Coming when he did and feeling in its full measure the tidal wave from France, Hardy was compelled both by inward and outward pressure to see life un-romantically, so far as the human fate is concerned: but always a poet at heart (he began with verse), he found a vent for that side of his being in Nature, in great cosmic realities, in the stormy, passionate heart of humanity, so infinite in its aspirations, so doughty in its heroisms, so pathetic in its doom. There is something noble always in the tragic largeness of Hardy's best fiction. His grim determinism is softened by lyric airs; and even when man is most lonesome, he is consoled by contact with "the pure, eternal course of things"; whose august flow comforts Arnold. Because of his art, the representative character of his thought, reflecting in prose, as does Matthew Arnold in verse, the deeper thought-currents of the time; and because too of the personal quality which for lack of a better word one still must call genius, Thomas Hardy is sure to hold his place in the English fiction of the closing years of the nineteenth century and is to-day the most distinguished living novelist using that speech and one of the few to be recognized and honored abroad. No writer of fiction between 1875 and 1900 has more definitely had a strong influence upon the English Novel as to content, scope and choice of subject. If his convictions have led him to excess, they will be forgiven and forgotten in the light of the serene mastery shed by the half dozen great works he has contributed to English literature.
II
Once in a while—a century or so, maybe,—comes an artist who refuses to be classified. Rules fail to explain him: he makes new rules in the end. He seems too big for any formula. He impresses by the might of his personality, teaching the world what it should have known before, that the personal is the life-blood of all and any art. Some such effect is made upon the critic by George Meredith, who so recently has closed his eyes to the shows of earth. One can find in him almost all the tendencies of English fiction. He is realist and romanticist, frank lover of the flesh, lofty idealist, impressionist and judge, philosopher, dramatist, essayist, master of the comic and above all, Poet. Eloquence, finesse, strength and sweetness, the limpid and the cryptic, are his in turn: he puts on when he will, like a defensive armor, a style to frighten all but the elect. And they who persist and discover the secret, swear that it is more than worth the pains. Perhaps the lesson of it all is that a first-class writer, creative and distinctive, is a phenomenon transcending school, movement or period. George Meredith is not, if we weigh words, the greatest English novelist to-day—for both Hardy and Stevenson are his superiors as artists; but he is the greatest man who has written fiction.
Although he was alive but yesterday, the novel frequently awarded first position among his works, "The Ordeal of Richard Feverel," was published a good half century ago. Go back to it, get its meaning, then read the latest fiction he wrote—(he ceased to produce fiction more than a decade before his death) and you appear to be in contact with the same personality in the substantials of story-making and of life-view. The only notable change is to be found in the final group of three stories, "One of Our Conquerors," "Lord Ormont and His Aminta" and "The Amazing Marriage." The note of social protest is louder here, the revolt against conventions more pronounced. Otherwise, the author of "Feverel" is the author of "The Amazing Marriage." Much has occurred in the Novel during the forty years between the two works: realism has traveled to an extreme, neo-idealism come by way of reaction, romanticism bloomed again, the Novel of ingenious construction, the Novel of humanitarian meaning, the Novel of thesis and problem and the Novel that foretells the future like an astrologer, all these types and yet others have been practised; but Meredith has kept tranquilly on the tenor of his large way, uninfluenced, except as he has expressed all these complexities in his own work. He is in literary evolution, a sport. Critics who have tried to show how his predecessors and contemporaries have influenced him, have come out lamely from the attempt. He has been sensitive not to individual writers, but to that imponderable yet potent thing, the time-tendency in literature. He throws back to much in the past, while in the van of modern thought. What, to illustrate, could be more of the present intellectually than his remarkable sonnet-sequence, "Modern Love"? And are not his women, as a type, the noblest example of the New Woman of our day—socially, economically, intellectually emancipated, without losing their distinctive feminine quality? And yet, in "The Shaving of Shagpat," an early work, we go back t the Arabian Nights for a model. The satiric romance, "Harry Richmond," often reminds of the leisured episode method of the eighteenth century; and while reading the unique "Evan Harrington" we think at times of Aristophanes.
Nor is much light thrown on Meredith's path in turning to his personal history. Little is known of this author's ancestry and education; his environment has been so simple, his life in its exteriors so uneventful, that we return to the work itself with the feeling that the key to the secret room must be here if anywhere. It is known that he was educated in youth in Germany, which is interesting in reference to the problem of his style. And there is more to be said concerning his parentage than the smug propriety of print has revealed while he lived. We know, too, that his marriage with the daughter of Thomas Love Peacock proved unhappy, and that for many years he has resided, almost a recluse, with his daughter, in the idyllic retirement of Surrey. The privacy of Boxhill has been respected; next to never has Meredith spoken in any public way and seldom visited London. When he was, at Tennyson's death, made the President of the British Society of Authors, the honor sought the man. The rest is silence; what has appeared since his death has been of too conflicting a nature for credence. We await a trustworthy biography.
