SUMMER BOOKS-2 The voice from Box Hill

JOHN BAYLEY

'The work of Hardy is my home as the work of Meredith cannot be', wrote E. M. Forster in Aspects of the Novel. He greatly admired Meredith; he had indeed been in- fluenced by him, but. . . This view is prob- ably general today, for like Carlyle Mere- dith (a new collection of whose correspond- ence has just appeared: The Letters of George Meredith edited by C. L. Cline, out. 3 vols 15 gns) made a powerful appeal— though an appeal long delayed—to the spirit of the age, and its atmosphere of brilliance, opulent performance and `good talk' for its own sake, the kind of appeal which dates so drastically and yet is too energetic and at times too disconcerting to be enjoyed purely for its period flavour.

Hardy, oddly enough, had taken his first novel to Chapman and Hall and had met 'our reader, the handsome man 'with a somewhat dramatic manner' who had ad- vised him `not to nail his colours to the mast just yet'. The phrase must have meant little to Hardy, who assumed naturally_ as he was to note at Meredith's centenary— that the novelist's plain job was `to record his reading of life'. Meredith's `reading of life', it cannot unfairly be said, was that of a brilliant actor running through a script with an eye less to the play than to the promise of a plum part for himself in it.

His origins were as humble as Hardy's, and both authors in their different ways exorcised in their novels ingrained appre- hensions of their social position. Melchi- zidec Harrington is Melchizidec Meredith, the masterful grandfather who ran a naval tailoring establishment in Portsmouth and jeopardised his business by often failing to bill his customers from his intense desire to be accepted as one of them. His grandson saw himself as one of nature's gentlemen, a changeling prince brought up below stairs —projected alternative titles for Evan Har- rington were Shams and Realities and Gen- tility and a Gentleman—and we remember Hardy's first title, The Poor Man and the Lady. Finished, its author records, `as an actor finished under hisses', the serial of Evan Harrington was accused of being so dull as to lower the circulation of Once a Week, and the judgment of the Saturday Review—'it is not a great work though a remarkable one, and deserves a front place in the literature that is ranked as avowedly not destined to endure'—was prescient. The role of the disguised prince ('as to hands and feet Evan has every mark of better blood') was destined for a limited season.

When Meredith fell in love with Pea- cock's daughter Mary, a vivacious and intel- ligent widow seven years his senior, his rightful leading lady—the Mirabell to his Millamant—seemed to have materialised. But Mary did not find it at all congenial to dwindle into the wife of an impecunious genius in a Surrey cottage. The actual cause of ruriture—Mary's affair with the painter Wallis—came, as often happens, after the pair had already got unendurably on each other's nerves. Wallis was not a nice man (Meredith, when a friend, obliged as the model for his Death of Chatterton and is por- trayed-even there with a curious malignancy)

and he ditched Mary without compunction when she became difficult. After her death in 1861, two years later, Meredith, who had re- fused all her pleas to visit her though he had allowed their son Arthur to go, at once began Modern Love, that extraordinary mono- drama in sixteen-line sonnets, and finished it in three months. Its publication was ignored rather than ill-received, though the SPECTA- TOR took the author to task for his `putrid skill': `Meddling causelessly and somewhat pruriently with a deep and painful subject on which he has no convictions to express, he sometimes treats serious themes with a flippant levity that is exceedingly vulgar and unpleasant.'

This is not entirely doltish grundyism. 'Levity' and 'no convictions to express' sug- gest the strange Shakespearian incubus that Meredith had managed to conjure up (at the height of his fame thirty years later the Shakespearian comparison was freely made on all sides), for Shakespeare's sonnets do indeed express no convictions and are in- stinct with levity. More significant perhaps, Modern Love has one thing in common with the great burst of love poetry which Hardy wrote after the death of his first wife from whom he had been estranged for years, and in which remorse and recollec- tion of what Meredith called 'the phantom woman in the past' are intimate and un- selfconscious: both express and liberate emotion which could not be felt in the presence of its object. A kind of transcendent justice was done to both Mary Peacock and Emma Gifford after their deaths by the men who had loved them.

But did Meredith know how unpleasant the hero of Modern Love is? I suspect he did, and the feat is all the more ebullient in consequence, for in Meredithian drama- tisation there is a kind of sly candour and what Dr Johnson would have called `a bot- tom of good sense' as notable in the poem as in that other great paean of self-portrayal, Sir Willoughby Patterne of The Egoist. Both achieve universality by way of self-knowl- edge, though such knowledge is only ad- mitted in the froth of whimsy or the strid- ency of a pose.

