Wear thine eternity, and are loved best By thee transfigured and in thee possest; Who madest beauty, and from thy boundless store Of beauty shalt create for evermore. These profoundly significant lines anticipate Benedetto Croce in philosophy, and in lucidity and persuasive power excel him greatly. Prose Style. Mr. Bridges writes a prose that is, like his verse, a product of mingled science and art. Evidently the problem which he has set himself, and achieved, is how to pack into the tersest forms of sound English the greatest amount of relevant and interesting matter. In doing this he expresses, as surely as in his poetry, a character at once virile and sensitive, reticent and truthful, serious and playful, ardent and restrained. His studies in Miltonic and classical prosody are as fascinating as they are cogent; his Memoirs of his three friends and fellow-poets, Dixon, Dolben, and Mary Coleridge (Cornhill, October 1907) are not less remarkable for their justice than for their sympathetic insight; his essay on Keats is an indis pensable key for the student, and as a brilliant and convincing interpretation of one poet by another probably without a parallel. SUPPLEMENTARY READING LIST Texts. ROSSETTI, D. G.: Poetical Works, ed. W. M. Rossetti (Ellis and Elvey, 1895); Family Letters, ed. W. M. Rossetti.-RoSSETTI, CHRISTINA G.: Poetical Works (Macmillan, 1904).-MORRIS, W.: Poetical Works (11 vols., Longmans); Works, ed. May Morris (24 vols., 1913-15).—SWINBURNE, A. C. : Poems (6 vols., Chatto, 1905); Dramatic Works (5 vols., Chatto, 1906); Selections from Poetical Works (Chatto, 1911); Blake, an Essay (Chatto, 1868); Essays and Studies (Chatto, 1875); A Study of Shakespeare (Chatto, 1880); Studies in Prose and Poetry (Chatto, 1894); The Age of Shakespeare (Chatto, 1908). BRIDGES, ROBERT: Poetical Works (6 vols., Murray, 1905). Studies. ROSSETTI, W. M.: Ruskin, Rossetti, Pre-Raphaelitism Papers (1854-62); Pre-Raphaelite Diaries and Letters (1900); Rossetti Papers, 1862-70 (1903).—ROSSETTI, HELEN M.: The Life and Work of D. G. Rossetti (1902).-HUNT, W. HOLMAN: Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.—MACKAIL, J. W.: William Morris, Life and Letters (2 vols., Longmans, 1899).-CLUTTON-BROCK, A.: William Morris his Life and Influence (1914).-WELBY, T. E.: Swinburne (Mathews, 1914).-Gosse, E.: Life of Swinburne (1917).-DRINKWATER, J.: Swinburne, an Estimate (1913). CHAPTER 1O. THE END OF THE CENTURY The Novelists: George Meredith, Thomas Hardy, R. L. Stevenson, George Gissing, THE NOVELISTS GEORGE MEREDITH (1828-1909).—In the Letters of George Meredith, edited and published by his son in 1912, may be found most of the important facts about his life. He was born in Portsmouth on February 12, 1828, the grandson of a naval outfitter, one Melchizedek Meredith, who bears a close resemblance to the great Mel in Evan Harrington. At the age of fourteen he was sent to school at Neuwied, where he was greatly influenced in religious matters by his teachers, the Moravians. In 1844 he was articled to a solicitor; but the law did not attract him, and every moment that could be snatched from business was devoted to literature. Among his literary friends was Mrs. Nicolls, the daughter of Thomas Love Peacock, a woman nine years older than himself, whom he married in 1849, when he was only twentyThe marriage was not a happy one, and they separated some years later. In 1861 Mrs. Meredith died, and three years afterwards Meredith married Miss Marie Vulliamy, with whom he lived happily for twenty years. Faith on Trial is the record of his anguish at her death in 1885. one. Meredith was very slow in obtaining recognition from the public, though he was quickly acclaimed by those who were most competent to judge-George Eliot, Swinburne, and Kingsley, for example. Money was, however, hard to come by, and he was forced to take up journalism of different kinds—reviewing, acting as foreign correspondent to the Morning Post, as publisher's reader, and later on, at the invitation of John Morley, as temporary editor of the Fortnightly. Sometimes his duties took him to the Continent, but the greater part of his life was passed in Surrey-first at Esher, and later on at Flint Cottage, Box Hill. It was here, in 1909, in ripe old age, that Meredith passed away-as much in sympathy with youthful ideas and aspirations as when he published his first volume of poetry in 1851. Works. His