BOOKS.

MEREDITH'S LETTERS.• THE range of these six hundred and thirty pages of Meredith's correspondence is so enormous that it is difficult to make up one's mind at what point to approach it. The volume of Meredith's personality was immense, and here we see it in full flood through sixty strenuous years. Every line is animated by his wonderful relish and curiosity for life. On every page there waves his banner, and beneath it rumbles and flashes all the artillery of his passionate and brilliant eloquence. For, like all the great Victorians, Meredith was essentially a moralist, and here his familiar creed is proclaimed again and again. " I preach," he writes in 1901, "for the mind's acceptance of reality in all its forms, for so we come to benevolence and to a cheerful resignation. There is no other road to wisdom." And again, five years later, " Never attempt to dissociate your ideas from the real of life. It weakens the soul ; ... it is a cowardly, temporary escape into delusion, clouding the mind, through which is our only chance of seeing God." But for him "the real of life" was no purely spiritual kingdom. "I love and cling to earth as the one part of God's handiwork which we possess." "It is braver to embrace the world than to renounce it," he writes ; and again, of St. Simeon, with inimitable violence :—

"I turn aching in all my flesh to adore this Pagan. . . . Don't you see that it is not adoration which moves the Stinking Saint, but, basest of prostrations, terror? . . . Beauty is our portion— belongs to us ; to deface it is not sublime. . . . Be not misled by this dirty piece of picturesque religiosity, animated : my gorge rises ! I hold my nostrils. I cry for a south-west wind to arise. Plunge them into the Pit, 0 Lord ! these worshippers of the pillar cujus ad effigiem tantum non meiere fax est.' " It was to the advancement of this creed that he laboured, to the spreading of "a close knowledge of our fellows, discern- ment of the laws of existence." He lived in the confidence " which began with hope and strengthens with experience, that humanity is gaining in stores of mind, and that the significa-

tion of this gift of life, that we should leave a better world for our successors, is being understood." It was a high as well as practical creed, and one which kept his hope bright and his sword active throughout his eighty years of life. To the end he knew the mood which he described to Maxse

in 1861, " When the heart was bursting with a new passion and the past was as the smoke of a fired-off old con- temptible gun." But with Meredith the passion was never new and never old. So much lives clearly both in his prose and verse, but the letters give a further clue, which almost elucidates a doubt that must often have assailed the reader of Meredith's novels. Again and again he preaches reality and thunders against senti- ment, and yet from time to time one has the feeling that the preacher himself is not looking at things quite squarely. With all the keenness of his analysis, with all his zeal for truth, were there not aspects of it from which he turned aside ? Did he not almost deliberately dazzle himself with the splendour of sensual life P Was his

enjoyment of this splendour really as keen and spontaneous as be would have us think P The tremendous trumpeting of meat and drink, which we find in some of his novels, occurs to one, of course, as an example. In the letters the weakness

. Letters of George Meredith. Collected and Edited by his Son. 2 vols. London; Constable and Co. [21s. net.]

of his own digestion and the important subjects of diet and drugging are commoner themes. Once he abandons himself to describe, more than half-jocularly, the recipe of a "lark pood'n " which he is meditating for a friend, but the letter ends with the question, not wholly jocular, "Do I degenerate P" Again, in one of the earliest letters he says, in seeming earnestness :—

" I am Bo miserably constituted now that I can't love a woman if I do not feel her soul and that there is force therein to wrestle with the facts of life. But I envy those who are attracted by what is given to the eye—yes, even those who have a special taste for woman flesh and this or that particular little tit-bit—I envy them ! It lasts not beyond an hour with me."

How are we to take this from the life-long advocate of a new chivalry which is to give woman a new station, a new dignity, and independence P Is it the very corruption of sentiment P Does he lash himself for the sake of argument into an unreal

condition, which, even if he could believe in it, would be inconsistent with the real essence of his creed P Or is this a genuine feeling to which he blinds himself by the splendid idealization of the passions which one knows so well P In the letters the false note is but seldom struck. For the most part the emotions which find utterance in them are piercingly genuine. How the love which his second marriage brought him, after his first disastrous mistake, shines out in his announcements to his friends !-

" I shall now live for the first time. . . . I shall work as I have never yet done. . . . My hope stands like a fixed lamp in my brain. . . . I shall taste some of the holiness of this mortal world and be new risen init. . . . I never touched so pure and conscience clear a heart. My own is almost abashed to think itself beloved by such a creature. The day when she is to be mine blinds me— will it come? It flickers like lightning in my brain. It will not burn steadily. I can't grasp it. What does this mean? I am troubled."

No leas keen are his sufferings during the last illness of his wife. " One knows not," he writes after a second operation, " how long this hunted bit of life will last. . . . Happily I have learnt to live much in the spirit, . . . otherwise this running of my poor doe with the inextricable arrow in her

flanks would pull me down too." And when the blow had fallen,—

"This place of withered recollections is like an old life to be lived again without sunshine. I cross it and recross it. Sharp spikes where flowers were ; . • . but I get to her by consulting her thoughts and wishes, and so she lives in me. This if one has the strength of soul brings a spirit to us. I feel this blow as I get more distant from it. While she lingered I could not hope for it to lag, and now I could crave any of the latest signs of her breathing—a weakness of my flesh. When the mind shall be steadier, I shall have her calmly present—past all tears."

How still in their depth of feeling are the letters which pass during Leslie Stephen's last illness ! "A letter from Leslie Stephen," writes Meredith to Morley on December 4th, 1902.

