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MEREDITH, GEORGE (1828-1908) , British novelist and years later he put forth a small volume of Poems (1851), which poet, was born at Portsmouth, Hampshire, on the 12th of Feb- was at least fortunate in eliciting the praise of two judgek ruary 1828; the parish church register records his baptism whose opinion was of the first importance to a beginner. Tennyon the 8th of April. About his early life few details are recorded, son was at once struck by the individual flavour of the verse, but there is a good deal of quasi-autobiography, derived appar- and declared of one poem, " Love in the Valley," that he could ently from early associations and possibly antipathies, in some not get the lines out of his head. Charles Kingsley's eulogy of his own novels, notably Evan Harrington and Harry Rich- was at once more public and more particular. In Fraser's mend, as to which the judicious may speculate. He had, as he Magazine he subjected the volume to careful consideration, used to boast, both Welsh (from his father) and Irish blood praising it for richness and quaintness of tone that reminded from his mother) in his veins. His father, Augustus
overload the description with ,objective details to the con- to have been founded upon that of Admiral Maxse. Sandra Belloni, Rhoda Fleming, Vittoria and Beauchamp are all master-pieces of his finest period, rich in incident, character and workmanship. " The House on the Beach " and " The Case of General Opie and Lady Camper
interest
Meanwhile further instalments of poemsPoems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth (1883)had struck anew the full, rich note of natural realism which is Meredith's chief poetic characteristic. " The Woods of Westermain," in particular, has a sense of the mysterious communion of man with nature unapproached by any English poets save Wordsworth and Shelley. Ballads znd Poems of Tragic Life (1887) and A Reading of Earth (1888) gave further evidence of the wealth of thought and vigour of expression which Meredith brought to the making of verse. To " the general," no doubt, Meredith's verse is prohibitive, or nearly sofor, after all, he has written some poems, like " Martin's Puzzle," " The Old Chartist," and " Juggling Jerry," which anybody can read with ease. But his most characteristic . style in verse is so concentrated that any one accustomed to " straightforward" writing, and unwilling to read with the mind rather than with the eye, must needs, to his loss, be put off. His readers, of the verse even more than of the prose, must be prepared to meet him on a common intellectual footing. When once that is granted, however, the music and magic of such poems as " Seed-time," " Hard Weather," " The Thrush in February," " The South-Wester," " The Lark Ascending," " Love in the Valley," " Melampus," " A Faith on Trial," are very real, amid all their occasional obscurities of diction. Meredith had now completed his sixtieth year, and with his advancing years the angles of his individuality began to grow sharper, while the difficulties of his style became accentuated. The increase in mannerism was marked in One of Our Conquerors (1881), otherwise a magnificent rendering of a theme fulf"vf both tragedy and comedy, and in the poem_ of " The Empty Purse " (1892). Neither Lord Ormont and His Aminta (1894) nor The Amazing Marriage (1895) reached the level of the earlier novels, though in the latter he seemed to catch an after-glow of genius. In 1898 appeared his Odes in Contribution to the Song of French History, consisting of one ode (" France, December 187o ") reprinted from Ballads and Poems (1871), and three others previously unpublished; a fine example of his lofty thought, and magnificentif often difficultand individual diction. In 1901 another volume of verse, A Reading it fusion of the principal effect. No doubt as a result of Kingsley's introduction, two poems by Meredith appeared in Fraser's Magazine shortly afterwards; but with the exception of these, and a sonnet in the Leader, he did not publish anything for the next five years. In the meanwhile he was busy upon his first essay in prose fiction. It was early in 1856 that the Shaving of Shagpat, a work of singular imagination, humour and romance, made its appearance. Modelled upon the stories of the Arabian Nights, it catches with wonderful ardour the magical atmosphere of Orientalism, and in this genre it remains a unique triumph in modern letters. Though unappreciated by the multitude, its genius was at once recognized by such contemporaries as George Eliot and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the latter of whom was one of Meredith's intimate friends. For his next story it occurred to Meredith to turn his familiarity with the life and legendary tradition of the Rhinelander into a sort of imitation of the grotesquerie of the German romanticists, and in 1857 he put forth Farina, a Legend of Cologne, which sought to transfer to English sympathies the spirit of German romance in the same way that Shagpat had handled Oriental fairy-lore. The result was less successful. The plot of Farina lacks fibre, its motive is insufficient, and the diverse elements of humour, serious narrative, and romance scarcely stand in proportion to one another. But the Ordeal of Richard Feverel, which followed in 1859, transferred Meredith at once to a new sphere and to the altitude of his accomplishment. With this novel Meredith deserted the realm of fancy for that of the philosophical and psychological study of human nature, and Richard Feverel was the first, as it is perhaps the favourite, of those wonderful studies of motive and action which placed him among the demigods of English literature. The essential theme of this fine criticism of life is the question of a boy's education. It depicts the abortive attempt of a proud and opinionated father, hide-bound by theory and precept, to bring