Hannah Lynch

“ Sombre the book is throughout, and we regard it as almost impertinent to yield to the occasional pricks of humour that tickle us into quiet laughter. How can we bear to laugh at the oddities of mankind, even at the bidding of such a master, when we see a sweet and pure girl’s life going to ruin, and understand that the very nature of her is such that there is no return from the wreck, no after-sunshine to restore the ravages of storm? Here is no picturesque mingling of lights and shadows, no lyrical romance, no melodies of the upper spheres, to imperil the dark remembrance of the dénouement. ”

“ If we come upon an occasional odd effect—a queer simile, a bit of isolated poetry lapsed into prose, a bar of pure melody dropped into speech—we recognise with pleasure and delight the author of ‘Richard Feverel,’ and we greet him with a cordial smile. This other writer is new to us, but not the less welcome—less serious, more polished and more fanciful; and while less of a poet, he is more of an artist—less philosophic, he is much more scientific. The play of wit is less sparkling and more penetrative. ”

“ There he walks and sits and talks before our newly-illuminated vision, naked to the soul, each beat of the heart discovered without its protection of flesh or garment; not one single young man whom we meet and part with in fiction, but the large pervading personality of human existence crystallized to one permanent shape—not Sir Willoughby Patterne, of Patterne Hall, but the soul of selfishness endowed with a form that might just as well have been yours or mine or our next-door neighbour’s. ”

“ Shakespearean is the word to describe Meredith, both in his defects and in his qualities. In each is he great, with something of the unapproachable greatness, the originality, the blood and brains and nerve, of the Stratford poet, towering over his fellows to-day as Shakespeare, alive, towered over his. Human to the heels, a seer and a psychologist in one, no word is lightly written, no character lightly drawn. ”

“ As a work of art, it is, indeed, the most complete and perfect thing that Meredith has done—a flawless masterpiece without any of the writer’s eccentric deviations and mannerisms. Perhaps oppressively witty, though much less so than ‘Diana,’ striking none but the delicately comic chord, and turning to pathos upon the point of a smiling curl of the lip, it carries us through a few weeks’ comedy at a pleasant canter to the accompaniment of fanciful humour and polished irony. ”

“ It is as much as one’s life is worth almost to speak to a very young bride about her married life; above all, if she be deeply enamoured of her husband, and for her mother to seek to unveil it would be a sacrilege. Mr. Meredith, who makes straight for nature divested of the swaddling clothes of sentimentality, and prefers her mud to the sentimentalist’s spangles and pink clouds, will perhaps say that the excess of delicacy to which naturally sensitive and fastidious womanhood has let itself be trained is artificial, unhealthy, and absurd. ”

“ The most beautiful thing in this remarkable book—next to Meredith’s generous defence of his heroine,—the tenderest, most naturally, humanly painted, is the sweet and faithful friendship between two intellectual women, one a soft-hearted, delicate Englishwoman with the milder and more clinging sentiments of her race, and the other our vivid Diana, made up of Irish cloud and Irish laughter, with her robuster and more ardent temperament. ”

“ Meredith admire the woman’s genius for intrigue, but he brings sympathy and affection to the task of making her intelligible to us. So far from seeking to make her odious to us, as Thackeray deliberately does in the portrayal of Rebecca, he leaves it impossible for us to judge her more harshly than he himself does. Wherever she is, we know that we cannot be dull, and we are amused and captivated enough to be willing to dispense with the chill atmosphere of perfect morality and candour. He does not pursue her with a relentless exposure of her inmost vices. ”

“ But then there was no satire or hardness in all Scott’s nature, and manly tenderness and sympathy were his predominant traits. He wrote stories for the pleasure of writing them, not to belabour or ridicule poor worn humanity, in which he kept his faith green and unquestioning as a child’s.
But, like Dickens, Meredith is a poet, and, like him, has all a poet’s extravagances and excesses. Scott, as a poet, is never excessive, never exuberant, and always exact. His strength is employed with a Scotch perception of its just value, whereas his Saxon brothers waste theirs with an endless profusion. ”

“ To French wit he brings German profundity of thought, the whole wrought into a thoroughly Saxon setting. Vividness of conception, intensity of vision, and strength of diction—combine these qualities, and you have English such as [52] no other writer has given us. It is beautiful, with a beauty all its own, and there seems to be no feat of which it is not capable. He has ransacked our language until he has wrought it, through a process of bewildering originality, into a flexibility, a forcible simplicity, a majesty and rhythm that, in his prose, surpass poetry. ”

