Very different from Swinburne’s ungenerous attitude to Thomson was that of George Meredith, as may be seen from several of his letters to me, published in the Life of James Thomson, and reprinted in Letters of George Meredith. A proposal was made that Mr. Meredith should himself write an appreciation of “B.V.”; this he could not do, but he gave me permission to make use of any opinions he had expressed by letter to me or in conversation; I visited him at Box Hill in 1891, and he talked at great length on that and other subjects. Of Thomson he spoke with feelings akin to affection, exclaiming more than once: “Poor dear fellow! I bitterly reproach myself that I did not help him more, by getting him work on the Athenæum.” But he doubted if he could at that date have been reclaimed: earlier in life he might have been saved, he thought, by the companionship of a woman who would have given him sympathy and aid; praise, too, which had been the ruin of many writers (he instanced George Eliot and Dickens, with some trenchant remarks about both) would have been good for “B.V.,” who was so brave and honest. He himself, he said, had often felt what it was to lack all recognition, and sometimes, when he had looked up from his writing and seen a distant field in sunlight, he had thought, “it must be well to be in the warmth.” What above all he admired in Thomson was his resolute clear courage. There had been no mention of pessimism in their talk, except that when he had been speaking of the brightest and the darkest moods of Nature, Thomson answered: “I see no brightest.”
Meredith was evidently repelled by this gospel of despair; he said that the writing of The City of Dreadful Night had done its author no good, inasmuch as he there embodied his gloomier images in a permanent form which in turn reacted on him and made him more despondent. He considered “Weddah and Om-el-Bonain” to be Thomson’s masterpiece, and the finest narrative poem we have: “Where can you find its equal?” I told him of Swinburne’s change of opinion about it, and he said instantly: “You know whose doing that is.” A playful account followed of the way in which his own poems used to be reviewed by Watts-Dunton in the Athenæum. “We always receive anything of Mr. Meredith’s with respect.” “You know,” said Meredith, “what that sort of beginning means.” Of late he had ceased to send out review copies of his poems, being sickened by the ineptitude of critics. “There are a good many curates about the country,” he added, “and the fact that many of them do a little reviewing in their spare hours does not tend to elevate literature.”
Of social problems he spoke with freedom; most strongly of the certain change that is coming, when women get their economic independence. Infinite mischief comes to the race from loveless marriages. But he anticipated it would take six or more generations for women to rid themselves of the intellectual follies they now inherit from their grandmothers.
At dinner Mr. Meredith talked of his distaste for flesh food, and his esteem for simplicity in all forms, and stated emphatically that it was quite a mistake to suppose that his own experiments in vegetarianism had injured his health. Yet, if he were to try that diet again, he knew how his friends would explain to him that it is “impossible to live without meat,” or (this in dramatically sarcastic tones) that “if it be possible for some persons, it is not possible for me.”[25] I was struck by his great kindliness as host; he was in fact over-solicitous for the welfare of vegetarian guests.
The formality and punctiliousness of Mr. Meredith’s manner, with his somewhat ceremonious gestures and pronunciation, perhaps affected a visitor rather unfavourably at first introduction; but after a few minutes this impression wore off, and one felt only the vivacity and charm of his conversation. It was a continuous flow of epigrams, as incisive in many cases as those in his books; during which I noticed the intense sensitiveness and expressiveness of his mouth, the lips curling with irony, as he flung out his sarcasms about critics, and curates, and sentimentalists of every order. His eyes were remarkably keen and penetrating, and he watched narrowly the effect of his points; so that even to keep up with him as a listener was a considerable mental strain. It was in consequence of my mentioning this to Mr. Bernard Shaw, a few days later, that he made his sporting offer that, if he were taken down to Box Hill, he “would start talking the moment he entered the house, and not let Meredith get a word in edgeways.” In Mr. S. M. Ellis’s biography of Meredith, Shaw is quoted as saying that the proposal emanated from Mr. Clement Shorter or myself: this, however, is quite incorrect, for the suggestion was his own, and much too reckless to have had any other source. Such an encounter, had it taken place, would not have been, as Shaw flattered himself, a monologue, but a combat so colossal that one shrinks from speculating on the result: all that seems certain is that it would have lasted till the talk-out blow was given, and that upon the tomb of one or other of the colloquists a hic tacet would have had to be inscribed.