up his son to a perfect state of manhood through a " system " which controls all his early circumstances and represses many of the natural and wholesome instincts and impulses of adolescence. The love scenes in Richard Feverel are gloriously natural and full of vitality, and the book throughout marked a revolution in the English treatment of manly passion. Those who have not read this novel in the original form, with the chapters which were afterwards omitted, have lost, however, the key to many passages in the story: In the following year Meredith contributed to Once a Week, and in 1861 published as a book the second of his novels of modern life, Evan Harrington, originally with the sub-title " He Would be a Gentleman "in allusion to the hero being the son of " Old Mel," the tailorwhich contains a richly humorousin its unrevised form, splendidly farcicalplot, with some magnificent studies of character. Afterwards revised, a certain amount of the farcical element was cut out, with the result that, considered as comedy, it has weak spots; but the Countess de Saldar remains a genuine creation. A year later he produced his finest volume of poems, entitled Modern Love, and Poems of the English Roadside, with Poems and Ballads. An attack upon the dramatic poem which gives the volume its title appeared in the Spectator, and is memorable for the fact that Meredith's friend, the poet Swinburne, with one of his characteristically generous impulses, replied (Spectator, June 7, 1862) in a spirit of fervent eulogy. Some of the individual " sonnets " (of sixteen lines) into which Modern Love is divided are certainly worthy of being ranked with the most subtle and most intense poetic work of the 19th century.Returning to fiction, Meredith next published Emilia in England (1864), afterwards renamed Sandra Belloni. His powerful story Rhoda Fleming (1865) followed soon afterwards. Vittoria, published in the Fortnightly Review in 1866, and in book form in 1867, is a sequel to Emilia in England. Four years later appeared The Adventures of Harry Richmond in the pages of Cornhill (187o-1871). Its successor was Beauchamp's Career (Fortnightly Review, 1874-1875), the novel which Meredith usually described as his own favourite. Its hero's character is supposed xvra. 6 creeds, and tragedies or comedies of his imaginary personalities amid the selected circumstances, and inspiring them with the identical motives and educational influences of life itself, Meredith spent an elaboration and profundity of thought and an originality and vigour of analysis upon his novels which in explicitness go far beyond what had previously been attempted in fiction, and which give to his works a philosophical value of no ordinary kind. Simplicity can scarcely be expected of his language, for the interplay of ideas is in itself original and complex, and their interpretation is necessarily original and complex too. But when Meredith is at his best he is only involved with the involution of his subject; the aphorisms that decorate his style .are simple when the idea they convey is simple, elaborate only in its elaboration. Pregnant, vividly graphic, capable of infinite shades and gradations, his style is a much finer and subtler instrument than at first appears, and must be judged finally by what it conveys to the mind, and not by its superficial sound upon the conventional ear. It owes something to Jean Paul Richter; something, too, to Carlyle, with whose methods of narrative and indebtedness to the apparatus of German metaphysics it has a good deal in common. To the novelist Richardson, too,. a careful reader will find that Meredith, both in manner and matter (notably in The Egoist and in Richard Feverel), owes a good deal; in " Mrs Grandison " in Richard Feverel he even recalls " Sir Charles Grandison " by name; and nobody can doubt that Sir Willoughby Patterne, both in idea and often in expression, was modelled on Richardson's creation. Careful students of the early 19th-century English novel will find curious echoes again in Meredith of Bulwer-Lytton's (Baron Lytton's) literary manner and romantic outlook.' But he was, after all, an originator, and at first suffered in estimation on that score; he wrote in his own way, and what is most characteristic in Meredith remains individual. Like all the great masters, he has his own tone of voice, his own fashion of expressing an idea. Feeling, perception, reflection, judgment, have equal shares in determining his architectonic relation to a problem or a situation. He rings changes on the changing emotions of humanity, but every chime rings true. He is a literary artist. He takes great themes, not little ones; the characters in his fiction are personalities, human beings, neither " heroes " nor sports "; and he does not descend to pander to lubricity or cater for the " reading public." His gallery of portraits of real human women, not dolls, would alone place him among the few creators in English literature. It is beyond our scope here to enter into details concerning the philosophy which represents Meredith's " criticism of life." Broadly speaking, it is a belief in the rightness and wholesomeness of Nature, when Nature" Sacred Reality "is lovingly and faithfully and trustfully sought and known by the pure use of reason. Man must be " obedient to Nature, not her slave." Mystical as this philosophy occasionally becomes, it is yet an inspiring one, clean, austere and practical; and it is always dominated by the categorical imperative of self-knowledge and the striving after honesty of purpose and thought. A strong vein of political Radicalism runs through Meredith's creed. It is, however, a Radicalism allied to that of the French philosophes, rather than to the contemporary developments of British party politics, though in later life he gave his open support to the Liberal party. In spite of his German upbringing Meredith was always strongly French in his sympathies, and his appreciation of French character at its best and at its worst is finely shown in his Napoleon odes. In the main his politics may be summed up as a striving after liberty for reason and conscience and the constant progress of humanity The cry of the conscien6e of life; Keep the young generations in hail, And bequeath them no tumbled house. of Life, appeared. In later years too he contributed occasional poems to newspapers
