”
From the delight of pure beauty like this, the reader passes to
sentences where the metaphysician has buried the artist and poet
under the unhewn masses of his thought.
From the delight of pure beauty like this, the reader passes to
sentences where the metaphysician has buried the artist and poet
under the unhewn masses of his thought.
Warner - World's Best Literature - v17 - Mai to Mom
”
"I have been sleeping for a century, it is true; but I have
been dreaming too, for a century. In my dreams I am also a
queen, and of what a divine kingdom! My palace has walls of
light. I have angels for courtiers, who celebrate me in music of
infinite sweetness. I tread on branches of stars. If you knew
what beautiful dresses I wear, the peerless fruits I have on my
table, and the honey wines in which I moisten my lips! As for
love, believe me, I don't lack that either; for I am adored by a
husband who is handsomer than all the princes of the earth, and
who has been faithful for a hundred years. Everything con-
sidered, I think, my lord, that I should gain nothing by coming
out of my enchantment. Please let me sleep. ”
Thereupon she turned toward the side of the bed, drew her
hair over her eyes, and resumed her long nap; while Puff the
little dog stopped yelping, content, her nose on her paws.
The prince went away much abashed. And since then, thanks
to the protection of the good fairies, no one has come to disturb
the slumbers of the Sleeping Beauty.
## p. 9908 (#316) ###########################################
9908
CATULLE MENDES
THE CHARITY OF SYMPATHY
From (The Humor of France)
N
O"
THE Spanish high-road, where the pretty lasses and the
handsome lads arm-in-arm were returning from the Cor-
rida, a young beggar, wrapped in his ragged cloak, asked
alms, saying he had eaten nothing for two days. Judging from
his miserable appearance and his hollow cheeks, it was plain he
did not lie. However, no one took any heed of him, occupied
as they were with singing and love. Must he be left to die of
hunger, the handsome beggar, by the roadside ?
But three girls of twenty years, plump, laughing, stopped and
took pity on him.
The first gave him a real.
“ Thank you,” he said.
The second gave him a smaller coin.
"May God reward you,” he said.
The third — the poorest and the prettiest — had neither small
coins nor reals; she gave him a kiss. The starving man spoke
never a word; but a flower-seller happening to come by, he
spent all the money they had just given him on a big bunch of
roses, and presented it to the pretty girl.
Translated by Elizabeth Lee.
THE MIRROR
From "The Humor of France)
I
I was in a kingdom in which there was no mirror. All the
mirrors — those you hang on the walls, those you hold in
your hand, those you carry on the châtelaine — had been
broken, reduced to the tiniest bits by order of the Queen. If the
smallest glass was found, no matter in what house, she never
failed to put the inhabitants to death with terrible tortures. I
can tell you the motives of the strange caprice. Ugly to a
degree that the worst monsters would have seemed charming
beside her, the Queen did not wish when she went about the
town to run the risk of encountering her reflection; and knowing
herself to be hideous, it was a consolation to her to think that
others at least could not see their beauty. What was the good
## p. 9909 (#317) ###########################################
CATULLE MENDÈS
9909
of having the most beautiful eyes in the world, a mouth as fresh
as roses, and of putting flowers in your hair, if you could not see
your head-dress, nor your mouth, nor your eyes? You could not
even count on your reflection in the brooks and lakes. The
rivers and ponds of the country had been hidden under deftly
joined slabs of stone; water was drawn from wells so deep that
you could not see their surface, and not in pails in which reflec-
tion would have been possible, but in almost flat troughs. The
grief was beyond anything you can imagine, especially among the
coquettes, who were not rarer in that country than in others.
And the Queen did not pity them at all; but was well content
that her subjects should be as unhappy at not seeing themselves
as she would have been furious at sight of herself.
However, there was in a suburb of the town a young girl
called Jacinthe, who was not quite so miserable as the rest, be-
cause of a lover she had. Some one who finds you beautiful, and
never tires of telling you so, can take the place of a mirror.
«What, truly ? ” she asked, "there is nothing unpleasant in
the color of my eyes ? "
« They are like corn-flowers in which a clear drop of amber
has fallen. ”
“My skin isn't black ? »
“Know that your brow is purer than snow crystals; know that
your cheeks are like roses fair yet pink! "
“What must I think of my lips ? »
« That they are like a ripe raspberry. ”
“And what of my teeth, if you please ? ”
“That grains of rice, however fine, are not as white. ”
“But about my ears, haven't I reason for disquiet ? »
“Yes, if it disquiets you to have in a tangle of light hair, two
little shells as intricate as newly opened violets. ”
Thus they talked, -she charmed, he more ravished still; for
he did not say a word which was not the very truth. All that
she had the pleasure of hearing praised, he had the delight of see-
ing. So their mutual tenderness grew livelier from hour to hour.
The day he asked if she would consent to have him for her hus-
band, she blushed, but certainly not from fear; people who seeing
her smile might have thought she was amusing herself with the
thought of saying no, would have been much mistaken. The
misfortune was, that the news of the engagement came to the
ears of the wicked Queen, whose only joy was to trouble that of
(
## p. 9910 (#318) ###########################################
9910
CATULLE MENDÈS
(
>>
others; and she hated Jacinthe more than all, because she was
the most beautiful of all.
Walking one day, a short time before the wedding, in the
orchard, an old woman approached Jacinthe asking alms; then
suddenly fell back with a shriek, like some one who has nearly
trodden on a toad.
"Ah, heaven! what have I seen?
What's the matter, my good woman, and what have you
seen? Speak. ”
« The ugliest thing on the face of the earth. ”
"Certainly that isn't me,” said Jacinthe, smiling.
"Alas! yes, poor child, it is you. I have been a long time in
the world, but I never yet met any one so hideous as you are. ”
“Do you mean to say that I am ugly — I? ”
“A hundred times more than it is possible to express! »
«What! my eyes ? »
“They are gray as dust; but that would be nothing if you
did not squint in the most disagreeable way. ”
My skin ?
“One would say that you had rubbed your forehead and
cheeks with coal-dust. ”
My mouth?
“It is pale like an old autumnal flower,”
My teeth ? »
“If the beauty of teeth was to be large and yellow, I should
not know any more beautiful than yours. ”
"Ah! At least my ears
They are so big, so red, and so hairy, one cannot look at
them without horror. I am not at all pretty myself, and yet I
think I should die of shame if I had the like. "
Thereupon the old woman, who must have been some wicked
fairy, a friend of the wicked Queen, fled, cruelly laughing; while
Jacinthe, all in tears, sank down on a bench under the apple-
trees.
Nothing could divert her from her affliction. “I am ugly! I
am ugly! ” she repeated unceasingly. In vain her lover assured
her of the contrary with many oaths.
« Leave me! you are lying
out of pity. I understand everything now. It is not love but
pity that you feel for me. The beggar-woman had no interest
in deceiving me; why should she do so? It is only too true: I
am hideous. I cannot conceive how you even endure the sight
((
»
(c
## p. 9911 (#319) ###########################################
CATULLE MENDÈS
9911
>>
of me. ” In order to undeceive her, it occurred to him to make
many people visit her: every man declared that Jacinthe was
exactly made for the pleasure of eyes; several women said as
much in a fashion a little less positive. The poor child persisted
in the conviction that she was an object of horror.
« You are
planning together to impose upon me! ” and as the lover pressed
her, in spite of all, to fix the day for the wedding, "I your
wife! ” she cried, “never! I love you too tenderly to make you
a present of such a frightful thing as I am. ” You can guess the
despair of this young man, so sincerely enamored. He threw
himself on his knees, he begged, he supplicated. She always
answered the same thing, that she was too ugly to marry. What
was he to do? The only means of contradicting the old woman,
of proving the truth to Jacinthe, would have been to put a mir-
ror before her eyes. But there was not a mirror in the whole
kingdom; and the terror inspired by the Queen was so great that
no artisan would have consented to make one.
“Well, I shall go to court,” said the lover at last. « However
barbarous our mistress is, she cannot fail to be moved by my
tears and Jacinthe's beauty. She will retract, if only for a few
hours, the cruel command from which all the harm comes. ”
was not without difficulty that the young girl allowed herself to
be conducted to the palace. She did not want to show herself,
being so ugly; and then, what would be the use of a mirror
except to convince her still more of her irremediable misfor-
tune? However, she finally consented, seeing that her lover was
weeping.
“Well, what is it? ” said the wicked Queen. “Who are these
people, and what do they want of me? ”
“Your Majesty, you see before you the most wretched lover
on the face of the earth. ”
That's a fine reason for disturbing me. ”
Do not be pitiless.
“But what have I to do with your love troubles ? ”
“ If you would allow a mirror — "
The Queen rose, shaking with anger.
«You dare to talk of a mirror! ” she said, gnashing her teeth.
"Do not be angry, your Majesty. I beseech you, pardon me
and deign to hear me. The young girl you see before you labors
under the most unaccountable error: she imagines that she is
ugly->
It
C
»
>>
## p. 9912 (#320) ###########################################
9912
CATULLE MENDÈS
“Well! ” said the Queen with a fierce laugh, she is right! I
never saw, I think, a more frightful object. ”
At those words Jacinthe thought she should die of grief.