“ There are so many tricks and surprises bestrewing our path, five-barred gates starting unexpectedly for us to leap; we are deliberately plunged neck and heels into so many swamps, and bowled over all sorts of rocks and stones, with the oddest sensations in conflict, that we more than once pay our debt grudgingly, and, like a peaceable man knocked down by a bludgeon, are amazed at the liberty that has been taken with our understanding. In this exuberant display of his own powers does Meredith show himself to be thoroughly English. ”

“ Can a young gentleman with a proper respect for himself feel romantically disposed towards a young woman, even if she be divinely beautiful, when she owns to a capacity to dine off potatoes? or ascend to heaven on an aria when the prima-donna refreshes herself with bottled stout? For such types, frequent enough, he suggests that sunlight must be too strong and gross, and wonders why they have not set their wits to invent some soft extract of a shadowy illumination wherewith to diminish the terrors and uglinesses of mere nature. ”

“ In the case of her English husband and her recreant English lover, her defender has no worse fault to urge against them than the stiff-necked prejudices of race. Both we see like respectable carriage-horses in harnessed strife with a young war-steed ready for dangerous speed and nerve-upsetting tricks—a potent, self-willed young creature, sniffing menacingly at conventionality, audacious from excess of purity, perilously poised upon every incalculable impulse, and in spite of a powerful intellect, scatter-brained upon all the ugly brinks in her career. ”

“ Meredith, with the entire creation, all the more so as she is the only girl he has drawn upon the old wearisome lines of masculine taste, of the eternal old-fashioned ivy-type, commonplace, loving and pretty, without character or interest apart from her second in the immortal duet with his breathless hero. ”

“ Degraded, shrunken, stripped of the glory of success, we see in him a monstrous image of ourselves, of all mankind, so that we are afraid to turn from him and wring hands with the wretch in a kind of shamed sympathy. We readily admit the pure comedy of this sublime absurdity in human form reduced to such shabby dimensions and exposed for the ridicule of posterity, but we cannot laugh very joyously at the exposure. ”

“ Not by any means an angel, but a young goddess, half woman, a creature of exquisite freshness, originality, bewildering wit and soaring intellect, as lovely as Aurora, and as cold, purer still, and more remote from the contamination of gross masculine admiration, than Diana. ”

“ Irish orators off the Parliamentary stage and the public platform are ready to laugh at themselves and at each other, whereas Beauchamp is in deadly earnest from six o’clock in the morning until twelve o’clock at night. Surely it can have been nothing else but sheer weariness that forced the writer to pitch his hero unexpectedly into the Channel, and bring his career to an untimely end. Never was catastrophe more inexplicable, and from the artistic point of view less justifiable, than Beauchamp’s death. We wake as from a prolonged nightmare with a gasp. ”

“ They seem to fly, and mount, and flutter round us, to catch our breath forcibly, and hold our imagination in the grasp of blood-warmed fingers. The most ordinary action of life, described by him in a line or two, is not a photograph, but a vivid revelation, a scene stamped not on the vision, but upon the mind. ”

“ Used as we have been to the lucid prose of Thackeray and the brilliant vulgarity and homeliness of Dickens, spoiled as our literary talent has been more recently by the flood of bloodless fiction poured into the circulating libraries and fast bringing the monthly magazines to a deadlock of incompetency and unimaginative drivel, can we wonder, though we may deplore, that the taste for excellence and vigour has diminished? ”

“ The queer old fellow, with a disconcerting reserve, tosses Dahlia off upon a charge of giddiness, drinks his beer, because he has not paid for it, propounds an arithmetical problem to Master Gammon, who retorts ‘that he is paid to work, and not to think,’ and continues to eat his dumplings to the fret of nerves of the watchers impatiently waiting for news of Dahlia. We learn of vestiary elegances and temper, and of an old man left to take his tea alone; and, like Rhoda, we understand the sadness of it and, unlike her, suspect its meaning. ”

“ Lucy may conquer the wise youth by the cookery-book, but as we are not invited to eat of her dinners, we prefer the unedifying sight of Richard upon the Thames and dining with guardsmen and light ladies at Richmond, or escorting his Sir Julian by way of conversion of that indecorous lady to the path of virtue. We like less Lady Judith, the ardent female Radical who married a decrepit lord to carry out her principles, and took Richard in hand, until he succumbed, upon champagne and song, into the arms of the siren. ”

