Part 15

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 of _Love in a Valley_ and _Richard 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's _Christian 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 of _Richard 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.

(3) THE ANGLO-IRISH ASPECT

Meredith never wrote a novel which was less a novel than _Celt 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 reads _Celt 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 Saxon_ seems 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 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.

XVII--OSCAR WILDE

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, if _Salomé_ had not been censored, the social comedies might never have been written. "It is possible," observes Mr. Ransome, "that we owe _The Importance of Being Earnest_ to the fact that the Censor prevented Sarah Bernhardt from playing _Salomé_ at the Palace Theatre." If this conjecture is right, one can never think quite so unkindly of the Censor again, for in _The 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 of _The Importance of Being Earnest_ that 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 in _The 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 in _Intentions_ and elsewhere. In _Salomé_ he 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 of _Salomé_? 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 of _Salomé_ one 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 in _De Profundis_ as 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 brief _Endymion_ (to name one of the poems), and the many hyacinthine passages in _Intentions_. But when one is anxious to see the man himself as in _De 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 in _Intentions_ that I am inclined to agree with Mr. Ransome that _Intentions_ is "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.

XVIII.--TWO ENGLISH CRITICS

(1) MR. SAINTSBURY