GEORGE MEREDITH’S STRENUOUS LIFE.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXV, Issue 2088, 24 May 1907, Page 1

GEORGE MEREDITH’S STRENUOUS LIFE.

Mr. George Meredith has entered upon his eightieth year, and it is particularly fortunate that he has lived long enough to see the popular -triumph of his genius, for there are few writers of equal merit .who lfad a more unfortunate experience in their early and even their mature years.

It is almost sixty years since ho first appeared in print —with a copy of voreses contributed to Chambers’ Journal—and a little more than half a century since he issued his first prose work, the unique “Shaving of Shagpat,” which still holds its own as the one absolutely successful attempt to reproduce the atmosphere of the “Arabian Nights” in any European language, for even “Vathek” and “Zadig” are essentially Western ill their spirit.

The greater part of Mr Meredith’s literary achievement was completed before he was sixty yqars old; |t is, indeed, doubtful whether anything published since that date lias materially added to his reputation, Yet ij; is only within the memory of (the present generation that he has been generally recognised as worthy of a place amongst the seven or eight greatest of British novelists, with Fielding and Scott, Thackeray, and Dickens. / Men of half his age can still retail ’the time when a. hardly a critic _pf

note thought it worth while to speak at length of liis books, and as Stevonson somewhere says, so wonderful a tragedy as “Rlioda; jFleming’.’ .ha'd to be sought for at - bookstalls, like,a rare Aldinel It was not until the appearance of “Diana of the Crossways,” in 1885, that Mr. Meredith’s name became at all familiar to the general reader, If Mr. Meredith had died at the age of Thackeray or Scott or Dickens he would have entirely failed to reap such a reward. .

Like Browning, Mr. Meredith never deliberately aimed at popularity, never wrote a book for the reader who regarded a book in the light of a cigar, as a convenient method of passing an idle hour. His extreme individuality of style, which earned him the same reproach of obscurity as Mr. Birrell had to defend Browning from, did much to militate against the immeTUate success of his work; now it serves as an antiseptic, for it is no longer fashionable Jto fyiy that one cannot understand him. though the famous first chapter of “Diana” can never i-be . called easy reading.