GEORGE MEREDITH.
THE death of Mr. Meredith on Tuesday morning was a great bereavement to the English race. Perhaps it is a bereavement without regrets, for his work was done, and we could hope for littlo more from that bountiful treasury. But none the less it alters the whole aspect of our modern world. The woods remain, but there are no longer any tall trees raising crests above their brethren. The mem presence among Us of one so groat, the sight of an old ago so worthy and so youthful, was an inspiration to his contemporaries. Mr. Meredith was issuing poetry while Wordsworth was still writing, and his career as a novelist began before George Eliot's. His life take° us back into mid-Victorian times, but he was so essentially a man of his day that we could never regard him as a survival. " I have always hoped," he once said, "I should not grow old as some do, with a palsied intellect, living backwards." For him the communications with the future were always open. In his own phrase, he kept "the young generations in hail," and their knocking at the door had no terrors for him. To the last he was in the thick of things, full of the zest of life, eagerly appreciative of every new man and new movement. To the youngest among us he was always the apostle of hope and courage, the most modern of the moderns, and yet a classic. Such an old age comes to few, but it is the appropriate one for a great man,—a summer of work, and then a mellow autumn which shows the ebbing of physical force, but no decline in spiritual Power. Leaving his books out of account, that is surely a great achievement.
When he died he was probably the greatest writer of fiction in the world. This is not the place to attempt a critical estimate of Mr. Meredith's ultimate place in literature. On that question the wits of the critics will be exercised for many generations. But it is certain that his must rank among the greatest names in nineteenth-century literature, and as a creator of men and women, a spectator of life with a Shake- spearean insight and catholicity, he has had few equals me° Scott. His genius wrought in many forms, and many reputations could have been shaped out of his incidental work; but it is as a novelist that he must have highest rank. People quarrel about the true nature of fiction, but the practice of the masters is always the same. Mr. Meredith took a large fragment of life in all its detail and variety, and set it before his readers so that none dare question its truth. Like Shakespeare, he does not take aides and preach a partial dogma; he has no prejudices in his art, and is as fair to woman OA to man, to the wise as to the foolish. His
business is not to judge, but to portray. But be never fell into the blunder of those who think that a mass of undigested and unselected detail is fiction. The shaping spirit of imagination is always at work in him, and he models his materials according to the canons of art. He sees the neces- sity.of the dramatic moment, when the characters in a single crisis of destiny stand revealed in their essential truth, and the mind of the reader is 'held and elevated as by great poetry. It is all one if this moment is romance, or comedy, or tragedy.
In the meeting of Lucy Desborough and Richard Feverel by the river and in the exquisite love-making of Evan Harrington we have that old idyll of youth and spring told as it has scarcely been told since Romeo and Juliet. When Sir Lukin Dunstane walks in the pine-wood while his wife is in the surgeon's hands; when Percy Dacier, fleeing from Diane, proposes to Constance Asper ; when Letitia Dale refuses Sr
Willoughby,—in these and a score of other scenes we have the human comedy raised to its most significant and dramatic,
moment. The ironies of life have never been handled Eo surely or so sanely. If the key be tragedy, we are moved as if some bright and noble thing had gone out of the world. Few can read the blotted sentences of Clare's diary or the death of Beauchamp without tears. However we may define the art of fiCtion, here we have it beyond cavil,—ai surely as when Rawdon Crawley trounces Lord Steyne, or when Caleb Balderstone picks up the plume from the cap of his dead master. Mr. Meredith faced the hardest of the novelist's tasks, for the conditions lie deals with are often those of a conventional society, where the humanity is hidden and drama seems far front the cushioned and modish life. But by this true artiul in comedy the difficulty of the medium is used to heighten the effect, and at the crisis the shivering human souls emerge from their coverings in a nakedness all the more dramatic from its contrast with their sheltered past. All modes of life pay toll to his genius, and to his catholicity nothing is common or unclean. No writer has ever done better justice to the average man. He looks not to the outside, but to the soul, and his true knights-errant are plain people like Tom Redworth and Vernon Whitford. Hence we may take his novels as the classic portrait-gallery of Englishmen. He loves English traits, and rejoices even in their limitations. It is the romance of fact he seeks, and, greatly dun-lug, be will make his heroes out of tailors' sons and schoolmasters and prosperous business men. John Bull is no butt for his - wit, but a kindly, blundering giant, with tremendous purpose in him and a vast deal of unspoken poetry. Which brings us to a quality that Mr. Meredith shares with Chaucer and Shakespeare,--bis kindliness. 'Like BaCon'i sage, he has the face of one who pities humanity. He deals gently and lovingly with his men and women, gravely conscious of our mortal weaknesses, and tender to any hint of virtue. In a word, he has that moral wisdom without which art is only a painted shutter.
