MEREDITH'S LETTERS.

Dominion, Volume 6, Issue 1569, 12 October 1912, Page 9

MEREDITH'S LETTERS.

A second selection from among the unpublished letters of Cieorgo Meredith appears in "Scribner's Magazine" for September. Tho dates extern! from the beginning of 1870 to tho middle of 18S7, and tho character ranges from thoso of tho tenderest intimacy addressed to his daughter to those of courteous reply to unknown persons who sought his opinion or sent their tribute of praise. In these fugitive, unconsidered writings (says tho "Daily Telegraph.") we see a great spirit who, nioro than most authors, "swain strongly in tho stream of his own being, and lived as one man," in the phrase of Sir Thomas Browne. His lottors could be no other man's; the quality of their noblo note, tho special senso of tragedy, and comedy, tho very language is all as Meredithian. as 'anything he gave to the public. "Tho Egoist" and "Diana" and "Beauchamp's Career" were in course of creation during this period, but the letters tell us not much of them. Even to so close a friend as Lord Morley of Blackburn he would say no more than this, in a letter of 188-1: "I can work passably well, and am just finishing at a great pace a two-volume novel, to be called 'Diana of Hie Crossways'—partly modelled upon Mrs. Norton. But this is between ourselves. I have had to endow her with brains, and make them evidence to tho discerning. I think she lives." And to the'wife of Leslie Stephen ho wrote on the same day: .' "I hope to finish with the delivery, of the terrible woman afflicting me (a positive heroine with brains, with real blood, and demanding utterance of the former, tender direction of tho latter) by tho end of April." THE SENSE OF FAILUKE. Meredith lived to do—at terrible disadvantage to himself—only the best that was in him. , How his experience led him to think and speak of tho career of letters is often to be gathered from these letters. To his son Arthur he wrote: I was informed of your wishing to throw up your'situation at Lille that you might embrace tho profession-of literature I was alarmed. My own- mischance in that walk I thought a sufficient warning. . .. After all, with, some ability, and a small independence just * to'keep away the wolf, and a not devouring am. bition, literature is tho craft one luay most honourably love. Ido not say to you, try it. 1 should say the reverse to anyone." . In an interesting, passage, addressed to a correspondent personally unknown to him, ho makes this observation: . "In England I am encouraged but by a few enthusiasts. I read in a critical review of some verses of mine the other day that I was 'a harlequin and a performer of antics.' lam accustomed to that kind-of writing, as our hustings orator is to the dead cat and the brick-bat flung in'his face—at which. ' ho smiles politely; and I too; but after many years of it my mind looks elsewhere:" . "HARSH FACTS." How- the miseries of bodily ill-health, dogged him along the path of his creativo work we are sometimes allowed to see. To Stevenson's cousin ho made, in 1887, this curious statement: ' ■ ■■ . "Latterly I.have been forced to discontinue prose owing to evil digestion and nerves. Verse does not tax mo so heavily." . Ana , to Mrs. Leslie Stephen:- , "I am always Wishing to come; I have often , to decline your charitable,,invitation. -1' am -now • writing'-daily-, very.hard, and ■ though '.the: work flours, to' its .end in full view, of.' a kind hardly to bear the strain.' If 1 eoiho to; London. I lose the next morning for work; I'am besides'but a tottering dnmniy at the festal board:"' .'; .■ The last- illness of his -wifowas a>long agony to. : Meredith. ' To Lord; Morley, during that time, he opened his heart in his own manner:

"Happily for me, I have learnt to live much in the spirit and sco brightness on the other side of life, otherwise this running of my poor doe with the inextricable arrow in her flanks would pull me down too. As it is I sink at times. I need air my strength to stand the buffets of tho harsh facts of existence. I wish it were Ito be the traveller instead. I nave long been ready for the start; can think prospectingly of the lyinj? in earth. She has no thought but of this light— and would cry to it like a Greek victim under the .knife." THE MEREDITHIAN TOUCH. Of fee Meredithian descriptive and epigrammatic touch we find less, perhaps, than might have been looked .for. Of what little is said of Nature, this from a Westmoreland dale in July is'the best: "I am liere ... battling with rain and mists, and stiff from a recent stiffish path up and down crags of a sufficient slops for brOoks and kids. Now and then wo have a spot of sun.' He would smile, but he must cry, and he has got a tragic handkerchief, and with horrid iteration of stago action ho resumes it when we are expecting him to give us a countenance. There is a nymph whoso death ho caused by giving top much." There is more of that note in his occasional praiso and blame of persons. Mrs. Langtry. in "Ours," is called "the ideal shepherdess of the chromolithographs. . . . Very handsome, not a shade of mystery or variableness:, the heroine for bold dragoons." And this is candid: "Saw Irving as Romeo. The Love Play ceases to present a sorrowful story, and becomes a pageant with a quaint figure ranting about." , Meredith did not spare "The Idylls of the King" on their nppearance. He wroto to Lord Morley in 1870: "Fancy one affecting the great poet and giving himself up (in our days!—he must have lost tho key of them) to such dandiacal fluting. Tot there was stuff here for a poet of genius to animate the figures and make them reflect us, and on us. I read the successive mannered lines with pain—yards of linen—drapery lor tho delight of ladies who would be in tho fashion. The prni-es of the book shut me away from mv fellows. To b? sure, there's the magnificent 'Lucretius/" To which is added the pulverising remark: "Fred Maxsn has been corresponding with Buskin.—Anon, anon. I am not at liberty to write of the letter's monstrous assumption of wisdom." ON THE CARLYLES. How. Meredith could write when his fastidious judgment ■ was conquered by real greatness we may s»e in an illuminating passage on the Carlylos: "Hβ was tho greatest of tho Britons of his time—after the British fashion of not coming ntlar perfection; Titanic, not, Olympian: a heaver of rocks, not a shaper. But if lie did no perfect work, ho had lightning's power to strike. out.| marvellous pictures and reach to tho inmost of men with a phrase. . . . "Between him and his wife the case is 'quite simple. She was a woman of peculiar conversational sprightliiKss, mulsuch a, woman longs for society. To him. bearing that fire of sincereness, ns I havo said, society was unendurable. . . . Such ii man could hardly be an nciveable husband for a woman of tlio liveliest vivacity. . • • They snapped at one another, and yet the basis of aflect'on wns mutually firm- Sho admired, he respected, and each knew the other to bo honest. Only she needed for her mate one who was more a citizen oF the world, mid a woman of tho placid disposition of Milton's Eve, framed by her master to be an honest labourers cook and housekeeper, with a nervous *ystem resembling a dumpling, would tiavo been enough for him." POLITICAL NOTES. Of politics there is very little in these letters. Hero is ono passage of price, written in 18S7: "On Tuesday night T was ii Riies'c of Hie Eighty Club, was introduced to Gladstone, who favoured mo

with the pleased grimace of the timinblc public man (in Hio grcctin" of an unknown), and heard a speech from him enough to make a cock robin droop his head despondently. We want a young leader. This valiant, prodigiously giflod, in many respects adinirnblo old man is, I fear me, very much an actor. His oralory liiis the veteran rhetorician's to mo painfully pcrccptiblo ivheii I tee

him waiting for his effects, timing those to follow."

And in 1870, toward the end of fhe Franco-German War, wo havo a note upon a foreign personality: "Count Bismarck gives audience to day to that deleterious little Frenchman Thinrs, who has been poisoning his countrymen for half a century, and now runs from Court to Court, from Minister to Minister, to get help to undo his own direct work. Count Bismarck will be amused, for ho has a keen appreciation of comedy. Philosophers would laugh aloud at tho exhibition of the author of tho 'Consulate and tho Empire' in the camp at Versailles. Modern France has been nourished on this lying book."