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(Htll'Cltii ! illll! :ii[| iiuiuruu: iiiLi iiii'L' iiLiimimiiL GEORGE MEREDITH SOME CHARACTERISTICS "> 3 5 3 -> :, HH Hi I^^^^H^^HH^^^HHHk^ V ^^^^^Ss^^^B^^^^^^^^I^^^^^Hi^^^^l HH^^I^H^^^^^^^^^^I^& ^^^s^^^^^^^^^^^^^^l^^l ^^^^H^^^^HHH^^P ^^^^hB^^^^^^I^^^I jt^^^^H wK^^^^^^BBB^^^^KK^^ ^-\ ffitH^^j^MH^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^H ^■isH^^BS^^^H^^^Hfe^ '^■U H^HHRHHH^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^H ^K^^^^^MI^^BB^- "-^^^S!^^^^ -v-'i^H ^^^Hi^^^^^l^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^H ^^^^^■■■■^1^ -"-i^^ ^<: «^hH ^^^^^^hS^BI^^^^^^^I^^^^^^^^^^^^^I^^^^h ■^^^^^^^^■■S^^f ^-'^ -- "^^^S^ w^^S^S^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^B^^^^B ^B^^^BBB^Eb^^ "^^^^SSB a^H^^Bf^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^H^^^^^^B HI^BBBIh^^^^ 3BpWa n^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^H W^Kom^' ^^m ^^^^^^^^^^^I^^^^^^H ^^I^^I^MI^HHi B^^^HH^^ all W|B||B^^^^^Bh ^BH^^^H^^^v^^^ ^S/fk HhH^^^^^^^H HIH^^^I^^IL "^ ^^^sSR ^^^^^^^^^^KUmK^^^^^K^^^^k HH^H[H^k[ '^'^'"^^ ^M^?^^^ w^^^^^KK^^Mk^^^^^^l ^H^^^^^^^^BBH^^^Bj' ^g^^^^^i^g^J^y^^^^^ -^/^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^KuMM^^MB^^B^By^^^H^^^fl ■ <^7^^jmJ^7^._ GEORGE MEREDITH SOME CHARACTERISTICS BY RICHARD LE GALLIENNE WITH A BIBLIOGRAPHY BY JOHN LANE JOHN LANE THE BODLEY HEAD LONDON AND NEW YORK 1905 SIXTH EDITION, REVISED • • • • • • ' '• • • • • • •• • • Printed by Ballantyne, Hanson &* Cow Edinburgh . i68 " Assured of worthiness we do not dread Competitors : we rather give them hail And greeting in the lists where we may fail: Must, if we bear an aim beyond the head ! My betters are my masters : purely fed By their sustainment I likewise shall scale Some rocky steps between the mount and vale : Meanwhile the mark I have atid I will wed. So that I draw tlie breath of finer air. Station is nought, nor footways laicrel-strewn. Nor rivals tightly belted for the race. Good speed to them / My place is here or there ; My pride is that amotig them I have place : And thus I keep this instrument in tune." INTERNAL HARMONY, *' So7igs and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth," p. 163. " Surely we owe a little to Time, to cheer his progress ; a little to posterity, and to our country. Dozens of writers will be in at yonder yawning breach if only perusers will rally to the philosophic standard. They are sick of the woodeny puppetry they dispense, as on a race-course, to the roaring frivolous. Well, if not dozens, half dozens : gallant pens are alive; one can speak of them in the plural. I venture to say that they would be satisfied with a dozen for audience, for a commencem.ent." DIANA OF THE CROSS WA YS, chap. I. p. 15. I Style and Aim The shortest way to the distinguishing excellence of any writer is through his hostile critics ; for it is always the quality they most diligently attack. But, as that is invariably the newest thing the writer possesses, this is little to be wondered at, for the majority of critics, in all places and times, are men of the last generation before genius, and the new is naturally as puzzling to them as to all of us. That precious offending quality is generally the most significant of all qualities, style. Most significant, of course, because if we seek out the reason of a style, we are at once in the heart of the writer's mystery, at once face to face with his peculiar artistic message. As all style is organic, we have but to track the springs of that organism to come upon the urgent impulse to expression, the quality of which marks, of course, a writer's individuality. I A « « • • , r • Style and Aim Now these tests are peculiarly applicable to the work of Mr. George Meredith. His style is at once a pillar of cloud and a pillar of light, it has kept his books for many years in first editions, but it has made those first editions pre- cious as the revelation of arcana. And the reason of it is The Egoist. Without the daring metaphor which is its most marked and powerful quality, it would have been impossible to make us see a drama of such infinitesimal subtleties, by no other means could vibrations so infinite have been registered. And in that delicate power we at once discover the central quality of Mr. Mere- dith's genius. Whatever else he can do, and he can do ever so many wonderful and beautiful things, here is what, so to say, he came to do, whatever else was done or left. The passion of his genius is, indeed, the tracing of the elemental in the complex ; the registration of the infinitesimal vibrations of first causes, the tracking in human life of the shadowiest trail of primal instinct, the hair- breadth measurement of subtle psychological tangents : and the embodiment of these results in artistic form. "In our fat England, the gar- dener Time is playing all sorts of delicate freaks Style and Aim in the hues and traceries of the flower of life, and shall we not note them ? " he writes in one of those passages in Sandra Bellonty where in the person of " The Philosopher " he occasionally cocks a comical eye at a bewildered public. It is with the drama of those highly wrought types that Mr. Meredith is concerned, to show us how '* behind the veil of our human conventions power is as constant as ever," and in their apparently unexpressive features to " find the developments and the eternal meanings " — a tragedy all the more impressive for being blood- less, a comedy all the more irresistible because uninterrupted by guffaws. It follows that the quest of his style is intensity, that it should be vividly suggestive rather than carefully definitive — all, indeed, the reverse of the neat French ideal of finality, with its San Graal of " the unique word." With Mr. Meredith it is rather the one, or, maybe, the fifty analogies, all brought together and thrown down in a gene- rous redundancy, so that the one end of con- veying his own intense impression to the reader may be achieved. " The art of the pen," says Diana, in a well-known passage, " is to rouse the inward vision, instead of labouring with 3 Style and Aim a drop-scene brush, as if it were to the eye \ because our flying minds cannot contain a pro- tracted description. That is why the poets, who spring imagination with a word or phrase, paint lasting pictures. The Shakespearean, the Dant- esque, are in a line, two at most." Mr. Meredith's method is, indeed, that of the poets and all great imaginative workers. His style may be said to be the result of that process expressed in Pippa Passes, of following in one art an ideal conceived in another, a process with which we are familiar in the relations of poetry and painting, and to which, doubtless, we owe some other products of our new imaginative prose. Such a style was the only possible medium for his matter — matter too intricate for verse, and too elusive for " pedestrian " prose. Nothing but vivid metaphor could light up for us such strange untrodden regions of the subjective as those into which he loves to take us ; for we can only, of course, understand the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar, and if " our flying minds cannot contain a protracted description " of the objective, how much less can we hope to hold the elusive impressions of the subjective by such means-. As well hope to take down the rapid 4 Style and Aim words of a fluent speaker in longhand. The essential quality, then, of Mr. Meredith's work, in his prose as in his verse, is a great metaphor. One wishes above all things to avoid over- accentuation in this present hey-day of the superlative, but one can hardly help asking whether since Shakespeare there has been a handling of imaginative phrase more truly mas- culine than Mr. Meredith's. Greater artists, both in prose and verse, of course, there have been, but in that one quality of flashing a picture in a phrase, of, so to say, writing in lightning, who are Mr. Meredith's rivals ? And it is a power of great suppleness, it is great in the heaviest sword-work, but it can play round a fair head and leave a thistle-down curl on the ground with the most consummate grace ; " images that stun the mind like bludgeons " there are on every page, but there are others also delicate as the notes of a zither. So convincing is it too, that often as it flashes its light upon some hidden track of thought, or inaccessible lair of sensation, it hardly seems to be metaphor at all, but the very process of thought and feeling literally described. The distinction between objective and subjective is overleaped, and we seem to see 5 Style and Aim matters of spiiit and nerve with our very jr\ physical eyes. Indeed that is what such art as Mr. Meredith's must do, for, in proportion as it is art, will the relevancy of that distinction diminish, if it be true, as surely it is, that the subjective once embodied in art really becomes objective. It is this very realistic closeness to the fact, I am persuaded, that has misled many, unfamiliar with the nuances of experience with which it deals, to charge Mr. Meredith with fantasticality. His fancy is prolific and delightful indeed, or we must have missed Shagpat from our shelves, but the metaphor I speak of comes of a higher power with which Mr. Meredith is no less richly endowed — imagination. His images have roots, they are there for another service than fancies. Moreover, he has apparently discovered the secret of a mental process which operates more or less with us all, but of which we are only occasionally, some perhaps never, conscious ; for is it not true that all impressions come to the most unimaginative through a medium of imagi- nation more or less fantastic in its influence, and that thus the most commonplace occurrence often assumes the quaintest guise. Through the subtlety of his imagination Mr. Meredith has 6 Styl d Ai e ana /iim come into possession of this distorting glass, and it is either because we have never reahsed the process in ourselves, or are unable to recognise it again in his characters, that he may some- times seem puzzling or overstrained. In short, his imagination is subtle enough to embody the workings of imagination in others. An example will best illustrate my meaning, and I will take one that has been a favourite with certain un- sympathetic critics, from The Egoist. " * You are cold, my love ? you shivered,' " said Sir Willoughby Patterne, as he walked across his park one morning with his betrothed Clara Middleton, then in the throes of her first effort to break off her engagement. ** * I am not cold,' said Clara, * some one, I suppose, was walking over my grave.' The gulf of a caress hove in view like an enormous billow hollowing under the curled ridge. She stooped to a buttercup ; the monster swept by." This image has more than once been selected for scorn, from the impression, I suppose, that it is merely a piece of extravagant fancy, a wilful euphuism, whereas it is surely an example of a most subtle realism. To a sensitive girl such as Clara, in such an attitude as hers to her be- 7 Style and Aim ■^ trothed, already beginning to dread his loathed attentions, it would really be in some such large image of fright that a threatened caress would menace her ; especially as her fear had already set her imagination in a state of ferment : and to have simply said that she shrank from his caress and escaped, would have been merely the state- ment of an onlooker and have given us little idea of her internal tumult as she did so. We should only have seen her shrink, whereas now we /eel her do so. I am convinced that the majority of Mr. Meredith's so-called fantasticalities have such true imaginative basis, and that if the reader cannot realise it, the fault is certainly his own. Not that I would say that Mr. Meredith never misses. Like every one else, he has *' the defects of his qualities," and it would not be difficult to place one's fingers on images that seem the result of his employing his method in uninspired moments — a certain bewildering and unbeautiful personification of Old Time, for instance, on an early page of The Tragic Comedians — but such are quite inconsiderable set against page after page of brilliant success. So far in speaking of Mr. Meredith's style I have referred to that quality in his writing Style and Aim which is most distinctly his own — that which forces us to talk of " Meredithese " — and have dealt with it in relation to the subject matter, through stress of which, I conceive, it was born. But though its genesis was, I think, really as I have indicated, he nevertheless applies it to many a charming use other than that for which it grew ; while he is capable of putting it aside altogether — as in Vittoria or Rhoda Fleming — and writing Saxon simple as a song. As in the case of all men who have the greater gift, he has, as I have said, a most remarkable, an Elizabethan power of fancy. No one is fonder of sword- exercise for its own sake. Of how he loves to beget beautiful things in mere wantonness, to discover the soul of a thing, as it were, in play, the well-known '* leg " passage or the chapter on ** an aged and great wine " in The Egoist^ are familiar examples. Another delicious instance in the same book, being of more quotable size, I shall venture to copy here. " He placed himself at a corner of the doorway for her to pass him into the house, and doted on her cheek, her ear, and the softly dusky nape of her neck, where this way and that the little lighter-coloured, irreclaimable curls running truant from the comb and the knot — curls, half-curls, root-curls, vine ringlets, wedding-rings, fledgeline^ feathers, tufts of down, blown 9 Style and Aim wisps — waved or fell, waved over or up or involutedly, or strayed, loose and downward, in the form of small silken paws, hardly any of them much thicker than a crayon shading, cun- ninger than long round locks of gold to trick the heart." Even when he sets himself for a serious characterisation there is still the same playful profusion of means. Witness the following masterly description of a style with which Mr. Meredith's own has much of essential relation- ship. Without the allusion to the Lectures on Heroes would any one need to be told the name of the writer referred to ? The passage occurs near the beginning of Beaiichamp^s Career. " His favourite author was one writing on Heroes, in (so she esteemed it) a style resembling either early architecture or utter dilapidation, so loose and rough it seemed ; a wind-in- the-orchard style, that tumbled down here and there an appre- ciable fruit with uncouth bluster ; sentences without com- mencements running to abrupt endings and smoke, like waves against a sea-wall, learned dictionary words giving a hand to street-slang, and accents falling on them haphazard, like slant rays from driving clouds ; all the pages in a breeze, the whole book producing a kind of electrical agitation in the mind and joints. This was its effect on the lady." Applied to nature the same style has given us description as new as it is always vivid, and often throbbing with a beauty of passionate light and bloom ; that wonderful sunset in Richard V lo Style and Aim Feverel, or this graphic bit descriptive of rain in the country, from The Egoist: " Rain was universal ; a thick robe of it swept from hill to hill ; thunder rumbled remote, and between the ruffled roars the downpour pressed down on the land with a great noise of eager gobbling, much like that of the swine's trough fresh filled." But, to turn again to larger considerations, Mr. Meredith's style is not only significant of the subtle work its master had to do, but also of the temper in which he has done it. Mr. Meredith is a realist, but a realist who uses metaphor is not greatly to be feared. He is a realist as all the great artists have been, not after the modern pattern of those *' whom the world imagines to be at nature's depths " because they " are impudent enough to explore its muddy shallows," but after the manner of the poets. His is that imaginative realism which, after much unhappy experience of another kind, we are again coming to recognise as not simply the only realism but the only art. It follows, therefore, that with all his subtleties of analysis, Mr. Meredith is no pessimist, as all the small realists must be. On the contrary, the work of Mr. Browning is not more robustly optimistic. How much of spiritual comfort we all owe to the poet of Rabbi Ben Ezra Style and Aim "bitter constraint and sad occasion" has but lately set us sorrowfully testifying, yet I feel that to some minds Mr. Meredith's optimism will be still more helpfully convincing, because, though he feels that " we have little to learn from apes," he fearlessly accepts the most melancholy results of modern science in a way that Mr. Browning, of course, refused to do. Really the faith of each is at base the same, as all faith is one, that instinctive reliance, in the face of all apparent contradiction, that " all's right with the world," which genius rarely misses ; but the weight of assurance each brings to another must, of course, depend on that other's needs, and the relativity of those to the weight of contradiction overcome. Mr. Meredith's attitude may be forcibly summed up in two of his own sentences, one from the lips of Diana — ** who can really think and not think hopefully ? " — and the other, an example of in vino Veritas^ from those of Mr. Pole — *' No one has said the world's a jolly world so often as I have. It's jolly ! " It would be impossible to think more ruthlessly than Mr. Meredith; he has been ever resolute in tearing from life every vestige of sentimentality, yet it has been to leave 12 Style and Aim us with all the deeper impression of its high and mystic significance. "You destroy the poetry of sentiment, Dr. Middleton," said Whitford. " To invigorate the poetry of nature," was the answer. 13 II ^^The Egoist," "Richard Feverd," and the Novels generally If I am right in my statement of the nature of Mr. Meredith's pecuHar art, there can hardly be any doubt that of all his books The Egoist is its most absolute product ; for therein he gives himself up entirely, without the smallest attempt at compromise with a " gallery " public, to his intellectual passion, on the track of that most fundamental of all our instincts, the lust of self. There are no clowns, at least of the old-fashioned sort, and no intervals whatever for refreshment. There is nothing to be done but to like it or leave it, sit up with it through the small hours, or doze over it at noonday. There is no middle course. If it is not predestined for one, one can no more live through a chapter than write it ; if it is — well, we break our hearts in trying to write about it. 14 "The Egoist," etc. Self! Selfishness ! What comparatively placid words they used to be, words to be birched out of us by fifteen, when a primitive dragonish hunger for biggest apples and largest slices is supposed to give place to the gentlemanly in- stincts ; a thing to quote Dr. Watts about and be sent to bed for, a vice to be tamed by a prefix, changed through all its snaky syllables by wearing the crown of a decorous negative : as little under- stood as was the circulation of the blood before Harvey. Yes ! Mr. Meredith is the Harvey of the Ego. But though a philsopher with a tem- perament of exceptional sensitiveness might have made and tabulated his discoveries, no one but an artist of great power could have given them that vivid form in which only can a living sense of their portentous significance be impressed. Stated abstractly, the information that each of us has a South-sea Islander somewhere within us would hardly interfere with our appetites ; we would take it as tranquilly as we do Sir Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia Epidemica. But, handled as Mr. Meredith has handled it, it is very different, it is nothing short of a terror. Not simply to tell us, but to make us by his dreadful lightning see the vampire in all of us, see with what 15 "The Egoist," etc. horrid channels connected, by what almost imper- ceptible arteries, self circulates through every corner of our being ; to show us the face of Mr. Hyde in the most trifling of its wilful acts, to make us shudder at such as we would at murder, and, indeed, to feel them no less, nay, perhaps more, than that — as the essences of poisons are the most deadly — this it was to write The Egoist. This may sound strong, I wish it were ten times stronger ; and to justify it it may be thought that the Egoist should appear Caliban-backed and cloven-footed, and a young country squire, of handsome presence, of manners and culture — well, it cannot be he ! Besides, good women love him. Yes ! for, as his clever friend Mrs. Mount- stuart Jenkinson phrased it, " You see he has a leg." " There it is, and it will shine through ! He has the leg of Rochester, Buckingham, Dorset, Suckling ; the leg that smiles, that winks, is obsequious to you, yet perforce of beauty self- satisfied ; that twinkles to a tender midway between imperious- ness and seductiveness, audacity and discretion ; between ' you shall worship me ' and ' I am devoted to you ' ; is your lord, your slave, alternately and in one. It is a leg of ebb and flow and high-tide ripples. Such a leg, when it has done with pre- tending to retire, will walk straight into the hearts of women. Nothing so fatal to them. Self-satisfied it must be. Humble- ness does not win multitudes or the sex." i6 *' The Egoist," etc. This was on the occasion of his coming of age, when his egoism was as yet at gambol like a young tiger, though it was soon to show its fangs. At this time a report went abroad that he was engaged to a certain dashing young lady of wealth and beauty, by name Constantia Durham, while others whispered of Laetitia Dale, the daughter of a retired army-surgeon living on Sir Willoughby's estate, "portionless and a poetess." *' Here she comes with a romantic tale on her eyelashes," was Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson's portrait of her. And, certainly, there was much to colour this report, for they had been boy and girl playmates ; she had written verses in honour of his majority, and he was unmistakably atten- tive to her. A third rumour gives us a first comical glimpse of egoism — " a story of a brilliant young widow of the aristocracy who had very nearly snared him." " A widow ? " he said on hearing of it. " I ! " The story was to be con- tradicted in positive terms. "*A widow!' straightening his whole figure to the erectness of the letter I." Meanwhile, Miss Durham '' had been nibbled at, all but eaten up " by rivals, notabl}^ by a young Captain Oxford ; and, being warned of this, Sir Willoughby at once proposed 17 B "The Egoist," etc. and was accepted — though his sense of niceness was affected at thus taking her after the soiHng pursuit of others. " She had not come to him out of cloistral purity, out of perfect radiancy. . . . He wished for her to have come to him out of an egg-shell, somewhat more astonished at things than a chicken, but as completely enclosed before he tapped the shell, and seeing him with her sex's eyes first of all men " — a demand of spurious niceness which Mr. Meredith again and again, throughout the book and elsewhere, traces to its springs in " infinite grossness " — " the ultra- refined but lineally great-grandson of the Hoof." But, on the contrary, " she talked frankly of her cousins and friends, young males ! " " The dust of the world," the soiling, circumscribing world, the natural enemy of the Ego, was on her. How- ever, he was engaged, and though Laetitia did love him, had loved him from girlhood, still she was able to join in the chorus of congratulation, for she had never dared to hope for herself, and could not bear to think him wrong ; she loved him, indeed, as Mr. Meredith expresses it, with the not uncommon female " ecstasy of the devotee of Juggernaut." But a surprise was in store for her and the county. Suddenly it was told that i8 "The Egoist," etc. Miss Durham had run away with Captain Oxford and was his wife ; and then came Laetitia's Httle hour. Fortification against the possible sneers of that world, so despised and yet so feared, was pro- vided by the circulation of a story to the effect that, far from his being jilted, Sir Willoughby had never really cared for Constantia, but accepted her as his mother's choice, and that her action sprang from a frenzied jealousy of Laetitia, with whom he had taken care to be seen at church and out v/alking at the earliest possible moment after his learning the news. It was with the air of " a man thus broken loose from an unhappy tangle to return to the lady of his first and strongest affections," that he came back to Laetitia. For several months a quiet courtship ensued between them, and county gossip once more rippled tranquilly over a certainty — to be rudely rufQed again by the sudden news one morning that, almost without a word, Sir Wil- loughby had left England for a tour of the globe. The inference against Laetitia seemed brutally obvious. And the county would have pitied her, says Mr. Meredith, and thanked her for a sensa- tion if she had only *' attempted pathos," but she was too proud for that, *^ the opportunity passed 19 "The Egoist," etc. undramatised," and, retiring within herself, she took up her cross as one of those ** patiently starv- ing women " of whom Mr. Meredith writes so tenderly, and of whom she was to be the type. Sir Willoughby had gone abroad accompanied by his cousin Vernon Whitford, whom Mrs. Mountstuart described as " Phoebus Apollo turned fasting-friar," a phrase, says Mr. Meredith, which " painted the sunken brilliancy of the lean long- walker and scholar at a stroke." A kind of George Warrington, I think, James Thomson well calls him, and like George too he was the victim of an early matrimonial indiscretion. He was one of those illuminating dependents whom Sir Wil- loughby loved to keep about him as, so to say, altar-candles. To have " a poet, still better a scholar, attached to your household," to date his prefaces from Patterne Hall, was an additional candle, as M. Dehors, his French cook, for instance, was another. The two cousins wrote home accounts of their travels, the one really serving (in the eyes of " the Patterne ladies," that is, Sir Willoughby's mother and two sisters) but as a foil to the other. Vernon ** endeavouring sadly to digest all he saw and heard," in his modest student way, Sir Willoughby, in the great 20 "The Egoist," etc. comic British fashion, " holding an Engh'sh review of his maker's grotesques." Ah ! but one was a Whitford, the other a Patterne ! Their return at the end of three years is the occasion of our first piercing ghmpse into the heart of egoism. Driving through his park on the morning of his return, the first friend he meets is Laetitia, out with school-children gathering flowers. " He sprang to the ground and seized her hand. ' Laetitia Dale ! ' he said. He panted. ' Your name is sweet English music ! And are you well ? ' The anxious question permitted him to read deeply in her eyes. He found the 7nan he sought there, squeezed him passionately, and let her go, saying, ' I could not have prayed for a lovelier home-scene to welcome me than you and these children flower-gathering. I don't believe in chance. It was decreed that we should meet. Do not you think so ? ' Laetitia breathed faintly of her gladness." I question if any honest male ever read this passage without its catching his breath, and making him put down the volume for a moment or two's thought — to take it up, perchance, a different man. Here, in a phrase from which one reels sick as from a blow, is the mainspring, here we first realise what this egoism is ; and we take up the book again eagerly on the watch for every sensitive vibration, some of us, may be, like an invalid, when, having at length in 21 a The Egoist," etc. some bulky pharmacopoeia come across his own particular trouble, he rushes hungrily at all the symptomatic details. Let us follow this scene a line or two further. Talking rapturously of the English green, " ' It is wonderful. Leave England and be baked, if you would appreciate it. You can't, unless you taste exile as I have done — for how many years ? How many ? ' ' Three,' said Laetitia. ' Thirty ! ' said he. • It seems to me that length. At least I am immensely older. But looking at you, I could think it less than three. You have not changed. You are absolutely un- changed, I am bound to hope so, I shall see you soon. I have much to talk of, much to tell you. I shall hasten to call on your father. I have specially to speak with him. I — what happiness this is, Laetitia ! But I must not forget I have a mother. Adieu, for some hours — not for many 1 ' He pressed her hand again. He was gone." What could poor Laetitia think ? " What but — ! she dared not phrase it or view it." Yet " at their next meeting she was ' Miss Dale.' " And soon this game of cat and mouse was to be made all the more inhuman by the introduction of an unconscious third, in the shape, of course, of another Constantia Durham — Clara Middleton, the one beautiful daughter of a certain Dr. Middleton, a stately member of our wealthy British theocracy, a type of rich humour whom we shall have to consider in another chapter. 22 "The Egoist," etc. The news came through young Crossjay Patterne, a patronised son of a contemned cousin "in the marines " (a distinguished commander), to whom Vernon had undertaken to act as tutor, and who had brought brightness into Laetitia's hfe by being ''sent out " from the hall to lodge with her and her father. Sir Willoughby, before seeing him, decided against having him at the hall, " pre- dicting that the boy's hair would be red, his skin eruptive, and his practices detestable." He proved to be a charming lad, however, one of those ''thorough boys" Mr. Meredith loves, and it was one day out bird-nesting near Upton Park, fifteen miles away, that he saw Sir Willoughby riding with a young lady. Sir Willoughby had taken no notice of his salute as they passed, but the young lady had turned round to smile at him. " The hue of truth was in that picture ! " It was not long before gossip confirmed the sickening suspicion, and it was placed beyond doubt by a flying visit of the Doctor and his daughter to the hall, with the effect that Vernon even turned painter, saying of the new queen — " she gives you an idea of the mountain echo " ; and of course Mrs. Mountstuart's portrait was not wanting. But somehow for once she missed, and even 23 "The Egoist," etc. displeased. " Dainty rogue in porcelain," need 1 say, was the unfortunate phrase. " • Why rogue ? ' said Sir Willoughby. ' I said — in porcelain,' she repHed. • Rogue perplexes me.' ' Porcelain explains it. ' ' She has the keenest sense of honour.' ' I am sure she is a paragon of rectitude.' ' She has a beautiful bearing.' ' The carriage of a young princess ! ' ' I find her perfect. ' •And still she may be a dainty rogue in porcelain.* ' Are you judging by the mind or by the person, ma'am ? ' 'Both.' ' And which is which ? ' ' There's no distinction,' • Rogue and mistress of Patterne do not go together,' • Why not ? She will be a novelty to our neighbourhood and an animation of the Hall. ' ' To be frank, rogue does not rightly match with 7ne.'" But Sir Willoughby had no intention of quite abandoning Laetitia this time, his egoism had long passed kittenhood now, it was '' a thing of teeth and claws " indeed. " He had, in the contemplation of what he was gaining, fallen into anxiety about what he might be losing. She belonged to his brilliant youth ; he was a man who lived backward almost as intensely as in the present ; and, notwithstanding Laetitia's praiseworthy zeal in attending to his mother, he suspected some unfaithfulness : hardly without cause : she had not looked paler of late, her eyes had not reproached him ; the secret of the old days between them had been as little concealed as it was ex- posed. She might have buried it, after the way of women. ^*The Egoist," etc. whose bosoms can be tombs, if we and the world allow them to be ; absolutely sepulchres, where you lie dead, ghastly. Even if not dead and horrible to think of, you may be lying cold somewhere in a corner. Even if embalmed you may not be much visited. And how is the world to know you are embalmed ? " So he talks with her about Italy, how often he has wished to be her cicerone there, and then — O! he wants her opinion of "a Miss Middleton," he has such reliance on her "intuition of cha- racter," and what it is to have such a friend to come to in a woman ! The " Platonic " idea is not impossible she has taught him. "Wives are plentiful, friends are rare. I know how rare ! " Then a little sentimental depreciation of life in halls in favour of that in a cottage like hers, at which she shakes her head, and he rejoins : " ' You may know me,' bowing and passing on contentedly. He stopped — ' But I am not ambitious.' • Perhaps you are too proud for ambition, Sir Willoughby. ' ' You hit me to the life ! ' He passed on regretfully, Clara Middleton did not study and know him like Laetitia Dale." Clara did not, she " did otherwise conceive of love," and already she was feeling that " some- thing," in the earliest days of his courtship at Upton Park, for which she had yet found no name. A " whirlwind wooing " at last caused 23 (( The Egoist/' etc. them to be plighted, though that something still weighed upon her. Perpetual discourses on the ideal love, a daily catechism on the child's *' do you really — really love me ? " pattern, needing an ever closer embrace of assurance, till within the first day or so of their engagement he had reached the astonishing demand that even " beyond death " she would still be his alone — ** ' His widow,' let them say ; a saint in widowhood " — while that monster world above all was anathema. This was what his wooing had become. In short, he ^' desired to shape her character to the feminine of his own," and she preferred to be herself. ** She would not burn the world for him ; she would not, though a purer poetry is little imagin- able, reduce herself to ashes, or incense, or essence, in honour of him, and so, by love's trans- mutation, literally be the man she was to marry." This constant " anghng for the first person in the second " on Sir Willoughby's part, by his occasional unconcealed irritation with unsuccess, gave her, one day, a hint of his endeavour, and she answered to his thought with " It is not too late, Willoughby." This wounded him and he forthwith " lectured her on the theii]e of the 26 "The Egoist," etc. infinity of love." " How was it not too late? They were plighted ; they were one eternally ; they could not be parted. She listened gravely, con- ceiving the infinity as a narrow dwelling where a voice droned and ceased not. However, she listened. She became an attentive listener." After two or three months of this, Dr. Middle- ton's stay at Upton Park came to an end and Sir Willoughby, on the plea of finding him a suitable residence in the neighbourhood, induced him to come and be his guest in the interval. Clara tried to resist, but in vain, and with their arrival at Patterne Hall this " comedy " really begins. All so far has been but a marshalling of the dramatis personce, taking up some fifty pages ; in the next five hundred we are to see them act. Further than this I do not here propose accom- panying the reader. I have followed the story so far because I felt it was the best way of giving any one unacquainted with the book an idea of the manner in which Mr. Meredith has dealt with his chief character — a manner which no general- ising could well convey, and I think that in the foregoing extracts he will have been able to gain a living conception of what fashion of man the Egoist was. All the subtleties of his psychology, ^7 "The Egoist," etc. of course, are not exhibited, for they can only be traced by minutely following the interplay of the various individualities, by the working out of the problem that soon presents itself — will Clara have the courage and the power, now that she has the resolution, to win her freedom again, or will Sir Willoughby, with the one powerful conventional weapon she has given him, her plighted troth, backed by endless resource of sophistry and the lower subterfuges to which his egoism is capable of sending him, win the day ? And, remember it is civilised warfare, where etiquette has to be observed, and one cannot end the game by dashing the board on the carpet. It is that essential drama to which actions, in the ordinary sense, stand but as the scoring in the pauses of the game, the external result of the unseen play of opposing individualities. This scoring is practically the whole of the " popular " drama, which would matter little if it stood for any real signification, but as it proceeds simply at the caprice of the marker, is, indeed, nothing more than a playing with the register — well, of course, it makes that drama utterly valueless to any one who seriously cares about the game of life at all. To abandon imagery, lest the reader, like 28 "The Egoist," etc. Cecilia, should conceive himself "addressed as a primitive intelligence," the plot of 77?^ Egoist grows as the outcome of character, instead of being manipulated according to the will and pleasure of the novelist. The novelist watches and records, but never interferes. It is, of course, the difference between men and women and " wooden puppetry." ** The catastrophe " comes " pat " as a mathematical result, and one has the satisfaction of that complete artistic whole, which, I should say, is, generally speaking, more within the reach of so-called *' subjective " than of '* objective " drama. This question of plot is indeed an easier one to settle in the case of the former than of the latter, what happens in a man is less a question for the arbitrary invention of the novelist than what happens to him ; and I think this is felt when one comes to compare the ending of The Egoist with the ending of Richard Feverel or Beauchamp's Career. There is an element admitted into the working out of the two latter stories, which, of course, is operative in the subjective world as well, but hardly as constantly or as volcanically — that of Chance. That it is no unimportant element of life we know, but how and when it is to be introduced into art is the 29 "The Egoist," etc. question, one which is as old as it seems un- answerable. Our modern method of dealing with it would seem to be, that the particular chances to which the dramatis personce are sub- jected shall be such as are not unlikely to arise out of their characters. Then, of course, there are various degrees of chances in our lives, some so frequent as to be usual and unsurprising — Richard's meeting with Lucy by the river, for instance — and such are not, therefore, disturb- ances in art. But to be struck by lightning on the way home to dinner is another degree of chance, no less unusual than disagreeable. That Beauchamp should die by drowning as he did was, of course, quite a possibility in the case of a man so unselfish and intrepid, but in spite of the fine note of tragic irony such as is life's own so struck, one feels no such inevitability about his end as comes with the last chapter of The Egoist. It does not seem of the same colour with the rest of the book, but merely a wilful darkening of the woof. Beauchamp might have been so drowned on his way home to wife and happiness, but the chances were a thousand to one against it. In Richard Fever el we are confronted with a similar perplexity, and though I doubt if, to set 30 ^'The Egoist," etc. matters right, it would now be any one's choice to lose a scene drawn with such vividness of power as that of Richard's terrible parting from his wife, yet as a part of a whole, I, for one, cannot feel it homogeneous. If one could have been pre- pared for these catastrophes by some manner of undefined foreshadowing, they might very likely have impressed one as fit ; and, if it be retorted that life gives no such warnings, one can only answer that, after all. Art is but a compromise. Mr. Meredith names The Egoist a *' comedy in narrative," but in doing so he uses the word comedy with a significance which is rarely respected, and of which it will be necessary to speak further in the next chapter. Suffice it here to say that mere satire, humour, or any species of fun-making, are all very distinct from, however related to, that significance. These but result from the working of the comic spirit which in itself is merely a detective force ; they are, of course, included in this present comedy, but they are far from all. When one comes to consider Sir Willoughby one realises how far. He is Mr. Meredith's great study in that Comic Muse which he invokes in his first chapter, and yet he hardly keeps the table on a roar. At least, laughter is 31 a The Egoist," etc. not the only emotion he excites ; tears and terror rainbowed by laughter might figure our compli- cated impression. A tragic figure discovered for us through the eye of comedy. It is certainly comic, in the customary sense, to see that great- mannered sublimity, that ultra-refined sentimen- talism reduced to paradox by the exposure of its springs ; but the laugh is only at the incon- sistency, it can hardly face the fact. And to see Sir Willoughby on his knees vainly imploring that Laetitia, who has all through served but as an "old-lace " foil for Clara, and with utter diffi- culty at last winning her, not for her sake either, but for fear of the world, the east wind of the world, and no longer the worshipful Juggernaut Laetitia of old, but Laetitia enlightened and unloving, — all this is comic of course ; to see tables turned is always comic, but we must not forget that life is before them, and, as Hazlitt says, " When the curtain next goes up it will be tragedy " — if the situation on which it falls can be called anything else. Sir Willoughb}^ indeed inspires that greatest laughter which has its springs in the warmth and the richness of tears. If he is Mr. Mere- dith's greatest comic study, he is, at the same 32 "The Egoist," etc. time, his most pathetic figure. Of course, his pathos is not of the drawing-room ballad order, any more, indeed, than his comedy would "select" for a "library of humour" — those fields are full, Mr. Meredith rarely strives there, possibly for the same reason that Lander strove not. But those for whom he has any appeal must feel with his creator that " he who would desire to clothe himself at everybody's expense, and is of that desire condemned to strip himself stark naked, he, if pathos ever had a form, might be taken for the living person. Only he is not allowed to run at you, roll you over and squeeze your body for the briny drops. There is the innovation," The pathos, as everything else in the book, is essential. That is, of course, why The Egoist is so pre-eminently Mr. Meredith's typical book, and Sir Willoughby his typical characterisation ; and there could hardly be a more victorious justification of a method. One great wonder, that before reading might well have been a great fear, is that, despite the end- less dissection of Sir Willoughby, the revelation of every *' petty artery " and tissue, he still keeps his outline and remains whole and living to our eyes, when he might so easily have resulted in 33 c "The Egoist," etc. an anatomical diagram, where one cannot grasp the whole for the parts, and the human form dis- appears beneath nets of veinwork and muscle. If it were otherwise, it would be impossible to understand how such a monster could be tolerated in any society, but as it is, while we have the fullest knowledge of his ghastly inner constitu- tion, we are yet able to see him as those about him did ; the courtly gentleman, generous to, if a little exacting from his dependents, with many charms that might well keep that something twisted in him, the existence of which he himself suspected as little as any one, from exposure, save under stress of the very closest relations. Besides his primary importance as one more great addition to Art's ** men and women," Sir Willoughby has another significance as a satire on masculinit}^; he is the type of it, "the original male in giant form " ; and though a world-wide type, especially does he stand for the British male, at once, perhaps, the finest, and certainly the most obnoxious representative of his sex. His silly airs of omnipotence, his dull-eyed numb conceit, his ridiculous solemnities, his boorish exclusiveness, his spurious niceties and sham moralities, his utter fundamental earthiness and vulgarity and 34 "The Egoist," etc. all the various too-well-known characteristics that rear an ass's head upon the paws and' haunches of the national lion ; these that it is to be feared satirists will continue to satirise without sending a ray of awakening into his dull self- satisfied head, these Mr. Meredith has satirised with a laughter that surely would reach the ears of the creature, if they were but as sensitive as they are long. In all his books Mr. Meredith has amused himself with this ridiculous John Bull, whose good qualities, let us not forget, he can embody with no less vigour ; but not even in Diana^ where he strikes so manfully for woman- hood against that masculinity incarnate, the British Bench, has he dealt him such a blow. Of the other characterisations in the book, each so firm and living, of the dialogue that made James Thomson exclaim upon it as the greatest ever written in the English tongue, of the wit and the poetry of style, of these space forbids writing here, though I hope to refer to them, in a general way, later on. One perfection, however, should be here noted, the artistic unity of the whole book ; an unity which perhaps no other of Mr. Mere- dith's books, except Rhoda Fleming, achieves, though probably in the opinion of most Diana . 