We do not ask for dogma from our greatest men. Their teaching is not enshrined in a formula or two for popular consumption. But it is worth noting one or two of the features of the inspiration which Mr. Meredith has given to his country- men, since he is not only novelist, but teacher and poet. His philosophy is chiefly to be found in his poetry, and that poetry is not for the hasty reader. Something of the obscurity of his prose style crept into his verse, and his pipe did not bear long "the happy country tone" of "Love in the Valley." Yet no work of our day so amply repays study. His lines are surcharged with thought, often subtle and difficult thought, but there are many momenta when the close argument ceases and the pure poetic magic takes its place. The first article in Mr. Meredith's philosophy is that the world is ruled by law. In that wonderful sonnet, "Lucifer in Starlight," he glorifies "time army of unalterable law" in the spirit of Milton. Cowards and weaklings must pay the price and suffer, for life is not a thing given but a thing to be won.
Nature is careless of us and our ways unless we are of use to her. Others in our generation have held this doctrine, but too often they have fallen, like Mr. Hardy in his Dynasty,. into a barren fatalism. But Mr. Meredith is an optimist, and believes that the universe is on the side of man's moral strivings. He believes in the regeneration of the world by man, and in the high destiny of humanity. In one of bis most famous sonnets lie compares the world to a dennken peasant staggering home from the inn to his cottage light, making wide circuits, but always getting nearer. Our line of advance it spiral, he says: we go wildly round- about, but we are always getting upwards, and though we seem to be still in the same spot, the level is higher, But the first condition of progress is that we accept the earth and do not beat our wings in the void. We must clear our eyes and see ourselves as we are, kin both to the brutes and to the
stars. Mr. George Trevelyan in his admirable study of Mr. Meredith's poetry has pointed out that whenever an unknown "she" is apostrophised, we may take this as meaning Mother Earth. That conception is the key of his philosophy. It is the world which God made and which His laws govern ; man is a part of it, and, as such, subject to natural laws, but he is also the key of the whole. He is close to the beasts and the wild things of Nature, and if he forgets his kinship he will become a vain dreamer. Mr. Meredith would have us always keep in mind the pit whence we were digged, and love the common earth as our mother, for it is only by the path of our common humanity that we can rise to higher things. MelaMpus, the wise physician, goes through the world healing men, and his power of healing comes just from hie kinship to
Nature, his "Simple love of the things That glide in grasses and rubble of woody wreck."
Here is an optimism of the old heroic kind, The world must be faced in all its grimness, for it is part of us, and we cannot escape. But we can make its alienness friendly, and trans- form its harshness by our love. Its inexorable laws become perfect freedom to those who understand its service. He calls upon mankind to give up tinsel gods and the whole kingdom of make-believe, to come into the fresh air and see things as they are, since the only optimism worth having is that which is more frank and merciless than any pessimism. "Neither shall they say, Lo here I or lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you." The common earth, this rough, intractable, savage place, is the only soil on which we can build Jerusalem. Such a creed is too natural for naturalism, too spiritual for asceticism. It blinks nothing, and yet hopes and believes all things. To-day, when the fashionable philosophy of life is one of thin sentiment, when men tend to strip morality of rigour, and daily idly with weakness and revolt, it is impossible to overpraise thin manly voice. In the close of one of his poems, the "Hymn to Colour," he has put into noble verse the central doctrine of his creed :—
" This way have men come out of brutishness, To spell the letters of the sky and read A reflex upon earth else meaningless.
******** • • More gardens will they win than any lost ; The vile plucked out of them, the unlovely Blain. Not forfeiting the beast with which they arts crossed,
To stature of the gods will they attain. They shall uplift their Earth to meet her Lord, Thennielves the attuning chord."
But the preacher was always secondary to the artist. In looking back on his work it is less the philosopher we think of than the creator. One recalls that wonderful mass of poetry, with every note in it from April bird-song to the thunderous dirge of the sea. One remembers his magical landscapes (for no novelist has ever bad greater power of reproducing the atmosphere of a scene), hie Alpine glens and pastures, his English meadow in high summer, his spring woodlands, his sea picturee, and a thoueand sketches of town and country. One remembers his interest in every phase of the human comedy, whether it were sport, or polities, or boyish escapades, or old wine, or sound scholarship, or the generous dreams of youth. Above all, one remembers that gallery of figures, most of whom are now part of our national heritage. Mr. Meredith has drawn every type of English man and woman and boy and girl, so that his novels are like the "Canterbury Tales," the true history of an age. We can only say of him, as Dryden said of Chaucer, "Here is God's plenty." •
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