Memories of George Meredith, o.m

by Lady Butcher. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. 1920. 12mo, viii+151 pp. $1.50.

‘AH, did you once see Shelley plain?’ — There is a respectable number of persons in America now who are ready to listen reverently to any authentic memories of George Meredith, and who will welcome and cherish this little book by one whose friendship with him was unbroken through the last forty-one years of his life.

The author was aged thirteen when she first met Meredith. Her young cousin, at whose house in the country she was visiting, proposed to her that they should get up early and climb Box Hill to see the sun rise. As they groped their way through the dark, the boy said, ‘ I know a madman who lives on Box Hill. He ’s quite mad, but very amusing. Let’s go and shout him up!' So they went up to Meredith’s cottage and began to throw stones against His bedroom window.

The novelist appeared at the window with a shout, and presently joined the children, ‘slightly clad, his nightshirt thrust into brown trousers, and his bare feet into leather slippers,’ and set off with them up the hill. ’Come on, London-pated girl!' he adjured the lagging thirteen-year-old. At the top of the hill, while the sun rose, he poured forth to the two youngsters ’the most wonderful prose hymn to Nature, Life, and what he called obligation.'

Of course, the girl was fascinated by this strange, delightful being. Whenever she visited her cousin’s family, she always saw Meredith. Later, he came to London and stopped at her father’s house. There he took part in Shakespeare readings, a form of entertainment to which the family was devoted. On one occasion he was a guest at a soap-bubble party, and tried to prevail upon the fattest of the guests to run about under the soap-bubbles and keep them floating in air.

The young girl was older than thirteen when she complained to him that one of her suitors had no conversation. ’Mr. Meredith pounced on this and said;. “Listen to the girl — no conversation! Once I walked down a lane and went into a cemetery, and behold, there were all the graves of those who had been rejected by this dear girl — and on each tombstone was a name, and beneath each name was the sad epitaph: ‘ Died for want of repartee!' ” ’

The good Meredithian will find in this little book many gleanings from the wit and wisdom of the sage; the author was accustomed to enter in her diary utterances that impressed her. ‘He told me that he had trained himself when he walked, to observe, not to feel.’ ‘ You have a mind; use it, or it will bite you.’ In reference to the public’s attitude toward his work: ’They have always been abusing me. I have been observing them. It is the crueller process.’

Lady Butcher brings out Meredith’s characteristic traits — his pride, his gayety, in which there was sometimes a touch of malice, his loyalty to friends, his depth of feeling, his courage and cheerfulness under suffering. The reader’s chief regret must be that the book is not longer, and the recollections more copious.

A. S. P.