XVI.—George Meredith

Mr. Belfort Bax declares that he kept a drawerful of half-crowns for foreign anarchists, because, as he explained apologetically: “They always wanted half-a-crown, and it saved time to have a stock ready.”

But this is no real contradiction of Rossetti. Morris’s anarchists represented his life’s work to him. He did not help them from that personal and irrational charity which made Rossetti want to give a penny to a beggar in the street. This may be regarded as a supersubtle distinction; but it is necessary if we are to understand the important fact about Morris that—to quote Mr. Compton-Rickett—“human nature in the concrete never profoundly interested him.” Enthusiastic as were the friendships of his youth—when he gushed into “dearests” in his letters—we could imagine him as living without friends and yet being tolerably happy. He was, as Mr. Compton-Rickett suggests, like a child with a new toy in his discovery of ever-fresh pursuits in the three worlds of Politics, Literature and Art. He was a person to whom even duties were Pleasures. Mr. Mackail has spoken of him as “the rare distance of a man who, without ever once swerving from truth or duty, knew what he liked and did what he liked, all his life long.” One thinks of him in his work as a child with a box of paints—an inspired child with wonderful paints and the skill to use them. He was such a child as accepts companions with pleasure, but also accepts the absence of companions with pleasure. He could absorb himself in his games of genius anywhere and everywhere. “Much of his literary work was done on buses and in trains.” His poetry is often, as it were, the delightful nursery-work of a grown man. “His best work,” as Mr. Compton-Rickett says, “reads like happy improvisations.” He had a child’s sudden and impulsive temper, too. Once, having come into his studio in a rage, he “took a flying kick at the door, and smashed in a panel.” “It’s all right,” he assured the scared model, who was preparing to fly; “it’s all right—somethinghad to give way.” The same violence of impulse is seen in the story of how, on one occasion, when he was staying in the country, he took an artistic dislike to his hostess’s curtains, and tore them down during the night. His judgments were often much the same kind of untempered emotions as he showed in the matter of the curtains—his complaint, for example, that a Greek temple was “like a table on four legs: a damned dull thing!” He was a creature of whims: so much so that, as a boy, he used to have the curse, “Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel,” flung at him. He enjoyed the expression of knock-out opinions such as: “I always bless God for making anything so strong as an onion!” He laughed easily, not from humour so much as from a romping playfulness. He took a young boy’s pleasure in showing off the strength of his mane of dark brown hair. He would get a child to get hold of it, and lift him off the ground by it “with no apparent inconvenience.” He was at the same time nervous and restless. He was given to talking to himself; his hands were never at peace; “if he read aloud, he punched his own head in the exuberance of his emotions.” Possibly there was something high-strung even about his play, as when, Mr. Mackail tells us, “he would imitate an eagle with considerable skill and humour, climbing on to a chair and, after a sullen pause, coming down with a soft, heavy flop.” It seems odd that Mr. John Burns could say of this sensitive and capricious man of genius, as we find him saying in Mr. Compton-Rickett’s book, that “William Morris was a chunk of humanity in the rough; he was a piece of good, strong, unvarnished oak—nothing of the elm about him.” But we can forgive Mr. Burns’s imperfect judgment in gratitude for the sentences that follow:

There is no side of modern life which he has not touched for good. I am sure he would have endorsed heartily the House and Town Planning Act for which I am responsible.

Morris, by the way, would have appreciated Mr. Burns’s reference to him as a fellow-craftsman: did he not once himself boast of being “a master artisan, if I may claim that dignity”?

The buoyant life of this craftsman-preacher—whose craftsmanship, indeed, was the chief part of his preaching—who taught the labourers of his age, both by precept and example, that the difference between success and failure in life was the difference between being artisans of loveliness and poor hackworkers of profitable but hideous things—has a unique attractiveness in the history of the latter half of the nineteenth century. He is a figure of whom we cannot be too constantly and vividly reminded. When I took up Mr. Compton-Rickett’s book I was full of hope that it would reinterpret for a new generation Morris’s evangelistic personality and ideals. Unfortunately, it contains very little of importance that has not already appeared in Mr. Mackail’s distinguished biography; and the only interpretation of first-rate interest in the book occurs in the bold imaginative prose of Mr. Cunninghame Graham’s introduction. More than once the author tells us the same things as Mr. Mackail, only in a less life-like way. For example, where Mr. Mackail says of Morris that “by the time he was seven years old he had read all the Waverley novels, and many of Marryat’s,” Mr. Compton-Rickett vaguely writes: “He was suckled on Romance, and knew his Scott and Marryat almost before he could lisp their names.” That is typical of Mr. Compton-Rickett’s method. Instead of contenting himself with simple and realistic sentences like Mr. Mackail’s, he aims at—and certainly achieves—a kind of imitative picturesqueness. We again see his taste for the high-flown in such a paragraph as that which tells us that “a common bond unites all these men—Dickens, Carlyle, Ruskin and Morris. They differed in much; but, like great mountains lying apart in the base, they converge high up in the air.” The landscape suggested in these sentences is more topsy-turvy than the imagination likes to dwell upon. And the criticisms in the book are seldom lightning-flashes of revelation. For instance:

A more polished artistry we find in Tennyson; a greater intellectual grip in Browning; a more haunting magic in Rossetti; but for easy mastery over his material and general diffusion of beauty Morris has no superior.

