This was written in the autumn of 1878, and is drawn from one of many little notes of invitation which used to preface a delightful day with George Meredith on the slopes of Box Hill. Our long rambles filled the afternoon, and were preceded by a simple but thoughtfully chosen lunch, which, when the weather allowed, was set out upon a gravel walk in front of the cottage beside the tall, sheltering hedge that gave shade from the sun. Meredith attached no small importance to the details of these little feasts. He prided himself not a little on his gastronomic knowledge, and was pleased when our climate made it possible to reproduce the impression of a genuine French déjeuner en plein air. In another letter he writes: “The promise of weather is good. Lilac, laburnum, nightingales, and asparagus are your dishes. Hochheimer or dry, still, red Bouzy, Richebourg and your friend to wash all down.” His knowledge of these matters of the table was, perhaps, not very profound, but the appropriate vocabulary which gave the air of the expert was always at his command. And this, I think, was characteristic of the man in respect of many fields of knowledge that lay beyond the arena in which his imaginative powers were directly engaged.
In his art he was never quite content to image only the permanent facts of life, either in their larger or simpler issues, unless he was permitted at the same time to entangle the characters of his creation in the coils of some problem that was intellectual rather than purely emotional. He loved to submit his creations to the instant pressure of their time, and with this purpose it was his business, no less than his pleasure, to equip himself intellectually with garnered stores of knowledge in fields into which the ordinary writers of fiction rarely enter. It was not, of course, to be supposed that he could claim equal mastery in all, although his intellect was so active and so agile that his limitations were not easily discerned. I remember one day at an Exhibition in the New Gallery having introduced him to an old gentleman, whose long life had been spent in a study of the drawings of the old masters, to whom Meredith, with inimitable fluency, was expounding the peculiar virtues of the art of Canaletto. Meredith was eloquent, but the discourse somehow failed to impress the aged student. When they had parted his sole commentary to me was: “Your friend—Mr. Meredith, I think you said—endeavoured to persuade me that he understood Canaletto, but he did not.”
But even if, in this single instance, the criticism be accepted as just, it must be conceded by all who knew him well that Meredith was not often caught tripping in the discussion of any topic in which his intellect had been actively engaged. Sometimes—and then, perhaps, rather in a spirit of audacious adventure and for exercise of his incomparable powers of expression—he would make a bold sortie into realms of knowledge that were only half conquered. But this was, for the most part, only when he had an audience waiting on his words. When he had only a single companion to listen there was no man whose talk was more penetrating or more sincere: and he was at his best, I used to think, in those long rambles that filled our afternoons at Box Hill. The active exercise in which he delighted seemed to steady and concentrate those intellectual forces that sometimes ran riot when he felt himself called upon to dominate the mixed assembly of a dinner table.
No one, assuredly, ever possessed a more genuine or a more exalted delight in nature. His veneration for the earth and for all that sprang from the earth as an unfailing and irrefutable source of the highest sanity in thought and feeling, amounted almost to worship. He never deliberately set out to paint the landscape in set language as we passed along, but a brief word dropped here and there upon our way, telling of some aspect of beauty newly observed and newly registered, showed clearly that every fresh encounter with nature served to add another gem to the hoarded store of beauty that lay resident in his mind. And yet, even here, the research for the recondite, either in the fact observed or in the phrase that fixed it, peeped out characteristically in the most careless fashion of his talk. He loved to signalise an old and abiding love of the outward world by some new token that found expression at once in language newly coined; and he would break away on a sudden from some long-drawn legend of a half-imaginary character that was often set in the frame of burlesque, to note, with a swift change to a graver tone, some passing aspect of the scene that challenged his admiration afresh. And then, when he had quietly added this last specimen to his cabinet, he would as quickly turn again, with boisterous mirth, to complete the caricature portrait of some common friend, which he loved to embellish with every detail of imagined embroidery.
In a mixed company Meredith did not often lean to the discussion of literature. He inclined rather, if an expert on any subject was present, to press the conversation in that direction, exhibiting nearly always a surprising knowledge of the specialist’s theme, knowledge at any rate sufficient to yield in the result a full revelation of the store of information at the disposal of his interlocutor. But in those long rambles when we were alone he loved to consider and discuss the claims of the professors of his own art, rejecting scornfully enough the current standards of his own time, but approaching with entire humility the work of masters whom he acknowledged. In those days (I am speaking now of the years between 1875 and 1888) he had by no means attained even to that measure of popularity which came to him at a later time, and when the talk veered towards his own work it was easy to perceive a lurking sense of disappointment that left him, however, with an undiminished faith in the art to which his life was pledged.
During the autumn of 1878 I had written to him in warm appreciation of some of his poems, and his reply is characteristic. “There is no man,” he writes, “I would so strongly wish to please with my verse. I wish I had more time for it, but my Pactolus, a shrivelled stream at best, will not flow to piping, and as to publishing books of verse, I have paid heavily for that audacity twice in pounds sterling. I had for audience the bull, the donkey, and the barking cur. He that pays to come before them a third time, we will not give him his name.” I think in regard to all his work, whether in prose or verse, he was haunted at that time by the presence of the bull, the donkey, and the barking cur. But if this had yielded for the moment some sense of bitterness in regard to the results of his own career, his attitude towards life was even then undaunted, and left him generously disposed towards all achievement of true pretensions, either in the present or in the past. Indeed, the true greatness of the man was in nothing better displayed than in the unbroken urbanity of his outlook upon life. His was of all natures I have known the most hopeful of the world’s destiny. The starved and shrivelled pessimism of the disappointed egotist had no part in his disposition. His wider outlook upon life was undimmed by the pain of whatever measure of personal failure had befallen him, and I believe that even if his faith in humanity had not of itself been sufficing and complete, he could have drawn from the earth, and the unfading beauty of the earth, encouragement enough to keep him steadfast in his way.
How admirably has he expressed this joy of full comradeship with nature in the opening lines of the “Woods of Westermain”!
Toss your heart up with the lark;
Foot at peace with mouse and worm,
Fair you fare.