A Knightly Pen

DURING the exceptionally rude weather of last February my friend and I took much fireside pleasure in re-reading together, with frequent pauses for elucidation, quotation, reflection, approval, or dissent, George Meredith’s great trilogy. We two have long been, in our way, disciples of Meredith, though secretly, — as one may say, — for fear of the Jews. There are so many organized bands of marauders, of both sexes, abroad, who continually order you to stand and deliver your most cherished opinions, that you instinctively put these possessions away in what you fondly hope will prove a secret pocket, before venturing into the wide world at all. For to be met, in a lonely place, on a dark night, by a member of some Browning or Meredith Society with the awful challenge “A paper, or your life!” is an experience fraught with paralyzing terror to some. Why it should seem so different a thing voluntarily to offer a humble contribution toward the exegesis of a masterly but eccentric writer, in whom a tardy and in some sort artificial popularity seems but to have increased a certain inborn relish for mystifying the vulgar, I cannot exactly say. The public, at all events, can always take your two mites or leave them.

At this point I seem to hear the pleasantly patronizing voice of some accredited Meredithian inquiring what I mean by George Meredith’s “great trilogy; ” and let us hope that my answer may surprise him a little, for otherwise I should have small excuse for saying anything at all.

Nobody, so far as I know, has yet been at the pains to point out the continuous and cumulative interest and close logical sequence of Mr. Meredith’s three latest, and, upon the whole, least popular and admired romances : One of our Conquerors, Lord Ormont and his Aminta, and The Amazing Marriage. Yet, taken collectively, they comprise the searching discussion of a very serious theme, which would seem to have haunted the novelist at intervals, from his youth up; and the long subsequent silence of the aging author makes it look a little as though he felt himself, and wished the world to understand, that he has now said his last word concerning it. I propose, then, to consider Mr. Meredith as he reveals himself unmistakably in these three books; in the character, namely, of a gallant champion of what are, to him, the sacred and inviolable Rights of Woman.

To begin with One of our Conquerors. Rarely, I think, has there been an overture to a great piece better conceived than that buoyant promenade and ignominious tumble of Victor Radnor upon London Bridge, with which the story opens. The main theme of a tremendous “Morality ” is here given, in one bar of ringing notes. Victor Radnor is a perfect type of the supremely successful man of the present day. A great London merchant with political aspirations on the eve of fulfillment, he had started on his career with such advantages in the way of family connection and inherited fortune as fairly to have acquired in early middle life that practically unlimited wealth which is just now the indispensable condition of any considerable social influence. He is a great lover and patron of the fine arts, and for music, a positive enthusiast. He is also a man formed by nature to inspire strong personal attachment ; a bounteous giver, a noble entertainer, with an ample and sunny genius, not only for the sweetest amenities of domestic life, but for manly friendship and a splendid munificence. His one child, a daughter, just developing into womanhood, is a beautiful, ardent, highly gifted creature; one of the most attractive pictures ever drawn of a happy and lavishly endowed girlhood. The half-dozen variously clever and, in the main, highly honorable men who constitute Victor Radnor’s most intimate circle, and are made free of his great houses in town and country, are all, as a matter of course, more or less in love with the brilliant Nesta; but their feeling for Nathaly, the girl’s mother, a woman herself still young and beautiful, is of another order. Toward her, their loyalty is dogged and resolute, their admiration wistful; the respect which the gentle dignity of her bearing makes it impossible for them to withhold is tinged both with indignation and regret. For here is the sun-spot, the fruitspeck, the flaw in the foundations of the stately fabric which these tolerant men of the world delight to haunt. Their gracious hostess, the mother of the peerless Nesta, is not Victor’s wife, and technically good women decline to visit her. He has, in fact, another wife living; and yet the circumstances “extenuate . ”