That, apart from the excellent “general diffusion of beauty,” is the kind of conventional criticism that might pass in a paper read to a literary society. But somehow, in a critic who deliberately writes a book, we look for a greater and more personal mastery of his authors than Mr. Compton-Rickett gives evidence of in the too facile eloquence of these pages.

The most interesting part of the book is that which is devoted to personalia. But even in the matter of personalia Mr. Cunninghame Graham tells us more vital things in a page of his introduction than Mr. Compton-Rickett scatters through a chapter. His description of Morris’s appearance, if not a piece of heroic painting, gives us a fine grotesque design of the man:

His face was ruddy, and his hair inclined to red, and grew in waves like water just before it breaks over a fall. His beard was of the same colour as his hair. His eyes were blue and fiery. His teeth, small and irregular, but white except upon the side on which he hew his pipe, where they were stained with brown. When he walked he swayed a little, not like (sic) a sailor sways, but as a man who lives a sedentary life toddles a little in his gait. His ears were small, his nose high and well-made, his hands and feet small for a man of his considerable bulk. His speech and address were fitting the man; bold, bluff, and hearty.… He was quick-tempered and irritable, swift to anger and swift to reconciliation, and I should think never bore malice in his life.When he talked he seldom looked at you, and his hands were always twisting, as if they wished to be at work.

When he talked he seldom looked at you, and his hands were always twisting, as if they wished to be at work.

Such was the front the man bore. The ideal for which he lived may be summed up, in Mr. Compton-Rickett’s expressive phrase, as “the democratization of beauty.” Or it may be stated more humanly in the words which Morris himself spoke at the grave of a young man who died of injuries received at the hands of the police in Trafalgar Square on “Bloody Sunday.” “Our friend,” he then said:

Our friend who lies here has had a hard life, and met with a hard death; and, if society had been differently constituted, his life might have been a delightful, a beautiful, and a happy one. It is our business to begin to organize for the purpose of seeing that such things shall not happen; to try and make this earth a beautiful and happy place.

There you have the sum of all Morris’s teaching. Like so many fine artists since Plato, he dreamed of a society which would be as beautiful as a work of art. He saw the future of society as a radiant picture, full of the bright light of hope, as he saw the past of society as a picture steeped in the charming lights of fancy. He once explained Rossetti’s indifference to politics by saying that he supposed “it needs a person of hopeful mind to take disinterested notice of politics, and Rossetti was certainly not hopeful.” Morris was the very illuminator of hope. He was as hopeful a man as ever set out with words and colours to bring back the innocent splendours of the Golden Age.

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George Meredith, as his friends used to tell one with amusement, was a vain man. Someone has related how, in his later years, he regarded it as a matter of extreme importance that his visitors should sit in a position from which they would see his face in profile. This is symbolic of his attitude to the world. All his life he kept one side of his face hidden. Mr. Ellis, who is the son of one of Meredith’s cousins, now takes us for a walk round Meredith’s chair. No longer are we permitted to remain in restful veneration of “a god and a Greek.” Mr. Ellis invites us—and we cannot refuse the invitation—to look at the other side of the face, to consider the full face and the back of the head. He encourages us to feel Meredith’s bumps, and no man whose bumps we are allowed to feel can continue for five minutes the pretence of being an Olympian. He becomes a human being under a criticizing thumb. We discover that he had a genius for imposture, an egoist’s temper, and a stomach that fluttered greedily at the thought of dainty dishes. We find all those characteristics that prevented him from remaining on good terms first with his father, next with his wife, and then with his son. At first, when one reads the full story of Meredith’s estrangements through three generations, one has the feeling that one is in the presence of an idol in ruins. Certainly, one can never mistake Box Hill for Olympus again. On the other hand, let us but have time to accustom ourselves to see Meredith in other aspects than that which he himself chose to present to his contemporaries—let us begin to see in him not so much one of the world’s great comic censors, as one of the world’s great comic subjects, and we shall soon find ourselves back among his books, reading them no longer with tedious awe, but with a new passion of interest in the figure-in-the-background of the complex human being who wrote them.