Doubt was no longer possible, since to the Queen's eyes as well
as to those of the beggar she was ugly. Slowly she lowered her
eyelids, and fell fainting on the steps of the throne, looking like
a dead woman. But when her lover heard the cruel words, he
was by no means resigned; he shouted loudly that either the
Queen was mad, or that she had some reason for so gross a lie.
He had not time to say a word more; the guards seized him and
held him fast. At a sign from the Queen some one advanced,
who was the executioner. He was always near the throne, be-
cause he might be wanted at any moment.
“Do your duty,” said the Queen, pointing to the man who had
insulted her.
The executioner lifted a big sword, while Jacinthe, not know-
ing where she was, beating the air with her hands, languidly
opened one eye, and then two very different cries were heard.
One was a shout of joy, for in the bright naked steel Jacinthe
saw herself, so deliciously pretty! and the other was a cry of
pain, a rattle, because the ugly and wicked Queen gave up the
ghost in shame and anger at having also seen herself in the
unthought-of mirror.
THE MAN OF LETTERS
From The Humor of France)
L
Ast evening, a poet, as yet unknown, was correcting the last
sheets of his first book. A famous man of letters, who
happened to be there, quickly caught hold of the young
man's hand, and said in a rough voice, «Don't send the press
proofs! Don't publish those poems! »
“ You consider them bad ? »
“I haven't read them, and I don't want to read them. They
are possibly excellent. But beware of publishing them. ”
“Why? ”
“Because, the book once out, you would henceforth be irre-
mediably an author, an artist — that is to say, a monster! ”
“A monster ? »
Yes. "
## p. 9913 (#321) ###########################################
CATULLE MENDÈS
9913
"Are you a monster, dear master ? »
« Certainly! and one of the worst kind; for I have been writ-
ing poems, novels, and plays longer than many others. ”
»
The young man opened his eyes wide. The other, walking
up and down the room, violently gesticulating, continued :-
“True, we are honest, upright, and loyal! Twenty or thirty
years ago it was the fashion for literary men to borrow a hun-
dred sous and forget to return them; to leave their lodgings
without giving the landlord notice; and never to pay, even in a
dream, their bootmaker or their tailor. To owe was a sort of
duty. Follies of one's youth! The Bohemians have disappeared;
literature has become respectable. We have cut our hair and
put our affairs in order, We no longer wear 'red waistcoats;
and our concierge bows to us because we give him tips, just as
politely as he does to the banker on the ground floor or the law-
yer on the second. Good citizens, good husbands, good fathers,
we prepare ourselves epitaphs full of honor. I fought in the last
war side by side with Henri Regnault; I have a wife to whom
I have never given the slightest cause for sorrow; and I myself
teach my three children geography and history, and bring them
up to have a horror of literature. Better still: it happened to
a remarkable turning of the tables — to lend six thousand
francs to one of my uncles, an ironmonger at Angoulême, who
had foolishly got into difficulties, and not without reading him a
severe lecture. In a word, we are orderly, correct persons. But
I say we are monsters. For isn't it indeed a monstrous thing,
being a man, not to be — not to be able to be — a man like other
men? to be unable to love or to hate, to rejoice or to suffer,
as others love or hate, rejoice or suffer ? And we cannot,- no,
no, never, - not under any circumstances! Obliged to consider
or observe, obliged to study, analyze, in ourselves and outside
ourselves, all feelings, all passions; to be ever on the watch for
the result, to follow its development and fall, to consign to our
memory the attitudes they bring forth, the language they inspire,-
we have definitely killed in ourselves the faculty of real emotion,
the power of being happy or unhappy with simplicity. We have
lost all the holy unctuousness of the soul! It has become impos-
sible for us, when we experience, to confine ourselves to expe-
riencing We verify, we appraise our hopes, our agonies, our
anguish of heart, our joys; we take note of the jealous torments
that devour us when she whom we expect does not come to the
me-
## p. 9914 (#322) ###########################################
9914
CATULLE MENDÈS
tryst; our abominable critical sense judges kisses and caresses,
compares them, approves of them or not, makes reservations;
we discover faults of taste in our transports of joy or grief; we
mingle grammar with love, and at the supreme moment of pas-
sion, when we say to our terrified mistress, 'Oh, I want you to
love me till death! ' are victims of the relative pronoun, of the
particle. Literature! literature! you have become our heart, our
senses, our flesh, our voice. It is not a life that we live - it is
a poem, or a novel, or a play. Ah! I would give up all the
fame that thirty years of work have brought me, in order to
weep for one single moment without perceiving that I am
weeping! ”
Translation of Elizabeth Lee.
## p. 9915 (#323) ###########################################
9915
GEORGE MEREDITH
(1828–)
BY ANNA MCCLURE SHOLL
M
HAT Robert Browning is among English poets, George Mere-
dith is among English novelists. A writer of genius who
had no predecessors and who can have no posterity, the
isolation of Meredith is inherent in the very constitution of his re-
markable novels. These are so completely of the man himself that
their kind will perish with him. Their weaknesses elude the imi-
tation of the most scholarly contortionists
of English. Their strength is altogether
superlative and unique.
In the preface to a late work Meredith
writes: «The forecast may be hazarded that
if we do not speedily embrace philosophy
in fiction, the art is doomed to extinction. ”
The Meredithian principle of the novel is
summed up in this prophecy. There have
not been wanting critics to whom the lusty
embraces of art with philosophy in Mr.
Meredith's novels seem productive of little
but intolerable weariness to the reader.
Be this as it may, the writer of 'The Egoist GEORGE MEREDITH
and of the Tragic Comedians) has been
scrupulously faithful to his ideal of what constitutes vitality in fiction.
He never descends to the deadening vulgarity of an intricate plot,
nor does he swamp character in incident. His men and women
reveal themselves by their subtle play upon one another in the slow
progress of situations lifelike in their apparent unimportance. They
are actors not in a romance nor in a melodrama, but in a drama of
philosophy. Sometimes this philosophy of Meredith's lies like a cloak
of lead about the delicate form of his rare poetical imagination.
The enchanting lines can only be faintly traced through the formless
shroud. The man who wrote this love passage in (Richard Feverel?
might seem to have made sad uses of philosophy in his later books:-
«The sweet heaven-bird shivered out his song above him. The gracious
glory of heaven fell upon his soul. He touched her hand, not moving his eyes
## p. 9916 (#324) ###########################################
9916
GEORGE MEREDITH
from her nor speaking: and she with a soft word of farewell passed across the
stile, and up the pathway through the dewy shades of the copse, and out of
the arch of the light, away from his eyes.
”
From the delight of pure beauty like this, the reader passes to
sentences where the metaphysician has buried the artist and poet
under the unhewn masses of his thought.
“A witty woman is a treasure: a witty beauty is a power. Has she actual
beauty, actual wit ? not an empty, tidal, material beauty that passes current
among pretty flippancy or staggering pretentiousness ? Grant the combination:
she will appear a veritable queen of her period, fit for homage, at least meriting
a disposition to believe the best of her in the teeth of foul rumor; because the
well of true wit is truth itself, the gathering of the precious drops of right
reason, wisdom's lighting; and no soul possessing it and dispensing it can
justly be a target for the world, however well armed the world confronting
her. Our contemporary world, that Old Credulity and stone-hurling urchin
in one, supposes it possible for a woman to be mentally active up to the point
of spiritual clarity, and also fleshly vile — a guide to life and a biter at the
fruits of death — both open mind and a hypocrite.
Between these two passages there is apparently a great gulf fixed,
but they are equally expressive of the genius of George Meredith.
He is a poet whose passion for mind has led him far enough away
from the poetical environment. Of all English novelists, none ap-
proach him in his absorption in the minds of men. He weaves his
novels not around what men do, but what they think. Mental sensa-
tions form the subject-matter of his chapters. He delights in minute
analyses, which, as in “The Egoist,' reveal human nature unclothed.
He laughs over his own amazing discoveries, but he seldom victim-
izes a woman. What sympathy he has with his creations falls to the
lot of his heroines. The minds of women are to George Meredith
the most fascinating subjects of research in the universe.
jest at times over their contradictions; but he attributes their worst
features to man, who should have been the civilizer of woman, but
who has been instead the refined savage, gloating over veiled, vir-
ginal dolls. ”
Meredith, who was born in 1828, was many years in revealing
himself to the British public, who loved him not. He had published
a volume of verse in 1851, and he was known to the narrow circle of
his friends as a poet only. His first wife was the daughter of Thomas
Love Peacock, who was in a sense the spiritual progenitor of George
Meredith the novelist. The' eccentric author of Headlong Hall' and
(Maid Marian,' whose novels are peopled with “perfectibilians, dete-
riorationists, statu-quo-ites, phrenologists, transcendentalists, political
economists, theorists in all sciences, projectors in all arts, enthusiasts,
lovers of music, lovers of the picturesque, and lovers of good dinners,”
might well have influenced the author of "One of Our Conquerors.
He may
## p. 9917 (#325) ###########################################
GEORGE MEREDITH
9917
Among the earlier works of Meredith “The Shaving of Shagpat'
and 'Farina' witness to the splendor of his imagination, but not to
the wealth of his psychological experience. "The Shaving of Shagpat'
is an extravaganza which puts the Arabian Nights) to shame.
