Poet-Lore: A Quarterly Magazine of Letters. April, May, June, 1900

by Various

Rhoda, her sister has, on the other hand, the defects of the positive character. She is head-strong, over-proud. It is from these characteristics that she suffers or leads others to suffer. "The Fates that mould us, always work from the main-spring."

In her relations with Anthony Hope, Rhoda takes the part of the tempter. The interview between the two shows such wonderful insight into character that from this passage alone Meredith might be ranked as great. Rhoda discovers that she has sold her sister in marriage to a brute. In her head-strong desire to buy her off from him, she goes to her uncle to beg for a large sum of money. Anthony, although a poor man in reality, has always delighted in deceiving his brother and his nieces on that point. Rhoda finds him struggling with the greatest temptation of his life. He has carried home money belonging to the bank of which he is a trusted employee. His love of money, his former deceit, make him very weak before Rhoda. So he falls. She is allowed to take with her the money she wants. As the reader looks back over the story, he sees that the money will prove useless for her ends, and that his fall will ruin her uncle's life. Meredith here shows himself a master of tragedy.

The life of the strong, impulsive, young Robert is not so dependent upon the crises of temptation. For he knows himself and lives with a constant purpose to conquer himself. His purpose is stronger than his passions. In respect to his obedience to Socrates's favorite maxim, he is a man rare even in our self-conscious age. What shall we say of Edward, "villain and hero in one"? Like Dahlia he loses his life's happiness through his besetting sin. Several times a courageous word said that ought to be said, or a brave deed done that should have been done might have saved him. And each time he proves himself a coward, until it is too late. Like the children of Israel he would not enter the promised land for fear of the inhabitants thereof. Like them too, he atoned by spending his forty years in the wilderness, and there laying down his life.

We must not neglect the "fascinating Peggy Lovell,"--a coquette whose charm even a woman can feel. Avarice and love of pleasure are her besetting sins. And avarice leads her to her fate. She has chosen to sow her wild oats and to accrue her debts. These she pays, as we all must in one way or another, with herself. Her way is to marry the man who can pay them rather than the man she loves.

One and all, major and minor characters, they come to the crises of their destinies. One after another chooses according to his character his life. This is Meredith's teaching.

But our author is not always sounding the very depths of life. He is no preacher, but a painter of human nature. The power of mind has a large place in his books. "Drink of faith in the brains a full draught," he tells us; and again:--"To read with a soul in the mirror of mind Is man's chief lesson."

'Diana of the Cross-Ways' teaches the partial failure, the temporary unhappiness, that result from lack of mental balance. It is the story of a charming, brilliant, but impulsive woman who makes many mistakes and who suffers from them. Diana is capable of loving one unworthy of her, and for such lack of wisdom she pays dearly. Yet she holds firmly and purely to the right and so wins happiness in the end. She is foolish sometimes, but she is not a fool. Hence her story is not a tragedy.

This novelist-philosopher has taught us, then, that folly tends to bring failure, but that righteousness is stronger than folly. He is not content to stop in his teachings even here. In 'The Tragic Comedians' he goes still further, and deals with the interrelations of the moral and intellectual. For character rules intellect, as intellect reacts upon character.

'The Tragic Comedians' begins with the birth of a love. With Clotilde, daughter of a highly respectable, but very conventional citizen, Alvan, a Jew and demagogue, a man of widespread and somewhat notorious reputation, falls in love. Clotilde is a beautiful, bright woman; interesting, but cowardly. Like all Meredith's heroes and heroines, she has her besetting sin.

To this sudden, overpowering new love Clotilde yields her heart, but will not yield her actions. She is afraid. While Alvan would go at once to her parents to ask for her hand, Clotilde, seeing only too plainly how little hope there is of obtaining their consent, prefers to dally with matters, and insists on his postponing the interview. Alvan's straightforward nature cannot understand such half-way measures. He leaves her unsought for a time, and begins to fade out of Clotilde's mind. Suddenly, when in the mountains with a friend, she hears that Alvan is near. She wants him then, and goes to seek him. Again he misunderstands her. This time he asks her to run away with him, but she refuses, seeming not so much shocked as afraid. She answers, not in a womanly, straightforward way, but with an evasion. Then she consents to let him speak to her father and mother. She addresses them first on the subject, but is met with a torrent of angry words. The poor thing cannot stand that. In her weakness she makes her next great mistake, and runs away to Alvan, beseeching him to marry her secretly. The woman who would not listen to his request for this very thing but a day or two before now begs for it. She finds that it is too late. Her lover, in his pride, has determined to meet her parents on their own ground. He will win her, he now declares, by conventional methods. So he takes her to a friend's home. It is there that the chief crisis of the book takes place, a crisis which is one of the most interesting I know in literature. It is a moral crisis.