George Meredith

To most readers, even those who are fairly well informed concerning current literature and familiar with the creators of it, the name of George Meredith has long remained comparatively unknown. Yet he has been writing and publishing assiduously since 1853. He came forward — perhaps one should rather say, he first definitely took his place in the great background of letters — at a time when Dickens had just published David Copperfield, and Thackeray, having given to the world the History of Pendennis, was about to confide to the same august body the History of Henry Esmond. Meredith, we may say, was born to literature when these two luminaries were in conjunction, and shone with an almost equal splendor. If we conceive an astrology of art and intellect, there is warrant for saying that Dickens and Thackeray, being in the ascendant when the horoscope of Meredith was cast, had a perceptible power over his literary destiny ; for the novels of Meredith reveal in some degree the mingled influence of these two stars. He, however, has lived to see them move in their courses, waxing or waning, as the case might be ; and he has seen various other bright lights rise, vanish, or endure. He has witnessed the career of Charles Reade and haply that of Wilkie Collins (if he deigned to notice it). The triumph of George Eliot on distinctly elevated ground has also presented itself to his living eyes. Meanwhile, he himself has somehow continued to occupy his place in the background. Now, backgrounds may be very good things : they are certainly essential in every picture which pretends to completeness. We encounter persons who even contend that those whose attention is drawn chiefly to the principal figures in a group, or fastens upon the details of the foreground, are superficial observers. These observers, it is hinted, do not appreciate the depth, the beauty, and superior force of the background. There is an ineffable something in that remoter space which is beyond reach of the common gaze.

My own acquaintance with George Meredith’s work began, in a fragmentary way, somewhere about 1868 or 1869, when his Adventures of Harry Richmond was moving through the pages of the Corhill Magazine. That acquaintance, notwithstanding the strong impression made upon me, was not continued nor completed until the appearance, lately, of a dignified edition of the novels, brought out in this country by Messrs. Roberts Brothers. The edition marks an event, not only for Meredith, but for students of fiction. Perhaps one might even affirm that it partially dislocates the author from the background, and brings him into a new, an unwonted prominence. We may assume this much : that it places him in a neutral position, where we are free to discuss his qualities without prejudice.

Of his poems it will not he necessary to speak here, except, it may be, in illustration of a point or two. It was as a poet that he began his career. There are two volumes of his verse extant: Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth, and Ballads and Poems of Tragic Life. A third volume is in preparation. The few of these pieces that I have read do not seem to be especially poetic. They lack the elasticity of the lyric ; they fail to embody that quality which we vainly try to compass by words expressing motion, music, — an unclassified phase of graceful or beautifully passionate energy that, however hard to define, is instantly felt when we see it fitly and perfectly manifested. They are rugged, thoughtful, grim, philosophic ; sown with sparkles of fancy that produce an effect of grotesqueness and crudity, like the similar specks of weird fire in his prose; and, like his prose, they bespeak in the writer a massive, original, and interesting mind. As for the prose itself, it fills some five thousand pages. Why, it may be asked, should the number of pages be mentioned ? Does it occur to any one, in reviewing Thackeray or Dickens, to apply the measurements of arithmetic, or to weigh their value by quantity ? Probably not. Nor did it occur to the present writer to take these considerations into account, on beginning a fresh examination of Harry Richmond and the brother novels of that family. On the contrary, I was surprised with delight at the keen perception shown by the novelist; his extraordinary energy ; his graphic vividness ; his versatility in entering into and representing the most intimate and familiar or the most outof-the-way moods, sensations, and sentiments experienced by the characters of the story. But, long before I had finished, I wondered where it would all lead to, and began to count the pages. If this was so with one book, how much more was it likely to be the case with the rest! Hence the counting, which must be accepted as a natural, instinctive index to some quality in the author that inspires a sense of number and weight.

We have here ten volumes of fiction. The Shaving of Shagpat, issued originally in 1855, is in a measure an imitation of the Arabian Nights, half burlesque and half serious ; with a moral concerning illusions in life and government, tucked away in the end of the story like a gold piece sewn into the lining of a coat. The garment itself, however, — that is, the substance of the tale, — is so richly bedizened, and so marvelous a mixture of splendors and tatters, that by the time we have pulled it to pieces, for the sake of the treasure it contains, the hidden coin seems of little worth.

In this story there are picturesqueness and spendthrift imagery to excess. It abounds in fantastic imagination, some of which is startling and impressive; but more often the effect is so extravagant as to excite an unpleasant mental vertigo. Especially is this so in the last part, with its colossal conflict of lightnings, vultures, scorpions, and the bird Khoorook, having wings a league long. And all this gigantic spectacle centres upon the rich and hairy clothier, Shagpat, whose false power resides in a single hair of his head, called “ the Identical,” which finally rises up, and burns for three days and nights ; then turns into a fiery serpent, and emits a stream of other fiery serpents. There is a wide difference between even the wildest flights of sane imagination and the fantasies of mania. It is hard to conceive how Mr. Meredith could have conjured up these half-delirious phantoms without losing the best part of his head amongst them. Possibly they were applied with deliberation, by himself, as a test of his own steadiness ; a discipline, a temptation, such as the anchorites and ascetics of earlier times considered indispensable to their equipment for final victory. Meredith appears to have passed through this particular temptation with colors flying forward. He has not since exposed himself to the sorcery of unbridled fancies. But no one could have predicted, from Shagpat, the future novelist. Similarly, Farina: a Legend of Cologne, published two years later, is unworthy of notice, beyond the remark that it gives token of a Teutonic influence, traceable elsewhere through his writings, in an evident familiarity with German localities, a fondness for alliteration, tortured compound words, and an inverted order of construction. Whether this came from direct contact with German literature, or was derived from the impress of Carlyle, whose grandiose manner of manipulating little things is frequently echoed in Meredith, it is impossible to judge. But the spurious Orientalism of Shagpat and the somewhat tawdry Germanism of Farina are interspersed with bits of verse little better than sublimated doggerel or the delusive Eastern poems of Mirza Schaffy ; and Meredith has never quite shaken off his fondness for introducing this kind of sham pasteboard verse, which assumes the appearance of real golden goblets on the stage, into his serious novels. I have a suspicion, although I may be wrong, that in these two early compositions he had been emboldened by the example of Thackeray’s success in semi-extravaganza. Natural gifts and power of expression they undoubtedly show ; but the writer was trifling with his powers and gifts, and had not yet found his field. It was not until 1859, when he had reached the age of thirty-two, that he produced The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, his first mature novel, charged to the brim with earnestness, wit, strength of conception. It is ostensibly a sermon upon the folly of bringing up a boy on theory, in ignorance of the world, and then letting him meet the utmost rigor of temptation, in the fatuous belief that, being encased in theory and maxims, he will be proof against harm. This, the main moral purpose, is strictly carried out, with an immitigable vigor almost appalling, and with strict truth of probability and nature. Richard’s father, the baronet, who writes aphorisms and tries to enact the part of an all-wise Providence towards his boy, is somewhat tediously presented. The moral primer sticks out from his pocket in an annoying way ; and it obtrudes itself also in the author’s treatment of Richard’s comrade, Ripton, the son of a prosperous London solicitor, who is allowed more latitude by his less theoretical father, but abuses his parent’s confidence. In all this there is a suggestion of little educational works, now happily obsolete, where the moral and immoral children were represented in blue and crimson and yellow, of tints