“ When he is not playing queer tricks with us and keeping every sense insufferably alert, every nerve strained to catch the meaning that dances tantalizingly before us, flying hither and thither upon fantastic figures of speech, until the writer himself seems drunk with his own juggling, he is quieting our baffled senses by these sharp revelations that have no artificial glamour about them. ”

“ Meredith may be accused of a desire to prove to us that in men middle-age is more attractive and lovable than youth, and that the sedate sadness that accompanies it but adds to the dignity of life, its thoughtful measure never exceeding a refined and placid geniality, and knowing no other discord than a very mild sense of disapprobation. ”

“ If he caricatures humanity, it is not as Dickens caricatures it, to tickle us into inextinguishable laughter, nor yet as Thackeray does, in a vein of comic satire. If he calls upon us to recognise that life is often a [24] sad blunder, and to pity the blunderers, he is neither sentimental in his claim, nor consciously pathetic. He indulges neither in the mawkish sentiment of Dickens, nor in the sentimental tenderness of Thackeray, and as little courts our tears as our laughter. Brain is what he asks of us, and its use in reading him. ”

“ What refuge in the eyes of those who unkindly [86] desire her good is there for her but marriage—with any man whose name she may bear? As for Edward, in his profound remorse and repentance, all Kentish faces are turned ruthlessly against him, against his offer of atonement, and poor Dahlia’s cry for his tenderness. Rhoda is his fiercest and most pitiless enemy. Dahlia’s letters to him have been suppressed by Algernon, who himself has pleasurable visions of marriage with the victim’s sister, and the wild ramping life of the colonies. ”

“ Meredith is above and beyond all a thinker, less simple and direct, less wholly preoccupied with the mission of improving humanity and beautifying life, than either George Eliot or Tolstoi. Perhaps he has a healthier conviction that the world is very well as it is, and that in the main it is all the better that we are neither so muddy nor so pink as realists and sentimentalists would have us believe, but are just comfortably spotted and well-meaning to escape excess of censure or admiration. ”

“ We get some queer specimens of upper-class snobocracy in ‘Harry Richmond,’ and what, pray, is Sir Willoughby Patterne if he is not a wondrously decorative and polished snob, contemplating complacently his own superiority in the mirror of his mind’s eye?
On the whole, Mr. Meredith is hard on his own sex. Sometimes he draws a young fool like Lord Palmet in ‘Beauchamp’s Career,’ who can be a lord, a fool, and a gentleman at the same time; who makes us laugh and holds our sympathies, there is something so extremely natural in his idiocy and something so very engaging in his candour ”

“ Here this subtle psychologist concerns himself neither with plot nor passion; neither with tragedy nor romance, nor with any of what may be called the passional springs of action and will. If ‘Richard Feverel’ was an original and bewildering canter along the highway of fiction, ‘The Egoist’ may be described as a breathless charge into the unknown, a direct and forcible challenge of the unsuspected. Here we see mercilessly unveiled civilized man, as he thinks and feels, in the person of a handsome young squire enjoying every advantage of nature, [119] fortune and birth. ”

“ Pictures and song abound in them, and breathless vivifying races with passion. Writers are not uncommonly enamoured of their heroines, and while none of his can claim a lack of sympathy and admiration on Mr. Meredith’s part, there are three that stand out as rivals for the post of his heart’s beloved. In different ways, all leading to the one source, like the various roads to Rome, is he equally the recording lover of Emilia or Sandra, Clara Middleton and Diana. ”

“ Meredith’s original genius, or deliberately shunned by him. The good old fashion, so dear to Scott and Thackeray, of bringing everything to a definite conclusion, either for better or worse, and clearing up all doubts as to the ultimate career of even their minor characters, is a fashion that he, with some cruelty and much contempt for the ordinary reader, utterly discards. He cares not a jot for our sympathy, still less for our judgment. ”

“ As an adventuress, she is unsurpassed, and, unlike poor Becky, lives and dies, we imagine, a fine lady, driven by ambition to duplicities, but not consciously mean or dishonest. Though a virtuous woman, her morals are crooked, and her sense of honour is the reverse of keen. We have seen how such a character in Thackeray’s hands would develop, and to what lengths in heartlessness his satire carried him. Meredith’s Countess is possible ”