For Meredith was his own great subject. Had he been an Olympian he could not have writtenThe EgoistorHarry Richmond. He was an egoist and pretender, coming of a line of egoists and pretenders, and his novels are simply the confession and apology of such a person. Meredith concealed the truth about himself in his daily conversation; he revealed it in his novels. He made such a mystery about his birth that many people thought he was a cousin of Queen Victoria’s or at least a son of Bulwer Lytton’s. It was only inEvan Harringtonthat he told the essentials of the truth about the tailor’s shop in Portsmouth above which he was born. Outside his art, nothing would persuade him to own up to the tailor’s shop. Once, when Mr. Clodd was filling in a census-paper for him, Meredith told him to put “near Petersfield” as his place of birth. The fact that he was born at Portsmouth was not publicly known, indeed, until some time after his death. And not only was there the tailor’s shop to live down, but on his mother’s side he was the grandson of a publican, Michael Macnamara. Meredith liked to boast that his mother was “pure Irish”—an exaggeration, according to Mr. Ellis—but he said nothing about Michael Macnamara of “The Vine.” At the same time it was the presence not of a bar sinister but of a yardstick sinister in his coat of arms that chiefly filled him with shame. When he was marrying his first wife he wrote “Esquire” in the register as a description of his father’s profession. There is no evidence, apparently, as to whether Meredith himself ever served in the tailor’s shop after his father moved from Portsmouth to St. James’s Street, London. Nothing is known of his life during the two years after his return from the Moravian school at Neuwied. As for his hapless father (who had been trained as a medical student but went into the family business in order to save it from ruin), he did not succeed in London any better than in Portsmouth, and in 1849 he emigrated to South Africa and opened a shop in Cape Town. It was while in Cape Town that he read Meredith’s ironical comedy on the family tailordom,Evan Harrington; or He Would be a Gentleman. Naturally, he regarded the book (in which his father and himself were two of the chief figures) with horror. It was as though George had washed the family tape-measure in public. Augustus Meredith, no less than George, blushed for the tape-measure daily. Probably, Melchizedek Meredith, who begat Augustus, who begat George, had also blushed for it in his day. As the “great Mel” inEvan Harringtonhe is an immortal figure of genteel imposture. His lordly practice of never sending in a bill was hardly that of a man who accepted the conditions of his trade. InEvan Harringtonthree generations of a family’s shame were held up to ridicule. No wonder that Augustus Meredith, when he was congratulated by a customer on his son’s fame, turned away silently with a look of pain.

The comedy of the Meredith family springs, of course, not from the fact that they were tailors, but that they pretended not to be tailors. Whether Meredith himself was more ashamed of their tailoring or their pretentiousness it is not easy to decide. BothEvan HarringtonandHarry Richmondare in a measure, comedies of imposture, in which the vice of imposture is lashed as fiercely as Molière lashes the vice of hypocrisy inTartuffe. But it may well be that in life Meredith was a snob, while in art he was a critic of snobs. Mr. Yeats, in his last book of prose, put forward the suggestion that the artist reveals in his art not his “self” (which is expressed in his life), but his “anti-self,” a complementary and even contrary self. He might find in the life and works of Meredith some support for his not quite convincing theory. Meredith was an egoist in his life, an anti-egoist in his books. He was pretentious in his life, anti-pretentious in his books. He took up the attitude of the wronged man in his life; he took up the case of the wronged woman in his books. In short, his life was vehemently pro-George-Meredith, while his books were vehemently anti-George-Meredith. He knew himself more thoroughly, so far as we can discover from his books, than any other English novelist has ever done.

He knew himself comically, no doubt, rather than tragically. InModern LoveandRichard Feverelhe reveals himself as by no means a laughing philosopher; but he strove to make fiction a vehicle of philosophic laughter rather than of passionate sympathy. Were it not that a great poetic imagination is always at work—in his prose, perhaps, even more than in his verse—his genius might seem a little cold and head-in-the-air. But his poet’s joy in his characters saves his books from inhumanity. As Diana Warwick steps out in the dawn she is not a mere female human being undergoing critical dissection; she is bird-song and the light of morning and the coming of the flowers. Meredith had as great a capacity for rapture as for criticism and portraiture. He has expressed in literature as no other novelist has done the rapturous vision of a boy in love. He knew that a boy in love is not mainly a calf but a poet.Love in a Valleyis the incomparable music of a boy’s ecstasy. Much ofRichard Feverelis its incomparable prose. Rapture and criticism, however, make a more practical combination in literature than in life. In literature, criticism may add flavour to rapture; in life it is more than likely to destroy the flavour. One is not surprised, then, to learn the full story of Meredith’s first unhappy marriage. A boy of twenty-one, he married a widow of thirty, high-strung, hot and satirical like himself; and after a depressing sequence of dead babies, followed by the birth of a son who survived, she found life with a man of genius intolerable, and ran away with a painter. Meredith apparently refused her request to go and see her when she was dying. His imaginative sympathy enabled him to see the woman’s point of view in poetry and fiction; it does not seem to have extended to his life. Thus, his biography is to a great extent a “showing-up” of George Meredith. He proved as incapable of keeping the affection of his son Arthur, as of keeping that of his wife. Much as he loved the boy he had not been married again long before he allowed him to become an alien presence. The boy felt he had a grievance. He said—probably without justice—that his father kept him short of money. Possibly he was jealous for his dead mother’s sake. Further, though put into business, he had literary ambitions—a prolific source of bitterness. When Arthur died, Meredith did not even attend his funeral.

Mr. Ellis has shown Meredith up not only as a husband and a father, but as a hireling journalist and a lark-devouring gourmet. On the whole, the poet who could eat larks in a pie seems to me to be a more shocking “great man” than the Radical who could write Tory articles in a newspaper for pay. At the same time, it is only fair to say that Meredith remains a sufficiently splendid figure in. Mr. Ellis’s book even when we know the worst about him. Was his a generous genius? It was at least a prodigal one. As poet, novelist, correspondent, and conversationalist, he leaves an impression of beauty, wit, and power in a combination without a precedent.