only a little more crude than those in Mulready’s paintings of English life. But the story of Richard’s boyish crime of arson ; the manner in which he faced the consequences ; the manly, generous, ardent nature that he revealed; and, furthermore, the story of his love for the portionless ward of his old enemy, and his loyalty in following it but to marriage, — these things are superbly told, with an intensity and a sympathetic fire which would be hard to match. Then comes the final, irrevocable woe, in which the hero is involved by his father’s craze for playing Providence. Meredith’s stories generally end happily ; but this one is profoundly tragic. I have read many of his chapters without being moved, even when the situation in itself must theoretically be acknowledged an affecting one. But it seems to me that the heart which is not touched, and the eyes that do not become moist, in the reading of the last portions of Richard Feverel must be indurated with a glaze of indifference which is not to he envied. The tragedy of the close is greatly heightened by the pathos and beauty of a scene in which errant Richard returns to his wife, who has borne him a son during his absence. Richard has but a few minutes with her. He suffers from a deep moral stain, unknown to his wife, and is pledged to depart secretly again, in order to fight a duel, which he madly believes to be required in defense of her honor. It is a thrilling moment when, " in the oblivion her lips put upon him, he was free to the bliss of her embrace.” The suspense is still higher when she leads him to see his child: “ His heart began rapidly throbbing at the sight of a little rosycurtained cot covered with lace like a milky summer cloud.” But Richard will not even look upon his son until he has confessed his sin. This is his Ordeal. The forgiveness of love comes unexpectedly; but even then he must break away, without explanation, to be in readiness for the fatal duel. The scene is given with a, mingling of force and of exquisite delicacy which is supreme. We must not forget, either, the chapter, equally powerful in another direction, entitled The Enchantress. Then, too, there is the wealth of character drawing and of searching observation scattered throughout the book. The nurse, Mrs. Berry, is almost Shakespearean in the fullness and fidelity with which she is depicted. Like the enchantress, Mrs. Mount, and others among the personages displayed by Meredith, she exemplifies a faculty which this writer possesses in a greater degree than any other novelist since Walter Scott. I mean the faculty of what may be called literary impersonation, the faculty of making fictitious characters move and talk, in a book, with the exact veracity of life ; making them as real as if we met them in the street or saw them on the boards of the theatre; yet never making them resort to artifice or exceed the bounds of nature. On the whole, I incline to mark Richard Feverel, Meredith’s first novel, as his best, excepting Beauchamp’s Career. The longer I think of it, also, the more I incline to say that it is essentially a great novel. But in some respects it is not great at all. That very faculty of wonderful literary impersonation, in which Meredith is at times so eminent, utterly forsakes him in many places, where he causes his people to talk in the most artificial way. What, for example, could be more unnatural than that a young man of modern England should, in ordinary conversation, deliver himself of this sentence, ascribed to Richard: “You said it set all your marrow in revolt, — ‘ fried your marrow,’ I think were the words, — and made you see twenty thousand different ways of sliding down to the Grim King ” ?

It is precisely this sort of alternation from the natural to the unnatural, from high artistic excellence to a disenchanting volubility closely resembling rubbish, that makes Meredith so perplexing a study. On the other hand, we find in Feverel those touches of description, those flashes of epigram, that frequently irradiate even the dullest stretch of his uninspired passages. Algernon Feverel, who had been wounded in the military service, was “ possessed, it was said, of the absurd notion that a man who has lost his balance by losing a leg may regain it by sticking to the bottle.” In another place, where a colloquy is going on between a tipsy man and Mrs. Berry, the narrator observes : “ Their common candle wore with dignity the brigand’s hat of midnight, and cocked a drunken eye at them from under it.” These quotations evince humor and fancy ; but, like many other amusing or pointed touches in Meredith’s writing, they are not very well timed. They are dropped in irrelevantly, impede the main interest, and burden the mind with a feeling that it would be very pleasant to attend to all these bright things, if we only had leisure to do so.

