In his prose work Meredith seems often half distrustful of his own inspiration, halting now and then to test the validity of the emotions he has awakened, and at times letting a jet of irony on to the fire he has kindled, as though half suspicious that he had been lured into the ways of the sentimentalist. But in his poetry he owns a larger daring and a higher freedom; there he treads unhampered by these half-conscious fears, and yet there, no less than in his prose, we can recognise his insatiable hunger to find and discover new tokens by which to arrest the vision that he loves.
Meredith’s little cottage at the foot of Box Hill was the fittest home for the writer and for the man. Not so far removed from town as to be beyond the echo of its strife, it enabled him when his duty as reader to Chapman and Hall took him to the office to pass an hour or two at luncheon at the Garrick Club, where he loved in these brief intervals of leisure to rally some of his old friends in laughing and cheerful converse.
These occasional visits served to keep him in touch with the moving problems of his time, towards none of which he affected any kind of indifference; and yet the pungent wit and profound penetration of view with which he handled such mundane themes were won and hoarded, I think, in the long silences and the chosen loneliness of his Surrey home. Hard by Flint Cottage stands the little inn at Burford Bridge, now transformed and enlarged to meet the constant incursions of visitors from the town, but at the time when I first remember it but little changed from the days when it sheltered Keats while he was setting the finishing touches to “Endymion.” The association often led us in our rambles to speak of the work of the earlier poet, for whose faultless art Meredith owned an unbounded admiration. Of the poets I think he spoke more willingly than of the writers of prose, though he was on the alert to recognise genius in any form, and never lacked enthusiasm in appraising the work of a writer like Charlotte Brontë. For George Eliot’s achievement he never professed more than a strictly limited respect. Her more pretentious literary methods failed to impress him, and there were times when the keenness of his hostile criticism bordered upon scorn. I remember when some one in his presence ventured to remark that George Eliot, “panoplied in all the philosophies, was apt to swoop upon a commonplace,” he hailed the criticism with the keenest enjoyment, and half-laughingly declared that he would like to have forged the phrase himself.
At the close of our afternoon rambles, that in summer time were prolonged to close upon the dinner-hour, we would return at loitering pace down the winding paths to the cottage, and when I was able to stay the night our evenings would be spent in the little châlet that stood on the hill at the summit of his garden. Meredith truly loved the secluded bower that he had fashioned for himself. It was there he worked, and during the summer months it was there he constantly passed the night. It was there I used to leave him when our long talk was over, and descend the garden to the room that had been allotted to me in the cottage. But of talk he never tired, and it was often far into the night before we parted. He loved also, when he found an appreciative listener, to read aloud long passages from his poems. Once I remember he recited to me during a single evening the whole of the body of sonnets forming the poem of “Modern Love.” On occasion—but not, perhaps, quite so willingly—he might be tempted to anticipate publication by reading a chapter or two from an uncompleted story, and I can recall with what admirable effect, not at Box Hill, but at Ightham Moat where we were both the guests of a gracious hostess, whose death long preceded his own, he read aloud to us the remarkable opening chapters of the “Amazing Marriage.”
Meredith greatly enjoyed those occasional visits to his friends, and found himself, I think, especially at home in the house I have named. He did not disdain the little acts of homage there freely offered him, for the guests assembled were always to be counted among his worshippers, and yet he was finely free from the smallest pretence of consciously asserted dignity. As a rule, he spoke but little of his own work, and then only on urgent invitation, content, for the most part, to accept the passing topic, which his high spirits and unflagging humour would quickly lift to illumination. On such occasions he loved to invent and elaborate, for one or other of his more intimate friends, some fancied legend that was absolutely detached from life and reality, and sometimes he so fell in love with the fable of his creation that for weeks or months afterwards his letters would continue to elaborate and to develop a story that had only taken birth in the jesting mood of a moment.
The young people of a country-house always found a welcome from Meredith, and towards women at all times his respect was of a kind that needed no spur of social convention. It sprang of a deep faith in their high service to the world, and a quickened belief in the larger future that was in store for them. In his own home the spirit of raillery, that he could not always curb, sometimes pressed too hardly upon those nearest him; but I think he was scarcely conscious of any pain he may have inflicted—hardly aware, indeed, of the reiterated insistence with which he would sometimes expose and ridicule some harmless foible of character that did not deserve rebuke. But if this fault must be conceded in regard to those who stood in the intimate circle of his home, it certainly implied no failing reverence towards the sex they owned. After all, an artist, who has a full claim to that title, is revealed most truly in his work. If the revelation there can be suspected, the art is false, and it may, I think, be claimed without challenge for Meredith that in the created characters of his work he has done for women what has been accomplished by no other writer since Shakespeare. Over all the mystery that gives them charm, his mastery in delineation was complete, but it is his appreciation of the nobler possibilities of character that lie behind the wayward changes of temperament that sets his portraiture of women beyond the reach of rivalry. I think most women who came to know him were conscious of this in his presence, and it is small wonder that that larger circle who met themselves mirrored in his books should count him among the most fearless champions of their sex.
A few months ago I found myself treading once more the road that leads to his cottage under the hill. Once again a “dozen differently coloured torches” were held up in the woods behind the house, flaming as I saw them first in his company. But there was one torch that burned no more. It had fallen from the hand that held it, and lay extinguished upon the earth his spirit owned and loved. But those days I passed with him there are memorable still, and as I stood beside the cottage gate amid the gathering shadows of evening, his own beautiful lines came back to me from “Love in the Valley”:
Lovely are the curves of the white owl sweeping
Wavy in the dusk lit by one large star.
Lone on the fir-branch, his rattle-note unvaried,