Lady Butcher’s charmingMemoirs of George Meredithis admittedly written in reply to Mr. Ellis’s startling volume. It seems to me, however, that it is a supplement rather than a reply. Mr. Ellis was not quite fair to Meredith as a man, but he enabled us to understand the limitations which were the conditions of Meredith’s peculiar genius. Many readers were shocked by the suggestion that characters, like countries, must have boundaries. Where Mr. Ellis failed, in my opinion, was not in drawing these as carefully as possible, but in the rather unfriendly glee with which, one could not help feeling, he did so. It is also true that he missed some of the grander mountain-peaks in Meredith’s character. Lady Butcher, on the other hand, is far less successful than Mr. Ellis in drawing a portrait which makes us feel that now we understand something of the events that gave birth toThe EgoistandRichard FeverelandModern Love. Her book tells us nothing of the seed-time of genius, but is a delightful account of its autumn.

At the same time it helps to dissipate one ridiculous popular fallacy about Meredith. Meredith, like most all the wits, has been accused of straining after image and epigram. Wit acts as an irritant on many people. They forget the admirable saying of Coleridge: “Exclusive of the abstract sciences, the largest and worthiest portion of our knowledge consists of aphorisms; and the greatest of men is but an aphorism.” They might as well denounce a hedge for producing wild roses or a peacock for growing tail feathers with pretty eyes as a witty writer for flowering into aphorism, epigram and image. Even so artificial a writer as Wilde had not to labour to be witty. It has often been laid to his charge that his work smells of the lamp, whereas what is really the matter with it is that it smells of the drawing-room gas. It was the result of too much “easy-goingness,” not of too much strain. As for Meredith, his wit was the wit of an abounding imagination. Lady Butcher gives some delightful examples of it. He could not see a baby in long robes without a witty image leaping into his mind. He said he adored babies “in the comet stage.”

Of a lady of his acquaintance he said: “She is a woman who has never had the first tadpole wriggle of an idea,” adding, “She has a mind as clean and white and flat as a plate: there are no eminences in it.” Lady Butcher tells of a picnic-party on Box Hill at which Meredith was one of the company. “After our picnic … it came on to rain, and as we drearily trudged down the hill with cloaks and umbrellas, and burdened with our tea baskets, Mr. Meredith, with a grimace, called out to a passing friend: ‘Behold! the funeral of picnic!’”

If Meredith is to some extent an obscure author, it is clear that this was not due to his over-reaching himself in laborious efforts after wit. His obscurity is not that of a man straining after expression, but the obscurity of a man deliberately hiding something. Meredith believed in being as mysterious as an oracle. He assumed the Olympian manner, and objected to being mistaken for a frequenter of the market-place. He was impatient of ordinary human witlessness, and spoke to his fellows, not as man to man, but as Apollo from his seat. This was probably a result of the fact that his mind marched much too fast for the ordinary man to keep pace with it. “How I leaped through leagues of thought when I could walk!” he once said when he had lost the power of his legs. Such buoyancy of the imagination and intellect separated him more and more from a world in which most of the athletics are muscular, not mental; and he began to take a malicious pleasure in exaggerating the difference that already existed between himself and ordinary mortals. He dressed his genius in a mannerism, and, as he leaped through his leagues of thought, the flying skirts of his mannerism were all that the average reader panting desperately after him could see. Shakespeare and the greatest men of genius are human enough to wait for us, and give us time to recover our breath. Meredith, however, was a proud man, and a mocker.

In the ordinary affairs of life, Lady Butcher tells us, he was so proud that it was difficult to give him even trifling gifts. “I remember,” she says, “bringing him two silver flat poached-egg spoons from Norway, and he implored me to take them back with me to London, and looked much relieved when I consented to do so!” He would always “prefer to bestow rather than to accept gifts.” Lady Butcher, replying to the charge that he was ungrateful, suggests that “no one should expect an eagle to be grateful.” But then, neither can one love an eagle, and one would like to be able to love the author ofLove in a ValleyandRichard Feverel. Meredith was too keenly aware what an eagle he was. Speaking of the reviewers who had attacked him, he said: “They have always been abusing me. I have been observing them. It is the crueller process.” It is quite true, but it was a superior person who said it.

Meredith, however, among his friends and among the young, loses this air of superiority, and becomes something of a radiant romp as well as an Olympian. Lady Butcher’s first meeting with him took place when she was a girl of thirteen. She was going up Box Hill to see the sun rise with a sixteen-year-old cousin, when the latter said: “I know a madman who lives on Box Hill. He’s quite mad, but very amusing; he likes walks and sunrises. Let’s go and shout him up!” It does Meredith credit that he got out of bed and joined them, “his nightshirt thrust into brown trousers.” Even when the small girl insisted on “reading aloud to him one of the hymns from Keble’sChristian Year,” he did not, as the saying is, turn a hair. His attachment to his daughter Mariette—his “dearie girl,” as he spoke of her with unaffected softness of phrase—also helps one to realize that he was not all Olympian. Meredith, the condemner of the “guarded life,” was humanly nervous in guarding his own little daughter. “He would never allow Mariette to travel alone, even the very short distance by train from Box Hill to Ewell; a maid had always to be sent with her or to fetch her. He never allowed her to walk by herself.” One likes Meredith the better for Lady Butcher’s picture of him as a “harassed father.”

