Meredith

“ In addition to the attractions of birth, breeding, and beauty which the writer thoroughly relishes, are those of sensibilities that can be delicate without affectation, a delightful wit untainted by smartness, singular good taste and tact, and honesty of soul. Here is a sparkling young woman as clear as daylight, as fresh as the morning dew, beautiful to look upon, as Meredith’s women always are, sweet and bewitching without any shabby tricks of mind or habit, who at the same time thinks for herself, a rare virtue in the male novelist’s heroine. ”

“ THE TEMPTATION Anne Meredith looked at her mother, appalled. “Marry David Curtis!” she exclaimed. “Marry a man I have seen not more than a dozen times. Are you mad?”
“No, but your uncle is,” bitterly. “God knows what has prompted this sudden philanthropy,” hesitating for a word. “This sudden desire to, as he expresses it, ‘square accounts’ with the past by insisting that you marry David Curtis or be disinherited.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ As a poet, Meredith attained, when he chose (and he often did choose) to a pitch of obscurity no less deserving of admiration, and of interpretative commentaries, than the darkest verses of Browning. He did not begin in this manner; his early verses, such as "Juggling Jerry," "The Old Chartist," "Marian," "Love in the Valley," have the charm of being fresh, natural, and easily readable by him who runs; while, like most of Meredith's verses, they are the poetry of a lover of the Earth, with all that she bears and nourishes. Many poems read like hymns to Earth by an Earth-intoxicated pagan. ”

“ There was something in the man's clear-cut face—something beyond aristocratic repose—as he looked down into her eyes—something which Sir John Meredith might perhaps have liked to see there. To all men comes, soon or late, the moment wherein their lives are suddenly thrust into their own hands to shape or spoil, to make or mar. It seemed that where a clever man had failed, this light-hearted girl was about to succeed. Two small clinging hands on Jack Meredith's breast had apparently wrought more than all Sir John's care and foresight. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ No one had questioned him as to his having gone to John Meredith’s bedroom instead of his own, and he had not mentioned the presence of a woman in the dead man’s room. Could it be that she was the “female” of Herman’s story, and was that “female” Anne Meredith, as the butler evidently believed? If so, what then did the parrot’s cry, “Anne—I’ve caught you—you devil!” signify? Had the parrot repeated Meredith’s death cry?
The lines about Curtis’ firm mouth tightened. His creed in life was simple: to live straight, never forget a friend, and never go back on a woman. ”

“ So she clenched her hands an instant with that feeling which knocketh a nail in the coffin of a desire not dead, and controlled herself, and went to the youth, breaking into beams of beauty; and an enchanting sumptuousness breathed round her, so that in spite of himself he suffered her to take him by the hand and lead him from that orchard through the shivered door and into the palace and the hall of the jasper pillars. Strange thrills went up his arm from the touch of that Queen, and they were as little snakes twisting and darting up, biting poison-bites of irritating blissfulness. ”

“ You want me to go back to that Platter—that God-forsaken Platter, as I may say.”
“Yes,” said Meredith. “That is about it. I would go myself—”
“God bless you! I know you would!” burst in Joseph. “You'd go like winkin'. There's no one knows that better nor me, sir; and what I says is—like master, like man. Game, sir—game it is! I'll go. I'm not the man to turn my back on a pal—a—a partner, sir, so to speak.”
“You see,” said Meredith, with the deep insight into men that made command so easy to him—“you see there is no one else. There is not another man in Africa who could do it.” ”

“ At sound of the servant’s receding footsteps Curtis dropped on one knee and ran his hand over John Meredith. A startled exclamation escaped him. He had left the body lying partly on one side as he had found it; now John Meredith was stretched at full length upon his back. Could Hollister have been so foolish as to turn him over? Only the coroner had the right to move a dead body.
As Curtis drew back his hand preparatory to rising, he touched a strand of hair caught around a button on the jacket of Meredith’s pajamas. ”

“ Meredith rode on. He did not want to catch up with Rasaldû. He was still thinking of Anne when the Rajah, wet through and mounted on a limping English thoroughbred, loomed up like a ghost in the rain-soaked twilight. He greeted Meredith much as the engineer had done.
"This rotten climate! Look what a mess I'm in. I've just come from Heerut—incog. you know. Wanted to do the poor beggars a good turn and they threw stones at me—they—they insulted me. It's that damned blackguard Barclay. He ought to have been shot. You English are getting too devilish delicate. One's got to hit, and hit hard." ”

“ Does Miss Meredith regard his eccentricities in this light?"
"Miss Meredith's inherent belief in the goodness of this favourite cousin leads her to give him the benefit of her doubts. She regards him as a man cursed by recurrent aberrations of mind; in other words, a victim of double consciousness." ”

“ 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. ”

“ Victor smartly commended her to slumber, with heaven’s blessing on her and a dose of soft nursery prattle.
He squeezed her hand. He kissed her lips by day. She heard him sigh settling himself into the breast of night for milk of sleep, like one of the world’s good children. She could have turned to him, to show him she was in harmony with the holy night and loving world, but for the fear founded on a knowledge of the man he was; it held her frozen to the semblance of a tombstone lady beside her lord, in the aisle where horror kindles pitchy blackness with its legions at one movement. ”

