements, would be difficult even for his peers. Its quality is at the same time rugged and elusive, obscure and dazzlingly brilliant, witty and profound, harsh and most musically tender, light as a summer cloud, majestic as a storm. But his great defect is artificiality. His splendid pages and his matchless dialogues never lose the obtrusive flavour of the midnight oil, and we see most of his characters through a blinding glitter of limelight. This excessive use of artificial illumination, while fascinating us and compelling our admiration for the writer’s extraordinary cleverness, wearies us and irritates us at times, and we long for the mental repose of a whiff of commonplace and a page or two, by way of interlude, of fluent easy prose that rests the eye and the brain. There are so many tricks and surprises bestrewing our path, five-barred gates starting unexpectedly for us to leap; we are deliberately plunged neck and heels into so many swamps, and bowled over all sorts of rocks and stones, with the oddest sensations in conflict, that we more than once pay our debt grudgingly, and, like a peaceable man knocked down by a bludgeon, are amazed at the liberty that has been taken with our understanding. In this exuberant display of his own powers does Meredith show himself to be thoroughly English. He is unapproachable as a wrestler with words and phrases, and infuses dead speech with the vitality of blood and muscles. Words with him are like thoughts—strong, living, tangible to the touch of the soul. They seem to fly, and mount, and flutter round us, to catch our breath forcibly, and hold our imagination in the grasp of blood-warmed fingers. The most ordinary action of life, described by him in a line or two, is not a photograph, but a vivid revelation, a scene stamped not on the vision, but upon the mind. When he is not playing queer tricks with us and keeping every sense insufferably alert, every nerve strained to catch the meaning that dances tantalizingly before us, flying hither and thither upon fantastic figures of speech, until the writer himself seems drunk with his own juggling, he is quieting our baffled senses by these sharp revelations that have no artificial glamour about them. He ceases to be the inhuman metaphorist, and becomes our brother again, and we forget that he ever terrified us. I open ‘Evan Harrington’ at random, and alight on a paragraph where each word is vividly set in a perfect whole. There is no twist or turning here, and as we see the red harvest-moon and the dark water and trees, so we seem to touch the hand of suffering youth:
‘Over a length of the stream the red, round harvest-moon was rising, and the weakened youth was this evening at the mercy of the charm that encircled him. The water curved, and dimpled, and flowed flat, and the whole body of it rushed into the spaces of sad splendour. The clustered trees stood like temples of darkness; their shadows lengthened supernaturally; and a pale gloom crept between them on the sward. He had been thinking some time that Rose would knock at his door and give him her voice, at least; but she did not come; and when he had gazed out on the stream until his eyes ached, he felt that he must go and walk by it. Those little flashes of the hurrying tide spoke to him of a secret rapture and of a joy-seeking impulse—the pouring onward of all the blood of life into one illumined heart, mournful from excess of love.’
In none of his books do such passages abound as in ‘Richard Feverel,’ unless, perhaps, in ‘Harry Richmond.’ These two books, and in a lesser degree ‘Sandra Belloni,’ may best be described as picturesque and melodious. The writer is less a thinker than a poet, and sometimes he sings with a sweetness that troubles our vision and catches us queerly about the throat.