One likes him, too, as he converses with his dogs, and for his thoughtfulness in giving some of his MSS., including that ofRichard Feverel, to Frank Cole, his gardener, in the hope that “some day the gardener would be able to sell them” and so get some reward for his devotion. As to the underground passages in Meredith’s life and character, Lady Butcher is not concerned with them. She writes of him merely as she knew him. Her book is a friend’s tribute, though not a blind tribute. It may not be effective as an argument against those who are bent on disparaging the greatest lyrical wit in modern English literature. But it will be welcomed by those for whom Meredith’s genius is still a bubbling spring of good sense and delight.

Meredith never wrote a novel which was less a novel thanCelt and Saxon. It is only a fragment of a book. It is so much a series of essays and sharp character-sketches, however, that the untimely fall of the curtain does not greatly trouble us. There is no excitement of plot, no gripping anxiety as to whether this or that pair of lovers will ever reach the altar. Philip O’Donnell and Patrick, his devoted brother, and their caricature relative, the middle-aged Captain Con, all interest us as they abet each other in the affairs of love or politics, or as they discuss their native country or the temperament of the country which oppresses it; but they are chiefly desirable as performers in an Anglo-Irish fantasia, a Meredithian piece of comic music, with various national anthems, English, Welsh, and Irish, running through and across it in all manner of guises, and producing all manner of agreeable disharmonies.

In the beginning we have Patrick O’Donnell, an enthusiast, a Celt, a Catholic, setting out for the English mansion of the father of Adiante Adister to find if the girl cannot be pleaded over to reconsider her refusal of his brother Philip. He arrives in the midst of turmoil in the house, the cause of it being a hasty marriage which Adiante had ambitiously contracted with a hook-nosed foreign prince. Patrick, a broken-hearted proxy, successfully begs her family for a miniature of the girl to take back to his brother, but he falls so deeply in love with her on seeing the portrait that his loyalty to Philip almost wavers, when the latter carelessly asks him to leave the miniature on a more or less public table instead of taking it off to the solitude of his own room for a long vigil of adoration.

In the rest of the story we have an account of the brothers in the London house of Captain Con, the happy husband married to a stark English wife of mechanical propriety—a rebellious husband, too, when in the sociable atmosphere of his own upper room, amid the blackened clay pipes and the friendly fumes of whiskey, he sings her praises, while at the same time full of grotesque and whimsical criticisms of all those things, Saxon and more widely human, for which she stands. There is a touch of farce in the relations of these two, aptly symbolized by the bell which rings for Captain Con, and hastens him away from his midnight eloquence with Patrick and Philip. “He groaned, ‘I must go. I haven’t heard the tinkler for months. It signifies she’s cold in her bed. The thing called circulation is unknown to her save by the aid of outward application, and I’m the warming-pan, as legitimately as I should be, I’m her husband and her Harvey in one.’”

It is in the house of Captain Con, it should be added, that Philip and Patrick meet Jane Mattock, the Saxon woman; and the story as we have it ends with Philip invalided home from service in India, and Jane, a victim of love, catching “glimpses of the gulfs of bondage, delicious, rose-enfolded, foreign.” There are nearly three hundred pages of it altogether, some of them as fantastic and lyrical as any that Meredith ever wrote.

As one readsCelt and Saxon, however, one seems to get an inkling of the reason why Meredith has so often been set down as an obscure author. It is not entirely that he is given to using imagery as the language of explanation—a subtle and personal sort of hieroglyphics. It is chiefly, I think, because there is so little direct painting of men and women in his books. Despite his lyricism, he had something of an X-ray’s imagination. The details of the modelling of a face, the interpreting lines and looks, did not fix themselves with preciseness on his vision enabling him to pass them on to us with the surface reality we generally demand in prose fiction.

It is as though he painted some of his men and women upon air: they are elusive for all we know of their mental and spiritual processes. Even though he is at pains to tell us that Diana’s hair is dark, we do not at once accept the fact but are at liberty to go on believing she is a fair woman, for he himself was general rather than insistently particular in his vision of such matters. In the present book, again, we have a glimpse of Adiante in her miniature—“this lighted face, with the dark raised eyes and abounding auburn tresses, where the contrast of colours was in itself thrilling,” “the light above beauty distinguishing its noble classic lines and the energy of radiance, like a morning of chivalrous promise, in the eyes”—and, despite the details mentioned, the result is to give us only the lyric aura of the woman where we wanted a design.

Ultimately, these women of Meredith’s become intensely real to us—the most real women, I think, in English fiction—but, before we come to handshaking terms with them, we have sometimes to go to them over bogs and rocky places with the sun in our eyes. Before this, physically, they are apt to be exquisite parts of a landscape, sharers of a lyric beauty with the cherry-trees and the purple crocuses.

Coming to the substance of the book—the glance from many sides at the Irish and English temperaments—we find Meredith extremely penetrating in his criticism of John Bullishness, but something of a foreigner in his study of the Irish character. The son of an Irishwoman, he chose an Irishwoman as his most conquering heroine, but he writes of the race as one who has known the men and women of it entirely, or almost entirely, in an English setting—a setting, in other words, which shows up their strangeness and any surface eccentricities they may have, but does not give us an ordinary human sense of them. Captain Con is vital, because Meredith imagined him vitally, but when all is said and done, he is largely a stage-Irishman, winking over his whiskey that has paid no excise—a better-born relative of Captain Costigan.