When Mary left him all Meredith's affec- tion became fixed on his son Arthur—there was no question then of the mother's `rights' in the child—and at this time his correspond- ence becomes significantly livelier, the letters longer and crammed with quips and jollity, as if a great show of boisterous `wind in the orchardness' must now be put on for the benefit of friends he needs more than ever. But the accounts of his visit to Italy with Arthur (a visit he could hardly afford) are touching in their passionate solicitude. Accustomed to being the apple of his father's eye, the boy took violently against his stepmother when Meredith married the sensible good-hearted Marie Vulliamy, who seems to have been in every way the anti- thesis of her predecessor; and he grew up a pedantic and rather priggish young man, estranged from his father and living and working in France until his death from con- sumption in early middle age. The sons of Victorian genius are the saddest of men, as the examples of Dickens and Browning show. Yet Meredith's later letters to him, still full of a solicitude which strives to make no demands or reveal anything but the wish to be of help, make moving reading and stand in remarkable contrast to the letter-writer's usual persona of overwhelm- ing jocularity, inventing snatches of excru- ciating ballade for his boon companions, Bonaparte Wyse and 'Tuck' Hardman.

In general Meredith gives the impression of avoiding intellectuals and bohemians—he preferred to dazzle the sensible and the staid —and two of his most reliable friends were Frederick Maxse, a landowner and aspiring mr, and Colonel Lewin (author of Proverbs of the Inhabitants of the Chittagong Hill Tracts and A Fly on the Wheel, or How I helped to govern India). For some years he had rooms in Rossetti's house in Chelsea but the two never seem to have hit it off, for Meredith's basically conventional soul was shocked by the chloral-taking and the brandy —in a letter to Hardman he gives an unfor- gettable sketch of Rossetti's working habits:

'Poor Rossetti seems to be losing his eye- sight, owing entirely to bad habits—a matter I foretold long ago: Eleven a.m. plates of small-shop ham, thick cut, grisly with brine: four smashed eggs on it; work till dusk: dead tired on sofa till 10 p.m. Then to Evans to dine off raw meat and stout. So on for years. Can nature endure these things? The poor fellow never sleeps at night. His nervous system is knocked to pieces. It's melancholy.'

Swinburne, who as a young man had sprung to Meredith's defence when Modern Love was first published, writing an impassioned letter which Hutton of the SPECTATOR printed as virtually a second review of the poem, refused at this stage to see him, pro- nouncing him a `baneful influence'. Mere- dith seems to have taken this in good part, continuing his admiration for the younger poet and recalling the time when after they had read the Rubaiyat together on its first appearance, lying in the grass at Copsham, Swinburne had been so inspired by the metre that he had rushed upstairs to com- pose the first stanzas of Gnus Veneris. But in a letter to Maxse he commented shrewdly that `I don't see in Swinhurne any internal centre from which springs anything that he does.'

Such sense about his contemporaries, and it is never waspish, is not uncommon in the letters. On Tennyson:

'Alack. the Holy Grail. Did you ever read such lines? The poet rolls them out like half-yards of satin . . . They look and taste cud-chewn. The figures are Dresden china. If he has hit the mind of his age, as it seems, the age too has hit him, and knocked spon- taneity out of him.'

The fatality in Tennyson's strange gift of making out of his own brooding tones the public voice of Victorian England is succinct-

ly defined. But such insights, or any argument followed up, are all too rare. And as age came on the monologue swells into the steady roar of the cataract, the sound heard by Max Beerbohm when he called on the great man at Box Hill in his old age. As he entered he heard 'the resonant rumble of a voice. The great man was talking to his dog'. And again as they left, when 'with a wave of his hand he sketched an oriental salaam, and as I was hoisting on my coat I heard again that resonant rumble. He was talking to his dog'.

It is probably excessive fluency, as much as anything else, that imparts an air of the ephemeral to his most stylish fictional writing. Great novelists are perhaps less articulate, or more hoarding—one thinks of Henry- James groping at the dinner-table for the expressive, the only possible phrase. 'God, Meredith, why can't you write as you talk!' exclaimed Burnand to the still youth- ful performer. In fact the trouble was, surely, that he did write as he talked: the two modes of communication were all too close together, and though nothing can last as long as the voice of a created character, nothing can be more disposable than the accents of his creator. The voice in Diana of the Crossways is from a vanished draw- ing-room, though in the poems and many of the letters we catch the truer and enduring tone.

Dr Cline has done a fine piece of editing: all traceable letters are included; the in- accuricies in the original collection by Meredith's second son William have been cleared up, and its eight hundred-odd pub- lished letters have swollen to well over two thousand. Editorial notes make the life of the letter-writer and the history of his corres- pondents easy to follow, but a preliminary biographical and critical introduction would have been a great advantage.