George Meredith
OF Modern Love, when it was published in 1862, the Spectator wrote ; " The effect of the book on us is that of clever, meretricious, turbid pictures, by a man of some vigour, jaunty manners, quick observation, and some pictorial skill, who likes writing about naked human passions, but does not bring either, original imaginative power or true sentiment to the task. Mr. Meredith writes with occasional vigour, but without any vestige of original thought or purpose. . . . The jocularities are intolerably feeble and vulgar. Mr. George Meredith is a clever man without literary genius, taste, or judgment."
Half a century later, and we read in the Spectator of May 22nd, 1909: " When he died he was probably the greatest writer of fiction in the world. It is certain that his must rank among the greatest names in nineteenth- century literature, and as a creator of men and women, a spectator of life with a Shakespearian insight and catholicity, he has had few equals since Scott. . . . We can only say of him, as Dryden said of Chaucer, ' Here is God's plenty.' " So the wheel revolves.
Now the wheel has completed the full circle and this Week's centenary reveals a fallen idol. Since iconoclasm must justify itself we have celebrated it by an exposure of Meredith's failings, as poet, philosopher, and novelist. It has not been a difficult task, for these are glaring. Nor has it been altogether a generous transaction ; we have been at greater pains to support our own judgment, by dwelling on his faults, than to assess his real worth. And it is not without an attendant element of risk, since we can never be certain that the wheel of his fame has come finally to rest. From every point of view, therefore, and before the occasion is lost for ever, it may be well to consider, not his shortcomings, which are obvious to the least critical, but his undoubted and outstanding excellence.
One of the barriers which stands in the way of our full acceptance of Meredith is the confusion, in his work, of his various functions. In his novels he is philosopher and poet. We complain that he preaches, or that he rants. A poet, he is still something of a novelist. Modern Love, we admit, has many fine lines, but it is too personal, too relative in its outlook ; something is lacking, here, of the pure idealism of the poet. It is true that Meredith's genius was too exuberant for its medium, and so far, certainly, he fails as an artist. It is true that his moralizing is the more tedious since the windmills that he tilts at have long ago been rased to the ground. He is frequently artificial, and his technique is clumsy and tends to melodrama. But these are faults in the setting : they are not flaws in the jewel. And if we persist in confounding the accidental with the essential we shall be the poorer. We shall lose pages of the most amazing beauty and tenderness and wit ; we shall lose excitement the most intense, and flashes of psychological perception almost godlike in their insight.
The most famous passage that Meredith ever wrote is probably the nineteenth chapter of Richard Feuerel, but it will bear quoting again :— " Away with Systems ! Away with a corrupt world ! Let us breathe the air of the Enchanted Island.
" Golden lie the meadows ; golden run the streams ; red gold is i on the pine stems. The sun is coming down to earth, and walks the fields and the waters.
" The sun is coming down to earth and the fields and the waters shout to him golden shouts. He comes, and his heralds run before him, and touch the leaves of planes and oaks and beeches lucid green."
This is not only, of its kind, the finest possible writing ; it is the complete revelation of a state of mind. It is more than a description of first love. It is first love itself. And at the end of the chapter, when the shepherd boy has squinted complacently down his pipe and gone home, one can only say,. " Yes, that's how it was. But how in the world did he know ?" And continually, with Meredith, one must lay down the book for reflection, and to wonder " How in the world did he know that ? " There is no novelist, at least in English literature, with Meredith's understanding of a psychological situation.
His choice of a situation is limited, no doubt, and his perception is most acute when his eye is turned on the relationships of men with women.- If ever writer was sex-ridden, it was Meredith. But there is a profound distinction between his outlook and that, for instance, of Mr. James Joyce. To Mr. Joyce, sex appears as an intriguing problem, not devoid of irony as to the part it takes in human affairs. To Meredith it is a constructive principle which harmonizes life with the Earth from which it comes and to which it must return. Meredith is a natural philosopher, but he makes no antithesis between Nature and Progress : Nature is not simply the primitive and simple as distinct from the finished and complex. The relationship between men and women is fundamental, but to be fully natural it must be fully complicated, although not artificial : otherwise we are as the beasts, and not human beings developed to the full extent of our capacity. Meredith's view of Nature, like Aristotle's, is teleological. Nature .is the end, not the Origin Hence, Meredith's heroines (always more admirable than his heroes) are extremely civilized, and they are civilized almost beyond reality because they are civilized to the limit of their potentiality, because, in short, they are completely natural.
It is commonly said that Meredith's outlook is old- fashioned, but that is a criticism which can be applied justly to his technique alone ; it will not cover his thought. His thought is at once sophisticated and profound. It is allusive and epigrammatic in expression. And sometimes it illumines not only those aspects of life which are universal but even those which, one would suppose, are peculiar to our own generation. Here is a comment on a memoir-writing general :- " She chafed at the possible printing and publishing of them.
That would be equivalent to an exhibition of him clean-stripped for a run across London—brilliant in himself, spotty in the offence."
In a sentence he has said everything that can be said of the writer of memoirs. And this, in Meredith, is not unique. There is scarcely a page which does not afford a treatise compressed into a phrase.
But no one reads Meredith to-day. Perhaps his demands are excessive. Perhaps it is generally assumed that to admire Mrs. Virginia Woolf or Mr. E. M. Forster must necessarily preclude any appreciation of Meredith —as though it were in some way impossible to like at the same time two differing schools of architecture ! Mr. Lytton Strachey has recently written of the preference of the present age " for what is swift, what is well arranged, and what -is not too good." And here, it may be, is the true explanation of Meredith's decline. For Meredith is not swift ; he is not well arranged ; and
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