Politically,Celt and Saxonseems to be a plea for Home Rule—Home Rule, with a view towards a “consolidation of the union.” Its diagnosis of the Irish difficulty is one which has long been popular with many intellectual men on this side of the Irish Sea. Meredith sees, as the roots of the trouble, misunderstanding, want of imagination, want of sympathy. It has always seemed curious to me that intelligent men could persuade themselves that Ireland was chiefly suffering from want of understanding and want of sympathy on the part of England, when all the time her only ailment has been want of liberty. To adapt the organ-grinder’s motto,

Sympathy without reliefIs like mustard without beef.

Sympathy without relief

Is like mustard without beef.

As a matter of fact, Meredith realized this, and was a friend to many Irish national movements from the Home Rule struggle down to the Gaelic League, to the latter of which the Irish part of him sent a subscription a year or two ago. He saw things from the point of view of an Imperial Liberal idealist, however, not of a Nationalist. In the result, he did not know the every-day and traditional setting of Irish life sufficiently well to give us an Irish Nationalist central figure as winning and heroic, even in his extravagances, as, say, the patriotic Englishman, Neville Beauchamp.

At the same time, one must be thankful for a book so obviously the work of a great abundant mind—a mind giving out its criticisms like flutters of birds—a heroic intellect always in the service of an ideal liberty, courage, and gracious manners—a characteristically island brain, that was yet not insular.

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Oscar Wilde is a writer whom one must see through in order to appreciate. One must smash the idol in order to preserve the god. If Mr. Ransome’s estimate of Wilde in his clever and interesting and seriously-written book is a little unsatisfactory, it is partly because he is not enough of an iconoclast. He has not realized with sufficient clearness that, while Wilde belonged to the first rank as a wit, he was scarcely better than second-rate as anything else. Consequently, it is not Wilde the beau of literature who dominates his book. Rather, it is Wilde the egoistic,—æsthetic philosopher, and Wilde the imaginative artist.

This is, of course, as Wilde would have liked it to be. For, as Mr. Ransome says, “though Wilde had the secret of a wonderful laughter, he preferred to think of himself as a person with magnificent dreams.” Indeed, so much was this so, that it is even suggested that, ifSaloméhad not been censored, the social comedies might never have been written. “It is possible,” observes Mr. Ransome, “that we oweThe Importance of Being Earnestto the fact that the Censor prevented Sarah Bernhardt from playingSaloméat the Palace Theatre.” If this conjecture is right, one can never think quite so unkindly of the Censor again, for inThe Importance of Being Earnest, and in it alone, Wilde achieved a work of supreme genius in its kind.

It is as lightly-built as a house of cards, a frail edifice of laughter for laughter’s sake. Or you might say that, in the literature of farce, it has a place as a “dainty rogue in porcelain.” It is even lighter and more fragile than that. It is a bubble, or a flight of bubbles. It is the very ecstasy of levity. As we listen to Lady Bracknell discussing the possibility of parting with her daughter to a man who had been “born, or at least bred, in a handbag,” or as we watch Jack and Algernon wrangling over the propriety of eating muffins in an hour of gloom, we seem somehow to be caught up and to sail through an exhilarating mid-air of nonsense. Some people will contend that Wilde’s laughter is always the laughter not of the open air but of the salon. But there is a spontaneity in the laughter ofThe Importance of Being Earnestthat seems to me to associate it with running water and the sap rising in the green field.

It is when he begins to take Wilde seriously as a serious writer that one quarrels with Mr. Ransome. Wilde was much better at showing off than at revealing himself, and, as the comedy of showing off is much more delightful than the solemn vanity of it, he was naturally happiest as a wit and persifleur. On his serious side he ranks, not as an original artist, but as a popularizer—the most accomplished popularizer, perhaps, in English literature. He popularized William Morris, both his domestic interiors and his Utopias, in the æsthetic lectures and inThe Soul of Man under Socialism—a wonderful pamphlet, the secret of the world-wide fame of which Mr. Ransome curiously misses. He popularized the cloistral æstheticism of Pater and the cultural egoism of Goethe inIntentionsand elsewhere. InSaloméhe popularized the gorgeous processionals of ornamental sentences upon which Flaubert had expended not the least marvellous portion of his genius.

Into an age that guarded respectability more closely than virtue and ridiculed beauty because it paid no dividend came Wilde, the assailant of even the most respectable ugliness, parrying the mockery of the meat tea with a mockery that sparkled like wine. Lighting upon a world that advertised commercial wares, he set himself to advertise art with, as heroic an extravagance, and who knows how much his puce velvet knee-breeches may have done to make the British public aware of the genius, say, of Walter Pater? Not that Wilde was not a finished egoist, using the arts and the authors to advertise himself rather than himself to advertise them. But the time-spirit contrived that the arts and the authors should benefit by his outrageous breeches.