“ Meredith presented as "my niece," the modest, self-possessed young girl, whose cheeks grew not a whit redder, and whose pulse did not quicken at the sight of him, though a gleam of something like curiosity shone in the brown eyes which scanned him so quietly. She was thinking of Lucy, and her injunction "not to speak to the hateful if she saw him;" but she did speak to him, and Mrs. Meredith fanned herself complacently as she saw how fast they became acquainted.
"You do not dance," Mr. Hastings said, as she declined an invitation from Ned Peters, whom she had met at Saratoga. ”

“ Meredith bent down and kissed the earnest little face, "You are the only friend I have got, Maggie, that thinks and feels as I do."
"O Ditto! Uncle Eden?"
"Well, I suppose Mr. Murray would do me the honour to let me call him my friend," said Meredith.
"And papa?"
"Mr. Candlish is very good to me; but you see, I do not know him so well, Maggie."
"Well, he thinks just as you do. And papa goes and preaches in the streets when he is in New York; in those dreadful places where the people live that never go to church."
"That's like Landolf," said Meredith. "I almost envy men like that old monk." ”

“ The commissary, with knitted brows, started to speak, but checked himself and took half a dozen strides. Returning, he said:—
“Miss Meredith, ’t is not just to judge the future by the past. Can ye not understand that what I did in Philadelphia, ay, every act of mine at which ye could take offence in our whole acquaintance, has been done on heated impulse? If ye but knew a man’s feelings when he loves as I love, and finds no response to his passion in the object of it, ye would pardon my every act.” ”

“ But when Delafield appeared, Meredith's secret antagonisms were soon dissipated. There was certainly no challenging air of prosperity about the young man.
At first sight, indeed, he was his old cheerful self, always ready for a walk or a row, on easy terms at once with the Italian servants or boatmen. But soon other facts emerged--stealthily, as it were, from the concealment in which a strong man was trying to keep them.
"That young man's youth is over," said Meredith, abruptly, to the Duchess one evening. ”

“ Up to the time of Meredith, the dominant male was the fashionable hero. Tom Jones, and Sir Charles Grandison, and Fairfax Rochester, and 'Stunning' Warrington are as different as possible; but all of them, in their several ways, keep up one male tradition in fiction. It is within our own day that that tradition has entirely changed. Have you ever noticed how inveterately, in Meredith's novels, the schoolmaster or his spiritual kinsman comes out on top? Lord Ormont cannot stand against Matey Weyburn, Lord Fleetwood against Owain Wythan, Sir Willoughby Patterne against Vernon Whitford. ”

“ I am kept so poor I have not the smallest of sums. I do not wish to leave Wales—the people begin to love me; and can one be mistaken? I know if I am loved or hated. But if my lord will give me an allowance of money of some hundreds, I will do his bidding; I will leave England or I will go to Esslemont; I could say—to Mr. Woodseer, in that part of London. He would not permit. He thinks me blacked by it, like a sweepboy coming from a chimney; and that I have done injury to his title. No, Riette, to be a true sister, I must bargain with my lord before I submit. ”

“ It was a folly that Merthyr could not understand in his friend Charlotte.
He said so, and then he gave a kindly sad exclamation of Emilia's name.
"You do pity her still!" cried Georgiana, her heart leaping to hear it expressed so simply.
"Why, what other feeling can I have?" said he unsuspiciously.
"No, dear Merthyr," she replied; and only by her tone he read the guilty little rejoicing in her heart, marvelling at jealousy that could twist so straight a stem as his sister's spirit. This had taught her, who knew nothing of love, that a man loving does not pity in such a ease." ”

“ 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. ”

“ Her eyes sought those of William Meredith, then, in a language I did not understand, she spoke some words, in so sweet a tone, they must have been of love. After a short stay I left, promising to return soon.
I did return—and at the end of two months was almost a friend for this young couple. Mr. and Madame Meredith had no selfish happiness, they could still spare the time to think of others. They could understand that a poor village doctor, having no other society than that of peasants, would deem an hour well spent that was passed in listening to polished conversation. ”

“ Mr Meredith's conception of life is crooked, ill-balanced, and out of tune. What remains?—a certain lustiness. You have seen a big man with square shoulders and a small head, pushing about in a crowd, he shouts and works his arms, he seems to be doing a great deal, in reality he is doing nothing; so Mr Meredith appears to me, and yet I can only think of him as an artist; his habit is not slatternly, like those of such literary hodmen as Mr David Christie Murray, Mr Besant, Mr Buchanan. ”

“ Perfect stillness reigned immediately, as if the pic-nic had heard its doom.
“Oh! I will go to her,” said her ladyship, whose first thought was to spare the family. “Andrew, come and give me your arm.”
But when she rose Mrs. Mel was no more than the length of an arm from her elbow.
In the midst of the horrible anguish she was enduring, the Countess could not help criticising her mother’s curtsey to Lady Jocelyn. Fine, but a shade too humble. Still it was fine; all might not yet be lost. ”