Meredith, like Browning, had too many ideas. And, as in his novels, so in his life, the brilliant egoist appeared to be an artificial construction. An American biographer, Professor Lionel Stevenson, notes in The Ordeal of George Meredith that by the time he was fifty, Meredith “had completely molded himself in a dramatic personality.” He had become the Comic Spirit in person and if there was overstrain, it was for clear personal reasons: “The components had been collected with a kind of genius. Impenetrably screened behind it lurked the Portsmouth tailor shop, the bankrupt father, and the dreadful decade of his first marriage.” The price was that he did not inspire intimacy:
It was not that he seemed either aloof or insincere; but he created the effect of a perpetual and consummate theatrical performance and the pilgrims to Box Hill were not so much consorting with a friend as they were appreciating a unique work of art.
It would be misleading to continue to press a comparison between Meredith’s life and his work as a novelist. Professor Stevenson is concerned with the writing life and very little with literary criticism. He comments on the novels, as they come along, but does not examine them in much detail. He notes (what Henry James deplored) Meredith’s evasion of the scène à faire; for example, it is the point of all Meredith’s novels, as Professor Stevenson admirably says, that the chief characters shall be tried by ordeal. They are burned in the fire of their own tragic or comic illusions and emerge from self-deception into self-knowledge. Yet, in Diana of the Crossways, the scene where Diana commits the folly of letting a political secret out of the bag is skipped. Is she an hysterical egoist? Is she as immoral as she appears? Has she merely lost her head? Only a direct account of the scene at the newspaper office, where she hands over the secret, can tell us. Meredith was no story-teller—a fatal defect, above all in the days of the three-volume novel. He is a novelist who gesticulates about a story that is implicitly already told. The cage of character is his interest. The rest of Professor Stevenson’s criticism is appreciative but not considerable. I find only one point of disagreement. He says that Meredith was the first to introduce something close to natural dialogue in the English novel. Certainly Meredith breaks the convention in which dialogue had been written up to this time; the result is not natural speech. Meredith simply applied his own allusiveness to dialogue, and allusiveness happens to be a characteristic of ordinary speech anyway; he was too full of himself to see the characters or speech of other people, except in so far as they could be elaborated as “idea” and in stylised form. Meredith’s dialogue is simply Meredith cutting a figure in his own society.
As a biography Professor Stevenson’s Life tells a well-known story competently. A writer has not much time for living and Meredith’s life is one more variant on the theme of the calamities of authorship. There is the aloof, handsome, snobbish youth making that first break with his environment by sheer pride of obsession. There is the unhappy marriage to Peacock’s daughter and the hardening of the heart—yet Meredith’s heart must have hardened in childhood. And then the literary grind follows. The Ordeal of Richard Feverel is a failure, so is Evan Harrington. Harry Richmond gets a few admirers. His integrity was untouched by neglect; he worked without a public until he was fifty, and by that time, his health went to pieces. The tall, eagle-faced man, the non-stop wit, talker and laugher, with his bouts of “manly” boisterousness and back-slapping, had always been a dyspeptic. Now he suddenly became deaf. He presently had the symptoms of locomotor ataxia. To keep his family he had ground away for years as a publisher’s reader and wrote three articles a week for a provincial newspaper. For years also he made a small annual sum by reading to an old lady once a week. His letters are full of the groans of laborious authorship. At fifty he had had enough, but he was fated to live into his eighties, unable to hear speech or music; unable to walk, which had been his chief pleasure in life. He was drawn about in a donkey chair. He was sixty before he became famous; the relative comfort of his old age was only in part due to his success—he inherited a little money from an aunt. In his personal life, he had seen the death of his two wives and the son whom he had once adored, but who had become estranged from him after his second marriage. A psychologist might say that Meredith’s life is an ironical illustration of the theory that we get what we are conditioned to desire. The death of his mother in very early childhood, and the pride and fecklessness of his father, had formed Meredith for self-sufficiency and loneliness: the brain rapidly filled in the hollows left by affections which had been denied. His own affections certainly became intellectual; his love letters are clearly of the kind that exhaust the feeling in an excessive flow of lyrical expression. He grieved over the death of his wife, but he had compared her to a mud fort! Friends found an annoying disconnection between brain and heart. There was one reward. It seems frequently to come to the egoistic temperament: the exciting, if heartless, power of living in the present. He tore up old letters and, in old age, is said to have scorned the common consolation of that time: living in the past. The torrential talker, the magician, was in short a picturesque monster, relishing his scars. One whimsical young American admirer—mentioned by Professor Stevenson—made the shrewd, even Meredithean remark, that he would probably have been happier and better organised if he had been a woman.
