of Life, appeared. In later years too he contributed occasional poems to newspapers and reviews and similar publications, which were collected after his death (Last Poems, 1910). His comedy, The Sentimentalists, was performed on the 1st of
March 1910; his early but unfinished novel, Celt and Saxon,
was also posthumously published in that summer.
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, Richard Feverel had been considerably shortened as compared with the original three-volume edition; but it was now robbed again of some of its best-known passages. It is no doubt competent to an author himself to revise his earlier published work even to the extent to which Meredith in the 1897 edition revised these novels; but certainly it is not necessary to accept his judgment when this involves the excision in old age of some of the most virile passages of books that were written in the full glow and vigour of his prime. In Constable’s memorial edition (1910) of his complete works the excisions were published separately, and are therefore on record for those to consult who care. But the wise will read Richard Feverel and Evan Harrington in the original versions.
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 novels. 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, or—in its strict sense—the seer. The reader, by the transference of the interest from the audience to the stage, is transported into the very soul of the character, and made to feel as he feels and act as he acts. Moreover, Meredith’s instinct for psychology is so intimate, and his sense of motive and action so true, that the interaction of character 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, 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.[1] 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, 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 conscience of life
Keep the young generations in hail,
And bequeath them no tumbled house.
- ↑ The fact that Bulwer-Lytton’s son, the 1st Earl of Lytton Meredith’s junior by three years, took the pen-name of “Owen Meredith,” led occasionally to some confusion among uninstructed contemporaries, and even the suggestion of a family connexion.