35 "The Egoist," etc. would be a third. But, speaking for myself, and much as I cherish Diana^ the conclusion somehow troubles me. I cannot read it without incon- gruous reminiscence of the last line in The Angel in the House. The Egoist, however, excites no such feelings, the colours all blend, and the " composition " is perfect. Dramatic grouping so fit, action so organic, and, as I have said, a de'noument so related, is surely a high bid for perfection in the novelist's art. Yet, if The Egoist is thus the book which of all Mr. Meredith's books commands wonder, Richard Feverel is that which wins our love. For love of a book, need one say, is often independent of its perfection or imperfection as art — "subject " has yet so many adherents among us. The subject of The Egoist is recondite, though near enough, the subject of Richard Feverel is — a first love. The difference of appeal to many will be almost that between the appeal of prose and poetry. I spoke, a page or two back, of what I conceived to be an artistic defect in the latter. If that prevents my considering Richard Feverel successful as a whole, it can in no way affect it in its brilliant parts. Mr. Meredith names it in a sub-title, " A History of Father and Son," and it is evidently 36 "The Egoist," etc. in the light of a story of an experiment, namely, that of the training of a youth upon a philosophic system, that he would have us regard it. I, how- ever, do not feel that it is thus we are to come at its importance. This motive distinctly influences the plot, and gives us much wisdom on the sub- ject of education, but it seems to me that the plot is made to fit it rather than to flow from it, and, apart from the flaw referred to above, I regard the plot of Richard Feverel as its one weakness. Its real importance for me lies in its being not so much a story as a poem of young love, in its powerful characterisation — especially of Adrian Harley — and in its magnificent style. This, it would thus appear, was as mature in its writer's twenty-seventh year as in this later day of Diana of the Cross waj/s. It is no injustice to his other books to say that Richard Feverel is fuller of fine things than any one of them, bril- liant as each is. And, of course, the greatest thing in it is the matchless lyric of the early love of Lucy and Richard ; for so I venture to name the two chapters, ** Ferdinand and Miranda," and " A Diversion played on a Penny Whistle," chapters which could be taken bodily from their context to make one complete poem, to stand 37 U "The Egoist," etc. with the very greatest of all such idylls. Not since the Vt^a Nuova has there been another such expression of that wonder, so sweet and awful, the breathless first awakening of love within the soul of a boy and a girl, with all the bloom of its starry transfiguration. Ecce deus fortior me^ qui veniens dominahitur mihi! The lovers of Verona are mature beside Lucy and Richard. It is, I think, primarily owing to those chapters that Richard Feverel is the one novel of Mr. Meredith's which can in any sense be said to be "popular." Readers who know nothing else of his writing know these chapters, and there can be no passage in his works from which there is less actual necessity to quote. At the same time, some quotation from them seems requisite in these pages, the aim of which is to dis- criminate and exhibit in some measure the individual side of Mr. Meredith's power. So accept, reader, what, if you are of my mind, age cannot wither for you, or custom stale. " Above green-flashing plunges of a weir, and shaken by the thunder below, lilies, golden and white, were swaying at anchor among the reeds. Meadow-sweet hung from the banks thick with weed and trailing bramble, and there also hung a daughter of earth. Her face was shaded by a broad straw hat of flexible brim that left her lips and chin in the sun, and, sometimes nodding, sent forth a light of promising 38 ii The Egoist," etc. eyes. Across her shoulders, and behind, flowed large loose curls, brown in shadow, almost golden where the ray touched them. She was simply dressed, befitting decency and the season. On a closer inspection you might see that her lips were stained. This blooming young person was regaling on dewberries. They grew between the bank and the water. . . . The little skylark went up above her, all song, to the smooth southern cloud lying along the blue : from a dewy copse standing dark over her nodding hat the blackbird fluted, calling to her with thrice mellow note : the kingfisher flashed emerald out of green osiers : a bow-winged heron travelled aloft, seeking solitude : a boat slipped toward her, containing a dreamy youth ; and still she plucked the fruit, and ate, and mused, as if no fairy prince were invading her territories, and as if she wished not for one, or knew not her wishes. Sur- rounded by the green shaven meadows, the pastoral summer buzz, the weirfall's thundering white, amid the breath and beauty of wild flowers, she was a bit of lovely human life in a fair setting; a terrible attraction. The Magnetic Youth leaned round to note his proximity to the weir-piles, and beheld the sweet vision. Stiller and stiller grew nature, as at the meeting of two electric clouds. . . . To-morrow this place will have a memory — the river and the meadow, and the white falling weir ; his heart will build a temple here ; and the skylark will be its high-priest, and the old black- bird its glossy-gowned chorister, and there will be a sacred repast of dewberries." There is only one other passage in the whole of Mr. Meredith's novels that at all approaches this in its passionate rapture — Sandra Belloni's meeting of Wilfred Pole at Wilming Weir in the moonlight ; though there is another wondrous wooing, passionate in another way — that where first meeting, wooing and winning, all in one short 39 *'The Egoist," etc. night, carry one along as Clotilde felt herself carried, ** on the back of a centaur " — that great imperious wooing of the great Alvan. I only speak here of the greatest, for in every book he has written some notes of that same intensity thrill us, and there is none where the theme of love is not handled both with a subtlety and a poetry such as it is no exaggeration to say is new to fiction. There is no more striking charac- teristic of Mr, Meredith's work than his treatment of love. Probably the root of his originality lies in his recking his own rede by treating him as an honest god, and dabbling not with the sentimental rouge. " He has," as a critic in The Athenceum has pointed out, ** studied sex, that great leaven of art." And he has done so fearlessly. He has not feared to face the physiological basis of passion, those ** reddened sources " from which Diana shrank. ^' What if" her "poetic ecstasy . . . had not been of origin divine ? had sprung from other than spiritual founts ? had sprung from the reddened sources she was com- pelled to conceal?" What if! echoes Mr. Meredith, with the glowing eye of a poet's faith. Is that morning glor}^ by the river any other than glory, however it came ? And is it not because 40 "The Egoist," etc. of his frank acceptance of that physical sanctity, of that bodily sacrament, and of the chaste sen- suousness that breathes through his expression of them, delicate and sweet as the incense that flutters from a young girl's gown, that such passages as that I have quoted come to us with so new a magic. They are irresistible as Lucy herself. His pictures of young married felicity, and especially of young wifehood, in the same book, are full of the same beauty, and, surely, never laughter so delicious rippled around another honeymoon save Lucy's and Richard's. " ' Oh, my own Richard ! ' the fair girl just breathed. He whispered, ' Call me that name.' She blushed deeply. • Call me that,' he repeated. ' You said it once to-day.' • Dearest ! ' 'Not that.' • O darling ! ' • Not that. ' • Husband ! ' She was won. The rosy gate from which the word had issued was closed with a seal." We owe much of this playfulness to " the wise youth," Adrian Harley, most delightful of all cynics, whom one could forgive twice his cynicism for half his wit, he who procured Richard and Ripton an extra bottle one evening, because 41 "The Egoist," etc. *' he liked studying intoxicated urchins," and who on a momentous occasion in Richard's career, when his earnest cousin Austin re- proached him for his apathy with '' the boy's fate is being decided now," could yawn out the imcomparable retort, "so is everybody's, my dear Austin ! " This Adrian, with what I cannot but feel great superficiality of judgment, has by some been taken to represent Mr. Meredith himself. Mr. W. L. Courtney, in a notable article in The Fortnightly Review, was, I believe, the first to propound the identity, and he certainly tries his contention by the strongest possible test, the Ferdinand and Miranda idyll, seeking to prove that even there the cynic shadow of " the middle- aged spectator " is present. But is this so ? He finds it in the title Mr. Meredith has ^iven to the second of these chapters — " A Diversion played on a Penny Whistle." After quoting a few beautiful Hnes from it, he says "but listen to the irony of the description of such a scene — * a diversion on a penny whistle.' " The irony ? Why, surely Mr. Court- ne}^ must have strangely interpreted the passage which runs thus — 42 ''The Egoist," etc. " Out in the world there, on the skirts of the woodland, a sheep-boy pipes to meditative eve on a penny-whistle. Love's musical instrument is as old, and as poor: it has but two stops ; and yet, you see, the cunning musician does thus much with it ! " If this means anything, is it not rather a tribute to the miracle of it all than a sneer, the ever present miracle of nature's transfiguring uses of what in our foolishness we so often regard as common and mean, because the wonder of it has been lost by familiarity ? Can any one imagine Adrian writing this concluding apos- trophe ? " Pipe no more. Love for a time ! Pipe as you will you cannot express their first kiss ; nothing of its sweetness, and of the sacredness of it nothing. St. Cecilia up aloft, before the organ pipes of Paradise, pressing fingers upon all the notes of which Love is but one, from her you may hear it." Oh no ! Mr. Meredith is not Adrian Harley, or no few of us have read him to strange pur- pose and are yet to be enlightened, for it has surely seemed that we have drawn more strength and joy from him than ever yet was yielded by make-believe. It is probabl}- Mr. Meredith's ubiquitous comic spirit that has laid him open to this misunderstanding, to controvert which, perhaps, it were only necessary to remark that a man like Adrian could never have been suffi- 43 "The Egoist," etc. Eiently in earnest to write novels at all. Any- how, I, for one, must take Mr. Meredith seriously and if that should seem a comic attitude to Mr. Courtney — he must have his smile. Besides this treatment of the theme of love, Richard Feverel is a typical book in other ways ; and if The Egoist be taken to stand for the one thing Mr. Meredith can pre-eminently do, Richard Feverel certainly illustrates the variety of his achievement in more familiar fields. He can not only embody new types, but can animate the old ones with hardly less success. Mrs. Berry would have been a feather even in Dickens' cap, had there been room for more in that ** forest of feathers." Its most striking characteristic next to style is probably its vivid dramatic quality. It is possible that owing to the very narrow sense in which the word dramatic is too often used — confining it exclusively to objective tab- leaux, as though the subjective made no demand on the dramatic ! — it may surprise some to learn that Mr. Meredith can describe a fight as vigor- ously as Charles Reade has done. Undeniably he can do so, and there is hardly a book of his which does not afford examples of the power. Rhoda Fleming is a novel full of "situations/ 44 *'The Egoist," etc. the one book I think of Mr. Meredith's which could be dramatised, if it be a compHment to say so. Vittoria is doubtless his one great achieve- ment in the objective dramatic. What professed historian could have given us such a picture of that great Austro-Italian struggle ? From whom could we have hoped for an impartiality that never leaves us in a moment's doubt as to the writer's vivid sympathies, and yet engages his powers as conscientiously in behalf of Austria as of Italy — winning our sympathy for a Colonel Weisspress no less than for an Angelo Guida- scarpi ? Rare too are the historians who give us scenes Hke the night at La Scala, or the duel in the Stelvio Pass. Of one great engine of the dramatic, dialogue I have already referred to Mr. Meredith as a master. And it is a mistake to think that he can only write the subtle epigrammatical conversa- tion of some of his sublimated types, for he is no less successful in those encounters where words follow each other like blows. One quahty of his dialogue to which James Thomson has drawn attention is its atmosphere. Missing this, one must often miss meaning as well. Mr. Meredith has observed that two talking do not 45 "The Egoist," etc. speak to the mere words uttered, but to all the nuances that accompany them, and then the various niceties of impression in the mind of the one addressed must be taken into account; so that without sense of the atmosphere, and ability to use one's imagination a little, the connection between question and answer is not always obvious. One must have some intuition for secondary meanings, and come prepared to make a running interpretative gloss underneath the mere words as we read, as Mr. Meredith has done for the reader in one simple dialogue between Rhoda and Robert, which it will be a propos to quote here. " ' I've always thought you were a born to be a lady. You had that ambition, madam.) She answered; 'That's what I don't understand.' (Your saying it, O my friend !) 'You will soon take to your new duties.' (You have small objection to them even now.) •Yes, or my life won't be worth much.' (Know, that you are driving me to it.) ' And I wish you happiness, Rhoda.' (You are madly im- perilling the prospects thereof.) To each of them the second meaning stood shadowy behind the utterances. And further ; ' Thank you, Robert.' (I shall have to thank you for the issue.) ' Now it's time to part.' (Do you not see that there is a danger for me in remaining ?) 46 "The Egoist," etc. •Good-night.' (Behold I am submissive.) 'Good-night, Rhoda.' (You were the first to give the signal of parting.) ' Good-night.' (I am simply submissive.) ' Why not my name ? Are you hurt with me ? ' Rhoda choked. The indirectness of speech had been a shelter to her, permitting her to hint at more than she dared clothe in words. Again the delicious dusky rose glowed beneath his eyes. But he had put his hand out to her and she had not taken it. ' What have I done to offend you ? I really don't know, Rhoda.' •Nothing.' The flower had closed." Distinctions, however, between Mr. Meredith's markedly subjective and objective novels are apt to be misleading, they are but accidental ; for, whether the novel be one chiefly of "action" like Vittoria, or of analysis as The Egoist, Mr. Meredith's one concern is still the spiritual issue. If he is not engaged in translating the subjective into the objective, he is tracing the objective back to its subjective springs. As with the poet of Sordello, nothing is valuable to him except in its relation to the history of a soul, the one thing worth study. This then is his one great motive, and in all his novels, whatever stir and action there may be, this is the ruling power. So much does one feel this passion in them, that one would not be surprised to hear that he wrote 47 (( The Egoist," et( them first purely for the sake of settling certain problems to his own satisfaction, producing a work of art on the way. It is this great organic sincerity in his work that makes it so important, and compels us to take it so seriously. One feels that it has not been manufactured, but has grown. It has nothing in common with those clever ** sets " on our shelves, which might just as easily have been in thirty as twenty volumes, had the novelist possessed more horse- power. The organic feeling animates every line, each word seems to have fallen inevitably as and where it is ; which, after all, is but to say that we are dealing with literature. Once again we see sincerity as the root of style, and the last word as the first for Mr. Meredith is his style. He has that great manner of the masters which is not to be aped, by virtue of which he rears his " figure of easy and superb preponderance " among our living novelists. Sharing all their brilliant parts, he possesses in addition such mature dignity as striplings envy in " set " man- hood, that *' weight " which is another than heaviness. He has all their sparkle, but " body" such as they have not — " To port for that ! " His method of telling a story is a sing'ular fusion 48 "The Egoist," etc. of new and old. A master of the modern im- pressionist method, he is as deliberate as Fielding, and thus unites the distinctive strength of each manner. He constantly loves to flash in a phrase and then make sure in a paragraph, and this contrast of intensity and deliberation gives a great piquancy to his writing. He spares no pains to reach his reader, to make him as wise as himself, and his backgrounds and accessories are each and all finished with the same con- scientious industry as the front of the picture. One is sometimes tempted to wish this were not so, thinking, maybe, that the energy expended in perfecting familiar types might have been blood in the veins of another Sir Willoughby. But Sir Willoughbys, as we have seen, must have their dependents ; and the gift of ten novels, in each of which there is at least one commanding creation, is surely no small generosity to one's generation, which possesses them too in a medium so precious for its own sake as Mr. Meredith's prose. 49 ./ Ill ^^The Comic Muse" There is nothing more essential to a considera- tion of Mr. Meredith's novels than a right under- standing of his "idea of comedy." For many of his creations have been conceived under its direct inspiration and all under its supervision, while the ultimate subtlety of its working is to be traced in the vital influence it has undoubtedly , exercised on his style. It is probably as much to that sensitiveness as to any other that we owe the entire absence of commonplace expression in his writing ; his keen nerve for what Dr. Holmes has called the polarisation of words detects for ^im, in the earliest stage of the comic process, what it is common to feel but in the exaggerated cases of prosers talking platitudes with an air, or in the presence of good folk capable of quoting *'the cup that cheers" in all solemnity. To posture in outworn expression is as ludicrous as 50 "The Comic Muse 5> swaggering in a threadbare coat, and to lead out a tottering phrase with the same sprightly gal- lantry we would show to one in the bloom of its first season is even pathetic. If '* our new thoughts have thrilled dead bosoms," we need not dress them from mouldy wardrobes. It will, therefore, be understood that one who has thus an eye for the comic in the microscopic features of a word, will not when he comes to consider the larger laughableness of men and women, give us simply a hurly-burl}' comicality after the pattern of those modern humorists who distort life instead of reflecting it, and pass from volume to volume in one long quest of new forms of sacrilege. The great difference between such and the author of The Egoist is that they Tiave to make their " comedy," whereas for the latter it inheres in all things as vitally as poetry and as diffused as sunshine. It needs but the eye to see, and the hand to fix it for us in art, with no more conventionalising than the exigen- cies of the art make absolute ; for, said Adrian Harley, " no art arrives at the artlessness of nature in matters of comedy." But, indeed, there is no matter on which the majority of men are more completely benighted than this of 51 > ^'The Comic Muse" comedy ; the idea that the comic is in the lau^h rather than the laughed at is of no restricted prevalence. It is, in short, continually confused with its vassal, humour, and few have any idea of the delicious smiles of the muse behind that mask "labelled for broad guffaw." Whoso is wiser than the rest is probably indebted to Mr. Meredith for much of his enlightenment, and if he did not 'hear, or has not read, that lecture on '* The Idea of Comedy and the uses of the Comic Spirit " delivered at the London Institution, February, and printed in The New Quarterly Magazine^ April 1877, he has not read the first chapter of The Egoist in vain. In the former, Mr. Meredith's ever keen instinct for differentiation gives us distinctions valuable as these. " If you detect the ridicule, and your kindliness is chilled by it, you are slipping into the grasp of satire. If, instead of falling foul of the ridiculous person with a satiric rod, to make him writhe and shriek aloud, you prefer to sting him under a semi-caress, by which he shall in his. anguish be rendered dubious whether indeed anything has^ hurt him, you are an engine of irony. If you laugh all round him, tumble him, roll him about, deal him a smack, and drop a tear on him, own his likeness to you and yours to your neighbour, spare him as little as you shun him, pity him as much as you expose, it is a spirit of humour that is moving you. 52 "The Comic Muse J7 The comic, which is the perceptive, is the governing spirit awakening and giving aim to these powers of laughter, but it is not to be confounded with them : it enfolds a thinner form of them." And preceding these definitions Mr. Meredith had written : " You may estimate 5'our capacity for comic perception by being able to detect the ridicule of them you love, without loving them less : and more by being able to see yourself somewhat ridiculous in dear eyes, and accepting the correc- tion their image of you proposes." It is just in this spirit that Mr. Meredith laughs at men and women, loving or pitying them all the same. The best illustration of the difference between his comedy and that of the modern " humorist " is his treatment of the theme of love. To the latter there would seem to be something convulsive in the idea of love itself, and a love- scene, however managed, intrinsically the funniest thing in the world. Thus it has become all but impossible to play even ** Romeo and Juliet" without cynicism in the stalls and horse-laughter from the pit. Such cynicism and such laughter have no relation to the comic spirit — except, indeed, as subjects of it, for at cynicism the gods themselves laugh, and the mirth of pits is purely ventral ; whereas, of 53 '^ The Comic Muse » course, the laughter of the muse ripples first, if not solely, in her brain, softly as the out-pouring of wine. To see " where " indeed " the laugh comes in " is a rare quality, perhaps hardly in- digenous in Britain — around whose mere name, as one writes it, there seems, in truth, a lambent light of the comic. In this matter of love, as in all subjects of the muse, it is not, of course, the fact that is laughable, but the falsehood in which it parades. For " if," says Mr. Meredith, " she watches over sentimentalism with a birch-rod, she is not opposed to romance. You may love, and warmly love, so long as you are honest. Do not offend reason. A lover pretending too much by one foot's length of pretence, will have that foot caught in her trap." It is not at Lucy and Richard by the river that the muse smiles, she smiles on them motherwise may be, not at the great passion of a Sandra, but the poor make- believe of a Wilfred Pole, who " could pledge himself to eternity, but shrank from being bound to eleven o'clock on the morrow morning," and could wonder if there was not a shade too much confidence in Sandra's cry of " my lover ! " Truth, indeed, life as it is, is the one great desire of the comic muse, and to whip men back 54 ^^The Comic Muse 55 to that does she carry her lash of laughter. Her great gift is an eye for proportion, to sins against which, in one way or another, all comic attitudes may be traced. The measure of the disproportion decides the quality of the laughter which she calls forth to ridicule and rectify it. She does not necessarily laugh herself — " inclined to smile " probably re- presents the extent of her own humorous de- monstrativeness — nor need we ; she but appeals to our brain to recognise the anomaly, whence may or may not run a summons to the powers of laughter. But let us beware lest in our laugh- ter we conmiit the very sin which raised it, for though all laughter, the most benighted, must arise primarily from an, at least, imagined comic perception, in most the maximum is on the wrong side. Over-laughing, the sin of the " hypergelast," as Mr. Meredith terms him, is even less tolerable to the muse than that of the " agelast," he who will not " Show his teeth in way of smile Though Nestor swore the jest be laughable," and if we are guilty of it, the muse will but send out another laughter upon ours, which in its turn may need chastening ; a good illustration of her 55 "The Comic Muse 9? primarily perceptive quality, and the process by which " the original big round satyr's laugh " is sublimated in time to '^ the slim feasting smile " of the muse. When we have learnt the secret of fine laughter, to do as much of it in the brain as possible, and when the comic conception is so mighty as to need all powers of laughter in heart and brain, "the laugh will come again," says Mr. Meredith, " but it will be of the order of the smile." Mr. Meredith's comedy, need one say, is of that order. He rarely enlists humour in the pre- sentation of his comic perceptions, never in the most important of them. These latter are, as ever, the less obviously and, therefore, the more exquisitely comic types of humanity ; respect- abilities and complacencies, the humour of which is not visible to the average naked eye, a subtle aura needing for its detection a certain gift, so to say, of comic clairvoyance. Types in whom many will not, " for the life of them," be able to see " what there is to laugh at," such as Matthew Arnold used to meet travelling " on the Wood- ford branch in large numbers." Matthew Arnold, by the way, with that exquisitely reticent smile of his, might stand for Mr. Meredith's 56 ^'The Comic Muse" " idea of comedy " made flesh. Perhaps the one representative of this complacent class for all ages was the man who, in days long past, was wont to say " Civis Romanum Sum," with an air, though his advantage over a modern parallel to whom the Bank of England is among the eter- nal verities, is doubtless one of priority alone. Mr. Meredith is a Copernican in a world yet peopled for the most part by Ptolemaists, men without Jupiter in their lives. And, from this living without Jupiter come all those forms of tradesmanlike seriousness with regard to life, as opposed to the great seriousness ; all forms of taking existence for more and, therefore, for less than it is : all that disproportion which it is the function of the comic muse to adjust. Sir Willoughby Patterne, as we have already seen, is Mr. Meredith's typical comic figure. He is so both in subject and in the manner of his presentation. The delicacy of the latter must surely represent the ultimate reserve of comic treatment. Pushed a shade beyond that, it would have been impossible to discover any artistic in- tention whatever, so little does Sir Willoughby betray the medium of his embodiment. The comedy of him is hardly more defined than the 57 ^^The Comic Muse 95 pathos, which is really quite undefined and left for the reader to discover ; and though there can be no doubt that the comic was the muse to give him to us, he is, indeed, only just hers. The treatment of Roy Richmond, Mr. Mere- dith's other great comic figure, is no less delicate, though proportionately broader. It approaches a shade nearer to the absolutely humorous, and, in keeping, its pathos is more on the surface. If we must place him second to Sir Willoughby, it is only as a subject, for in the matter of presen- tation they seem to me equals ; but, whereas one is a wholly new type, the other is the compara- tively familiar one of the great adventurer. Whether or not, however, there has been such an adventurer in fiction before, I leave to the school of comparative criticism, though I must commit myself to the extent of expressing surprise at the odd caution with which a certain critic who is not wont to be timid sets Roy Richmond alongside Barry Lyndon, with the air of paying him a compliment ! To my mind such a juxtaposition is anything but that. I have always looked upon Thackeray's Irishman as a broad charcoal caricature, and little to boast of as that, and I certainly fail to 58 "The Comic Muse 59 see any common basis of comparison between him and a careful characterisation such as Roy Richmond. If burlesque and comic art — Mr. Burnand and Moliere — are one and the same, it may be discoverable. Both these figures, of Sir Willoughby and Roy Richmond, strike, as we have seen, that minor note, which I think it is generally admitted every great comic figure does strike. All such are, indeed, somewhat of ''tragic comedians." The Muse " hastens to smile lest she should weep." ** A tragic comedian," says Mr. Meredith, of Alvan, " that is, a great pretender, a self- deceiver, one of the vividly ludicrous, whom we cannot laugh at, but must contemplate, to dis- tinguish where their character strikes the note of discord with life." But the measure of the dis- proportion to life of a soul of such high serious- ness as Alvan's, though it may come under the observation of the comic spirit, is not a subject for comic treatment, however delicate ; it belongs to the other hemisphere of art, and comedy has really such part in it as pathos has in more dis- tinctly comic figures. There is that touch of the infinite in his bearing before which whatever faint comic suggestiveness there may be in him, 59 "The Comic Muse 5> laughter must give place to a more serious regard. If he is not of the gods, he is a demi- god, and the true comic figure is a mortal of mortals. Of Mr. Meredith's treatment of " the simple order of the comic," that Dr. Middleton before referred to is probably the freshest study. Doubtless the relationship which has been pointed out between him and Dr. Folliott in Peacock's Crotchet Castle is real, though his type was, after all, hardly Peacock's cop3Tight, and charming as the latter's doctor is, he must give way in flesh and blood realisation to Dr. Middle- ton. Peacock's characters are always too obvious personifications for one to feel much life in them, though they might appeal more nearly to one if they were not ticketed with such unmistakable labels, not to say placards, behind which the man is lost sight of to begin with. Whatever may be said against Dr. Middleton's phraseology, and he does on one occasion refer to his daughter as a ** fantastical planguncula," he is certainly alive. The well-known scene wherein Sir Willoughby and he discuss that " aged and great wine " is probably the best example of Mr. Meredith's use of humour, rich 60 "The Comic Muse 5J and yet characteristically restrained, to be found in his novels. Fortunately, it is also the most quotable. Sir Willoughby " raised a key to the level of Dr. Middleton's breast, remarking : ' I am going down to my inner cellar.' ' An inner cellar ! ' exclaimed the doctor. ' Sacred from the butler. It is interdicted to Stoneman. Shall I offer myself as guide to you ? My cellars are worth a visit.' ' Cellars are not catacombs. They are, if rightly con- structed, rightly considered, cloisters, where the bottle medi- tates on joys to bestow, not on dust misused ! Have you anything great ? ' ' A wine aged ninety.' • Is it associated with your pedigree, that you pronounce the age with such assurance ? ' ' My grandfather inherited it.' • Your grandfather. Sir Willoughby, had meritorious off- spring, not to speak of generous progenitors. What would have happened, had it fallen into the female line ? I shall be glad to accompany you. Port ? Hermitage ? ' • Port ! • ' Ah ! we are in England ! ' " Then again in the library, seated, with the decanter between them. "Dr. Middleton eyed the decanter. There is a grief in gladness for premonition of our mortal state. The amount of wine in the decanter did not promise to sustain the starry roof of night and greet the dawn. ' Old wine, my friend, denies us the full bottle ! ' ' Another bottle is to follow.' •No!' 'It is ordered.' 6i "The Comic Muse" • I protest.' ' It is uncorked.' ' I entreat.' ' It is decanted.' • I submit. But, mark, it must be honest partnership. You are my worthy host, sir, on that stipulation. Note the superiority of wine over Venus ! — I may say the magnanimity of wine ; our jealousy turns on him that will not share! But the corks, Willoughby. The corks excite my amazement.' ' The corking is examined at regular intervals, I remember the occurrence in my father's time. I have seen to it once.' ' It must be perilous as an operation for tracheotomy ; which I should assume it to resemble in surgical skill and firmness of hand, not to mention the imminent gasp of the patient. ' A fresh decanter was placed before the doctor. He said, ' I have but a girl to give ! ' He was melted." Another type I do not remember to have seen set forth so well before is that of Algernon Blancove in Rhoda Flemings an example of the not uncommon weak-minded young fool, who used to buy cigars " to save himself from excesses in charity," yet was not without the alternatives of his vascillating temperament, for " he'd aim at a cock-sparrow, and be glad if he missed." Of what may be termed the " stock " roles of the comic, all those types known on the stage as *' character parts," Mr. Meredith has a full com- pany. He can give us boys and their solemn absurdities, country folk, old men and women and eccentrics of various kinds, in a way that, to state 62 "The Comic Muse" one's opinion in minimum, makes it quite worth our while watching them. ** I growed at a farm, and you don't go to tell ne'er a tree t'walk " — " He was very much in harmony with universal nature, if to be that is the secret of human life " — " the reply was evidently a mile distant and had not started " — **a. sheepskin old Time writes his nothings on" — these are phrases belonging to and descriptive of that Master Gammon who used to annoy housekeeper Sumfit by the relentless patience with which on dumpling-days he would sit and absorb dumpling after dumpling till, exasperated beyond patience, she would cry, " when do you think you'll have done, Mas' Gammon," and after due delay he would reply, " when I feel my buttons, marm." This Master Gammon and the countryman in Diana who " could eat hog for a solid hower " have been the subjects of compara- tive discussion here and there, to which I will not add more than to say that one is too apt to write of countrymen as though there was but one fixed type of them — whereas, of course, they are as various in character as other vegetables. This Master Gammon certainly, to my mind, embodies in a humour as direct as it is quaint some of the 63 "The Comic Muse »> most striking traits of the more primitive class of farm-labourer, that human nullity who has only to stand still to be taken for a gnarled gate- post, and through whom the formation of man *' from the dust of the ground " comes to seem a not unlikely thing. In his humorous characterisation, as else- where, it will be seen that Mr, Meredith does most of his work by phrases, though, as I liave said, he seldom fails to supplement his first vivid impres- sion of a leading trait by a patient fulness of studied detail, a rare solicitude for the reader. But it is the first phrases that always give us the firmest grasp, the deepest insight, and it is by that that the character fives in our minds. If one thinks again of the hapless Barrett in Sandra BeUoni it will be, I think, because he looked " as if he had been a gentleman in another world and was the ghost of one in this," and despite the careful portrait of Anthony Hackbut in Rhoda Flemings it is towards the end of the book that we know him best, when he accepts a glass of wine from Robert, not because he really cared about it, but because he could not deny himself " the tender ecstasy of being paid for." This Anthony Hackbut is an example, though not the 64 ^'The Comic Muse 9> best, of Mr. Meredith's use of the fantastic, that ** Arabian Night " faculty which in him is very strong, and of which we feel the more serious spell in such a chapter as " An Enchantress," in Richard Feverel. Mr. Romfrey's odd jumbled dream while dozing near Beauchamp's sick-bed is a good example of it ; better still those make- believe stories wherein Roy Richmond used to take such liberties of juxtaposition with various characters of history and drama for the benefit of his dear boy Harry. " ' Great Will ' my father called Shakespeare, and ' Slender Billy' Pitt. The scene where Great Will killed the deer, dragging Falstaff all over the park after it by the light of Bardolph's nose, upon which they put an extinguisher if they heard an}' of the keepers, and so left everybody groping about and catching the wrong person, was the most wonderful mixture of fun and tears. Great Will was extremely youthful, but everybody in the park called him ' Father William ' : and when he wanted to know which way the deer had gone, King Lear (or else my memory deceives me) pursued and Lady Macbeth waved a handkerchief for it to be steeped in the blood of the deer ; Shylock ordered one pound of the carcase ; Hamlet (I cannot say why, but the fact was impressed upon me), offered him a three-legged stool ; and a number of kings and knights and ladies lit their torches from Bardolph ; and away they flew, distracting the keepers and leaving Will and his troop to the deer. That poor thing died from a different w-eapon at each recital, though always with a flow of blood and a successful dash of his antlers into Falstaff; and to hear Falstaff bellow ! But it was mournful to hear how sorry Great Will w^as over the animal he had slain. He spoke like 65 E "The Comic Muse 55 music. I found it pathetic in spite of my knowing that the whole scene was lighted up by Bardolph's nose, when I was just bursting out crying — for the deer's tongue was lolling out and quick pantings were at his side ; he had little ones at home — Great Will remembered his engagement to sell Shylock a pound of the carcase; determined that no Jew should eat of it, he bethought him that Falstaff could well spare a pound, and he said the Jew would not see the differ- ence ; Falstaff only got off by hard running and roaring out that he knew his unclean life would make him taste like pork and thus let the Jew into the trick." This is delightful nonsense, and the faculty of improvisation which it witnesses must, of course, have been Mr. Meredith's before it was Roy Richmond's, in whose history it swayed such a power of charm ; but the crowning example of such is The Shaving of Shagpaf, that gnomic book which the very clever will doubtless persist in interpreting as a satirical allegory, but which one can be well content to take according to its label — "an Arabian entertainment." Its fantasy, however, is not its only attraction ; probably its subtlest fascination is a purely literary one, such as we enjoy in that most delicate parody which is the barely heightened reproduction of the thing itself. Nothing could be more delicious than Mr. Meredith's imitation of the Oriental phrase- ology, and the cleverness with which he has caught the manner of the Arabian story-teller in 66 "The Comic Muse 99 every particular, even to all the various styles of the indispensable quotations " in the words of the poet." The very title of the first chapter — '' The Thwackings " — is a triumph, and the opening lines give a most appetising foretaste of what is to follow. " It was ordained that Shibli Bagarag, nephew to the renowned Baba Mustapha, chief barber to the Court of Persia, should shave Shagpat, the son of Shimpoor, the son of Shoolpi, the son of Shullum; and they had been clothiers for generations, even to the time of Shagpat, illustrious. Now the story of Shibli Bagarag, and of the ball he followed, and of the subterranean kingdom he came to, and of the enchanted palace he entered, and of the sleeping king he shaved, and of the two princesses he released, and of the Afrite held in subjection by the arts of one and bottled by her, is it not known as 'twere written on the finger-nails of men and traced in their corner robes ? As the poet says : Ripe with oft telling and old is the tale, But 'tis of the sort that can never grow stale." And what, in its way, could be better than the description of *' a woman, old, wrinkled, a very crone, with but room for the drawing of a thread between her nose and her chin." But, in addi- tion to this pervading humorous value, there are many passages of serious beauty, the love-scenes in " Bhanavar the Beautiful," for example ; and some of the snatches of song therein are quite 67 ^^The Comic Muse 99 exquisite, though those, of course, are not our present concern. That quahty of dehcate parody is more to the point, as indicative of a power of humorous phrase, that purely hterary humour which consists rather in quaintness of statement than in subject matter, in which Mr. Meredith's writing is peculiarly rich. It is, indeed, in that all pervading piquancy of verbal flavour, and his use of comedy as ^* a criticism of life " in its more conventional and highly cultivated forms, that we must look for Mr. Meredith's most original inspiration from the Comic Mui^e. 68 IV "The Pilgrim's Scrip" The title which, in the first instance, belongs to Sir Austin Feverel's volume of apothegms, may well stand for all those considerable riches, making, perhaps, the bulk of Mr. Meredith's wealth, which exist in the form of aphoristic gold pieces, and sentences readily negotiable as quotation, throughout his novels. An American lady has so applied it to a very charming collection of Meredithian " wit and wisdom," for which alone one sighs the lack of an international copyright. As originally used it denotes a collection of what pagan Elizabethans, anxious to make their peace before the end, would have called *' Divine Epigrams," but for us to so confine it in these pages would be pedantic, as there are as many wise things outside as within it. It forms, indeed, but one of Mr. Meredith's many excuses 69 ^^The Pilgrim's Scrip 55 for being witty — Dr. Middleton, Adrian Harley, Stukeley Culbrett, Mrs. Mountstuart, and others — which are as efficient, however, in the Danae- shower of his wit as half a dozen basins spread to catch a day's rainfall from the south-west. One sometimes wonders why he should have taken the trouble to provide these mouthpieces, for he is just as shamelessly witty without them, and probably his best things are said in propria persona. But, while making use of the label, " The Pilgrim's Scrip," to stand for the bulk of Mr. Meredith's phrase-making, sacred and profane — that is, for his wit as a power apart from its several working — it would be as well to bear in mind its secondary, more exact, meaning too. " Who rises from prayer a better man his prayer is answered " is, of course, the product of precisely the same power as that which armed Diana with her " arrowy phrases " and gave Adrian his caustic tongue ; as, for example, the sensuousness of a Crashaw and a Keats is much the same, although one dedicated his to the Virgin and the other to Cynthia. Yet there is a strong physiognomical difference in the products which one wishes to have marked. 