So Arthur was sent to school and doubtless did not cry.
•
Doubtless, also, Arthur did not cry when he was sent away to the Continent to a cheaper school four years later. Anyway he was now a big “little man” of thirteen. Papa understood his feelings, though, no doubt. Had not Papa too been sent away to Germany to school at the same age? Arthur did not know he was being sent away for life. But Arthur rarely came home any more after this. Papa’s new wife Marie didn’t much like him, anyway, and there were a new brother and sister, whom he didn’t know very well. He felt strange coming home.
George went to visit him in Switzerland in 1871, when Arthur was eighteen. George wrote home that Arthur was “a short man, slightly moustached, having a tuft of whisker; a good walker, a middling clear thinker, sensible, brilliant in nothing, tending in no direction, very near to what I predicted of him as a combatant in life, but with certain reserve qualities of mental vigour which may develop; and though he seems never likely to be intellectually an athlete, one may hope he will be manful. . . . In a competitive examination of fifty he would be about the twenty-fifth.” George was always doing this, analyzing poor Arthur’s character disapprovingly.
Shortly after this, Arthur’s first notable manly act, exhibiting “certain reserve qualities of mental vigour,” was to have nothing more to do with George.
•
How it came about was this: Arthur was feverishly clung to and caressed by the frantic, angry Meredith for two or three years and then, as a child of nine, sent away to school, first nearby, then farther and farther away, to Switzerland, to Germany, and had learned to live there by himself, without father or family. Without complaint. When he was a little boy he had many thoughts about Mama, about a beautiful mother whom he must not mention. Could not talk to Papa about. And when Papa finally allowed him to see Mama it was because she was going to die and then he would not ever see her any more. And he still could not talk of it to Papa, and so he got in the habit of not talking to Papa at all, and he somehow got the notion that Papa did not think too much of him anyway: Papa did not like people who sometimes wanted to cry; Papa seemed to think him very stupid and slow, but he was only silent. He made friends at his schools. He had no home, anyway. He wrote dutiful letters to George, fewer and fewer of them, and received boring, tendentious replies. In one exchange, Arthur has mentioned that he is not a practicing Christian. Of this George intones:
—What you say of our religion is what thoughtful men feel: and that you at the same time can recognize its moral value, is matter of rejoicing to me. The Christian teaching is sound and good: the ecclesiastical dogma is an instance of the poverty of humanity’s mind hitherto, and has often in its hideous fangs and claws shown whence we draw our descent. . . . Belief in the religion has done and does this good to the young; it floats them through the perilous sensual period when the animal appetites most need control and transmutation. If you have not the belief, set yourself to love virtue by understanding that it is your best guide both as to what is due to others and what is for your positive personal good. If your mind honestly rejects it, you must call on your mind to supply its place from your own resources. Otherwise you will have only half done your work, and that is always mischievous. Pray attend to my words on this subject. You know how Socrates loved Truth. Virtue and Truth are one. Look for the truth in everything, and follow it, and you will then be living justly before God. Let nothing flout your sense of a Supreme Being, and be certain that your understanding wavers whenever you chance to doubt that he leads to good. We grow to good as surely as the plant grows to the light. The school has only to look through history for a scientific assurance of it. And do not lose the habit of praying to the unseen Divinity. Prayer for worldly goods is worse than fruitless, but prayer for strength of soul is that passion of the soul which catches the gift it seeks.
Your loving father,
George Meredith
So much for the climate of emotional richness that surrounded little Arthur’s formative years. He was nineteen now, and must have wondered what, if any, was the use. He and George do not correspond much, if at all, after this, or see each other for a long time.