To return to the unreadableness of Meredith. He is not unreadable; he exists a page at a time; he is quotable, to be skipped through. The large characters like Sir Willoughby Patterne or Richmond Roy are myths. Meredith is tedious only in his detail; when he intends to be preposterous he is wonderful, as he is in that scene in Harry Richmond, where Richmond Roy poses publicly as an equestrian statue. Meredithean irony is excessive, as all the brainstuff is, but it is excellent when the character or the scene is fantastic enough for him. He is impossible until one submits to his conception of Romance; after that he is only hard work. He is a rhapsodist who writes about people who are really souls moving impatiently out of their present into their future, towards destruction or self-knowledge. They are pagan souls in the poetic sense, not characters in the moralistic sense; giants of the Celtic tradition, grotesques in the German; all their geese are swans. Their lives are portrayed as heightened exercises in their integrity and their sense of honour. Professor Stevenson remarks that Meredith was attacked with ridicule until he was fifty, not only because he was a pagan who could not tell a story and at odds with popular realism, but because Romance was out. His fame began when Romance came in. Stevenson and Conrad contain strange echoes. Chesterton’s suburban romance owes a lot to him. D. H. Lawrence was the last to be influenced by him. Another element in making his fame was the rise of feminism. It is very hard for ourselves to imagine another revival in Romance. What a future generation of novelists may find stimulating in him is that preoccupation of his with what he called “the idea.” He enlarged the novel with a brilliant power of generalisation. It was spoiled, as so much English fiction has been, by the obsession with romantic class-consciousness, but in Beauchamp’s Career, or even in a clumsy novel like One of Our Conquerors, he has an ability to generalise about society as living history. And his presentation of character—Diana Merion, for example, in Diana of the Crossways—as idea and person at once, is a fertile addition to the old English tradition of character types, removed from our moralising habit. The pile of French novels at the chalet, the attempt to turn Molière into English, had their point.
Harry Richmond contains fewer difficulties of style than most of his work, chiefly because it is written in the first person. Meredith was a poetic or rhapsodic novelist, and Harry Richmond is a romance about the serious deceits and comedies of romance. Several of the characters are more than life-size, or speak and live in the heightened language of an imagination which is sometimes fine, at other times wooden or uncertain of its level; but there is no doubt that Meredith creates a complete world. Critics have often said that Meredith’s taste for the chivalrous and high-sounding takes him clean out of the nineteenth century and sends his novels f
loating away in clouds of nonexistent history. They have said that we can never pin him down to time and place, and that he is intellectually Ruritanian. This is only superficially true. We must take into consideration a novelist’s temperament before we judge like that. Because Meredith’s mind was microscopic, because his subject again and again is people’s imaginative, ideal, future-consuming view of themselves and of their environment, this does not mean that they have no known place in a recognisable world. Nothing could be more thoroughly Victorian in imagination than Harry Richmond; if the neo-medieval colouring is precisely that, this novel reads as if it were an attempt to glamorise Victorian life out of recognition. This is a well-known habit among the poets of the nineteenth century. The cult of the picturesque history can be described as an escape from the grim squalor of the industrial revolution; but we can also think of it as a confident and imperial enterprise of colonisation. The Victorians were high-feeders on what is felt to be foreign in time or place. Harry Richmond is cast in the imperial frame of mind, and if Meredith can be justly accused of being merely Ruritanian, he did not fall into the ludicrous which so often imperils (shall we say?) Tennyson’s historical or legendary poems. The very pretences of Harry Richmond’s fantastic father to the throne of England and to royal blood expresses the rising, exuberant side of the situation in England at that time when people were very liable to be plethoric about the greatness of their history. The plot and many details of narration are also true to the period. It was a time of violent changes of fortune in private life, of tremendous claims to estates and titles. Meredith is known to have got the idea for Richmond Roy’s wild claim from the fact that William the Fourth had many children by an Irish actress, and also from the marriage of George IV to Mrs Fitzherbert. Meredith’s remoteness has been greatly exaggerated by critics brought up on realism.