70 ^The Pilgrim's Scrip 9» If **The Pilgrim's Scrip" be kept apart for the " sacred " side of Mr. Meredith's wit, he has given us no such general heading for his "pro- fanities " ; so will it seem profane in me to suggest ** Diana's Quiver" in default of a better ? Under two such fanciful labels one could speedily classify all his good things — " The Pilgrim's Scrip " to represent the earnest wisdom of his wit, "Diana's Quiver" the more playful satiric aspect of it. This gift of phrase-making is Mr. Meredith's most generally known quality : one of his com- mentators considers him the greatest wit in English literature, and sa3's that Sheridan is " not visible beside him " ; but unsympathetic critics do not seem to regard this as a high com- pliment, for I have noticed that this one quality they will allow to our author they delight to belittle, saying that proverb-making " is no great game," and that only an inferior type of genius runs into aphorism. When one remembers that the greatest writers practically live for the vulgar by a pre-eminent faculty of that nature, one may be pardoned for holding a different opinion, and at least one cannot be wrong in feeling that the aphorism is too small a field on which to decide 71 "The Pilgrim's Scrip 59 SO great an issue as the measure of genius. After all too Mr. Meredith himself, with that unfailing manysidedness born of his comic perception, is before them in detraction. All that can be said against his particular vice he has expressed in phrases that give it no mercy. " A maker of proverbs — what is he but a narrow mind the mouthpiece of a narrower . . . consider the sort of minds influenced by set sayings. A proverb is the half-way house to an idea, I conceive ; and the majority rest there content : can the keeper of such a house be flattered by his company ? " This is his severe judgment on Sir Austin Feverel, upon whose foible he is continually turning a humorous eye ; and, in like manner, Diana is made to regard the " lapidary sentences " of her own special gift as having merely " the value of chalk-eggs, which lure the thinker to sit." A warning against the exhibition of detached examples of wit in that same famous first chapter is no less applicable to the " wisdom " of George Meredith than it was to that of Dan Merion's sparkling daughter. It can only be truly known in a body, for it is the many-coloured product of a most peculiarly complicated personality, 72 "The Pilgrim's Scrip" Mr. Meredith being so alive on all sides of his nature that he has given us utterances from every contradictory standpoint. It v^ould be hard to conceive, indeed, a per- sonality vi^hose component parts are at once so many and so various, and yet wrought together into so subtly harmonious a whole. Mr. Meredith has probably the most perfectly balanced mind of any great modern, at once so capable of high enthusiasm, and so rich in common sense. He is another example of the sanity of the poet. He has an unexampled gift of logic, and nothing gives him greater amusement than the spectacle of illogicality in any form. He simply cannot understand the denial of fact for any purpose whatsoever ; and the habitual abnegation of it for spiritual purposes is a strange puzzle to him. For he himself is able still to remain a transcendentaHst, while welcoming all, and materialism but inspires him with '' a sensual faith in the upper glories." He is capable of frenzies fine as those of any poet of the century, and yet he has all that coolness of head, that dispassionate judgment, which popular superstition attributes to the man of science — qualities which, one need hardly say, 73 "The Pilgrim's Scrip" the actual man of science (who is nothing if not a poet gone wrong) is pathetically innocent of. He is our first scientific student of human nature, and has all the student's high scorn of sentimental shrinking from diagnosis, that which sees and then rushes away "to interchange lift- ings of hands at the sight, instead of patiently studying the phenomenon of energy," * " Dealing with subjects of this nature emo- tionally," said Percy Dacier, " does not advance us a calculable inch." He never regrets, he has a too everpresent sense of law. " It was a quality going, and a quality coming," he writes * I cannot forbear reference here to the scathingly sarcastic treatment of this attitude in the sonnet entitled " Whimper of Sympathy," printed in the Ballads and Poems of Tragic Life. " Hawk or shrike has done this deed Of downy feathers: rueful sight! Sweet sentimentalist, invite Your bosom's power to intercede. So hard it seems that one must bleed Because another needs must bite : All round we find cold Nature slight The feelings of the totter-knee'd. O it were pleasant, with you To fly from this tussle of foes, The shambles, the charnel, the wrinkle: To dwell in yon dribble of dew On the cheek of your sovereign rose, And live the young life of a twinkle." 74 ^^The Pilgrim's Scrip'* of the passing away of Sandra's first maidenly simplicity ; " nor will we, if you please, lament a law of growth." The natural result of this manysidedness is that one finds him claimed by men of the most diverse intellectual complexion. The modern young cynic hails him as master, imitates his brilliancy in many well-known columns, and yet the most earnest of our living workers claim him for their own. It is odd that the imputation of cynicism, which has long been the one criticism of ignorant mediocrity upon Thackeray, should have attached itself to Mr. Meredith also. Indeed the word '* cynic" is the one missile of a public which flees in nervous terror at the earliest indication of satire. It never waits to see against whom it is directed ; it is sufficient that it be clever to draw down the popgun pellet. As a matter of fact there is no more foundation for the charge against Mr. Meredith than there was against the warm-hearted editor of Cornhill. His faith in humanity is no less firm than his faith in life, and one may be sure he would never have taken the trouble to scourge its follies had he not deemed it worth whipping. " Who is the 75 "The Pilgrim's Scrip 5> coward among us ? He who sneers at the failings of humanity," wrote Sir Austin in his gilt-edged note-book. Again, in The Egoist- — " Cynicism is intellectual dandyism without the coxcomb's feathers, and it seems to me that cynics are only happy in making the world as barren to others as they have made it for themselves." This charge of cynicism has arisen, doubt- less, because Mr. Meredith is so enamoured of reality and refuses absolutely to be sentimental. " Sacred Reality," he names it in one of his poems — real beauty, real greatness, real religion. To him life is solemn with the fulness of these things, and of them he is ever ready to prophesy ; while he is more than usually dowered with the prophetic "scorn of scorn" for the paltry imita- tions that usurp the worship of the world. Not Carlyle himself had a more white-hot hatred of ** simulacra." While his philosophy of life, as has been said, is one of faith, it is by no means easily so. In man's future he has a most absolute trust, but he none the less insists that man will have to work for it. "Only he His soul well-knit, and all his battles won, Mounts, and that hardly, to eternal life," 76 "The Pilgrim's Scrip" He has as little sentimental solace to offer man for his sorrows here as the sad-smiled poet just quoted. Growth is ail he promises for struggle, " at war with ourselves . . . the best happiness." He is quite pitiless in the manner in which he strips man of his last " blanket of a dream," he will allow him none of his old comfortable excuses, and where man whines of fate, Mr. Meredith points at folly. " You talk of Fate ! It's the seed we sow individuall}^ or collec- tively." Fools ** run jabbering of the irony of fate to escape the annoyance of tracing the causes." There is but one way, " expediency is man's wisdom. Doing right is God's." ^* Man know thyself " is a phrase unfortunately associated with quacks of the medical profession, but it, nevertheless, is one reiterated lesson of " The Pilgrim's Scrip "— '' then be thyself " the other. In turning from the matter to consider the manner of Mr. Meredith's phrase-making, one must not forget how, " like all rapid phrasers, Mrs. Mountstuart detested the analysis of her sentence. It had an outline in vagueness and was flung out to be apprehended, not dissected." Yet it may still be permissible to note a few 77 '^ The Pilgrim's Scrip 59 general characteristics which certainly contribute to give Mr. Meredith's phrases their unique flavour. Its most marked quality is that already re- ferred to, his quite abnormal instinct for analogy. This is no little coloured by the accomplish- ment of learning, which enables him to draw images from the most odd and out of the way places. Thus he writes of ** a world where inno- cence is as poor a guarantee as a babe's caul against shipwreck," and talks of ''words big and oddly garbed as the pope's body-guard." By reason of the same accomplishment he is able to make use of the technicalities of scien- tific and artistic knowledge, as in that help- ful aphorism from Diana — "The light of every soul burns upward. Let us allow for atmos- pheric disturbance," or in a somewhat irritating fashion in passages such as that in which *'Crossjay's voice ran up and down a diatonic scale, with here and there a query in semitone and a laugh on a ringing note." He loves to send metaphor, Ariel-like, to the ends of the earth for the mere pleasure of fan- tastical juxtaposition, the result being a kind of literary grotesque which all who have feeling for 78 "The Pilgrim's Scrip ?> style for its own sake relish, perhaps, more than anything in his writing. Such phrases stand out like gargoyles in all his books. Wlien, for in- stance, a snore is described as '' the ellin trumpet of silence," or a country feast as " the nuptials of beef and beer " ; when in that charming scene of simple comedy in Lawyer Thompson's office, Ripton grew aware that his surreptitious studies in English fiction were being overlooked by his irate father, and the '* proximity roused one of" his " senses, which blew a call to the others " ; or when again in that dear moment when Redworth watched Diana kindling the fire at midnight in the lonely ** Crossways," " a little mouse of a thought scampered out of one of the chambers of his head and darted along the passages, fetching a sweat to his brows." It is also owing to his power of close metaphor that his style has often a warm intimacy of phrase, in his dialogue a power of suggesting, so to say, the very physical conditions of the birth of a phrase ; while his most beautiful bear a bloom tender beyond words. ** She coloured like a sea- water shell " ; a double wild cherry in bloom suggests " Alpine snows in noon — sunlight, a flush of white." " He pronounced ' Love ' a little 79 ** The Pilgrim's Scrip" modestly, as it were, a blush in his voice " ; ^'the day was soft and still, the flowers gave light for light " ; Sandra's face " was like the after-sunset across a rose-garden, with the wings of an eagle poised outspread on the light " ; and after her song the stillness settled back again "like one folding up a precious jewel." There are no few on whom some of these phrases and their like have no other effect than an irritation beyond mad bulls. To them they are simply violations of language, which, of course, they are, if man was made for the dic- tionary, and if we are to regard language as a fixed unchangeable institution, and not a com- promise to be modified by mortal convenience. Mr. Meredith, however, takes the latter view ; to him language is but one big analog}^ ; and when one remembers how troubled poor old Colonel Newcome used to be over Keats, and that, after all, the world has come to see with Clive and his friends, it gives one courage to side with him. No few well-meaning people will tell one that it is not in the power of white to flush, and that a blush in the voice is an impossibility, that " hours " have never " crumbled slowly," and 80 "The Pilgrim's Scrip" that there is no such thing as '* the thread of a look " ; to which one can only answer that there is evidently then no such thing as metaphor, or that it is their mission on earth, like Red worth's, to kill them on the wing. It may be objected that such prose is open to the charge which lies against most modern art, and especially, perhaps, against music, of aiming beyond its particular genius, trying to do more than its conditions warrant — of music to be pictorial, of painting to be poetical, and of prose to be the synthesis of all ; but, nevertheless, the canons of an art are not eternal in the heavens, and whether it may legitimately add another stop to its compass " not argument but effort shall decide." Of this there can be little doubt, that the continual demand of our modern intensity for expression that " bites " can no longer be met in literature by a simple use of words, and that, whether or not it be in excess of the need, Mr. Meredith's style is certainly an initiative in the direction of the necessary raising of language to its higher powers. In that power of compression which is the readiest road to force, in the manufacture, so to 8l F '^The Pilgrim's Scrip 99 say, of the literary cartridge, Mr. Meredith has no parallel except Browning. He almost stuns one at times with his perfectly crushing force, and any one of his books is as sternly invigo- rating as an electric bath. As an example of the vitality that can be crushed into three little words there can be none more striking than that picture in ** the Woods of Westermain " of "The print that shows Hasty outward-tripping toes. Heels to terror, on the mould." The italics are, of course, mine. Such a phrase may be glibly sneered at; one, indeed, might quote Mr Meredith's own characterisation of Alvan's writing and say that the telegraph is manifestly the model of such style, but do we really regret the lost particles, demonstrative pronouns or qualifying adjectives, with which another man would have made at least three lines of what is now but three words ? One feels the same almost brutal power in such a phrase as that describing Attila's Huns in the Nuptials of Attila — ''those rock-faces hung with weed." And though these references here to his poetry may seem to be a little out of place, they may, on the other hand, 82 "The Pilgrim's Scrip 55 introduce the question which Mr. Meredith's writing continually suggests to one — whether this power of phrase is a specific prose characteristic. For my part, I think that if one were to suggest that Mr. Meredith was born for verse and made for prose, there would doubtless be found many to agree, and the reverse of the famous dictum of Matthew Arnold on Shelley might, I think, be risked in his case without much fear of derision. Verse, per se, has always a better chance of longevity than prose, the mere bulk of the latter being one drawback in the struggle for survival. Then there is of necessity more lath-and- plaster work about prose, especially the novel, than verse, and it is really more a question of the relative durability of two forms of art, than an impossible comparison between the works themselves, that one has to settle in conjecturing whether indeed posterity will not know Mr. Meredith rather as the poet of Modern Love than the novelist of the Ego. Note. — To any one who cares about the history of Mr. Meredith's phrases it may be interesting to note that Diana's fondness for " antiques " dates back to The Case of General Ople and Lady Camper (from which, as has been pointed out else- where, comes the title oi One of our Conquerors), one of those three uncollected stories, of which that fine bit of tragic comedy, The Tale of Chloe, will some day I hope, be reprinted. 83 V Woman in the Novels Of all the many matters on which Mr. Meredith has written, he has written on none so often, or with greater authority and charm, than on " that mystery the human heart Female." And was this not to be expected, for where should a style such as his find fuller scope than in the delinea- tion of woman ? In her complex individuality, indeed, it meets with a subject for which it has no redundant powers ; for its subtlety her delicate psychology, and for its poetry is there not her beauty ? Mr. Meredith has written of her in many moods, he has said sly and wicked things about her innumerable, wise things as many, and great and noble things no few. The former are best known ; probably because we still live in a masculine world, which delights not to quote against itself what woman can hardly quote in her own behalf. 84 Woman in the Novels " I expect that woman will be the last thing civihsed by man " is often on its lips, apparently unsuspecting that the saying may be two-edged and the advantages of being " civilised by man" problematical ; but it is silent as to how " primi- tive men abound and will have their pasture." Because Mr. Meredith often flirts with his sub- ject, it would be a mistake indeed to think that his prevailing mood in regard to it is other than one of utter seriousness — for, before one jests with him upon it, certain passages of " black earnest " in The Egoist have to be reckoned with. Certainly, no man has written more mercilessly against the brutal selfishness of his own sex in its relations with woman ; by no means, however, on the platform of a modern " woman question," but from the point of view of a humanity far broader. Diana and her sister queens would hardly have won us had they been pamphlets in petticoats. No, it is by their womanhood alone, in Mr. Meredith's art as in that of any other who has won Hke success, that they rule over us. If asked what is the quahty that especially distinguishes Mr. Meredith's woman, it would be no bad answer to say that they eat well and are not ashamed. In his delineation of them his 85 Woman in the Novels fearless adoption of the modern conception of the unity of body and spirit finds its poetry. No writer with whom I am acquainted has made us so realise "the value and significance of flesh," and spirit as the flower of it. In his women we seem to see the transmutation in process. He accepts as simple fact what Rossetti was at one time so anathematised for expressing, he too knows ** not her body from her soul," and he has been the first of the novelists to give her to art with all the bloom of her sweet physical holiness upon her — mulier as well as femina. With sentimentality about her he has, therefore, no patience whatever. Of distinctions between the sexes not founded on organism he takes no account. " A girl that was so like a boy " was Sir Austin Feverel's "ideal of a girl." I should say it is Mr. Meredith's too. " The subsequent immense distinction " he considers " less one of sex than of education." The woman all feminine, the man all masculine are terrors to him. That likeness in difference of which the Laureate has sung is his ideal of the relations of man and woman too. *' You meet now and then men," he writes in 86 Woman in the Novels The Tragic Comedians, '* who have the woman in them without being womanised ; these are the pick of men. And the choicest women are those who yield not a feather of their womanli- ness for some amount of manlike strength . . . man's brain, woman's heart." Her conventional "purity," sentimental daintiness, are to him a dangerous superstition born of the selfish gross- ness of man. It is appetite not love that makes such demands. But '* love : a word in many mouths not often explained," what is that but " a finer shoot of the tree stoutly planted in good gross earth ; the senses pouring their live sap, and the minds companioned, and the spirits made one by the whole-natured conjunction." Mr. Meredith has nothing but scorn for that artificial line of demarcation between the sexes embodied in the ladies " retiring " from the dinner-table. If the gentlemen's after-dinner wine and wit are good things for the husband, there is no reason in nature why they should not be so for the wife also ; and if not good for him, why, he should have the manliness to give them up altogether. One can hardly be wrong in reading Alvan's robust conception of wifehood in The Tragic Comedians as Mr. Meredith's own. It was not 87 Woman in the Novels only on the heights of mind and heart that he and his Clotilde were to meet, but whatsoever things of sense were wholesome for him, should she not share them too — wine and all ? " They marched to the table together, and sat together, and drank a noble Rhine wine together — true Rauenthal. His robustness of body and soul inspired the wish that his well-born wife might be, in her dainty fashion, yet honestly and without mincing, his possible boonfellow : he and she, glass in hand, thanking the bountiful heavens, blessing man- kind in chorus. It belonged to his hearty dream of the wife he would choose, were she to be had." This idea of a " fair boonfellow of the rollick- ing faun " is surely better than the sneaking indulgence every man must feel his *' after- dinner " hour to be. To love the flower and be ashamed of the root is a pitiable silliness in Mr. Meredith's eyes. To stand entranced at Lucy's terrible youthful beauty, and to object to that plumping of her exquisite proportions on bread and butter (and " worse ! ") without which that dazzling bloom of health could never have been upon her cheek ; to ascend heaven on an aria and object to the tired prima donna recuperating on bottled stout, is incomprehensible illogicality. ''True poets and true women have the native sense of the divineness of what the world deems gross 88 Woman in the Novels material substance," he writes in Diana^ and it is because Mr. Meredith too feels that divineness with such a passionate faith and worship, knows it so to be ** at the founts of the world," that the make-believe poetry of sentimentalism seems such a laborious foolishness to him — as though men should become too fastidious for the " gross- ness " of natural sunlight, and choose to live by some glow-worm extract of cucumber. That woman should need stage-lights to make her wonderful seems the very strangest of errors. Why, she herself is a star ! — a swaddled star (if the phrase be not too wild), swaddled in no end of sentimental muslins and exhibited by Chinese lantern. To tear these wrappages every one away, to put that stupid light out, and give her back to us again in all her old wonderful shining, that is what Mr. Meredith has set him- self to do for her and us. Woman is really a tradition with us to-day, a superstition, whose priests are the sentimental- ists, latter-day guardians of a revelation which long ago had life in it, but which they have so perverted that it is hard to see in its feeble survival any trace of the old chivalric ideal. Mr. Meredith comes with a new revelation of her old 89 Woman in the Novels divineness, for a long time now little more than a rumour kept in circulation by men for the sake of resultant gratification on lower planes. To quote his own words once more, he destroys the poetry of sentimental woman, " the ideal of a waxwork sex," to give us woman as she is, a starry reality " undreamed of by sentimental man." He brings to us a poet's assurance, deepest of all, of the truth of that old instinct of man that has given us Sybil and Norn. Woman is nearer to nature's heart than man, as the poet is nearer ; she lives more with the great things that alone make life worth having than he ; she values the Eternities, and has but little of his comical seriousness with regard to temporal things ; and by that reliance on her instincts and intuitions of which man has from time immemorial made mock, she rises among his conventions, an ever-springing fount of natural illumination. It is for this reason that she means so much to him, and for Mr. Meredith she means all. ''They are our ordeal," said Sir Austin, warning Richard that *' there are women in the world, my son " ; and again in The Egoist — " Women have us back to the conditions of primitive man, 90 Woman in the Novels or they shoot us higher than the topmost star. But it is as we please. Let them tell us what we are to them : for us, they are our back and front of life ; the poet's Lesbia, the poet's Beatrice ; ours is the choice. And were it proved that some of the bright things are in the pay of Darkness, with the stamp of his coin on their palms, and that some are the very angels we hear sung of, not the less might we say that they find us out, they have us by our leanings. They are to us what we hold of best or worst within. By their state is our civilisation judged : and if it is hugely animal still, that is because primitive men abound and will have their pasture." "Ours is the choice" because ours is that strength, of body and brain, of which, as Mr. Meredith is constantly insisting, woman is by nature so resistlessly a worshipper ; hers is the Hght of the spirit, but where and how it shall burn is for man to say, it is in the power of his strength as a lamp in the hand. But woe to him if he use it ill ! ''For women are not the end, but the means of life, and they punish us for so perverting their uses. They punish society." A man's relations to woman, how he regards her, how he acts towards her, are the most significant things about him. The whole tragi-comedy of The Egoist comes, as has been seen, of the testing of Sir Willoughby by woman ; and the phrase Mr. Meredith uses to describe one woman in Rhoda Fleming would, doubtless, more or less, also represent to him the whole sex — *' a crucible- 91 Woman in the Novels woman/' one "in contact with whom you were soon resolved to your component parts." Of that perversion of her uses Mr. Meredith, as I have already hinted, has much to say, and there can be no doubt that woman has yet had no such ally in her battle against mascuHnity as he ; all the more precious because he is able to look at both sides, and as well as taking part in the battle with all his various powers, is able to do good camp-service in arming her against herself. Most men who take up the cause of woman do so sentimentally, as her slave ; Mr. Meredith rather fights as her captain, the only way, as I fancy he has somewhere said, for man to help her. He can laugh at her too, which senti- mental man dare never, and to be able to laugh at a woman is to have her in one's power. Over her various quixotries, and all her serious-faced patents for ** emancipating " her sex, he is as merry as Adrian Harley on the solemn plotting of Richard and Ripton ; and for the female fad- dist and philanthropist he has as little mercy as Thackeray. ** Relapsed upon religion and little dogs " is his caustic characterisation of Mrs. Caroline Grandison, into whose ''garden of girls " Sir Austin Feverel carried the Cinderella 92 Woman in the Novels slipper on behalf of his model son, and into the secrets of whose patent female forcing-house we are allowed to follow him, led by the good woman herself — that gymnasium fitted-up with " swing- poles, and stride-poles, and newly invented in- struments for bringing out special virtues : an instrument for the lungs ; an instrument for the liver ; one for the arms and thighs ; one for the wrists ; the whole for the promotion of the Christian accomplishments." "Woolly negroes blest her name, and whiskered John Thomases deplored her weight " is another phrase by which she is commended to our unforgetfulness. And what characterisation of a well-known type of woman could be better than this of Lucie, Baroness von Crefeldt, in The Tragic Comedians, who, we are told, "was one of those persons who after a probationary term in the character of woman, had become men." One of Mr. Meredith's favourite pleasantries is to take woman at her word, and give her the hearing of that " reason " of her possession of which she is so anxious to assure us ; then with a face of mock-seriousness expose her delicious illogicalities, her valiant sophistries, and send her back to her feminine defences with the pout 93 Woman in the Novels he has watched for — " you expect me to be all reason ! " " ' Wise or not, he has the right to scheme his best to keep you,' said Vernon Whitford, as Clara took him into her con- spiracy against Sir Willoughby. She looked on Vernon with a shade of wondering reproach — ' Why ? what right ? ' ' The right you admit when you ask him to release you.'" To Struggle for days in the net and then to exclaim " What net ? " — is not this woman ? And, again, what could be more delicious than Adrian's reductio ad absurdum of Richard's in- dignant vindication of Lucy from the blame of his marriage. " ' She did all she could to persuade me to wait ! ' empha- sised Richard. Adrian shook his head with a deplorable smile. • Come, come, my good Ricky ; not all ! not all ! ' Richard bellowed : ' What more could she have done ? ' ' She could have shaved her head, for instance.' " Wholesome laughter is perhaps woman's greatest need, it blows away the sentimental gossamer (I had almost written cobweb), and Mr. Meredith's is as generous as his own South-West. The rare cynical ring in it is kept for those negative types for whom few of us would cry mercy. Mr. Meiedith is able too, I said, to look at both sides of the great conflict. While untiring in his denunciation of man's unworthy use of 94 Woman in the Novels woman's divineness, he does not forget that ^' bad is two-sexed upon earth," and that man's is only half the apple. If he so passionately appreciates her special greatness, it is not to forget man's ; while he recognises that the weakness of either sex is but an overgrowth of its strength — woman becoming the slave rather than the mistress of those senses through which her illumination comes, and man driven by rather than driving that brain which is the fount of his strength. " Get you something of our purity And we will of your strength : we ask no more," said the Fair Ladies in Revolt, in that charming and masterly ballad in which Mr. Meredith embodies a duel in dialogue between the sexes — with the result that the ladies won one of their two opponents, who had from the first, indeed, remained suspiciously silent during his friend's attack. Strength, otherwise brain, " more brain, O Lord, more brain ! " that — Mr. Meredith's universal specific — is woman's need, though one hesitates to chime in at once with "purity" for man, remembering a notable saying of Sir Austin Feverel's, as he complimented Lady Blanche on her woman's worship of strength — ** strength in whatever form " is '* the child of heaven ; whereas 95 Woman in the Novels purity is a characteristic and can be spotted — how soon I " — remembering that and the inevitable corollary which Lady Blanche at once detected, but which only one of Mr. Meredith's dramatis personce could have so neatly formulated — " I see," she said archly, *' we are the lovelier vessels ; you claim the more direct descent. Men are seedlings : women slips ! " Now, of course, Mr. Meredith does not mean that, and when he says that man's need is purity I cannct think that he uses the word merely as Sir Austin did, for that would be to name all that something "which places woman so high " a paltry gloss indeed, and re- duce the feminine to a poor sum of degrees north or south of man, when does not the whole of nature witness it as one of the two equal poles on which the world spins round ? I shall not venture to say exactly what Mr. Meredith does mean, but suggest the substitution of the word *' spirit " for '* purity," as one has already written " brain " for " strength," and leave the masculine reader to think out his need for himself. Whether Mr, Meredith's specific is indeed the feminine panacea he asserts lovers of Diana may, perhaps, be pardoned for doubting, for she had brain, surely, and yet if her story means anything it would 96 Woman in the Novels seem to testify against Mr. Meredith's theory ; at every important crisis of her life her brain seemed at once to abdicate, and leave her at the mercy of her impulses. Once a woman always a woman. Besides is not brain also "two-sexed on earth" ? At least I found Mr. Meredith paying a compliment to " the fine brain of woman " some- where, I am certain — and . . . but I can fancy Mr. Meredith exclaiming with Alvan, " Oh, she's a riddle, of course. I don't pretend to spell every letter of her." And yet how many has he spelt ! It would seem indeed that he has " sprouted " those " petticoats " which Tracy Runningbrook sighed the lack of " for the answering of purely feminine questions " ; or as if in some mystic manner he had become initiated mason-wise into their sex. For all their nuances ^ all their " feminine silk- flashes of meaning," seem familiar to him, every little trick of their nerves, every whim of their blood, every warm sweet secrecy of it too. Yet with what an exquisitely tender reverence does he touch them, like some gentle physician with his stethoscope at the bosom of a blushing girl. What a bloom is there on every dear revelation ! That picture of Sandra '' glad to extinguish the 97 G Woman in the Novels candle and be covered up dark in the circle of her warmth " ; or the observation of ** the mellowed depth, the soft human warmth, which marriage had lent to her voice " in after years in Italy. If any other man has written of motherhood as Mr. Meredith has written I have yet to meet with his work. I suppose there are poor folk in the world capable of misunderstanding those delicate pages in Richard Feverel which tell how Lucy's " Innocent maidenhood awoke To married innocence " under the delicious care of good " Bessie Berry " — but, like Modern Love and everything great or beautiful in the world, such writing " is not meat For little people or for fools," and, happily, the world is not quite made up of such. Mr. Meredith is safe with the rest. I do not propose here to consider one by one those individual women " whose names are five sweet symphonies." Apart from the question of space, I cannot see whom it would benefit. To imagine that I could in a page or two give them to the reader who has yet to know them would be a poor compliment to their perfection, and what reader who knows them already would not 98 Woman in the Novels be filled with furious impatience at the presump- tuous surplusage ? Moreover, I have nothing of the nature of British " criticism " to offer upon them, and passages of exclamatory admiration, unless one can do them as well as Mr. Swinburne, are little profitable. Diana Warwick, Sandra Belloni, Clara Middle- ton, Rhoda Fleming, Cecilia Halkett — " Shake- speare's women" all ; and let no man miss Alvan's Clotilde, imperishable type of that feminine cowardice to which, Mr. Meredith says, all young women are trained ; or that wonderful study of woman in her great natural role of charlatan, the Countess de Saldar. And these, of course, are not all, nor are the rest forgotten though unnamed. Could one forget a Renee thus described ? — "... a brunette of the fine lineaments of the good blood of France. She chattered snatches of Venetian caught from the gondoliers, she was like a delicate cup of crystal brimming with the beauty of the place, and making one . . . drink in all his impressions through her. Her features had the soft irregularities which run to rarities of beauty, as the ripple rocks the light; mouth, eyes, brows, nostrils, and bloomy cheeks played into one another liquidly ; thought flew, tongue followed, and the flash of meaning quivered over them like night-lightning. Or oftener, to speak truth, tongue flew, thought followed: her age was but newly seventeen, and she was rrench." 99 Woman in the Novels This is as good as the famous '^ dainty rogue in porcelain " or " the look of the nymph that had gazed too long on the faun, and had unwit- tingly copied his lurking lip and long sliding eye " ; phrases belonging to that Clara whom Mr. Meredith seems to have determined to make blessed above women, if description could do it ; though, in truth, there is no woman he has ever written about who does not live in our memory by some such vivid phrase or sensitive character- isation. His style certainly attains its finest flower in her service ; that dehcate power of dis- tinguishing "the half-tones humming round the note of a strung wire, which is a blunt single note to the common ear," and that touch so light to render every impression with its virgin bloom. As I have given the exoteric reader but little opportunity of judging for himself, I shall not apologise to any who may know the passage by heart for quoting here probably the most beauti- ful of all Mr. Meredith's descriptions of woman, that of Clara walking in a breeze. "... she wore a dress cunning to embrace the shape and flutter loose about it, in the spirit of a summer's day. Calypso-clad, Dr. Middleton would have called her. See the silver birch in a breeze : here it swells, there it scatters, and it is puffed to a round and it streams like a pennon, and 100 Woman in the Novels now gives the glimpse and shine of the white stem's line within, now hurries over it, denying that it was visible, with a chatter along the sweeping folds, while still the white peeps through. She had the wonderful art of dressing to suit the season and the sky. To-day the art was ravishingly com- panionable with her sweet-lighted face; too sweet, too vividly meaningful for pretty, if not of the strict severity for beautiful. Millinery would tell us that she wore a fichu of thin white muslin crossed in front on a dress of the same light stuff, trimmed with deep rose. She carried a grey-silk parasol, traced at the borders with green creepers, and across the arm devoted to Crossjay, a length of trailing ivy, and in that hand a bunch of the first long grasses. These hues of red rose and green and pale green, ruffled and pouted in the billowy white of the dress ballooning and valleying softly, like a yacht before the sail bends low ; but she walked not like one blown against ; resembling rather the day of the South-West driving the clouds, gallantly firm in commotion ; interfusing colour and varying in her features from laugh to smile and look of settled pleasure, like the heavens above the breeze." Such a picture as this, such poetry with such particularisation, seems to me not only a triumph for Mr. Meredith, but for the literary art itself. And this coral-island perfection is all the more striking in a writer who is such a master of a method so diifferent as his own great impres- sionism. lOI «■«• t , c VI '' Modern Love " and Nature Poetry A CULT within a cult is an interesting literary development, and such, if it be not already established, it will be quite safe to predict before long in the case of Mr. Meredith. For, now that his novels are threatened with popu- larity, it will be strange if that "acute and honourable minority " which has so long rejoiced in secret " to be thwacked with aphorisms and sentences and a fantastic delivery of the verities " does not intrench itself behind his verse. It pays the penalty of that insane desire to "go shares " in a new thing which is so common that it should conclusively demonstrate the altruism of humanity, and of which, of course, the present volume is a paradoxical example ; it has called in the man from the highways to 102 ^^ Modern Love," etc. the feast only to find that really, after all, it is impossible for them to eat together. It is begin- ning to feel what Mr. John Addington Symonds, for example, will to a certainty one day experience, if he is not already repenting his generous impulse to " share " his secluded Davos. The recent outcry concerning Mr. Meredith's novels has already attracted the excursionists of literature ; there are fatal signs of them in the beloved land. It is already considered necessary to read those arcana without understanding, or to lie about them ; and that old minority will be fortunate if it still keeps its faith before the spectacle of ungainly and foolish conversion. But in the case of Mr. Meredith's verse his disciples may, I think, rest secure of intrusion ; for it is long since it was deemed necessary to read good poetry, and all who love it in sincerity and truth will hope it may be still longer before it is deemed so again. Thanks to that, poetry at the present time is the one art comparatively free from vulgarisation, our one "Shadowy isle of bliss Midmost the beating of the steely sea." Thus, happier than the man who discovers a new novelist, the critic of poetry may reveal his 103 a Modern Love," etc. latest find without danger of invasion from Philistia ; only those who are really his fellows will have ears to hear, he will win that sympathy which is so passionate a need, and none the less escape the garlic-eating " brother." Most of us have, I suspect, come to Mr. Meredith's verse by way of his prose, which in the case of almost any other writer would mean with a presumption against it, except, of course, in so far as it might be modified by gratitude for past delight or that curiosity which always attaches to an artist's essays in a new medium. Many prose-writers — the majorit3^in fact — have first written verse; yet, as it has been to them (what, indeed, it is becoming the fashion to re- gard it all round) but as the grindstone on which to sharpen the fine tools of prose, their verse has more interest than value. It is but the leaf, not the flower of their genius. Mr. Meredith's prose, however, is generally so akin in its imaginative method to verse, that one comes with confidence to his rhymed poetry, expecting at least the same qualities of power as have already won us. Nor are we disappointed. For, although Mr. Meredith has undoubtedly sharpened the tools of prose upon his verse, it has been as one knife is 104 ^'Modern Love," etc. sharpened on another knife, and certainly the flower of his genius is double. That 185 1 volume of " Poems," on which the bookish virtuoso sets such price, is really worth more to art than one would expect from a knowledge of its foster-parent — for, pleasant and certainly happiest of fellows as the " bookman " is, how rarely does he rescue us a diamond from his dustheap ! Oddity and sentiment are dear to him, but he has weak eyes for greatness — saving exceptions, of course, among which count these *' Poems, by George Meredith. John W. Parker and Sons, 185 1." And these became dear, we may be sure, through no recognition of a new eye upon nature in The South-West Wind in the Woodland and the Pastorals, or of the delicious freshness of note and chasteness of touch of Love in the Valley^ but through a canny forecast of " the Meredith market " that was to be. And, indeed, a casual glance therein might easily have missed the significance of the book, for the greater part of it is made up of the graceful sentimentahties and insipid ''antiques" of the " keepsake " school, though here and there is a line or a lyric decidedly beyond them. But had it once fallen upon a page of that South- West 105 "Modern Love/' etc. Wind there should have been no mistake. Rare twins, the eye of a naturahst and the voice of a poet, were unmistakably present. "The great south-west drives o'er the earth, And loosens all his roaring robes Behind him, over heath and moor," for none but a poet with an imagination as mas- culine as his voice, and who else gives us lines of description such as these ? " Now whirring like an eagle's wing Preparing for a wide blue flight, — Now flapping like a sail that tacks And chides the wet bewildered mast, Now screaming like an anguished thing Chased close by some down-breathing beak. Now wailing like a breaking heart, That will not wholly break, but hopes With hope that knows itself in vain ; Now threatening like a storm-charged cloud, Now cooing like a woodland dove. Now up again in roar and wrath High soaring and wide sweeping, now With sudden fury dashing down Full-force on the awaiting woods." What poet even unless he have added the naturalist's sensitive instinct, which hears without listening, sees without watching, and remembers without a book. The south-west wind is a passion with Mr. Meredith. It often blows in his novels, and there is another fine poem to it 1 06 "Modern Love/' etc. in A Reading of Earth. " Love in the Valley " is the one poem Mr. Meredith has deemed worthy of reprinting. It reappears with much new beauty in the Poems and Lyrics of the foy of Earth. But there is one at least of the *' Pastorals " which should surely have been reprinted too, and from which, as the volume is so rarely to be seen, I shall venture to make a somewhat lengthy quotation : " Summer glows warm on the meadows ; then come, let us roam thro' them gaily, Heedless of heat, and the hot-kissing sun, and the fear of dark freckles ; For never one kiss will he give on a neck, or a lily-white forehead, Chin, hand, or fair bosom uncover'd, all panting, to take the chance coolness, — But surely the hot fiery pressure shall leave its brown seal of espousal. Still heed him not ; come, tho' he kiss till the soft little upper- lip loses Half its pure whiteness ; just speckl'd where the curve of the rosy mouth reddens. Come, let him kiss, let him kiss, and his kiss shall make thee the sweeter, Thou art no nun veil'd and vow'd; doom'd to nourish a withering pallor ! City exotics beside thee would show like bleach'd linen at mid-day. Hung upon hedges of eglantine ! Thou in the freedom of nature, Full of her beauty and wisdom, gentleness, joyance, and kindliness ! 