•
“Arthur is coming here today,” writes Edith to Henry Wallis. “This is his birthday. He is 21. He has been for some months with Tom Taylor, as tutor to his son but he goes next month into a merchant’s house in Havre. He is a queer lad, very small, quiet and very studious. He found it quite impossible to live with the Merediths. I am sorry for the lad. He has been kept so long abroad that he seems to have no idea of home-life, and his affections seem to me never to have been awakened, and there is, I grieve to say, little sympathy between our natures somehow or other. I do not know why I should trouble you with all this. It has run from my pen without the least premeditation.”
•
Arthur was no longer like an Englishman and so he did not come back to England when he left school in Stuttgart. First he went to Le Havre and worked, and then to Lille, where he worked in a linseed warehouse. Arthur had a little money from Mama, or perhaps from the Peacocks or Nicolls, and he took no money from George but made his own way. We do not know what he did with himself when he came home from the linseed warehouse each night. Studied Cicero, perhaps, earnestly as Papa had said to; or maybe he was witty in the French language and went to cafés. Maybe he had a little French girl for a mistress, with whom he lived a vie de bohème; or maybe he was always silent, applying himself in the hope that the brain Papa had convinced him was not capacious would expand itself with study. He was a man of twenty-eight now. One day when he coughed a great spurt of blood came out upon his handkerchief and over his shirt front.
He went to London to the doctor—perhaps he was an Englishman at that, heading for English shores at a time of trouble. He did not communicate with George, but a family friend did, and told George that Arthur was ill. George writes to him. He has not seen Arthur for eight years:
Let me know of your present condition immediately, and of how you feel affected, and what you think to be the cause of it. The account of the nature of your work makes me fully commend the wisdom of your decision to quit it and Lille. It would severely tax the strongest. You should have rest for a year. The first thing to consider is the restoration of your physical soundness, and rest in the right sort of atmosphere for you might do much in a few months:—either on our South Coast, or Devon; or if advisable at Davos-platz in the Grisons, where friends of mine of weak lungs have been with profit. Your pride, I hope, will not be offended if I offer to eke out your income during the term of your necessary relapse. You have laboured valiantly and won our respect, and you may well consent to rest for awhile, when that is the best guarantee for your taking up the fight again.
Arthur apparently has formed a life plan which the family friend tells George of. George tells Arthur:
When I was informed of your wishing to throw up your situation at Lille that you might embrace the profession of Literature, I was alarmed. My own mischance in that walk I thought a sufficient warning. But if you come to me I will work with you in my chalet (you will find it a very quiet and pretty study), and we will occupy your leisure to some good purpose. I am allowed the reputation of a tolerable guide in writing and style, and I can certainly help you to produce clear English. You shall share the chalet with me. Here you will be saving instead of wasting money at all events. It will in no way be time lost. After all, with some ability, and a small independence just to keep away the wolf, and a not devouring ambition, Literature is the craft one may most honourably love. I do not say to you, try it. I should say the reverse to anyone. But assuming you to be under the obligation to rest, you might place yourself in my hands here with advantage; and leading a quiet life in good air, you would soon, I trust, feel strength return and discern the bent of your powers. Anything is preferable to that perilous alternation of cold market and hot café at Lille. I
had no idea of what you were undergoing, or I would have written to you before. No one better than I from hard privation knows the value of money. But health should not be sacrificed to it. I long greatly to see you. I would at once run over to Lille, if I could spare the time. . . .
In four days time he had Arthur’s reply, that the lung hemorrhage had ceased, that he was better, that he was going to the mountains, that he had no need of financial help. George writes him, mostly about George:
. . . the thought of a child of mine having the prospect of life extinguished in his youth, is a cruel anguish. Hitherto my lungs have worked soundly.—Nothing but the stomach has ever been weak. Unhappily this is a form of weakness that incessant literary composition does not agree with.
And:
We have been long estranged, my dear boy, and I awake from it with a shock that wrings me. The elder should be the first to break through such divisions, for he knows best the tenure and the nature of life. But our last parting gave me the idea that you did not care for me; and further, I am so driven by work that I do not contend with misapprehension of me, or with disregard, but have the habit of taking it from all alike, as a cab-horse takes the whip.