Pause a moment, here, to reflect that Meredith’s Feverel was drawing near the end of its publication as a serial in Once a Week, when the conductors of that English periodical made a bid for Hawthorne’s Marble Faun (then lying finished in MS.), to succeed Meredith’s tale. Hawthorne did not accept the offer; but this chance conjunction of the two works in time and place offers an interesting contrast. The romance of the American author, when published, rose to its due place in the monument of his fame which his own genius built for him. The Englishman’s novel, published simultaneously, sank into obscurity. The author of it has, nevertheless, gone on working resolutely, although deprived of the incentive of renown, with a confidence and constancy that must have been begotten either by the firm inward sense of a justifying genius, or else by a vast, unshakable conceit. It behooves us to inquire which of these two forces it was that actuated him. His next novel, Mary Bertrand, is not included in his latest and authoritative edition : we may therefore take up Evan Harrington, which came out in 1861. In that book, the theme is supplied by the fortunes of a young man, the son of a fashionable tailor in Lymport-on-theSea, who had been addicted to fashionable and aristocratic associations, gallantry, and debts. At the moment when the drama opens, this glittering but embarrassing father has died. His daughters have married well; one of them being the Portuguese Countess de Saldar. “ It was a remarkable thing that these ladies thought no man on earth like their father, and always cited him as the example of a perfect gentleman; and yet they buried him with one mind, and each mounted guard over his sepulchre, to secure his ghost from an airing.” Indeed, it is the terror of their lives that their origin will be discovered ; that the dead tailor may arise metaphorically and confront them inopportunely amid the surroundings of their new and factitious social dignity. The shadow of this dread rests with especial darkness on the son Evan, who has had a taste of diplomatic life with his brother-in-law, the Count de Saldar, at the court of Lisbon, and has fallen in love with Rose, the daughter of Lady Jocelyn. He has been playing the fine gentleman, without title or money, and on returning to England, in the same ship with Rose, finds himself suddenly swamped, by the death of his father, in a mire of ignoble tailordom and mortification, as the residuary legatee of his father’s debts, which he bravely and honorably assumes. It will be seen at once that this posture of affairs points to a fertile field of comedy and pathos ; and it must be said without delay that Meredith gathers from it a rich harvest, in places. The trouble is that he has not sufficiently ploughed and tilled the ground. In the midst of the smiling crop, there remain obstinate ledges and fragments of dull stone, or patches of sand.

The story unfolds a large picture of English life in certain of its phases, which is both amusing and instructive ; but the author’s quick discernment and lifelike delineation are set in such a doughy mass of words that I am reminded of that singular man, Charles Sealsfield, who long ago spread himself over the larger part of the United States in a thin crust of fiction, once greatly lauded, but now forgotten. The same waste of uncommon energy in a dense medium of words, that oppresses the explorer Sealsfield, is a cause for lament in the case of Meredith, who nevertheless has much the more highly endowed mind. The vicissitudes of young Evan Harrington are sketched with great gusto and, at times, with a most entertaining effect. Nothing could be better than the portrait of old Tom Cogglesby, and the account of a meeting between him and his brother Andrew at the Aurora tavern. The human nature is exact ; the drawing is broad, yet nice ; the tints are mellow ; a delicious humor pervades the whole episode. But Evan’s vagabond comrade, Jack Raikes, is a total failure. In him we discern the temporary sway of the Dickens star; but none other than Dickens himself could have done justice to this irregular personage. Meredith, in attempting to portray him, is ready enough with words to put into his mouth; but the mimetic or impersonating faculty which I have mentioned does not answer at his call, and Mr. Raikes is all shell and no meat. The Countess de Saldar — a scheming, insincere woman, affecting the airs of foreign nobility, even to her accent in speaking — is very much better rendered ; but the recital of her wiles and the extracts from her letters are given at too great length. We know the character when the half has been told, and the added illustration of it becomes a dead-weight. At last the bad tendencies in her are pushed to an extreme in her sudden amorous advances towards her sister’s husband, Andrew. This is done abruptly ; so that, while her action may be a logical enough outcome of her character, it appears precipitate, and makes an impression of purely superfluous coarseness. But this is in keeping with the author’s prevailing rigorousness in telling the truth at all hazards, even when he has to drag it in by the neck so awkwardly that it seems to be inverted, and looks rather like falsehood. As he elsewhere makes one of his people say, “You parsons and petticoats must always mince the meat to hash the fact,” so he is resolved not to mince matters himself, even though, as a consequence, he should inflict indigestion upon us. In this pushing of his characters to an extreme, and his remorseless amplification of their attributes, he also betrays his overmastering impulse to make them absolute tyes. Obeying it, he makes of “ Mrs. Mel ” Harrington, Evan’s mother, an iron female, repulsive in her hard constancy to her humble position as the widow of the defunct tailor. She it was who, for long years, had endured in silence the follies and infidelities of her showy husband. Naturally enough, she became hardened. She does not weep for her husband’s death. Her sole motive is to face the debts, and make her son carry on business at the shop ; while his love for Rose, his ambition, and the Countess are all tugging at him to withdraw from the smirching connection with “ trade.” Mrs. Mel in reality would be a pathetic figure; but Meredith admits no hint of that likelihood. In his hands, she is purely an embodiment of harsh duty and fatefulness. Distinct and tangible she certainly is, in this aspect, as much so as the contact with cold metal. But it may be doubted whether she is humanly true. You may mould examples of the perfect sphere in the form of billard-balls, and by means of those unresisting bodies may illustrate geometric and dynamic laws on the green table ; but you will not stir the heart by doing so. Neither can you move the heart, nor produce a conviction of deep veracity, by playing off against one another, in fiction, characters which are simply hard, unmalleable bodies, representing a single passion or idea. More than this, Meredith is open to the charge of compelling a character, for the sake of effect, into a most unlikely and unmanly position ; as when he makes Evan claim the authorship of an anonymous letter, really written by the countess, — a letter reflecting upon another woman’s honor, and calling her husband’s notice to a flirtation which his wife, Mrs. Evremonde, is carrying on with a young man. Evan temporarily blasts his own character by asserting to Lady Jocelyn, the mother of his affianced wife, that he wrote this contemptible letter. He does so in order to shield his tricky sister, and is unable to give any reason for his supposed epistolary effort. But, as Lady Jocelyn remarks, “ when one can’t discern a motive, it’s natural to ascribe certain acts to madness.” And so we must ascribe Mr. Meredith’s manipulation of Evan to a kind of madness. These things should be left to the melodrama, where there is no escape from the exactions of climax and curtain, and where outré proceedings are more admissible. But they are perhaps the inevitable result of Mr. Meredith’s inclination to assume arbitrary control of his characters, and make them represent or do whatever he pleases.

Apparently conscious of this, he pauses at one point to say, “ You may think the Comic Muse is straining human nature rather toughly in making the Countess de Saldar rush, open-eyed, into the jaws of Demogorgon, dreadful to her,” — which, by the way, is an instance of unduly inflated language, to which he is prone. Now his Muse (of whom he has a great deal to say, in the course of his works) does strain human nature very frequently. It would be well for him could he observe better the maxim laid down in his own poem, entitled The Two Masks : —

I am afraid that Mr, Meredith’s creatures are not scrupulous in obeying the ordinance of reason. By this I do not mean to blame them for unreasonableness in the ordinary sense, for that is a state which all human beings are liable to fall into. What I wish to convey is, that his characters sometimes “ outleap our human features,” and fail to conform to the laws of nature.