107 "Modern Love," etc. Come, and like bees we will gather the rich golden honey of noontide ; Deep in the sweet summer meadows, border'd by hillside and river ; Lined with long trenches half-hidden, where, sweetest, the smell of white meadow-sweet Blissfully hovers — O sweetest ! but pluck it not ! even in the tenderest Grasp it will lose breath and wither ; like many, not made for a posy. See the sun slopes down the meadows, where all the flowers are falling ! Falling unhymn'd ; for the nightingale scarce ever charms the long twilight ; Mute with the cares of the nest ; only known by a ' chuck, chuck,' and dovelike Low call of content, but the finch and the linnet and black- cap pipe loudly. From elms round the western hillside warbles the rich-bill'd ouzel ; And the shrill throstle is filling the dusky thickening copses ; Singing o'er hyacinths hid, and most honey'd of flowers, white field-rose. O joy thus to revel all day in the grass of our own beloved country ; Revel all day, till the lark mounts at eve with his sweet ' tirra-lirra ' ; Thrilling delightfully. See, on the river the slow rippled surface Shining ; the slow ripple broadens in circles ; the bright surface smoothens ; Now it is flat as the leaves of the yet unseen water-lily. There dart the lives of a day, ever-varying tactics fantastic. There by the wet-mirror'd osiers, the emerald wing of the kingfisher io8 "Modern Love," etc. Flashes, the fish in his beak ! There the dab-chick dived, and the motion Lazily undulates all thro' the tall standing army of rushes. O joy thus to revel all day, till the twilight turns us home- ward ! Till all the lingering deep-blooming splendour of sunset is over, And the one star shines mildly in mellowing hues, like a spirit Sent to assure us that light never dieth, tho' day is now buried- Saying ; to-morrow, to-morrow, few hours intervening, that interval Tuned by the woodlark in heaven, to-morrow my semblance far eastward, Heralds the day 'tis my mission eternal to seal and to prophecy. Come then and homeward ; passing down the close path of the meadows. Home like the bees stored with sweetness ; each with a lark in the bosom, Trilling for ever, and oh ! will yon lark ever cease to sing up there?" Was the summer sumptuousness of the real English fields and not those of some dream- island ''far from all men's knowing" ever so expressed for us, and all the delicious sensuous absorption that in such a ramble lengthens a July day into a summer, and drowns as in wine the memory of the town. What minute pictures too ! " There, by the wet-mirror'd osiers, the emerald wing of the kingfisher 109 "Modern Love," etc. Flashes, the fish in his beak ! There the dab-chick dived and the motion Lazily undulates all thro' the tall standing army of rushes," — or that pathetic vignette of the nightingale " mute with the cares of the nest " (Hke how many another poor poet) ; while the whole poem is suffused with that divine suggestiveness without which a picture of nature is mere earth and timber. Mr. Meredith's studies of her in her sibylHne moods, and the fine manly philosophy he has learnt from her, were yet to come. At this point it will be well to abandon the chronological method, as too unwieldy for the scope of such a chapter as this, and in which there is always a danger of not being able to see the wood for the trees ; and try to gain a broad view of Mr. Meredith's verse as it at present lies garnered in his four more repre- sentative volumes. The one question with which such an inquiry is concerned is : What does this poet bring us that we can find nowhere else ? To which I would make answer : A new poetry of nature, and Modern Love. Let us first consider the latter. In the same volume are some genre pictures of country life, the power and charm of which could not well be no '' Modern Love," etc. overstated, the quaintness, the colour, the dramatic vividness of phrase — " Easy to think that grieving's folly When the hand's fir^n as driven stakes," says " JuggHng Jerry " in a poem which has won nearest to popularity of any of the verses of a poet who has never known what it is to be *' lapped in the elysium of a new edition." Ask most people about Mr. Meredith's poetry, and it is strange if they do not quote ** JuggHng Jerry " or some other of these " Poems of the English Roadside." But, surely, fine as they are, it is not in them that we find what we can find nowhere else, and to know them and miss the poem which gives the title to the volume were almost as unpardonable as to know Tennyson only by his ** Northern Farmer." Again, '* Mar- garet's Bridal Eve " is a beautiful poem well deserving the praise it has won, and the Ballads and Poems of Tragic Life are full of fine things, such as that livid picture of Attila's death chamber, with the frenzied wife who has murdered him, •' Huddled in the corner dark, Humped and grinning like a cat " ; but they are for the most part, nevertheless, studies in the conventional subjects of tragedy, III "Modern Love/' etc. and in the manner — more or less Meredithised certainly — of other poets. They are quite re- markable enough to give Mr. Meredith a place above the crowd of modern singers, but not that higher seat which, in my judgment, is his, in right of the So7igs and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth and Modern Love. Modern Love is Mr. Meredith's one great poem of tragic life. It is, moreover, Mr. Meredith's one great achievement in poetic art. All the other qualities of poetry are to be found on any page of his volumes, but, with the exception of this and one or two other shorter pieces, such as "The Meeting," the quahty of art, the architectural faculty, is lacking. ** Every section of this great progressional poem," said Mr. Swinburne, in a noble vindicatory letter against the criticism of the Spectator, ** being connected with the other by links of the finest and most studied workmanship." And as art is, of course, the one antidote against " the opium of time," this is likely, despite the notable nature poems yet to be considered, to be the one poem which will carry to posterity the name of George Meredith as a writer of verse. XZ2 "Modern Love/' etc. It is a story of the unhappy wedlock of two who were, the poet tells us, " rapid falcons in a snare, Condemn'd to do the flitting of the bat. Lovers beneath the singing sky of May They wander'd once; " but now ! — let the wonderful picture of the open- ing sonnet express their present unhappiness. " By this he knew she wept with waking eyes : That, at his hand's Hght quiver by her head. The strange low sobs that shook their common bed Were called into her with a sharp surprise. And strangled mute, like little gaping snakes, Dreadfully venomous to him. She lay Stone-still, and the long darkness flow'd away With muffled pulses. Then, as midnight makes Her giant heart of Memory and Tears Drink the pale drug of silence, and so beat Sleep's heavy measure, they from head to feet Were moveless, looking through their dead black years, By vain regret scrawl'd over the blank wall. Like sculptured effigies they might be seen Upon their marriage-tomb, the sword between Each wishing for the sword that severs all." So, day by day, " each suck'd a secret and each wore a mask," she wooed by another, and he with hidden knowledge of her sin. But no common natures are these two, no vulgar misalliance is theirs ; else were there no story ; rather are they two instruments, each fine, each capable of discoursing excellent music by 113 H "Modern Love," etc. itself or with its natural complement, yet never intended to be played together, which, however, fate has insisted on wedding in a duet. " It is no vulgar nature I have wived," says the husband, and again "The misery is greater, as I live! To know her flesh so pure, so keen her sense. That she does penance now for no offence. Save against Love." Therefore, the story is one of Mr. George Meredith's own dramas of fine shades and sub- limated sensitiveness which have their action in the mind and heart, rather than in the daylight world of labelled " act and deed"; with sufferings, need one say, none the less piercing, and crises none the less portentous for that. "Beneath the surface this, while by the fire They sat, she laughing at a quiet joke." Only a very careful study of the poem, line by line, can, of course, reveal the fulness of its masterly subtlety — but even that inconsiderate person who expects to run and read at the same time could hardly miss gaining deep hints thereof. Of such fine fibre is the husband that we find him so reverent of his wife and of the claims of her true heart's love over his mere husband's " rights by law established " as to be able to say — 114 ^^ Modern Love," etc. " It cannot be such harm on her cool brow To put a kiss ? Yet if I meet him there ! But she is mine ! Ah, no ! I know too well I claim a star whose light is overcast : I claim a phantom-woman in the Past. The hour has struck, though I heard not the bell ! " For distraction he appeals to pleasure and to philosophy alike in vain, gnawed at by suspicion and sick with yearning for those "splendours, mysteries, dearer because known," which ''her shoulder in the glass," albeit so familiar, inspires, " Yet it was plain she struggled, and that salt Of righteous feeling made her pitiful," — and at times it seemed that they might be on the very threshold of the old Saturnian reign once more, if either could take that one step nearer, which Pride, however, always interfered to prevent. The cause of their estrangement suggests a bitter reflection on woman. " In Love's deep woods I dreamt of loyal Life : — the offence is there ! " A woman's jealousy will not even brook the rivalry of a dream. " My crime is that, the puppet of a dream, I plotted to be worthy of the world. Oh, had I with my darling help'd to mince The facts of life, you still had seen me go With hindward feather and with forward toe. Her much-adored delightful Fairy Prince ! " 115 (C Modern Love/' etc. And the hardest pain to bear is not the loss of the future of "dim rich skies" so dear to all men, but that of the past now proved illusion. If that "Were firm, or might be blotted : but the whole Of life is mixed : the mocking Past must stay ; And if I drink oblivion of a day, So shorten I the stature of my soul." Yet how different is Nature's acceptance of the •* over and gone " ! " ' I play for seasons ; not eternities ! * Says Nature, laughing on her way. ' So must All those whose stake is nothing more than dust ! ' And lo, she wins, and of her harmonies She is full sure ! Upon her dying rose She drops a look of fondness and goes by, Scarce any retrospection in her eye ; For she the laws of growth most deeply knows, Whose hands bear, here a seed-bag ; there an urn. Pledged she herself to aught, 'twould mark her end ! This lesson of our only visible friend. Can we not teach our foolish hearts to learn ? Yes ! yes ! — but oh, our human rose is fair Surpassingly ! Lose calmly Love's great bliss, When the renew'd forever of a kiss Sounds thro' the listless hurricane of hair ! " Then a fourth is added to the drama by the husband's looking for comfort, though " with little prospect of a cure," on a woman to whom through the rest of the poem he refers as his " Lady " as distinguished from his wife — with the consequence that the latter has another " veering ii6 "Modern Love," etc. fit," and illustrates what her husband was after- wards to experience, " How many a thing which we cast to the ground, When others pick it up becomes a gem." Can it be true that " women still may love whom they deceive," since she is jealous ? Then comes this sonnet, so delicately pictorial, so vividly dramatic, and, like them all, so masculine in phrase. " I think she sleeps : it must be sleep, when low Hangs that abandon'd arm towards the floor : The hand turn'd with it. Now make fast the door. Sleep on : it is your husband, not your foe ! The Poet's black stage-lion of wrong'd love, Frights not our modern dames: — well, if he did ! Now will I pour new light upon that lid, Full-sloping like the breasts beneath, ' Sweet dove, ' Your sleep is pure. Nay, pardon ; I disturb. ' I do not ? well ! ' Her waking infant stare Grows woman to the burden my hands bear : Her own handwriting to me when no curb Was left on Passion's tongue. She trembles thro' ; A woman's tremble — the whole instrument ; — I show another letter lately sent. The words are very like : the name is new." Ah me ! for the old nights when by the *' clicking coal " they used to sit, and he talk senti- mentality about the ceciditflos of Love — yet never thought it then. To the world, however, they are the happiest of couples. " They see no ghost." "7 "Modern Love/' etc. *' Hiding the skeleton " is the game, and it is so well played that they '* waken envy of their happy lot." " Fast, sweet, and golden shows our marriage-knot." O ! to be Hke Jack and Tom and Moll and Meg on that country green I They are happy enough, God keep them so — yet what is their happiness ? — O cynic ! — " 'tis true that when we trace its source, 'tis beer." The finding of " a wanton-scented tress " reminds him of an old amour — for he was never " of those miserable males Who sniff at vice, and, daring not to snap, Do therefore hope for Heaven " — and the discovery makes him ask himself " If for that time I must ask charity, Have I not any charity to give? " The bitterest cup of unconscious mockery is held to their lips one evening by a young friend about to be married, who, full of talk of his " most wondrous she," demands their blessing, ^' convinced that words of wedded lovers must bring good." " We question : if we dare ! or if we should ! And pat him, with light laugh. We have not winced. Next, she has fallen. Fainting points the sign To happy things in wedlock. When she wakes She looks the star that thro' the cedar shakes : Her lost moist hand clings mortally to mine." iiS "Modern Love/' etc. Then it is evident that she is struggHng to speak out her secret to him — she has nervous fits and falls into tears when he is by, but " She will not speak. I will not ask. We are League-sunder'd by the silent gulf between." *• 'Tis Christmas weather, and a country house Receives us : rooms are full : we can but get An attic-crib. Such lovers will not fret At that, it is half-said. The great carouse Knocks hard upon the midnight's hollow door. But when I knock at hers, I see the pit. Why did I come here in that dullard fit ? I enter, and lie couch'd upon the floor. Passing, I caught the coverlid's quick beat : — Come, Shame, burn to my soul ! and Pride, and Pain — Foul demons that have tortured me, sustain ! Out in the freezing darkness the lambs bleat. The small bird stiffens in the low starlight. I know not how, but, shuddering as I slept, I dream'd a banished Angel to me crept : My feet were nourish'd on her breasts all night." Yet why will she not speak ? " Oh ! I do but wait a sign ! Pluck out the eyes of Pride ! thy mouth to mine ! Never ! though I die thirsting. Go thy ways ! " He is worried and unstrung. '* Distraction is the panacea," says the doctor — so let it be, any- thing the devil may offer, for "he seemed kind when not a soul would comfort." — Ah! my Lady ! " Lady, I am content To play with you the game of Sentiment, And with you enter on paths perilous : " 119 "Modern Love," etc. but if he indeed does give himself to her, his slighted egoism speaks, she must be utterly his. " I feel the promptings of Satanic power, While you do homage unto me alone." Yet how is it that this new love has little of the wonder and brings none of the peace of the old? " Am I failing ? for no longer can I cast A glory round about this head of gold. Glory she wears, but springing from the mould : Not like the consecration of the Past ! Is my soul beggar'd ? Something more than earth I cry for still : I cannot be at peace In having Love upon a mortal lease. I cannot take the woman at her worth ! Where is the ancient wealth wherewith I clothed Our human nakedness, and could endow With spiritual splendour a white brow That else had grinn'd at me the fact I loath'd ? A kiss is but a kiss now ! and no wave Of a great flood that whirls me to the sea. But as you will ! we'll sit contentedly, And eat our pot of honey on the grave." Only one man before Mr. Meredith has written lines of such pathos as the sixth and seventh here, or of such shuddering grimness as the last two — what a picture of "middle-aged sensuality" is there ! It is as fearful as Holbein. Yet there is a line in the next sonnet even more fearful. In that chill mood of disillusion which he has 120 "Modern Love," etc. now reached, sitting with the kisses of his mistress dust and ashes on his lips, he philo- sophises on the evolution of Love. " First, animals ; and next. Intelligences at a leap ; on whom Pale lies the distant shadow of the tomb. And all that draweth on the tomb for text." With brain has come the sense of death ; for the first time it is a factor in our schemes, schemes shrunken by its admission from eternity to an hour. But " into this state comes Love," and in the intense wonderful life he brings, death is forgotten, nay ! is " impossible " — the light is so strong, darkness must be a myth. " the shadow loses form. We are the lords of life, and life is warm. Intelligence and instinct now are one." But love takes flight and then we see how that extravagant faith was but a ** rose in the blood," a flattery of passion — " And we stand waken'd, shivering from our dream." Happy then is he who can learn from nature — she who, in an earlier sonnet we were told, plays " for seasons not eternities " — to " live but with the day " and plod and plod untroubled by to-morrow. Lady, then sneers the sonneteer, this is the best I can say for love, this philosophy of the charnel ; we are I2Z ^'Modern Love," etc. too wearily wise for sentimental lollipops ; it is no use craving a sonnet to your shoe-tie, we are long past that, at least I am, and this grim stuff is my modern apology for gallantry. ^^ Lady, this is my sonnet to your eyes." This is a downright wicked line. It was so Mephistopheles laughed beneath Marguerite's window. Only the lost so cruelly sneer. Then a more peaceful mood awhile prevails ; he looks at his mistress with less jaundiced eyes ; if the heart cannot endow her with that " ancient wealth of spiritual splendour," there is much in her to stimulate the mind. " This golden head has wit in it. I live Again, and a far higher life, near her." Moreover, she has " that rare gift to beauty. Common Sense." And she is very beautiful, too. That bloom he was just despairing of is indeed on her face, and she has that ardour of nature which can walk with him from fire to fire and slake that passionate thirst, with which so long he has been *' languishing in drouth ; " though, with all, she cannot win him complete oblivion of that sorrow through which he sought her. 122 "Modern Love," etc. '* One restless corner of my heart, or head, That holds a dying something never dead, Still frets, though Nature giveth all she can. It means, that woman is not, I opine, Her sex's antidote. Who seeks the asp For serpents' bites? 'Twould calm me could I clasp Shrieking Bacchantes with their souls of wine ! " The next sonnet reveals that this last act has been played with a continental health resort for its stage, whereon now enters " Madam." Husband and wife exchange the usual courtesy inquiries and off-hand answers, through which, however, on the part of the wife, come cries from the smothered suffering underneath. Of these he coldly affects to take no heed, but still he cannot but be moved by the refined sensitiveness of his wife's nature, which makes no vulgar show of pain and allows itself no vulgar solace — though, surel}^, there is danger in such pent feeling, for herself, if not for him. " She is not one Long to endure this torpidly, and shun The drugs that crowd about a woman's hand." At last comes a meeting between his wife and his mistress, and the nuances of womanly finesse in their attitude to each other fill him with cynical wonderment. From the next sonnet but one we gather that his mistress has been feeling 123 "Modern Love," etc. pity for his wife and urging him to cleave to her and let their liaison come to an end. But no ! he says, to cleave to her would be sacrilege — vileness. It is either you or that. " Give to imagination some pure light In human form to fix it, or you shame The devils with that hideous human game : — Imagination urging appetite ! . . . Imagination is the charioteer That, in default of better, drives the hogs. So, therefore, my dear Lady, let me love ! " To this — " She yields : my Lady in her noblest mood Has yielded : " and there comes a golden hour of " music and moonlight/' wherein the cup of his dreams seems to run over, and his " bride of every sense " seems found at last. But on his way homeward, lo ! his wife and her lover ! and at once his heart, that just now had been so full of music, is writhing with a jealousy that would have seemed impossible yesterday. " Can I love one, And yet be jealous of another ? " O ! what shall he do ? Can he achieve peace **by turning to this fountain-source of woe," and seeking the old love at the old shriae — but there is no guidance anywhere, and 124 "Modern Love/' etc. " The dread that my old love may be alive, Has seiz'd my nursling new love by the throat." Next we read — " We two have taken up a lifeless vow To rob a living passion : dust for fire ! " and that vileness he so feared has come upon them, " If I the death of Love had deeply plann'd, I never could have made it half so sure. As by the unbless'd kisses which upbraid The full-waked sense; or, failing that, degrade!" Yes, love is surely dead in him, for pity has come to take its place — a certain sign. She knows, too ; it makes her rave with pain, and so the days go by. One day they are in the fields — in " the season of the sweet wild-rose " — *' my Lady's emblem in the heart of me." He plucks one and dreams over it. Madam comes along and demands it of him. He drops it, and as they walk on, he feels her stop and " crush it under heel with trembling limbs." " These," mocks the sad heart, " these are the summer days, and these our walks." At last an accident breaks the unnatural silence between them. He finds her one morning in a wood with her lover. 125 cc Modern Love," etc. " I moved Towards her, and made proffer of my arm. She took it simply, with no rude alarm ; And that disturbing shadow pass'd reproved I felt the pain'd speech coming, and declared My firm belief in her, ere she could speak. A ghastly morning came into her cheek, While with a widening soul on me she stared." The next great sonnet, in spite of the multi- tude of foregoing quotations, must be quoted entire — the sonnet of which Mr. Swinburne has said that *' a more perfect piece of writing no man alive has ever turned out." Witness lines five to eight : " We saw the swallows gathering in the sky, And in the osier-isle we heard their noise. We had not to look back on summer joys, Or forward to a summer of bright dye. But in the largeness of the evening earth Our spirits grew as we went side by side. The hour became her husband, and my bride. Love that had robb'd us so, thus bless'd our dearth! The pilgrims of the year wax'd very loud In multitudinous chatterings, as the flood Full brown came from the west, and like pale blood Expanded to the upper crimson cloud. Love that had robb'd us of immortal things, This little moment mercifully gave. And still I see across the twilight wave, The swan sail with her young beneath her wings." Then at last they *' drank the pure daylight of honest speech," but, alas I for the nature of 126 "Modern Love," etc. woman, in which sense and senses are so inter- mixed, and for which there is no help but " more brain, O Lord, more brain," she conceives the ideal devotion of parting from him, so that he may go and be happy with his heart's lady. So, without a word, she was gone. '' He found her by the ocean's moaning verge," his old love seemed in his face, she took his hand and went back with him, and somehow " seem'd the wife he sought, tho' shadow-like and dry." But that night — "her call Was heard, and he came wondering to the bed. ' Now kiss me, dear ! it may be, now ! ' she said. Lethe had pass'd those lips, and he knew all." " Thus piteously Love closed what he begat : The union of this ever-diverse pair ! These two were rapid falcons in a snare, Condemn'd to do the flitting of the bat. Lovers beneath the singing sky of May, They wander'd once ; clear as the dew on flowers : But they fed not on the advancing hours : Their hearts held cravings for the buried day. Then each applied to each that fatal knife. Deep questioning, which probes to endless dole. Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul When hot for certainties in this our life! — In tragic hints here see what evermore Moves dark as yonder midnight ocean's force, Thundering like ramping hosts of warrior horse, To throw that faint thin line upon the shore! " Any one who loves these fifty poems — fifty 127 "Modern Love," etc. poems, and yet one poem — must often have wondered why, among all the glib chatter which the last year or two has given us about the sonnet, he has heard so little of Modern Love. How is it that with all the solemn discussion, as with bowed heads and bated breath, of '* the great sonnet- sequences," Modern Love has found no place among them? "Why, because," exclaims some young Miss of ten, who practises sonnet-writing in the nursery, as a kind of bouts rimes, ** don't you know that Mr. Meredith's Modern Love is not written in sonnets ? A sonnet cannot have more than fourteen lines, and there are, let me see, how many kinds, Petrarcan, Shakespearean and — and — ," so on. One can hardly be supposed to be in need of such information at this hour, and cer- tainly one may be excused for thinking that Mr. Swinburne knows something about metrical law. And yet he employs the term sonnet to the poem I have just quoted. The young Miss may not re- member that there was a moment in the history of the sonnet when sonneteers hung indecisive be- tween a form in sixteen and that in fourteen lines. Of course, the choice finally fell upon the fourteen- Hned form, wisely, all will agree, but do not the sixteen-line poems in Modern Love so completely 128 ^'Modern Love," etc. fulfil all the essential conditions of the sonnet as now traditionally formulated, that we may well extend to them the benefit of that *' historic doubt," and accept them as that exception which proves the rule ? Certainly they achieve that microcosmic completeness which is the aim, of course, of every poem, but which one looks for more especially in the sonnet. That they are in the main dramatic — whereas the sonnet has generally been employed as a lyric form — matters not. *^ The moment eternal," however presented, is not that the one theme of the sonnet ? An isolated dramatic act — in the mind or in the daylight — a crisis, a tableau, come equally within its scope, and Modern Love is made up of such tableaux in sonnets, each of which, so victorious is the art, is a complete poem, capable of sustaining a separate artistic existence, and yet again, by virtue of "links of the finest and most studied workmanship," part of a still greater whole. There is a small and a great way of writing sonnets; there is the modern way of "the little masters," and there is that of the great poets. The parallels between Art and Religion are eternally suggestive. Just now they are each 129 I (C Modern Love," etc. suffering from a very similar trouble — the decay of form. Each is doing its best to make-believe by the aid of strange gums and spices of embalmment ; yet how vainly ! It is but the delicate husk, the fair shell painted and fretted by a life that has for ever left it, and which is already stretching hands to the light in the infancy of new forms. Form in Art has become a pedantry with us once more ; we talk of it as a fixed quantity, and so for most of us it is a dead thing. The recent pother about the sonnet to which I have alluded is an example of this. Rossetti really said the one vital thing about it — " A Shakespearean sonnet is better than the most perfect in form because Shakespeare wrote it." " Fundamental brainwork," that other phrase of his, is everything. Strange is it to reflect that the very men whose sonnets we alone care about have written their best in irregular forms; Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, Wordsworth, Rossetti, and Mrs. Browning. Wordsworth sings the praise of the sonnet in one of most mongrel form. Seeing that laws are certainly not made for the artist, one cannot help wondering for whose benefit they 130 "Modern Love/' etc. are so elaborately written down ! " It takes a soul to make a body," Mrs. Browning said — so does it take a spirit to make a form. If a man has nothing to say, let him be silent. Why should he so invariably choose the sonnet in which to say it ? After all, is it not true that if a sonnet is a poem, we don't care about its being a sonnet, and if it is not a poem, we don't care about it at all, be it never so well-bred a Petrarcan ? And now to return again, after too long a digression, to Modern Love. It is usual to class together Shakespeare's Sonnets, Rossetti's House of Life y and Mrs. Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese^ as the three great sonnet-sequences. This appears to me really more or less arbitrary in regard to Shakespeare, for the general kinship of form is little in relation to the radical diversity in inspiration. Rossetti's sonnets are chiefly the product of highly wrought fancy — he seems to have kept his imagination, in the main, of course, for his other poems — and if Shakespeare's sonnets have one quahty more than another, it is that space and might of imagination for which we have no other name than the master's own. Mrs. Browning's are really much more truly related to 131 " Modern Love/' etc. Shakespeare's, for they are spontaneously lyrical in their inspiration, and imaginative in their expression ; yet they are so related but as the hawk is related to the eagle. Such comparisons are indeed of little or no value ; I have depre- cated the making of them elsewhere ; yet, as they have been instituted, I shall venture for once to break my own precept and suggest that Modern Love is the one poem of closest kin to Shake- speare's sonnets. The kinship is hardly in the form, which is, without exception, composed of four Petrarcan quatrains, each independent in respect of rhymes ; nor is it merely in the ** Shakespearean ring " of the verse. That is a trick soon learnt, and may mean something or nothing. It is simply in '* the fundamental brain- work," which one feels alive through every line and word of the poem, the spaciousness and strength of the imagination revealed to us by that greatness of metaphor, and that compression of phrase, which mark all great literary art, and of which I have before spoken in considering Mr. Meredith's prose. Though I can onl}^ hope by my synopsis to have given a faint idea of the poem as a whole, yet of this quality of imaginative phrase my numerous quotations furnish abundant 132 '^ Modern Love," etc. examples. The last quatrain of the poem alone, if nought else were left, should witness a master. Whether or not the kinship to Shakespeare's sonnets seems a real one to others, or whether it is but an eccentricity of my own judgment, is of little moment : it is only important that Modern Love should be recognised as a great poem of " tragic life." One would need no knowledge of his 1 85 1 poem_s to expect much from Mr. Meredith's later volumes of nature-poetry, to which it is full time to turn. The wonderful natural descriptions scattered broadcast over his novels are sufficient earnest of a power in the quality of which he is especially alone. For his nature-poetry is indeed quite different from any other before known in English literature. And the difference lies in the fact that, while most other poets have sung of Nature in the abstract, have moralised, senti- mentalised, transcendentalised her, Mr. Meredith has cared more to sing her as she is in the concrete. His predecessors have, in the main, sung the spirit of nature ; he sings her body, which is the earth, as well — '* this Earth of the beautiful breasts." Nature with a big " N," and nature with a 133 " Modern Love," etc, little '*n," express, I think, the two attitudes. It would seem to be an assumption from of old that a man may hope to interpret the one, though knowing httle, and knowing that little wrongly, of the other. It is, indeed, one of the liberties included in that '' poetic license " which no poet ever thinks of taking out. And, of course, it is true that Art (to quote the beautiful words of Mr. Oscar Wilde), ** has flowers that no botanist knows of, birds that no museum possesses," that ** she can bid the almond tree blossom in winter, and send the snow upon the ripe cornfield," yet, somehow, one has a feeling that the art which is best for us, and what we call the greatest, stands not in need of these miracles ; her birds sing every morning in every glittering wood, her almond tree " bringeth forth his fruit in his season." At least it is so with Mr. Meredith. He sings of nature, not because he worships her in some vague way afar off, as one might the abstract Woman, but because he has loved and worshipped her as a man his wife, lying in her arms, eye to eye, breath to breath. He has lived with her day by day for many years, he knows all her moods, moods of summer and winter, of joy and travail, strange 134 ^' Modern Love/' etc. moods of contradiction hard to bear, and yet alike in one as in another he has never lost his faith that her heart is love — " love, the great volcano." In his knowledge of all the " secret things " of the vi^oods and fields, all that too many of us but know by a rustle in the hedge as we come by, by a whirring or a scratching that stops with a strange precision ere we can approach within a yard of it (as though it were an elfin loom or a secret still), and remains dumb with un- shaken determination while we stand and listen in vain, with a queer sense of a life looking up at us and holding its breath somewhere near, though all unseen ; in his knowledge of nature's *' fairie," her troll-folk and her diablerie, Mr. Meredith can be compared with none save his own Melampus. " With love exceeding a simple love of the things That glide in grasses and rubble of woody wreck ; Or change their perch on a beat of quivering wings From branch to branch, only restful to pipe and peck ; Or, bristled, curl at a touch their snouts in a ball; Or cast their web between bramble and thorny hook ; The good physician, Melampus, loving them all, Among them walked, as a scholar who reads a book." One is impressed by this intimate knowledge 135 '' Modern Love," etc. not only, or indeed chiefly, in the individual life brought under our notice, but rather in the same way that nature herself impresses us with the sense of her secret industries. When Mr. Meredith has to detail or describe he is, as I said in the beginning, as accurate as a naturalist, but as a rule one feels that he knows immeasurably more than he tells — an impression directly the reverse of that we receive from most nature poetry. There is a background as of the wood's own shade to all his pictures. So is it in those "enchanted woods" of Westermain. The impression of the poem is just that of the woods themselves. The hum by day, as of unseen myriads at their work, talking and singing to themselves somewhere in the under- wood, comes upon us as one reads the poem just as it does on the ear in nature ; the echoing pregnant silence by night, on which now and again a queer chuckle or an eerie cry breaks like a mysterious bubble from the deeps of some dark water. These have never been expressed before as they are in Mr. Meredith's poem, the very obscurities of which (and here and there it must be confessed it is impenetrable) seem somehow to help the effect, in some way, 136 " Modern Love/' etc, perhaps, suggesting dark " bogie-holes," or rich bramble glooms. That brooding horror of night there is espe- cially impressive, and the sense of life in its " dragonhood " working out its evolutionary salvation in those dark coverts is realised with a vividness that makes the flesh creep. "Enter these enchanted woods You who dare. Nothing harms beneath the leaves More than waves a swimmer cleaves. Toss your heart up with the lark, Foot at peace with mouse and worm, Fair you fare. Only at a dread of dark Quaver, and they quit their form: Thousand eyeballs under hoods Have you by the hair. Enter these enchanted woods You who dare. Here the snake across your path Stretches in his golden bath : Mossy-footed squirrels leap Soft as winnowing plumes of sleep : Yaffles on a chuckle skim Low to laugh from branches dim Up the pine, where sits the star, Rattles deep the moth-winged jar. Each has business of his own ; But should you distrust a tone. Then beware. Shudder all the haunted roods. All the eyeballs under hoods 137 '^ Modern Love," etc. Shroud you in their glare. Enter these enchanted woods You who dare." Here at once in this first poem do we learn Mr. Meredith's one great nature lesson, his attitude towards her, the simple attitude of utter trust, complete faith. Only by such an approach, he again and again impresses us, can we hope to know anything of her heart. In any other, she will be a riddle — a horror. " You must love the light so well That no darkness will seem fell, Love it so you could accost Fellowly a livid ghost." So going to her, you shall in time come to read much that was dark and mysterious with cleansed eyes, you shall gain glimpses of her secret processes, and become initiated into her secret lore. You shall come to see how " Change is on the wing to bud Rose in brain from rose in blood," and how " Of him who was all maw " she will by her fiery alchemy of pain make " Such a servant as none saw Through his days of dragonhood." So watching we shall come to have glimpses 138 " Modern Love," etc. of our own evolution up to spirit — " blood and brain and spirit " — how " From flesh unto spirit man grows Even here on the sod under sun," if we have the patience of faith in nature, content not to understand all her ways, •' Leaving her the future task, Loving her too well to a^k." Mr. Meredith's faith would seem to be, what indeed all faith is, the reliance of instinct. It is like the faith of Browning's Lippo Lippi, for whom life meant intensely and meant good, though he, no more than any other man, had found what that meaning was, but made it meat and drink to seek it out. So, if I read Mr. Meredith aright, he wants no other assurance that " the soul of things is sweet " than such a ramble in the fields as that of his 185 1 poems. After all that bloom and colour, all that golden bounty of clustering life, what solemn fooling does our pessimism seem ! Like the Shakespeare of his own sonnet — " How smiles he at a generation ranked In gloomy noddings over Ufa ! " But it is not by our blood that Mr. Meredith bids us read nature. On the contrary, he 139 " Modern Love/' etc. specially cautions us against doing so. It was reliable maybe in June, but hardly so in November. Brain alone is safe then. '' Never is Earth misread by brain." " Master the blood," says he in autumn, "Nor read by chills, Earth admonishes : Hast thou ploughed, Sown, reaped, harvested grain for the mills, Thou hast the light over shadow of cloud." For this reason A Reading of Earth is even more helpful to us than the Songs and Lyrics, for it is comparatively easy to have faith in the summer, the time of the obvious "joy of earth " ; it is harder when the autumn " Narrows the world to my neighbour's gate, Paints me life as a wheezy crone." But are we only to see a meaning in nature's easy summer moods, and seek none in her savage wintry ones ? It is true, as of old, that whom she loveth she chasteneth. With her " passion for old giant-kind " she loves the strong, and she would have him stronger ; contention with her ice and her bitter winds will do that for him. "Behold the life at ease : it drifts. The sharpened life commands its course. She winnows, winnows roughly ; sifts, To dip her chosen in her source : 140 ^^ Modern Love," etc. Contention is the vital force, Whence pluck they brain, her prize of gifts." ** Such meaning in a dagger day ! " Through what ordeal we may have to pass before we can submit our hearts wholly unto nature, and say, " Behold she doeth all things well," not only in the autumn of the year, but in that colder winter by the graveside of our loved ones, when there is no light anywhere, no voice but the voice of the one dark fact — through such ordeal as of ice does the poet take us with him in A Faith on Trial, to me, in its stern way, the most spiritually helpful of all modern poems. The poet's wife lies between life and death — indeed there is no hope of her recovery at all — and he has to face Love's one shuddering question " of the hfe beyond ashes." He goes out into the fields to face it, amid all the boisterous rejuvenes- cence of a May morning. " The changeful visible face Of our Mother I sought for my food ; Crumbs by the way to sustain. Her sentence I knew past grace . . , I champed the sensations that make Of a ruffled philosophy rags. For them was no meaning too blunt, Nor aspect too cutting oi steel, This earth of the beautiful breasts, 141 '' Modern Love," etc. Shining up in all colours aflame. To them had visage of hags ; A Mother of aches and jests: Soulless, heading a hunt Aimless except for the meal. Hope, with a star on her front, Fear, with an eye in the heel ; Our links to a Mother of grace ; They were dead on the nerve, and dead For the nature divided in three ; Gone out of heart, out of brain, Out of soul : I had in their place The calm of an empty room." So walking in darkness, sudden as a white light, there flashed upon his eyes from the face of a yew-clad ridge "the pure wild cherry in bloom," the very bush whose blossoming, spring by spring, he and his loved one had hailed together as a symbol of the Eternal Resurrection — " Celestial sign Of victorious rays over death . . . She, the white wild cherry, a tree, Earth-rooted, tangibly wood. Yet a presence throbbing alive." But never yet in any spring had her blooming seemed so like a revelation — " there was needed darkness like mine." Her beauty ** drew the life" in him ** forward," by flashing before it, as in a vision, " the length of the ways he had paced " since those mornings when, " a footfarer out of the dawn to youth's wild forest," she had 142 " Modern Love," etc. inspired him '' to the dreaming of good illimitable to come." And still her message was the same. She was still holding up that victorious celestial sign, true still, if true then. Have faith, thou poor stricken footfarer, still walk forward as of old, and trust — "Dream still Through the maze, the mesh and the wreck." And thus, leaving " the Questions that sow not nor spin," came into his heart a wisdom, here — " Rough- written, and black, As of veins that from venom bleed, I had with the peace within ; Or patience, mortal of peace. Compressing the surgent strife In a heart laid open, not mailed, To the last blank hour of the rack, When struck the dividing knife ; When the hand that never had failed In its pressure to mine hung slack." It is rough comfort that nature gives us, but " we have but to see and hear " to win it. " Not she gives the tear for the tear. Weep, bleed, rave, writhe, be distraught, She is moveless. . . For the flesh in revolt at her laws. Neither song nor smile in ruth, Nor promise of things to reveal. Has she, nor a word she saith ; We are asking her wheels to pause. 