George was right, apparently, that Arthur did not care for him much.
•
More years passed. Arthur saw Papa occasionally, only occasionally. He lived mostly in Italy, and wrote a few articles for magazines, and worked at a book on English prose style, for which George sent a suggestion now and then. He was ill again in 1886, and had to come to London, and George visited him in the hospital. In 1889 it was clear that his tuberculosis—for of course he had that most typical of nineteenth-century diseases—was far advanced, and he decided to take a voyage to Australia to see if the climate there would help him. For that is what tubercular people did then, they sailed, and sought, and hoped; they were curiously innocent about their fatal maladies. George writes in February 1889 to Edith:
Please read and meditate on this before you speak of it to Arthur. I want you to use your influence in getting him to accept this little sum in part payment of his voyage. Tell him it will be the one pleasure left to me when I think of his going. It may not help much—and yet there is the chance. As I sat chattering yesterday afternoon and noticed how frail he looked, I was pained with apprehension. He may find on the voyage to and fro, that a rather broader margin for expenses will spare some financial reckoning and add to necessary comforts. Tell him that I now receive money from America—and there is promise of increase. And I live so simply that without additions to income I could well afford myself this one pleasure. He will not deny it if he thinks. I apply to you for an aid that must needs be powerful with him; I am sure you are rational; you have been sister and mother to him, you will induce him not to reject from his father what may prove serviceable. As for money—how poor a thing it is! I never put a value on it even in extreme poverty. He has an honourable pride relating to it; touch his heart, that he may not let his pride oppose my happiness—as far as I may have it from such a source as money.
It is not known whether Arthur took the money or not, but he took the voyage, and, it would seem, without George’s help, for he went “saloon” class instead of first, and found himself with a “mad inebriate” in his cabin, whom he wrote Edith about.
“When I think of that poor boy with the mad inebriate in his cabin I am taken with rage. It shall be spoken of to the P. & O. But their management depends in part for dividends on the sale of liquor—just as the National Revenue does. Great Britain is on a beer-cask,” fumes George.
•
They say a sea voyage sometimes helps. Arthur hoped it would. Rest and a sea voyage and getting away from the English climate. He hoped it would help. He didn’t mind a lonely voyage—he was used to strange places and strange faces. Didn’t mind long silences; days without speaking to anyone out loud; he had sometimes spent entire weeks with his thoughts anyway, with no one to talk out loud to.
Anyway, on a ship people would talk to a thin, dying young man wrapped in a robe in his deck chair with the sea air maybe good for him. Kindhearted ladies would remark among themselves that he looked a little improved, perhaps. Someone had a relative who had gone to the Antipodes a dying man and come back quite cured. You never knew. Arthur would be aware of faint solicitude beneath the well-bred reticence of his fellow passengers. They did not know, no doubt, that he was the son of a famous writer in England; perhaps it would surprise them. Perhaps it would interest them. Probably Arthur did not tell them.
Arthur was unlucky in his cabinmate, a violent alcoholic, who frightened Arthur a little, although Arthur understood a little, too, since there are forms and forms of desperation, which the frightened eyes of the quiet, dying young man and the glaring red ones of the “mad inebriate” might, for a second, communicate.
•
Arthur came back to England in the spring of 1890. He went to Edith’s house, where she cared for him; she was very kind; but in September he died. George did not go to his funeral:
My dear Edith,
Will35 is urgent to keep me away, as the long standing injures me, and I am at the moment oppressed. But I shall come if I feel better tomorrow. Woking is a place where I could wish to lie. Lady Caroline Maxse is there and Fitzhardinge her son, and perhaps the admiral will choose it. The where is, however, a small matter. Spirit lives. I am relieved by your report of Arthur’s end. To him it was, one has to say in the grief of things, a release. He has been, at least, rich above most in the two most devoted of friends, his sister and her husband. Until my breath goes I shall bless you both.—As to the terms of the Will, they are fully in accord with what I should have proposed. Will and Riette have seen your letter and warmly think the same. They will each have as much money as young ones need to have—under our present barbaric system. Know that if you do not see me tomorrow, there is physical obstacle. Believe me, that my heart is always with you both and with your little ones.
