It comes as something of a shock to be told that the lines—
Lovely are the curves of the white owl sweeping
Wavy in the dusk lit by one large star;
are musically akin to:
Lars Porsena of Clusium,
By the nine gods he swore.
And Mr. Clutton-Brock would be the last man to pretend that it is the same music we find in both. Meredith’s variations on the old tune are, he makes clear, as important a part of the music as is the old tune itself. “It is folk-song with the modern orchestra like the symphonies of Dvorák, and it combines a singing rhythm with sharpness and fullness of detail as they had never before been combined in romantic poetry.” Criticism like this is not merely a comment on technique; it is a guess of the spirit, emphasising the primitive and universal elements which make Love in the Valley probably the most enduring of Meredith’s works.
I do not think Mr. Clutton-Brock is so happy when he writes of Meredith as a novelist. He goes too far when he suggests that Meredith’s witty characters, or mouthpieces, are “always subsidiary and often unpleasant,” like the wise youth in Richard Feverel. Meredith, he declares, “does not think much of these witty characters that he cannot do without.” He “would never make a hero more witty than he could help, for he likes his heroes to be either men of action or delightful youths whom too much cleverness would spoil. He himself was not in love with cleverness, and never aimed at it.” This is only partly true. It is partly true in regard to Meredith’s men, and not true at all in regard to his women. Diana of the Crossways alone is enough to disprove it. Meredith’s heroes were conventions; his heroines were creations; and he liked his creations to be witty. He loved wit as his natural air. His Essay on Comedy is a witty dithyramb in praise of wit. Mr. Clutton-Brock seems to me to make another mistake in regard to Meredith when he says that “if he had had less genius, less power of speech, less understanding of men, he might have been an essayist.” As a matter of fact, Merdith was too proud to be an essayist. There are no proud essayists, though many vain ones. Mr. Belloc is the nearest thing to a proud essayist that one can think of, and his pride is really only a fascinating arrogance.
It will be seen that Mr. Clutton-Brock excites to controversy, as every good critic who attempts a new analysis of an author’s genius must do. Were there space, I should like to dispute many points in his essay, “The Defects of English Prose,” in which, incidentally, he accepts the current over-estimate of the prose—the excellent prose—of Mr. Hudson. The purpose of criticism, however, is to raise questions as much as to answer them, and this Mr. Clutton-Brock continually does in his thoughtful analysis of the success and failure of great writers. He is an expositor with high standards in life and literature, who worships beauty in the temple of reason. His essays, though slight in form, are rich in matter. They are fragments of a philosophy as well as comments on authors.