It is in the relation of a great popularizer, then—a popularizer who, for a new thing, was not also a vulgarizer—that Wilde seems to me to stand to his age. What, then, of Mr. Ransome’s estimate ofSalomé? That it is a fascinating play no lover of the pageantry of words can deny. But of what quality is this fascination? It is, when all is said and done, the fascination of the lust of painted faces. Here we have no tragedy, but a mixing of degenerate philtres. Mr. Ransome hears “the beating of the wings of the angel of death” in the play; but that seems to me to be exactly the atmosphere that Wilde fails to create. As the curtain falls on the broken body ofSaloméone has a sick feeling, as though one had been present where vermin were being crushed. There is not a hint of the elation, the liberation, of real tragedy. The whole thing is simply a wonderful piece of coloured sensationalism. And even if we turn to the costly sentences of the play, do we not find that, while in his choice of colour and jewel and design Flaubert wrought in language like a skilled artificer, Wilde, in his treatment of words, was more like a lavish amateur about town displaying his collection of splendid gems?

Wilde speaks of himself inDe Profundisas a lord of language. Of course, he was just the opposite. Language was a vice with him. He took to it as a man might take to drink. He was addicted rather than devoted to language. He had a passion for it, but too little sense of responsibility towards it, and, in his choice of beautiful words, we are always conscious of the indolence as well as the extravagance of the man of pleasure. How beautifully, with what facility of beauty, he could use words, everyone knows who has read his briefEndymion(to name one of the poems), and the many hyacinthine passages inIntentions. But when one is anxious to see the man himself as inDe Profundis—that book of a soul imprisoned in embroidered sophistries—one feels that this cloak of strange words is no better than a curse.

If Wilde was not a lord of language, however, but only its bejewelled slave, he was a lord of laughter, and it is because there is so much laughter as well as language inIntentionsthat I am inclined to agree with Mr. Ransome thatIntentionsis “that one of Wilde’s books that most nearly represents him.” Even here, however, Mr. Ransome will insist on taking Wilde far too seriously. For instance, he tells us that “his paradoxes are only unfamiliar truths.” How horrified Wilde would have been to hear him say so! His paradoxes are a good deal more than truths—or a good deal less. They helped, no doubt, to redress a balance, but many of them were the merest exercises in intellectual rebellion. Mr. Ransome’s attitude on the question of Wilde’s sincerity seems to me as impossible as his attitude in regard to the paradoxes. He draws up a code of artistic sincerity which might serve as a gospel for minor artists, but of which every great artist is a living denial. But there is no room to go into that. Disagree as we may with many of Mr. Ransome’s conclusions, we must be grateful to him for a thoughtful, provocative, and ambitious study of one of the most brilliant personalities and wits, though by no means one of the most brilliant imaginative artists, of the nineteenth century.

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Mr. Saintsbury as a critic possesses in a high degree the gift of sending the reader post-haste to the works he criticizes. HisPeace of the Augustansis an almost irresistible incitement to go and forget the present world among the poets and novelists and biographers and letter-writers of the eighteenth century. His enthusiasm weaves spells about even the least of them. He does not merely remind us of the genius of Pope and Swift, of Fielding and Johnson and Walpole. He also summons us to Armory’sJohn Buncleand to the Reverend Richard Graves’sSpiritual Quixoteas to a feast. Of the latter novel he declares that “for a book that is to be amusing without being flimsy, and substantial without being ponderous,The Spiritual Quixotemay, perhaps, be commended above all its predecessors and contemporaries outside the work of the great Four themselves.” That is characteristic of the wealth of invitations scattered throughThe Peace of the Augustans. After reading the book, one can scarcely resist the temptation to spend an evening over Young’sNight Thoughtsand one will be almost more likely to turn to Prior than to Shakespeare himself—Prior who, “with the eternal and almost unnecessary exception of Shakespeare … is about the first to bring out the true English humour which involves sentiment and romance, which laughs gently at its own, tears, and has more than half a tear for its own laughter”—Prior, of whom it is further written that “no one, except Thackeray, has ever entered more thoroughly into the spirit ofEcclesiastes.” It does not matter that in a later chapter of the book it isRasselaswhich is put withEcclesiastes, and, afterRasselas,The Vanity of Human Wishes. One does not go to Mr. Saintsbury as an inspector of literary weights and measures. His estimates of authors are the impressions of a man talking in a hurry, and his method is the method of exaggeration rather than of precise statement. How deficient he is in the sense of proportion may be judged from the fact that he devotes slightly more space to Collins than to Pope, unless the pages in which he assails “Grub Street” as a malicious invention of Pope’s are to be counted to the credit of the latter. But Mr. Saintsbury’s book is not so much a thorough and balanced survey of eighteenth-century literature as a confession, an almost garrulous monologue on the delights of that literature. How pleasant and unexpected it is to see a critic in his seventies as incautious, as pugnacious, as boisterous as an undergraduate! It is seldom that we find the apostolic spirit of youth living in the same breast with the riches of experience and memory, as we do in the present book.

One of the great attractions of the eighteenth century for the modern world is that, while it is safely set at an historical distance from us, it is, at the same time, brought within range of our everyday interests. It is not merely that about the beginning of it men began to write and talk according to the simple rules of modern times. It is rather that about this time the man of letters emerges from the mists of legend and becomes as real as one’s uncle in his daily passions and his train of little interests. One has not to reconstruct the lives of Swift and Pope from a handful of myths and references in legal documents. There is no room for anything akin to Baconianism in their regard. They live in a thousand letters and contemporary illusions, and one might as well be an agnostic about Mr. Asquith as about either of them. Pope was a champion liar, and Swift spun mystifications about himself. But, in spite of lies and Mystifications and gossip, they are both as real to us as if we met them walking down the Strand. One could not easily imagine Shakespeare walking down the Strand. The Strand would have to be rebuilt, and the rest of us would have to put on fancy dress in order to receive him. But though Swift and Pope lived in a century of wig and powder and in a London strangely unlike the London of to-day, we do not feel that similar preparations would be needed in their case. If Swift came back, one can without difficulty imagine him pamphleteering about war as though he had merely been asleep for a couple of centuries; and Pope, we may be sure, would resume, without too great perplexity, his attack on the egoists and dunces of the world of letters. But Shakespeare’s would be a return from legendary Elysian fields.