But, on the same page where he tries to excuse his “ straining,” the author redeems himself with a witticism concerning the countess: “ The Countess de Saldar, like other adventurers, has her star. They who possess nothing on earth have a right to claim a portion of the heavens. Much may be done with a star.”

In spite of all its defects, Evan Harrington contains more ingenuity of plot and is better constructed than most of its author’s novels. A robust, rollicking humor pervades portions of it ; and the chapter in which “ Old Mel’s ” daughters have to “ digest their father at dinner ” — plainly speaking, suffer an exposure of their plebeian origin, at a brilliant dinner-party — is not only fine, spirited, and strong, but is also rendered tonic by a dash of searching satire. In this mixture of the bluff, sportive tone with wholesome castigation of shams, and with the intermittent moralizing or discourse about his personages, which Meredith allows himself, we may. I think, accurately detect the occult control of Dickens and Thackeray, side by side. Not that the more recent writer is imitative of either ; but he seems to have incorporated with his own singular and independent genius elements from the same sources on which those great but unlike masters drew.

In Evan Harrington, epigram, as usual, sparkles from the flint of even the most obdurate parts of the narrative ; and we come now and then upon refreshing little oases of description. He paints, for instance, a whole night-scene with these few words : “ The white highway, beneath a moon that walked high and small over marble clouds.” Again, in the landscape of the picnic episode, he happily touches in “ a bending birch, which rose three-stemmed from the root, and hung a noiseless green shower over the basin of green it shadowed.” Then there is the little brook at Beckley Park, the representation of which in words is so charming that it may well be partly quoted here “ The dive could be taken to a paved depth, and you swam out over a pebbly bottom into sunlight, screened by the thick-weeded banks, loose-strife, and willow-herb, and mint nodding over you, and in the later season long-plumed yellow grasses.” Here Rose loved to walk at night; and Evan’s window overlooked the spot. “ The view was sweet and pleasant to him, for all the babbling of the water was of Rose,” — how Tennysonian this, in music and expression ! — “ and winding in and out, to east, to north, it wound to embowered hopes in the lover’s mind, to tender dreams ; and often at dawn, when dressing, his restless heart embarked on it. and sailed into havens, the phantom joys of which colored his life for him all the day. But most he loved to look across it when the light fell. . . . The faint blue beam of a star chained all his longings, charmed his sorrows to sleep.”

We now approach two of the novels which, although Rhoda Fleming intervened between them, belong together. Emilia in England (which, in the new edition, is put forth as Sandra Belloni) is really no more than the first part of a very extended recital, completed in the later story entitled Vittoria. In many respects they are very characteristic of Meredith; yet it must be confessed that they present a substance almost impossible to analyze. How any one ever came to conceive these tales, to what purpose they were directed in his own mind, why he should be at the pains to gather in one group so heterogeneous a lot of characters, and how he commanded the patience to pursue the threads of their actions and emotions, I am at a loss to guess. Briefly, these two books, taken all in all, are frightfully dull. Emilia (whose real name is Sandra Belloni), having an English mother, is first depicted as a woman with a wonderful voice, that augurs a great career for her as a public singer. But she is in England ; she is undeveloped ; and, above all, the main energies of her nature are devoted to the cause of Italian emancipation. She is sympathetic and self-sacrificing ; is susceptible to love, also; and touches, at various points, the domestic history of her English friends. Two Englishmen love her ; one of them, Wilfrid Pole, selfishly, and not quite worthily. The other, Merthyr Powys, spends his fortune and risks his life in the cause of freedom for Italy. But, while she apparently encourages both these men, she really does not love either of them absolutely. Wilfrid is unworthy of her, and she severs herself from Merthyr by accepting an engagement to go into training for an operatic career, under the auspices and at the cost of one Antonio Pericles, who worships her voice, and only her voice. This sacrifice is made by her, in order to obtain from the rich Pericles a sum of ready money for the relief of certain English friends who are in acute financial need. At this point, Emilia (or Sandra Belloni) ends. But in Vittoria we find the same heroine, now in Italy, masquerading under the name of Vittoria, and acting as an Italian conspiratress, who, in her guise of débutante at the opera, is to give the signal for revolt by singing a song with the refrain " Italia shall be free!”—which has not been submitted to the Austrian censor of the stage in Milan. The situation is strong ; one expects all sorts of inspiring results from this beginning. But, with the broad champaign of the Italian revolutionary epoch open before him, Mr. Meredith fails to realize our hopes. Emilia, Vittoria, or Sandra, has a great deal to say; and her two former English lovers, Wilfrid and Merthyr, are present; the first serving as an officer in the Austrian army, the second being still at her beck in aiding Italian patriotism. She uses them both : forcing Wilfrid, through her fascinations, to betray his trusts as an Austrian officer, until he is broken and degraded from his rank; and leaving Merthyr to serve her faithfully on the Italian side, while she marries Count Carlo, a native Italian patriot, with whom she lives not very happily. The idea which the writer wished to convey was, I suppose, that a woman so entirely given up to the liberation of her native land as Emilia, or Vittoria, is conceived to have been must forego the happiness of a genuine and complete union with any man. She destroyed the careers of her two English devotees, for the sake of Italy; but when she married Count Carlo, she also sacrificed herself, because it turned out that her husband and herself were not wholly in unison, and that he did not trust her even in conspiracies for Italian freedom. Because he did not trust her, he lost his life in a futile revolt, and she was left to mourn him inconsolably. The lesson seems to be, For freedom and country everything must be sacrificed, even the love and the hopes of all individual patriots.