(The
Ordeal of Richard Feverel’ is his first typical novel, and in a sense
one of his greatest, because it combines his passion for philosophical
estimates of character with his passion for beauty Beauty to George
Meredith means women and nature. The genius of the man forgets
theories when under this double inspiration.
One of the most perfect love scenes in the whole range of fiction
is that between Richard and Lucy alone together in the sweet fields.
Richard Feverel was a youth with whom it was intended that nature
should have little to do. He was reared upon a system, the fruit of
the dejected brain and hurt heart of his father, Sir Austin Feverel.
This system in its sublimated perfection overlooks human nature,
and provides for marriage as a play of Hamlet' with Hamlet left
out. Richard, young, ardent, living in his youth as in a halo, breaks
through the paddock of the appointed order to marry Lucy, a farm-
er's daughter, the one woman of George Meredith adjusted to the
sentimental type. Separated from his bride, Richard is plunged
into his fiery ordeal. He comes out of it spotted, wretched, unwill-
ing to return to his girl bride, whose love had not held him from un-
faithfulness. The book closes in the sombreness of tragedy; an
ending unusual with Meredith, who inclines naturally to the comedy
of human nature. There is not a little of this comedy in Richard
Feverel. ' The household of Sir Austin is essentially the fruit of the
author's humorous insight into the eccentricities of men and women.
In his portrayal of the wise youth Adrian Harley, who will speak
only in epigrams; of Algernon Feverel, to whom dinner is both
heaven and hell; of the scheining mother; of the pale Clare, the type
of feminine submission to the inevitable, — Meredith exhibits his com-
prehension of twisted and damaged human nature and his detach-
ment from it.
No author ever took his creations less seriously, unless indeed
they are women, full of rich, vibrant life. Meredith's characters must
be a match for him, else he will hold them up to the subtle ridicule
of those who are in his secret. The men and women of 'Evan Har-
rington' are thus put on the stage. Parts of this novel are supposed
to be pages from Meredith's own experience when living in a village
near London. The struggles of Evan and his sisters, who have been
hampered in their social career by their father, a tailor of foppish
pretensions, are related with delicate gusto. About these central
figures come and go a host of Meredith's own people, enveloped one
and all in the rose light of a dainty comedy of manners.
## p. 9918 (#326) ###########################################
9918
GEORGE MEREDITH
In Sandra Belloni? and in its sequel Vittoria) the transition be-
comes marked from the well-tempered realistic romance of Richard
Feverel,' and the frank comedy of Evan Hai ston,' to the meta-
physical, enigmatic, subtle novels of Meredith's later manner. Yet
(Sandra Belloni' and Vittoria’ are brilliant with “noble strength on
fire. ” The heroine Emilia is the daughter of great passions. Her
meteoric life is traced by flashes through heavy clouds of profound
and lengthy epigrams, - epigrams after the manner of Meredith, whole
paragraphs long.
In Diana of the Crossways the peculiar genius of Meredith finds
more complete expression. This is a year-long novel for the reading,
and like The Egoist requires perhaps a lifetime for digestion. The
career of Diana, an Irish gentlewoman, strong and beautiful, pure and
fervid, made for love and leadership, is the subject of this remark-
able novel. The men who love her are seen and judged less by a
light of their own making than by the radiance of Diana. They are,
as is usual with Meredith's men, the dependents of the woman. The
author introduces his reader to his heroine by a preface unintelligible
to the uninitiated :-
« To demand of us truth to nature excluding philosophy is really to bid
a pumpkin caper. As much as legs are wanted for the dance, philosophy
is required to make our human nature credible and acceptable. Fiction
implores you to heave a bigger breast and take her in with this heavenly
preservative helpmate, her inspiration and her essence. There is a peep-
show and a Punch's at the corner of every street: one magnifying the lace-
work of life, another the ventral tumulus; and it is there for you, dry bones,
if you do not open to Philosophy. ”
Philosophy, the guiding star of Meredith's artistic pilgrimage, leads
him in The Egoist' into heavy quagmires of mannerisms. Yet this
novel is the most typical of his intricate genius. It reveals to the
full his passion for unveiling man to the gaze of man. Sir Willoughby
Patterne, the egoist, might be embodied satire on the dearest frailty
of man, were he not too lifelike and too remote from the region of
the abstract. His monstrous selfishness is set forth in such exquisite
detail that the lesson cannot possibly fail of its purpose through un-
due exaggeration. Clara Middleton, “the dainty rogue in porcelain,”
too precious for the clumsy fingers of Sir Willoughby, ranks with
Diana as one of the most finished creations of Meredith. She gives
to (The Egoist whatever charm it has. It is mainly for the sake
of George Meredith's women that the reader adventures o'er moor
and fen and crag and torrent of his philosophical mysteries of style.
The prize is worth the quest. No one but Hardy has approached
Meredith in the portrayal of woman nature, and Hardy falls short of
## p. 9919 (#327) ###########################################
GEORGE MEREDITH
9919
Meredith, because the creator of Diana has done what the creator of
Tess omits doing. He has given to the world its own nineteenth-
century women of the best type, - brilliant but not neurotic, thought-
ful but not morbid. Renée and Cecilia in Beauchamp's Career,'
Clara Middleton in "The Egoist,' Aminta in Lord Ormont,' Diana,
Vittoria, and others of their kin, are in their mentality women of no
century but the present; yet in their capacity for noble passion they
might be placed with Elaine in the airy tower of a forgotten castle,
or with Penelope in the sea wanderer's palace, or with Senta in the
fisherman's hut. The milkmaid type of woman Meredith drew but
once, in Lucy. She is much more of a pink-and-white country lass
than Dahlia and Rhoda in 'Rhoda Fleming. These sisters are in no
sense country women, unless the straightforward passionate career of
Rhoda seeking to right a ruined sister establishes her as a child of
nature. To George Meredith it is the woman who combines heart
and intellect who is to be worshiped on bended knees. His ideal of
women- and perhaps the best description of his own
- is
summed up in this passage from his essay on Comedy':-
women
(
« But those two ravishing women, so copious and so choice of speech, who
fence with men and pass their guard, are heartless! Is it not preferable to
be the pretty idiot, the passive beauty, the adorable bundle of caprices,- very
feminine, very sympathetic of romantic and sentimental fiction ? Our women
are taught to think so. The Agnès of the (École des Femmes) should be
a lesson for men. The heroines of comedy are like women of the world:
not necessarily heartless from being clear-sighted; they seem so to the sen-
timentally reared only for the reason that they use their wits, and are not
wandering vessels crying for a captain or a pilot. Comedy is an exhibition
of their battle with men, and that of men with them; and as the two, however
divergent, both look on one object, — namely, Life,- the gradual similarity of
their impressions must bring them to some resemblance. The comic poet
dares to show us men and women coming to this mutual likeness: he is for
saying that when they draw together in social life their minds grow liker; just
as the philosopher discerns the similarity of boy and girl until the girl is
marched away to the nursery. Philosopher and comic poet are of a cousinship
in the eye they cast on life; and they are equally unpopular with our willful
English of the hazy region, and the ideal that is not to be disturbed. ”
George Meredith explains himself and his doctrine so lucidly in
this paragraph, that it seems impossible ever again to join forces
with the “willful English of the hazy region. ” Yet in his latest nov-
els he sometimes compels his most penetrative disciples to apostasy.
Professor Dowden has well said that the obscurity of an author is
a matter for subsequent generations to decide; yet the obscurity of
Meredith in One of Our Conquerors,' in the Amazing Marriage,'
or in Lord Ormont and his Aminta,' can scarcely be due to the
## p. 9920 (#328) ###########################################
9920
GEORGE MEREDITH
smoked glasses of his contemporaries. A writer like Meredith, who
possesses in the highest degree the unique gift of the comic insight
into life, with all that it implies of delicate sympathy and subtle
comprehension of human nature, must be expected to tell of his
extraordinary discoveries in an extraordinary tongue. The question is
pertinent, however, of whether supreme genius might not be able to
relate the same marvelous stories of humanity in a simpler speech.
George Meredith the novelist cannot overshadow George Meredith
the poet. His brilliant imagination, his admiration, his love, escape
from philosophy and the trammels of prose and become clothed in
verse when he looks with a single eye upon nature. Meredith ap-
proaches Wordsworth in his love of nature, untainted with the mor-
bidness which sees its own moods reflected in the changes of earth
and air and sky. He sings her praise out of the fullness of an un-
selfconscious passion.
In Modern Love,' a series of sonnets, Meredith gives to his
insight into men and women a poetical embodiment. An alienated
husband and wife seek the secret of their alienation through the
labyrinths of married human nature. The poet sums up their pitiful-
ness in two lines of the closing sonnet:
“Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul
When hot for certainties in this our life! »
The series is rich in poetry. George Meredith might be remem-
bered if he had written nothing else but the perfect sonnet begin-
ning -
(We saw the swallows gathering in the sky,
And in the osier-isle we heard their noise. "
To future generations George Meredith may not be known as
the greatest novelist of this century. He may take his place as the
supreme exponent of philosophy in fiction; or as an author to whose
mystic realism the key has been lost, whose faint laughter irritates
because the source of it is not apparent. Yet the prophecy may be
ventured that there will be those in each successive generation to
whom the flavor of Meredith will be as fine wine, and who will catch
the inspiration of his genius through the intervening solidities of his
depressing cleverness.
