GEORGE, MEREDITH.

Dominion, Volume 2, Issue 550, 3 July 1909, Page 12

GEORGE, MEREDITH.

, It ia difficolt to realise that .George Mcieis dead. Hβ lived, for eighty-one years; for more than, ha,lf a century hia intellectual i fofcs had teen, active in the midst of us; ' during bin Utter years his > published works SjepQ few—a noble'poem or a generous letter , contributed to these columns, such as tho tabula ,to Swinburne,, which was published ' hers above the, easily lecognispble initials, a Jew days after his fellow-poet's , death. Yet his living presence was always felt among us. .The mind > travelled often to the 'house at. Box HiU, tho once great walker, great talker, great writer, tho > poet with the noble , head, the koen-eyed, ' foe oi pretence ■ and folly, watched, with almost unabated interest, the life, of which so many dirjeront features appealed to him, from cricket to tragic love, from old wine |o 'contemporary politics. It ,will long bo difficult to believe that $hat i great bJcain is at rest, that there is no Georgo Meredith in the flesh to spur men , to endeavour, or to laugh at them for their good. Not only in his written works, how* erer, has he'left counsel and example. His , ' pubLo he oonquored slowly # and with diffiHo never leaped into fame, but y climbed to it, with many a. set-back, along An inhospitable path. Yet, in the end, he achieved the position of the greatest man of letters of bis,age, a position disputed., if at all, only by the poet whose death 'we mourned a month ago; and ho achieved that position by the exercise of tho two qualities to which ho pinned his high faith for ~ the future of humanity, the intellect and the will. The present i 8 hardly tho occasion to ftiscuss aneiv the much discussed question, of th© obscurity of his stylo in prose and verse. In spite of all the triumphs, which that stylo 2 achieved ; iw inventor can hardly bo acquitted of f, wilfulnoes which,, whether or not it arose from intellectual scorn of the slipshod ant} tho commonplace, or from pride ot brain, or from mere obstinacy, or from any motive baser than pur© artistic pnrposo, had tho effect of preventing his- message— the message which be burned to deliver— from reaching many thousands of readers well qualified to profit by it. And yet wo cannot fail to admire' the force of the intellect which exacted recognition in spite of euch an obstacle, and the tenacity of will which steeled a professional writer to defy ajl lures of popularity and wealth in the •years when they taste the sweetest. With George Meredith passes the last of the Victorian giants, and 1 as such his fitting resting-place is Westminster'Abboy, It is no disparagement to the poets, novelists, or , critics of a later day to say that not one of them is tho equal of the anthor of the "Hymn to Colour," "Tho Ordeal of Richard' Fnverel," and, the ''Essay on Comedy." They , would be among tho first to acknowledge their indebtedness to tho ureat artist, and still more to the great philosopher. It is a noteworthy fact that, though the students of George Meredith (alj statistics of Bales notwithstanding) remained comparatively few in number, hie philosophy has penetrated, through the works of younger writers, a very large section of tho pnbTic. Moreover, justioe cannot bo dono to his achievement, unless it ia recognised that throughout, in the idyll of Richard and Lucy, In tho hnge laughter of "Tfye Shaving of Shagpat," in the acuto oritidpmof the essay on 'fComeq.y," no jesji than ,jn tho most didactic chapter in his novels or in "Tho Woocls oi \YotjtQrmain" and, "A Night of Frost in May." Mpred|tji w,js a prophet, charged with an urgent message. That meseago iv as not so much any original interpretation, of the; past, ot ony par§«jnJar process

of laying by .for the future, ae the right use of th« pre 3 * 11 *" 01 the past, indeed, ho had a clear conception. Ho saw it as man's "emergence from brutishness," chiefly through tio development and refinement of hw affecUons On tho subject of future ho noil reticent. Nature, as he ea(d iq his greatest novol, perhaps hie greatest poem, '.'Modern , Love," plays for soasons, not oternitiou, and man would be woll advised to do tho same The force of, Meredith's philosophy wj in his acceptance of man, not as ho ought to bo (nor certainly, in Charles Lamb's phrase, as he ought not to be, for ho could have had nothing but detestation for tho so-called "neo p.iganistn" faslipnablo a few jeare ngo), but ae he ia —a social animal, rooted m uqturo, developed through society, and capable of lmmoasurajjlo furthor devpfopincnt. This ivoa tho subject of Mciedith's no\el3, in which men and women aliko aro nearly all people refined and subtilised by society, of his poetry, ovpn of his criticism. "On such men and women ho wished to impress tho importance of a right use of tho present, ttie jettison of all humbug, a revolt from tho tjrnnny of effete- custom; a cheerful courago, "rejoicing even v in tho north-castors of circumstance, an aroidauce of tho brute on tho ono Bide, and on the other of ortravagant claims to freedom from natural law Brains to sep facts of life as tbpv arc and courage tp handle th.em aright without fear of failure of hppo of'roivard— those nerc what he asked of men, and even more perhaps of women, for whom, understanding them as few men have understood £hom, he foresaw a future in which they should all bo (ae men mil devoutly hopo) no lo&s charming than'his own irresistible heroines, and a great deal wiser that) some of the-m. "Moro bpajn, 0 Lord, m,<jro brain'" is the cry he puta up for them in "Modern Love " Optimistic as his faifh in mankind «as, it was also, it must bo admitted, tho foundation of a morality rathor forbidding m its. of sanctipfi to. the average man To nature the unit Iβ of little 'or no importance, and, if mankind is to live in accordance, with natural law, each man must ask no moro consideration for himself than anj other unit receives Tjiis was the philosophy which, under one aspect'or another, ran through* every page of his work- in prose thai u now as limpid aiuTlovely ae 'it m now orabbed and fantasiic; in verso that sometimes sings JIIIO a Bornetamcq marcbee lijte on_ Army, all drums and tramplings, Rnd sometimes leaps with as disconcerting an agility as eyer did Jane, ''ifaa widow of a labouring ewain." gtfrn afi the doot<nne is, jt k far more consoling than the creed to which a living poet and novelist has lately given capital exproasion —with only a hint of alleviation at tho oloßCr-in the monumental drama of "Tlio There w laughter in that drama, but it is not the laughter that soundq continually in the work of Meredith, now tho silvery laugh'which he himself ascribed to the Comic Spirit, now the rolling, rumbling laugh, "broad as ten thousand beeves at pasture," of a happy giant. A great brain and jt great will nave, passed from among us; Georgp Meredith is f'now in a littlo dust nuioscent"; hut the; wqrld is tho wiser and the bettor for h\e life and work.—London 'Times.'* '