Take a good look at the road of life—see how rough it is! Understand that there are two opposite principles of life; there are things that attract to danger, and there are powers that compel a man to make the greatest effort of which his strength is capable. Consider all pleasure as dangerous; if you want to be safe and sure, kill your passions, and master all your desires. Observe how hard foolish people and sensual people find life. Wrap yourself up in self-control, keep always on your guard against pleasure, keep on distrust as a suit of armour—no, rather as a skin, never to be taken off. Before you allow yourself to follow any natural impulse, remember how dangerous natural impulses are. Beware of Nature! Otherwise you will soon find out, with trembling, that the whole world is against you, that human experience is against you, that you have become an enemy of society. And as for a wife, remember that you should choose a wife exactly as you would buy a horse, or as you would make any business purchase. In business bargaining, it is the man who keeps his temper the longest and conceals his feelings the most cunningly, that gets the best article.. Never allow an impulse to guide you. Never follow the guidance of your heart. Life is hard, make up your mind to go steadily forward and bear your burden, and if you will do this while you are young, you will become comfortably rich when you get old, and will have the respect of society and the enjoyment of everything good in this world. I have said that this advice is very immoral, although it is in one way very sensible.
I say that it is immoral only for this reason, that it tells people to act sensibly, not for the love of what is good and true, but merely for the sake of personal advantages. I cannot believe that a man is good who lives virtuously only because he finds virtue a profitable business. All this is pure selfishness, but there is no doubt that a great many successful men live and act exactly according to these principles. Now let us consider the third voice, the voice of mere passion, esthetic passion, which is especially strong with generous minds. It is not usually the dullard nor the hypocrite nor the egotist who goes to his ruin by following the impulses of such a passion as that here described. It is rather the man of the type of Byron, or still more of the type of Shelley. It is against danger of this voice that the artist and the poet must especially be on guard.
O the rosy light! it fleets,
Dearer dying than all sweets.
That is life: it waves and goes;
Solely in that cherished Rose
Palpitates, or else 'tis death.
Call it love with all thy breath.
Love! it lingers: Love! it nears:
Love! O Love! the Rose appears,
Blushful, magic, reddening air.
Now the choice is on thee: dare!
Mortal seems the touch, but makes
Immortal the hand that takes.
Feel what sea within thee shames
Of its force all other claims,
Drowns them. Clasp! the world will be
Heavenly Rose to swelling sea.
This will need a good deal of explanation, though I am sure that you can feel the general meaning without any explanation. The poet is making a reference to the rose of the alchemist's dream—the strange old fairy-tale of the Rosicrucians. It was believed in the Middle Ages and even later, that an Elixir of Life might be formed by chemistry—that is to say, a magical drink that would make old men young again, or prolong life through hundreds of years. It was said that whenever this wonderful drink was made in a laboratory, there would appear in the liquid the ghostly image of a luminous Rose. It would take much too long to go into the history of this curious and very poetical fancy. Suffice to say that the poet here uses the symbol of the rose of the alchemist to signify life itself—the essence of youth, and the essence of passion and the worship of beauty. Now we can attempt to paraphrase:
How wondrous beauty is! How wondrous life and love! Yet quickly these must pass away. Of what worth is life without love? Better to love and die quickly. The desire of the lover is, in its way, a desire for sacrifice; he is willing to give his life a thousand times over for the being he adores. He thinks that love is life, that there is nothing else worth existing for. His passion gives new and strange colour to all his thoughts, new intensity to all his senses; the world becomes more beautiful for him. Even as if the colour of the sunlight were changed, so do all things appear changed to the vision of the man who is then bewitched. But, even during the bewitchment, he is faintly conscious of duty, of right and wrong, of a voice within him warning against dangers. He knows, he fears, but he will not heed. He reasons against his conscience. Is not this attraction really divine? She is only a woman, yet merely to touch her hand gives a shock, as of something supernatural. Then the very strength of passion itself makes it seem more natural. The poet compares it to a sea—the tide of impulse could not be better described, because of its depth and force. And always the urging of this passion is "Take her! Do not care! That will be heaven for you!"
The last stanza has a strange splendour, as well as a strange power; reckless passion has never been more wonderfully described in sixteen lines. And to which of the three voices does the poet give preference? Not to any of them. He says that all of them are deficient in true wisdom. The first he calls "liquid"—meaning sweet, like the cry of a dove. But that does not mean that it is altogether commendable. The second voice he calls a "caw"—meaning that it is dismal and harsh, like the cry of a black crow. As for the last, he says only that it is "the cry that knows not law!" By this he means that which suffers no restraint, and which therefore is incomparably dangerous. Yet I suppose that it is better than the caw. What the poet thinks is that the three different voices united together, so that each makes harmony with the others, so that the good which is in each could make accord—would be "music of the sun!"
Hark to the three. Chimed they in one,
Life were music of the sun.
Liquid first, and then the caw,
Then the cry that knows not law.
This utterance is not nearly so common-place as we might think at first reading. There is a great deal of deep philosophy in it. Meredith means that all our impulses, all our passions, all our selfishness, and even our revolts against law, have their value in the eternal order of things. In a perfect man all these emotions and sentiments would still exist, but they would exist only in such form that they would beautifully counterbalance each other. But there is no such thing as human perfection, and the individual is therefore very likely to be dominated by selfishness if he acts cautiously, and dominated by passion when he acts without judgment.
I think I have quoted enough of Meredith to give you some notion of his particular quality. At all events I hope that you may become interested in him. He is especially the poet of scholars; the poet of men of culture. Only a man of culture can really like him—just as only a man long accustomed to good living can appreciate the best kinds of wine. Give fine wine to a poor man accustomed only to drink coarse spirits, and he will not care about it. So the common reader cannot care about Meredith. He is what we call a "test-poet"—your culture, your capacity to think and feel, is tested by your ability to like such a poet. The question, "Do you like Meredith?" is now in English and even in French literary circles, a test. But remember that Meredith has great faults. If he did not have, he would rank at the very top of the Victorian poets. But he has the fault of obscurity, like Browning, he often tortures language into the most amazing forms, and he is about the most difficult of all English poets to read. His early work is much better than his later in this respect. But the difficulty of Meredith is not only a difficulty of language. No one can understand him who does not also understand the philosophical thought of the second half of the nineteenth century. He is especially the poet of a particular time, and for that reason it is very much to be regretted that he is less clear than almost any literary artist of his period.