MR. GEORGE MEREDITH'S NOVELS.*
THE sumptuous and beautiful edition of Mr. George Meredith's collected novels which is now being issued constitutes a visible testimony that this remarkable writer has finally won the ear of the reading public. It has been a long fight. Richard Feverel appeared in 1859,—the year in which Adam Bede was published. George Eliot's popularity had passed its zenith before her contemporary was known beyond a narrow circle of admirers. We hold, however, that Mr. Meredith can never be widely popular, probably never more popular than he is at present, first, because of his exclusive interest in motives of the most extreme complexity; and secondly, because in attempting to combine the quality of comedy with the quality of narrative, he falls to a certain extent between two stools. There is, of course, a far more obvious reason in his extraordinary style. If lucidity were the only merit of style, as it is perhaps the greatest, Mr. Meredith's would be the worst English ever written. Its excellences, and it has many, are those rather proper to poetry; picturesqueness, variety, and the bold combination of words apparently incongruous into an illuminating phrase. But the obscurity is terrible, and in the last books his manner has degenerated into a mannerism. We have been educated to understand it, as we taught ourselves to understand Browning, and familiarity has dulled our righteous irritation at the more glaring perversities. But when the quickness of contemporary apprehension and the interest in contemporary thought exist no longer, will it not be with Mr. Meredith as with a man not less witty and subtle, and in his day not less famous, Dr. Donne ?
His extraordinary creative power may save him. Many of his people are not merely lifelike portraits, they are life itself. They have an atmosphere of their own, a sort of physical emanation which is felt when they are on the scene, not merely in what they say or do, but in what the other people say and do. Victor Radnor is as heady a stimulant as his favourite "Old Venve." And nowhere in art do we find manlier men; Beauchamp and Dartrey Fenellan affect one like a strong wind off the sea. As for his women, a recent writer in the Quarterly has praised them eloquently, and with reason. His young girls, like Rose Jocelyn, have the dew of the morning upon them ; they have the quixotism of virginal natures. Their passage to the wider experience of womanhood is drawn with an insight which is, we think, unrivalled, for Shake- speare, by the conditions of his art, never had occasion to attempt it; and in a different type of the feminine, Shake. speare himself could hardly have bettered Mrs. Berry. Her place is with the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet, though she would have repudiated the company. Nowhere has Mr. Meredith so well shown his hold upon all the broader and simpler impulses of human nature as in this treatment of the ancient theme, the old nurse and the young bride ; and every scene with Lucy and her faithful Beesy makes one regret that the author of their being should have spent so much of himself upon portraying, not fundamental human nature, but its sporadic vagaries. The thing which stands in the way of Mr. Meredith's fame is his passion, alike in style and subject, for the eccentric and the bizarre.
There is no hero in Scott or Dickens who is more attractive than Richard Feverel or Beauchamp, but then neither Scott nor Dickens was strong in heroes. One has to go to Clive
• The Works of George Meredith. Westminster: Archibald Constable and Co.
Newcome or Esmond for anything as good in the mere pre- sentment of a brilliant young man's character. But the very excellence of Mr. Meredith's work is itself a stumbling- block ; we feel so confident of his people, we know them so well, they are such breathing, thinking flesh and blood to us, that we resent finding them made to do things which seem out of their natures. In the wonderful scene which closes Beauchamp's Career—when his friends come up to find men madly dragging the tideway, and are shown, not Beauchamp, but the frightened, crying child whom Beauchamp brought out of the water before he went in on his attempt to save the second life and the river took him under—everyone must feel instinctively before the words are written, "This is what we have in exchange for Beauchamp." The protest " not uttered, but visible in the blank stare at one another of the two men who loved Beauchamp," comes not less automatically to us. Yet the reader feels, too, rather than perceives, the dramatic fitness, not less than the dramatic irony, of the situation, when Beauchamp, to save this " insignificant bit of mudbank life," gives up his own, worth ten thousand of it, and dies, having accomplished not one of all his aspirations, yet in complete and beautiful fulfilment of his nature, having simply been himself. Beauchamp, in short, is to u what he was to his friends ; we also are stifled with the wordless sorrow for him, though as spectators we are sensible to the rounding-off of his career. Yet half a dozen times through the book Mr. Meredith is accounting for the unaccountable in Beauchamp's conduct. It is as if nothing interested him but derangement, the imperceptible grain of sand that sets the whole mechanism out of gear. Take Richard leveret, again. You have the novelist describing young love as few writers since Shakespeare have described it; yet for a dozen hair-splitting scruples and prejudices you have the youth, so perfectly mated, parted from his bride, almost estranged from her, and step by step led into an actual infidelity. As one goes over the psychology point by point, there is perhaps no single moment at which one rises up in dissent; but the accumula- tion of subtleties is too much, and one feels an assurance that somehow the mere positive force of human attraction would have made short work of all the cobwebs. As for the tragic ending, Stevenson said long ago that it was false in art, and we hold with him ; but we should hesitate even to accept the possibility of such a misunderstanding as is described. Mr. Meredith is an amazing reasoner upon pride ; it is the keynote of his psychology. When he makes his best-beloved characters, not less than his immortal Egoist, play their most fantastic tricks before high heaven, he always shows us pride pulling the nerve-strings. Half of his moat tortuous analysis is necessitated by an attempt to show pride like a disease disordering human action. Pride hinders a man from doing something which he would naturally desire to do, by the fear of lese-majesti to his self-esteem ; vanity makes a man do something for which he has no desire, in order to affect the opinion which others entertain of him. Some time is needed before we can learn to tolerate, or even to follow, this anatomy of morbid conditions. The great novelists before Mr. Meredith gave us live men and women acting simply and intelligibly in accordance with their loves and hates ; Mr. Meredith shows men and women just as living, but who act strangely, crookedly, even incomprehensibly.