Celt
From the early 'nineties onward Meredith's fame had been firmly established. His own literary contemporaries still living could join hands with the younger generation of enthusiastic admirers in insisting on a greatness of which they themselves had been unable to persuade the public. He was chosen to succeed Tennyson as president of the Authors' Society; on his seventieth birthday (1898) he was presented with a congratulatory address by thirty of the most prominent men of letters of the day; before he died he had been included by the king in the Order of Merit; and in various other ways his position as the chief living English writer had come to be popularly recognized. The critics discussed him; and new editions of his books (both prose and verse), for which there had long been but scanty demand, were called for. One of the 'results was that Meredith, with very doubtful wisdom, recast some of his earlier novels; and in the sumptuous " authorized edition " of 1897 (published by the firm of Constable, of which his son, William Maxse Meredith, was a member) very large alterations are made in some of them. In fact, a reader who compares the first and last editions either of Richard Feverel or Evan Harrington will notice changes little short of revolutionary. Even in the previously current editions of 1878 onwards, published by Chapman & Hall
Meredith's literary quality must always be considered in the light of the Celtic side of his temperament and the peculiarities of his mental equipment. His nature was intuitive rather than ratiocinative; his mental processes were abrupt and far-reaching; and the suppression of connecting associations frequently gives his language, as it gave Browning's, but even to a greater extent, the air of an impenetrably nebulous obscurity. This criticism applies mainly to his verse, but is also true of his prose in many places, though there is much exaggeration about the difficulties of his navels. When once, however, his manner has been properly understood, it is seen to be inseparable from his method of intellection, and to add to the narrative of description both vividness of delineation and intensity of realization. The essential respect in which Meredith's method of describing action, and emotion in narrative differs from that of convention is that, while the ordinary method is to relate what happens from the point of view of the onlooker, Meredith frequently describes it from the point of emotion of the actor; and his influence in this direction has largely modified the art of fiction. Herein lies the secret of the peculiar brilliancy of his style, derived from his combination of the narrator with the creator, orin its strict sensethe seer. The reader, by the transference of the interest
and character directly dominates the sequence of events depicted in his imaginary world, and discloses the moral idea or criticism of life, instead of the preconceived " moral " being merely illustrated by the plot. In building up the minds, actions, ' The fact that Bulwer-Lytton's son, the 1st Earl
It is part of Meredith's philosophyand this must be remembered in considering his dictionthat verbal expression is itself a test of right thought and action. Hence is derived his passion for verbal analysis. Hence also his impulse towards and vindication of poetrymeaning still " the best words in the best order "; and hence his own dictum, otherwise perhaps hard to undiscerning minds, that Song itself is the test by which truth may be tried. The passage occurs in " The Empty Purse "a poem which throughout is a careful though mannered exposition of Meredith's general views on life Ask of thyself : This furious Yea Of a speech I thump to repeat, In the cause I would have prevail, For seed of a nourishing wheat, Is it accepted of Song 7 Does it sound to the mind through the ear, Right sober, pure sane ? has it disciplined feet ? Thou wilt find it a test severe; Unerring whatever the theme. Rings it for Reason a melody clear, We have bidden old Chaos retreat, We have called on Creation to hear; All forces that make us are one full stream. Meredith is generally ranked far less high as a poet than as a novelist. But he can only be understood and appreciated properly by those who realize that not prose (in the ordinary sense) but poetry was to him the highest form of expression, and that only in it could he fully deliver his message , as a writer who aspired to contribute something more to the common stock of ideas than could be embodied dramatically in prose fiction.On Meredith's 8oth birthday in 1908, the homage of the English literary world was again paid in an address of con-gratulation. But his health, which for many years had been precarious
A carefully compiled bibliography by John Lane was included in George Meredith: Some Characteristics, by R. Le Gallienne (189o). This sympathetic essay in criticism was the first substantial publication addressed to that stimulation of a wider appreciation of Meredith which was carried on by several later books, perhaps the best of which is M. Sturge Henderson's George Meredith: Novelist Poet, Reformer (19o8); but such earlier testimonies to Meredith's importance as Justin McCarthy's, in his History of Our Own Times, must not be forgotten. See also J. A. Hammerton, George Meredith in Anecdotes and Criticism (1909). (H. CH.) End of Article: MEREDITH, GEORGE (1828-1908) If you wish, you can link directly to this article.
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