George Meredith: A Study

by Hannah Lynch

But viewing him upon the ground of the simple story-teller, we must admit that this is a ground either foreign to Mr. Meredith’s original genius, or deliberately shunned by him. The good old fashion, so dear to Scott and Thackeray, of bringing everything to a definite conclusion, either for better or worse, and clearing up all doubts as to the ultimate career of even their minor characters, is a fashion that he, with some cruelty and much contempt for the ordinary reader, utterly discards. He cares not a jot for our sympathy, still less for our judgment. He notes that life is chiefly interrogatory and unsatisfactory—an unfinished drama rarely terminating with the rightful wedding-bells or the merited reward; that choice is rarely justified by results, and that good and evil still remain vexed questions to be decided, as far as definite decision is possible, except upon their broadest issues, by temperament and individuality, by race and sex and training, as faith and love are decided. Look at the end of all his stories, and you will find yourself confronted with the unanswerable question which is sure to fix us in the examination of the lives of each one of us. There is the fatal tide, we know, but can we dare to say at what precise turning of the road of life we missed it?

This is the philosophy that ‘Richard Feverel’ exposes—conjectural, questioning; a drawn game between reason and impulse, between nature and intellect, between a philosopher’s system and a young man’s first love. Neither win, because, though a mighty fighter and a Homeric wrestler with words, Meredith is not of the definite school, and will not pander to his readers’ tastes either way. Are you for the mismanaged poor hero, or for the disappointed philosopher, gazing in the last page upon the system fondly built upon sand, and laid in ruins by the first breath of purely human disaster? Mr. Meredith resolves that your sympathies shall be balanced, as his own are soundly balanced. He leaves you with a question upon your lips, and your childish reproach is chidden by his silence.

Richard is the strongest and best hero the writer has drawn, before he fell in love with the more intricate complexities of woman, and delighted in her intellectual surprises, her social difficulties and struggles with iron fate and masculinity. We part with him as he rises from a sick-bed, widowed and broken upon the outset of brilliant manhood, enshadowed in a tragic gloom, and who is to explain to us the evolution of middle-age in this youth of burning hope and rash promise? Not the creator, certainly. The throes of commonplace speculation into which he may thrust the ordinary reader trouble him not, and he is less merciful to him even than Tolstoi. He takes us from that strong Shakespearean scene, in which Richard reads the diary of Clare Doria Forey, unveiling her unconscious and reticent love, only fully measured by her on the threshold of a loveless marriage, while overhead the candles are burning in her mortuary chamber, and flickering lugubriously upon the lips that have spoken to him from ‘behind the hills of death’; and without giving us time to clear our throats of the gathered sensations of pity and pain, he hurls us into fresh emotions, equally painful, by the death of Lucy, Richard’s young wife. And after that we learn nothing more of Richard, and are at liberty to decide for ourselves whether Sir Austin, the broker system-creator, and Lady Blandish married, like any other pair of middle-aged lovers, or preferred to continue in the less definite and secure path of platonic sentimentalities—the one studying the pilgrim’s scrip, the other adding to its wisdom.

The fault is perhaps to be laid to our complex, inquiring, and unrobust age, that men like Tolstoi and Meredith should both be incomplete as artists and as thinkers. Completeness in art belongs to simplicity of thought and directness of vision, and these are the attributes of the real story-teller, who is never diverted from his task by philosophic conjecture or by psychological problems. Mr. Meredith’s incompleteness is shown in an affectation of oddness and an artificial glamour that leave the reader with senses and wits perturbed, anxiously questioning the gravity of the writer, apprehensive of being laughed at, and not altogether sure that he has not been assisting at the marvellous performance of a juggling metaphorist, instead of the discoveries and exposition of a serious philosopher. This artificial glamour is more sparingly used in ‘Richard Feverel’; hence, perhaps, its larger popularity than any of his other works. But it is hardly, as a whole, so great as ‘The Egoist,’ ‘Rhoda Fleming,’ or ‘Diana of the Crossways.’ In it the quality of tenderness, noticeably absent in the rest, abounds, and also a lovely freshness and a visible delight in youth and in youthful joys. It is a work pre-eminently human, with all the defects and qualities of humanity strongly marked. Had it been written in blood, it could not be redder with life. Vitality is its captivating charm and melody its voice. As a work of art, it may be far from perfect, and we recognise that it is marred by many impossible situations, errors of taste and judgment, and a tendency, in the portrayal of the famous Mrs. Berry, to gross caricature. Nevertheless, we love it, faults and all, with that strong personal love and a wish for frequent dipping at its sources that it is the unshared privilege of truly great and original productions to inspire. How many are the writers we turn to in all moods, knowing we shall ever find something new, something helpful in their familiar pages! Shakespeare for the English mind and for a very few foreigners; Montaigne, and perhaps Molière, for others. Others, again, decide between Scott, Thackeray, and George Eliot. Add to this limited sphere a half-dozen of the world’s best poets, and the circle of comforters and permanent friends is formed. In such choice company may Meredith present himself with ‘Richard Feverel’ in his hand, and his place will be no mean one in their midst. Shakespeare himself might offer him the cordial hand-clasp of brotherhood, and assure him that since the appearance of Beatrice and Portia, no such women as Diana, Emilia, and his German princess had ever shot upon the dull world from masculine brains.