Attacked when he was little more than a lad upon what was at once his most chivalrous and his weakest side, captured and “ married and a’ ” by a sickly and fanatical heiress much older than himself, who both delighted in his personal beauty and desired the salvation of his soul by the non-conformist formula, he had borne the spiritual tyranny under which he fell sweetly enough upon his own account; but he could not bear seeing it exercised over the rare young creature whom calamity had precipitated from a higher social rank than that of his wife, and forced to earn her living as that wife’s companion. The elopement which followed placed the woman, of course, under the ban of society, but not the man. If personal genius, added to unswerving personal devotion, could have redeemed the situation, Victor’s would have done so; and, as a matter of fact, he believes that he has all but won his battle with society at the moment when the story opens. The old wife, from whom, under English law, there was no possibility of obtaining legal divorce, lies at the point of death from a lingering but absolutely incurable disease, while the man of many millions has just completed an exceptionally stately pleasure house, a little way out of London, to which all the great world both of art and fashion seems ready to flock, asking no questions. Then comes that buoyant walk over the bridge, upon a bright spring morning, the wanton spite of a street rough, excited by the too obvious complacency of the conquering hero, the staggering impact of a gutter-missile on an immaculate expanse of shirt-front, the fall backward, and a confused feeling ever after, upon the hero’s part, that he had heard through the subsequent ringing in his ears the forewarning of Nemesis, — the first, faint, faroff, almost melodious bay of the hounds of retribution.

Retribution is indeed wrought upon the genial sinner with Greek punctuality and completeness. His Nathaly’s heart had been broken, figuratively, long before, by remorse, by the deep mortification bred of social contumely, by her anguish over the uncertain position and future of the bright maiden who has never suspected her dire disadvantage; and the mother who was not a wife had bravely concealed her own spiritual sufferings for the sake of the man and the child whom she adored. Now the physical organ of the martyr is attacked, and this too she succeeds in hiding, so that Victor, manlike, never dreams in the absorption of his manifold purposes that it has become a breathless race for death between the two women whom he has equally wronged. The legal wife wins by a few hours, and the shock to our conqueror is so great that he falls fatally stricken in body and brain, and unable even to dictate the testament which would have secured her vast inheritance to his idolized child.

“Here ’s a sermon, Harry! ” as the old Baroness Bernstein said to her Virginian kinsman, when he failed to recognize her own resplendent portrait as a girl. But there are subsidiary themes and incidental homilies in this extremely serious book which are hardly less impressive. There is the flaw, detected and exposed, of lurking vulgarity in the ideal of life accepted by every man who will be first and foremost a money king. There is the quaint idyl of Victor Radnor’s confidential clerk, the converted pugilist, who consecrates his formidable fist to God and the intrepid Salvation lass whom he had rescued from the violence of a drunken brute. Above all, there is the effect of the long tragedy, they have seen so near, upon those fair-minded men of the world who have the run of Victor’s house. Theoretically, of course, and in the face of that world, they stand by their own order and its Mohammedan traditions. But the “pity and terror” of it all purify their feeling both for mother and daughter in degrees that vary exactly with the native nobility of each man’s mind. The titled fiancé, so needful to the success of Victor’s political plans, whom Nesta had dutifully accepted at her father’s eager instance, but to her mother’s unspoken distress, draws back naturally enough from the revelation that the mother is impelled to make, and half accepts the release which the girl instantly offers him when she herself is told the truth. Afterward he repents, and would risk and condone all, but it is too late. In the forcing fire of that sharp crisis, the virginal soul of his bride that might have been has risen above and passed far away from him. If ever young woman “grew upon the sunny side of the wall, ” it was Nesta up to the time when she learned the truth about her parentage. And yet — paratum est cor suum — the divine preparation of the heart had been surely going on. And when the maiden of nineteen springs to moral maturity in one fierce hour, we know not which to admire more, — her arrowy rectitude, or her ample charity. Love answereth all things. She loves, encourages, and supports her mother. She loves, compassionates, and nerves her father. She never judges either. She seems not even to know how firmly she holds in her slender hand the balance between these two beloved beings of whose error she was born. In her large, fresh, and thoroughly illuminated inner being there is no room even for righteous scorn. And no more is there any room for hesitation or fear. Henceforth hers is a steady and undaunted championship of all women under a social cloud: both the actually “fallen ” and those like to fall; a championship whose Christlike frankness comes near to appalling, at times, even the most generous of her own devoted followers among men. The author’s divination of the probable workings of a brave, blameless, and clairvoyant woman’s heart seems at this point little less than dæmonic. He has painted, and painted con amore, a whole gallery of splendid and spotless girl-portraits : Lucy Desmond, Clara Middleton, Rhoda Fleming, the artless and heroic creature whom he saddles with the absurd name of Carinthia Jane, Diana Merrion, — but no, Diana does not quite belong with the others, nor does Aminta. But Nesta is the flower of them all; and it is with a sigh of heartfelt content that we give her, in the end, to be married to the most magnanimous of her many suitors, who had stood modestly aside in the days of her high prosperity, but with whom we know that she will lead, in comparative poverty and retreat, a life both blessed and blessing.