143 '' Modern Love," etc. Well knows she the cry of unfaith. If we strain to the farther shore, We are catching at comfort near. Assurances, symbols, saws, Revelations in legends, light To eyes rolling darkness, these Desired of the flesh in affright. For the which it will swear to adore. She yields not for prayers at her knees ; The woolly beast bleating will shear. These are our sensual dreams. . . . For the road to her soul is the Real." " I bowed as a leaf in rain ; As a tree when the leaf is shed To winds in the season at wane ; And when from my soul I said, May the worm be trampled : smite, Sacred Reality ! power Filled me to front it aright. I had come of my faith's ordeal." In thus writing first of Mr. Meredith's attitude towards nature rather than his poetic expression of that attitude, I shall, doubtless, seem to have placed the cart before the horse. It is, however, an order to the use of which the poems in their entirety naturally impel one. The ideal Art, which Mr. Pater has formulated in his essay on the School of Giorgone, is, of course, well-nigh impossible in poetry. It is harder for a poem, perhaps, than for any other form of art to *' present that one T44 " Modern Love," etc. single effect to the * imaginative reason/ " which is Beauty. A rigid apphcation of such test would deprive us of much in which we feel rich. The " subject " must almost always obtrude itself on our intelligence ; we can hope for little more than that it shall be transfigured. Few poets have the power to give us the pearl in complete solution. Mr. Pater, it will be remembered, instances Shakespeare's songs as examples of such achievement — almost. Keats' Eve of Saint Agnes and Tennyson's Lotos-Eaters seem to me to come near a more difficult success — more difficult because of their greater length. I have been wondering, as I write, if in the little poem of The Meeting Mr. Meredith has not for once, and once only maybe (unless the forty-seventh sonnet of Modern Love be allowed as another instance), been so victorious. In a painting of equal power one feels that the subject would make quite a secondary appeal, the colour alone would give us its entire impression of dark tragic beauty ; and in the poem one really seems more to see the figures and their portentous setting than to read of them. 145 ^^ Modern Love," etc. •• The old coach-road thro' a common of furze, With knolls of pine, ran white : Berries of autumn, with thistles and burrs, And spider-threads, droop'd in the light. The light in a thin blue veil peer'd sick; The sheep grazed close and still ; The smoke of a farm by a yellow rick Curl'd lazily under a hill. No fly shook the round of the silver net ; No insect the swift bird chased ; Only two travellers moved and met Across that hazy waste. One was a girl with a babe that throve Her ruin and her bliss ; One was a youth with a lawless love, Who claspt it the more for this. The girl for her babe humm'd prayerful speech ; The youth for his love did pray ; Each cast a wistful look on each, And either went their way." Be this as it may, Mr. Meredith cannot, I think, be said to be among the poets of whom such victory is characteristic. He has more than one resemblance to Browning, but he undeniably has one, and that is at once the power and the disregard of form. That he has such power no one can doubt who has read his Modern Love, The Meetings Phoebus with AdineUis, Melampus, or Love in the Valley ^ 146 " Modern Love," etc. but that he no less often exhibits that disregard is unhappily equally certain. At the same time, that less perfect part of Mr. Meredith's poetry is not so as Wordsworth's barren patches are ; it is far from barren indeed ; it is full of song and flowers, though wild as wild ; it is Hke a mass of rich yarn that awaits the weaver, full of threads of wondrous colour, but still yarn. And so it comes about that we cannot speak of Mr. Meredith's poetry as a whole, as we can of Wordsworth's, wherein division of unmistakable sheep and unmistakable goats is comparatively easy. To select the perfect and abide by that would not only be to leave out a good half of his work, which, whatever its imperfections, is yet full of beauty and power, but would also mean missing a certain pecu- liarity of flavour which these very poems alone possess. All Mr. Meredith's verse has imagina- tion, music, and colour, such as the great among the poets alone bring us, but not all has that orbed completeness which can only come of form. Thus he may be said to give us more poetry than poems, and excepting Phcebus with Admetus, MelampuSy and one or two more, it would not, I think, be unjust, for the purpose of a broad 147 " Modern Love," etc. division, to include all his nature-poetry under the former head. For they read too often like the first rough drafts of poems, loose in texture, and full of dropped stitches — here a line of masterly compression, there an inorganic stretch of twelve. It is poetry in the ore, all a-glitter with gold, but the refiner has been lazy or indifferent. Yet gold it is, gold of Ophir. It is doubtless a question of temperament as to whether we value such ore beyond the finished work of lesser men. Their chances of interesting posterity are probably about equal. For, though Art is indeed the one antidote against the opium of time, it has no charm against the disinte- gration of the elements. To granite, marble, and gold, so long as there are eyes to behold beauty, it can give immortality ; but to clay it can bring no more than the life of a day, for it cannot save from the sun and rain. Our fashionable modern poetry is charmingly petite ^ we have much perfect prettiness, fairy bric-a- brac ; but will not its airs and graces seem old-fashioned in the beau-monde of posterity, with its new ton and its own crazes ? So long and for that may its art save it. Meanwhile, we do not live by prettiness alone, and though it be 148 " Modern Love/' etc. true that " delight " is the end of art, there are many degrees of that, degrees mounting from triviality to transfiguration. There is a trivial delight of eye and ear, but ** the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear with hearing," and it is our whole moral and intellectual being to which great art brings its great joy. It can hardly be said that the delight of the ear has been forgotten in our day ; indeed, it has become so much the fashion to appeal to it that some critics would seem actually to believe that by its verdict alone must poetry stand or fall ; and, certainly, a supersensitiveness in that organ would seem to be their one critical qualification. Others there are with other hungers, and some who come to poetry for more than a taste in the mouth find these fondants of fancy little satisfying ; and such, if they can only come by some strengthening thought, will not be squeamish at its being a little raw. Among these latter will Mr. Meredith find his larger audience. I should, however, be doing little justice to poetry which I value so highly, if I left any reader of these pages with the impression that for its message only is Mr. Meredith's nature- 149 " Modern Love/' etc. poetry of worth. My intention is very different. It has one lack, that of the high economy of form ; but it has positive qualities of such power and charm that I can conceive many loving it far beyond the more perfect Modern Love. It is rich in poetic magic, that glamour which so much art that we feel ought to delight us lacks ; it has all that unauthorised charm which irregular features, nevertheless, so often exercise. It haunts you — a certain sign. It abounds in delicious measures, in lines con- stantly thrilHng the memory like shooting stars, in pictures delicate " as the shell of a sound," or forcible to very cruelty, and no poetry could well be stronger or more fecund in its imagery. Its metaphors leap out as inevitably as the stars from an electric jar, it clusters into fancies as naturally as the frost on the pane. Yet, nevertheless, it is not so much poetry to stand and look at, but rather to strip and plunge into like a stream, deep, strong, and bracing, bright with many a shining reach, and happy with the laughter of innumerable ripples. To again change the figure, one seems to taste the very health of the earth in it ; it has a certain innocent wildness of flavour that, wherever we are, brings the 150 ^^ Modern Love," etc. woodland about us, rustling and aromatic, in a breath. It has, indeed, as great a magic of natural association as a whiff of hawthorn. It is like a feast of blackberries — not excepting the seeds in the teeth. 151 VII The Critics "For if the Kinfi lik: not the comedy, Why, then, belike, he likes it not, perdy.** It will scarcely be disputed that hitherto Mr. Meredith has had more to bear in the way of neglect than from overt critical hostility, though he has by no means altogether escaped the ** self-appointed thongmen of the press." But now that the day has come which " afar off " James Thomson — one of Mr. Meredith's earliest and most faithful disciples — loved to prophesy, the voices of criticism are well-nigh unanimously in his favour; and daily from one quarter or another come critical cuff and kick to impress upon a numb public the latest example of its immemorial purblindness. John Bull, however, is too well represented in all fields to lack champions for any development of his Philis- tinism whatsoever; and for the matter in hand 152 The Critics he some short time back sent forth his Goliath in the person of a National Reviewer^ whose article on ** Fiction Plethoric and Anaemic," in a number of his journal now about a year old, deserves the notice of all honest men, lovers of fair play and The Egoist; not as serious criti- cism, but as that British public's long insensitive disregard of Mr. Meredith finding voice and endeavouring to justify itself, graceless and un- repentant. The article is rude, blustering, and dictatorial ; and if it were only as potent as it is provincial, it might possibly scare timid converts, whom Mr. Stevenson or Mr. J. M. Barrie have won as subscribers to the recent popular edition of the novels ** in monthly volumes." It serves too as a wholesome warning against the positive tone in criticism, and indeed reminds us once more how futile is the quest of finality therein ; a futility, indeed, which even the friendly Meredith " hterature " has already most abundantly illustrated. Let us glance for a moment at some few diversities of opinion. For example, who has not been tossed on many winds as to which of the master's works is Vmuvre ? for each one of his novels in succession 153 The Critics has by one or another been proclaimed to the honour. With James Thomson it was Emilia in England (ihe^n so named), and its sequel Vittoria; for Mr. Stevenson it is The Egoist, Mr. Barrie seems to lean to Harry Rtchmondy and our National Reviewer finds it in " that astonishing feat of unbridled fancy," The Shaving of Shag- pat; The Egoist being to him ''the most entirely wearisome book purporting to be a novel that I ever toiled through in my life." Mr. Courtney has with him so much of the world as is Mr. Meredith's in his unhesitating choice of Richard Feverel, while it is probably the most " superior thing " to cry " great is Diana. ^^ '* Mr. Meredith writes such English as is within the reach of no other living man," said a critic in the Daily News. " His style," wrote James Thomson, " is very various and flexible, flowing freely in whatever measures the subject and the mood may dictate. At its best it is so beautiful in simple Saxon, so majestic in rhythm, so noble with noble imagery, so preg- nant with meaning, so vital and intense, that it must be ranked among the supreme achieve- ments of our literature. A dear friend said 154 The Critics well, when reading Vittoria : ' Here truly are words that if you pricked them would bleed.' " Yet, Mr. Courtney thinks that Mr. Meredith's style is *' never easy or flowing," and that " it is impossible to attribute to our author the gift of style" at all '* except in a very special sense"; while the National Reviewer aforesaid holds that " no milder word than detestable can be applied to " (that * supreme achievement of our literature '), ** the preposterous style of which " certain quoted '' foregoing sentences are examples." To James Thomson Mr. Meredith's dialogue is the only dialogue we have ever had, it " is full of life and reality, flexile and rich in the genuine unexpected, marked with the keenest distinc- tions, more like the keen-witted French than the slow and clumsy EngHsh " ; yet for the National Reviewer " it is not dialogue, but a series of mental percussions, its hard staccato movement and brittle snip-snap . . . tires the reader." The introduction to Diana, again, is a famous crux, ** Of all introductory chapters to an interesting novel" Mr. Courtney considers it "the most irritating," and yet for the accom- plished critic of the Manchester Examiner it 155 The Critics is the one thing in the book. And so on ad infinitum^ till the brain fairly reels with con- tradiction, and in agony of soul one cries, What use indeed is criticism ? Is it of any use ? Waiting for a clearer mood in which to answer the question, when our eyes have grown a little accustomed to these mists of confusion, we may come to see some solid ground whereon to stand. After all, these contradictory figures have a com- mon denominator, and by that may be illustrated what may be regarded as the only, yet very notable, service of criticism. Whatever else is to be proved, this at least is certain — that George Meredith is a centre of power, of what- ever nature, in whatever degree, no matter. So much have we learnt by being thus driven, as we may say, ** from pillar to post." Here is a notable figure — consider him. This is really all that criticism should venture to say with an air of finality. All beyond this should be said tentatively, with an ever-present regard to that law of relativity which must obtain so long as light is coloured by the glass it shines through. It is not impossible that after all this wraUj^ling about Mr. Meredith's novels, 156 The Critics posterity, in its quiet way, will go up to the shelf and lay its hand on Modern Love. Who knows ? The modern attempt to affiliate criticism to exact science seems to me a strange literary hallucination, for the element of temperament, which finds no admission into the latter, must, one would think, be an obvious and, in the nature of things, a permanent disturbance in any science of criticism however broadly based. And yet one sees individual systems appHed daily as confidently as though each were generally accepted as long measure, authors weighed one against another with the certitude of an accredited avoirdupois, and various heights of inspiration calculated as though they were church steeples, and criticism trigonometry. If criticism must be dubbed a science at all, its place is rather among the occult sciences, and the divin- ing rod an appropriate symbol of its method. We may trust it to discover power in the ore, to find out where gold is hid, and then if we Hke we may proclaim it for gold sky-high ; but measuring and weighing are functions impertinent to it, except purely for such satisfaction as may accrue to the measurer and the weigher himself or those 157 The Critics who chance to be of his mind. It is alike impossible either to measure (once and for all) or to overrate good work ; there is, as a popular advertisement puts it, only one quality, " The Best." Some critics have a loose way of talking about true poets and true poetry, of bad art and good art, as if art can be appraised like butter into best, middling, and common : work is either poetry or it is not, art or not art, and, if it is one or the other, it is equal to any. Perfection is equal, and all art stands on the equality of perfection. All which seems simple enough, yet why do we forget it in fruitless comparative criticism of matters on planes between which no comparison is really possible ? On what conceivable ground can Scott be compared with Mr. Meredith ? Yet Mr. Barrie, talking wildly of Mr. Meredith's pre- eminence, gives him a giddy place, " without dethroning Scott." Because they were both novelists — Mr. Barrie and others would doubtless answer. One might as well compare their works because they were both men. Do we not here come upon the mis- take that underlies so much criticism ? Instead of going to an author to find out ** the virtue, 158 The Critics the active principle " in his work, and noting it " as a chemist notes some natural element " (to quote the helpful words of Mr. Pater), many critics go to him with abstract definitions of what he ought to be, and by that pattern, should he differ, condemn him. If he cannot be made to fit the ready-made court suit they bring him, well, he must stand shivering in the nakedness of unpopularity and — do they really think ? — of oblivion. The suit into which the National Reviewer and others of his persuasion would force Mr. Meredith is a narrow and shallow inter- pretation of the term novelist. " Is he great at construction ? Is he great as a master of narrative ? Is he great as an artist in dialogue ? Is he great as a creator of cha- racter ? " they ask all in a breath ; to which questions they immediately proceed to attach vivacious negatives. No ! he does not weave twopence-halfpenny mysteries. No ! he does not tell us the old stories over and over again. No ! " he tires the reader." No ! Adrian Harley is *' a mere tedious personification — a prodigy of boredom to the reader " ! ! ! Are not the types eternally fixed ? Who shall increase 159 The Critics tbem ? Unlimited Squires Western, Parsons Adams ad infinitum — now these are the types for British art ! Of course, as Mr. Courtney writes, " it may be difficult to defend some of" Mr. Meredith's novels " on the hypothesis that the primary task of a novelist is to amuse," and such, indeed, despite certain strictures on the ordinary novel reader, would seem to be that National Reviewer's hypothesis. ** Does he keep awake ? will he while away an idle hour ? " are the only questions which he would really seem to have had in his mind. Is the novel, of all forms of art, to be allowed no expansion, is it for ever to coin- cide with a dictionary definition and be, as old Webster has it, " a fictitious tale or narrative in prose, intended to exhibit the operation of the passions, and particularly of love " ? If so, it had, logically, no right to outgrow its first form of the novella^ and as the nine- teenth century has no Arcadia, it should, therefore, have no novelists. Most will agree that the great elemental passions are the proper, indeed the only, themes for art, but as the work of race-breeding goes on, surely, i6o The Critics these are continually becoming " touched to finer issues " — " Change is on the wing to bud Rose in brain from rose in blood " — less and less do our lives express themselves in the extremes of action, we are learning to be merciful to the superlative, to know something of self-control and the sense of proportion. Thus there is more meaning in our little fingers nowa- days than in the whole strong right arm of the men of old time, we lift an eyebrow where our ancestors had committed manslaughter. Is pic- turesque sentiment to be for ever the only language of love. Union Jack heroism the only garb of courage ? Has selfishness no other form than cannibalism, or cruelty no subtler form than noisy violence or coarse malignity ? Why, therein lies the limitation of the stage, of necessity always more or less restricted to the obvious, the presentation of such life as may be expressed by outward and visible sign; and does all, does the finest, life always find such expression ? Is there no drama but that of labelled " act and deed " ? Surely, Thought is the most dramatic of all things, yet what stage can give us that ? l6l L The Critics Of course our National Reviewer knows all this: it is stale enough, maybe, for he is one of George Eliot's disciples. She knew the drama of thought and gave it to us in some types, but must " victorious analysis " stop with her or them ? There are subtler individualities than Tito, and shall we not welcome their drama ? Sir Willoughby Patterne, of Patterne Hall, is one such, and Mr. Meredith has given us his drama of nerves. By -and -by there will be others more subtle than he, and then, maybe, we shall need a stronger lens. Wherever there is life there is a story (as wherever there is criticism there must be pla- titudes), all life stories are equally worth telling, the old as well as the new, the new as well as the old. The National Reviewer and his British public would seem to disagree with Mr. Meredith, not because he cannot tell a story, but because he will not tell the parti- cular stories they are solely interested in. The disagreement is natural ; we can but applaud what appeals to us, like the squire in Mr. Dobson's poem : ** He praised the thing he understood, 'Twere well if every critic would." 162 The Critics If the ** various shades of grey " are invisible to us, how can we be expected to be interested in them ? With regard to character, is the word to bear no other than the stage significance of " character parts," to be applied only to the whimsical, the eccentric, or the provincial ? Again, is dialogue a sine qua non of the novelist's art ? Do all characters, do all stories, reveal themselves in talli ? The drama postulates that they do, and is an arbitrary form to that extent ; but on what compulsion must the novelist ? Certainly not from exigency, like the dramatist, for truer methods lie to his hand. And with regard to the objection against Mr. Meredith's dialogue that all his characters talk Meredithese, that never man spake Hke this man, and so on, does not the same charge apply equally to Shake- speare and Browning ? — yet surely Hamlet or Lippo Lippi are not less alive for that. Literal- ness is not the essential of dialogue, truth to the spirit of the speaker is. There are many in- stances where the letter would distort the whole significance of a character; indeed, this is perhaps oftener so than not. If the novehst is to employ dialogue, why should he be refused 163 The Critics the same freedom in the use of it as the dramatist or the poet ? But, in truth, of all the above-stated provi- sions one alone is fundamental — that the novelist should be able to tell a story. What story and how he tells it his business, not ours. Dialogue or disquisition matters not, so that the end is attained, the end of presenting to us a living thing ; for in art the end does justify the means. Character - drawing is really included in that fundamental power; for, unless we have a vital grasp of the dramatis personcB, the story is not really told at all. A chronicle of what happened to lay figures M or N may be interesting, but till we know who and what they were it is not a story. Events have no significance in them- selves except to schoolboys, who get over the difficulty by appropriating them through their imaginations to themselves. It would really be as true to say that the power of creating cha- racter is the novelist's essential gift, for no character can really be drawn apart from the lights and shades of its various relations with other characters and its whole environment, to set forth which involves a story. To show how any being or thing is alive is the 164 The Critics end of all art, and especially the novelist's. If he can do that for half-a-dozen readers he has succeeded. Why should the "million" or "the average intelligence " be the touchstone ? Fame, either present or posthumous, is no test what- ever. It may be, as it vi^ould seem to be in Mr. Meredith's case, that the novelist's methods of presentation are eccentric and difficult, or that his particular story needs a new technology like science. He may write in the language of an outlandish or forgotten people, in Norwegian or in Latin. If so he must not expect to be as lucky as Ibsen, or grumble if he shares the oblivion of '* Vinny " Bourne. There is no reason why he should do his work in the vernacular. It is time the superstition of " good plain Saxon " were exploded. To do much with little is well, but to do is the essential, and, once done, neither number and variety of tools, nor prodigality of materials, can depreciate per- fection. That Mr. Meredith does not write the verna- cular, at least in that of his work which is most really his, does not so much matter as would at first sight appear ; for, supposing it imaginable as written in any other style, in their own 165 The Critics " plain Saxon," would The Egoist have any stronger appeal for ** the general " than it has at present ? Surely not ; for though to some of us there is presented an unmistakably living man, and the greatest master cannot do more than make his creations alive, and a story much like tragedy beneath its ''comedy in narrative," he is a man who, could they even be made to understand him, could not possibly interest them ; and it is a tragedy which they would not appreciate, because there are not four deaths in the fifth act. You cannot really appeal to the heart without first appealing to the brain, and the average brain is still busy with the obvious. In this respect Mr. Meredith is really in the position of a poet's poet, one might call him the novelist's novelist. Indeed, it is a question for considera- tion, it seems to me, if this is not the position of every great artist. It is a commonplace to say that he is always in advance of his age, but does posterity ever catch him up ? There is a great deal more cant than truth in the chatter about the universal appeal of Shakespeare, and who is there that reads Dante ? The fact is that posterity is as much in the dark about him i66 The Critics as his own age, but, a few dead critics having made a noise about him, it tries to get over its difficulty by unintelligently making a superstition of him. Was it Thoreau who said that the great artists have really been taken by "the world " on the faith of a few critics ? Anyhow that other fine saying was certainly his : " The great poets have never been read because it takes great poets to read them." Yet there are at least two of Mr. Meredith's books that should make that " universal appeal," dealing with interests near home, and written mainly in the vernacular. Surely there is plenty of " human interest," and ruddy enough humour too, in Evan Harrington^ and I cannot imagine a public taking Adam Bede^ and finding nothing for itself in Rhoda Fleming. Richard Feverel is largely on another plane, and makes a subtler appeal, and yet if it gave one critic (I forget where I read his words) the idea that Mr. Mere- dith should be able to write a good boys' book, there must be much in it that would suit the public, for, after all, " boys' books " are really what the public wants. *' Plenty of blood and brawn — never mind brain," would seem to be their demand and that of a certain so- 167 The Critics called '^masculine" school of critics. Do they ever reflect that the craving for that so-called masculine comes of the feminine side of our nature ? But, while it is really Mr. Meredith's stories for which critics have no taste, it is about his style that they make most fuss; it is even a stumbling-block to the wise, at times. We have glanced at some diversity of opinion re- garding it already. All agree in quoting the " Ferdinand and Miranda " passage in Richard Feverel as perfection, fewer seem to have come across the " Wilming Weir " chapter in Sandra Belloni. But his phrase-making ! It seems hopeless to expect agreement upon that. With a polite National Reviewer it stands for nothing but '* coxcombry," and yet who will quite agree with Mr. Barrie when, though he hails Mr. Meredith most brilliant of living writers, yet, making the strangest choice of pet phrases, he says of others, ''these are misses " ? What Mr. Meredith's style is to me I have already striven to express, and some of those ''misses," some of the most heinous examples of " coxcombry," have already served me as 1 68 / -^^H^i. ■''■'>'!' ill/':', " — -TT — t^ '^ ^7V 5*1? .n"--^^^ -'.-f^-^ t" The Critics illustrations of his excellence. Such is man ! It is all in the point of view, as Mr. Stevenson has said. Criticism is perhaps the one thing in which we must live to ourselves. At most the critic is but the tribune of a temperament, the representative of a certain intellectual interest. The ideal critic is like the ideal king : if we could all agree about his wisdom, his power, and so forth, there would be no need of politics ; so if we could all agree upon the man who had the finest culture with the most sensitive temperament, criticism might pretend to finality : but, meanwhile, we will do well to follow Mr. Pater's advice and attempt only the ex- pression of what a certain work or personality is to ourselves — though in so doing please let us be careful of other people's feelings. It is in art as in religion, we all worship the same thing under different forms ; there is but one Spirit of Beauty, and whatever artistic fetish — be it '' masculine " or what you please — our neighbour is kneeling before, we can tell by his face and by his voice whether he sees that spirit there. Cannot we keep the jarring intolerance of secta- rianism outside the pleasant lettered Academe, and be neighbourly over our hkes and dislikes ? 169 The Critics Is it not possible to take both Squire Western and Sir Willoughby into our regard, or at least to hold one without anathematising our fellow because he claims to be capable of appreciating both ? For, be sure that the man who can appreciate the Sir Willoughbys is he who brings the highest relish for the Squire Westerns. The greatest danger to other folks' feelings lies in comparison. Why we make them I do not know ; they are constantly growing out of date, and while current they are futile. Nothing so much as criticism impresses one how truly odious they are. It is well to admire Mr. Meredith's skill with boys in Richard Feverel^ indeed, we would not lose that splendid fight for much ; but why need Mr. Barrie be so positive that Thackeray's boys are not so genuine, why dethrone Traddles, why say that there are no boys like them in contemporary fiction, even if we have been so industrious as to have reaped so large a field ? There are boys in A Daughter of Hethy surely. Criticism should not need to be dated, and such, to have any value at all, would need to be. Richard Feverel and Ripton Thompson are boys^ typical boys, real and living. Is not that enough ? The comparative 170 The Critics method, of course, has its uses, but latterly it has sadly overgrown them, and the critics are all too many who tell us who and what a writer is like and is not like, but leave us almost wholly in the dark as to what he is. Especially do they love to compare him with the most outlandish authors of their acquaintance, apparently scorning English standards, and recognising no literature nearer than the Kamschatkan. Let us, too, avoid the superlative ; it is a vulgar form, not half so dignifying as the simple positive. ' A poor civic tinsel of a word, we cam only wear it in our little town, and that only in our little day/' For it is but a relative term, its value must be for ever fluctuating; but plain good endures and no contingency can ever set to it a limitation. The parable of the Talents is suggestive here. The man who brought two was called good and faithful, but he who had five was called nothing more. So Art considers her children. In the House of Fame there are many mansions. For me — maybe for you, reader — Sandra and Diana belong to Art's own dream of great women. Lucy and Richard by the river-side are with the great lovers; Sir Willoughby takes 171 The Critics a place in your moral mythology; he is your wholesale bete noirey every day you cry him Retro ; Roy Richmond holds you by the heart, Adrian Harley by the brain, and somehow by the heart too ; for the more you think of him the less you fear his cynic pose. Maybe you love not Thackeray's inns better than the "Aurora," you often think of Evan Harrington and the postillion, of that delicious ride of his with Polly, and who could forget the great Countess ? Dr. Middleton and that aged and great wine have perhaps made your cheap port seem the richer at your occasional symposia; you know a good part of that "leg" passage by heart, and often find Meredithese floating on your talk. You have quoted ''the vomit" as you poured with the stream from the theatre ; maybe you have known a dear face " swim " up to you ''for a brilliant instant on tears," and been grateful to Mr. Meredith for that so offensive phrase; and thoughts have rung little silver bells through your brain in the midnight. When your blood runs a little thick, have you never taken down Vittoriay and lived over again that great fight in the Stelvio pass ; or harrowed yourself once more with old Squire Beltham's 172 The Critics slaughter of poor Roy Richmond by his merciless shuddering invective ? You have felt you had beauty, comedy, tragedy, in all these, and in how many other characters and scenes. So have I. But he has not. Let us pray. i73 Postscript: 1899 1 HAVE left this book, save for a few clerical errors, as I wrote it in 1 889 : a boy's book, full of boyish faults, and yet, I trust, marked by some of the excellences of boyhood. At twenty- three, however clever we may chance to have been created, one is deficient in that experience of the many ways of living which is necessary for anything like a complete appreciation of a writer so shot with many-coloured existence as Mr. Meredith. For example, at twenty-three one is too young for irony, though one may foolishly affect it. Yes ! when I look back upon this little book, I feel that it would not be out of place to decorate me with a little bronze medal bearing the legend, ** For Courage." I assume that there is no medal " For Impudence." Perhaps it does not usually happen in criticism that the child is father to the man, and it is not 175 Postscript : 1899 given to us all to corroborate our boyhood. In the main, as I re-read these simple enthusiastic pages, I rejoice to find myself of to-day in unwonted accord with my younger self of ten years ago. Certain slight changes of view were of course inevitable. Perhaps, for example, while holding Mr. Meredith's greatness to be even greater than I did in 1889, I have come more exactly to understand the manner of it, and to see that it is perhaps more a philosopher's and less an artist's greatness than I could have been brought to admit at twenty-three. The charm of simple and therefore classical form is one which in the fermenting period of youth, when the simple is apt to seem the obvious, is, I think, withheld from us. Of course, no one reader can speak for another, yet I think it very generally true that the young reader prefers his literature knotted and lined with thought. Being himself in process, he is more interested in processes than products. I confess that there are simple things in Wordsworth that I have had to wait till a few weeks ago to appreciate. Browning comes more and more to remain with us for his, not few, lyrical simplicities; and so, I think, it 176 Postscript: 1899 will be with Mr. Meredith. My old conviction grows stronger that it will be Richard Feverel and perhaps no other of his novels, Love in the Valley^ Modern Love, and perhaps no other of his poems, that will keep his name alive in English literature, in spite of all the amazing inspiration of the work that will thus be left — gold-mines that will always be occasionally visited by the literary antiquary and the young man with a soul. Yet, of course, in this Mr. Meredith is no worse off than many another great writer. Wordsworth and Coleridge are already in a like case. They live, artistically, in a mere handful of lyrics ; but then there are other ways for a great writer to live than as an artist : he may live too as a spiritual or intellectual influence. I think that Coleridge, great as was his spiritual influence in his own day, can hardly be said to count any longer in that respect. With Wordsworth it is different, though I think that his message will tend to become merged in that of his disciples, who have broadened and deepened it, or at all events dissociated it from the ^<22/<;>^^r/>i- of Wordsworth's own method. How it will seem in fifty years' time one need not conjecture ; but from the 177 M Postscript: 1899 present point of time, when one stands and ponders the universe, it certainly seems that there has been no spiritual influence, for England at least, comparable in significance to Mr. Meredith as a philosopher. Had Mr. Meredith only been a German, Europe, and not England alone, would have welcomed him as the greatest of all living philosophers, a position which at present seems, somewhat inexplicably, reserved for Nietzche, whose philosophy is a piece of bullying reaction compared with Mr. Meredith's harmoniously developed '^reading of earth, "and whose brilliant aphoristic gift is at least equalled by Mr. Mere- dith's. During the last ten years Mr. Meredith's influence upon current thought, perhaps less directly than indirectly by means of the younger writers he has influenced, has been very marked. The striking reaction from the materialistic in- terpretation of human life, the renaissance of spiritual ideahsm — an idealism founded on the fearless acceptance of the facts of nature — have been largely of his creating. His ideals of romance, of humour, of wit have been the ideals generally accepted and largely followed by no- velists and dramatists of the hour. On every hand one finds his books as the chief fertilisers 178 Postscript: 1899 of progressive thought and progressive art. At the present moment, indeed, his influence may seem echpsed behind that Tory reaction of which Mr. Kipling's is the captain voice; but one has read Mr. Meredith to little purpose v\rho should be alarmed at the present signs and wonders, and forget that reaction is only one of the many mysterious methods of advance. Surely Mr. Meredith should have so trained our eyes that in the darkest murk of reaction they shall still have clear sight of "A morn beyond mornings, beyond all reach Of emotional arms at the stretch to enfold : A firmament passing our visible blue. To those having nought to reflect it, 'tis nought ; To those who are mist, 'tis mist on the beach From the billow withdrawing ; to those who see Earth, our mother, in thought, Our spirit it is, our key." Of Mr. Meredith's work published since 1890 one may say generally that it is remarkably of a piece with the work that preceded it. Its excel- lences and its faults are the same, and its creative youth is as lusty and prodigal as that which created Richard Feverel. The inexhaustible fairy well of his fancy proves to be veritably inexhaust- ible. Some of his loveliest butterflies of phrase 179 Postscript: 1899 flit through his later books; and whereas most progressive writers grow conservative and re- pentant as they grow older, Mr. Meredith has grown more and more audaciously progressive. Of poetry he has published two new volumes — The Empty Purse, and Odes in Contribution to French History. To these must be added a new edition of Modem Love (1892), with which was included a characteristic piece of Meredithian comedy, The Sage Enamoured and the Honest Lady. A second edition of Modern Love exactly thirty years after the first ! Is there any more astonishing instance of the tardy appreciation of a great poem ? Mr. Meredith took this unique opportunity to make one or two verbal alterations in the poem of no great importance or felicity. In the thirteenth " sonnet," for the famous second line of these two, " When the renewed for ever of a kiss Sounds through the listless hurricane of hair," we have, " Whirls life within the shower of loosened hair ! " which is hardly an improvement. Then in the fine twenty-third '^sonnet," for " The great carouse Knocks hard upon the midnight's hollow door," 180 Postscript: 1899 we have the curious alteration, *•' Knocks upon hard the midnight's hollow door." In the finest sonnet of all — the forty-seventh — for the closing Hnes, " And still I see across the twilight wave The swan sail with her young beneath her wings," we have "Where I have seen," which to a memory accustomed to love the first form seems a wholly gratuitous blemish. But, of course, these are mere trifles, as are all the corrections, to which one may add the omission of the original motto, " This is not meat For little people or for fools." This remained as true, I suppose, in 1892 as in 1862, but perhaps Mr. Meredith felt it to be somewhat too obvious a statement. The Sage Enamoured and the Honest Lady demands more than a passing mention, though I will not pretend that I can follow it through all the mazes of its unusually difficult expression. It reads like a poem which Mr. Meredith has first written in shorthand, then partly translated into longhand, leaving the remainder in the original shorthand notes, to decipher as best we may. I confess that some of the shorthand notes baffle me. On the other hand, the general 181 Postscript: 1899 drift of the poem seems clear, and, at all events, the great beauty of some of the earlier lines is enough, whether we read the general riddle of the poem aright or not. " Her eyes were the sweet world desired of souls " — . . " her tones A woman's honeyed amorous outvied, As when in a dropped viol the wood-throb moans Among the sobbing strings, that plain and chide Like infants for themselves, less deep to thrill Than those rich mother-notes for them breathed round " — "About her mouth a placid humour slipped The dimple, as you see smooth lakes at eve Spread melting rings where late a swallow dipped " — " these flowers grow on stalks ; They suck from soil, and have their urgencies Beside and with the lovely face mid leaves " — What youth ever sang of woman like this *' sage enamoured " ? I venture also to quote two of tliose curious little crippled lyrics, so characteristic of Mr. Meredith, though not unlike Browning : bright- eyed, sweet-voiced little creatures that limp and sing, which we seem to love all the more for their sad crushed feet ! Here is the first : 182 Postscript: 1899 " Love is winged for two, In the worst he weathers, When their hearts are tied ; But if they divide, O too true ! Cracks a globe, and feathers, feathers. Feathers all the ground bestrew. I was breast of morning sea, Rosy plume on forest dun, I the laugh in rainy fleeces, While with me She made one. Now must we pick up our pieces, For that then so winged were we." Here is the second : " Ask, is Love divine, Voices all are, ay. Question for the sign, There's a common sigh. Would we through our years, Love forego, Quit of scars or tears ? Ah, but no, no, no ! " The Empty Purse (1892) is a philosophical poem of great importance among Mr. Meredith's writings. In its