Alla Mare Shall
## p. 9921 (#329) ###########################################
GEORGE MEREDITH
9921
RICHARD AND LUCY: AN IDYL
From "The Ordeal of Richard Feverel'
W**
HEN nature has made us ripe for love, it seldom occurs
that the Fates are behindhand in furnishing a temple for
the flame.
Above green-flashing plunges of a weir, and shaken by the
thunder below, lilies, golden and white, were swaying at anchor
among the reeds. Meadow-sweet hung from the banks thick
with weed and trailing bramble, and there also hung a daughter
of earth. Her face was shaded by a broad straw hat with a
flexible brim that left her lips and chin in the sun, and some-
times nodding, sent forth a light of promising eyes. Across her
shoulders, and behind, flowed large loose curls, brown in shadow,
almost golden where the ray touched them. She was simply
dressed, befitting decency and the season. On a closer inspection
you might see that her lips were stained. This blooming young
person was regaling on dewberries. They grew between the
bank and the water. Apparently she found the fruit abundant,
for her hand was making pretty progress to her mouth. Fastid-
ious youth, which shudders and revolts at woman plumping her
exquisite proportions on bread and butter, and would (we must
suppose) joyfully have her quite scraggy to have her quite poeti-
cal, can hardly object to dewberries. Indeed, the act of eating
them is dainty and induces musing. The dewberry is a sister to
the lotus, and an innocent sister. You eat; mouth, eye, and hand
are occupied, and the undrugged mind free to roam. And so it
was with the damsel who knelt there. The little skylark went
up above her, all song, to the smooth southern cloud lying along
the blue; from a dewy copse standing dark over her nodding
hat the blackbird fluted, calling to her with thrice mellow note;
the kingfisher flashed emerald out of green osiers; a bow-winged
heron traveled aloft, seeking solitude; a boat slipped toward her,
containing a dreamy youth; and still she plucked the fruit, and
ate, and mused, as if no fairy prince were invading her territo-
ries, and as if she wished not for one, or knew not her wishes.
Surrounded by the green shaven meadows, the pastoral summer
buzz, the weirfall's thundering white, amid the breath and beauty
of wild flowers, she was a bit of lovely human life in a fair set-
ting; a terrible attraction. The Magnetic Youth leaned round to
note his proximity to the weir-piles, and beheld the sweet vision,
XVII-621
## p. 9922 (#330) ###########################################
9922
GEORGE MEREDITH
Stiller and stiller grew nature, as at the meeting of two electric
clouds. Her posture was so graceful that though he was making
straight for the weir, he dared not dip a scull. Just then one
most enticing dewberry caught her eyes. He was floating by
unheeded, and saw that her hand stretched low, and could not
gather what it sought. A stroke from his right brought him
beside her. The damsel glanced up dismayed, and her whole
shape trembled over the brink. Richard sprang from his boat
into the water. Pressing a hand beneath her foot, which she
had thrust against the crumbling wet sides of the bank to save
herself, he enabled her to recover her balance and gain safe
earth, whither, emboldened by the incident, touching her finger's
tip, he followed her.
HE HAD landed on an island of the still-vexed Bermoothes.
The world lay wrecked behind him; Raynham hung in the mists,
remote, a phantom to the vivid reality of this white hand which
had drawn him thither away thousands of leagues in an eye-
twinkle. Hark, how Ariel sung overhead! What splendor in the
heavens! What marvels of beauty about his enchanted head!
And, () you wonder! Fair Flame! by whose light the glories of
being are now first seen. Radiant Miranda! Prince Ferdinand is
at your feet.
Or is it Adam, his rib taken from his side in sleep, and thus
transformed, to make him behold his Paradise, and lose it?
The youth looked on her with as glowing an eye. It was the
First Woman to him.
And she — mankind was all Caliban to her, saving this one
princely youth.
So to each other said their changing eyes in the moment they
stood together; he pale, and she blushing.
She was indeed sweetly fair, and would have been held fair
among rival damsels. On a magic shore, and to a youth edu-
cated by a System, strung like an arrow drawn to the head, he,
it might be guessed, could fly fast and far with her. The soft
rose in her cheeks, the clearness of her eyes, bore witness to
the body's virtue; and health and happy blood were in her bear-
ing Had she stood before Sir Austin among rival damsels,
that Scientific Humanist, for the consummation of his System,
would have thrown her the handkerchief for his son. The wide
summer-hat, nodding over her forehead to her brows, seemed to
## p. 9923 (#331) ###########################################
GEORGE MEREDITH
9923
>
flow with the flowing heavy curls, and those fire-threaded mellow
curls, only half-curls,— waves of hair, call them, - rippling at the
ends, went like a sunny red-veined torrent down her back almost
to her waist; a glorious vision to the youth, who embraced it as
a flower of beauty, and read not a feature. There were curious
features of color in her face for him to have read. Her brows,
thick and brownish against a soft skin showing the action of the
blood, met in the bend of a bow, extending to the temples long
and level: you saw that she was fashioned to peruse the sights
of earth, and by the pliability of her brows that the wonderful
creature used her faculty, and was not going to be a statue to
the gazer.
Under the dark thick brows an arch of lashes shot
out, giving a wealth of darkness to the full frank blue eyes,
a mystery of meaning — more than brain was ever meant to
fathom; richer, henceforth, than all mortal wisdom to Prince
Ferdinand. For when nature turns artist, and produces contrasts
of color on a fair face, where is the Sage, or what the Oracle,
shall match the depth of its lightest look ?
Prince Ferdinand was also fair. In his slim boating attire
his figure looked heroic. His hair, rising from the parting to
the right of his forehead, in what his admiring Lady Blandish
called his plume, fell away slanting silkily to the temples across
the nearly imperceptible upward curve of his brows there,— felt
more than seen, so slight it was,- and gave to his profile a
bold beauty, to which his bashful, breathless air was a flattering
charm. An arrow drawn to the head, capable of flying fast and
far with her. He leaned a little forward to her, drinking her in
with all his eyes,- and young Love has a thousand. Then truly
the System triumphed, just ere it was to fall; and could Sir
Austin have been content to draw the arrow to the head and let
it Ay, when it would fly, he might have pointed to his son again,
and said to the world, “Match him! ” Such keen bliss as the
youth had in the sight of her, an innocent youth alone has
powers of soul in him to experience.
"O women! ” says The Pilgrim's Scrip, in one of its solitary
outbursts, women, who like, and will have for hero, a rake!
how soon are you not to learn that you have taken bankrupts to
your bosoms, and that the putrescent gold that attracted you is
the slime of the Lake of Sin! »
If these two were Ferdinand and Miranda, Sir Austin was not
Prospero and was not present, or their fates might have been
different.
-
## p. 9924 (#332) ###########################################
9924
GEORGE MEREDITH
So they stood a moment, changing eyes, and then Miranda
spoke, and they came down to earth, feeling no less in heaven.
She spoke to thank him for his aid. She used quite com-
mon simple words; and used them, no doubt, to express a com-
mon simple meaning: but to him she was uttering magic, casting
spells, and the effect they had on him was manifested in the
incoherence of his replies, which were too foolish to be chron.
icled.
The couple were again mute. Suddenly Miranda, with an
exclamation of anguish, and innumerable lights and shadows play-
ing over her lovely face, clapped her hands, crying aloud, "My
book! my book! ” and ran to the bank.
Prince Ferdinand was at her side. What have you lost ? »
he said.
“My book! my book! ” she answered, her long delicious curls
swinging across her shoulders to the stream. Then turning to
him, divining his rash intention, "Oh, no, no! let me entreat you
not to,” she said: "I do not so very much mind losing it. ” And
in her eagerness to restrain him she unconsciously laid her gen-
tle hand upon his arm, and took the force of motion out of him.
Indeed, I do not really care for the silly book," she con-
tinued, withdrawing her hand quickly, and reddening. "Pray do
not!
The young gentleman had kicked off his shoes. No sooner
was the spell of contact broken than he jumped in. The water
was still troubled and discolored by his introductory adventure;
and though he ducked his head with the spirit of a dabchick,
the book was missing. A scrap of paper floating from the
bramble just above the water, and looking as if fire had caught
its edges, and it had flown from one adverse element to the
other, was all he could lay hold of; and he returned to land dis-
consolately, to hear Miranda's murmured mixing of thanks and
pretty expostulations.
"Let me try again,” he said.
"No indeed! ” she replied, and used the awful threat, “I will
run away if you do;” which effectually restrained him.
Her eye fell on the fire-stained scrap of paper, and bright-
ened as she cried, “There, there! you have what I want. It is
that. I do not care for the book. No, please' you are not to
look at it. Give it me. ”
Before her playfully imperative injunction was fairly spoken,
Richard had glanced at the document and discovered a Griffin
## p. 9925 (#333) ###########################################
GEORGE MEREDITH
9925
between Two Wheatsheaves; his crest in silver; and below –
oh, wonderment immense, his own handwriting! remnant of his
burnt-offering! a page of the sacrificed poems! one blossom pre-
served from the deadly universal blight.
