overload the description with objective details to the confusion 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 tailor—which contains a richly humorous—in its unrevised form, splendidly farcical—plot, 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 (1870–1871). 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 to have been founded upon that of Admiral Maxse. Sandra Belloni, Rhoda Fleming, Vittoria and Beauchamp are all masterpieces of his finest period, rich in incident, character and workmanship. “The House on the Beach” and “The Case of General Opie and Lady Camper” (New Quarterly Magazine, 1877) were slight but glittering exercises in comedy; the next important novel was The Egoist (1879), which shows an increase in Meredith’s twistedness of literary style and is admittedly hard to read for those who merely want a “story,” but which for concentrated analysis and the real drama of the human spirit is an astounding production. In an interesting series of lectures which Meredith delivered at the London Institution in 1877 his main thesis was that a man without a sense of comedy is dead to the finer issues of the spirit, and the conception of Sir Willoughby Patterne, the central figure of The Egoist, is an embodiment of this idea in the flesh. The Tragic Comedians (1880), the next of Meredith’s novels, slighter in texture than his others, combines the spirits of comedy and tragedy in the story of the life of Ferdinand Lassalle, the German Socialist. The appearance of Diana of the Crossways (1885), a brilliant book, full of his ripest character-drawing, though here and there tormenting the casual reader by the novelist’s mannerisms of expression, marks an epoch in Meredith’s career, since it was the first of his stories to strike the general public. Its heroine was popularly identified with Sheridan’s granddaughter, Mrs Norton, and the use made in it of the contemporary story of that lady’s communication to The Times of the cabinet secret of Peel’s conversion to Free Trade had the effect of producing explicit evidence of its inaccuracy from Lord Dufferin and others. As a matter of historical fact it was Lord Aberdeen who himself gave Delane the information, but the popular acceptance of the other version of the incident gave a factitious interest to the novel.
Meanwhile further instalments of poems—Poems 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 and 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 so—for, 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 (1891), otherwise a magnificent rendering of a theme full of 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 afterglow of genius. In 1898 appeared his Odes in Contribution to the Song of French History, consisting of one ode (“France, December 1870”) reprinted from Ballads and Poems (1871), and three others previously unpublished; a fine example of his lofty thought, and magnificent—if often difficult—and individual diction. In 1901 another volume of verse, A Reading