I noticed a certain resemblance in Meredith’s profile to that of Edward Carpenter (it may be seen in some of the photographs); and this was the more surprising because of the unlikeness of the two men in temperament, Meredith’s cry for “More brain, O Lord, more brain!” being in contrast with Carpenter’s rather slighting references to “the wandering lunatic Mind.” Yet Meredith, too, was an apostle of Nature; his democratic instincts are unmistakable, though the scenes of his novels are mostly laid in aristocratic surroundings, so that his “cry for simplicity” came “from the very camp of the artificial.” This was the view of his philosophy taken by me in an article on “Nature-lessons from George Meredith,” published in the Free Review, in reference to which Mr. Meredith wrote: “It is pleasant to be appreciated, but the chief pleasure for me is in seeing the drift of my work rightly apprehended.”
To Mr. Bertram Dobell, the well-known bookseller, whose name is so closely associated with Thomson’s and Traherne’s, I was indebted for much information about books and writers of books, given in that cosy shop of his in the Charing Cross Road, which was a place of pleasant recollections for so many literary men. I had especial reason to be grateful to him for directing me to the writings of Herman Melville, whose extraordinary genius, shown in such masterpieces as Typee and The Whale, was so unaccountably ignored or undervalued that his name is still often confused with that of Whyte Melville or of Herman Merivale. Melville was a great admirer of James Thomson; this he made plain in several letters addressed to English correspondents, in which he described The City of Dreadful Night as the “modern Book of Job under an original form, duskily looming with the same aboriginal verities,” and wrote of one of the lighter poems that “Sunday up the River, contrasting with the City of Dreadful Night, is like a Cuban humming-bird, beautiful in fairy tints, flying against the tropic thunderstorm.”
Mr. Dobell was a man of very active mind, and he had always in view some further literary projects. One of these, of which he told me not long before his death, was to write a book about his friend, James Thomson; and it is much to be regretted that this could not be accomplished. Another plan—surely one of the strangest ever conceived—was to render or re-write Walt Whitman’s poems in the Omar Khayyám stanza: a proposal which reminded me of the beneficent scheme of Fourier, or another of the early communists, to turn the waters of the ocean into lemonade. It is difficult to speak of Leaves of Grass and the Rubáiyát in the same breath; yet I once heard the Omar Khayyám poem referred to in a still stranger connection by a clergyman who was the “autocrat of the breakfast table” in a hotel where I was staying. Suddenly pausing in his table-talk, he did me the honour of consulting me on a small question of authorship. “I am right, am I not,” he said, “in supposing that the translator of Omar Khayyám was—Emerson?”
Mr. Dobell’s experiences in book-lore had been long and varied, and he could tell some excellent stories, one of which especially struck me as showing that he had a rare fund of shrewd sense as well as of professional knowledge. He once missed from his shop a very scarce and valuable book, in circumstances which made it a matter of certainty to him that it had been abstracted by a keen collector who had been talking to him that very day, though no word concerning the book had been spoken. Dobell was greatly troubled, until he hit upon a plan which was at once the simplest and most tactful that could have been imagined. Without any inquiry or explanation, he sent in a bill for the book, as in course of business, and the account was duly paid.
Through Songs of Freedom, an anthology edited by me in 1892, I came into correspondence with many democratic writers, several of whom, especially Mr. Gerald Massey and Mr. W. J. Linton, showed much interest in the work and gave me valuable assistance. Dr. John Kells Ingram’s famous verses, “The Men of ‘Ninety-Eight,” were included in the book; and as curiosity has sometimes been expressed as to how far the sentiments of that poem accorded with the later views of its author, it may be worth mentioning that, in giving me permission to reprint the stanzas, he wrote as follows: “You will not suppose that the effusion of the youth exactly represents the convictions of the man. But I have never been ashamed of having written the verses. They were the fruit of genuine feeling.” A request for Joaquin Miller’s spirited lines, “Sophie Perovskaya,” brought me a letter from the veteran author of that very beautiful book, Life amongst the Modocs (a work of art worthy to be classed with Herman Melville’s Typee), which was one of the strangest pieces of penmanship I ever received, having the appearance of being written with a piece of wood rather than a pen, but more than compensating by its heartiness for the labour needed in deciphering it: “I thank you cordially; I am abashed at my audacity long ago, in publishing what I did in dear old England. I hope to do something really worth your reading before I die.” But that he had done long before.