The appeal then must be to the books themselves. Exclusive of short story, sketch and tale, they include a dozen novels of generous girth—for Meredith is old-fashioned in his demand for elbow-room. They are preeminently novels of character and more than any novelist of the day the view of the world embodied in them is that of the intellect. This does not mean that they are wanting in emotional force or interest: merely, that in George Meredith's fiction men and women live the life of thought as it is acted upon by practical issues. Character seen in action is always his prepossession; plot is naught save as it exhibits this. The souls of men and women are his quarry, and the test of a civilization the degree in which it has developed the mind for an enlightened control over the emotions and the bodily appetites. Neither does this mean, as with Henry James, the disappearance of plot: a healthy objectivity of narrative framework is preserved; if anything the earlier books—"Feverel," "Evan Harrington," "Rhoda Fleming" and the duo "Sandra Belloni" and "Vittoria"—have more of story interest than the later novels. Meredith has never feared the use of the episode, in this suggesting the older methods of Fielding and Smollett. Yet the episodic in his hands has ever its use for psychologic envisagement. Love, too, plays a large role in his fiction; indeed, in the wider platonic sense, it is constantly present, although he is the last man to be called a writer of love-stories. And no man has permitted himself greater freedom in stepping outside the story in order to explain his meaning, comment upon character and scene, rhapsodize upon Life, or directly harangue the reader. And this broad marginal reservation of space, however much it is deplored in viewing his work as novel-making, adds a peculiar tonic and is a characteristic we could ill spare. It brings us back to the feeling that he is a great man using the fiction form for purposes broader than that of telling a story.
Because of this ample personal testimony in his books it should be easy to state his Lebensanschauung, unless the opacity of his manner blocks the way or he indulges in self-contradiction in the manner of a Nietzsche. Such is not the case. What is the philosophy unfolded in his representative books?
It will be convenient to choose a few of those typical for illustration. The essence of Meredith is to be discovered in such works as "The Ordeal of Richard Feverel," "Evan Harrington," "Harry Richmond," "The Egoist," "Diana of the Crossways." If you know these, you understand him. "Lord Ormont and his Aminta" might well be added because of its teaching; but the others will serve, with the understanding that so many-sided a writer has in other works given further noble proof of his powers. If I allowed personal preference to be my sole guide, "Rhoda Fleming" would be prominent in the list; and many place "Beauchamp's Career" high, if not first among his works;—a novel teeming with his views, particularly valuable for its treatment of English politics and certainly containing some of his most striking characterization, in particular, one of his noblest women. Still, those named will fairly reflect the novelist and speak for all.
"Richard Feverel," which had been preceded by a book of poems, the fantasia "The Shaving of Shagpat" and an historical novelette "Farina," was the first book that announced the arrival of a great novelist. It is at once a romance of the modern type, a love-story and a problem book; the tri-statement makes it Meredithian. It deals with the tragic union of Richard and Lucy, in a setting that shifts from sheer idyllic, through worldly and realistic to a culmination of dramatic grief. It contains, in measure heaped up and running over, the poetry, the comedy and the philosophy, the sense of Life's riddle, for which the author is renowned. But its intellectual appeal of theme—aside from the incidental wisdom that stars its pages—is found in the study of the problem of education. Richard's father would shape his career according to a preconceived idea based on parental love and guided by an anxious, fussy consulting of the oracles. The attempt to stretch the son upon a pedagogic procustean bed fails disastrously, wrecking his own happiness, and that of his sweet girl-wife. Love is stronger than aught else and we are offered the spectacle of ruined lives hovered over by the best intentions. The hovel is an illustration of the author's general teaching that a human being must have reasonable liberty of action for self-development. The heart must be allowed fair-play, though its guidance by the intellect is desirable.
It has been objected that this moving romance ends in unnecessary tragedy; that the catastrophe is not inevitable. But it may be doubted if the mistake of Sir Austin Feverel could be so clearly indicated had not the chance bullet of the duel killed the young wife when reconciliation with her husband appeared probable. But a book so vital in spirit, with such lyric interludes, lofty heights of wisdom, homeric humor, dramatic moments and profound emotions, can well afford lapses from perfect form, awkwardnesses of art. There are places where philosophy checks movement or manner obscures thought; but one overlooks all such, remembering Richard and Lucy meeting by the river; Richard's lonesome night walk when he learns he is a father; the marvelous parting from Bella Mount; father and son confronted with Richard's separation from the girl-wife; the final piteous passing of Lucy. These are among the great moments of English fiction.