The spell of Harry Richmond—for to read it is to pass into trance—exists because of the brilliant handling of an impossible subject. If Meredith had confronted Richmond Roy’s claim squarely and realistically he would have been lost. His art lies in building up the character of the father as the romantic and charming figure seen by his child, and then in gradually disclosing that he is first an adventurer, living in state one minute and in a debtor’s prison the next; at last, by evasive insinuation, comes the royal claim. Richmond Roy grows larger and larger, richer in resource and effrontery, more and more triumphant for every setback, but skating on thinner and thinner ice the farther he goes. Meredith learned from French novelists the method of working up to the key phrase. The moment the farmers on whom Harry Richmond is boarded when he is a child start deferring to him, and are heard at last to whisper superstitiously “Blood rile,” the thrill is aesthetic. It has exactly the effect of the words “You are an egoist” when they are spoken to Sir Willoughby Patterne and when they transform the tension and tighten the focus of that book. Richmond Roy has been too obviously compared with Micawber; he is far more complex than that; his follies and dreams have genius. He is not a windbag; he is a fine actor. He is nearer to Falstaff. Richmond Roy alarms. He alarms when he brazenly orders scarlet liveries, permitted only to the Royal Family, for his postilions. He alarms by his knowledge of our weaknesses. He can bounce his way into buying a château or a yacht. He can spellbind a foreign court and rout the hostess of Bath. Notoriety he thrives on. His impudence when he poses as an equestrian statue at the German court is splendid. These imaginative episodes set off the scurvy ones; the father’s nasty relationships with the press, his unscrupulous robbery of his adoring son, his caddish exploitation of the young man’s love for the German princess, his cold-hearted swindling of his sister-in-law. He pretends that the money came from personages who are anxious to keep him quiet. He is a mountebank, and if we are glad in the end that Squire Beltham exposes him in good Squire Western style, it is not really because we like to see vice punished, but because the rogue has got too maddening and has reached an hysterical and pathetic stage where he will become a figure too farcical to bear his real weight as a symbol; hence his tragedy. Meredith works up to that proper conclusion but, like a great artist, explores all the other possibilities first. He has the piling-on instinct of the story-teller. We are delighted towards the end when Richmond Roy is confronted with another false claimant, a so-called Dauphin who claims to have marks on his body which prove his heredity. Meredith is clever enough to give this episode twice; in two different kinds of gossip, one showing Richmond Roy the master of an insulting situation, the other through Squire Beltham’s hilarious British scorn. Meredith’s mastery of comedy does not exclude the low and, indeed, in the low he is not tempted to his vice of over-polishing. When the ladies retire from the dinner table—a nice touch that—the squire lets go:
They got the two together, William. Who are you? I’m a Dauphin; who are you? I’m Ik Dine, bar sinister. Oh, says the other; then I take precedence of you! Devil a bit, says the other; I’ve got more spots than you. Proof, says one. You first, t’other. Count, one cries. T’other sings out. Measles. Better than a dying Dauphin, roars t’other; and swore both of ’em ‘twas nothing but port wine stains and pimples. Ha! Ha! And, William, will you believe it?—the couple went round begging the company to count spots to prove their big birth. Oh Lord, I’d ha’ paid a penny to be there! A Jack of Bedlam Ik Dine damned idiot!—makes the name o’ Richmond stink.