Arthur left his “estate” of £2,007.18s5d to Edith. We do not know if, in his last hours, he was comforted by the prospect of being laid in his grave near such eminent personages as Lady Caroline Maxse and Fitzhardinge her son.
•
Poor Peacock had died, calling on the immortal gods to let him die, so it was clearly enough a merciful release, but now Miss May was all alone at Lower Halliford. Or maybe Edith stayed with her there sometimes. May stayed at Lower Halliford always. It was too late for her to marry; she was over forty now. Papa left her all his money, and the cottages and everything that he had; the real Peacocks didn’t get any of it. Well, she deserved it, taking care of him until the last, all those years, and never marrying.
And when May died, when she was just sixty, she gave it all to her real family—her nephew Edward, the innkeeper, and her brother William, the fisherman, and her other nephews Arthur and Edgar Upsdill. Perhaps she might have been better off to have stayed with her family, and might have become the wife of some sturdy fisherman, and, like her real sister, might have had a pair of such sturdy, sweet boys as Arthur and Edgar. Upsdill is a fine name for such rising young men; they will perhaps rise out of their social class into a finer one with Aunt May’s money.
It is not known whether May regretted her fine chance in life at the Peacocks’ house. It is certain that Edward the innkeeper, and William, and the Upsdill boys thought it swell of Aunt May, who had been so lucky in the world, to do so well by them.
•
When Mama died, little Edith Nicolls was a nearly grown-up girl of almost seventeen and was living at Lower Halliford. After Mama’s death, Grandpapa seemed to need her very much. He could scarcely be made to move, he was so sunk in depression. His words and thoughts were bitter and sad, but he was glad Edith was there. He confided in her and allowed her in his library, and she understood that some day her task would be to deal with Grandpapa’s papers and writings. Edith did.
We do not hear of her until eight years after Grandpapa’s death, when she is engaged on a biography of Grandpapa to preface an edition of his works which she was preparing under the aegis of an old Peacock admirer, Henry Cole. That she should do this, we feel, is only fitting; it is the duty of lesser lives, finding themselves appended to great ones, to set aside personal considerations and write memoirs so that posterity may know in greater detail the immortal words, the cherished anecdotes of its heroes.
Perhaps, at first, Edith stayed at Lower Halliford with May, as maiden ladies did in those days if they had property and were bereaved. But it is probable that the Nicolls stepped in and saw to it that Edith got some experience of London society—she would never meet an eligible husband in Lower Halliford, that was certain, and the time was 1866, when young girls still had above all things to find husbands, and Edith was nearly twenty-two.
Edith ought to have been a most eligible girl. We hope she was pretty, and it is possible that General Sir Edward and Lady Nicolls were able to “do a little something for her” in the financial way, and she had important relatives: the steamship-manufacturing Lairds, for example. Even if she was poor, Edith was genteel, with two famous Grandpas as a dowry, and—we hope—a pretty face.
But we do not hear of her, and she does not marry, and then it is suddenly 1874 and we come upon Edith again, and she is now over thirty, and has not married; she is still Miss Nicolls, so it is nearly up with her. She is writing a life of Grandpapa, as she ought, and the record of this survives in her correspondence with a man by the wonderful name of L’Estrange.
Mr. L’Estrange was an Irish gentleman and a self-appointed inquirer into the affairs of Thomas Love Peacock, whose writing he admired above anybody’s. A good thing, too, because he wrote very intrusive letters to ask Peacock biographical questions which Peacock answered, and to which, if he had not, the answers would not be known.
The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith and Other Lesser Lives Page 17