Hence Mr. Saintsbury may justly hope that his summons to the modern random reader, no less than to the scholar, to go and enjoy himself among the writers of the eighteenth century will not fall on entirely deaf ears. At the same time, it is only fair to warn the general reader not to follow Mr. Saintsbury’s recommendations and opinions too blindly. He will do well to take the author’s advice and read Pope, but he will do very ill to take the author’s advice as regards what in Pope is best worth reading. Mr. Saintsbury speaks with respect, for instance, of theElegy on an Unfortunate Lady—an insincere piece of tombstone rhetoric. “There are some,” he declared in a footnote, “to whom this singular piece is Pope’s strongest atonement, both as poet and man, for his faults as both.” It seems to me to be a poem which reveals Pope’s faults as a poet, while of Pope the man it tells us simply nothing. It has none of Pope’s wit, none of his epigrammatic characterization, none of his bewigged and powdered fancies, none of his malicious self-revelation. Almost the only interesting thing about it is the notes the critics have written on it, discussing whether the lady ever lived, and, if so, whether she was a Miss Wainsbury or a lady of title, whether she was beautiful or deformed, whether she was in love with Pope or the Duke of Buckingham or the Duc de Berry, whether Pope was in love with her, or even knew her, or whether she killed herself with a sword or by hanging herself. One can find plenty of “rest and refreshment” among the conjectures of the commentators, but in the verse itself one can find little but a good example of the technique of the rhymed couplet. But Mr. Saintsbury evidently loves the heroic couplet for itself alone. The only long example of Pope’s verse which he quotes is merely ding-dong, and might have been written by any capable imitator of the poet later in the century. Surely, if his contention is true that Pope’s reputation as a poet is now lower than it ought to be, he ought to have quoted something from theEpistle to Dr. ArbuthnotorThe Rape of the Lock, or evenThe Essay on Man. The two first are almost flawless masterpieces. Here Pope suddenly becomes a star. Here he gilds his age and his passions with wit and fancy; he ceases to be a mere rhymed moralist, a mechanician of metre. Mr. Saintsbury, I regret to see, contends that the first version ofThe Rape of the Lockis the best. One can hardly forgive this throwing overboard of the toilet and the fairies which Pope added in the later edition. We may admit that the gnomes are a less happy invention than the sylphs, and that their introduction lets the poem down from its level of magic illusion. But in the second telling the poem is an infinitely richer and more peopled thing. Had we only known the first version, we should, no doubt, have felt with Addison that it was madness to tamper with such exquisite perfection. But Pope, who foolishly attributed Addison’s advice to envy, proved that Addison was wrong. His revision ofThe Rape of the Lockis one of the few magnificently successful examples in literature of painting the lily.

One differs from Mr. Saintsbury, however, less in liking a different garden from his than in liking a different seat in the same garden. One who is familiar as he is with all the literature he discusses in the present volume is bound to indulge all manner of preferences, whims and even eccentricities. An instance of Mr. Saintsbury’s whims is his complaint that the eighteenth-century essays are almost always reprinted only in selections and without the advertisements that appeared with them on their first publication. He is impatient of J. R. Green’s dismissal of the periodical essayist as a “mass of rubbish,” and he demands his eighteenth-century essayists in full, advertisements and all. “Here,” he insists, “these things fringe and vignette the text in the most appropriate manner, and so set off the quaint variety and the other-worldly character as nothing else could do.” Is not the author’s contention, however, as to the great loss the Addisonian essay suffers when isolated from its context a severe criticism on that essay as literature? The man of letters likes to read from a completeSpectatoras he does from a complete Wordsworth. At the same time, the best of Addison, as of Wordsworth, can stand on its own feet in an anthology, and this is the final proof of its literary excellence. The taste for eighteenth century advertisements is, after all, only literary antiquarianism—a delightful indulgence, a by-path, but hardly necessary to the enjoyment of Addison’s genius.

But it is neither Pope nor Addison who is ultimately Mr. Saintsbury’s idol among the poets and prose-writers of the eighteenth century. His idol of idols is Swift, and next to him he seems most wholeheartedly to love and admire Dr. Johnson and Fielding. He makes no bones about confessing his preference of Swift to Aristophanes and Rabelais and Molière. Swift does not at once fascinate and cold-shoulder him as he does to so many people. Mr. Saintsbury glorifiesGulliver, and wisely so, right down to the last word about the Houyhnhnms, and he demands for theJournal to Stellarecognition as “the first great novel, being at the same time a marvellous and absolutely genuine autobiography.” His ultimate burst of appreciation is a beautifully characteristic example of what has before been called Saintsburyese—not because of any obscurity in it, but because of its oddity of phrase and metaphor:

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