It has been said that Meredith is not a story-teller—but a story need not depend very much on plot; it can and does in Meredith depend on pattern and the disclosure of character through events. The weakness is that the fantastic father engrosses the great part of the interesting incident; when he is off-stage our interest flags. Meredith’s narrative is not a straight line; it is a meandering back and forth in time, a blending of events and commentary and this Meredith must have gone for instinctively, because he is wooden in straightforward narration. We follow an imagination that cannot bear precision. He depends on funking scenes, on an increasing uncertainty about how exactly events did occur. There is a refusal to credit reality with importance until it has been parcelled out between two or three minds and his own reflections on it. Even in the duel scene in Germany, the excellence is due to the ironical telescoping of the event; we are hearing Meredith on the duel, telling us what to look at and what not to bother about. The effect is of jumping from one standstill scene to another. Life is not life, for him, until it is over; until it is history. (One sees this method in the novels of William Faulkner.) The movement is not from event to event, but from situation to situation, and in each situation there is a kernel of surprising incident. In realism he is tedious. One can almost hear him labouring at what he does not believe in and depending on purely descriptive skill.
The love scenes in Harry Richmond present a double difficulty to ourselves. The mixture of realism and high romance is awkward; we are made to feel the sensuality of lovers in a way remarkable to mid-Victorian novels; their words appear to be a highfalutin way of taking the reader’s mind off it and, in this respect, Meredith’s pagan idealism is no more satisfactory than the conventional Christian idealism of other novelists. Like Scott, Meredith is always better at the minor lovers than the major ones. His common sense, touched by a half-sympathetic scorn, is truer than his desire, which is too radiantly egocentric. In Meredith’s personal life, his strongest and spontaneous feelings of love were those of a son and a father, and this is, of course, the theme of Harry Richmond. That is why, more than any of his other works, this one appears to be rooted in a truth about the human heart. In erotic love, Meredith never outgrew his early youth and the fact over-exhilarates and vulgarises him by turns.
Harry Richmond is thought to be less encumbered than Meredith’s other novels because it is written in the first person. Unfortunately, as Mr Percy Lubbock pointed out some years ago in The Craft of Fiction, the first person has to be both narrator and actor in his own story, and in consequence stands in his own light. I do not believe that this is a serious fault in Harry Richm
ond as a story, for what carries us forward is Meredith’s remarkable feeling for the generosity, impulsiveness and courage of youth and its splendid blindness to the meaning of its troubles. Harry is blinded by romantic love for his father and the German princess; he is weak in not facing the defects of the former and in not being “great” enough for the latter; but both these sets of behaviour are honourable and have our sympathy. With his father he shares a propensity for illusion and romance and is cured of them. Since he is the narrator we have only his word for it, and one is far from convinced that Harry Richmond has been cured or even examined. Put the story in Henry James’s hands and one sees at once that the whole question of illusion or romance would have been gone into far more deeply. It is the old Meredithean trouble; he is an egoistical writer, fitted out with the egoistical accomplishments, and one who can never be sufficiently unselfed to go far into the natures of others. His portraits start from him, not from them, and the result is that he is only picturesque, a master of ear and eye, a witty judge of the world, a man a good deal cutting a figure in his own society; we are given brilliant views of the human heart, but we do not penetrate it. He has no sense of the calamitous, no sense of the broken or naked soul, and—fatally—no sense of evil. More than any other novelist of his age, he has the Victorian confidence and in a manner so dazzling and profuse that it is natural they called him Shakespearean. In the effusive Victorian sense, he was; but Shakespearean merely linguistically, glamorously, at second hand, without any notion of human life as passion or of suffering as more than disappointment. He is a very literary novelist indeed.
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