He handed it to her in silence.
"I have been sleeping for a century, it is true; but I have
been dreaming too, for a century. In my dreams I am also a
queen, and of what a divine kingdom! My palace has walls of
light. I have angels for courtiers, who celebrate me in music of
infinite sweetness. I tread on branches of stars. If you knew
what beautiful dresses I wear, the peerless fruits I have on my
table, and the honey wines in which I moisten my lips! As for
love, believe me, I don't lack that either; for I am adored by a
husband who is handsomer than all the princes of the earth, and
who has been faithful for a hundred years. Everything con-
sidered, I think, my lord, that I should gain nothing by coming
out of my enchantment. Please let me sleep. ”
Thereupon she turned toward the side of the bed, drew her
hair over her eyes, and resumed her long nap; while Puff the
little dog stopped yelping, content, her nose on her paws.
The prince went away much abashed. And since then, thanks
to the protection of the good fairies, no one has come to disturb
the slumbers of the Sleeping Beauty.
## p. 9908 (#316) ###########################################
9908
CATULLE MENDES
THE CHARITY OF SYMPATHY
From (The Humor of France)
N
O"
THE Spanish high-road, where the pretty lasses and the
handsome lads arm-in-arm were returning from the Cor-
rida, a young beggar, wrapped in his ragged cloak, asked
alms, saying he had eaten nothing for two days. Judging from
his miserable appearance and his hollow cheeks, it was plain he
did not lie. However, no one took any heed of him, occupied
as they were with singing and love. Must he be left to die of
hunger, the handsome beggar, by the roadside ?
But three girls of twenty years, plump, laughing, stopped and
took pity on him.
The first gave him a real.
“ Thank you,” he said.
The second gave him a smaller coin.
"May God reward you,” he said.
The third — the poorest and the prettiest — had neither small
coins nor reals; she gave him a kiss. The starving man spoke
never a word; but a flower-seller happening to come by, he
spent all the money they had just given him on a big bunch of
roses, and presented it to the pretty girl.
Translated by Elizabeth Lee.
THE MIRROR
From "The Humor of France)
I
I was in a kingdom in which there was no mirror. All the
mirrors — those you hang on the walls, those you hold in
your hand, those you carry on the châtelaine — had been
broken, reduced to the tiniest bits by order of the Queen. If the
smallest glass was found, no matter in what house, she never
failed to put the inhabitants to death with terrible tortures. I
can tell you the motives of the strange caprice. Ugly to a
degree that the worst monsters would have seemed charming
beside her, the Queen did not wish when she went about the
town to run the risk of encountering her reflection; and knowing
herself to be hideous, it was a consolation to her to think that
others at least could not see their beauty. What was the good
## p. 9909 (#317) ###########################################
CATULLE MENDÈS
9909
of having the most beautiful eyes in the world, a mouth as fresh
as roses, and of putting flowers in your hair, if you could not see
your head-dress, nor your mouth, nor your eyes? You could not
even count on your reflection in the brooks and lakes. The
rivers and ponds of the country had been hidden under deftly
joined slabs of stone; water was drawn from wells so deep that
you could not see their surface, and not in pails in which reflec-
tion would have been possible, but in almost flat troughs. The
grief was beyond anything you can imagine, especially among the
coquettes, who were not rarer in that country than in others.
And the Queen did not pity them at all; but was well content
that her subjects should be as unhappy at not seeing themselves
as she would have been furious at sight of herself.
However, there was in a suburb of the town a young girl
called Jacinthe, who was not quite so miserable as the rest, be-
cause of a lover she had. Some one who finds you beautiful, and
never tires of telling you so, can take the place of a mirror.
«What, truly ? ” she asked, "there is nothing unpleasant in
the color of my eyes ? "
« They are like corn-flowers in which a clear drop of amber
has fallen. ”
“My skin isn't black ? »
“Know that your brow is purer than snow crystals; know that
your cheeks are like roses fair yet pink! "
“What must I think of my lips ? »
« That they are like a ripe raspberry. ”
“And what of my teeth, if you please ? ”
“That grains of rice, however fine, are not as white. ”
“But about my ears, haven't I reason for disquiet ? »
“Yes, if it disquiets you to have in a tangle of light hair, two
little shells as intricate as newly opened violets. ”
Thus they talked, -she charmed, he more ravished still; for
he did not say a word which was not the very truth. All that
she had the pleasure of hearing praised, he had the delight of see-
ing. So their mutual tenderness grew livelier from hour to hour.
The day he asked if she would consent to have him for her hus-
band, she blushed, but certainly not from fear; people who seeing
her smile might have thought she was amusing herself with the
thought of saying no, would have been much mistaken. The
misfortune was, that the news of the engagement came to the
ears of the wicked Queen, whose only joy was to trouble that of
(
## p. 9910 (#318) ###########################################
9910
CATULLE MENDÈS
(
>>
others; and she hated Jacinthe more than all, because she was
the most beautiful of all.
Walking one day, a short time before the wedding, in the
orchard, an old woman approached Jacinthe asking alms; then
suddenly fell back with a shriek, like some one who has nearly
trodden on a toad.
"Ah, heaven! what have I seen?
What's the matter, my good woman, and what have you
seen? Speak. ”
« The ugliest thing on the face of the earth. ”
"Certainly that isn't me,” said Jacinthe, smiling.
"Alas! yes, poor child, it is you. I have been a long time in
the world, but I never yet met any one so hideous as you are. ”
“Do you mean to say that I am ugly — I? ”
“A hundred times more than it is possible to express! »
«What! my eyes ? »
“They are gray as dust; but that would be nothing if you
did not squint in the most disagreeable way. ”
My skin ?
“One would say that you had rubbed your forehead and
cheeks with coal-dust. ”
My mouth?
“It is pale like an old autumnal flower,”
My teeth ? »
“If the beauty of teeth was to be large and yellow, I should
not know any more beautiful than yours. ”
"Ah! At least my ears
They are so big, so red, and so hairy, one cannot look at
them without horror. I am not at all pretty myself, and yet I
think I should die of shame if I had the like. "
Thereupon the old woman, who must have been some wicked
fairy, a friend of the wicked Queen, fled, cruelly laughing; while
Jacinthe, all in tears, sank down on a bench under the apple-
trees.
Nothing could divert her from her affliction. “I am ugly! I
am ugly! ” she repeated unceasingly. In vain her lover assured
her of the contrary with many oaths.
« Leave me! you are lying
out of pity. I understand everything now. It is not love but
pity that you feel for me. The beggar-woman had no interest
in deceiving me; why should she do so? It is only too true: I
am hideous. I cannot conceive how you even endure the sight
((
»
(c
## p. 9911 (#319) ###########################################
CATULLE MENDÈS
9911
>>
of me. ” In order to undeceive her, it occurred to him to make
many people visit her: every man declared that Jacinthe was
exactly made for the pleasure of eyes; several women said as
much in a fashion a little less positive. The poor child persisted
in the conviction that she was an object of horror.
« You are
planning together to impose upon me! ” and as the lover pressed
her, in spite of all, to fix the day for the wedding, "I your
wife! ” she cried, “never! I love you too tenderly to make you
a present of such a frightful thing as I am. ” You can guess the
despair of this young man, so sincerely enamored. He threw
himself on his knees, he begged, he supplicated. She always
answered the same thing, that she was too ugly to marry. What
was he to do? The only means of contradicting the old woman,
of proving the truth to Jacinthe, would have been to put a mir-
ror before her eyes. But there was not a mirror in the whole
kingdom; and the terror inspired by the Queen was so great that
no artisan would have consented to make one.
“Well, I shall go to court,” said the lover at last. « However
barbarous our mistress is, she cannot fail to be moved by my
tears and Jacinthe's beauty. She will retract, if only for a few
hours, the cruel command from which all the harm comes. ”
was not without difficulty that the young girl allowed herself to
be conducted to the palace. She did not want to show herself,
being so ugly; and then, what would be the use of a mirror
except to convince her still more of her irremediable misfor-
tune? However, she finally consented, seeing that her lover was
weeping.
“Well, what is it? ” said the wicked Queen. “Who are these
people, and what do they want of me? ”
“Your Majesty, you see before you the most wretched lover
on the face of the earth. ”
That's a fine reason for disturbing me. ”
Do not be pitiless.
“But what have I to do with your love troubles ? ”
“ If you would allow a mirror — "
The Queen rose, shaking with anger.
«You dare to talk of a mirror! ” she said, gnashing her teeth.
"Do not be angry, your Majesty. I beseech you, pardon me
and deign to hear me. The young girl you see before you labors
under the most unaccountable error: she imagines that she is
ugly->
It
C
»
>>
## p. 9912 (#320) ###########################################
9912
CATULLE MENDÈS
“Well! ” said the Queen with a fierce laugh, she is right! I
never saw, I think, a more frightful object. ”
At those words Jacinthe thought she should die of grief.