earliest work of fiction was The Shaving of Shagpat (1856), a burlesque Oriental story. The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859) was the first of his great novels. It was followed by Evan Harrington (1861), Sandra Belloni (1864) and its sequel, Vittoria (1866), Rhoda Fleming (1865), The Adventures of Harry Richmond (1871), and Beauchamp's Career (1876). His greatest work, The Egoist, appeared in 1879. Then followed The Tragic Comedians (1880), Diana of the Crossways (1885), One of our Conquerors (1891), Lord Ormont and his Aminta (1894), and The Amazing Marriage (1895). In the last-named year he reprinted his short stories, in a volume called The Tale of Chloe. His various volumes of poems, beginning with Modern Love, have now been collected in a single volume. The Essay on Comedy (1897) is his only contribution to the literature of criticism. Characteristics. It was as a poet that Meredith first appealed to the world, and his fiction as well as his poetry is the work of a poet. He himself could see no reason to separate his poetry from his prose for critical purposes; his thought, George Meredith. he said, expressed itself spontaneously in the one medium or the other, and could no more be divided from it than his body from his mind and soul. And it is true that in both prose and verse, the attitude towards life is the same. Meredith conceives life as a tragi-comedy, and his humour is thoughtful, even mournful in character. There is plenty of irony in his writing; he is too profound a humorist to show a trace of cynicism. His own Diana gives what is perhaps the best summary of his point of view: "Who can really think and not think hopefully? . . . When we despair or discolour things it is our senses in revolt, and they have made the sovereign brain their drudge." Meredith dislikes both the "rose-pink" and "dirty drab" view of life; he holds that "the sight of ourselves is wholesome, bearable, fructifying, finally a delight." His humour is bound up with his broad, sympathetic knowledge of life. It is a part of that largeness of view which is necessary to his conception of the comic writer, who "must be able to penetrate." He has wit, brilliant and illumining; it is his distinguishing, his unique possession; no other English writer possesses in equal degree dexterity in the manipulation of language and the power to impart to the reader enjoyment of such subtlety. But, in addition, Meredith's humour is a thing apart and equally alluring. In one of his letters R. L. Stevenson describes this power in illustrating his own. My view of life [he writes] is essentially the comic and the romantically comic. . . the notes that Meredith has found, Evan and the postillion, Evan and Rose, Harry in Germany. And to me these things are the good; beauty touched with sex and laughter, beauty with God's earth for the background, . . . comedy which keeps the beauty and touches the terrors of our life (laughter and tragedy-in-a-good-humour having kissed), that is the last word of moved representation, embracing the greatest number of elements of fate and character, and telling its story, not with the one eye of pity, but with the two of pity and mirth. The passions which Meredith depicts show the widest possible range of variation. He hates sentimentalism, but he gives us, in The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, the purest and most delicate romance. He cannot bear to play with the reader's feelings, and though he is moved, it is never to tears; yet his pathos is as genuine as his humour, and his novels and his poetry are full of both. Modern Love is proof that he can command the tragic muse with as much success as his better-loved mistress, comedy, and the reader feels constantly in his work how true it is that tragedy and comedy are composed of the same elements, though differently mixed. In sheer exuberant fun, also, he need fear no rival. One of many examples occurs near the beginning of The Adventures of Harry Richmond-the story of Great Will, in the scene where [he] killed the deer, dragging Falstaff all over the park after it by the light of Bardolph's nose, upon which they put an extinguisher if they heard any of the keepers." The same delightful vein is well seen in that fantastic tale, The Shaving of Shagpat. Humour of a different order may be found in the publichouse scenes in Evan Harrington, or, again different, in the