But if this be the meaning of these two novels, it surely might have been conveyed in much less space than Mr. Meredith has used. And he has filled the space, to the very horizon, with such a cloud of characters and so bewildering a mist of universal talkativeness that it is hard work to extract even this much of meaning from the thousand pages which are appropriated to the chosen theme. The best piece of portraiture discoverable in this two-part tragedy is the delineation of Barto Rizzi, the powerful, restless, mysterious Italian conspirator, of noble birth, relentless towards the treacherous, and suspecting everybody. This figure is worthy of Balzac ; but, unhappily, it is not fully developed. Still, when one looks back at these novels, and gives them the benefit of a liberal perspective, the character of Emilia (or Sandra, or Vittoria) comes out strongly, in a large coherence that embraces and atones for many minor inconsistencies and, it may be added, for capital faults. It is under circumstances like these, when he is wrestling with the adversity of his own mistakes, that Meredith’s great power of representing types comes to his rescue.

Vittoria’s friend, Laura Piaveni, tlie widow of an Italian soldier-martyr, is also a remarkable study of the feminine nature. A vital creature she is, — pure and sweet by native bias, but charged with tenderness, passion, memory, revenge, and tears and smiles, as the atmosphere of earth is charged with the mingled or conflicting potencies of sunshine, thunder, and gentle rain, Charles Reade was an adept in the knowledge and depicture of many feminine traits ; but, despite his wiry alertness of observation and his consummate nimbleness in conveying his perceptions, the women whom Reade drew were cut a good deal according to one pattern. They are genuine, so far as they go ; but they excite just a suspicion of clever mechanism, actuating their verisimilitude. One sometimes feels that their quick glances, the rising and falling of their eyelids, — nay, the heaving of the bosom itself, and the fountain of bright tears, — are under the control of cunning springs, or valves and pulleys. It is not so with Meredith. His female characters may be far less interesting, to the popular eye ; but they are absolutely real and unimpeachably spontaneous. One is aware of a depth in them as hard to fathom as the sky is; endlessly palpitating like the sky, too, with shifting colors and mysterious light and darkness ; unresting, yet steadfast as the firmament. Moreover, Meredith’s women are very acutely and wonderfully differentiated ; being strongly individual, as well as types. Another thing especially to be noted about them is, that they are not merely images of women as seen from the masculine point of view. Thackeray, Dickens, Hawthorne, Reade, — in fact, nearly all male novelists, excepting Balzac, perhaps, — however penetrating their insight or comprehensive their seizure of feminine character may be, leave upon their portraiture of women a trace of the process by which they have grasped the subject. They still seem to stand on the outside of it. I hardly think that even Mr. Howells should be excepted. Meredith, on the contrary, appears to identify himself with the women created by him ; and here, again, he becomes in so far Shakespearean. Rhoda Fleming, an entirely English story, dealing with life in Kent and London, contains some telling examples of this quality. The elder sister, Dahlia, who comes to grief; her honest but too harshly upright sister, Rhoda; and the enigmatic, tricksy, but sincerely and consistently inconsistent Mrs. Lovell, are all extraordinarily vigorous and veracious creations. Read the chapter called The Expiation, and that other headed Dahlia’s Frenzy, and see whether you do not agree that Meredith is a master of feminine nature. “ The young man who can look on them we call fallen women with a noble eye,” says the author, “is to my mind he that is most nobly begotten of the race, and likeliest to be the sire of a noble line.” That sentence sounds the spiritual keynote of the novel, Rhoda Fleming. There is nothing mawkish, nothing false, in the author’s treatment of the most difficult of all problems that can be presented to the art of fiction. Far from that, Rhoda Fleming is one of the best balanced works, in this respect, that it has been my fortune to meet with. Justice is meted out on all sides, impartially ; but it is the justice, not of theory, but of nature’s law and logic. The errors of the sundry personages, good or bad, return upon them in consequences that are unerring. This is not pleasant for the personages of the tale, and therefore will not be pleasant for those readers who like to have terrible realities served up in fiction with cream and sugar. If the critic may be pardoned for acknowledging his possible fallibility or want of nerve, lie will admit that it is hard to be perfectly sure that Meredith, in this case, has not cleaved too austerely close to the pitiless line of fact. He sends home each rivet, in his fearful demonstration of natural law acting on the life of men and women, as with a clang of iron. Nevertheless, the springs of pity and terror are unsealed, though it may be that the author has to drive an artesian well in order to reach them. Rhoda Fleming is a very grim book ; but I should be unable to acquit myself before conscience were I to omit saying that it is also a great book, and for direct narrative and dramatic power ranks among the foremost of its author’s works. Even the evanescent sketch of Mrs. Fleming, the mother of Dahlia and Rhoda, devoted to her flower-garden and her girls, is admirable; and their father, Farmer Fleming, is another portrait as solid, true, and living as a head by Franz Hals, or Bonnât, or our American Vinton. The rural low comedy is also excellently given in the fat, affectionate farm-cook, Mrs. Sumfit, “ whose waist was dimly indicated by her apron-string,” and her kindness was as exuberant as her person; likewise in the old farmhand, Master Gammon, “ an old man with the cast of eye of an antediluvian lizard.” Gammon was fond of dumplings at dinner; and on an occasion when important news was to be deferred until the end of that meal, Mrs. Sumfit impatiently asked him, “ When do you think you ’ll have done, Mas’ Gammon ? ” “ He half raised his ponderous, curtaining eyelids, and replied, ‘ When I feels my buttons, marm.’ ”

