Lady Butcher’s charming Memoirs of George Meredith is admittedly written in reply to Mr. Ellis’s startling volume. It seems to me, however, that it is a supplement rather than a reply. Mr. Ellis was not quite fair to Meredith as a man, but he enabled us to understand the limitations which were the conditions of Meredith’s peculiar genius. Many readers were shocked by the suggestion that characters, like countries, must have boundaries. Where Mr. Ellis failed, in my opinion, was not in drawing these as carefully as possible, but in the rather unfriendly glee with which, one could not help feeling, he did so. It is also true that he missed some of the grander mountain-peaks in Meredith’s character. Lady Butcher, on the other hand, is far less successful than Mr. Ellis in drawing a portrait which makes us feel that now we understand something of the events that gave birth to The Egoist and Richard Feverel and Modern Love. Her book tells us nothing of the seed-time of genius, but is a delightful account of its autumn.
At the same time it helps to dissipate one ridiculous popular fallacy about Meredith. Meredith, like most all the wits, has been accused of straining after image and epigram. Wit acts as an irritant on many people. They forget the admirable saying of Coleridge: “Exclusive of the abstract sciences, the largest and worthiest portion of our knowledge consists of aphorisms; and the greatest of men is but an aphorism.” They might as well denounce a hedge for producing wild roses or a peacock for growing tail feathers with pretty eyes as a witty writer for flowering into aphorism, epigram and image. Even so artificial a writer as Wilde had not to labour to be witty. It has often been laid to his charge that his work smells of the lamp, whereas what is really the matter with it is that it smells of the drawing-room gas. It was the result of too much “easy-goingness,” not of too much strain. As for Meredith, his wit was the wit of an abounding imagination. Lady Butcher gives some delightful examples of it. He could not see a baby in long robes without a witty image leaping into his mind. He said he adored babies “in the comet stage.”
Of a lady of his acquaintance he said: “She is a woman who has never had the first tadpole wriggle of an idea,” adding, “She has a mind as clean and white and flat as a plate: there are no eminences in it.” Lady Butcher tells of a picnic-party on Box Hill at which Meredith was one of the company. “After our picnic … it came on to rain, and as we drearily trudged down the hill with cloaks and umbrellas, and burdened with our tea baskets, Mr. Meredith, with a grimace, called out to a passing friend: ‘Behold! the funeral of picnic!’”
If Meredith is to some extent an obscure author, it is clear that this was not due to his over-reaching himself in laborious efforts after wit. His obscurity is not that of a man straining after expression, but the obscurity of a man deliberately hiding something. Meredith believed in being as mysterious as an oracle. He assumed the Olympian manner, and objected to being mistaken for a frequenter of the market-place. He was impatient of ordinary human witlessness, and spoke to his fellows, not as man to man, but as Apollo from his seat. This was probably a result of the fact that his mind marched much too fast for the ordinary man to keep pace with it. “How I leaped through leagues of thought when I could walk!” he once said when he had lost the power of his legs. Such buoyancy of the imagination and intellect separated him more and more from a world in which most of the athletics are muscular, not mental; and he began to take a malicious pleasure in exaggerating the difference that already existed between himself and ordinary mortals. He dressed his genius in a mannerism, and, as he leaped through his leagues of thought, the flying skirts of his mannerism were all that the average reader panting desperately after him could see. Shakespeare and the greatest men of genius are human enough to wait for us, and give us time to recover our breath. Meredith, however, was a proud man, and a mocker.
In the ordinary affairs of life, Lady Butcher tells us, he was so proud that it was difficult to give him even trifling gifts. “I remember,” she says, “bringing him two silver flat poached-egg spoons from Norway, and he implored me to take them back with me to London, and looked much relieved when I consented to do so!” He would always “prefer to bestow rather than to accept gifts.” Lady Butcher, replying to the charge that he was ungrateful, suggests that “no one should expect an eagle to be grateful.” But then, neither can one love an eagle, and one would like to be able to love the author of Love in a Valley and Richard Feverel. Meredith was too keenly aware what an eagle he was. Speaking of the reviewers who had attacked him, he said: “They have always been abusing me. I have been observing them. It is the crueller process.” It is quite true, but it was a superior person who said it.
Meredith, however, among his friends and among the young, loses this air of superiority, and becomes something of a radiant romp as well as an Olympian. Lady Butcher’s first meeting with him took place when she was a girl of thirteen. She was going up Box Hill to see the sun rise with a sixteen-year-old cousin, when the latter said: “I know a madman who lives on Box Hill. He’s quite mad, but very amusing; he likes walks and sunrises. Let’s go and shout him up!” It does Meredith credit that he got out of bed and joined them, “his nightshirt thrust into brown trousers.” Even when the small girl insisted on “reading aloud to him one of the hymns from Keble’s Christian Year,” he did not, as the saying is, turn a hair. His attachment to his daughter Mariette—his “dearie girl,” as he spoke of her with unaffected softness of phrase—also helps one to realize that he was not all Olympian. Meredith, the condemner of the “guarded life,” was humanly nervous in guarding his own little daughter. “He would never allow Mariette to travel alone, even the very short distance by train from Box Hill to Ewell; a maid had always to be sent with her or to fetch her. He never allowed her to walk by herself.” One likes Meredith the better for Lady Butcher’s picture of him as a “harassed father.”
One likes him, too, as he converses with his dogs, and for his thoughtfulness in giving some of his MSS., including that of Richard Feverel, to Frank Cole, his gardener, in the hope that “some day the gardener would be able to sell them” and so get some reward for his devotion. As to the underground passages in Meredith’s life and character, Lady Butcher is not concerned with them. She writes of him merely as she knew him. Her book is a friend’s tribute, though not a blind tribute. It may not be effective as an argument against those who are bent on disparaging the greatest lyrical wit in modern English literature. But it will be welcomed by those for whom Meredith’s genius is still a bubbling spring of good sense and delight.
[(3) The Anglo-Irish Aspect]
Meredith never wrote a novel which was less a novel than Celt and Saxon. It is only a fragment of a book. It is so much a series of essays and sharp character-sketches, however, that the untimely fall of the curtain does not greatly trouble us. There is no excitement of plot, no gripping anxiety as to whether this or that pair of lovers will ever reach the altar. Philip O’Donnell and Patrick, his devoted brother, and their caricature relative, the middle-aged Captain Con, all interest us as they abet each other in the affairs of love or politics, or as they discuss their native country or the temperament of the country which oppresses it; but they are chiefly desirable as performers in an Anglo-Irish fantasia, a Meredithian piece of comic music, with various national anthems, English, Welsh, and Irish, running through and across it in all manner of guises, and producing all manner of agreeable disharmonies.