literary aspect it is marked by a full measure of the obscurity of Mr. Meredith's later poetic manner, but as always it is an obscurity continually lightning with vivid fire of phrase, and often opening out into rifts of lucent 183 Postscript: 1899 and lovely expression. Take this beautiful description of childhood, for example : *' There the young chief of the animals wore A likeness to heavenly hosts, unaware Of his love of himself; with the .hours that leap. In the dingle away from the rutted highroad, Around him the earliest throstle and merle, Our human smile between milk and sleep. Effervescent of Nature he crowed. Fair was that season ; furl over furl The banners of blossom ; a dancing floor This earth ; very angels the clouds ; and fair Thou on the tablets of forehead and breast : Careless, a centre of vigilant care. Thy mother kisses an infant curl. The room of the toys was a boundless nest, A kingdom the field of the games. Till entered the craving for more, And the worshipped small body had aims." 1 may perhaps be allowed to quote here a passage before printed in which I endeavour to explain the later manneristic development of Mr. Meredith's style. I wrote it d propos the quotation just made, and I said : " There is scarcely any sign in this passage of that strange literary disease, a sort of writer's cramp, which has overtaken Mr. Meredith, in a strangely similar form to that in which it also overtook Brownin*^. It is not merely a result of gram- matical compression. It is the more compound 1 84 Postscript: 1899 expression of endless metaphor. Both in Brown- ing and in Mr. Meredith, but especially in Mr. Meredith, the fancy — or should we say the imagination ? for the imagery has more of the organic nature of imagination — has passed beyond the control of the writers. It is no longer possible for them to see anything simply as it is, but only in some fantastic image of itself. Almost every word is charged with some such metaphorical allusion, image treads upon image, without the least regard for proportion, and grammatical idio- syncrasies adding to the confusion, what wonder that the casual reader faints by the way ? " The Empty Purse is described as **A Sermon to our Later Prodigal Son," and, stated briefly, is a counsel against the wealth and luxury of our modern life, particularly as it affects the youth of a country. Not till their wealth is spent, till the purse is empty, the wealth with which ^'grandmotherly laws" indulge our aristocratic youth, can they really know life as it is, and help on the making of the world by the needed forces of their young powers. Here are one or two characteristic phrases which will indicate the general temper and manner of the poem : 18S Postscript: 1899 " He strutted, a cock, he bellowed, a bull, He rolled him, a dog, in dirt." " There are giants to slay, and they call for their Jack." **.... a nursery Past !" '* May brain democratic be king of the host ! " " A Conservative youth ! who the cream-bowl skimmed, Desiring affairs to be left as they are." " Peace, Our lullaby word for decay." " There are those whom we push from the path with respect Bow to that elder . . . In his day he was not all wrong. Unto some foundered zenith he strove, and was wrecked. He scrambled to shore with a worship of shore." " 'Tis known how the permanent never is writ In blood of the passions." ** I can hear a faint crow Of the cock of fresh mornings, far, far, yet distinct." " Keep the young generations in hail. And bequeath them no tumbled house ! " " Is it accepted of song? Does it sound to the mind through the ear, Right sober, pure sane ? has it disciplined feet ? Thou wilt find it a test severe ; Unerring whatever the theme. Rings it for Reason a melody clear. . . ." The volume included several other poems of importance, notably the fine odes to " The Comic Spirit," and " Youth in Memory/' several beau- 186 Postscript: 1899 tiful nature poems, particularly the lovely " Night of Frost in May " : "With splendour of a silver day, A frosted night had opened May : And on that plumed and armoured night As one close temple hove our wood, Its border leafage virgin white " ; but, most notable of all, I think: "Jump-to- Glory Jane," which, with all its grotesqueness, the grotesqueness of its subject, is perhaps the most sympathetic interpretation of such popular rehgious movements as the Salvation Army ever made. I quote the lovely last verse : *' Her end was beautiful : one sigh. She jumped a foot when it was nigh. A lily in a linen clout She looked when they had laid her out. It is a lily-light she bears For England up the ladder-stairs." Turning to Mr. Meredith's prose during the period, one has to record the appearance of three novels no less notable than their predecessors, marked, like the poetry, with the old superb vigour, volcanoes of starry phrase, gardens of beautiful women, storehouses of wisdom and comedy : One of Our Conquerors^ Lord Ormont and his Aniinta^ T lie Amazing Marriage ; audit is interesting to note that the last is the most 187 Postscript: 1899 vigorous of the three, and the most free from the bewildering and defacing mannerisms of Mr. Meredith's later style. In various ways they are all concerned with that problem with which Mr. Meredith has often been deeply occupied in his books, but which he has never approached with such outspoken radicalism as in One of Our Conquerors and Lord Ormont and his Aniinta. In point of style One of Our Conquerors is the least satisfactory of the three. In fact, on the whole, it is the most irritating of all Mr. Meredith's books; it contains more crabbed phrasing and less felicities than any book Mr. Meredith ever wrote. The most impenetrable passages of The Egoist or Diana are lit by electric light compared with the average writing in One of Our Conquerors. Probably no book ever written has begun with an opening sentence so appallingly deterrent. I quote it as a curious example of diseased expression : "A gentleman, noteworthy for a lively countenance and a waistcoat to match it, crossing London Bridge at noon on a gusty April day, was almost magically detached from his conflict with the gale by some sly strip of slipperiness, abounding in that conduit of the markets, which had more or less adroitly performed the trick upon preceding passengers, and now laid this one flat amid the shuffle of feet, peaceful 188 Postscript: 1899 for the moment as the uncomplaining who have gone to Sabrina beneath the tides." Of course, there are beautiful things in the book, but they are few, and the thorny tangle on which they grow is so forbidding that it is to be feared few have ever dared, or cared, to penetrate it. If you can only once force your way into the story, there is the reward of a group of characters and a modern social situation of great interest to the sociologist. And I must not forget that there is an excellent wine chapter — "Old Veuve." Yet, frankly, the book is a weari- ness of the flesh, and the most devoted Mere- dithian must feel in reading it that the limits of an indulgent patience have been reached. Did Mr. Meredith ever pay the least attention to the complaints of his readers, one might almost have thought that he had himself realised too that here was, as they say in America, **the limit." For, with his next novel, Lord Orrnofit and his Aminta, there comes a sudden simplifi- cation of manner as welcome as surprising. Also, the theme, again — as in One of Our Con- querors — an "irregular" union is treated on broader lines and to a more definite conclusion. Indeed, Lord Ormont and his Aminta is the most 189 Postscript: 1899 important deliverance upon marriage in English literature. It is a statement of the case for more flexible unions between men and women of the highest authority — the statement of a great philosopher, a great poet, a great novelist; and the statement is the more authoritative as being that of a man close upon seventy years of age — not the hotblooded theorising of some sensual boy. Therefore I propose to deal with it some- what more in detail. Lord Ormont is an elderly national hero, whose vigorous military policy in India has met with the usual revulsion of national feeling. An ungrateful country somewhat beclouds him for a time, but long before the eclipse, and after, he had been the hero alike of a certain boys' and a certain girls' school. " Cuper's " boys and " Miss Vincent's" girls alike adored him, and this common admiration was largely influential, in conjunction with other natural causes, such as manly beauty on the one hand and womanly beauty on the other, to draw together the souls of the king and queen of the respective schools — " Matey " Weyburn and " Browny " Farrell. However, fate, in the shape of an aunt, was against them, and they were parted. By curious 190 Postscript: i8gg chance, some years after, "Browny" becomes the wife and " Matey " the private secretary of their schooldays hero, Lord Ormont. " Browny " is a real, or rather a legal, wife to Lord Ormont, with accessible marriage lines ; but from a certain perversity of disposition he declines for a long time to make the marriage public — with the consequence that " Matey's " reputation suffers, she is nibbled at by one or two adventurous lady-killers, and herself grows sad and lonely of heart. At this juncture enters the young secre- tary. Space forbids my following the game of passion and honour between these passionate and honourable souls. Never were two lovers at once more passionate and more honourable. The game is just one of those subtle tussles of sex and convention which Mr. Meredith loves to umpire ; and he has seldom arranged the duel with more exciting suspense than in this between "Matey" and "Browny": now passion gains a point, and now law ; now law seems about to extinguish passion once and for all, and then, next minute, passion has the lady blushing in his arms ready for a run with her — and so the game goes this way and that, with delicious interludes, such as that hour at the inn together* 191 Postscript : 1899 But " by various ways men attain to the same end " ; and though one had quite given up " Matey " and ** Browny's " romance for lost, just, as Drayton sings, '*at the last gasp of love's latest breath," up it flares again, and the reader is made happy by "Matey" and ^'Browny" counting the world well lost so that they keep each other. It is characteristic of Mr. Meredith's method that this denouement should, after all the noble struggle and self-denial, the resolutions to be '^good," of the two lovers, come about all but independently of their resolution, by sheer accident. In the present case, given the situa- tion, the conclusion is doubtless natural enough, but it must be admitted that the situation has to be somewhat arbitrarily supplied. The lovers have finally parted. ''Matey" is going to found an international school in Switzerland, and he is standing on the deck of a vessel outward bound, close in shore on the southern coast, when he sees *' Browny " bathing ! The impulse to dive in pursuit of her is too strong. The mighty mother has her way with him, and the idyll of the two lovers swimming together, grotesque as in the hands of a smaller 192 Postscript: 1899 writer it might well have been, and impossible realistically speaking as I suppose it is, is one of the sweetest idylls in fiction. There is quite the old Richard Feverel bloom upon it. " * What sea-nymph sang me thy name ?' * She smote a pang of her ecstasy into him : " Ask mine ! " ' ' Browny ! ' They swam ; neither of them panted ; their heads were water-flowers that spoke at ease. 'We've run from school ; we won't go back.' ' We've a kingdom. ' ' Here's a big wave going to be a wall.' • Off he rolls.' ' He's like the big Brent broad meadow under Elling Wood.' ' Don't let Miss Vincent hear you. . . .'" Thus "they swam silently, high, low, creatures of the smooth green roller. He heard the water- song of her swimming/' After this the die is cast; Aminta leaves her lord, and joins her "Matey" in his educational dreamland, while Lord Ormont shows what good stuff there is in him — not to speak of his sense of irony, and heaping coals of fire — by sending one of his grand-nephews to their great school ! Mr. Meredith leaves us in no manner of doubt as to how he regards the situation. Near the end he has this significant passage : 193 N Postscript: 1899 '* Laws are necessary instruments of the majority ; but when they grind the sane human being to dust for their maintenance, their enthronement is the rule of the savage old deity, sniffing blood-sacrifice. There cannot be a based society upon such conditions. An immolation of the naturally constituted individual arrests the general expansion to which we step, decivilises more, and is more impious to the God in man than temporary revelries of a license that Nature soon checks." And still more explicit are Wey burn's solemn words of plighting to his " Browny " : **I shall not consider that we are malefactors. We have the world against us. It will not keep us from trying to serve it. And there are hints of humaner opinions : it's not all a huge roUing block of Juggernaut. Our case could be pleaded before it. I don't think the just would condemn us i heavily. . . . With a world against us pur love and labour are constantly on trial ; we must have great hearts, and if the world is hostile we are not to blame it. In the nature of I things it could not be otherwise. My own soul, we have to see that we do — though not publicly, not insolently — offend good citizenship. But we believe — I with my whole faith, and I may say it of you — that we are not offending Divine law." Among the many beautiful phrases with which the book abounds I have gathered these at random : "The forest Goddess of the Crescent, swanning it through a lake — on the leap for the run of the chase — watching the dart, with her humming bow at breast." "They talked to hear one another's voices." " Her look at him fed the school on thoughts of what love really is when it is not fished out of books and poetry." *' How preach at a creature 194 Postscript: 1899 on the bend of passion's rapids ! " " The vision of a strenuous lighted figure." " Thames played round them on his pastoral pipes. Bee-note, and woodside blackbird, and meadow cow, and the leap of the fish of the silver rolling rings composed the music." For sheer vitality, sheer creative " go," perhaps The Amazing Marriage is the most Hving of all Mr. Meredith's recent books. If the theme of Lord Ormont and his Aminta might be described as the " new marriage " — by elopement ! — the theme of The Amazing Marriage might be described as the old marriage — by mistake ! It is a book of many riches, but it has no very general significance. A cynical overbearing eccentric of a young lord proposes impulsively, during a dance at Baden Baden, to one of the superbest young women Mr. Meredith has created, and then, hoping she may forget all about it, disappears to one of his English estates. But an old kinsman of Carinthia — who herself is a wild Diana-like creature, innocent of the most elementary matrimonial wile — sees that Lord Fleetwood keeps to his promise. Fleetwood keeps it grimly indeed — ^just keeps it, neither more nor less. He drives his bride from the church on a four-in-hand with a devilish reck- lessness which he means to frighten her, hardly 195 Postscript: 1899 throwing her a word the while; and the first entertainment he offers her is a prize-fight. In short, he behaves to her with that studied brutality for which no one can match an Enghsh aristocrat, and the various developments result- ing provide one of those themes of tragi-comedy in which Mr. Meredith is so at home. In the main, however, I find the book less interesting for its drama or its psychology as for its descriptive force, its picture of Carinthia, its nature-pictures, unmatched even by Mr. Meredith himself, its store of brilliant aphorism, and its general atmosphere of stage-coach England. It contains, too, the best prize-fight since Hazlitt, or, should I not say, George Borrow. Carinthia is one of Mr. Meredith's most fascinating heroines, and as she entered the gallery of beautiful women already created by his hand there must have been no small flutter of jealousy : Clara Middleton and Diana must have felt an unexpected insecurity of supremacy. The epi- grammatist always in attendance as chorus in Mr. Meredith's novels — this time one Woodseer, a charming figure said to be a sketch of Robert Louis Stevenson — has many shots at describing her, but they are none of them especially happy. 196 Postscript : 1899 It is rather in the general impression, variously built up, that one realises the splendid animal and pure spirit that is Carinthia. I am not sure that Mr. Meredith's typical girl — for, after all, like every other novelist, he has but one heroine, under various names — is not found more often in America than England. That physical abundance and vigour and bloom, combined with an almost boyish unconsciousness of them in intercourse with men — comrades frank and open-hearted out of sheer innocence of being anything else — that one finds more often in American than in English girls. Perhaps we are not always so pleased as we should be when we find it, for there is no little of the coldness of the goddess about these young Dianas. One sees Carinthia clearhest in recalling that wonderful morning walk among the Alps with her brother. She seems somehow contained in the very descriptions of mountains and mornings — de- scriptions such as Mr. Meredith has never sur- passed — and one or two quotations from which I include here, as no passages before quoted in this study so well represent Mr. Meredith's amazing descriptive power. 197 Postscript: 1899 "Dawn in the mountain-land is the meeting of many friends. The pinnacle, the forest-head, the latschen-tufted mound, rock-bastion and defiant cliff and giant of the triple peak, were in view, clearly lined for a common recognition, but all were figures of solid gloom, unfeatured and bloomless. Another minute and they had flung oflf their mail and changed to various, indented, intricate, succinct in ridge, scar and channel ; and they had all a look of watchfulness that made them one company. The smell of rock- waters and roots of herb and moss grew keen ; air became a wine that raised the breast high to drink it ; an uplifting coolness pervaded the heights. . . . The plumes of cloud now slowly entered into the lofty arch of dawn and melted from brown to purple- black. The upper sky swam with violet ; and in a moment each stray cloud-feather was edged with rose, and then suffused. It seemed that the heights fronted East to eye the interflooding of colours, and it was imaginable that all turned to the giant whose forehead first kindled to the sun : a greeting of god and king. . . . The armies of the young sunrise in mountain - lands neighbouring the plains, vast shadows, were marching over woods and meads, black against the edge of golden ; and great heights were cut with them, and bounding waters took the leap in a silvery radiance to gloom ; the bright and dark-banded valleys were like night and morning taking hands down the sweep of their rivers. Immense was the range of vision scudding the peaks and over the illimitable Eastward plains flat to the very East and sources of the sun." Of the minor character-sketches which are detachable from the context, that of the postilhon, Charles Dump, is most successful, and is also worth quoting too because, as its author says, "When once you have seized him the whole period is aHve to you." He gives the atmo- 198 Postscript : 1899 sphere of the book, hke an old drawing. A comparison, perhaps permissible, is Mr. James Welch's old postillion, in Rosemary. "... a small man, looking diminished from a very much larger one by shrinkage, in thickish wrinkles from the shoulders to the shanks. His hat is enormous and very gay. He is rather of sad countenance. An elevation of his collar behind the ears, and pointed at the neck, gives you notions of his having been dropped from some hook. He stands with his forefinger extended, like a disused semaphore post, that seems trembling and desponding on the hill by the roadside, in his attitude while telling the tale ; if standing it may be called, where the whole figure seems imploring for a seat. That was his natural position, as one would suppose any artist must have thought, and a horse beneath him. But it has been suggested that the artist in question was no painter of animals." From the great aphoristic and generally de- scriptive wealth of the book I make this brief selection : "She was not of the creatures who are excited by an atmosphere of excitement ; she took it as the nymph of the stream her native wave, and swam on the flood with expansive languor, happy to have the master passions about her ; one or two of which her dainty hand caressed, fearless of a sting; the lady patted them as her swans" — "She could make for herself a quiet centre in the heart of the whirlwind, but the whirlwind was required " — ' " Language became a flushed Bacchanal in a ring of dancing similes " — " Power of heart was her conjuring magician" — "Then you sail away into the tornado, happy as a sealed bottle of ripe wine" — " Touching the picture of happiness, conceive the bounteous Bacchic spirit in the devoutness of a Sophocles " — [this 199 Postscript: 1899 description of a prize-fighter entering the ring] — " Ben Todds was ostentatiously deUberate : his party said he was no dancing-master. He stepped out, grave as a barge emerging from a lock" — "To preserve Romance (we exchange a sky for a ceiling if we let it go), we must be inside the heads of our people as well as the hearts ... in days of a growing activity of the head" — "Nature is the truth" — "She was moon out of cloud at a change of the theme" — "He was born with a suspicion of the sex. Poetry decorated women, he said, to lime and drag men in the foulest ruts of prose." And here is a fine passage on the very aphoristic gift I have been illustrating : "Woodseer sat for a certain time over his note-book. He closed it with a thrilling conceit of the right thing written down ; such as entomologists feel when they have pinned the rare insect. But what is butterfly or beetle compared with the chiselled sentences carved out of air to constitute us part owner of the breathing image and spirit of an adored fair woman ? We repeat them, and the act of repeating them makes her close on ours, by virtue of the eagle thought in the stamped gold of the lines." "The eagle thought in the stamped gold of the lines " ! Could anything be said much more finely than that, and could any phrase better express the quality of Mr. Meredith's own magnificent phrase ? In addition to these novels the precious essay on ** Comedy" — to which reference has already been made on an earlier page — has been rescued from the forgetfulness of The New Quarterly Magazine, and made into a book, winning much 200 Postscript : 1899 appreciation in its new form. Mr. Meredith's publishers have also issued a sumptuous edition de luxe of his complete writings, which Mr. Meredith has revised for the occasion. I have not had the leisure to compare the revised with the original versions, nor yet with the 1886 library edition, except very cursorily in the case of RicJiard Fever el y which, I regret to see, has been further chastened by its creator's hand. I am afraid I shall go on preferring it in its original exuberance. RICHARD LE GALLIENNE. 30X BIBLIOGRAPHY GEORGE MEREDITH AND HIS REVIEWERS [1849— 1899] A BIBLIOGRAPHY BY JOHN LANE PREFACE As my first attempt in the direction of compiling a serious bibliography I put this forward tentatively, being fully conscious that it must be incomplete, in spite of its having been a labour of love. I am naturally anxious to add to it in any subsequent edition, but should no other edition be called for, I shall still be glad to receive any information bearing on the subject, for my own delectation ; at any rate I hope it may be my privilege to extend it, by Mr. Meredith being spared to us for many more years of vigorous and characteristic work. It is highly probable that I have failed to find all Mr. Meredith's uncollected and fugitive pieces, but I earnestly hope that this effort will induce others who have a special knowledge of the subject to com- municate with me. I am aware that Mr. Meredith contributed to The Morning Post and The Pall Mall Gazette in a Preface journalistic capacity. His articles are unsigned save by the Hall-Mark of his genius, and I have not attempted to record them. The writer has said ''Let them lie," and in such a matter surely the author's wish should be regarded. I have, doubtless, omitted many reviews of Mr. Meredith's works, but I shall always be grateful for references to omissions. It seems to me of greater interest to append the writers' names when possible ; in a few cases I have succeeded (those within paren- theses), and the result is curiously interesting. For instance, Mr. W. E. Henley owns to having reviewed that masterpiece, "The Egoist," in four different places — The A theitceumy A cademyy Pall Mall Gazette y and The TeacJier. From that period the tide turned in favour of Mr. Meredith's works, and no one can doubt that Mr. Henley's brilliant criticisms [reprinted in his " Views and Reviews " ], which won the praise of James Thomson [" B.V." ],* did much to open the eyes of critics and readers alike. There is a remarkable review of " Richard Fe- * Extract from Thomson's diary: — '''■Saturday, Nov. i, 1879. Athmawn — Opening article on Egoist. The first critique on any of George Meredith's books I have ever come across, in which the writer showed thorough knowledge of his works, and anything like an adequate appreciation of his wonderful genius." — Vide James Thomson's Life, by H. S. Salt, p. 140. 1890. vi Preface verel" in 1859 in The Times, which, however, has since accorded to Mr. Meredith only short notices of two of his novels. James Thomson's '' Note on George Meredith " [reprinted in his '' Essays and Phantasies "] on the appearance of ^' Beauchamp's Career" [1876] is quite a notable thing: the Atlie- ncBuin review of the same work is hardly less note- worthy. More recently in the Saturday Review [1886] appeared an excellent article on '* Mr. George Meredith's Novels " by an anonymous writer whose name — as well as that of The Times reviewer of "Richard Feverel " and iht Athenceum reviewer of '•Beauchamp's Career" — I should like to have been able to give, as they must have been the means of enormously increasing the number of Mr. Meredith's readers. At the same time it must be confessed that many of the criticisms that have appeared on Mr. Meredith's work, whilst not unfavourable, clearly indicate that the writers are not in sympathy with him. Mr. Meredith's printed letters are provokingly scarce ; I only know of six, four of which are frag- mentary. Those who have been privileged to read his letters will share in my lament, for it is from his epistolary writings that we best learn to know the man : in them he — as it were — bares his soul. vii o Preface In the preparation of this work I have received generous help from Mr. John Morley, M.P., Mr. Theodore Watts, Mr. Kegan Paul, Mr. William Sharp, Mr. Frederick Chapman, Dr. Garnett, Mr. S. T. Whiteford, Mr. Gleeson White, Mr. Charles Strachey, Dr. F. Arnold, Mr. F. J. Simmons, Mr. F. G. Aylward, Mr. J. Marshall, Mr. Elkin Mathews; especially I wish to thank Mr. F. H. Evans and Mr. Arthur Symons. My thanks are also due to Mr. A. C. Swinburne for kindly permitting me to reprint his noble letter to the Spectator in defence of *' Modern Love," and to Mr. William Morton Fullerton for kindly allowing me to use his drawing — sketched for him by Mr. W. Maxse Meredith — of Mr. George Meredith's Chalet^ the birthplace of so many characters in that brilliant galaxy the like of which the world has not seen since Shakespeare. JOHN LANE. 37, SouTHWicK Street, Hyde Park, W. January^ 1 89 1. VHl A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF GEORGE MEREDITH. 1849. Chillianwallah (Poem). Chambers's Edinburgh Journal^ July 7, 1849, Vol. XII., N.S., No. 288, p. 16. (Not reprinted.) 1850. Extracts from a Letter, dated December 17, 1850, to Parker (the Publisher), in reference to the publication of "Poems," 1851. Messrs. Sotheby, Wilkinson, & Hodge's Sale Catalogue of Autograph Letters, Lot 144, p. 22, Nov. 27, 1889. Mr. Elkin Mathews purchased this lot. The letter is now in the possession of Julian Marshall, Esq. IX A Bibliography of [1851 POEMS: BV GEORGE MEREDITH. EOS ! blest Goddess of the Morning, hear The blind Orion praying on thy hill. And in thine odorous breath his spirit steep, That he, the soft gold of thy gleaming hand Passing across his heavy lids, sealed down With weight of many nights and ni^ht-like days May feel as keenly as a new-born child, And, through it, learn as purely to behold The face of Nature. . . His blind eyes wept- R. H. Horne's " Orion. LONDON : JOHN W. PARKER & SON, West Strand. [Fcap. 8vo. pp. viii. unnumbered and i6o, and slip of Errata at end.] i85i] George Meredith TO THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK, ESQ. THIS VOLUME IS DEDICATED WITH THE PROFOUND ADMIRATION AND AFFECTIONATE RESPECT OF HIS SON-IN-LAW. Weybridge, May, 1351. A Bibliography of [1851 Contents : *The Olive Branch. Love within the Lover's Breast. The Wild Rose and the Snowdrop. The Death of Winter. The Moon is Alone in the Sky. John Lackland. The Sleeping City. The Poetry of Chaucer. ,, Spencer. , , Shakespeare. ,, Milton. ,, Southey. ,, Coleridge. ,, Shelley. ,, Wordsworth, , , Keats. Violets. Angelic Love. Twilight Music. Requiem. The Flower of the Ruins. The Rape of Aurora. South-West-Wind in the Woodland. Will o' the Wisp. Fair and False. Two Wedded Lovers watch'd the rising Moon I cannot Lose thee for a Day. Daphne. Should thy Love Die. London by Lamplight. * I am informed that this piece was first published in some magazine, but I have been unable to trace it. I should be glad if any reader can give me a reference to an earlier appearance of this, or of any other poem in this collection. xii i8si] George Meredith Under Boughs of breathing May. Pastorals (see pp. 101-5, an extended version of this fine poem appears at pp. 87-icx) of '* Poems and Lyrics," 1883). Beauty Rohtraut [originally appeared in The Leader, September 14, 1850, p. 597]. To a Skylark. Sorrows and Joys. The Flower unfolds its dawning cup. Thou to me art such a Spring. Antigone. Swathed round in Mist and Crown'd with Cloud. No, no, the falling Blossom is no sign. The Two Blackbirds. July. I would I were the Drop of Rain. Come to me in any shape. The Shipwreck of Idomeneus. The Longest Day. To Robin Redbreast. The Daisy now is out upon the green. Sunrise. Pictures of the Rhine. To a Nightingale. Reviews. — The Leader, pp. 635, 636, July 5, 1851. The Spec- tator, p. 642, July 5, 1851. The Athencetcm, p. S95, Aug. 23, 1851. The Critic, pp. 539, 540 (by William Michael Rossetti), Nov. 15, 1851. Fraser's Magazine, Vol. XLIV., pp. 629-31, Dec, 1851 (by Chas. Kingsley). Edinburgh Review, pp. 355, 356, Oct., 1856, The Curio (U.S.A.), pp. 265-7, by J. Rogers Rees, Jan.-Feb., 1888. Invitation to the Country (Poem). Fraser's Magazine^ Aug. 1851, Vol. XLIV., pp. 217, 218. (Not reprinted.) xiu A Bibliography of [1851-6 To Alex. Smith, the Glasgow Poet (Sonnet). The Leader^ Dec. 20, 1851, p. I2I2. (Not reprinted.) 1852. The Sweet o' the Year (Poem). Fraser's Magazine^ June, 1852, Vol. XLV., p. 699. 1856. THE I SHAVING OF SHAGPAT. | An Arabian Entertainment. | By | George Meredith. | Lon- don: ; Chapman & Hall, 193, Piccadilly. 1856. | \The author reserves the right of translating this work.] Crown 8vo, pp. viii. 384. The * 'remainder" of this Edition was sold off in red cloth, without lettering on side, with price (loj. 6d.) on back, and edges trimmed. This Edition has the following Prefatory Note : It has seemed to me that the only way to tell an Arabian Story was by imitating the style and manners of the Oriental Story-tellers. But such an attempt, whether successful or not, may read like a translation : I therefore think it better to prelude this Entertainment by an avowal that it springs from no Eastern source, and is in every respect an original Work. G. M. December 8, 1855. The Second Edition of this work was issued in 1865, by Messrs. Chapman & Hall, in the Series of "Standard Editions of Popular Authors," with a Frontispiece of " Bhanavar among the Serpents of Lake Kasatis ; " designed by F. Sandys and engraved by J. Saddler. Crown 8vo, pp. viii. 283, xiv ^856] George Meredith The following new Prefatory Note was written for this Edition : — " It has been suggested to me by one who has no fear of Allegories on the banks of the Nile, that the hairy Shagpat must stand to mean umbrageous Humbug conquering the sons of men ; and that Noorna bin Noorka represents the Seasons, which help us, if there is health in us, to dispel the affliction of his shadow ; while my heroic Shibli Bagarag is actually to be taken for Circumstance, which works under their changeful guidance towards our ultimate release from bondage, but with a disap- pointing apparent waywardness. The excuse for such behaviour as this youth exhibits, is so good that I would willingly let him wear the grand mask hereby offered to him. But, though his backslidings cry loudly for some sheltering plea, or garb of dignity, and though a story-teller should be flattered to have it supposed that anything very distinct was intended by him, the Allegory must be rejected altogether. The subtle Arab who conceived Shagpat, meant either very much more, or he meant less ; and my belief is, that, designing in his wisdom simply to amuse, he attempted to give a larger embrace to time than is possible to the profound dispenser of Allegories, which are mortal ; which, to be of any value, must be perfectly clear, and, when perfectly clear, are as little attractive as Mrs. Malaprop's reptile." This Edition has the following dedication: — "Affectionately inscribed to William Hardman, of Norbiton Hall." (Sir William Hardman, for 1 8 years Editor of The Morning Post, died on September ii, 1890, aged 62.) Another Edition was issued by Messrs. Chapman & Hall, in Pictorial Boards, at 2s., 12 mo, 1872. In this issue the Prefatory Note of the second edition is repeated. Reprinted, with " Farina," by Messrs. Chapman & Hall, in the Collected Editions of 1887 and 1889, in both XV A Bibliography of [1S56 of which the prefatory notes are omitted. Crown 8vo, pp. vi. 412. The Author's American Copyright Editions of this work were issued by Messrs. Roberts Brothers, Boston, simultaneously with the first and second English Collected Editions, and are identical with them. Reviews. — The Spectator^ p. 1366, Dec. 20, 1855. The Ex- aminer, Dec. 29, 1855. The Critic, p. 15, Jan. i, 1856. The AtJiencEum, pp. 6, 7, Jan. 5, 1856. The Leader, pp. 13-17, Jan. 5, 1856. The Sun, Jan. 8, 1856. Saturday Review, p. 216, Jan. 19, 1856. The Idler, No. 3, pp. 191, 192, March, 1856. Westj?iinsier Review, No. 18, N.S., Vol. IX., pp. 638, 639 (by George Eliot), April, 1856. The New Quarterly Review, No. 18, pp. 149-52, April, 1856. Pall Mall Gazette, ^. $, May 7, 1887. The Literary World (Boston), p. 285, Sept. 3, 1S87. xn i857] George Meredith 1857- FARINA : | A Legend of Cologne. | By | George Meredith, | author of " The Shaving of Shagpat." | London: | Smith, Elder, & Co., 65 Cornhill. | 1857. 1 Crown 8vo, pp. iv. unnumbered and 244. A Second Edition, with an engraved title-page by Mr. W. J. Linton, after the design of Mr. Walter Crane, was issued by Messrs. Smith, Elder, & Co. 1865. Cloth, crown 8vo, pp. 248. This work also appeared in 1865 in Smith, Elder, & Co.'s "Standard Authors" Series, at is. With the exception of the engraved title being used for the paper cover, this edition is identical with the second. In this series the work went into at least three editions, but I have only been able to collate the first and third editions in this form, the latter differs slightlj inasmuch as it was issued by Chapman & Hall, 1868, and has a printed title-page, Mr. Crane's design (in colours) being used for the cover. Reprinted with " The Shaving of Shagpat," by Messrs. Chapman & Hall, in the Collected Editions of 1887 and 1889. Crown 8vo, pp. vi. 412. The Author's American Copyright Editions of this work were issued by Messrs. Roberts Brothers, Boston, simultaneously with the first and second English Collected Editions, and are identical with them. Reviews. — T/ie Spectator, pp. 886, 887, Aug. 22, 1857. The Examiner, p. 532, Aug., 1857. The Saturday Review, p. 207, Aug. 29, 1857. The Leader, p. %y], Aug. 29, 1857. The Critic, p. 394, Sept. I, 1857. The Daily News, Sept. 3, 1857. The Globe, Sept. 7, 1857. The Press, p. 898, Sept. 12, 1857. Westminster Review, pp. 597-9, No. 24, Vol. XII., N.S. (by George Eliot), Oct., 1857. Morning Post, Nov. 20, 1857. Athenaum, pp. 1483, 1484, Nov. 28, 1857. Eclectic Review, pp. 457-61, May, 1^58. xvii A Bibliography of [1^59 1859. THE ORDEAL | OF | RICHARD FEVEREL. | A History of Father and Son. | By | George Meredith. | In three volumes. | London : | Chap- man & Hall, 193, Piccadilly. | 1859. | [The right of Translation is reserved.'^ Crown 8vo. Vol. I., pp. iv. 303; Vol. II., pp. iv. 348; Vol. III., pp. iv. 395. Second Edition. Frontispiece by C. O. M(urray). One vol. 8vo, pp. 484. Kegan Paul, 1878. In this edition, and in all subsequent ones, the work is largely altered and condensed. Reprinted by Messrs. Chapman & Hall, in the Collected Editions of 1885, 1888, and 1890. 8vo, pp. 472. The Author's American Copyright Editions of this work were issued by Messrs. Roberts Brothers, Boston, simultaneously with the first and second English Collected Editions, and are identical with them. A Colonial Edition, identical with the above, was printed for Messrs. G. Robertson & Co. in 1887. This work is included in Baron Tauchnitz's "Collection of British Authors." In 2 vols., pp. 632. 1875. Cheap Edition. Reprinted from the Revised Edition of 1 89 7, by George Newnes, Limited, London, by arrange- ment with Messrs. Archibald Constable & Co. Large crown 8vo, pp. 216. Paper wrapper, with portrait on front. xviii i859] George Meredith Compressed Translations. L'Epreuve de Richard Feverel : Roman de la vie Anglaise de M. George Meredith. Par M. E. D. Forgues. Revue des Deux Mondes. — Premiere Partie, April 15, 1865 ; Deuxieme Partie, May i, 1865 ; Derniere Partie, May 15, 1865. Riccardo Feverel. Per Giorgio Meredith. Versione dall' inglese di L. Padoa. Milano : Emilio Croci, Editore. 1873, 2 vols., i2mo, pp. 240. Pictorial paper wrappers. Reviews. — T'/^^ Critic, pp. 6, 7, July 2, 1859. The Leader, P- 7985 July 2, 1859. The AthencEum, p. 48, July 9, 1859. Saturday Review, pp. 48, 49, July 9, 1859. The Spectator, pp. 717, 718, July 9, 1859. The Illustrated London Nezvs, p. 165, Aug. 13, 1859. The Ti??ies, p. 5, Oct. 14, 1859. Westminster Review, Vol. XVI., N.S., p. 627, Oct. 14, 1859. Westminster Review, July, 1864. Copers Tobacco Plant, p. 5 (by James Thomson), May, 1879. Time, Vol. II., N.S., pp. 751, 752 (by Arthur Symons), Dec, 1883. Pall Mall Gazette, p. 5, Dec. 12, 1885. Vanity Fair, Jan. 16, 1886. The Song of Courtesy (Poem), with an Illustration by J. Tenniel. Once a Week, July 9, 1859, Vol. I., P- 30- (Not reprinted.) The Three Maidens (Poem), with an Illustration by Hablot K. Browne. Once a Week, July 30, 1859, Vol. I., p. 96. (Not reprinted.) Over the Hills (Poem), with an Illustration by Hablot K. Browne. Once a Week, Aug. 20, 1859, Vol. I., p. 160. (Not reprinted.) A Bibliography of C1859 The Crown of Love (Poem), with an Illustration by (Sir) J. E. Millais. Once a Week, Dec. 31, 1859. Vol. II., p. 10. (Not reprinted.) A STORY-TELLING PARTY. | Being a Recital OF Certain Miserable Days | and Nights Passed, Wherewith to Warm the Heart of the Christ- mas Season. (Unsigned) Once a Week, Dec. 24, 1859, PP- 535-542. (Not reprinted.) i86i] George Meredith 1861. EVAN HARRINGTON. | By | George Meredith, I author of " The Ordeal of Richard Feverel," | " The Shaving of Shagpat," | etc. | In 3 volumes. ) Lon- don : I Bradbury and Evans, 11, Bouverie Street. | 1 861. I [The right of translation is reserved.'\ Crown 8vo, Vol. I., pp. iv. 302 ; Vol. II., pp. iv. 279 ; Vol. III., pp. vii. 282. In 47 chapters. This work originally appeared in 47 chapters in Once a Week, with 40 illustrations by Charles Keene, from Feb. 11 to Oct. 13, i860, inclusive, under the title of "Evan Harrington; or, He would be a Gentleman." Second Edition, with a Frontispiece by Charles Keene, was issued by Messrs. Bradbury, Evans, & Co., 1866. I vol. crown 8vo, pp. iv. 519. Reprinted by Messrs. Chapman & Hall, in the Collected Editions of 1885 and 1889, pp. iv. 519. The Author's American Copyright Editions of this work were issued by Messrs. Roberts Brothers, Boston, simultaneously with the first and second English Collected Editions, and are identical with them. A Colonial Edition, identical with the above, was printed for Messrs. G. Robertson & Co. in 1888. A Bibliography of [1861 Unauthorised Edition. This work was published in America, by Messrs. Harper & Bros., in i860, before it had been reprinted in this country, with the sub-title, as follows : — " Evan Har- rington ; or. He would be a Gentleman," pp. 492, i2mo, cloth, 1 1. 