I am not contending that Rhoda Fleming is great as a work of art; the truth being that it is marred by the same diffuseness which has always interposed as a barrier between Meredith and the public, by muffling the clear sound of his best notes, which carry an indubitable ring of greatness in thought and perception. Disproportion and tediousness are his besetting sins. In the closing chapters of Rhoda Fleming, however, he throws off these incumbrances. To speak tersely, he “ comes down to business,” and reveals an ability in condensed, rapid, nervous narrative which makes him the equal of Charles Reade where Reade is at his best. There is no blinking this ability. The evidence of it is found again in certain passages of Harry Richmond and of Beauchamp’s Career. In Harry Richmond, the want of proportion is once more painfully felt; yet there, too, we find magnificent studies of character, massive — monolithic, if the term be allowable — as though they had been hewn out of solid rock. Such are Harry himself; his father, Richmond Roy, the motive of whose life is his claim to bastard royal descent; choleric old Squire Beltham; his niece Janet; and that woman of ideal grandeur and sweetness, Princess Ottilia. All the earlier part of the book, which relates to Harry’s boyhood, schooldays, and boyish loves as described by himself, is fascinating beyond description. Everything that occurs seems to have happened to ourselves. For the time being we live in his world, and there seems to be no other world at all, in our experience. But this illusion does not last. The story breaks down utterly, in the middle. Continual hammering on one line of effect dulls the edge. The length of the narrative, too, the multitude of persons introduced, and their all but endless involvements tax the attention beyond endurance. Yet the unabated energy with which old Roy, gradually developing into insanity in his schemes for recognition by the royal family, is kept before us, stimulates even a tired brain ; and Harry’s slow evolution from blind love and worship of his father to a perception of his really worthless, erratic, and scoundrelly character shoots through the whole an intensely vivid and pathetic ray of light. A sort of indirect advocacy of republicanism is perhaps discernible in the book. The pretense of royalty caricatured in the representative of a bastard line ; the disgrace and humiliation which it brought upon Harry; and his final reconciliation with Janet, as the true union between equals, seem to point in this direction. But, on the other side, we have Ottilia, the German princess, sincerely loving and appreciating the hero, and representing in her own person the genuine royalty, which is of the heart and soul, while conventional royalty is a mere mask or husk. But this forms only a minor interest; hardly felt, as the book stands, until the very end. The main interest lies in the great, turbulent human drama which is exhibited ; and of this the din and tumult swell to such a degree that, towards the close, one feels as if his brain were assailed by the harmonic din of one of Wagner’s stupendous operas. I am not alone, am perhaps even one of the majority, now, in subscribing to a belief in Wagner’s mastering genius. Perhaps I may have larger company by and by than, I fear, can be enjoyed at present, in the recognition of Meredith’s greatness. The temptation is strong to quote, in this place, old Jorian’s observation to Harry Richmond’s father: " You have genius and courage out of proportion, and you are a dead failure, Roy ! ” One might address these words to Meredith, not inaptly. Yet that would not be wholly fair, because, instead of being a dead failure, he is a live one, with a possibility of some day stalking out into the broad light of success, bestowed by the more thoughtful class of readers. His failure thus far is no doubt due to his deficient art; but his merits call for mercy, and will probably obtain it. I have marked dozens of passages in Harry Richmond, for quotation; but they cannot be given here, for want of space, and I must content myself with a reference to the tremendous invective of Squire Beltham (page 497 et seq.), as instancing the writer’s signal faculty of throwing himself into an alien character and speaking from fictitious lips with unlimited vehemence. I remember hearing an eminent Cambridge poet say, in conversation, that modern literature could not produce bursts of impassioned language like those of the Elizabethan dramatists, because modern life had become too refined and circumspect to admit of our writers being familiar with such extremes of utterance. But here, in Meredith, there seems to be a piece of proof to the contrary.

In all of Meredith’s books there is a certain element of irrelevancy and inconsequence. He is apparently not quite sure of his purpose, or else loses touch of his fundamental conception, if he have one. Some of his chief persons are flighty: at all events, they have a strong tendency to run away from the situation when it becomes embarrassing, and to kite around the Continent or the globe, in extensive travels, by way of relieving their surcharged minds. This trick of theirs grows rather tiresome; but I suppose it answers to some kindred quality in their creator’s genius. However this may be, the novel entitled Beauchamp’s Career is one of Meredith’s best productions; and the central personage is one of the inconsequent, erratic kind, although he believes that he has a fixed purpose, and tries to serve it. The author warns us, in the beginning, that his book has no plot; and this is something of a relief, because, to say truth, Meredith is not an adept in handling plots. Beauchamp’s Career, then, is a novel without a plot, as Vanity Fair was a novel without a hero. In the present instance, Meredith says, “ The exhibition of a hero whom circumstances overcome, and who does not weep or ask you for a tear, who continually forfeits attractiveness by declining to better his own fortunes, must run the chances of a novelty.” The hero proceeds to run these chances forthwith, and, to my thinking at least, he wins the goal of triumph. Anything more engaging than the impetuous generosity and bravery of Beauchamp it would be hard to imagine. This youth begins by trying to challenge all France to a single combat, in defense of the honor of England, at the time when invasion is threatened by the generals of Napoleon III. Later, he falls in love with a French girl, Renée, and takes up arms intellectually against his own country, on account of the insular narrowness and injustice that he discovers there. This new combat, in turn, engages all his energies ; and, after distinguishing himself as a hero in the Crimean war, he plunges into politics at home, as a radical and the friend of the workingman, — at the temporary cost of ruining his worldly prospects with the wealthy earl who brought him up and meant to advance his fortunes. He nearly kills himself in working for the workingman ; and he is in love with, or tries to marry, three several women, at different times. But when Renée, after marrying a French gentleman, runs away from him, and comes to London to throw herself into the arms of Beauchamp, he holds to the part of an honorable man by a tremendous struggle, and restores her to her husband by a masterly and considerate manipulation of circumstances, which leaves her reputation as intact as his own honor and honesty are. Conceptions like this are by no means common in fiction, and the ability to carry them out effectively is still more unusual. But this is by no means the whole of Beauchamp’s Career. The young man, with all his faults and divagations, and with what his creator calls his “ rocketmind,” is a hero, first and last. With such a hero, so generous, so genuine, so headlong in his enthusiasm, yet so selfcontained, what need of a fixed plot ? There is plot enough, however, — the plot of actual life. The story is consummately real, and the conclusion, succinct though it be, is deeply touching. It is a thoroughly manly book, but the women in it are as remarkable and commendable for truth as the central man is. One must search a long time in the masterpieces of fiction for a woman so complex, so natural, so wonderfully portrayed, as Rosamund Culling, who loves Nevil Beauchamp with a mingling of mother’s and sister’s love, and watches over him constantly.

