244 GEORGE MEREDITH'S LETTERS still I have to write — and for a public that does not care for my work. ... I have failed, and I find little to make the end undesirable. ... I am so driven by work that I do not contend with misapprehension of me, or with disregard. Part of me has become torpid." He made a Viking's end, as all men know,
- retaining his laugh in Death's ear," as in one of these
letters he vows he will — " that being what our Maker prizes in men." But then he was one of those who
- ' despised melancholy," he let " grief eat into me and
never speak of it, partly because I despise the sym- pathy of fools and will not trouble my friends." He would not trail his tragedy. But in these letters the cry escapes. It is hard to speak soberly of this wastage ; but these two books, superior to all resentment, offer bitterness its best rebuke. And instead of rounding on the age that baffled him, the understanding course is no doubt to make the difference between them the measure of our gratitude for his coming. The difficulties he faced are the index to our need of him ; had he been greeted gladly, suffered nothing, his value would have been the less. " Friend," he writes to Lord Morley — "friend, in the woods you and I may challenge the world to match us in hap- piness. Out of them I feel myself pulled back a century or so." We are approaching him now ; the day will come when we will be his contemporaries. Meanwhile his past is our future, and these letters may help us like maps into the unknown. They will pass immediately into the stuff of living thought, making blood and tissue instantly; for they show us the fluttering ideals and dim desires of our day clearly formulated and alive. To read them is to find a groping track suddenly stiffening and straighten- ing into highroad. Down that, towards his figure, we now press. Manchester Guardian, 1912.