whole conception of The Egoist. Meredith deals with the big problems of life and death, love and hate, but he is no more afraid of honest laughter than of the sorrow that purifies and the passion that unmans. Laughter! O thou reviver of sick Earth, good for the spirit, good For body thou! to both art wine and bread. Creed. Meredith's theory of life is eminently sane and practical, and all the more so because he recognizes the sanity of idealism as well as the virtue of realism. He differs from the other poet-optimists of the 19th century in that he is convinced neither of the soul's immortality nor of its pre-natal existence. He conceives that it is at least possible that Nature, red in tooth and claw, is merciless and pitiless to the individual. But in spite of this agnosticism and the refusal to accept any anodyne which deadens, instead of satisfying, reason, he maintains a consistently optimistic attitude. Without what he thought might prove to be delusive hopes for the future of the individual ego, he rejoices in the larger hope, which is practical certainty, of the future of the race. The individual life does not die; it lives on in the larger, richer life of the future which it helps to build up. (2,352) 19 Just as he sees hope for the individual and for the race in the process of evolution so, too, Meredith trusts in growth and change to bring about social and political advance. More brain power, the cultivation of reason and of intellect, the help of the Comic Spirit alone can bring the strength to get rid of undesirable conditions. He hates the materialism and meanness and faithlessness of modern life; above all, he hates the undue preponderance given to wealth, and the enervation and weakness to which it leads. Yet everywhere, amid prevalent evil, he recognizes signs of progress and ultimate good; he believes in the worth of human fellowship and the duty of service. Such service can be rendered only as a result of the knowledge that comes from a resolute facing of facts in nature and in human life. Style. Both in prose and in poetry Meredith is a difficult writer, and this is due only in part to the profundity of his thought. His wit and his consequent delight in the skilful play of language sometimes lead him astray; he is so anxious to avoid the commonplace that at times he falls into obscurity by what seems sheer wilfulness. Sometimes, again, he credits the reader with his own velocity of thought and power to spring from one craggy metaphor to another. He refuses to explain or interpret, and states the conclusions at which he has arrived, or the points of view he wishes us to adopt, without making it at all clear why we should do so. Another reason for his occasional obscurity is his wilful and deliberate use of elliptical sentences. No writer is more allusive in style than Meredith. His language is naturally metaphorical and symbolical: he does not seek comparisons; they spring to his lips unsought. As a result he is seldom direct and simple in his appeal. He invites intellectual appreciation as well as æsthetic enjoyment. Again, he has a great deal to say, and is able to express himself by many different methods which jostle each other for precedence, so that his language is apt to become burdened with the richness of an overflowing imagination. His aim is to compress into a few words profound thought and memorable images: success, when it is achieved, is absolute, but failure is common, and then the knottiness of the thought and expression requires careful unravelling. But in the frequent pages where there is neither straining nor struggling, he achieves the beauty of the inevitable in word and in phrase. THOMAS HARDY (born 1840).-Thomas Hardy is the greatest living English novelist, and the tale of his writings, which began as long ago as 1871 with Desperate Remedies, has seen several volumes added to it within the present century. Mr. Hardy is most popular as the Wessex novelist, and he excels as the interpreter of village life and peasant folk in his own Dorsetshire home. His most remarkable achievement is, however, The Dynasts, a new form of epic-drama which is, in a sense, complementary to the novels. In recent years he has published only verse, and his poetry, though it is occasionally deficient in beauty of sound, has secured his position as a poet. It is hard to determine whether he be a greater master of verse or of prose. |