Patrick Cosgrave on Meredith
Meredith : A Change of Masks Gillian Beer (Athlone Press £2.50) Meredith: The Critical Heritage edited by loan Williams (Routledge and Kegan Paul £5.50) George Meredith saw his reputation rise, fall, and then rise again in his own lifetime. When the wheel came round for the third time he was, not past caring, but, or so he felt, past benefiting. The phenomenon of rise and fall, is moreover, a peculiarly interesting one in his case, not only because of the imbalance and stresses in his own temperament — which led him to disastrous marriage and severe nervous Instability — but, principally, because he was, at one and the same time, a doggedly experimental writer, and one who sought public favour for years with remarkable dedication. His reputation has not recovered from its second fall, after his death, and he will hardly ever be a read writer, like his great critical rival, Hardy: but he was, as a poet and novelist, a very considerable talent. His experiments with the novel form and with metre cut a path into the future which has been followed, in the first instance too much, in the second too little; and he remains an absorbing and powerfully attractive, artistic revolutionary.
It is the great merit of these two excellent books to give the reader as full an introduction to Meredith as he could wish for, save that Mrs Beer, by choice, does not discuss the poetry. At a time when compilations of the "critical heritage" type are under attack, it is worth emphasising the exceptional discrimination with which Mr Williams has made his choice of reviews of Meredith's work in the author's own lifetime, and how skilfully these are woven together to show, not merely a pattern of views on Meredith, but a panorama of the criticism of the time as well. The Spectator, alas, does not come well out of this overview, for R. H. Hutton pursued Meredith through our pages for years, with a pertinacious lack of understanding (though he was in other respects quite a good critic) unknown to the kindly, and even indulgent, reviewers who fill these columns today. Scarcely remembered writers like Samuel Lucas show their worth again in Mr William's pages; some great ones, like George Eliot, remind us of just how bad and pretentious they could be as critics; and, for quality and insight there are one or two — to me at any rate — surprises, like Charles Kingsley.
Nonetheless, as evidence of the level of critical acumen of the period, Mr Williams's collection is depressing: the critics are far too preoccupied with the relationship of Meredith's plots to real life' and social proprieties and quite uncomprehending (in general) of his purpose and the advances he was making in the art (that is to say, the craft) of writing. He was the first major English novelist since Fielding to devote thought seriously to the theory of literature, and to the potentiality of the forms he had chosen — the novel and the short poem.
As Mrs Beer observes, he uses "a protean artistry to give form to truths which he feels to be absolute." He felt a potentially sharp divorce between theories of order in life and the impulses of the personality, of egoism, and he devoted his art to presenting the strife in action. Because his work bears everywhere the impress of a tortured soul, and because its introspection is so intense, we tend to think of him as the precursor of the modern psycheorientated novel. This concern was clear from his early book, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, in which a young man's personality is twisted from childhood into the lunatic theoretical mould of a father bereaved by his wife's desertion: and where therefore there is from the outset a clash between the system of order and the personality. The sources of The Ordeal were in Meredith's own life, but it is striking that, for the 1878 edition of the novel, he cut out material that made the father, Sir Austin, look too silly. This leads us to the tribute of an anonymous critic in the 1859 Saturday Review, who emphasised what others had missed — that Meredith fused the highly stylised clash into art: and his later excisions improved the sense of the novel as a living, discriminating experience. He had expanded the capacity of the novel form to deal with this problem, of which his age was peculiarly aware, and his critics for the most part noticed only the deliberate sharpness with which he had defined his subject, and not the art with which he was beginning to handle it.
It is on the progression of Meredith as an artist that Mrs Beer is especially outstanding. More than any other recent writer, she seizes on this aspect of her ' subject, and develops it with telling effect, making particularly important use of Meredith's notebooks. She has a deep sympathy with her subject, which enables her to present a fine analysis of the use made of his personal experience in his work. At her best (and that is for most of the book) she writes with a calm and prescient lucidity that clarifies the material without losing hold of the many difficulties, obscurities, and uncertainties that Meredith presents to his reader. Most important of all, she has enlarged our understanding of the capacity of the novel form, as well as of Meredith's achievements in it.
Her fault is to hesitate between the views of different critics, and to try to encapsulate their contradictory views rather than judge them. Occasionally she seems to lack decisive confidence in herself. There is, for example, a passage in which, after a rather despairing summary of the views of several critics of The Ordeal, she concludes that the novel's "effects and suggestions are always janus faced, shifting, kaleidoscopic." Then, too, despite her contribution to the study of Meredith's art, the influence of her sources, and the inclination of her temperament and training incline her, as is the modern literary fashion, to absorption with his psychological problems.
The novel which must "tell a story," and especially the novel which can be shown to have a direct relationship to the author's life, encourages this emphasis. In his poetry — of which there are several fascinating reviews in Mr Williams's book — the craftsmanship and its significance can be seen most clearly. Since Coleridge especially, English poets have increasingly experimented with trisyllabic metres, though, historically, the prevailing pattern was disyllabic. The trisyllabic anapaest is a larger iamb with two, instead of one, unstressed syllables. It started, especially in the longer lines, to take the emphasis out of a poetic line, and thus reflected, as well as encouraged, a generality rather than a particularity of thought about essentials on the part of nineteenth century poets. But anapaestic metres, like iambic, run with the current emphasis in the spoken language, Meredith (' Juggling Jerry' is a very good example) experimented with dactylic metres, which is the trisyllabic metre running against the current of the language, beginning as its foot does with a stressed syllable. Except in very short lines, where effects can be forceful but where, for that reason, thought is difficult (Tennyson is a good example) the stresses in anapaestic metres are tortured, because strong syllables appear in unstressed positions. This is doubly true of the dactylic line. The shorter line shows the poet in a mood of simple assertion. The .longer anapaestic line shows him in a mood (if he Is good enough) of potential doubt. The good dactylic line can give a powerful account of artistic order imposing itself on moral turmoil, which is precisely what Meredith's work is about, as Mrs Beer shows. Because we have never had a great poet consistently employing trisyllabic metres we have never realised their full potential for rendering — especially with the dactyl — that troubled awareness of something profoundly wrong with the established order of society and morality (an order expressed in the current of the language), which we think of as peculiarly contemporary. Moreover, the bad anapaestic poets of the nineteenth century, and the brave trisyllabic experimenters, like Meredith, were overhauled by greater poets, like Hopkins and Yeats, who revitalised the iambic .modes. The pity is that more recent poets, whose consciousness might well be akin to Meredith's and who might have learned from him, have instead opted for , the sub-iambic modes of free verse, in pursuit of that psychological expression which Mrs Beer also finds characteristic of Meredith.
Perhaps the greatest merit of Mrs Beer's book is that she re-opens such paramount questions of debate which have long been closed in English critical discussion and deals with them with a probing and acute intelligence. With her study and Mr Williams's compendium, we may now begin to appreciate the significance of Meredith, and the opportunities lost by failing to do so before.
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