Doubt was no longer possible, since to the Queen's eyes as well
as to those of the beggar she was ugly. Slowly she lowered her
eyelids, and fell fainting on the steps of the throne, looking like
a dead woman. But when her lover heard the cruel words, he
was by no means resigned; he shouted loudly that either the
Queen was mad, or that she had some reason for so gross a lie.
He had not time to say a word more; the guards seized him and
held him fast. At a sign from the Queen some one advanced,
who was the executioner. He was always near the throne, be-
cause he might be wanted at any moment.
“Do your duty,” said the Queen, pointing to the man who had
insulted her.
The executioner lifted a big sword, while Jacinthe, not know-
ing where she was, beating the air with her hands, languidly
opened one eye, and then two very different cries were heard.
One was a shout of joy, for in the bright naked steel Jacinthe
saw herself, so deliciously pretty! and the other was a cry of
pain, a rattle, because the ugly and wicked Queen gave up the
ghost in shame and anger at having also seen herself in the
unthought-of mirror.
THE MAN OF LETTERS
From The Humor of France)
L
Ast evening, a poet, as yet unknown, was correcting the last
sheets of his first book. A famous man of letters, who
happened to be there, quickly caught hold of the young
man's hand, and said in a rough voice, «Don't send the press
proofs! Don't publish those poems! »
“ You consider them bad ? »
“I haven't read them, and I don't want to read them. They
are possibly excellent. But beware of publishing them. ”
“Why? ”
“Because, the book once out, you would henceforth be irre-
mediably an author, an artist — that is to say, a monster! ”
“A monster ? »
Yes. "
## p. 9913 (#321) ###########################################
CATULLE MENDÈS
9913
"Are you a monster, dear master ? »
« Certainly! and one of the worst kind; for I have been writ-
ing poems, novels, and plays longer than many others. ”
»
The young man opened his eyes wide. The other, walking
up and down the room, violently gesticulating, continued :-
“True, we are honest, upright, and loyal! Twenty or thirty
years ago it was the fashion for literary men to borrow a hun-
dred sous and forget to return them; to leave their lodgings
without giving the landlord notice; and never to pay, even in a
dream, their bootmaker or their tailor. To owe was a sort of
duty. Follies of one's youth! The Bohemians have disappeared;
literature has become respectable. We have cut our hair and
put our affairs in order, We no longer wear 'red waistcoats;
and our concierge bows to us because we give him tips, just as
politely as he does to the banker on the ground floor or the law-
yer on the second. Good citizens, good husbands, good fathers,
we prepare ourselves epitaphs full of honor. I fought in the last
war side by side with Henri Regnault; I have a wife to whom
I have never given the slightest cause for sorrow; and I myself
teach my three children geography and history, and bring them
up to have a horror of literature. Better still: it happened to
a remarkable turning of the tables — to lend six thousand
francs to one of my uncles, an ironmonger at Angoulême, who
had foolishly got into difficulties, and not without reading him a
severe lecture. In a word, we are orderly, correct persons. But
I say we are monsters. For isn't it indeed a monstrous thing,
being a man, not to be — not to be able to be — a man like other
men? to be unable to love or to hate, to rejoice or to suffer,
as others love or hate, rejoice or suffer ? And we cannot,- no,
no, never, - not under any circumstances! Obliged to consider
or observe, obliged to study, analyze, in ourselves and outside
ourselves, all feelings, all passions; to be ever on the watch for
the result, to follow its development and fall, to consign to our
memory the attitudes they bring forth, the language they inspire,-
we have definitely killed in ourselves the faculty of real emotion,
the power of being happy or unhappy with simplicity. We have
lost all the holy unctuousness of the soul! It has become impos-
sible for us, when we experience, to confine ourselves to expe-
riencing We verify, we appraise our hopes, our agonies, our
anguish of heart, our joys; we take note of the jealous torments
that devour us when she whom we expect does not come to the
me-
## p. 9914 (#322) ###########################################
9914
CATULLE MENDÈS
tryst; our abominable critical sense judges kisses and caresses,
compares them, approves of them or not, makes reservations;
we discover faults of taste in our transports of joy or grief; we
mingle grammar with love, and at the supreme moment of pas-
sion, when we say to our terrified mistress, 'Oh, I want you to
love me till death! ' are victims of the relative pronoun, of the
particle. Literature! literature! you have become our heart, our
senses, our flesh, our voice. It is not a life that we live - it is
a poem, or a novel, or a play. Ah! I would give up all the
fame that thirty years of work have brought me, in order to
weep for one single moment without perceiving that I am
weeping! ”
Translation of Elizabeth Lee.
## p. 9915 (#323) ###########################################
9915
GEORGE MEREDITH
(1828–)
BY ANNA MCCLURE SHOLL
M
HAT Robert Browning is among English poets, George Mere-
dith is among English novelists. A writer of genius who
had no predecessors and who can have no posterity, the
isolation of Meredith is inherent in the very constitution of his re-
markable novels. These are so completely of the man himself that
their kind will perish with him. Their weaknesses elude the imi-
tation of the most scholarly contortionists
of English. Their strength is altogether
superlative and unique.
In the preface to a late work Meredith
writes: «The forecast may be hazarded that
if we do not speedily embrace philosophy
in fiction, the art is doomed to extinction. ”
The Meredithian principle of the novel is
summed up in this prophecy. There have
not been wanting critics to whom the lusty
embraces of art with philosophy in Mr.
Meredith's novels seem productive of little
but intolerable weariness to the reader.
Be this as it may, the writer of 'The Egoist GEORGE MEREDITH
and of the Tragic Comedians) has been
scrupulously faithful to his ideal of what constitutes vitality in fiction.
He never descends to the deadening vulgarity of an intricate plot,
nor does he swamp character in incident. His men and women
reveal themselves by their subtle play upon one another in the slow
progress of situations lifelike in their apparent unimportance. They
are actors not in a romance nor in a melodrama, but in a drama of
philosophy. Sometimes this philosophy of Meredith's lies like a cloak
of lead about the delicate form of his rare poetical imagination.
The enchanting lines can only be faintly traced through the formless
shroud. The man who wrote this love passage in (Richard Feverel?
might seem to have made sad uses of philosophy in his later books:-
«The sweet heaven-bird shivered out his song above him. The gracious
glory of heaven fell upon his soul. He touched her hand, not moving his eyes
## p. 9916 (#324) ###########################################
9916
GEORGE MEREDITH
from her nor speaking: and she with a soft word of farewell passed across the
stile, and up the pathway through the dewy shades of the copse, and out of
the arch of the light, away from his eyes.
”
From the delight of pure beauty like this, the reader passes to
sentences where the metaphysician has buried the artist and poet
under the unhewn masses of his thought.
“A witty woman is a treasure: a witty beauty is a power. Has she actual
beauty, actual wit ? not an empty, tidal, material beauty that passes current
among pretty flippancy or staggering pretentiousness ? Grant the combination:
she will appear a veritable queen of her period, fit for homage, at least meriting
a disposition to believe the best of her in the teeth of foul rumor; because the
well of true wit is truth itself, the gathering of the precious drops of right
reason, wisdom's lighting; and no soul possessing it and dispensing it can
justly be a target for the world, however well armed the world confronting
her. Our contemporary world, that Old Credulity and stone-hurling urchin
in one, supposes it possible for a woman to be mentally active up to the point
of spiritual clarity, and also fleshly vile — a guide to life and a biter at the
fruits of death — both open mind and a hypocrite.
Between these two passages there is apparently a great gulf fixed,
but they are equally expressive of the genius of George Meredith.
He is a poet whose passion for mind has led him far enough away
from the poetical environment. Of all English novelists, none ap-
proach him in his absorption in the minds of men. He weaves his
novels not around what men do, but what they think. Mental sensa-
tions form the subject-matter of his chapters. He delights in minute
analyses, which, as in “The Egoist,' reveal human nature unclothed.
He laughs over his own amazing discoveries, but he seldom victim-
izes a woman. What sympathy he has with his creations falls to the
lot of his heroines. The minds of women are to George Meredith
the most fascinating subjects of research in the universe.
jest at times over their contradictions; but he attributes their worst
features to man, who should have been the civilizer of woman, but
who has been instead the refined savage, gloating over veiled, vir-
ginal dolls. ”
Meredith, who was born in 1828, was many years in revealing
himself to the British public, who loved him not. He had published
a volume of verse in 1851, and he was known to the narrow circle of
his friends as a poet only. His first wife was the daughter of Thomas
Love Peacock, who was in a sense the spiritual progenitor of George
Meredith the novelist. The' eccentric author of Headlong Hall' and
(Maid Marian,' whose novels are peopled with “perfectibilians, dete-
riorationists, statu-quo-ites, phrenologists, transcendentalists, political
economists, theorists in all sciences, projectors in all arts, enthusiasts,
lovers of music, lovers of the picturesque, and lovers of good dinners,”
might well have influenced the author of "One of Our Conquerors.
He may
## p. 9917 (#325) ###########################################
GEORGE MEREDITH
9917
Among the earlier works of Meredith “The Shaving of Shagpat'
and 'Farina' witness to the splendor of his imagination, but not to
the wealth of his psychological experience. "The Shaving of Shagpat'
is an extravaganza which puts the Arabian Nights) to shame.
