E. T. Raymond

“ With his peculiar tendencies George Meredith could never have been a journalist of the kind that delights the editorial soul—the man who never under-writes or over-writes either in space or quality, who can always be depended on to produce a first-class trade article, who never uses an expression queried by the printer’s reader. The highest merit of the journalist is to make complicated things clear, and dry things readable; Meredith’s genius lay in the direction of making the simplest things obscure, and the most ordinary things out-of-the-way. ”

“ He himself seems hardly to have been aware of the ravages which disease and disappointment had wrought on his fine intellect, and the latter scenes were scarcely less painful to his more generous antagonists than to the few friends who still refused to believe that he was an exhausted man and a spent political force. Nobody is more quickly forgotten than a living politician who has ceased to count, and when the end came it was with an almost ridiculous sense of remoteness that the average member of the public read the inevitable homilies on Lord Randolph’s strange and sad career. ”

“ In the presence of one who had shown such large fidelity, such noble disdain of the objects of selfish desire, such self-forgetting devotion to a trust, it would have been more difficult for faction and self-seeking to display themselves unashamed. He is too recently dead for his spirit to work on this generation as it will, doubtless, on men still unborn. But alive he might have reminded the masses that there can be true greatness in great place, and people in great place that true greatness is a matter of a man’s soul and not of his station. ”

“ It is not easy to find a parallel to a change so swift, so silent, and so complete—a change, moreover, so powerful and various in its effect, for the newest journalism, with its loud and simple Imperialism, its indifference to party ties, its lack of interest in moral or religious questions, its intense concern in wealth and the manifestations of wealth, has contributed as much as anything to the digging of that great spiritual gulf which separates us from the Victorian time. ”

“ Should an intellectual conviction be always regarded as a moral imperative? If we think a thing is wrong in the sense of being politically inexpedient, should we risk the existence of all sorts of other things, which we think right, in order to save ourselves from the stigma of inconsistency or lack of principle? On the answer depends largely our judgment of men like Lord Courtney. To a certain class of mind he represented, almost more than any man after the death of Bright, the unspoiled hero in politics. To me he is not a hero. ”

“ If among all the considerable painters of the Nineties I distinguish Leighton and Watts, it is not because I think them possessed of the greatest talents, or even the most interesting personalities, but because they seem between them to represent rather specially what sharply marked off the art then passing away from what has taken its place. Both were very much of the nineteenth century in the largeness of their ideas and their sense of the importance of their mission. In many ways there could have been no two men, and no two craftsmen, more distinct. ”

“ There could have been no greater contrast to Temple. Temple said what he had to say, and cared very little what people thought as to the thing said or the manner of its saying. Creighton had always some of the eagerness and wistfulness of the clever young man who feels it incumbent on him to sparkle, and is troubled with just a doubt whether he has quite “come off.” His paradoxes are often strongly reminiscent of Oscar Wilde’s; they are not so witty, but have much the same superficial smartness, essential untruth, and light contempt of average humanity. ”

“ It requires no great courage to attempt an “appreciation” of anybody, from Homer to Addison, who has long been dead. For if one knows very little about such people, there is really very little to be known—little, that is, to tell us the very men they were. The great figures of the past are either phantoms or statues, things of mist or things of stone, without form or with nothing but form. Of a phantom there can be any view; of a statue there can be essentially but one; the only possible diversity is attained by throwing coloured lights on it, as they do on stage groups. ”

“ Russell’s fame as an advocate wholly overshadowed his reputation as a politician. He was twice Attorney-General; he had a place of importance in the inner councils of the Liberal Party; and he spoke with industry and intelligence wherever he was wanted to speak. But he was not at his happiest either in the House of Commons or on the platform. With fellow-members of Parliament he was too haughty, and with popular audiences too cold and formal, and his mind had neither the breadth nor the geniality for the part either of a statesman or a demagogue. ”