How explain the comparative neglect, even among titled officers of the Propaganda Fide, into which this noble romance has fallen in ten years ? I have heard one of the most earnest of the “master’s” enrolled followers confess, almost with tears in his eyes, that One of our Conquerors was, in every sense of the phrase, more strong than he ; and that he had started a score of times to accompany the hero over London Bridge, only to turn back baffled and disconcerted before he had gained the middle stream. Such a defection as this is clearly the author’s own fault. Let the truth be spoken plainly, then, about the positively unpardonable manner in which this beautiful story is told. Mr. Meredith is never, as we all know, too easy to read ; but nowhere else, in the entire range of his works, early and late, in prose or in verse, is he so resolutely, rudely, disdainfully, I may say, insolently enigmatical as in all but the concluding passages of One of our Conquerors. A man with so grave a message to deliver has no moral right to cast it in crabbed conundrums, and swaddle it in reams of allusive, illusive, and irrelevant verbiage! One might suspect Mr. Meredith of being ashamed and almost afraid of the intensity of his own feeling, were it not that, as a dramatic poet, both by temperament and title, he is the last man in the world whom one would expect to succumb to any such chilly and pitiful form of intellectual mauvaise honte. Moreover, at the very end of the book, as I have said, the author does forget himself and the tantalizing humors of his inverted phraseology. His diction then becomes quite simple and even terribly clear, and the long gathering agony of the situation he has conceived presses to its fall with a “polished velocity ” that recalls Ruskin’s renowned description of the Cataract of Schaffhausen.

So much for the first member of our trilogy. The story of Lord Ormont and his Aminta is briefer, and much more plainly, not to say bluntly told. Enter a schoolboy and a schoolgirl — the pride of their respective establishments, both beautiful, ambitious, romantic — ogling each other with rapture through a mist of morning dreams across the artificial barriers which are necessarily maintained between them. Silly creatures ! — Matthew and Aminta, — yet how sympathetically, how wistfully, how reverentially, even, is the fine fatuity of their awkward age depicted! The curtain drops abruptly upon the lean, sweet figures in this charming picture, to rise again seven years later and show Aminta married, through the successful manœuvring of a vulgar aunt, to a great nobleman and a great general, old enough to be her father, to wit, Lord Ormont, whose brilliant military services to his country in foreign war have never been fairly appreciated in England. He had been sulking sternly upon the Continent when himself captured as aforesaid, and he had stalked into the snare so palpably laid for him half in homage to Aminta’s fresh young loveliness, and half to spite his own ungrateful order at home, and disappoint, once for all, the very natural matrimonial expectations of its daughters. Lord Ormont marries his Aminta honorably at the English Consulate; but, alas, he is ashamed of having done so. When the time comes for taking her to England, the hero of a hundred fights has not the courage unequivocally to acknowledge his bride. He neither installs her in one of his historic houses, nor introduces her to his proper world; and that world, headed by his own fine, overbearing sister, Lady Charlotte, jealous to fanaticism for his fame, eagerly assumes Aminta’s position to be irregular, and treats the lady accordingly. All that Nathaly suffered righteously Aminta has to suffer without cause, and she endures for a time with a dignified patience wonderful in one so young and proud. That which wakes the insulted countess, not so much to wrath with her ungenerous lord as to scorn of herself for having accepted him at her aunt’s bidding from motives of gratified vanity and mere worldly ambition, is the arrival on the scene, as secretary to the earl, of her boy lover Matthew. The latter had welcomed as a special boon of Providence an engagement to compile and edit the famous memoirs which are to constitute Lord Ormont’s Apologia. The great unrewarded commander had long been the idol of Matthew’s chivalrous imagination as the unforgotten Aminta had been the angel of his one amorous dream. When fate brings him to dwell in the house of those two, and he finds her so wantonly discredited there, gallant struggles ensue, de part et d’autre, and prayers and dreams of a superhuman renunciation, but — it is perhaps not necessary to say what not long after happened.