(The
Ordeal of Richard Feverel’ is his first typical novel, and in a sense
one of his greatest, because it combines his passion for philosophical
estimates of character with his passion for beauty Beauty to George
Meredith means women and nature. The genius of the man forgets
theories when under this double inspiration.
One of the most perfect love scenes in the whole range of fiction
is that between Richard and Lucy alone together in the sweet fields.
Richard Feverel was a youth with whom it was intended that nature
should have little to do. He was reared upon a system, the fruit of
the dejected brain and hurt heart of his father, Sir Austin Feverel.
This system in its sublimated perfection overlooks human nature,
and provides for marriage as a play of Hamlet' with Hamlet left
out. Richard, young, ardent, living in his youth as in a halo, breaks
through the paddock of the appointed order to marry Lucy, a farm-
er's daughter, the one woman of George Meredith adjusted to the
sentimental type. Separated from his bride, Richard is plunged
into his fiery ordeal. He comes out of it spotted, wretched, unwill-
ing to return to his girl bride, whose love had not held him from un-
faithfulness. The book closes in the sombreness of tragedy; an
ending unusual with Meredith, who inclines naturally to the comedy
of human nature. There is not a little of this comedy in Richard
Feverel. ' The household of Sir Austin is essentially the fruit of the
author's humorous insight into the eccentricities of men and women.
In his portrayal of the wise youth Adrian Harley, who will speak
only in epigrams; of Algernon Feverel, to whom dinner is both
heaven and hell; of the scheining mother; of the pale Clare, the type
of feminine submission to the inevitable, — Meredith exhibits his com-
prehension of twisted and damaged human nature and his detach-
ment from it.
No author ever took his creations less seriously, unless indeed
they are women, full of rich, vibrant life. Meredith's characters must
be a match for him, else he will hold them up to the subtle ridicule
of those who are in his secret. The men and women of 'Evan Har-
rington' are thus put on the stage. Parts of this novel are supposed
to be pages from Meredith's own experience when living in a village
near London. The struggles of Evan and his sisters, who have been
hampered in their social career by their father, a tailor of foppish
pretensions, are related with delicate gusto. About these central
figures come and go a host of Meredith's own people, enveloped one
and all in the rose light of a dainty comedy of manners.
## p. 9918 (#326) ###########################################
9918
GEORGE MEREDITH
In Sandra Belloni? and in its sequel Vittoria) the transition be-
comes marked from the well-tempered realistic romance of Richard
Feverel,' and the frank comedy of Evan Hai ston,' to the meta-
physical, enigmatic, subtle novels of Meredith's later manner. Yet
(Sandra Belloni' and Vittoria’ are brilliant with “noble strength on
fire. ” The heroine Emilia is the daughter of great passions. Her
meteoric life is traced by flashes through heavy clouds of profound
and lengthy epigrams, - epigrams after the manner of Meredith, whole
paragraphs long.
In Diana of the Crossways the peculiar genius of Meredith finds
more complete expression. This is a year-long novel for the reading,
and like The Egoist requires perhaps a lifetime for digestion. The
career of Diana, an Irish gentlewoman, strong and beautiful, pure and
fervid, made for love and leadership, is the subject of this remark-
able novel. The men who love her are seen and judged less by a
light of their own making than by the radiance of Diana. They are,
as is usual with Meredith's men, the dependents of the woman. The
author introduces his reader to his heroine by a preface unintelligible
to the uninitiated :-
« To demand of us truth to nature excluding philosophy is really to bid
a pumpkin caper. As much as legs are wanted for the dance, philosophy
is required to make our human nature credible and acceptable. Fiction
implores you to heave a bigger breast and take her in with this heavenly
preservative helpmate, her inspiration and her essence. There is a peep-
show and a Punch's at the corner of every street: one magnifying the lace-
work of life, another the ventral tumulus; and it is there for you, dry bones,
if you do not open to Philosophy. ”
Philosophy, the guiding star of Meredith's artistic pilgrimage, leads
him in The Egoist' into heavy quagmires of mannerisms. Yet this
novel is the most typical of his intricate genius. It reveals to the
full his passion for unveiling man to the gaze of man. Sir Willoughby
Patterne, the egoist, might be embodied satire on the dearest frailty
of man, were he not too lifelike and too remote from the region of
the abstract. His monstrous selfishness is set forth in such exquisite
detail that the lesson cannot possibly fail of its purpose through un-
due exaggeration. Clara Middleton, “the dainty rogue in porcelain,”
too precious for the clumsy fingers of Sir Willoughby, ranks with
Diana as one of the most finished creations of Meredith. She gives
to (The Egoist whatever charm it has. It is mainly for the sake
of George Meredith's women that the reader adventures o'er moor
and fen and crag and torrent of his philosophical mysteries of style.
The prize is worth the quest. No one but Hardy has approached
Meredith in the portrayal of woman nature, and Hardy falls short of
## p. 9919 (#327) ###########################################
GEORGE MEREDITH
9919
Meredith, because the creator of Diana has done what the creator of
Tess omits doing. He has given to the world its own nineteenth-
century women of the best type, - brilliant but not neurotic, thought-
ful but not morbid. Renée and Cecilia in Beauchamp's Career,'
Clara Middleton in "The Egoist,' Aminta in Lord Ormont,' Diana,
Vittoria, and others of their kin, are in their mentality women of no
century but the present; yet in their capacity for noble passion they
might be placed with Elaine in the airy tower of a forgotten castle,
or with Penelope in the sea wanderer's palace, or with Senta in the
fisherman's hut. The milkmaid type of woman Meredith drew but
once, in Lucy. She is much more of a pink-and-white country lass
than Dahlia and Rhoda in 'Rhoda Fleming. These sisters are in no
sense country women, unless the straightforward passionate career of
Rhoda seeking to right a ruined sister establishes her as a child of
nature. To George Meredith it is the woman who combines heart
and intellect who is to be worshiped on bended knees. His ideal of
women- and perhaps the best description of his own
- is
summed up in this passage from his essay on Comedy':-
women
(
« But those two ravishing women, so copious and so choice of speech, who
fence with men and pass their guard, are heartless! Is it not preferable to
be the pretty idiot, the passive beauty, the adorable bundle of caprices,- very
feminine, very sympathetic of romantic and sentimental fiction ? Our women
are taught to think so. The Agnès of the (École des Femmes) should be
a lesson for men. The heroines of comedy are like women of the world:
not necessarily heartless from being clear-sighted; they seem so to the sen-
timentally reared only for the reason that they use their wits, and are not
wandering vessels crying for a captain or a pilot. Comedy is an exhibition
of their battle with men, and that of men with them; and as the two, however
divergent, both look on one object, — namely, Life,- the gradual similarity of
their impressions must bring them to some resemblance. The comic poet
dares to show us men and women coming to this mutual likeness: he is for
saying that when they draw together in social life their minds grow liker; just
as the philosopher discerns the similarity of boy and girl until the girl is
marched away to the nursery. Philosopher and comic poet are of a cousinship
in the eye they cast on life; and they are equally unpopular with our willful
English of the hazy region, and the ideal that is not to be disturbed. ”
George Meredith explains himself and his doctrine so lucidly in
this paragraph, that it seems impossible ever again to join forces
with the “willful English of the hazy region. ” Yet in his latest nov-
els he sometimes compels his most penetrative disciples to apostasy.
Professor Dowden has well said that the obscurity of an author is
a matter for subsequent generations to decide; yet the obscurity of
Meredith in One of Our Conquerors,' in the Amazing Marriage,'
or in Lord Ormont and his Aminta,' can scarcely be due to the
## p. 9920 (#328) ###########################################
9920
GEORGE MEREDITH
smoked glasses of his contemporaries. A writer like Meredith, who
possesses in the highest degree the unique gift of the comic insight
into life, with all that it implies of delicate sympathy and subtle
comprehension of human nature, must be expected to tell of his
extraordinary discoveries in an extraordinary tongue. The question is
pertinent, however, of whether supreme genius might not be able to
relate the same marvelous stories of humanity in a simpler speech.
George Meredith the novelist cannot overshadow George Meredith
the poet. His brilliant imagination, his admiration, his love, escape
from philosophy and the trammels of prose and become clothed in
verse when he looks with a single eye upon nature. Meredith ap-
proaches Wordsworth in his love of nature, untainted with the mor-
bidness which sees its own moods reflected in the changes of earth
and air and sky. He sings her praise out of the fullness of an un-
selfconscious passion.
In Modern Love,' a series of sonnets, Meredith gives to his
insight into men and women a poetical embodiment. An alienated
husband and wife seek the secret of their alienation through the
labyrinths of married human nature. The poet sums up their pitiful-
ness in two lines of the closing sonnet:
“Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul
When hot for certainties in this our life! »
The series is rich in poetry. George Meredith might be remem-
bered if he had written nothing else but the perfect sonnet begin-
ning -
(We saw the swallows gathering in the sky,
And in the osier-isle we heard their noise. "
To future generations George Meredith may not be known as
the greatest novelist of this century. He may take his place as the
supreme exponent of philosophy in fiction; or as an author to whose
mystic realism the key has been lost, whose faint laughter irritates
because the source of it is not apparent. Yet the prophecy may be
ventured that there will be those in each successive generation to
whom the flavor of Meredith will be as fine wine, and who will catch
the inspiration of his genius through the intervening solidities of his
depressing cleverness.