50. Reviews. — Harpei^s Monthly Magazine, Vol. XXII., p. 260, Jan., 1861. Saturday Review, Jan. 19, 1861. The Spectator^ p. 66, Jan. 19, 1861. The Examiner, p. 183, March 23, 1861, Pall Mall Gazette, p. 5, Dec. 12, 1885. Vanity Fair, June 20., 1886. Time, Vol. II., N.s. (by Arthur Symons), pp. 631-3, Nov, 1885. xxii i862] George Meredith 1862. MODERN LOVE | AND | POEMS OF THE ENGLISH ROADSIDE, | WITH | POEMS AND BALLADS. I By | George Meredith, | Author of "The Shaving of Shagpat," "The Ordeal of Richard I Feverel," etc. | London: | Chapman & Hall, 193, Piccadilly. | 1862. | Extra fcap. 8vo, pp. viii. 216. Affectionately inscribed to Captain Maxse, R.N. Contents ; Grandfather Bridgeman. The Meeting (originally appeared in Once a Week, Sept. I, i860, Vol. III., p. 276, with an illustration by (Sir) J. E. Millais). Modern Love. Juggling Jerry (originally appeared in Once a Week, Sept. 3, 1859, Vol. I., pp. 189, 190, under the title of "The Last Words of Juggling Jerry," with an illustration by Hablot K. Browne). The Old Chartist (originally appeared in Once a Week, Feb. 8, 1862, Vol. VI., pp. 1S2-4, with an illustration by F. Sandys). The Beggar's Soliloquy (originally appeared in Once a Week, March 30, 1861, Vol. IV., pp. 378, 379, with an illustration by Charles Keene). The Patriot Engineer (originally appeared in O^ice a Week, Dec. 14, 1861, Vol. v., pp. 685-7, with an illustration by Charles Keene). Cassandra. The Young Usurper. Margaret's Bridal-Eve. Marian. The Head of Bran (originally appeared in Once a Week, Feb. 4, i860, Vol. IL, pp. 151, 132, with an illustration by (Sir) John K Millais). xxiii P A Bibliography of [1862 By Morning Twilight. Autumn Even-Song (originally appeared in Once a Weeky Dec. 3, 1859, Vol. L, p. 464). Unknown Fair Faces. Phantasy (originally appeared in Once a Week, Nov, 23, i86i, Vol. v., pp. 601, 602). Shemselnihar. " A Roar through the tall twin Elm-Trees." "When I would Image." " I chafe at Darkness." By the Rosanna. To F. M. {i.e.. Admiral Maxse) (originally appeared in Once a Week, Oct. 19, 1861, Vol. V., pp. 460-2). Ode to the Spirit of Earth in Autumn. The Doe : A Fragment from " Wandering Willie." Reviews. — The Critic, p. 487, May 17, 1862. *The Spectator^ pp. 580, 581, May 24, 1862. The Athcnceum, p. 719, May 31, 1862. Westviinster Review, Vol. XXII., N.S., p. 284, July, 1862. * This notice evoked the following interesting letter from Mr. Swinburne, which has never before been reprinted : — The Spectator y June 7, 1862, pp. 632, 633. Mr. George Meredith's " Modern Love." Sir, — I cannot resist asking the favour of admission for my protest against the article on Mr. Meredith's last volume of poems in the Spectator of May 24th. That I personally have for the writings, whether verse or prose, of Mr. Meredith, a most sincere and deep admiration is no doubt a matter of infinitely small moment. I wish only, in default of a better, to appeal seriously on general grounds against this sort of criticism as applied to one of the leaders of English literature. To any fair attack Mr. Meredith's books of course lie as much open as another man's; indeed, standing where he does, the very eminence of his post makes him perhaps more liable than a man of less well-earned fame to the periodical slings and arrows of publicity. Against such criticism no one would have a right to appeal, whether for his own work or for another's. But the writer of the article in xxiv i862] George Meredith question blinks at stating the fact that he is dealing with no unfledged pretender. Any work of a man who has won his spurs and fought his way to a foremost place among the men of his time, must claim at least a grave consideration and respect. It would hardly be less absurd, in remarking on a poem by Mr. Meredith, to omit all reference to his previous work, and treat the present book as if its author had never tried his hand at such writing before, than to criticise the Legoide des Siecles, or (coming to a nearer instance) the Idylls of the King, without taking into account the relative position of the great English or the greater French poet. On such a tone of criticism as this any one who may chance to see or hear of it has a right to comment. But even if the case were different, and the author were now at his starting-point, such a review of such a book is surely out of date. Praise or blame should be thoughtful, serious, careful, when applied to a work of such subtle strength, such depth of delicate power, such passionate and various beauty, as the leading poem of Mr. Meredith's volume : in some points, as it seems to me (and in this opinion I know that I have weightier judgments than my own to back me) a poem above the aim and beyond the reach of any but its author, Mr. Meredith is one of the three or four poets now alive whose work, perfect or imperfect, is always as noble in design as it is often faultless in result. The present critic falls foul of him for dealing with "a deep and painful sub- ject on which he has no conviction to express." There are pulpits enough for all preachers in prose ; the business of verse- writing is hardly to express convictions ; and if some poetry, not without merit of its kind, has at times dealt in dogmatic morality, it is all the worse and all the weaker for that. As to subject, it is too much to expect that all schools of poetry are to be for ever subordinate to the one just now so much in request with us, whose scope of sight is bounded by the nursery walls ; that all Muses are to bow down before her who babbles, with lips yet warm from their pristine pap, after the dangling delights of a child's coral ; and jingles with flaccid fingers one knows not whether a jester's or a baby's bells. We have not too many writers capable of duly handling a subject worth the serious interest of men. As to execution, take almost any sonnet at XXV A Bibliography of [1862 random out of this series, and let any man qualified to judge for himself of metre, choice of expression, and splendid language, decide on its claims. And, after all, the test will be unfair, except as regards metrical or pictorial merit ; every section of this great progressive' poem being connected with the other by links of the finest and most studied workmanship. Take, for example, that noble sonnet beginning " We saw the swallows gathering in the skies," a more perfect piece of writing no man alive has ever turned out; witness these three lines, the grandest perhaps of the book : " And in the largeness of the evening earth, Our spirit grew as we walked side by side ; The hour became her husband, and my bride ', " but in transcription it must lose the colour and effect given it by its place in the series ; the grave and tender beauty, which makes it at once a bridge and a resting-place between the admirable poems of passion it falls among. As specimens of pure power and depth of imagination at once intricate and vigorous, take the two sonnets on a false passing reunion of wife and husband ; the sonnet on the rose ; that other beginning : " I am not of those miserable males Who sniff at vice, and daring not to snap, Do therefore hope for Heaven." And, again, that earlier one : " All other joys of life he strove to warm." Of the shorter poems which give character to the book I have not space to speak here ; and as the critic has omitted noticing the most valuable and important (such as the "Beggar's Soli- loquy" and the "Old Chartist," equal to Beranger for com- pleteness of effect and exquisite justice of style, but noticeable for a thorough dramatic insight, which Beranger missed through his personal passions and partialities), there is no present need to go into the matter. I ask you to admit this protest simply out of justice to the book in hand, believing as I do that it expresses the deliberate unbiassed opinion of a sufficient number xxvi i862] George Meredith of readers to warrant the insertion of it, and leaving to your consideration rather their claims to a fair hearing than those of the book's author to a revised judgment. A poet of Mr. Meredith's rank can no more be profited by the advocacy of his admirers than injured by the rash and partial attack of his critics. A. C. SWINBURNE. MODERN LOVE | a Reprint | To which is added | The Sage Enamoured and the Honest Lady | By | George Meredith. | London | Macmillan & Co. | and New York | 1892 | All rights reserved. Fcap. 8vo, pp. viii. unnumbered and i to 107; at foot of verso of page 107 : " Printed by T. & A. Constable, Printers to Her Majesty, | at the Edinburgh University Press." Bound in dark blue cloth, lettered on back. Contents : The Promise of Disturbance. Modern Love. The Sage Enamoured and the Honest Lady. ' * Love is Winged for Two." **Ask, is Love Divine." '♦Joy is Fleet." The Lesson of Grief. Dedication on page v., " To | Admiral Maxse | in Constant Friendship." Also an Edition of " Modern Love," with a " Foreword by E. Cavazzi." Post 8vo. Limited to four hundred copies. Published by Thomas B. Mohser, Portland, Maine, U.S.A. 1891. A large paper edition was published of above. A Bibliography of [1864 1864. EMILIA IN ENGLAND | By | George Meredith I author of" Evan Harrington " "The Ordeal of Richard Feverel" | "The Shaving of Shagpat " | In three volumes | London: | Chapman & Hall, 193, Picca- dilly. I 1864. I \The right of Translation is j'eserved.'\ Crown 8vo, Vol. I., pp. iv. 306 ; Vol. II., pp. iv. 285 ; Vol. III., pp. iv. 338. Reprinted by Messrs. Chapman & Hall in the Collected Editions of 1887 and 1889, under the title of" Sandra Belloni." Originally " Emilia in England," pp. vii. 462. The Author's American Copyright Editions of this work were issued by Messrs. Roberts Brothers, Boston, simultaneously with the first and second English Collected Editions, and they are identical with them. A Compressed Translation. Sandra Belloni : Roman de la Vie Anglaise, de M. George Meredith. Par M. E. D. Forgues.* * It may be interesting to note that Mr. Arthur Symons has recently picked up in Paris, on the Quai des Grands Augustins, first editions of Richard Feverel and E7nilia m England — both of them presentation copies. The flyleaf of the former has " With the Author's compliments," and, below, " M. Buloz," not in Mr. Meredith's handwriting. On the title-page of the latter Mr. Meredith has written : " Monsieur E. D. Forgues — Hommages de I'Auteur." Revue des Deux Mondes. — Premiere Partie, Nov. 15, 1864. Seconde Parti-;, Dec. i, 1864. Derniere Partie, Dec. 15, 1864. xxviii iS64] George Meredith Reprinted in a volume as follows : — Sandra Belloni : L'Anneau D'Amasis ; La Famille Du Docteur. Imitations de 1' Anglais. Par E. D. Forgues. Paris : Librairie de L. Hachette et Cie., Boulevard Saint Germain, No. 77. 1866. 8vo, pp. 355, of which " Sandra Belloni " occupies the first 212 pages. Reviews. — The Reader (by (Dr.) Richard Garnett), April 23, 1864. The Athen(zum, p. 609, April 30, 1864. Saturday Review, p. 660, May 28, 1864. Westminster Review, p. 253, July, 1864. The Examiner, p. 469, July 23, 1864. Pall Mall Gazette, p. 5, June 14, 1886. Time (by Arthur Symons), Vol. III., N.S., pp. 379, 380, March, 1886. The Story of Sir Arnulph (Poem). Once a Week, Jan. 23, 1864, Vol. X., p. 126. (Not reprinted.) XXIX A Bibliography of [1865 1865. RHODA FLEMING. | A Story. | By | George Meredith, | author of | " The Ordeal of Richard Feverel," " Evan Harrington," etc. etc. | In three volumes. | London : | Tinsley Brothers, Catherine Street, Strand. | 1865. | [All rights of Translation and Reproduction are reserved.^ Crown 8vo, Vol. I., pp. vi. 331 ; Vol. II., pp. vi. 291 ; Vol. III., pp. vi. 256. Reprinted by Messrs. Chapman & Hall, in the Collected Editions of 1886 and 1890. Crown 8vo, pp. vii. 399. These editions are considerably revised. The Author's American Copyright Editions of this work were issued by Messrs. Roberts Brothers, Boston, simultaneously with the first and second English Collected Editions, and are identical with them. This work, with an Introductory Note of three pages, signed "P. R.," is included in the "Colonial Edition" of " Petherick's Collection of Favourite and Approved Authors," 1889. Reviews. — The Illustrated London News, p. 307, Sept. 30, 1865. Athenaum,'^. ^^'^, Oct. 14, 1865. Saturday Review, p. 489, Oct. 14, 1865. Morning Post, p. 2, Oct. 18, 1865. Pall Mall Gazette, pp. 842, 843, Oct. 26, 1865. Westminster Review, Vol. XXIX., N.S., p. 285, Jan., 1866. Vanity Fair, Jan. 26, 1 886. Athenceum (New Edition), pp. 137, 138 (by W. E. Henley), July 31, 1886. Time^ Vol. IV., N.S., pp. 248, 249 (by Arthur Symons), Aug., 1886. XXX 1867] George Meredith 1867. * VITTORIA. I By | George Meredith. | In three volumes. | London: | Chapman & Hall, 193, Picca- dilly. I MDCCCLXii. I [Legal Rights reserved.'] Post 8vo, Vol. I., pp. iv. 317 ; Vol. II., pp. iv. 333 ; Vol. III., pp. iv. 288. In 46 chapters. This work originally appeared in the Fortniglitly Review^ in 46 chapters, from Jan. 15, 1866, to Dec. i, 1866, inclusive. Reprinted by Messrs. Chapman & Hall, in the Collected Editions of 1886 and 1889, pp. vii. 500. The Author's American Copyright Editions of this work were issued by Messrs. Roberts Brothers, Boston, simultaneously with the first and second English Collected Editions, and are identical with them. Reviews. — Pall Mall Gazette, p. loii, Jan. 25, 1867. The Saturday Review, p. 149, Feb. 2, 1867. The Spectator, pp. 161, 162, Feb. 9, 1867. The Athenaum, p. 248, Feb. 23, 1867. Pall Mall Gazette^ p. 5, June 14, 1886. ■* The references in this work to ' ' The Chief " are to Mazzini, and I have seen or heard it stated that an Italian newspaper had reprinted these references as the best estimate of their great patriot, but as I have been unable to verify this statement, I should feel obliged to any correspondents who would supply me with information on this subject. xxxi A Bibliography of [1867-8 La Maison Forestiere (Critical Note on). The Fort- nightly Review^ Jan. I, 1867, pp. 126-8. (Not reprinted.) Training in Theory and Practice. By Archibald Maclaren (Critical Note on). The Fortnightly Review, March, 1867, pp. 380-2. (Not reprinted.) Lines to a Friend Visiting America (Poem). [These lines were addressed to Mr. John Morley. During Mr. Morley's absence Mr. Meredith took charge of The Fortnightly. '\ The Fortnightly Review, Dec, 1867, pp. 727-31- (Not reprinted.) 1868. Saint Paul (Poem). By Frederic H. Myers (Critical Note on). The Fortnightly Review, Jan., 1868, pp. 115-7- (Not reprinted.) Countess of Brownlow's Reminiscences (Critical Note on). The Fortnightly Review, Feb. i, 1868, pp. 229-32. (Not reprinted.) Mr. Robert Lytton's Poems (Signed Article). The Fortnightly Review, June, 1868, pp. 658-72. (Not reprinted.) xxxii 1869-70] George Meredith 1869. Homer's Iliad in English Rhymed Verse. By Charles Merivale (Critical Note on). The Fortnightly Review^ May, 1869, pp. 629-30. (Not reprinted.) Extracts from a Letter, dated June 25, 1869, to John Holden, on Edgar Poe's " Raven." Messrs. Sotheby, Wilkinson, & Hodge's Sale Catalogue of Autograph Letters, Lot 145, p. 22, Nov. 27, 1889. 1870. In the Woods (Poem in nine stanzas). The Fortnightly Review^ Aug., 1870, pp. 179-83. Portions of this poem have been altered and reprinted. See "Whimper of Sympathy," pp. 63, 64, Ballads and Poems, 1887 ; "Woodland Peace," pp. 52-4, and "Dirge in Woods," pp. 64, 65, of A Reading of Earth, 1888. Also in later editions. xxxui A Bibliography of C1871 1871. THE ADVENTURES | OF | HARRY RICH- MOND. I By I George Meredith. | In three vols. I London: | Smith, Elder & Co., 15, Water- loo Place. I 187 1. I [All rights reserved.'] Crown Svo, Vol. I., pp. iv. 318, and i unnumbered; Vol. II., pp. iv. 325; Vol. HI., pp. iv. 298, and i unnumbered. In 60 chapters. The second edition, identical with the above, was also issued in 1871. This work originally appeared in 60 chapters, in Cornhill, with 15 initial and 15 full-page illustrations by Mr. George Du Maurier, from Sept. 1870 to Nov. 1871, inclusive. Reprinted by Messrs. Chapman & Hall, in the Collected Editions of 1887 and 1889, pp. 544. The Author's American Copyright Editions of this work were issued by Messrs. Roberts Brothers, Boston, simultaneously with the first and second English Collected Editions, and are identical with them. A Colonial Edition, identical with the above, was printed for Messrs. G. Robertson & Co. in 1887. Reviews. — Athenceiim^ p. 590, Nov. 4, 1871. Daily News^ Nov. 6, 1 87 1. The Echo, ^o\. 10, 1871. The Examiner, p. 11 22, Nov, II, 1 87 1. The Illustrated London News, p. 466, Nov. 11, 1 87 1. The Daily Telegraph, Nov. 20, 187 1. The Graphic, Nov. 25, 1S71. The Morning Post, Dec. 2, 187 1. Westminster Review y Vol. XLI., N.S., p. 274, Jan., 1872. The Spectator, pp. 79, 80, Jan. 20, 1872. The Australasian, Feb. 10, 1872. Vanity Fair, March 16, 1872. Blackiuood's Magazitie, p. 755, June, 1872. Pall Mall Gazette, p. 5, Jan. 14, 1886. Vanity Fair, June 20, 1886. TiT?ie, Vol. III., N.S., pp. 247, 248 (by Arthur Symons), Feb., 1886. 1876] George Meredith 1876. BEAUCHAMP'S CAREER. | By George Meredith, | author of " The Shaving of Shagpat," " The Ordeal of Richard | Feverel," etc., etc. | In three volumes. | London: | Chapman & Hall, 193, Piccadilly. | 1876. | [A/l rights reserved.'] Crown 8vo, Vol. I., pp. vii. 312; Vol. II., pp. vii. 318; Vol. III., pp. vii. 339. In 56 chapters. This work originally appeared in The Fortnightly Review, in 56 chapters, from Aug. 1874 to Dec. 1875, inclusive. Reprinted by Messrs. Chapman & Hall, in the Collected Editions of 1886 and 1889, pp. vii. 506. The Author's American Copyright Editions of this work were issued by Messrs. Roberts Brothers, Boston, simultaneously with the first and second English Collected Editions, and are identical with them. This work, with an Introductory Note of three pages, signed "P. R.," is included in the "Colonial Edition" of " Petherick's Collection of Favourite and Approved Authors." 1889. This work is also included in Baron Tauchnitz's "Collection of British Authors." 2 Vols., p. 672. 1866. Reviews. — Daily Nexvs, Dec. 22, 1875. Athenmim, p. 19, Jan. i, 1876. The Standard, Jan. 4, 1876. The Exa?ni7ter, p. 45, by G. B. S. [i.e., Geo. Barnett Smith), Jan. 8, 1876. The limes, p. 4, Jan. 8, 1876. The Graphic, Jan. 8, 1876. The Academy, p. 51, by Dr. R. F. Littledale, Jan. 15, 1876. Pall iV all Gazette, pp. 11, 12, Feb. 5, 1876. Canadian Monthly, pp. 341-343, May, 1876. Saturday Reviezu, May 13, 1876. Cope's Tobacco Plant (by James Thomson), June, 1876. The Secularist (by James Thomson), 1876. Time, Vol. IV., n.s., pp. 508, 509 (by Arthur Symons), Oct., 1886. XXXV A Bibliography of [1879 1879. THE EGOIST | A Comedy in Narrative | By | George Meredith | In three volumes. | London j C. Kegan Paul & Co., i, Paternoster Square | 1879 I Crown 8vo, Vol. I., pp. v. 337 ; Vol. II., pp. iv. 320; Vol. III., pp. iv. 353. Second Edition, with a Frontispiece by H. M. P[aget], was issued, in one Volume, by Messrs. Kegan Paul & Co. 1880. Crown 8vo, pp. 505. Reprinted by Messrs. Chapman & Hall, in the Collected Editions of 1886 and 1890, pp. vii. 505. The Author's American Copyright Editions of this work were issued by Messrs. Roberts Brothers, Boston, simultaneously with the first and second English Collected Editions, and are identical with them. Unauthorised Editions. No. 90 in " Harper's Franklin Square Library." 15 cents. No. 1 150 in George Munro's (N.Y.) " Seaside Library," 2 Vols., pp. 458, Dec. 26, 18S8. Reviews. — Athe>iLeuf?i, p. 555 (by W. E. Henley), Nov. i, 1879. The Examiner^ p. 1409, Nov. i, 1879. ^^^ Spectator ^ pp. 1383, 1384, Nov. I, 1879. Pall Mall Gazette, p. lO (by W. E. Henley), Nov. 3, 1879. Daily News, p. 6, Nov. 12, 1879. Satm-day Review, p. 607, Nov. 15, 1879. The Academy, p. 369 (by W. E. Henley), Nov. 22, 1879. Copes lobacco Plant (by James Thomson), Jan., 1880. NcW Quarterly Magazine, pp. 228-232, Jan., 1880. British Quarterly (by Henry Allon, D.D.), p. 232, Jan., 1880. Westminster Review, Vol. LVH., N.s., p. 287, Jan., lb8o. The Teacher, p. 130 (by W. E. Henley), Feb. 14, 1880. Blackwood^s Magazine, Vol. CXXVHI., pp. 401-404, Sept., 18S0. Pall Mall Gazette, p. 5, May 7, 1887. Twie, Vol. IV., N.s., p. 755 (by Arthur Symons), Dec, 18S6. xxxvi i88o] George Meredith 1880. THE TRAGIC COMEDIANS | A Study in a WELL-KNOWN Story. | (Enlarged from The Fort- nightly Review.^ \ By | George Meredith. | In two volumes. | London: | Chapman & Hall, Limited, 193, Piccadilly. 1880. {All Rights Reserved.) Crown 8vo, Vol. I., pp. iv. unnumbered and 199 ; Vol. II., pp. iv. unnumbered and 181. In 17 chapters. Many copies of this edition were bound up in one volume, with 1 88 1 substituted for 1880. This story originally appeared in The Fortnightly Review, in 15 chapters, from Oct. 1880 to Feb. 1881, inclusive. Another Edition was issued by Messrs. Ward, Lock, & Co., in the "Select Authors" Series, at 2s. (1881). One Vol. crown 8vo, pictorial boards, pp. 309. This work is included in Baron Tauchnitz's "Collection of British Authors," pp. 280, 1881. " The Tragic Comedians " tells the story of an episode in the life of Ferdinand Lassalle — the love-episode which led to his tragic death. All the characters are real people, only the names being changed. Mr. Meredith's main authority was the book written by the heroine of his narrative, Helene von Racowitza {nde Helene von Donniges), entitled " Meine Beziehungen zu Ferdinand Lassalle." The book was published at Breslau, in 1879, by Schottlaender (pp. 188). See also for an account of the situation from a more independent standpoint, " Lassalle's Tod. Im Anschluss an die memoriess der Helene von Raco- witza : Meine Beziehungen zu Ferdinand Lassalle zur Erganzung derselben." Chemnitz: Ernest Schnieizner. 1880. New Edition, revised and corrected by the Author, with an Introductory Note on Ferdinand Lassalle by xxxvii A Bibliography of [isso Clement Shorter. Crown 8vo, pp. 258, with auto- graph portrait in Photogravure. Green cloth. Ward, Lock, Bowden, & Co. Subjoined are some of the principal characters and their English substitutes. Real Nafnes. Characters in the Novel. Ferdinand Lassalle Sigismund Alvan. Helene von Donniges Yanko von Racowitza Baron Korff Countess von Hatzfeldt Rustow Clotilde von Riidiger. Marko Romaris. Count Kollin. Lucie Baroness von Crefeldt. Tresten. Dr. Haenle Dr. Storchel. The following articles also throw considerable light on the characters in this book : — Ferdinand Lassalle : The German Social Democrat. By J. M. Ludlow. The Fortnightly Review, A^T\\ 1869, PP- 419-453- A Son of the New Time. Temple Bar, March, 1881, pp. 314-329. An Episode in the Life of Ferdinand Lassalle (with a portrait). By M. Walters. The Universal Review, Aug. 15, 1890, pp. 521-534. Reviews. — The Athenceum, Jan. 8, 18S1. Daily News, p. 3, Jan. 27, 1 88 1. Scotsniati, p. 6, Jan. 28, 1 88 1. Truth, Jan. 28, 1881. The World, Feb. 7, 1881. Westminster Review, Vol. LIX., N.S., p. 612, April, 1881. Melbourne Argus, May 14, 1881. Letter to James Thomson (" B.V.") See the " Life of James Thomson," by H. S. Salt, pp. 153; 154- xxxviii i883] George Meredith 1883. POEMS AND LYRICS | OF | THE JOY OF EARTH I By | George Meredith | London | Macmillan & Co. | 1883. Extra fcap. 8vo, pp. ix. 181, and a Note on unnumbered page at end Inscribed to James Cotter Morison. Antistans mihi milihtis irecentis. Contents. The Woods of Westermain. A Ballad of Past Meridian (originally appeared in The Fortnightly Revieiv, June, 1 876, p. 829). The Day of the Daughter of Hades. The Lark Ascending (originally appeared in The Fortnightly Revieiv, May, 1 88 1, pp. 588-591). Phoebus with Admetus (originally appeared in MacmillarCs Magazme, Dec, 18S0, Vol. XLIII,, pp. 122-4). Melampus. Love in the Valley (originally appeared in Macmillan's Magazme, Oct., 1 878, Vol. LI., pp. 445-51. Reprinted in "Patchwork," by Mr. Frederick Locker, 1879, pp. 142-5. Mr. Locker adds the following note : — "We can picture to ourselves the boy poet of these charming lines, like Keats, hardly out of his teens"). The Three Singers to Young Blood. The Orchard and the Heath (originally appeared in Mac- miliar^ s Magazhte, Feb., 1868, pp. 362-6). Martin's Puzzle (originally appeared in The Fortnightly Review, June, 1865, pp. 239-41). xxxix Q A Bibliography of [1883 Earth and Man. A Ballad of Fair Ladies in Revolt (originally appeared in The Fortnightly Review^ Aug., 1876, pp. 232-41). Sonnets. Lucifer in Starlight. The Star Sirus. Sense and Spirit. Earth's Secret. Tu c • % <■ ci, 1 ( originally appeared in The Spirit of Shakespeare, I %,, \, , ^. , -{ The AtheiKxiim, continued. I ^ , 00 o I Feb. 10, 1883, p. 184. Internal Harmony. Grace and Love. Appreciation. The Discipline of Wisdom, The State of Age. Progress. The World's Advance. A Certain People. The Garden of Epicurus. A Later Alexandrian. An Orson of the Muse. The Point of Taste. Camelus Saltat, continued. To J. M. (John Morley), originally appeared in The Fortnightly Review, June, 1867, p. 696. To a Friend Recently Lost, T. T. (Tom Taylor), origi- nally appeared in The Cornhill Magazine, Oct., 1880. My Theme, continued. Time and Sentiment (originally appeared in The Fort- nightly Review, April, 1870, p. 432, under the title of " A Mark in Time "). Reviews. — The limes, June 11, 1883. St. Jameses Gazette , PP- 6, 7, June 25, 1883. Pall Mall Gazette, June 29, 1883. The Academy, by Mark Pattison, pp. 37, 38, July 21, 1883 (reprinted in The Literary News (U.S.A.), pp. 318, 319, Oct., 1883). The xl I 1883] George Meredith Scotsman, July 21, 1883. Manchester Guardian, July 23, 1883. AthencEtwi, pp. 103-5 (by Theodore Watts), July 28, 1883. Merry England (by Mrs. Alice Meynell), Aug., 1^83. Literary World, Aug. 3, 1883. Glasgow Herald, Aug. 7, 1883. See also letter headed "A Voyage round the World" (by Moncure D. Conway), Glasgow Herald, Aug. 14, 1883. The Contemporary Review, by W. P. Ker, Sept., 1883. Melbourne Aj-gus, Sept. 15, 1883. Fortnightly Review, by W. L. Courtney, pp. 717, 718, Nov., 1883. Daily News, Dec. 4, 1883. Literary World (Boston, U.S.A.), p. 454, Dec. 15, 1883. Critic (U.S.A.), Dec. 29, 1883. Annual Register, 1883. sU A Bibliography of [1885 1885. DIANA OF THE CROSSWAYS | A Novel | By | George Meredith | Considerably enlarged from " The ForUiightly Review " | In Three Volumes | London : Chapman and Hall | Limited | 1885 | \All Rights re- served^ Crown 8vo. Vol. I., pp. viii. 344 ; Vol. II., pp. vi. 335 ; Vol. III., pp. vi. 330. In 43 chapters. Inscribed to Frederick Pollock. Three editions in this form were exhausted in 1885. Twenty-six chapters of this work (down to chap. 8, Vol. III.) originally appeared in The Fortnightly Review^ from June to December, 1884, inclusive. Reprinted by Messrs. Chapman & Hall, in the Collected Editions of 1885 ^"^^ 1889, pp. vi. 348. The Author's American Copyright Editions of this work were issued by Messrs. Roberts Brothers, Boston, simultaneously with the first and second English Collected Editions, and they are identical with them. A Colonial Edition, identical with the above, was printed for Messrs. E. A. Petherick & Co., in 1887. Unauthorised Editions. No. 468 in *' Harper's Franklin Square Library." Price 20 cents. No. 350 in George Munro's (N.Y.) " Seaside Library," p. 106, i2mo. 10 cents. xlii i885] George Meredith This Edition was obviously reprinted from The Fortnightly RcvirM ; it is consequently only a fragment (down to chap. 2i), although no intimation to the effect appears. The Author's concluding words of reference to an "extended chronicle" being studiously omitted. A Burlesque (by Rudolph C. Lehmann) of this work, under the title of " Joanna of the Cross Ways " (by George Verimyth, author of Richard's Several Editions^ The Aphorist, Shampoo's Shaving-Pot), appeared as No. 3 of " Mr. Punch's Prize Novels," with an illustration by E. T. R. Punchy Oct. 18, 1890, pp. 191, 192. Reviews. — The Gtiardian, Feb. 25, 1885. The Academy, p. 147, by James Ashcroft Noble, Feb. 28, 1885. Court Circular, Mar. 2, 1885. Vanity Fair, Mar. 2, 1885. Daily News (Leader), Mar. 10, 1885. Whitehall Review, Mar. 12, 1885. Athenaum, pp. 339, 340 (by W. E. Henley), Mar. 14, 1S85. The Graphic, Mar. 14, 1885. St. James's Gazette, Mar. 16, 1885. Saturday Review, pp. 389, 390 (by Cosmo Monkhouse), Mar. 21, 1S85. Pall Mall Gazette, p. 4, Mar. 28, 1885. Illustrated London N'lWS,Mzx. 22,, 1885. Scots?7ian, p. 5, Mar. 30, 1885. The Literary World, pp. 322, 323, April 3, 1885. Glasgow Herald, p. 6, April 9, 1885. The Spectator, pp. 517, 518, April 18, 1885. Truth, April 23, 1885. The Titnes, June I, 18S5. Standard, ]\xnQ 2, i2,2>-j. Literary World {'Boston, \5.S. A.), July 25, 1^85. A Letter to the Queen on Lord Cranworth's Marriage and Divorce Bill. By the Hon. Mrs. Norton. " Only a woman's hair." London : Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans. 1855. Demy 8vo, pp. 155. Mr. Le Gallienne writes me — xliii A Bibliography of [1885-6 *'I don't know that there is any authoritative warrant for the inclusion of Mrs. Norton's ' Letter ' among Meredithiana, but the gossip which identifies her with Diana is, of course, sufficiently general to make a conjectural inclusion imperative. "That the gossip is well founded a very cursory perusal of the letter puts quite beyond doubt, the circumstances are too nearly parallel to admit of hesitation. " If it really be so, a very interesting artistic comparison might be made between this original Diana and her of the Crossways. Brilliant as the letter is, it suffers from a hysterical rhetoric that differentiates them to a degree which bears triumphant witness to Meredith's creative power." On the Danger of War (Sonnet). May I, 1885, p. 3. (Not reprinted.) Pall Mall Gazelle, 1886. A Pause in the Strife (Pohtical Article). Pall Mall Gazette, July 9, 1886. (Not reprinted.) Concessions to the Celt (Essay). Fortnightly Review, Oct., 1886, pp. 448-51. (Not reprinted.) To Cardinal Manning (Sonnet). Pall Mall Gazette, Nov. 5, 1886. (Not reprinted.) xliv 188;] George Meredith 1887. BALLADS AND POEMS | OF | TRAGIC LIFE | By I George Meredith | London | Macmillan and Co. | And New York | 1887 | [All rights re- served]. Extra fcap. 8vo, pp. vi. unnumbered and 160. This work was also issued by Messrs. Roberts Brothers, Boston, in 1887. Contents : The Two Masks. Archduchess Anne. The Song of Theodolinda (originally appeared in The Co7'nhill Magazine, Sept. 1872, pp. 308-12). A Preaching from a Spanish Ballad (originally , appeared in The Fortnightly Review, Kyxg.^ 1886). The Young Princess (originally appeared in The English Illustrated Magazine, Dec, 1886, pp. 184-90). King Harald's Trance. "Whimper of Sympathy (originally appeared in The Fortnightly Review, Aug., 1870, as part of "In the Woods "). Young Reynard. Manfred. Hernani. The Nuptials of Attila (originally appeared in The New Quarterly Alagazine, ]3.n., 1879, pp. 47-62). Aneurin's Harp (originally appeared in The Fort- nightly Review, Sept., 1871, pp. 255-9). xlv A Bibliography of [1887 France, December, 1870 (originally appeared in The Forttiightly Review, Jan., 187 1, pp. 86-94). Men and Man. The Last Contention. Periander. Solon. Bellerophon. Phaethon (originally appeared in The Fortnightly Review^ Sept., 1S67, pp. 293-5). Notes. Reviews. — Pall Mall Gazette, p. 5, May 26, 1887. The Athenmim, p. 759 (by W. E. Henley), June ii, 1887. The Academy, p. 406, by J. M. Gray, June 11, 1887. The Saturday Review, p. 851 (by W. E. Henley), June ii, 1887. The Curio (U.S.A.), by Stuart Merrill, p. 267, Jan. and Feb., 1888. The Critic (U.S.A.), p. 242, Nov. 17, 1888. Progress (by G. W. Foote), pp. 218-21, July, 1S87. Letter on the Ambleside Railway. Pall Mall Gazette^ Feb. 25, 1887, P- 4- (Not reprinted.) Mr. George Meredith's Contribution under the head of " Fine Passages in Prose and Verse Selected by Living Men of Letters." The Fortnightly Review^ Aug., 1887, pp. 310-13. "The 24th ///a^ contains the highest reaches in poetry." "In Modern English Verse I would cite for excellence Keats' Ode to a Grecian Urn, and Ode to Atitumu ; Tennyson's CEnone ; the Kubla Khan of Coleridge." "In Modern Prose the description of Rachel, under title of 'Vashti,' in Villette, by Charlotte Bronte, chapter 23rd. "In Poetry, Mr. Meredith gives the whole of the second scene in the fourth act of Shakespeare's Henry VIIIP xlvi i887] George Meredith "Further, Mr. Meredith gives the passage from Virgil's ALneid^ Book iv., knovra as Dido's Lament." " In Prose Mr. Meredith gives Hamlet's Speech to the Players, and also the passage from Villette in which Charlotte Bronte describes the great French actress, Rachel." "Further, Mr. George Meredith gives the passage in the Memoires of St. Simon which describes the character of the Regent Orleans." To Children : For Tyrants (Poem). The English Illustrated Magazine^ Dec, 1887, pp. 184-6. (Not reprinted.) xlvii A Bibliography of [isss 1888. A READING OF EARTH | By | George Mere- dith I London | Macmillan and Co. | and New York I 1888 I [All rights reserved.'^ Extra fcap. 8vo, pp. vi. 136. Contents : Seed-Time. Hard Winter. The South-Western. The Thrush in February (originally appeared in Mac77iillan^ s Magazine, Aug., 1885, pp. 265-71). The Appeasement of Demeter (originally appeared in Macmillan^ Magazine, Sept., 1887, Vol. LVI., PP- 374-7)- Earth and a Wedded Woman. Mother to Babe (originally appeared in The English Illustrated Alagazine, Oct., 1886, p. 26, with an illustration by the Poet's son, Mr. W. Maxse Meredith). Woodland Peace (originally appeared in The Fort- nightly Review, Aug., 1 870, as part of "In the Woods "). The Question Whither. Outer and Inner. Nature and Life. Dirge in Woods (originally appeared in The Fort- nightly Review, Aug., 1870, as part of "In the Woods "). A Faith on Trial. Change in Recurrence. xlviii i888] George Meredith Hymn to Colour. Meditation under Stars. Woodman and Echo. The Wisdom of Eld. Earth's Preference. Society. Winter Heavens. Epitaphs. M. M. (Mrs. Meredith. Mrs. Meredith died Sept. 17, 1885.) The Lady C. M. (Lady Caroline Maxse. Lady Caroline died Jan., 1886.) J. C. M. (James Cotter Morison. Mr. Morison died Feb. 26, 1 888. Mr. Meredith and Mr. John Morley were Mr. Morison's executors.) Islet the Dachs. Gordon of Khartoum. The Emperor Frederick of our Time. The Year's Sheddings. Reviews. By Mr. Meredith's special request no copies of this work were sent out for review ; I have, however, met with the four following notices : — The Scots Observer, pp. 274, 275, Jan. 26, 18S9. Manchester Guardian, Feb. 4, 1889. The Scottish Art Review, pp. 263-5, by William Sharp, Feb. 4, 1889. National Reformer (by G. W. Foote), Feb. 24, 1889. A Stave of Roving Tim (Poem). The Reflector, Feb. 5, 1888, pp. 119, 120. (Not reprinted.) On this subject Mr. Charles Strachey kindly sends me the following very interesting note : — xlix A Bibliography of [i The Reflector, a weekly paper edited by Mr. J. K. Stephen, which began and ended a not inglorious career in the earlier half of 1888, contains in its advertisement columns (Jan. 29, p. 112), the following announcement : — "The gentleman who recently asked a younger man what the dickens he expected to come to if he started in life as a Tory, is referred to the precedent of Mr. Gladstone." That "The gentleman" and the "younger man" were Mr. Meredith and the editor of The Reflector respectively, appears from the next issue of the paper (Feb. 5, p. 119), which contains a poem of eight stanzas by Mr. Meredith, called "A Stave of Roving Tim," prefaced by the following characteristic letter. The reference to "the triolets of the French piano," is an allusion to the large number of poems in triolet form which had appeared in The Reflector. "Sir, — The senior (see your Advertisement columns) who met that young Joseph Hofmann of politics, with the question as to the future of the youthful Tory, is impressed by The Rc/lcctor's repartee, in which he desires to find a very hopeful promise, that may presently dispel strange images of the prodigy growing onionly, and showing a seedy head when one appears. Mean- while, he sends you a lyric out of many addressed encouragingly to certain tramps, who are friends of his, for the purpose ot driving a breath of the country through your pages, though he has no design of competing with the exquisite twitter of the triolets of the French piano which accompanied your birth, and bids fair to sound your funeral notes. Yours, &c., "George Meredith." The Pilgrim's Scrip : or, Wit and Wisdom of George Meredith. With Selections from his Poetry, and an Introduction. Boston (U.S.A.) : Roberts Bros. 1888. This volume has a portrait and an introduction more or less personal, of 50 pages by Mrs. Gilman. 1 I888-90] George Meredith Reviews. — The Bi-itish Weekly, p. 187, Jan. 18, 1889. Scots Obsei-ve?; p. 245, July 20, 1889. 1889. Mr. Meredith's Opinion of Jas. Thomson ("B. V.") See " The Life of James Thomson," by H. S. Salt, pp. 179, 180. " On Hearing the News from Venice " (Sonnet on the Death of Robert Browning). Pall Mall Gazette, Dec. 14, 1889, p. I. See also Mr. W. Sharp's " Life of Browning," pp. 197, 198. A facsimile of this Sonnet was given in the Fall Mall Budget, Dec. 19, 1889, p. 1623. (Not reprinted.) 1890. The Art of Authorship : Methods of Work, and Advice to Young Beginners. Personally Contributed by leading Authors of the Day. Compiled and Edited by George Bainton. Contribution by Mr. Meredith, pp. 129-32. Letters on above Subject. The Author, June 16, 1890. Vol. I., No. 2, p. 45. The Riddle for Men (Poem). 77!^ Paternoster Review, Nov., 1890, No. 2, Vol. I., p. loi. (Not reprinted.) li A Bibliography of [1891 1891. ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS | By | George Meredith | In three volumes | London : Chapman and Hall, Limited. | 1891 | [All rights reservedly. Crown 8vo. Vol. I., pp. iv., unnumbered, and i to 302 ; Vol. IL, pp. iv., numbered, and i to 320; Vol. IIL, pp. iv., numbered, and i to 307 ; verso blank. At the foot of the last page of each volume : " Printed by William Clowes and Sons, Limited, London and Beccles." Chapters, Vol. L, 15; Vol. II., 13; Vol. III., 14. In all 52, numbered separately. Bound in blue cloth, lettered on back. Originally appeared in The Fortnightly Review , The Australasian, and the Sunday Edition of The Sun (New York) simultaneously, from Oct., 1890, Reprinted by Messrs. Chapman & Hall in the Collected Editions, 1892, pp. vi. and 1 to 414. lii i892] George Meredith 1892. JUMP TO GLORY JANE. | By George Meredith. | Edited and arranged | by Harry Quilter. | With forty- c vented, four de- 'w drawn, and signs in- Q written By Laurence Housman. | Swan, Sonnenschein & Co. I Paternoster Square, | London. | 1892. Crown 8vo, pp. 28 numbered, and i to 36, illustration facing last page. Bound in parchment, lettered on side (with design) and back. Dedicated by Harry Quilter : "To the Right Hon^'"- John Morley, Secretary of State for Ireland." Note on Page 2. Th's edition is limited to an issue of 1000 copies (250 of which have been ordered by Messrs. Macmillan and Co. for the American market), and a special issue of 100 copies on Van Gelder paper, bound in vellum and gold. Originally appeared in The Universal Review, Oct., 1889, pp. 240-52. liii A Bibliography of [1892-4 POEMS I THE EMPTY PURSE | With Odes to THE Comic Spirit | To Youth in Memory | and Verses | By | George Meredith | London | Mac- millan and Co. 1892. Fcap. Svo, pp. viii., un- numbered, and I to 136. At foot of last page, " Printed by R. & R. Clark, Edinburgh^ Bound in dark blue cloth, lettered on back. Contents : Wind on the Lyre. The Youthful Quest. The Empty Purse. Jump-to-Glory Jane. To the Comic Spirit. Youth in Memory. Odes, Verses, Penetration and Trust. Night of Frost in May. The Teaching of the Nude. Breath of the Briar. Empedocles. * To Colonel Charles. England before the Storm. Tardy Spring. * Originally appeared in The Pall Mall Gazette^ Feb. 16, 1887. 1893. The Labourer (Poem). The Westminster Gazette^ Feb. 6, 1893. 1894. Foresight and Patience (Poem). The National Review^ April, 1894, Vol. XXIIL, pp. 164-174. Uv 1894] George Meredith 1894. BALLADS AND POEMS | OF | TRAGIC LIFE | By I George Meredith | London | Macmillan and Co. I and New York | 1894 | All rights reserved. Globe 8vo, pp. viii., unnumbered, and i to 160. At foot of last page, " Printed by R. & R. Clark, Edin- burghy Bound in dark blue cloth, lettered on back. Contents : The Two Masks. Archduchess Anne. The Song of Theodolinda. A Preaching from a Spanish Ballad. The Young Princess. King Harald's Trance. Whimper of Sympathy. Young Reynard. Manfred. Hernani. The Nuptials of Attila. Aneurin's Harp, France, December, 1870, Men and Man. The Last Contention. Periander. Solon. Bellerophon. Phaethdn. Notes. A Bibliography of [1894 THE TALE OF CHLOE— THE | HOUSE ON THE BEACH— | THE CASE OF GENERAL | OPLE AND LADY CAMPER | By | George | Meredith | London | Ward, Lock & Bowden, Limited | Warwick House, Salisbury Square, E.C. | New York and Melbourne | 1894 | [All rights re- served?^. 8vo, pp. viii., numbered, and i to 345, verso blank. Containing Portrait and view of The ChSlet, Box Hill, in photogravure. Of this edition 250 copies, numbered, were printed. Bound in French grey paper sides, parchment back, uncut edges. " The Tale of Chloe " was reprinted from The New Quarterly Mag-azme, July, 1879, pp. 57-113; also serially in Tke Sz^n (New York) in i!^90. Reprinted in *' Lovell's Westminster Series," No. 6, July 7, 1890. Crown 8vo, pp. 144, paper wrapper. New York : John W. Lovell & Company. Price 25 cents. "The House on the Beach" was reprinted from Tke New Quarterly Magazine, January, 1877, pp. 329-410. An unauthorised edition of this Tale was issued by Messrs. Harper Brothers, in their "Half-Hour" Series, No. 22, 1877. 24mo, pp. 140. Price 20 cents. "The Case of General Ople and Lady Camper" was reprinted from The Neiv Quarterly Magazine, No. 16, July, 1877, pp. 428- 478 ; also serially in The Sun (New York) in 1890. Reprinted in " Lovell's Westminster Series," No. 3, June 23, 1890, as an "Extra" number. Crown 8vo, pp. 126, paper wrapper. New York : John W. Lovell and Company. Price 25 cents. Ivi 1894-5] George Meredith LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA | A Novel | By I George Meredith | In three volumes London : Chapman and Hall, Ld. | 1894 j [Ail rights reserved]. Crown 8vo, Vol. I., pp. viii., unnumbered, and i to 235, verso blank; Vol. 11. , pp. viii., unnumbered, and i to 240; Vol. III., pp. viii., unnumbered, and i to 266. At foot of last page in Vol. III., " Richard Clay & Sons, Limited, London and Bungay." Chapters, Vol. I., 8; Vol. II., 10; Vol. III., 12. In all 30. Bound in citron-coloured cloth, leathered on back. Note on p. ii., Vol. I., " This Edition, in 3 Vols., consists of 1500 copies." Note on p. v., "Gratefully inscribed | to I George Buckston Browne, I Surgeon." 1895. THE AMAZING j MARRIAGE , By ! George Mere- dith I In two volumes | Westminster | Archibald Constable and Co. | 1895. Crown 8vo, Vol. I., pp. viii., numbered, and i to 270; Vol. II., pp. vi., numbered, and 271 to 551. At foot of last page, " Printed by T. and A. Constable, Printers to Her Majesty at the Edinburgh University Press," verso blank. In 47 Chapters. Bound in light bronze-green cloth, leathered on side and back. Dedication on p. v., " To my Friend | Frederic Jameson." Originally appeared serially in Scribners Ma_i;aztne {hondon and New York), Jan. to December, 1895, Vols. XVII. and XVIII. Ivii A Bibliography of [1896-7 1896. The Warning (Sonnet). The Daily Chronicle^ July 6^ 1896. Mrs. Meynell's Two Books of Essays.* (Critical Note on.) The National Review^ Aug., 1896, Vol. XXVII., pp. 762-770. Outside the Crowd (Poem). By George Meredith. The National Review, Sept. 1896, Vol. XXVIII. , p. 26. "Trafalgar Day" (Poem). The Daily Chronicle, Oct 21, 1896. 1897. AN ESSAY ON | COMEDY | AND THE USES OF THE I COMIC SPIRIT | By | George Meredith | Westminster | Archibald Constable and | Company, 1897. Crown 8vo, pp. i to 105, at foot of verso, " Printed by T. and A. Constable, Printers to Her Majesty at the Edinburgh University Press." Bound in brown buckram, lettered on back. Originally appeared in The New Quarterly Magazine, April, 1877, under the title of "On the Idea of Comedy, and of the Uses of the Comic Spirit (A Lecture delivered at the London Institution, February ist, 1877)." An article on this Lecture {" Mr. George Meredith on Laugh- ter") appeared in The Spectator of Feb. 10, 1877, pp. 179, 180. * " The Rhythm of Life ; and The Colour of Life." London and New York : John Lane. Iviii i897] George Meredith SELECTED POEMS | By George Meredith j West- minster I Archibald Constable and Co. | 2 Whitehall Gardens | 1897. Crown 8vo, pp. viii. and i to 245, at foot of verso, " Printed by T. and A. Constable, Printers to Her Majesty at the University Press." Bound in brown buckram, lettered on back. Contents : Woodland Peace. The Lark Ascending. The Orchard and the Heath. Seed-Time. Outer and Inner. Wind on the Lyre. Dirge in Woods. Change in Recurrence. Hard Weather. The South-Wester. The Thrush in February. Tardy Spring. Breath of the Briar. Young Reynard. Love in the Valley. Marian. Hymn to Colour. Mother to Babe. Night of Frost in May. Whimper of Sympathy. A Ballad of Past Meridan. Phoebus with Admetus. Melampus. The Appeasement of Demeter. The Day of the Daughter of Hades. The Young Princess. lis A Bibliography of [1897 The Song of Theodolinda. The Nuptials of Attila. Penetration and Trust. Lucifer in Starlight. The Star Sirius. The Spirit of Shakespeare. The Spirit of Shakespeare — continued. The World's Advance. Earth's Secret. Sense and Spirit. Grace and Love. Winter Heavens. Modern Love. Juggling Jerry. The Old Chartist. Martin's Puzzle. A Ballad of Fair Ladies in Revolt. The Woods of Westermain. The following note appears on page viii. : — The selection here ??iade has \ been under the supervision of\ the Author. Another Edition, crown i6mo, pp. viii., unnumbered, and I to 204. At foot of last page, " Edinburgh : T. and A. Constable, Printers to Her Majesty." Bound in brown paper, parchment back, with autograph in gold, lettered on back. Archibald Constable & Co., 1898, 1898] George Meredith 1898. " Hawarden " (Poem). The Daily Chronicle^ May 27, 1898. ODES I IN CONTRIBUTION | TO THE SONG | OF FRENCH | HISTORY | By | George Mere- dith I Westminster | Archibald Constable and Co. | 2 Whitehall Gardens | 1898. Crown 8vo, pp. viii., unnumbered, and i to 94. At foot of last page, " Butler & Tanner, The Selwood Printing Works, Frome, and London." Bound in brown buckram, lettered on back. Contents : The Revolution. Napoleon. France, December 1870 [a Reprint]. Alsace-Lorraine. On page vi. : — "Inscribed to the | Right Hon. John Morley, M.P." THE GEORGE | MEREDITH | BIRTHDAY BOOK I Selected and | Arranged by | D. M. West- minster I Archibald Constable & Co. (Title-page enclosed within designed border.) Medium i6mo, pp. 306 unnumbered, last page blank. Bound in light green linen, lettered (with design) on back and side. Ixi A Bibliography of [1898 THE I NATURE POEMS | OF | GEORGE MERE- DITH I with I 20 Full-Page Pictures in Photogravure ] and an etched Frontispiece | by | William Hyde | (monogram) Westminster | Archibald Constable and Co. I 2 Whitehall Gardens | 1898. Imperial 8vo, pp. viii., unnumbered, and i to 76. At foot of last page, " Edinburgh : T. & A. Constable, Printers to Her Majesty." Contents : Woodland Peace. The South-Wester. The Lark Ascending. The Thrush in February. The Orchard and the Heath. Tardy Spring. Seed-Time. Breath of the Briar. Outer and Inner. Love in the Valley. Dirge in Woods. Hymn to Colour. Change in Recurrence. Night of Frost in May. Hard Weather. Winter Heavens. The Woods of Westermain. Note on p. ii. : — "Of this edition 150 copies have been printed, of which this is No (Signed) William Hyde." Bound in green paper, parchment back, with a design, lettered on back. " The Caging of Ares " (Poem). The Daily Chronicle, June 5, 1899. " The Night Walk " (Poem). The Century Magazine, August, 1899, Vol. LVIIL, No. 4. "At the Close" (Sonnet). The Daily Chronicle, November 16, 1899. Ixii George Meredith Uniform Editions. The first complete uniform Edition, 32 Volumes. Demy 8vo, linen, lettered on back, gilt top. This Edition is limited to 1000 numbered and signed (by Mr. William Maxse Meredith). Sets for Sale. The first volume contains a Portrait, reproduced in photogravure, from a drawing by John S. Sargent, R.A. Archibald Constable & Co. Vols. I and 2. The Ordeal of Richard Feverel. 