These few words do no justice to Beauchamp’s Career. But The Egoist may be passed in fewer words, without doing it any wrong. The Egoist is Meredith’s worst novel: an inflated, obese, elephantine comedy, which is not comic. The idea of a rich young Englishman, so absorbed in himself that his egotism crops out offensively in the midst of his love-making with three different women, and keeps him hesitating, and them in suspense, as to which one he will marry, is amusing in a way. But Meredith’s treatment of this theme is not only unutterably fatiguing, but also becomes revolting. I shall make but one quotation from this book, merely as an example of needlessly hideous metaphor : “ Women whose bosoms can be tombs, if we and the world allow them to be, absolute sepulchres, where you lie dead, ghastly. . . . You are no better than a rotting wretch to the world that does not have peeps of you in the woman’s breast. . . . There are women that have embalmed you, and have quitted the world to keep the tapers alight; and a stranger comes, and they who have your image before them will suddenly blow out the vestal flames, and treat you as dust to fatten the garden of their bosoms for a fresh flower of love.” Can any one wonder that readers, coming upon such enormities as this, should close the book, and refuse, henceforth, to read Meredith ? Although he does not ordinarily offend so grossly, it is no more than fair to give warning here that he frequently makes a desert of his pages, by the sand-storm of his words ; that he lets his characters diverge into by-ways of irrelevant talk ; and that he wears out the mental tympanum with a variation of dull or sharp reports, caused by the intermittent explosions of his own accumulated philosophy and wisdom. If Mr. Meredith only knew when he or we had got enough of a good thing, both parties to the affair would be much better off.

In Diana of The Crossways, he has attempted, with partial success, to do something different from his usual line. He has, in fact, attempted to make himself popular. As a consequence, the book has, I believe, made better headway with the public than any of its predecessors ; and yet there could hardly be a more convincing proof of the futility of the effort made by the author to render himself popular, than that which is supplied by this production. He has chosen a pure, beautiful, gifted, and dazzlingly brilliant woman as his heroine ; he has put her through a severe matrimonial, amatory, and emotional experience, and matched her at last with a strong, patient, sturdy, yet sensitive type of man who is quite worthy of her. He titillates the impure appetite of readers by introducing scandal and divorce proceedings. It may be that these elements have served to give the novel an impetus ; but they do not make it genuinely popular. His way of telling the story is, in the main, as excellent as he knows how to fashion it, — direct, dramatic, vivacious. Has he lowered himself, by this appeal to the mob ? I cannot think so, although a friend, in whose judgment I have much confidence, assures me that Meredith has lowered himself, here. My friend puts it that Meredith has for years been playing on a great, resonant, piercing instrument, which produced sounds that struck the popular ear as discord. In Diana of The Crossways, he consents to insert a mute in his trumpet, and thereby agrees to compromise by pleasing the multitude with a muted resonance. I don’t think this is quite true. Meredith’s attempt is in the right direction. It is his duty to catch the general ear, if he can ; and he has tried to do so, without letting himself down. Diana of The Crossways bubbles, sparkles, effervesces, with the customary Meredithean scintillating foam; and it is more direct and conversational than most of his novels. But it betrays in the author the same inability to hold his hand, after the final, effective touch has been given; and it is marred by the exuberance of fanciful imagery and the excess of half-poetical phraseology that suffuse all of Meredith’s novels with a flush of over-excitement, resembling that of hysteria. It may not be amiss to cite here a startling instance of Meredith’s cumbrous style, taken from the first page of Diana: “ The promptness to laugh is an excellent progenitorial foundation for the wit to come in a people ; and undoubtedly the diarial record of an imputed piece of wit is witness to the spouting of laughter.” This may be capped by a quotation from The Egoist:

“ ‘ Horace is an excellent fellow,’ said Willoughby, wise in the Book which bids us ever, for an assuagement, to fancy our friend’s condition worse than our own, and recommends the deglutition of irony as the most balsamic for wounds in the whole moral pharmacopœia.” Such is the tough sort of useless writing which the reader of Meredith must be prepared to face, at every turn.

Probably two or three volumes could be compiled of Gems or Beauties of Meredith, owing to the prodigality with which he flings epigram and apothegm into the trenches. It is impossible, in the limited space of this article, to give any adequate idea of his wealth in this respect. He lavishes, too, his utmost riches of color, of epithet and characterization upon the most unimportant persons and passages, without considering the cost. In a word, he is extravagant. He spends where spending is not needed. Does he do it for show ? Perhaps. It should seem that he wishes us to consider him a Monte Cristo of novelists, whose resources are endless. But the result is satiety. There are people who pin together those pages of French novels which they do not wish their children to read ; and probably these particular pages excite the liveliest curiosity of all. But there are many pages of Meredith which could be pinned together without arousing any curiosity in the reader thus debarred from them. The novels would read just as well — in fact, better — without them. Meredith is one of those men so determined to be original that he virtually declares, “ I will mark off a ground here for my own.” He marks it off, and, instead of originality, he finds himself surrounded by isolation. He does not really need to take this precaution; and he is to blame for the luckless result. Naturally, he is original enough; but he emphasizes his distinction by using an involved, tortuous style, and interrupting his story at all points for the sake of exploiting his own acumen. He is the Robert Browning of prose, and suffers oppression and misunderstanding, because of the involutions and wanton copiousness of his own style. Style is what his English friends have praised him for. They say there is no such master of English living. But then no one else would wish to be master of such a style as Meredith’s, — so clumsy, at times ungrammatical, often affected and wearisome. The English critics praise him for exactly that thing in which he is weak ; because mere command of words, hurled forth in a bewildering medley, is certainly not “ style.” But they fail to praise him for his mighty grasp of character, his subtle and pervasive insight into all phases and grades of human nature, his faculty of literary impersonation and of embodying types, which makes him Shakespearean; not, I grant, a Shakespeare in full play, lucid and free, but a writer who at moments unmasks guns of the largest pattern, and, though not a Shakespeare in action, is a Shakespearean writer at rest. The difference is very great; but then, also, the partial resemblance is well worth considering.