In Meredith’s very faults there is an excess of strength. It is this superabundance and an impatience of drivelling sentiment that lead him so frequently to shock our nineteenth-century taste. I think he shocks us with deliberate aim, deeming our taste questionable and unrobust, and our fastidiousness unhealthy. These blows directed against our temple of false modesty are in no book fiercer and more astounding than in ‘Richard Feverel,’ and in no other book has he risen to such supreme heights. Here you have at its best the matchless splendour and majesty of his prose, and pages of prolonged beauty. You have ample scope to realize the vividness of his interpretation of nature, and the delight of young love so magically unveiled by him in those three beautiful chapters on the opening romance of Richard and Lucy—‘Ferdinand and Miranda,’ ‘Diversions played on a Penny Whistle,’ and ‘Time-honoured Treatment of a Dragon by a Hero.’ Which of these three chapters to choose it would be difficult to say, for there is nothing like them in all English literature for sweetness, melody, and pulse-moving charm. If I had to pronounce, I should be disposed to give the preference to the ‘Penny Whistle’ chapter, though, from the fact that the first meeting between Richard and Lucy is oftenest quoted, I judge it to be the most popular.

Match me this exquisite picture in prose or poetry: ‘The sun is coming down to earth, and the fields and the waters shout to him golden shouts. He comes, and his heralds run before him, and touch the leaves of oaks and planes and beeches lucid green, and the pine-stems redder gold; leaving brightest footprints upon thickly-weeded banks, where the foxgloves’ last upper-bells incline, and bramble shoots wander amid moist rich herbage. The plumes of the woodland are alight; and beyond them, over the open, ’tis a race with the long-thrown shadows; a race across the heaths and up the hills, till, at the farthest bourne of mounted eastern cloud, the heralds of the sun lay rosy figures and rest.’

Or yet again, this other: ‘The tide of colour has ebbed from the upper sky. In the west the sea of sunken fire draws back, and the stars leap forth and tremble, and retire before the advancing moon, who slips the silver train of cloud from her shoulders, and, with her foot upon the pine-tops, surveys heaven.’

In these three chapters we have Mr. Meredith not only at his best, but better than many of the best poets upon their own ground. He sings rather than speaks. He neither wants to astonish nor affright us, but solely to enchant us. And who can read him and remain unmoved—withstand the spell he casts upon us? Shelley was never more musical, more thrilling, and never so strong.

But there is much else in the novels of this remarkable writer besides music and poetry, and the soft showery joys and sorrows of young love. There are the qualities and deficiencies of his tragic and his mighty side as a pendant for the grace and charm of the mood we have seen. Everything in him is pronounced. He has a taste for strong lights and shadows, for grotesque asides and interruptions; is sometimes crude, always complex, and often incomplete. His coarseness is akin to the coarseness that shakes us to amazement in the tragedies and comedies of Shakespeare, where ribaldry and lovely delicacy go hand-in-hand; where, swift upon the most fanciful play of thought and scenes of pathetic beauty, and images as exquisite as a Theocritan idyl, come a burst of clownish mirth and hideous joking.

Shakespearean is the word to describe Meredith, both in his defects and in his qualities. In each is he great, with something of the unapproachable greatness, the originality, the blood and brains and nerve, of the Stratford poet, towering over his fellows to-day as Shakespeare, alive, towered over his. Human to the heels, a seer and a psychologist in one, no word is lightly written, no character lightly drawn. He delights in humanity, and almost wickedly revels in its eccentricities. Hence his tendency to exaggeration. He seizes a queer character, such as old Tom Cogglesby, John Raikes, or Mrs. Berry, and, not content with their natural oddities, like Dickens, he must steep them in the colours of his own imagination; with the result that they come out of the process caricatures, and we find it exceedingly hard to divest them of their comic garb, and trace them back to the elemental, whence they started on their devious wanderings through their creator’s mind. This characteristic, as M. Taine observes, is peculiarly English. Since Rabelais’ days the French writers are too hampered by laws and rules in art, inalterable, like those of the Medes and Persians, to dare play such tricks with reality and human nature as Dickens, Thackeray, and Meredith, in their jesting moods, permit themselves. Scott’s moods had no such promptings, perhaps because he was a better story-teller than any of the three, and found the humour of life quite sufficient without the aid of exaggeration. But then there was no satire or hardness in all Scott’s nature, and manly tenderness and sympathy were his predominant traits. He wrote stories for the pleasure of writing them, not to belabour or ridicule poor worn humanity, in which he kept his faith green and unquestioning as a child’s.