“ The great curse of the times is the desire of cutting a dash, being in appearance something you are not in reality.... I have written this because I find myself unable to do what I could formerly accomplish with little difficulty.”
It is the old story of the brilliant performer in the field and the humble munition-maker at home; behind every shining success lies years, and perhaps generations, of obscure effort; and the feet of the mighty tread now on dead men’s bones and now on the bodies of the living. The greatest sacrifices incidental to Courtney’s career were after all not his own. ”

“ But all this was not solely Meredith’s fault, it was also the fault of his country. In the France of the fleur-de-lis or the France of the tricolour the lack of birth would not have irked such a nature; in Victorian England it became a fact of real importance. It was the one little insanity of a rather specially sane mind; the one want of humour in a richly humorous temperament; the one absurd weakness in one perhaps even too confident in his own strength. ”

“ The young fellow of the Nineties saw simply a large dull man, with a large dull way of talking, a man incapable of saying a witty thing, or doing a picturesque thing; and in his haste this young fellow declared that all men were snobs, that the sole secret of the Duke’s influence was his wealth and position, that if he had been born the son of a clerk he would never have risen to be more than a clerk, but, being the son of a great noble, people hastened to find in him qualities which were simply not there. ”

“ This indiscreet athleticism is paralleled in other departments of Meredith’s life. In literature he was perpetually throwing the beetle—juggling in ponderous style with ponderous things; he is a muscular rather than a nimble wit. I remember to have seen an acrobat climb down a table leg, hand over hand, as if he were lowering himself from the Nelson Monument—a difficult feat, no doubt, but a very useless and ungainly one. Meredith’s cleverness gave often the same impression of wasted power and even compromised dignity. ”

“ Cory, with all his affectionate partiality for the young Scottish aristocrat, is still sagacious. He puts his finger unerringly on the weak spot. The mature Lord Rosebery, of course, did not get what the young Lord Dalmeny wanted. He just missed the palm, and he got a great deal of the dust. But the desire to have the best of all worlds, the love of facile success, the resentment of pain, trouble, and ingratitude, no doubt explain his strange and splendid but rather maimed career. Mr. Gladstone described him, while he was still young, as “the man of the future.” ”

“ But it is not beyond the ingenuity of politicians to convey an impression without making a statement, and they so contrived matters that a good many people, while honouring him as a soldier and recognising him as a high-minded public servant, watched him with a certain strained attention. It needed the Great War to reveal to the working classes the true nature of the man and the absolute singleness of his aims. ”

“ Comfortable people, accustomed to deference throughout life, have little conception of the hunger for respect which reigns among those who seldom get it. Indeed, half our social troubles would be over if the “better” classes could grasp the simple fact that the “lower” classes are much more sensitive than themselves on all points of dignity. To a mere factory hand, man or woman—it was a novelty of the Army that it put the sexes from the first on an exactly equal footing—it was luxury to put off insignificance with the work-day clothes and put on importance with the Army uniform. ”

“ Now, the Irish are not the best people in the world with whom to do money business; but they do take ideas seriously. And if they have been promised an elephant, they expect an elephant. It is no use arguing with them that the elephant would be a white elephant, that an elephant in Ireland would not be nearly so well suited to the bogs as a stork, that so dangerous a brute is no fit plaything for children of the flighty Celtic temperament. ”

“ A true aristocracy must always be shameless. But the circle in which John Morley grew up was refined and secretive as no other circle on earth; the pride of the upper classes is comparatively simple; the pride of the middle class is as nicely compounded as the melancholy of Jacques. It was this pride, and nothing else, which gave John Morley that reputation of chilly austerity which was really quite foreign to his character. ”

“ That is the point of view of the hero-blackguard whom great emergencies so often call forth. “Let what will happen, so no man can call me untrue to my principles,” is another point of view, that of the man who cannot be quite fully a hero because he is constitutionally incapable of being the least bit of a blackguard. Thin partitions divide heroism and blackguardism; all space lies between them and the great kingdom of the smug. The best of the smug can rise to very considerable heights, but their fastidiousness prevents them achieving the splendour of perfect selflessness ”