"His day with Treves next Wednesday. I have been going through it in advance. He has the starry philosophy—above terrestrial shocks." And to Stephen himself, "Think of your Alps and Surrey hills, and of me with arms outstretched to greet you, as I trust they will be on a day having you in sight." Then when the end is coming Stephen writes a short note (the only one from another hand included in these volumes). " I cannot trust to anybody else to say how much I value your friendship, and I must send you a message, perhaps it may be my last, of my satisfaction and pride in thinking of your affection for me. And Meredith, now crippled for many years and hardly able to hold a pen, answers :—

" Your letter gave me one of the few remaining pleasures that I can have. I rejoice in your courage and energy. . . . We who have loved the motion of legs and the sweep of winds, we come to this. But for myself I own it is the natural order. There is no irony in nature. God bless and sustain you, my friend."

And nine days later, when the end has come, he writes to the dead friend's daughter :—

"This day's news darkens my mind. Last autumn I was near going. The loss of my friend spurs to the wish that I had preceded him. He was the one man in my knowledge worthy of being mated with your mother. I could not say more of any man's nobility."

But it is not only the man himself who comes before us in these pages. In the flash of his wit and insight the whole world of his correspondents leaps to being. Here is Admiral Maxse, his friend for more than forty years, to whom he likened a mountain torrent because it was "both hearty and

gallant, subtle and sea-green." Here, too, comes William Hardman, nicknamed " Tuck "

ruddy man and lusty. . . . A dangerous man, Sir, for he tempteth us to love this life and esteems it a cherishable thing; yet withal one whom to know once is to desire for ever. . . Hence my fear for the man in that he, who was good himself as an egg new laid, had a love of things good, and did attract them to him pro- fusely, which is against one of the decrees."

Then there is the skipper of the Admiral's yacht "Our old friend! It chokes me to think that we have lost him. I have Purcell's dear old wind-brown gleam of a face, the manner of him, the voice and walk, more firmly stamped in my mind than most living men are. He comes up to meet me now ; I see him dashed with spray, parrying a thrust from me. I can't believe he's gone. His voice is alive in my ears. Poor dear old man ! He was so true a gentleman, with a pardonable old dog's growl now and then—after all, very rarely. On my soul I think I shall never smell salt water or look on a grey ridge of sea or sea haze without thinking of him."

One could spin out the catalogue to half a volume, for Meredith, with his great breadth of mind, insatiable interests, and quick impulse and insight into character, had a genius for friendship. He seemed able to carry on a hundred intimacies at a time, and in the fire of his imagination we see the figures of his friends stand before him as he sits down to write to them.

There is not space to touch one-tenth of the facets of this memorable collection. The light it throws on Meredith's style is no less interesting than that in which it sets his mind. The reader can see, what was always realized by those who were privileged to enjoy Meredith's conversation, that the involution and obscurity of his style are no less a part of the man than the emotion to which it gives expression. Even where his pen seems to be running swiftly and on the clearest course, a sudden intricacy of thought will divert him into a tortuous little byway, through which the stream flows with a swiftness which the eye can hardly follow. Thus in one of the early letters he describes himself in a state of uncertainty. "Pierrot straightening hands and legs to dance facing the four corners alternately would look foolish beside me"; and in writing to a friend, who one may surmise was bald, he ends, "I send my love to Mrs. J., but fear your tarnishing it in the transmission. But I kiss my hand to the heavens, and let her only look on your head and she will see the act reflected." Again, in writing of his own Diana, he breaks suddenly into.this, " She is the mother of experience and gives that dreadful baby suck to brains." Elsewhere a letter is "a literal transcript of the gaping of joint eyes and mouth "; the south-west wind "a variable monster who jumps from black to bright, over a marvelling earth, between your shudder and your sigh." Again, in mock heroic vein he threatens one whom he accuses of " amorous flummery " with deportation " to where the tile- tats are in concert, there to flummerize amongst them" ; and for a last example we may take his description of a misty day, " A grey crayon on a white sheet of two abandoned donkeys before the chalet."

But we could go on spinning quotations to the end of time, for the pressure of excellence is wonderfully sustained. The earliest letters are mature, the latest have still the vitality and exuberance of youth. Change there is, of course; a touch of priggishness, which one notices here and there in early man- hood, vanishes in the warmth of added experience. The fulness of the writing wanes a little during the years when the literary production is greatest. The freakish exuberance which inspired the early letters to " Tuck " becomes richer and less fantastic in the later correspondence with Mrs. Walter Palmer, Mrs. Sturgis, and his grandchildren. The wisdom which deals so briskly in blow and counter-blow with Captain Maxse and Mr. Jessopp, speaks in a tone more measured and pontifical through the wonderful letters to Lady Ulrica Duncombe and Lord Morley. As one passes from page to page one feels experience accumulate, wisdom mature, a mighty grasp growing yearly in certainty and power. It is a wonderful record of a great spirit, one which time will surely number with the greatest, and one can be thankful for the labour to which we owe its collection and the few notes which are added to elucidate the story. It may be thought that too many trivial letters have been introduced, but the work is really biographical in aim, and it was important that nothing relevant should be excluded. In some other respects, however, there is room for improvement. The notes are not always very happily placed, identities being sometimes explained several pages after the introduction of the characters. Names, too, are occasionally misspelt, such as Laudeck for Landeck and Marmeluda for Marmolada. It is to be hoped that such small errors will be corrected in later editions, for the volumes are surely destined to be a lasting monument.