A cardinal fault in Meredith’s novels is that they are lame in movement. He lacks, on the whole, narrative and dramatic skill, although he shows, in places, that he can command it. He is too much like a biographer. We look for a novelist, and find an annalist. The mere bulkiness of his novels cannot wholly account for our disappointment; because some of George Eliot’s books are just as bulky, but do not oppress us so severely by their size. The difficulty consists rather, I think, in the fact that Meredith tries to give an epic largeness to every history that lie undertakes. The result is a want of proportion ; just as it is when painters choose a canvas too large for their composition, or, conversely, paint figures which are too large for the canvas on which they are placed. This was the case with Madox Brown’s Work, and with the Rest of George Watts (exhibited in this country two years ago). It was also the case with some of the Russian Verestchagine’s early paintings. The effect of disproportion found in these paintings of the Russian, and of two English artists representing a certain school, meets with a curious correspondence in the disproportion of Meredith. We discover the same thing again in Tolstoï’s Anna Karenina. Russian and English! It is curious that these two peoples, so opposed politically, should develop the same uncouth disproportion artistically. One does not perceive the defect in Daudet or Zola, however heavy their outlines or gross their delineation may be. They, at least, preserve the sense of proportion.

In Tolstoï the waste of space and material is less annoying, because it seems to proceed from unsophistication. Meredith sins like Tolstoï ; but it is not through unsophistication. Nor is it through willfulness entirely, but rather by the weakness of a too great self-consciousness, the pride of a brilliant, superior mind, which wants to make itself instantly felt by squandering superfluous treasures of diction and of sententious statement, instead of waiting to be slowly recognized at last. The crudities and disproportion in Meredith seem, at first glance, to ally him with the extreme so-called Realists, who believe that nature stunted and dwarfed is truer than nature carried to the largest development. He says, somewhere, ‘‘ Romances are the destruction of human interest.” But, in fact, Meredith, while realistic in certain ways, is highly romantic. He never hesitates to give a free rein to the impulses of human nature, however sentimental or extravagant they may be. He is also very romantic in his manner of heightening effects and idealizing emotions or actions. Possibly it is just this mixture of the two tendencies in him which has led to his missing popular approbation in his day. He is like a richly freighted boat that, launched on an eddy formed by the meeting of two rivers, is stranded at the very point of junction, and loses the momentum of both currents. This opinion of him I wrote among my notes long before I came upon the following passage in Beauchamp’s Career, where the author, digressing for a moment, speaks of his own method, and says, “ My way is like a Rhone island in the summer drought, stony, unattractive, and difficult between the two streams of the unreal and the over-real, which delight mankind—honor to the conjurers! My people conquer nothing, win none ; they are actual, yet uncommon. It is the clock-work of the brain that they are directed to set in motion, and — poor troop of actors to vacant benches ! — the conscience residing in thoughtfulness which they would appeal to ; and if you are impervious to them, we are lost; back I go to my wilderness, where, as you perceive, I have contracted the habit of listening to my own voice more than is good.” By the unreal, as the context shows, Meredith means “ characters contemptibly beneath us,” — which is his way of stigmatizing so-called Realism. I find in this utterance corroboration of my view of Meredith ; namely, that he occupies a ground midway between the Realists and Romanticists. That he uses a peculiar style, unnecessarily repellent to the average reader, and indicative of a desire to indulge in verbal gymnastics, is not conclusive against him. The style of Robert Louis Stevenson is just as peculiar, in its way, — just as foreign to current habits of speech, and frequently very affected ; yet Stevenson has won a wide popularity, and, oddly enough, stands forth as the man who triumphed with his New Arabian Nights, whereas Meredith long ago failed in his Shagpat imitation of Oriental story. There exists an elusive quality, a charm, which Meredith has not caught. He reviews and commands a broader range, a larger battalion of human characters, than came within Thackeray’s ken; he is far more sincere and trustworthy in his delineation of human nature than Dickens was ; he understands women more radically than Charles Reade did. He is inferior to Balzac in the impartial yet sympathetic rendering of human individualities ; and he manifests a much deeper and larger mind than that of Stevenson, who is excellent and popular. But, on the other hand, he is devoid of that exquisite, profound, reserved tenderness which made Thackeray, with his narrower range of characters and less titanic grasp, a greater soul and a finer artist.

What, then, are we to conclude ? A critic who sets out to compare one creative writer with others is in much the same position as a juggler, who, having thrown one silvered ball into the air, projects other silvered balls after it, and keeps the whole group of glittering spheres in such constant motion that the spectators soon lose all sense of the object with which he began. It is possible that the juggler himself might forget the identity of the particular orb which he first tossed up to view. Let us, therefore, abandon comparisons, and hold fast to Meredith while we have him between our fingers. Meredith is simply Meredith, and we must take him as he is. Popularity is not an infallible test of merit. The Bible and the plays of Shakespeare — one an inspired work, the other, as the phrase goes, uninspired — are read, understood, and loved by all kinds and conditions of men. Browning, Landor, and Meredith are not. The particular disciples of Browning, Landor, and Meredith claim that to understand and love these authors implies a faculty of appreciation above that of ordinary mankind. Briefly, they make a cult; they rely upon an asserted superiority in themselves ; they cultivate an egotism which, perhaps, their favorite authors prompt and share. I am unable to make common cause with these devotees, for the reason that, it seems to me, the primary object of writing for publication is that the writer should make himself understood by the public. If he be in advance of his time, or if he have revelations to impart for which the world is not ripe, or a manner of viewing things which is not yet in vogue, he has a hard task before him. The harder the task, by so much will it be harder for him to master the resources of art in such a way as to make his meaning clear, and the mode of its expression attractive. In this process, Meredith has, on the whole, distinctly failed. He ought not to be condemned on that account, nor should he be extravagantly praised for failing in this particular. There are mountains which we all admire, at a distance: they may he verdured heights or craggy snowpeaks. Worthy of admiration though we may think them as features in the landscape, few of us care to climb them ; and if we make the attempt, it is likely enough that, before we have gone halfway, we shall regret our effort. Our shoes are injured ; our eyes are blinded by the dazzle of the snow ; we are troubled by the crevasses and the length of the route, and wish we were at home again. But if we hold out and gain the frosty summit, we discover a satisfaction in the circumstance that we have climbed, and in the new view that we command. So it is, I think, in scaling the rugged heights of Meredith’s novels. If we persist in mounting to the places whither they lead, we shall at least have learned something of Meredith, and of the world, from his point of view. That which we have learned will enable us to judge him afterwards, not by scraps and particles, but by the large, mountainous scale on which he is built.

George Parsons Lathrop.