“ There have always been journalists of great and even boisterous independence, and they were more numerous in Meredith’s time than in our own. Even now, however, the idea of the refined and penniless man of genius working against his convictions under the lash of a brutal and tyrannous proprietor belongs not to Fleet Street, where they produce newspapers, but to the Haymarket, where they produce plays. ”

“ To adapt his own words, there is something tragic about the enormous number of young men there are in England at any given moment who start life with some Greek and Latin, a knack of good form and social dexterity, a more than competent physique, enough money to enable them to spend a few of their best years in rather laborious idleness, and no notion of giving the world a full equivalent of what they propose to take out of it. The number of young women in much the same case is scarcely less disquieting. The real moral of Wilde’s tragedy is not the obvious one. ”

“ Thus favoured, Thomas Hardy produced during the Seventies and Eighties a great mass of consistently high work. But it was not till 1891 that he won full recognition from the greater public.
There are two tests which a work of the imagination must pass before it can be called successful in the highest and best sense. It must satisfy the critical. It must appeal to the uncritical. The thing which the connoisseur alone can appreciate is often fine art; it is seldom truly great art. The thing which may momentarily capture the crowd may be pure rubbish ”

“ He was a Little Englander only in the sense of not conceiving of England—or Scotland—as little; he was an Imperialist only in the sense of wishing to maintain and extend “the greatest secular agency for good known to mankind.” Equidistant from opposite extravagances, there was in all his great Imperial speeches a width, a dignity, and a balance, as well as a fervour of conviction, hardly to be found elsewhere, and this solitary splendour sufficed to outweigh his occasional descent in other directions into what might seem mere whim and petulance. ”

“ He loved, moreover, the good comradeship that political life engenders; to a certain type of man it is the main compensation of the career. There is more zest in broiled bones where plotting is than in a stalled ox consumed in placidity. None enjoyed better than Joseph Chamberlain the meal conspiratorial, the meal triumphal, the meal consolatory; good dining was, indeed, one of his most unfailing pleasures; [128] like Talleyrand, he might have said, “Show me another which renews itself three times a day, and lasts an hour each time.” ”

“ Huxley and Tyndal were survivals of an earlier age; the old fairy tales of science had grown common-place, and the newer wonders were still to come; though there were stirrings in letters and art, on the whole it was still the reign of the old men.
Yet this appearance of changelessness was largely deceptive. The Nineties were essentially a time of transition. They resembled that point in the life of a caterpillar when a change of skin is almost due. The thing is at once lethargic and uneasy; its qualms and its inertia alike suggest coming dissolution. ”

“ Thus Carlyle suddenly forgets that he is a sort of Hebrew prophet, and runs after Newman or the Pope, throwing mud, for all the world like a small boy at Portadown. Thus Kingsley, one moment quite big and universal, is the next moment a shrill sectarian. Thus Tennyson descends abrupt from Virgilian grandeur to suburban prejudice. So many of the great Victorians seemed to be really so anxious to believe in God, and so afraid that it was not an advanced thing to believe, that the fear of dogma and the yearning for faith caused them perpetually to wobble. ”

“ Chamberlain joined a Conservative Cabinet that a young man like Sir Alfred Milner, with nothing but his brains to recommend him, caught the eye of a colleague of the Cecils.
It was not only that the Whig magnate was ready to admit any sufficiently able man to the freedom of his circle. He habitually showed also the rare magnanimity—or rare sagacity—of submitting to the domination of men whom he had made, and men who could never, without his acquiescence, have entered into serious competition with himself. ”

“ We hear much now about the degradation of the Press. Lord Coleridge thought the solemn London papers of the early Nineties, though “rather better educated” than the American, “to the full as vile,” and “with a swagger and insufferable pretence and self-assertion” from which American journalism was free. Moreover, the “Court and aristocracy degrade the independence and corrupt the manners of the vast numbers who are brought within their influence.” It can be well understood that a man holding such opinions, and expressing them with such vigour, was only popular among those who thought with him. ”