Upon the rebels, in this instance, Mr. Meredith pronounces no formal sentence. By implication he may almost be regarded as justifying them, for it is Lord Ormont and his kind against whom he trains the tremendous artillery of his moral. That valiant old soldier had, after all, so sound a heart, and so keen a faculty of discernment, except when swayed by petty personal spite! He thoroughly appreciated, nay, doted on the infinite possibilities of the rare young creature whom, still, the selfish custom of his sex and the indurated cruelty of his caste permitted him to abuse, as toy or instrument, until he had fairly driven her to insurrection and constructive crime. He had intended to right her so magnificently when it should be his own good time and royal pleasure to do so! He would deck her with the worldrenowned family diamonds, and trample upon the whole impudent and ungrateful peerage in drawing her to his side. But when he finally turned and signified his gracious willingness to adjust her coronet the youthful countess was gone.

It is this escape of his outraged bride from the house that should have protected her which gives a mortal stab to the old patrician’s towering pride and fills him with a noble remorse. If the aristocratic vices have, up to this point, been allowed their most ruthless play in the persons both of the earl and Lady Charlotte, the aristocratic virtues too shine brightly in the composed and magnanimous conduct of the brother and sister after the catastrophe. With the everlasting exception of Shakespeare, I doubt if the other dramatist ever lived who could have portrayed so to the inmost palpitating life the rude, imperious, and at the same time intensely human and convincing character of Lady Charlotte Eglett. The final word of this strange, eventful, and more or less risqué history remains with her, and very simply and grandly is it spoken.

Still, there will always be good folk — and folk wise with the wisdom of both worlds, too — who will shake their heads over the ostensible teaching of Lord Ormont and his Aminta. Was it for this reason, or only for the sake of emphasizing his deeper meaning, that Mr. Meredith chose to retell the tale with altered characters and conditions, and so to relate it the second time as to vindicate his injured heroine absolutely and conclusively ? To say that The Amazing Marriage is only another version of the story of Lord and Lady Ormont is not, however, to suggest, for one moment, that the author repeats himself. Quite otherwise. He is indeed so affluent a creator of human types and combinations that the identity of the twice-told parable is not immediately apparent to the reader. Lord Fleetwood, the morbid and previously disappointed wooer of the mountain maid Carinthia Jane, seems at first sight to have little in common with a virile hero like Lord Ormont, except his eminent social rank. He is, however, like the elder nobleman, a despot by circumstance, — a nature not wholly ignoble, but spoiled by the possession and misuse of practically unlimited power; while the nature of the lesser and more modern man is badly corroded by the action of hungry parasites. A curiously keen perception of historic truth is shown in the change of type from the high-bred warrior of the Napoleonic era, whose pride is purely personal and racial, to the cynical Crœsus of a more material generation, who relies chiefly on his enormous wealth to save him from the consequences of his deeds. In the headlong pursuit of his unholy purpose Lord Fleetwood offers bribes, and stoops to meannesses for so much as suggesting which in his presence the elder tyrant would have slain a minion with his hands. And yet — startling anomaly ! — Lord Fleetwood is, in some respects, the more developed moral being of the two. He can perceive that his inferiors in station and fortune have rights, though he will take his own fill of outraging the same. Lord Ormont, the incorruptible, is unvisited by any such suspicion. Lord Fleetwood is, in fact, quite a bit of a social philanthropist, and considerably interested in the welfare of mankind when at leisure from his own lust. Lord Ormont has no such theoretic weakness or imaginary detachment. Money, he disdains. He regards it as an insignificant and rather sordid accident, inseparable merely from a position like his own. Lord Fleetwood and Victor Radnor, on the other hand, both gloat, in their several fashions, over their shekels, and the man who has inherited even more than the man who has amassed them. Yet they do it in no miserly spirit, but rather through a sublime confidence in the power of wealth to purchase — indulgence. When the pampered Lord Fleetwood finds, to his amazement, that the fair woman upon whom he had first fixed his choice for a bride has already given her heart to an impecunious army officer, it is in a transport of childish fury that he flings his own title and fortune at the feet of the woodland Cinderella, who chances to be the sister of his rival. She, poor child, receiving his heartless offer upon the night of her first ball, accepts it humbly, in her utter innocence of the world and of men, grateful to Heaven and the kind magnate who has saved her from the deeply dreaded fate of being a burden on her beloved brother and so hindering the consummation of his happiness. Lord Ormont had been a coward concerning his marriage, but a preux chevalier always in his private relations with his wife, as Victor Radnor had also been toward the woman who was not his wife. The more ingrain and brutal selfishness of Lord Fleetwood leads him to flaunt his mésalliance, and to make a veritable Roman holiday for his sycophantic following out of the indignities which he heaps upon the helpless head of his bride.

Helpless except through the resources of her own upright and intrepid soul. Slowly, surely, the child who had been so shamefully joué rises to the full height of her inviolate womanhood. She learns first to comprehend, then to endure, and eventually to command the abnormal situation. The meekness of her first surrender is only equaled by the majestic assurance of her ultimate ascendency. Neither Nathaly nor Aminta had, alas, been blameless. Carinthia, by all the sanctions of human law, remains transparently and triumphantly so. For her own sake and that of the heir of Fleetwood she will maintain her full right and title. The wealth which is her due she will take that she may distribute it in a considered charity. Her experience of ignominy in her own sinless person, like Nesta’s in that of her unhappy mother, makes her the tender sister and the tireless helper of all the despised and shamed. Only one reprobate is beyond the pale of her mercy, and that reprobate is her husband. To him as a wife she will on no condition return. For that spiritual fop, sick at last of self-indulgence, and shivering under a terrific moral arrest, there can be no place of repentance with her. So pitifully does the spoiled child of fortune plead with her before his desperate end that the weak reader is all but won over to his part, but Astræa is implacable. Thus much of hardness remains in that big heart as the result of a scathing early experience. The wound has healed, but the pale cicatrix is always there: —

Nothing, observe, can be imagined less namby-pamby, less meek and mild, conventionally supple and clinging, than the feminine ideal which commands Mr. Meredith’s allegiance, and which he holds up for admiration in these latter tales of his, or indeed in his romances generally. The woman whom he delights to honor, whom he compassionates, for whom he pleads, against whose gravest lapses he will sternly offset an age-long accumulation of arbitrary injustice, must herself possess a goodly share of the socalled virile virtues. Before everything she must have the primal — how frequently one is moved to add, the sole and final — virtue of courage. “She was brave ” is the laconic tribute of the heart-stricken old earl to his lost Aminta as he dreams, in his fading days, of the perils they had relished and confronted side by side. And again, of the same : “She was among the bravest of women. She had a full ounce of lead in her breast when she sat with the boys at their midday meal, showing them her familiar, pleasant face.” The scene in The Amazing Marriage where Carinthia, in the presence of her horrified and half-paralyzed lord, defends the village children from the onset of a rabid dog is one of the most thrilling in fiction; and after saying upon the burning last page of One of our Conquerors that Nesta brought her husband the “dower of an equal valiancy, ” he proceeds to a more subtle development of his favorite theory: “You are aware of the reasons, the many, why a courageous young woman requires of high heaven, far more than the commendably timid, a doughty husband. She had him; otherwise would that puzzled old world which beheld her step out of the ranks to challenge it, and could not blast her personal reputation, have commissioned a paw to maul her character, perhaps instructing the gossips to murmur of her parentage. Nesta Victoria Fenallan had the husband who would have the world respectful to any brave woman. This one was his wife.” The mailed maiden of Mr. Meredith’s generous dream is magnanimous, but she tolerates no base affront, and there is, as we have seen, a limit to her mercy. His Carinthia he credits with a sense of honor so refined that it puts the traditional albeit somewhat ragged code of the “gentleman ” conspicuously to shame. Where, as with Diana of the Crossways, this keen punctilio fails, even her creator’s own marked partiality barely avails to save from lasting disgrace the most seductive daughter of his imagination. For the woman who is unable to defend herself he has infinite pity, but — he leaves her to her fate. Nathaly dies without rehabilitation and redress: Letitia, open-eyed, disenchanted, and yet clasping her chain, is handed over to the baffied and humiliated Egoist.

But the oddest feature of Mr. Meredith’s crusade is this: the emancipation which he invokes for the suffering fair is in no sense an intellectual one. It is anything and everything rather than an affair of sciences, languages, courses, and careers. And still less is it what is quaintly called by a certain class of agitators “economic.” It is purely moral, and can be achieved only through the moral regeneration of the woman’s natural master. A champion of Woman’s Rights — even with capitals — Mr. Meredith stands confessed ; yet with the clearly defined proviso that a woman has no rights, under the present dispensation, save such as may accrue to her through the righteousness of man. No other author ever gauged so accurately all that a high-spirited woman feels, as none, surely, ever exposed so relentlessly the dastard quality that may shelter itself within the clanging armor of your imposing masculine bravo. Nevertheless Mr. Meredith takes his text quite frankly from Paradise Lost, “He for God only, she for God in him.” The first and by far the most difficult part of this antiquated ideal once realized, the second would be found to comprehend the way of all blessing for man and woman alike. The woman’s office in creation is to be magnified, her ways, in so far as she has been made “subject to vanity, not willingly, ” are to be justified, her more than Augustinian “love of love” is to be satisfied; but all and strictly within the adamantine limits established, from the beginning, in the order of nature, by the Author of Life.

Yet when I say that Mr. Meredith wants no intellectual emancipation for his clients I am conscious of using a hackneyed, clumsy, and inexact phrase. His loftier claim appears to be that the very best order of feminine capacity is something far too good for the service of the study. Relatively to this sublime endowment, mere cleverness is but a vulgar knack, — and verbal wit, contemptible. One may even say that he does his best to make it appear so, in the list he is at the pains to compile for us, of Diana Merrion’s renowned epigrams. They are solemnly recondite and elaborately dull. Only one of them has even the torpedo-snap of genuine repartee, and sticks in the memory because of the flash light that it flings backward on Mr. Meredith’s own fortified position. “Man has passed Seraglio Point, but he has not yet rounded Cape Turk.”

The paradox which our author so vehemently sustains is not absolutely new. Neither is it, historically speaking, very old. Its first distinct enunciation is probably to be found in the Magnificat: “Respexit humilitatem ancillae suae. . . . Deposuit potentes ex sede, et exaltavit humiles.” It is a mystical doctrine doubtless, and during not a few of the so-called Christian centuries it figured as an explicit article in the religious creed of a pious and valiant if somewhat destructive order of men. Life in this world, according to the scheme of things in question, is continuous warfare wherein offensive operations are committed to the man, and those of defense to the woman. He trains the bands, organizes the sorties, endures the bleak bivouac, leads the forlorn hope to desperate assault. She heartens and provisions the garrison, being quite ready herself to stand to the guns in time of stress, no less than to dress the wounds of the stricken and pray for the souls of those who fall. Such intervals of leisure as may occur in her strenuous life may well enough be occupied in the conning of missals and the working of tapestry to veil the brutal roughness of the fortress’ inner wall. These things are a parable; but really, when one comes to think of it, they symbolize no such very unfair division either of labor or of honor; nor is it easy to imagine a re-assignment of parts which would not upon the whole increase the chances of fatal confusion and final defeat. In short, Mr. Meredith’s ideal is that of the thirteenth century, rescued from disrepute and ridicule, and shaped, so far as may be, to the uses of the third millennium. And thus it was that my friend and I came to decide, between ourselves, beside our fallen fire, that his is, essentially, and above all others now current, a knightly pen.

Harriet Waters Preston .