MR. MEREDITH'S MODERNISM.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR:] Sin,—In your reference to Mr. Meredith's birthday (Spectator, February 15th) you suggest one peculiarity in the work of our greatest living novelist which explains why recognition has come to him so tardily. "His life spanned the whole Victorian age," and yet he has never represented that age. In the nineteenth century he stood alone. His kindred will not be found in his great contemporaries—Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Tennyson—but in Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne. He is their lineal descendant, and if we can find a parent for any work so distinctly original as his, we can find it in Fielding. Even his titles have an eighteenth-century ring,- e.g., "The Adventures of Harry Richmond," " Beauchamp's Career," "Lord Ormont and his Aminta." His is not the actual eighteenth-century manner; it is an evolution of the eighteenth century, sublimated and impregnated with French charm and lightness. If the Fielding novel had continued on its own lines, and had not been diverted, partly through the influence of women writers, it would have evolved into some- thing like the characteristic Meredithian novel,—i.e., fictitious biography, chapters of a great Com4die Humaine. Yet Mr. Meredith has always been more " modern " than the Victorians. He joins the eighteenth to the twentieth century as if there never had been a Victorian gap. From the date of his earliest novels he anticipated what we understand to-day by Modernism. The Victorian age was one of idealism and spirituality, of sentiment that at its best was exalted and noble, and at its worst was sentimentality_ Heart was even more important than brain in the world of Dickens and George Eliot. There was a stronger sense of the seriousness than of the humour of life. Religion or religious philosophy was an important element. Mr. Meredith reacted against nearly every trait of his own times, and in reacting towards the past he produced a new type, a future, which has already become the present with us. The qualities lie especially emphasises are strength with power, and above all, brains. The head rules the heart; "soul," if such an obsolete term may pass, does not appear. The most distinctive feature of the style is polished, and yet genial, satire. Sentiment and emotion are drawn as weakness and follies ; sentimentality is the cardinal sin. Instead of idealism he gives us almost scientific naturalism, and the love passion is frankly physical. Most of these traits are the common property of our twentieth- century writers. They, too, have reverted in many ways to the -Fielding age, partly, no doubt, under Mr. Meredith's influence. Intensely modern he may be, but he has also been
intensely un-Victorian.—I am, Sir, &c., E. S. G.
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