GEORGE MEREDITH.

Evening Star, Issue 19800, 25 February 1928, Page 6

GEORGE MEREDITH.

A hundred years ago this mouth was born George Meredith. Last month Thomas Hardy died. The close coincidence of the death and the anniversary makes it more natural to consider how the fame of Meredith stands to-day. For some twenty years preceding and following the opening of the present century Meredith and Hardy wore the two groat living leaders of English fiction. They were the complete opposites of each other. Life was a feast to Meredith; it was a grim struggle against wanton Fates to Thomas Hardy. Meredith had a religion which exalted him and gave him joy, if it was no more definite than Pantheism. Hardy could see no purpose in the universe. Ail that redeemed it for him was the beauty—allied, however, with the cruelty—of Nature, and the kindliness, the invincible courage, of thousands of lowly mankind. And, as Chesterton has pointed out, the man who cherished the sad philosophy had the clear and lucid style, and the man who rejoiced in the comic spirit, like another optimist, Browning, had a crabbed and perverse style, which grew more crabbed and perverse as he continued to write. No one questioned, however, up till Meredith’s death that he was the greater writer. Now it is probable that even the novels of Thomas Hardy are read more than the novels of Meredith. The two men had nothing but admiration for each other. Meredith, when ho was a publisher’s reader, commended Hardy’s first book—not ‘ Under the Greenwood Tree,’ but a book which ho suppressed—and encouraged him to persevere as a novelist. When a national testimonial was addressed to Meredith, bearing Hardy’s signature among others, on the occasion of the former’s eightieth birthday, Hardy wrote; “I have known Mr Meredith for so long a time—forty years within a few months—and his personality is such a living one to me that 1 cannot reach a sufficiently detached point of view to write a critical estimate of his great place in the world of letters.” But the one living rival of Meredith as a literary master, in the opinion of contemporaries best able to judge when that was written, was not Hardy but Swinburne, destined to die within a few weeks of him. It was Swinburne who was put first, Meredith second. Their work was not incapable of comparison, because Meredith was also a poet, and bis poems as well as his novels were admired profusely by the real poet laureate of his day. When the sonnet sequence ‘ Modern Love ’ was adversely reviewed in the ‘ Spectator,’ Swinburne wrote a long letter of protest to that journal, in which he described it as “a poem above the aim and beyond the roach of any but its author.” He went on to say: “Mr

Meredith is oue of the three or four poets now alive [this was in 1862] whose work, perfect or imperfect, is always as noble in design as it is often faultless in result. . . . Wo have not too many writers capable of duly handling a subject worth the serious interest of men. As to execution, take almost any sonnet at random out of this series, and let any man, qualified to judge for himself of metre, choice of expression, and splendid language, decide on its claims. And, after all, the test will be unfair, except as regards metrical or pictorial merit, every section of this great progressive poem being connected with the others by links of the finest and most studied workmanship.” , Meredith would have been more gratified by poetic fame than by any to bo gained by a novelist. It is his verse which tends to be valued highest at the present time. But the novels which he continued to write for an audience fit though few were a great contribution to literature. He is a poor narrator. His method was to concentrate on successive scenes, viewed through the eyes of this or the other character, and the concentration had the effect, of causing gaps between the scenes. The stories are not well linked up. His new method began, however, a fresh chapter in the history of the novel. , ‘The Ordeal of Richard Feverel,’ published in 1859, has been called tho first example of the modern novel. And tho wit, lyrical fervor, and powers of description which he brought to his task have been excelled by no other writer. Ho has given to us also a gallery of noble women second only to that of Shakespeare. Ho was greater, perhaps, as an artist than as a man. He falsified tho returns on a census paper to conceal the fact that his grandfather was a tailor, but ho made no suppression of the “Great Mel” and of “Mel’s” trade connections in 1 Evan Harrington.' The Letters which were published three years after his death rather chilled than encouraged the interest which had been revived in his novels. Yet it' is the barest truth that has been said of him by Chesterton that “ he is full of good things. A reader opening one of his books feels like a schoolboy opening a hamper which he knows to have somehow cost a hundred pounds. He may be more bewildered by it than by an ordinary hamper; but lie gets tho impression of a real richness of thought; and that is what one really gets Horn such riots of felicity as ‘Evan Harrington’ or ‘Harry Richmond.’ ”