Alla Mare Shall
## p. 9921 (#329) ###########################################
GEORGE MEREDITH
9921
RICHARD AND LUCY: AN IDYL
From "The Ordeal of Richard Feverel'
W**
HEN nature has made us ripe for love, it seldom occurs
that the Fates are behindhand in furnishing a temple for
the flame.
Above green-flashing plunges of a weir, and shaken by the
thunder below, lilies, golden and white, were swaying at anchor
among the reeds. Meadow-sweet hung from the banks thick
with weed and trailing bramble, and there also hung a daughter
of earth. Her face was shaded by a broad straw hat with a
flexible brim that left her lips and chin in the sun, and some-
times nodding, sent forth a light of promising eyes. Across her
shoulders, and behind, flowed large loose curls, brown in shadow,
almost golden where the ray touched them. She was simply
dressed, befitting decency and the season. On a closer inspection
you might see that her lips were stained. This blooming young
person was regaling on dewberries. They grew between the
bank and the water. Apparently she found the fruit abundant,
for her hand was making pretty progress to her mouth. Fastid-
ious youth, which shudders and revolts at woman plumping her
exquisite proportions on bread and butter, and would (we must
suppose) joyfully have her quite scraggy to have her quite poeti-
cal, can hardly object to dewberries. Indeed, the act of eating
them is dainty and induces musing. The dewberry is a sister to
the lotus, and an innocent sister. You eat; mouth, eye, and hand
are occupied, and the undrugged mind free to roam. And so it
was with the damsel who knelt there. The little skylark went
up above her, all song, to the smooth southern cloud lying along
the blue; from a dewy copse standing dark over her nodding
hat the blackbird fluted, calling to her with thrice mellow note;
the kingfisher flashed emerald out of green osiers; a bow-winged
heron traveled aloft, seeking solitude; a boat slipped toward her,
containing a dreamy youth; and still she plucked the fruit, and
ate, and mused, as if no fairy prince were invading her territo-
ries, and as if she wished not for one, or knew not her wishes.
Surrounded by the green shaven meadows, the pastoral summer
buzz, the weirfall's thundering white, amid the breath and beauty
of wild flowers, she was a bit of lovely human life in a fair set-
ting; a terrible attraction. The Magnetic Youth leaned round to
note his proximity to the weir-piles, and beheld the sweet vision,
XVII-621
## p. 9922 (#330) ###########################################
9922
GEORGE MEREDITH
Stiller and stiller grew nature, as at the meeting of two electric
clouds. Her posture was so graceful that though he was making
straight for the weir, he dared not dip a scull. Just then one
most enticing dewberry caught her eyes. He was floating by
unheeded, and saw that her hand stretched low, and could not
gather what it sought. A stroke from his right brought him
beside her. The damsel glanced up dismayed, and her whole
shape trembled over the brink. Richard sprang from his boat
into the water. Pressing a hand beneath her foot, which she
had thrust against the crumbling wet sides of the bank to save
herself, he enabled her to recover her balance and gain safe
earth, whither, emboldened by the incident, touching her finger's
tip, he followed her.
HE HAD landed on an island of the still-vexed Bermoothes.
The world lay wrecked behind him; Raynham hung in the mists,
remote, a phantom to the vivid reality of this white hand which
had drawn him thither away thousands of leagues in an eye-
twinkle. Hark, how Ariel sung overhead! What splendor in the
heavens! What marvels of beauty about his enchanted head!
And, () you wonder! Fair Flame! by whose light the glories of
being are now first seen. Radiant Miranda! Prince Ferdinand is
at your feet.
Or is it Adam, his rib taken from his side in sleep, and thus
transformed, to make him behold his Paradise, and lose it?
The youth looked on her with as glowing an eye. It was the
First Woman to him.
And she — mankind was all Caliban to her, saving this one
princely youth.
So to each other said their changing eyes in the moment they
stood together; he pale, and she blushing.
She was indeed sweetly fair, and would have been held fair
among rival damsels. On a magic shore, and to a youth edu-
cated by a System, strung like an arrow drawn to the head, he,
it might be guessed, could fly fast and far with her. The soft
rose in her cheeks, the clearness of her eyes, bore witness to
the body's virtue; and health and happy blood were in her bear-
ing Had she stood before Sir Austin among rival damsels,
that Scientific Humanist, for the consummation of his System,
would have thrown her the handkerchief for his son. The wide
summer-hat, nodding over her forehead to her brows, seemed to
## p. 9923 (#331) ###########################################
GEORGE MEREDITH
9923
>
flow with the flowing heavy curls, and those fire-threaded mellow
curls, only half-curls,— waves of hair, call them, - rippling at the
ends, went like a sunny red-veined torrent down her back almost
to her waist; a glorious vision to the youth, who embraced it as
a flower of beauty, and read not a feature. There were curious
features of color in her face for him to have read. Her brows,
thick and brownish against a soft skin showing the action of the
blood, met in the bend of a bow, extending to the temples long
and level: you saw that she was fashioned to peruse the sights
of earth, and by the pliability of her brows that the wonderful
creature used her faculty, and was not going to be a statue to
the gazer.
Under the dark thick brows an arch of lashes shot
out, giving a wealth of darkness to the full frank blue eyes,
a mystery of meaning — more than brain was ever meant to
fathom; richer, henceforth, than all mortal wisdom to Prince
Ferdinand. For when nature turns artist, and produces contrasts
of color on a fair face, where is the Sage, or what the Oracle,
shall match the depth of its lightest look ?
Prince Ferdinand was also fair. In his slim boating attire
his figure looked heroic. His hair, rising from the parting to
the right of his forehead, in what his admiring Lady Blandish
called his plume, fell away slanting silkily to the temples across
the nearly imperceptible upward curve of his brows there,— felt
more than seen, so slight it was,- and gave to his profile a
bold beauty, to which his bashful, breathless air was a flattering
charm. An arrow drawn to the head, capable of flying fast and
far with her. He leaned a little forward to her, drinking her in
with all his eyes,- and young Love has a thousand. Then truly
the System triumphed, just ere it was to fall; and could Sir
Austin have been content to draw the arrow to the head and let
it Ay, when it would fly, he might have pointed to his son again,
and said to the world, “Match him! ” Such keen bliss as the
youth had in the sight of her, an innocent youth alone has
powers of soul in him to experience.
"O women! ” says The Pilgrim's Scrip, in one of its solitary
outbursts, women, who like, and will have for hero, a rake!
how soon are you not to learn that you have taken bankrupts to
your bosoms, and that the putrescent gold that attracted you is
the slime of the Lake of Sin! »
If these two were Ferdinand and Miranda, Sir Austin was not
Prospero and was not present, or their fates might have been
different.
-
## p. 9924 (#332) ###########################################
9924
GEORGE MEREDITH
So they stood a moment, changing eyes, and then Miranda
spoke, and they came down to earth, feeling no less in heaven.
She spoke to thank him for his aid. She used quite com-
mon simple words; and used them, no doubt, to express a com-
mon simple meaning: but to him she was uttering magic, casting
spells, and the effect they had on him was manifested in the
incoherence of his replies, which were too foolish to be chron.
icled.
The couple were again mute. Suddenly Miranda, with an
exclamation of anguish, and innumerable lights and shadows play-
ing over her lovely face, clapped her hands, crying aloud, "My
book! my book! ” and ran to the bank.
Prince Ferdinand was at her side. What have you lost ? »
he said.
“My book! my book! ” she answered, her long delicious curls
swinging across her shoulders to the stream. Then turning to
him, divining his rash intention, "Oh, no, no! let me entreat you
not to,” she said: "I do not so very much mind losing it. ” And
in her eagerness to restrain him she unconsciously laid her gen-
tle hand upon his arm, and took the force of motion out of him.
Indeed, I do not really care for the silly book," she con-
tinued, withdrawing her hand quickly, and reddening. "Pray do
not!
The young gentleman had kicked off his shoes. No sooner
was the spell of contact broken than he jumped in. The water
was still troubled and discolored by his introductory adventure;
and though he ducked his head with the spirit of a dabchick,
the book was missing. A scrap of paper floating from the
bramble just above the water, and looking as if fire had caught
its edges, and it had flown from one adverse element to the
other, was all he could lay hold of; and he returned to land dis-
consolately, to hear Miranda's murmured mixing of thanks and
pretty expostulations.
"Let me try again,” he said.
"No indeed! ” she replied, and used the awful threat, “I will
run away if you do;” which effectually restrained him.
Her eye fell on the fire-stained scrap of paper, and bright-
ened as she cried, “There, there! you have what I want. It is
that. I do not care for the book. No, please' you are not to
look at it. Give it me. ”
Before her playfully imperative injunction was fairly spoken,
Richard had glanced at the document and discovered a Griffin
## p. 9925 (#333) ###########################################
GEORGE MEREDITH
9925
between Two Wheatsheaves; his crest in silver; and below –
oh, wonderment immense, his own handwriting! remnant of his
burnt-offering! a page of the sacrificed poems! one blossom pre-
served from the deadly universal blight.
He handed it to her in silence.