The result is that plain people cannot be brought to care for Mr. Meredith ; they are not conscious of so complex a humanity within themselves, and they cannot sym- pathise with it. It is not that Mr. Meredith does not feel the beauty of simplicity ; nothing could be simpler, nothing more beautiful, than the womanhood of Lucy Feverel, but it is only used as an offset to the appalling maze of conflicting theories and emotions in Richard's father and to the battle of love with pride in Richard himself. Yet this is in the novel best suited to make converts, where the appeal to the reader's emotions is most direct. For Mr. Meredith does not aim principally at anything so straightforward as evoking either pity or terror; his delight is to play upon all the stops of silent laughter. Even in the last great scene between Lucy and Richard the note of irony is present. There is Lucy ready to lavish upon the returned sinner infinite love and infinite forgiveness ; in the beauty of her young wifehood and motherhood she holds out to him happiness pressed down and overflowing; and he abandons the whole to go and fight a duel, nothing compelling him but a fantastic notion of honour, which in the last resort has no better substance than a despicable vanity. It is the very tragedy of the ridiculous. Mr. Meredith's whole concep- tion of literature is dominated by the comic spirit ; he believes, above all things, in the purging by laughter ; but it is so subtle a laughter that nine people out of ten will not share the enjoyment. In short, he uses the novel to give hie readers the intellectual pleasure of high comedy rather than the more obvious pleasure of narrative. Take the simplest of all his books, Evan, Harrington. Here, to begin with, the notion of making his hero a tailor is, from one point of view, a piece of grotesque humour, like one of old Tom Cogglesby's whims in the book itself. From another, it is the opening for a profound piece of humorous psychology. Is the heroic character independent of heroic employments ? is the true hero able to dignify any occupation ? or have the irrational old prejudices and words of contempt acquired a sort of physical existence, which humanity can no better reason away than the toothache ? All of that is profoundly interesting, but highly complex, and the story becomes at times not a story, but a disquisition on the different kinds of pride. One sees pride working in every variety of character under every variety of circumstance ; honest pride and false pride alternating in the hero ; the contemptible arrogance of Lord Lucky, the bastard pride which buoys up the wonderful Countess in her dazzling career of imposture, the ridiculous vanity of Mr. Raikes, the inverted pride of old Tom Cogglesby, who prides himself on not being proud—last of all, the pride of love victorious, when Rose Jocelyn is content to take her lover out of a tailor's shop. But the result of all this ironic comment is to hinder the narrative, and one cannot but feel something of the playwright's dexterous but arbitrary combination of incidents and types. The whole plot pivots upon machinations of the Countess, and vagaries of the Cogglesby brothers, which strain the limits of stage verisimilitude. In the centre of action are real personages, Rose, Evan, and Lady Jocelyn. Revolving about them are characters who bear a less immediate relation to life ; Lady Jocelyn is fact, the Countess is the amazing creation of a consummate dramatist. Toni Cogglesby is another excellent stage type ; Jack Raikes is almost a conventional buffoon. This difference of creation in the personages of one drama must be accounted a defect, and to a certain extent it is present in all Mr. Meredith's work. In One of Our Conquerors, for instance, Skepsey has that touch of caricature which marks the stage technique ; Colney Durance and Simeon Fenellan are two of those machines for emitting witticisms in which the drama from Congreve to Sheridan abounded ; but they walk the earth among living creatures, Victor, Nesta, and Dartrey Fenellan_ Are we to take the novelist as the reciter of a tale which compels belief in its reality ? or is he going to set before us high comedy in which we may shut our eyes to improbabili- ties and simply accept the diversion ? In our opinion, Mr. Meredith might with more reason than Balzac describe the whole series of his novels under the title Comidie Humaine yet an English title would suit them better, for he gives us not so much the Drama as the Comedy of Life.
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