4. Evan Harrington. 6. Sandra Belloni. 8. Vittoria. Rhoda Fleming. TheAdventures of HarryRichmond. Beauchamp's Career. The Egoist. Diana of the Crossways. One of Our Conquerors. Lord Ormont and His Aminta. The Amazing Marriage. The Shaving of Shagpat. ) The Tragic Comedians. J Short Stories. A Tale of Chloe and General Ople. Short Stories. Farina, and The House on the Beach. Essays. Poems. 31 „ 32. Poems. IxiU 3 5 7 9 1 1 13 15 17 19 21 i% 10. 12. 14. 16. 18. 20. 22. 24. 26. 27. 28. 29. 32. ;:} A Bibliography of New Popular Edition. Crown 8vo. Cover designed by A. A. Turbayne. Bound in red cloth, lettered on back, monogram on side, uncut edges. With photo- gravure Frontispieces by Bernard Partridge, Harrison Miller, Edward Thornton, and others. Archibald Constable & Co. The Ordeal of Richard Feverel. Evan Harrington. Sandra Belloni. Vittoria. Rhoda Fleming. The Adventures of Harry Richmond. Beauchamp's Career. The Egoist. Diana of the Crossways. One of Our Conquerors. Lord Ormont and his Aminta. The Amazing Marriage. The Shaving of Shagpat. The Tragic Comedians. Short Stories. Selected Poems. Ixiv 1828-89] George Meredith PERSONALIA Mr. Meredith was born in Hampshire on Feb. 12, 1828. " Many Happy Returns of the Day." The Worlds Feb. 12, 1890, p. 16. Mr. Meredith's birthday is not given in any of the books of reference, such as " Men of the Time." George Meredith. By Flora L. Shaw. The New Princeton Review^ March and April, 1887, Vol. III., N.S., pp. 220-9. An Interview with George Meredith. By W. M. F. {i.e.^ Wm. Morton Fullerton). Boston Advertisft- (U.S.A.), Dec. 17, 1888. [Reprinted in the Supple- ment of The British Weekly^ Jan. 4, 1889, p. 164.] The Pilgrim's Scrip. Introduction by Mrs. Oilman. 50 pp. Roberts Brothers, Boston, 1888. With Portrait. The Home Life of George Meredith. The Book Buyer ^ Jan., 1889, pp. 580-2. With Portrait. Ixv A Bibliography of [1889-94 Old Neuwieders (Mr. Meredith's School and School- fellows). Daily News, Jan. i8, 1889. A Visit to George Meredith. By J. B. Oilman. The Author, Boston, Mass., April, 1891, Vol. III., p. 49. By George ! with illustration by E. J. W. Punch, Dec. 19, 1891, Vol. CI., p. 300. The above was a skit upon the evidence given by Mr. Meredith in the case of Pinnock v. Chapman and Hall. The First Meeting between George Meredith and Robert Louis Stevenson. By Alice Gordon. The Bookman, London, Jan., 1895, Vol. VII., p. iii. George Meredith's Maiden Speech. By Dr. Robertson Nicoll. The Bookman (American), Aug., 1895, Vol. II., p. 34-6. " George Meredith " (Sonnet). By Morton Fullerton. Yellow Book, Oct., 1894, Vol. III. Published by John Lane : London & New York. Ixvi 1858-88] George Meredith to PORTRAITS OF MR. MEREDITH Pen Drawing by D. G. Rossetti. 1858. Mr. T. Nettleship writes to me on this subject as follows : — " In 1858 Rossetti completed the pen drawing of which the title was ' Mary Magdalene at the door of Simon the Pharisee.' I have often seen it at Rossetti's house in Cheyne Walk. It was upright ; the central group was formed by the Magdalene, her lover, and a white doe or fawn with roses hung round its neck. The Magdalene's head is turned in profile from left to right, looking in at the housedoor, in the upper part, and to the left of the composition, the head of Christ is seen through a window of the porch ; the head is in profile, looking at the Magdalene, i.e. from right to left, and is silhouetted darkly against a light behind it. I have always understood that this head was origi- nally drawn from George Meredith ; certainly his photograph which you shewed me sometime since, vividly recalls the character of this head of Christ." 1^^^.— The Book Buyer (N.Y.), June, 1888, p. 196. * „ Harper's Monthly Magazine^ June, 1 8 8 8, p. 15. * „ " The Pilgrim's Scrip," Boston. „ Some Sketches at the Parnell Dinner (George Meredith, John Morley, Edwin Arnold, and others). Pall Mall Gazette^ May 10, 1888. * All these portraits seem to be engraved from Mr. Hollyer's photograph. Ixvii A Bibliography of [1889-96 * 1889. — The Book Buyer^ Jan., 1889, p. 581. (See p. Ivii.) * „ The Star ^ Feb. 19, 1889. * „ The Magazine of Poetry^ July, 1819, p. 347. „ The Graphic, May 18, 1889, "Mr. Meredith Studies Character," at the Parnell Commis- sion, by S. P. Hall. * 1890. — The Pall Mall Gazette, ^Sin. 25, 1890. * „ The Penny Illustrated Paper, P'eb. i, 1890. * „ Great Thoughts, Oct. 4, 1890. * „ " Letters to Living Authors," by J. A. Steuart. Sampson Low & Co. By E. J. W. (Caricature), Punch, Dec. 9, Vol. CL, p. 300. Painting by George Frederick Watts, R.A. Engraving from above by J. Biscombe Gardiner. Proof copies on Japanese vellum. London : John Lane. 1896. — (Caricature). By Max, in Vanity Fair, Sept. 24. • All these portraits seem to be engraved from Mr HoUyer's photograph. Ixviii 1864-79] George Meredith ARTICLES ON MR. MEREDITH'S NOVELS, OR WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO THEM 1864. Novels with a Purpose. (" Richard Feverel " and " Emiha in England.") Westminster Review, July, 1864, pp. 25-49. By Justin McCarthy, M.P. Re- printed in his volume of Essays — " Con Amore," p. 316-60. Tinsley Brothers. 1868. 1867. Le Roman Anglais Contemporain. Par E. D. Forgues. Revue des Deux Mondes, June 15, 1867. 1877. Living Novelists, No. 5. — George Meredith. [By W. E. Henley.] London: The Conservative Weekly Journal^ Aug. 25, 1877. 1879. The Novels of George Meredith. [By Arabella Shore.] The British Quarterly, April, 1879. ^^^- LXIX., pp. 411-25. Ixix A Bibliography of [issi-e 1881. A Note on Mr. George Meredith {on the occasion of ^^ Beauchamf s Career ''''^^ May, 1876. Essays and Phantasies. By Jas. Thomson. London : Reeves & Turner, 196, Strand. 1881. Pp. 289-95. 1885. Mr. George Meredith and the Modern Novel. Daily News, Oct. 19, 1885. George Meredith's Novels. Pall Mall Gazette, Dec. 1 2, 1885. Robert Browning and George Meredith. A Note (No. 80) on their similarity. By Arthur Symons. Browning Society s Papers. Part I., Vol. 11. 1885-6. Pp. 80-2. 1886. George Meredith's Works. [By W. E. Henley.] The State, April 17, 1886. George Meredith's Novels. By W. L. Courtney, M.A. The Fortnightly Review, June, 1886, pp. 771-9. Re- printed in The Book Mart (U.S.A.), Oct., 1886. Three Novels by Mr. Meredith. Pall Mall Gazette, June 14, 1886. Mr. George Meredith's Novels. Saturday Review, July 24, 1886, pp. 116, 117. George Meredith's Novels. The subject of " The Ixx 1886-8] George Meredith London Letter," signed H.B. The Critic (U.S.A.), Aug. 14, 1886, pp. 77, 78. George Meredith's Novels. The Spectator^ Oct. 16, 1886, pp. 1 38 1, 1382. [Reprinted in The Critic (U.S.A.), Vol. XL, pp. 205, 206, Oct. 22, 1887.] George Meredith. By Flora L. Shaw. The New Prince- ton Review J March, 1887, Vol. II L, pp. 220-229. 1887. The Novels of George Meredith. Literary World (U.S.A.), April 30, 1887, Vol. XVIIL, pp. 137, 138. Mr. George Meredith's Works. Pall Mall Gazette, May 7, 1887. [Reprinted in Pall Mall Bugdet^ May 12, 1887, pp. 29, 30.] A Word with George Meredith. Atlantic Monthly, June, 1887, Vol. LIX., pp. 854, 855. George Meredith. Harvard Monthly, July-Sept., 1887, Vol. IV., p. 138. By G. P. Baker, jun. 1888. George Meredith. By George Parsons Lathrop. Atlantic Monthly, Feb., 1888, No. 364, Vol. LXL, pp. 178-93. The Functions of the Novelist, and the way George Meredith fulfils them. A paper read at the University College Literary Society. By Miss Adeline Sergeant. The Academy, March 10, 1888, p. 175. The Gospel according to George Meredith. Pall Mall Gazette, Sept. 27, 1888. Part I. Pall Mall Gazette^ Oct. 15, 1888. Part II. Ixxi S A Bibliography of [1888-9 Mr. George Meredith's Novels. By J. M. Barrie. The Contemporary Review^ Oct., 1888, Vol. LIV., pp. 375- 86. [Reprinted in Eclectic Magazine (U.S.A.), Vol. CXII., pp. 118-26, Jan., 1889.] The Lost Works of George Meredith. By J. M. Barrie. [The Lecture on Comedy and the Three Stories, con- tributed by Mr. Meredith to The New Quarterly Magazine.'\ The Scots Observer^ Nov. 24, 1888. 1889. Thackeray's Characters in Real Life (with reference to Mr. Meredith's characters in " The Egoist "). Pall Mall Gazette, April 30, 1889, p. 3. Letters to Living Authors : To Mr. George Meredith, signed " Roderick Random " (i.e. J. A. Steuart), Wit and Wisdom, May 11, 1889, pp. 9, 10. [Reprinted in " Letters to Living Authors." By J. A. Steuart, pp. 1-17. Sampson Low, 1890.] George Meredith's Novels. The Critic (N.Y.), June i, 1889, pp. 267, 268. George Meredith's Views of Women. By a Woman (i.e. Miss Adeline Sergeant). Temple Bar, June, 1889, No. 343, Vol. LXXXVL, pp. 207-13. [Reprinted in Book Mart (U.S.A.), Aug., 1890.] George Meredith. The Echo, June 28, 1889, p. i. Ixxii 1889-90] George Meredith George Meredith. Selections from Original Contribu- tions by James Thomson to Cope's Tobacco Plant. Liverpool : At the Office of Copers Tobacco Plant. 1889. Pp. 46-8. George Meredith as a Theorist. By T. McLaughlin. New Englander, Aug., 1889, Vol. LL, pp. 81-95. Modern Men — George Meredith. [By Jas. McLaren Cobban.] The Scots Observer, Sept. 28, 1889, pp. 5 1 5, 516. Reprinted in " Modern Men " from Tke Scots Observer, pp. 116-22. London: Edward Arnold, 18, Warwick Square, E.C. Fiction — Plethoric and Anaemic. By Wm. Watson. The National Review, Oct., 1889, pp. 167-83. The Daughter of Dreams. Family Herald^ Oct. 26, 1889, pp.413, 414- 1890. The Meredithyramb and its Critics. By Richard Le Gallienne. Time, March, 1890, pp. 307—19. George Meredith. Views and Reviews. By W. E. Henley, pp. 43-55. London: David Nutt. 1890. Mr. Meredith's Novels. By A. N. Monkhouse. The Manchester Quarterly, Oct., 1890, pp. 293-322. George Meredith. Great Thoughts, Oct. 4, 1890, pp. 216-20. Ixxiii A Bibliography of [1891-3 1891. A Lady's Estimate of George Meredith. A paper read by Mrs. W. D. Fish before the Crouch Hill Library. The Echo, Feb. 4, 1891. George Meredith. A Study. By Hannah Lynch. Por- trait. 1 89 1. Methuen & Co. A Study of Mr. George Meredith. By J. A. Newton- Robinson. Murray s Magazine, Dec, 1891, Vol. X., pp. 859-868. 1892. Meredith's Method and Teaching. By W. J. Dawson (illustrated). The Young Man, Feb., p. 49, and March, p. 88, 1892, Vol. VI. Meredith for the Multitude. By Richard Le Gallienne (illustrated). The Novel Review, May, 1892, Vol. L, pp. 140-152. Mr. Meredith and His Critics. By F. Graham Aylward. The Library Review, Vol. L, May, 1892, pp. 134-139, and July, 1892, pp. 281-288. Studies of Contemporary Novelists : English. L George Meredith. By David Dick. World Literature, Vol. IL First Paper, May, 1892, pp. 1-6. Second Paper, June, 1892, pp. 32-7. Third Paper, July, 1892, pp. 59-65. 1893. George Meredith as Journalist. By Frederic Dolman, The New Review, March, 1893, Vol. VHL, pp. 342- 348. Ixxiv 1893-6] George Meredith George Meredith. Temple Bar^ April, 1893, Vol XCVIL, pp. 589 -604. George Meredith. By Anne Wakeman Lathrop (an Interview). Illustrations, including Portrait, by George Hutchinson, Idler^ Nov., 1893, Vol. IV., pp. 343-348. 1894. George Meredith and the Public. By Colin Weird. Great Thoughts^ Feb. 3, 1894, Vol. XXI., pp. 361, 362. Ernest Newman on George Meredith. Free Review^ Aug., 1894, Vol. II., pp. 398. George Meredith's Novels. By Emily F. Wheeler. The Chautauquan^ Aug., 1894, Vol. XIX., pp. 561-5. 1895. Mr. Meredith's Novels. The Edinburgh Review^ Jan., 1895, Vol. CLXXXL, pp. 33-58. The Novels of George Meredith. By J. H. Bocklehurst. The Manchester Quarterly^ Oct., 1895, Vol. XIV., pp. 340-352- A Summer with George Meredith : In Particular " Richard Feverel." By Edith Menefee. Poet Lore, Oct., 1895, Vol. VII., pp. 505-512. 1896. Mr. Meredith's Novels. By Allan Monkhouse. Books and Plays, pp. 1-46. John Lane, London and New York, 1896. [Reprinted from The Manchester Quar- terly^ Oct., 1890, pp. 293-322.] Ixxv A Bibliography of [1896-7 Mr. Meredith in Little. By G. S. Street. " Quales Ego," pp. 1-12. John Lane, London & New York, 1896. [Reprinted from The Yellow Book ^ April, 1895, Vol. v., pp. 174-185. John Lane]. The Women of George Meredith. By Garnet Smith. The Fortnightly Review, May, 1896, Vol. LIX., pp. 775-790- George Meredith's Women. By M. V. Great Thoughts, May 16, 1896, Vol. VIL, pp. 99, 100. The Novels of George Meredith. By F. Mary Wilson Parsons. Temple Bar, June, 1896, Vol. CVIIL, pp. 262-269. Nature Lessons from George Meredith. By Henry S. Salt. The Free Review, Sept., 1896, Vol. IV., p. 502. George Meredith's Heroines. By Frances E. Ashwell. Great Thoughts, Vol. VHL I. Lucy Desborough. Oct. 3, 1896, pp. 3, 4. n. Rhoda Fleming. Nov. 4, 1896, pp. 107, 108. HL Emilia Alessandra Belloni. Dec. 26, 1896, pp. 215, 216. 1897. IV. Diana of the Crossways. Jan. 23, 1897, pp. 271, 272. V. Clara Middleton. Feb. 27, 1897, pp. 251, 252. VI. Carinthia Jane. March 20, 1897, pp. 407, 408. Ixxvi 1897-8] George Meredith My Contemporary in Fiction. By David Christie Murray. The Canadian Magazine^ March, 1897, Vol. VIIL, p. 411. Meredith on Comedy. By G. B. S. (George Bernard Shaw). The Saturday Review ^ March 27, 1897, Vol. LXXXIII., pp, 314-316. The Apotheosis of the Novel under Queen Victoria. By Herbert Paul. The Nineteenth Century, May, 1897, Vol. XLI. Portion relating to George Meredith, pp. 786, 787. George Meredith's Novels. By M. Johnson. The Primitive Methodist Quarterly Review^ July, 1897, Vol. XIX., pp. 422-436. The Novels of George Meredith. The Quarterly Review^ July, 1897, Vol. CLXXXVL, pp. 159-182. A Note on George Meredith. By Arthur Symons. The Fortnightly Review^ Nov., 1897, Vol. LXII., pp. 673-678. 1898. Some Opinions. By A. B. C. D. Blackwood's Edin- burgh Magazine, Nov., 1898, Vol. CLXIV. Portion relating to George Meredith, pp. 593-6. Ixxvii A Bibliography of [1883-94 ARTICLES ON MR. GEORGE MEREDITH'S POETRY Poets of To-day. By W. L. Courtney. The Fortnightly Review, pp. 717, 718, Nov., 1883. George Meredith's Poetry. By [Arthur Symons.] West- minster Review, Sept., 1887, ^o\. CXXVIIL, pp. 693-7- An Inarticulate Poet. The Spectator, Oct. 15, 1887. George Meredith's Nature Poems. By Richard Le GaUienne. Lippincotfs Monthly Magazine, Sept., 1890, pp. 418-24. George Meredith's Nature Poetry. By Richard Le GalHenne. Lippincotfs Magazine, Sept., 1890, Vol. II. Enghsh Special Edition, pp. 418-424. George Meredith's Poetry. Westminster Review, Sept., 1887, Vol. CXXVIIL, pp. 693-697. Mr. Meredith in His Poems. By Professor Edward Dowden. The Fortnightly Review, March, 1892, Vol. LL, pp. 337-353- The Poetry of George Meredith. By George Wharton. The Free Review, Oct., 1894, Vol. III., p. 36. Ixxviii 1894-7] George Meredith George Meredith's Nature Poetry. By William F. Revell. The Westminster Review^ Nov., 1894, Vol. CXLII., pp. 506-523. Nature as Interpreted in the Poems of George Meredith. The Author^ May i, 1895, Vol. V., pp. 319-321. Mr. Meredith's Poems. By Allan Monkhouse. Books and Plays, pp. 47-79. John Lane, London & New York, 1896. Nature Interpreted by George Meredith's Poems. By Ramsay CoUes, M.R.I. A. The Irish Monthly, Aug., 1896, Vol. XXIV., pp. 420-424. The Poetry of George Meredith. The Church Quarterly Review, July, 1897, Vol. XLIV., pp. 386-403. Ixxix A Bibliography of [1884-6 DEDICATIONS " This Romance is dedicated to George Meredith, at whose suggestion it was written." From Post to Finish. A Novel, by Hawley Smart. 3 Vols. London : Chapman & Hall. 1884. " To George Meredith, as a token of a very sincere admiration, is this story, with some timidity, inscribed by the author." Through Troubled Waters. A Novel by Hannah Lynch. Ward, Lock, & Co. [1885.] " To George Meredith, Novelist and Poet, this book on an illustrious contemporary is with deep respect and admiration inscribed." Introduction to the Study of Browning. By Arthur Symons. Cassell&Co. 1886. Ixzz 1856-82] George Meredith APPRECIATIONS New Poets. Edinburgh Review, Oct., 1856, pp. 355, Mr. Pater's Essays. By John Morley. The Fortnightly Review J April, 1873, p. 473. The Confessions of a Young Man, pp. 269, 277. (As Poet.) By George Moore. The Novel of Manners. By H. D. Traill. The Nineteenth Century, October, 1875, P- 57^- Essays and Studies. 1875. (As Poet.) By A. C. Swinburne. P. 87. The New Fiction. By Henry Holbeach \i.e., William Brighty Rands]. The Contemporary Review, February, 1880, pp. 250, 251. Reprinted in Appleton^ s Journal, Vol. XXIIL, p. 345- A Gossip on Romance By R. L. Stevenson. Long- man^ s Magazine, No. i, Nov., 1882, p. 75. D. G. Rossetti : A Record and a Study. By William Sharp. 1882. Pp. 25 and 352. The Works of Fielding. The Athenceum, Nov. 4, 1882, P- 593- ixxxi A Bibliography of [1885-89 George Eliot's Life. Vol. I., pp. 389, 390. 1885. Our Noble Selves. By Grant Allen. The Fortnightly Review^ February, 1887, pp. 214, 217, 220. The Present State of the Novel. By Geo. Saintsbury. The Fortnightly Review^ Sept., 1887, p. 411. Aphorisms, An Address. By John Morley. Macmillan & Co., 1887, p. 20. Books Which Have Influenced Me (Egoist). By R. L. Stevenson. No. i. The British Weekly ^^ Extras ^^ 1887, pp. 12, 13. The Reign of Queen Victoria. Edited by T. Humphry Ward. 2 Vols. 1887. Vol. H., p. 491. By Richard Garnett. Life and Literature : An Evening with Mr. R. L. Steven- son. Pall Mall Gazette^ Aug. 8, 1888, p. 11. Review of F. W. Robinson's " The Youngest Miss Green." The Athenceum^ Sept. 15, 1888, p. 350. Life of James Thomson (" B. V."), by H. S. Salt, pp. 22, 136, 138, 140, 141, 152, 154, 156, 165, 167, 179, 180, 292, 293. Bertram Dobell. London: 1889. This volume is indispensable to Meredith Students ; it throws a strong side light on Mr. Meredith's character. The Decay of Lying : A Dialogue. By Oscar Wilde. The Nineteenth Century^ Jan., 1889, p. 40. Our Booking Office. By Baron de Book Worms. Punch, Jan. 12, 1889, p. 22. Ixxxii 1889-90] George Meredith Books and Bookmen. By " Tatler." "There are many 'appreciations' in this interesting weekly column (on Thursdays)."— 7%«? Star, May 9, 1889. A Dead Man's Diary. 1890. Edited by G. T. Bettany, M.A. Pp. 47-9. Mr. Stevenson's Methods in Fiction. By A. Conan Doyle. National Review^ Jan., 1890, pp. 646-57. Romance and Youth. St. Jameses Gazette^ Feb. 18, 1890. Tennyson and After ? The Fortnightly Review^ May, 1890, pp. 629 and 635. Distinction. By Coventry Patmore. The Fortnightly Review^ June, 1890, p. 827. Ferdinand Lassalle. By M. Walters. The Universal Review^ Aug. 15, 1890, p. 521. Note on Charlotte Bronte. By A. C. Swinburne, p. 10. A Voice from the Nile. By Jas. Thomson. Bertram Dobell's Introduction. Pp. 40 and 49. A History of Our Own Times. By Justin McCarthy, M.P. Vol. IV., pp. 550, 551. Life of Robert Browning. (Great Writer Series.) By William Sharp. 1890. Pp. 123, 124, 186, 197, 198. Hints on Catalogue Titles. By Charles P\ Blackburn, Sampson Low & Co. 1884. Pp. 83, 91, 97. New Watchwords of Fiction, By Hall Caine. The Con- temporary Review^ April, 1890, p. 485. Ixxxiii A Bibliography of [1891 How One Wrestled with George Meredith, Esq., Novelist, and was Thrown. Full-page illustration by J. Barnard Partridge. Hood's Comic Annual, 1891, p. 63. The Celt in English Art. By Grant Allen. The Fort- nightly Review, Feb., 1891, pp. 268, 277. Decorative Electric Lighting. By Mrs. J. E. H. Gordon. The Fortnightly Review, Feb., 1891, p. 279. The Soul of Man under Socialism. By Oscar Wilde. The Fortnightly Review, Feb., 1 891, pp. 312, 313. Owing to the recognition that Mr. Meredith has re- ceived during the last few years, the limitations of space will not permit me to bring the above list up to date. PARODIES By George! With an Illustration by E. J. W. Punch, Dec. 19, 1 89 1, Vol. CI., p. 300. The Victory of Aphasia Gibberish. By Max Beerbohm. Saturday Revieiv, Christmas Number, 1896, pp. 10 and II. At the Sign of the Cock. (French Style, 1898.) [Being an Ode in further " Contribution to the Song of French History," dedicated without maHce or permission, to Mr. George Meredith], contained in " Cap and Bells." By Owen Seaman, pp. 15-20. Pub- lished by John Lane, London and New York, 1900. Ixxxiv SOME NOTES IN REGARD TO GEORGE MEREDITH IN AMERICA BY W, MORTON FULLERTON SOME NOTES IN REGARD TO GEORGE MEREDITH IN AMERICA. Some one said once of Matthew Arnold, in reference to a well-known impression left by his original style, that he attained clearness by defect of vision. It is a saying not wholly to my mind. But there is much truth in it ; and the fact of this truth is largely accountable for his vogue, and his distinction as a writer of limpid and unequivocal prose. He was always intelligible, and more than that, he was always charming ; and this is a great thing. These were qualities that gave Arnold a strong power of attraction in America ; and for many men, at colleges and the universities, men given at the time when they first made his acquaintance to Schopenhauer and Omar Khayyam, he was the chief voice out of England across the sea ; and another writer, who, owing to his aristo- phanic temper, never could have worn the academic robe of Arnold, a writer far greater in spirit and in achievement than Arnold, was never heard of among us. I remember so well when the name of Meredith first became in America a name to conjure with; and most clearly of all I remember the surprised awakening for A Bibliography of some of us when we realised how long this man had been writing, and that we had known nothing of him. There seemed no excuse that a people who were the first to detect the greatness of Carlyle had failed to acquaint themselves with the kindred genius of George Meredith — kindred at least in many respects. The oversight was not easy to explain. But the American audience of to-day and of this recent period of which I am speaking was, it was evident when one stopped to think, a very different audience from that of the early New England and the early Boston ; for subtlety, and graces, and tricks of style were not then thought so desirable characteristics as spontaneity of sincere expres- sion from the virile heart of a man. So, without my analysing too curiously, it will be plain by these few suggestions in what direction the explanation of the fact would lead me had I room here to consider it. I hasten to state with brevity one or two unobtrusive facts in regard to Meredith in America; facts which, in a book of this sort, will not be out of place. Before the appearance of the first uniform American edition, as to the exact date of which I am from this point of time uncertain, George Meredith was scarcely known at all in America. I recall Professor Croswell, of Harvard, once saying to me that he had just been reading a very remarkable book, the work of a great mind, naming one of the novels of Meredith, and his asking me if I knew anything about the book ; but either from preoccupation in my Theocritus at the time, or more likely from the indifference of an undergraduate Ixxxviii George Meredith already sated with books to be read in anticipation of examinations, I failed to follow my friend's suggestion. He had used the English edition, and except from him I doubt if in all Cambridge I should have been able to get a copy of Meredith. For a long time even the great libraries were without a volume by Meredith, except perhaps a small poorly-printed Bowdlerized edition of Diana which did scarcely any service whatever in making him known in America. And then the first uniform one volume edition appeared from Roberts Brothers in Boston, and the triumphal progress began. Even then, it was a long time, however, before George Meredith and " Owen Meredith " were quite differentiated in the popular mind Yet many readers were deacons and deaconesses in the cult of Browning, or rabbis in his and in Emerson's school ; people do such queer things in great towns, and particularly in that one which Mr. Henry James has called the " remarkable city of Boston." At the time when this edition appeared I happened to be literary editor of the Boston Advertiser, The first volume of the series was Richard Feverel; and it was upon this book that I chanced after a weary passage over a truly barren unharvested sea of modern fiction. It came as a revelation, and I turned to biographical dictionaries and indexes — all I could lay my hands on — to find out some- thing about the author of a book which seemed to me to contain passages of supremely excellent writing, and which as a whole, notwithstanding that it was so full of crudities and exasperating defects, was, to my mind, at least the peer of any novel of the century. There was not much Ixxxix A Bibliography of to learn about Meredith in this fugitive fashion ; there were a few attempts at criticism in EngHsh reviews, but these were rarely read ; and then another novel in the new edition was at hand awaiting perusal. I felt that I detected almost rare qualities of insight and a great and distinguished power of original expression. But the thing was, at that time, to say so. Once, at a dinner-party, I found within me the tem- porary courage of my opinions. There were at the table several people of recognised authority as critics who held the ears of many men. But venturing to say a little of what I thought about Meredith, I met with only an incredulous look, born of an utter ignorance of his work. One man, however, came round with a smile and grasped my hand. The incident was typical of the attitude of the public towards Meredith. Either there was utter ignorance, or an enthusiasm equally dense and unworthy. So that when it came to me to notice these books in the AdverHscr, in somewhat too eulogistic phrase, and I trespassed upon the editorial page instead of disporting myself within the parallel bars of my own more accustomed columns, a mild but waiting scepticism as to my sanity was the least offensive form of a feeling natural enough indeed, but which in its intensity took the shape of abso- lutely damning belief in my immature and untrained judgment. But the martyrdom was not painfully pro- tracted. With chagrin I soon noted that I was not to be allowed the selfish pleasure of clinging to an unpopular cause. I had kept the columns as full of allusions to Mr. Meredith, and of editorials upon him, as my editor- George Meredith in-chief would endure ; and as a result had called out a number of responses that kept, as the expression is, the ball rolling. In less than a year in Boston we all read Meredith, and Mr. Niles up there in the bay-window on Beacon Hill would have told you that he was contem- plating a new and cheaper edition. Philadelphia, mean- while, and New York, had done themselves the honour of Mr. Meredith's company ; and I hope with all my heart that Mr. Meredith had honest practical proof of it. Nothing ever written in America upon Mr. Meredith was so opportune or effective, I may say, as Miss Flora Shaw's article in the Princeton Review. We all quoted from it. But this awakening was more than thirty years late ; and thirty years is so long a time to wait in the life of a man ! W. M. F. July 27, 1890. RUDYARD KIPLING A CRITICISM By RICHARD LE GALLIENNE WITH BIBLIOGRAPHY BY JOHN LANE Price 3s. 6d. net. Crown 8vo. Price $1.25. GUARDIAN.— "Undeniably very good reading. One of the cleverest pieces of criticism we have come across for a long time. Mr. Le Gallienne's praises of the bulk of Mr. Kipling's works are not less cordial, original, and clever, than the censures he passes upon the passages that offend him." MORNING LEADER. — " An excellent piece of criticism . . . just and sincere." OUTLOOK. — " Kipling has never been so thoroughly examined or so justly appreciated as in this volume." ACADEMY. — " Indubitably the work of a critic who knows his own mind, who brings a real love of literature to his task, and who can appreciate excellence in work to which innately he is antipathetic." GEORGE MEREDITH SOME CHARACTERISTICS By RICHARD LE GALLIENNE WITH A BIBLIOGRAPHY (GREATLY EXTENDED IN THIS EDITION) BY JOHN LANE Sixth Edition^ Revised. Price 5s. net. Post 8vo, cloth. Price $2.00. TIMES. — "The many admirers of Mr. Meredith's works will be glad to have their attention directed to this handsome book in his honour." SPEAKER. — " Mr. Le Gallienne's criticism is well written and good reading. . . . Mr. Lane's bibliography, full of interesting and curious matter . . . could hardly be bettered." VANITY FAIR. — " A very interesting and helpful book, likely to be agreeable to -Mr. Meredith's instructed admirers, and suggestive to many by whom his works are misunderstood. ... As appreciations merely, the essays are of a high order of literary merit." PALL MALL.— Mr. Le Galiienne . . . knows his Meredith thoroughly, possesses the requisite enthusiasm, the indispensable insight. . . . He is sympathetic and intelli- gent. . . . There is an invaluable bibliography of seventy pages. If only for the sake of the bibliography, the book is one no lover of Meredith can afford to be without." JOHN LANE, PUBLISHER, LONDON AND NEW YORK THE ART OF THOMAS HARDY By LIONEL JOHNSON WITH ETCHED PORTRAIT BY WILLIAM STRANG, AND BIBLIOGRAPHY BY JOHN LANE Second Edition. Price 5s. 6d. net. Crown 8vo, Price $1.50 net. TIIMESi — ^" Those who want to read about Mr. Hardy will find Mr. Johnson an instructive and not too obtrusive guide. He is a man of culture and insight." ACADEMY. — " It is indeed an admirable book ; admirable in temper, admirable in felicity ; revealing to us, one would gladly think, a new master in this most difficult art of criticism ; one whose writings may stand on our shelves beside the golden volumes of Arnold and of Pater. ... I close the book with a feeling of profound gratitude to him, with a sense that he has given me a new work of art for my contemplation and consolation. " MEN AND LETTERS By HERBERT PAUL Fourth Edition. Price 5s. net. Crown 8vo. Price $1.50 net. DAILY NEWS.— " Mr. Herbert Paul has done scholars and the reading world in general a high service in publishing this collection of his essays. . . . To write an essay that shall tickle the understanding, as a sauce by Brillat .Savarin must have tickled the palate, is a task attempted by many and accomplished by few. Among these few Mr. Paul must be ranked. ... It must be read as a whole by all who appreciate urbanity, humour, and a style which glitters like the point of a rapier wielded by a master of fence." PUNCH. — "A delightful book of essays. Mr. Paul's touch is as light, and his style as brilliant as his reading is wide and his memory accurate. . . . His fund of good stories is inexhaustible, and his urbanity never fails. On the whole, this book is one of the very best examples of literature on literature and life." BOOKSafPERSONALITIES By H. W. NEVINSON Price 5s. net. Crown 8vo. Price $1.50 net. WORLD. — "There is the same strong and gentle spirit, the irony always used in the service of the good, the true, and the beautiful, the pathos, and the varied, easy style which we found in 'Between the Acts.' . . . His judgments are always valuable; where they are new they are fascinating. . . . The chief value of the book lies in its felicitous expression of the point of view of a scholar and lover of books, who is no book- worm or dilettante. To read the opinions of such a man, who never judges a book by book-knowledse, is most salutary." DAILY CHRONICLE. — " It is a remarkable thing, and probably unique, that a writer of such personality as the author of ' Between the Acts' should not only feel, but boldly put on paper, his homage and complete subjection to the genius of one after another of these men. He is entirely free from that one common virtue of critics, which is superiority to the author criticised. Thus, in turn, he here submits himself, not without humour, to the very style of William Morris, of Thomas Browne, of Mr. Belloc, and produces masterly appreciations by means of discreet parodies of their work." DAILY NEWS. — " His own criticism of Mr. Hardy could be applied to himself. He also is full of the pity of mortality, full of its laughter and amazing ways." DAILY TELEGRAPH. — " Mr. Nevinson's essays are discriminating as they are appreciative. The general reader will like them, for they are neither over-learned nor over-critical, easily written, and distinctly pleasing and popular." JOHN LANE, PUBLISHER, LONDON AND NEW YORK THE LIFE &' LETTERS OF R. S. HAWKER SOMETIME VICAR OF MORWENSTOW By HIS Son-in-Law, C. E. BYLES IVi^/i numerous Illustrations ^ including Lithographs by J. Ley Pethybridge, Two Sketches by the Earl of Carlisle, reproductions fro7n contemporary Prints, Portraits, Photographs, cr-v. Price 2IS. net. Demy 8vo. Price $3.50 net. TIMESa — "Dr. Johnson's wrath at the suggestion that a friend's eccentricity of dress and religion should be counted to him for madness, is a matter of history'. . . . Mr. Byles has abetter case than Dr. Johnson had, and his effort to disprove the charge re- sults in ... a triumphant acquittal. A well-written life is not, as Carlyle declared it to be, almost as rare as a well-spent one : it is a much rarer thing indeed. Mr. Byles has given us a book which will earn the gratitude of those whose love of poetry urges them to a knowledge of the poet." ATHEN>EUM. — "An authoritative and satisfactory biography. Mr. Byles has performed his task — by no means an easy one — with skill and good taste. The book has evidently been with him, as with his publisher, a genuine labour of love." OUTLOOK. — " Hawker, though the fact is only now beginning to be recognised, was one of the few real poets of his generation, and perhaps the greatest of all the poets who have also been clergymen of the Church of England ; greater than Heber, greater than Keble, greater than John Henry Newman, greater even than George Herbert. This admirable biography will be doubly welcome if it wins a larger public for his writings." MORNING POST.—" Gratitude is distinctly due to Mr. Byles." DAILY CHRONICLE.— "This admirable memoir." ACADEMY. — "His fragment of the ' Sangraal ' is worthy to be compared with Tennyson's." / EMILE ZOLA: Novelist ©"Reformer an account of his life, work, and influence By E. a. VIZETELLY With numerous Ilhistrations, Portraits, o^c. Price 21S. net. Demy 8vo. Price 83.50 net. TIMES. — " Mr. Vizetelly has the faculty of telling a straightforward story in an interesting manner, and he probably knew Zola better than any other Englishman." DAILY TELEGRAPH. — " Extremely interesting and comprehensive." Mr. O'Connor in T.P.'s WEEKLY. — "It is a story of fascinating interest, and it is told admirably by Mr. Vizetelly." WESTMINSTER GAZETTE.— "This fine volume . . . will be read eagerly." ACADEMY. — " It was inevitable that the authoritative life of Zola should be from the pen of E. A. Vizetelly. ... A worthy tribute to the genius of the master." ATHEN/EUM. — "It is our duty to congratulate Mr. Vizetelly on his exhaustive and interesting account of Zcla's life and labours, and to pay homage to his devotion to the memory of his departed friend." DAILY CHRONICLE.— "Told faithfully, sympathetically, and with no little charm." DAILY GRAPHIC.—" Mr. Vizetelly may be congratulated on his achievement." DAILY MAIL. — " Interesting and straightforward. ... It bears the weight of indisputable authority." DAILY NEWS. — "A volume of singular, in places of quite absorbing, interest." OUTLOOK.—" Mr. Vizetelly must be congratulated." PALL MALL GAZETTE. — " A picture of the man as he was." ST. JAMES'S GAZETTE.—" Mr. Vizetelly has done his work capitally. This book deserves to be widely read." STANDARD. — "A veritable human document." JOHN LANE, PUBLISHER, LONDON AND NEW YORK WALT WHITMAN: An Essay WITH A SELECTION FROM HIS WRITINGS By EDMOND holmes Price 3s. 6d. net. Small 4to. Price $1.25 net. LITERATURE. — •' Mr. Holmes has a faculty of sane and temperate criticism which is as uncommon as praiseworthy. We can recommend him as a safe and compe- tent guide to any one who wishes to begin an acquaintance with the poet of the democracy and his works." PILOT. — " His book illuminates more than its immediate subject." SATURDAY REVIEW.—" Full of profoundly suggestive and really illumining remarks expressed with eloquence and fervour." LITERARY WORLD.—" Mr. Holmes writes sympathetically, yet sanely, of the peculiar qualities of Walt Whitman's poetrj. . . . The genuine desire of Mr. Holmes, that Walt Whitman should be more widely understood and appreciated, is shown by the excellent selections from his poems included in this volume." ROBERT BROWNING: ESSAYS AND THOUGHTS By J. T. NETTLESHIP WITH PORTRAIT. SECOND EDITION. Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d. net. The present edition is more than doubled in size, containing additional essays, dealing with poems which have appeared since the publication of the first volume. ACADEMY. — " Mr. Nettleship has made us realise the true depth and breadth of the philosophy which underlies the vast and varied body of Browning's poetical work." LITERARY WORLD. — "The work of an accomplished scholar, a keen critic. It must hold ;4 very high place among the studies of Browning." ATHEN/EUM.— "Mr. Nettleship's thoughtful volume." DAILY NEWS. — " The work of years of the most devoted application. The most careless reader of these essays must be convinced that he has been conducted into the presence of a sovereign genius." TATLER'S LITERARY NOTES. — "Among the best criticisms of poetry ever written. Of all books on Browning its criticism is the sanest, its style the clearest." JOHN LANE, PUBLISHER, LONDON AND NEW YORK THE WORKS OF ANATOLE FRANCE 1 has long been a reproach to England that only one volume by ANATOLE FRANCE has been adequately rendered into English ; yet outside this country he shares with TOLSTOI the distinction of being the greatest and most daring student of humanity living. V There have been many difficulties to encounter in completing arrangements for a uniform edition, though perhaps the chief bar- rier to publication here has been the fact that his writings are not for babes — but for men and the mothers of men. Indeed, some of his Eastern romances are written with biblical can- dour. ** I have sought truth strenuously," he tells us, " I have met her boldly. I have never turned from her even when she wore an THE WORKS OF ANATOLE FRANCE unexpected aspect." Still, it is believed that the day has come for giving English versions of all his imaginative w^orks, as well as of his monumental study JOAN OF ARC, which is undoubtedly the most discussed book in the world of letters to-day. f MR. JOHN LANE has pleasure in announcing that the following volumes are either already published or are passing through the press. THE RED LILY MOTHER OF PEARL THE GARDEN QF EPICURUS THE CRIME OF SYLVESTRE BONNARD BALTHASAR THE WELL OF ST. CLARE THAIS THE WHITE STONE PENGUIN ISLAND THE MERRIE TALES OF JACQUES TOURNE- BROCHE JOCASTA AND THE FAMISHED CAT THE ELM TREE ON THE MALL THE WICKER-WORK WOMAN AT THE SIGN OF THE QUEEN PEDAUQUE THE OPINIONS OF JEROME COIGNARD MY FRIEND'S BOOK THE ASPIRATIONS OF JEAN SERVIEN JOAN OF ARC (2 vols.) H All the books will be published at 6/- each with the exception of JOAN OF ARC, which will be 25/- net the two volumes, with eight Illustrations. ^ The format of the volumes leaves little to be desired. The size is Demy 8vo (9 X 5|), and they arc printed from Caslon type upon a paper light in weight and strong of texture, with a cover design in crimson and gold, a gilt top, end-papers from designs by Aubrey Beardsley and initials by Henry Ospovat. In short, these are volumes for the biblio- phile as well as the lover of fiction, and form perhaps the cheapest library edition of copyright novels ever published, for the price is only that of an ordinary novel H The translation of these books has been entrusted to such competent French scholars as MR. Alfred allinson, MR. FREDERIC CHAPMAN. MR. ROBERT B. DOUGLAS, THE WORKS OF ANATOLE FRANCE MR. A. W. EVANS, MRS. FARLEY, MR. LAFCADIO HEARN, MRS. W. S. JACKSON, MRS. JOHN LANE, MRS. NEWMARCH, MR. C. E. ROCHE, MISS WINIFRED STEPHENS, and MISS M. P. WILLCOCKS. ^ As Anatole Thibault, dit Anatole France, is to most English readers merely a name, it will be well to state that he was born in 1 844 in the picturesque and inspiring surroundings of an old bookshop on the Quai Voltaire, Paris, kept by his father. Monsieur Thibault, an authority on eighteenth-century history, from whom the boy caught the passion for the principles of the Revolution, while from his mother he was learning to love the ascetic ideals chronicled in the Lives of the Saints. He was schooled with the lovers of old books, missals and manuscripts ; he matriculated on the Quais with the old Jewish dealers of curios and objeis d'art ; he graduated in the great university of life and experience. It will be recognised that all his work is permeated by his youthful impressions ; he is, in fact, a virtuoso at large. % He has written about thirty volumes of fiction. His first novel was JOCASTA ^ THE FAMISHED CAT (1879). THE CRIME OF SYLVESTRE BONNARD appeared in 1881, and had the distinction of being crowned by the French Academy, into which he was received in 1896. ^ His work is illuminated with style, scholarship, and psychology ; but its outstanding features are the lambent wit, the gay mockery, the genial irony with which he touches every subject he treats. But the wit is never malicious, the mockery never derisive, the irony never barbed. To quote from his own GARDEN OF EPICURUS : " Irony and Pity are both of good counsel ; the first with her smiles makes life agreeable, the other sanctifies it to us with her tears. The Irony I invoke is no cruel deity. She mocks neither love nor beauty. She is gentle and kindly disposed. Her mirth disarms anger and it is she teaches us to laugh at rogues and fools whom but for her we might be so weak as to hate." IT Often he shows how divine humanity triumphs over mere asceticism, and with entire reverence ; indeed, he might be described as an ascetic overflowing with humanity, just as he has been termed a " pagan, but a pagan constantly haunted by the pre-occupation of Christ." He is in turn — like his own Choulette in THE RED LILY — saintly and Rabelaisian, yet without incongruity. *<'^- THE WORKS OF ANATOLE FRANCE At all times he is the unrelenting foe of superstition and hypocrisy. Of himself he once modestly said : " You will find in my writings perfect sincerity (lying demands a talent I do not possess), much indulgence, and some natural affection for the beautiful and good." fl The mere extent of an author's popularity is perhaps a poor argument, yet it is significant that two books by this author are in their HUNDRED AND TENTH THOU- SAND, and numbersof them well intotheir SEVENTIETH THOUSAND, whilst the one which a Frenchman recently described as " Monsieur France's most arid book" is in its FIFTY-EIGHTH THOUSAND. f Inasmuch as M. FRANCE'S ONLY contribution to an English periodical appeared in THE YELLOW BOOK, vol. v., April 1895, together with the first important English appreciation of his work from the pen of the Hon. Maurice Baring, it is peculiarly appropriate that the English edition of his works should be issued from the Bodlev Head. ORDER FORM 190 To Mr. Bookse/Ier Please send me the follovoing works oj Anatole France : THE RED LILY MOTHER OF PEARL THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS THE CRIME OF SYLVESTRE BONNARD BALTHASAR THE WELL OF ST. CLARE THAIS THE WHITE STONE PENGUIN ISLAND THE MERRIE TALES OF JACQUES TOURNE- BROCHE for which I enclose - JOHN LANE,Publi8her,Thb Bodley Head,Vigo St. London, W. 14 DAY TT^P RBTXmN TO DESK FKOM ^^S, BORROWBD LOAN DEPT. J^f^^^^dbooks are sub/ect to u„„,ediate tecaU. L-D 2lA-50m-8.'61 (Cl795sl0)476B ,T„. General Library University of California -tferkeley 'A 57830 THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY