George Meredith's Return

by CHARLES MORGAN

1

MEREDITH, it would appear, is still out of season. A biography by Siegfried Sassoon, a new edition of Modern Love with an introduction by Cecil Day Lewis, and an address by Osbert Sitwell before the English Association are evidence enough that, among writers of widely different schools, interest has reverted to him. There has been little public response. Articles on the subject have been dutifully written, but the works of Meredith himself have not begun to appear on the tables of ordinary intelligent readers or in their conversation. Meredith has been dead forty years. It has been a long purgatory for so great a man.

It will certainly not end, as Trollope’s purgatory ended, by his being recognized as a comfortable period-piece. Meredith is a challenge or nothing; a stimulant, never a soporific; and it is, I think, a misrepresentation of him to suggest, as many critics do, that his stimulus was primarily that of high comedy, He himself gave grounds for this suggestion and might even, in certain moods, have welcomed it, for he had his polite, artificial, drawingroom moods when his imagination dressed him up as a courtier; but to think of him in this costume and, even more, to praise him in the same breath with which the praises of Miss Austen are ordinarily sung is to do him disservice. Just as he had none of Trollope’s steady, blunt indifferences, so he had none of Miss Austen’s delicate detachments. They, who had nothing else in common, had this: the gift of shrugging their shoulders, and this gilt, whether it take the tough Trollopean or the ironically Austenian form, is today highly appreciated. It inarches with our cynicisms and our fashionable despairs.

Meredith had none of it. He was not tough and blunt, but stalwart and penetrating, with a love effacing awkward facts and driving his way through them and coming out on the other side. He was an ironist too, but his irony (except when he made an affectation of it, as he did sometimes in his courtly moods) was not an avoidance of passion but a way into it. Whether he was writing verse or a novel, he was, in essence and impulse, a poet, which is precisely what Trollope and Miss Austen were not.

He will come out of purgatory for none of the polite reasons which have delivered Trollope and Miss Austen, but when it is grasped that, far from being a period-piece, he was writing for the latter half of the twentieth century and beyond. To grasp this may not be easy. He was so modern that he had the modern vice of non-lucidity, of playing sometimes to an audience of one — for which another term is “showing off.”He had, too, a virtue which unfortunately is often confused with his vice: the virtue of extreme compression, of poetic lightning. When he had seen most clearly and was most passionately and earnestly struggling to communicate his vision; when, that is to say, he was by no means fiddling to an audience of one, but was fiercely striving to draw down light from heaven or draw up heat from earth and give it to mankind, he could sometimes be made obscure by excess of meaning. He had, in brief, two obscurities: the obscurity of wilfulness, which was his weakness; and the obscurity of pressure, which was a consequence of his strength.

To read Meredith is, therefore, an exercise in attention, but the reader may at least be assured that the exercise is not a literary-historical one. On the contrary, the mental fight in which Meredith unceasingly engaged was for a way through darkness and evil powers which beset us far more closely than they beset his contemporaries. In this sense, he was prophetic: a modern poet but without a grievance, without self-pity, undaunted, and, on occasions, when obscurity fell from him, with that power of enchanted singing which is a poet-thinker’s irresistible claim to be heard.

Poets who never sing, whose whole work is an intellectual growling or an emotional stutter, would do better to write textbooks on the economic or sociological subjects that interest them, for a poet’s claim to be heard as a truthteller is that the truth which comes through him is not rational only but has a natural or a divine source. The proof of this, the only proof that our whole being spontaneously accepts, is that a natural or divine voice now and then speaks audibly in his words, and he sings as Shakespeare did in “O Mistress Mine” and Meredith in “Love in the Valley.” Meredith unquestionably had this authority without which poets, as poets, have none, and it entitles him, even when he is fighting for meaning, to be deeply searched for the truth with which he had contact.

It has seemed important, when speaking of him as a “modern” poet, to make clear that he is not a poet of dust and ashes, and to show in what way his lyrical genius entitles him to be heard as a sage. But it is not the purpose of 1 his essay to praise his lyricism; still less to analyze his novels; but rather to suggest why he is to be regarded as a. man who spoke, as has been said, to “the latter half of the twentieth century and beyond.”

The problems of our life which may be called “modern” have their root in the fact that our relationship to Nature is different, not in degree only but in kind, from that of our ancestors. They felt that they had too little power over Nature; we know that we have too much. They were struggling always to make little machines, plows or catapults, to do some of the work of their muscles in peace or war; we, if we lose our heads or our faith —and neither is easy to maintain — are plunged into a nightmare of asking how we may control the machines we have raised up.

The United States Government’s official publication on Atomic Energy, written by Professor If. D. Smyth of Princeton and issued by the War Department in August, 1045, has never had the credit it deserves as a piece of literature. Nothing in our time has been better written for its purpose. It is a flawless example of discretion and lucidity. Everything, thank heaven, is not told, but within the permitted limits nothing is blurred.

Not often does this masterpiece move from the ways of pure or applied science to speak of the feelings of men, but when it does the effect, is overwhelming. Having described for 133 pages the growth of the atomic project and the struggle of scientists to produce the bomb, Professor Smyth says on a quiet breath: “Initially many scientists could and did hope that some principle would emerge which would prove that atomic bombs were inherently impossible. This hope has faded gradually.” It is a deeply humane statement of mankind’s predicament. These men went on with their work hoping always that “some principle would emerge” which would grant to them and to all the world the salvation of failure.

Why did they go on? Not only because, if they did not, the enemy might anticipate them, but because it was in the destiny of science that they should go on. It is the world’s fate that it cannot refuse knowledge, as it is man’s fate that he cannot cease to think, today his knowledge, his power over Nature, has so far outrun his wisdom that he is weighed down by guilt — the perpetual theme of our poetry of despair —and feels himself to be, like the Fallen Angels, outcast from Good. “Now seems the language heard of Love as rain/To make a mire where fruitfulness was meant.” Meredith in his sonnet “The Promise in Disturbance” has the black mood of our age, but also the transcendence of it.

Paradise lost, says Meredith here, but neither illusory nor destroyed; paradise regainable.

2

MEREDITH is called often a “nature poet,” and so he was, but not only or chiefly in the sense of his being one who praised the sensible beauty of flowers and trees and sky. Earth was his symbol; a harmony between Man and Earth was his recurrent theme; discord was his note of tragedy. Man and Earth, he said, are naturally harmonious; therefore discord between them is a sin against Nature which Nature punishes. The sum of life’s good was, in his view, made up of harmonies existing one within the other. First is the internal harmony of each man undivided against himself. He must accept. He must not rebel against the natural distinctions, the hierarchy of powers, by being enviously egalitarian — “my betters are my masters.”

In brief: I preserve my internal harmony by a proud, unembittered acceptance of natural differences.

The second of Meredith’s harmonies is that of personal relationship, and he studies it again and again, in novels and poems, in the form of the relationship between man and woman. In that form its many dualisms and perils of discord — Spirit and Flesh, Intelligence and Instinct, Symbol and Common Sense—are seen pressed together. On this subject he establishes his poetic authority by singing ns only the inspired have ever sung: —

The harmony oi early love is here taken by Meredith as the emblem of man’s perfect relationship with all that the world is, his “morning light" and paradise unbetrayed. The same harmony is at the heart of The Ordeal of Richard Feverel and is the point of reference from which the agonized departures of Modern Love are to be measured. This sequence of fifty poems is commonly regarded as Meredith’s criticism of marriage, but it is much more than that; it is, implicitly, a criticism of the relationship between human beings.

The care that each of us has for his internal harmony, the integrity of his own personality, makes difficult mutual response and intermixing. The difficulty is increased by the imperfection of our means of communication, for language, even the language of good will and compromise, can he salt on a wound when once the wound has been opened; and yet, between those who have loved and fallen apart, the feeling (not the memory only) of their lost harmony persists, and what torments them is much less their actual misfortunes, angers or denials, than their sense of exile. They are together, but outside paradise; their being together is made intolerable by that exclusion. Compromise, reason, even desire are all dust and ashes to those in a condition of discord. “ I see no sin: the wrong is mixed.” Nevertheless “no morning can restore what we have forfeited.”

And yet, cries Meredith, in the supreme poem of the series, the harmony was and is natural. Nature herself flows in to quiet the discords of men. When husband and wife walk hopelessly together in the open air, then: —

It is Meredith looking out, as he always did, from the discord of personal relationship to the including harmony of Earth with Man. To this third harmony the greater part of his work is devoted, and he would have seen the use of atomic energy as a threat to it. But he would not have limited his criticism to the military uses, He would not have howled in self-pity: “This thing is evil because it kills men”; nor would he have said complacently: “All will be well if only wo can exclude the military use and develop the civil use so that it may yield us more and more riches and power.” He would have seen clearly, as the world has not yet seen, that the civil uses are not necessarily beneficent, but may yet further cut Man off from his origin in Nature and his sense of being her child. He is a wicked and foolish child who attempts to enslave his mother.

But Meredith was not a defeatist. If you failed in one harmony, you might hope to find reconciliation in a greater and including harmony. A lonely man at odds with himself might find peace in the relationship of human love. Two lovers whose harmony had broken down might have assuagement in that loving Nature which “became her husband and my bride.” And if, in mid-century, our nuclear physicists can no longer “hope that some principle will emerge" to make impossible a new discord in Man’s relationship with Earth, Meredith’s sage counsel would be to look for a wider harmony beyond it.

His emblem of the supreme harmony was the stars. They were that religion in him which transcended his religion of Earth. Whenever stars rise in his poetry, his poetry soars. The familiar instance is his great sonnet “Lucifer in Starlight ” where the fiend, in rebellion, is awed by them: —

But his most explicit word is in “Meditation under Stars.” Here he comes astonishingly close to stating our own problem in our own terms, when he asks whether we are to consider

and answers in effect that the stars represent a harmony not affected by our discord, and a love (his other word for harmony) not destructible by the seeming failure of the love that binds Man and Earth: —

The italics are not Meredith’s. They mark his deeper answer to his own deep questioning; his alternative to the distracted fears and desperate remedies which are causing the twentieth century to lose its balance.