Hugh Chisholm

“ But the Ordeal of Richard Feverel, which followed in 1859, transferred Meredith at once to a new sphere and to the altitude of his accomplishment. With this novel Meredith deserted the realm of fancy for that of the philosophical and psychological study of human nature, and Richard Feverel was the first, as it is perhaps the favourite, of those wonderful studies of motive and action which placed him among the demigods of English literature. The essential theme of this fine criticism of life is the question of a boy’s education. ”

“ Sandra Belloni, Rhoda Fleming, Vittoria and Beauchamp are all masterpieces of his finest period, rich in incident, character and workmanship. “The House on the Beach” and “The Case of General Opie and Lady Camper” (New Quarterly Magazine, 1877) were slight but glittering exercises in comedy; the next important novel was The Egoist (1879) , which shows an increase in Meredith’s twistedness of literary style and is admittedly hard to read for those who merely want a “story,” but which for concentrated analysis and the real drama of the human spirit is an astounding production. ”

“ To “the general,” no doubt, Meredith’s verse is prohibitive, or nearly so—for, after all, he has written some poems, like “Martin’s Puzzle,” “The Old Chartist,” and “Juggling Jerry,” which anybody can read with ease. But his most characteristic style in verse is so concentrated that any one accustomed to “straightforward” writing, and unwilling to read with the mind rather than with the eye, must needs, to his loss, be put off. His readers, of the verse even more than of the prose, must be prepared to meet him on a common intellectual footing. ”

“ The essential respect in which Meredith’s method of describing action and emotion in narrative differs from that of convention is that, while the ordinary method is to relate what happens from the point of view of the onlooker, Meredith frequently describes it from the point of emotion of the actor; and his influence in this direction has largely modified the art of fiction. Herein lies the secret of the peculiar brilliancy of his style, derived from his combination of the narrator with the creator, or—in its strict sense—the seer. ”

“ In an interesting series of lectures which Meredith delivered at the London Institution in 1877 his main thesis was that a man without a sense of comedy is dead to the finer issues of the spirit, and the conception of Sir Willoughby Patterne, the central figure of The Egoist, is an embodiment of this idea in the flesh. The Tragic Comedians (1880) , the next of Meredith’s novels, slighter in texture than his others, combines the spirits of comedy and tragedy in the story of the life of Ferdinand Lassalle, the German Socialist. ”

“ Pregnant, vividly graphic, capable of infinite shades and gradations, his style is a much finer and subtler instrument than at first appears, and must be judged finally by what it conveys to the mind, and not by its superficial sound upon the conventional ear. ”

“ He rings changes on the changing emotions of humanity, but every chime rings true. He is a literary artist. He takes great themes, not little ones; the characters in his fiction are personalities, human beings, neither “heroes” nor “sports” ”

“ As a matter of historical fact it was Lord Aberdeen who himself gave Delane the information, but the popular acceptance of the other version of the incident gave a factitious interest to the novel.
Meanwhile further instalments of poems—Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth (1883) —had struck anew the full, rich note of natural realism which is Meredith’s chief poetic characteristic. “The Woods of Westermain,” in particular, has a sense of the mysterious communion of man with nature unapproached by any English poets save Wordsworth and Shelley. ”

“ In fact, a reader who compares the first and last editions either of Richard Feverel or Evan Harrington will notice changes little short of revolutionary. Even in the previously current editions of 1878 onwards, published by Chapman & Hall, Richard Feverel had been considerably shortened as compared with the original three-volume edition; but it was now robbed again of some of its best-known passages. It is no doubt competent to an author himself to revise his earlier published work even to the extent to which Meredith in the 1897 edition revised these novels ”

“ His own literary contemporaries still living could join hands with the younger generation of enthusiastic admirers in insisting on a greatness of which they themselves had been unable to persuade the public. ”