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The meadows green, the fallows brown,
The dreams of labor in the town;
He sings the sap, the quickened veins;
The wedding song of sun and rains
He is, the dance of children, thanks
Of sowers, shout of primrose-banks,
And eyes of violets while they breathe;
All these the circling song will wreathe,
And you shall hear the herb and tree,
The better heart of men shall see,
Shall feel celestially, as long
As you crave nothing save the song.

Yet even here the difference between Meredith and Shelley is obvious. No poet ever had his feet more firmly planted on this solid earth than George Meredith. No poet ever lived so habitually in actual and metaphysical clouds, none was ever so entirely a "thing enskied," as Shelley. Meredith follows him, a long way after, in power of lyrical rapture; he shares his burning ardor for justice and right, and his unquenchable faith in the future; but while Shelley is the most ethereal and spiritual of all poets, Meredith is, in a good sense, the most terrestrial. The goal Shelley dreamed of was pure spirit, free of body, uninfluenced, untainted by body. The ideal of Meredith was spirit grown out of body, not forgetting the flesh, not forgetting even the ancestral beast, but carrying him along too, raising flesh, and even the transformed beast, to higher and ever higher life. For Meredith is, more definitely than Shelley, as definitely even as Wordsworth, a poet with a doctrine. Whether his doctrine is either as fit for poetic treatment, or as universal in its appeal, as Wordsworth's is another question. I cannot myself think that it is. “Quit you like men, be strong," is a noble text; but the preacher who used no other would be felt to be lacking in sympathy, in tenderness, even in knowledge of the inevitable weakness of our struggling, erring, falling, human nature. As we hear the strong voice reiterating its

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message of no weakness and no surrender, we cannot help feeling sometimes that the strain put on us is too great and too continuous, we cannot help turning away to the other voice that "spoke and loosed our hearts in tears." The greatness of Wordsworth lay in the universality of his address: the primal simplicity of his poetry brought its "healing power," its restoration of the freshness and ease of youth, not to the strong-willed and strong-brained only, but to all. The danger of Meredith is that the weak may shrink before his almost violent masterfulness, the simple may falter and fail before the prickly fortifications of intellectualism with which he surrounds his gospel. These are drawbacks which no one will deny. But, if Meredith's gospel is not one that all can hear, it is none the less one of rare stimulus for those who can. It may, of course, be found in the novels by those who look for it, but in the poems: it is almost omnipresent. In varying forms of expression it is suggested everywhere, and there are a large number of poems, such as Earth and Man, The Woods of Westermain, The Thrush in February, A Faith on Trial, The Empty Purse, of which it is the staple theme. The best account of it is that given in the chapter called "The Philosopher and Moralist" in Mr. George Trevelyan's book on Meredith, the strongest thing in a most interesting and useful book which makes many rough Meredithian places plain. Its shortest expression is perhaps that which Mr. Trevelyan quotes from Lord Ormont: "we do not get to any Heaven by renouncing the Mother we spring from; and when there is an eternal secret for us, it is best to believe that Earth knows, to keep near her, even in our utmost aspirations." It is, in act, a doctrine of earth, A Reading of Earth, as he named one volume of his poems. Poetry can never be stated in terms of

prose, and to pretend to set out in any language but its own the faith that inspires the poetry of Meredith would be to ignore the very nature of poetry. But, recognizing the utter inadequacy of any such attempts, and the positive hindrance they become if accepted as complete, there may be no harm in saying that the root doctrine of Meredith is that we come from earth, the whole of us, not only flesh and blood, but also brain and spirit; that we forget this at our peril; that we have to iive to the full the life of earth, keeping blood and brain and spirit in close touch with earth; and that, all having the same source, all have equal right to life, so that blood must never be swallowed up or lost in brain, nor brain in spirit. As he puts

it in The Woods of Westermain,

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If he is to see her as she is, to "know her for Spirit," to feel "stern joy her origin," and himself, her child, no "child of woe," he must purge the "distempered devil of self," look bravely with an eye "from Reason not disjoined" on old "fables of the Above," and turn resolutely away from the deceptions of an "unfaith clamoring to be coined To faith by proof." To arrive at the final goal he must purify and develop all the powers that are in him, and lose not one:

She her just Lord may view

Not he, her creature, till his soul has yearned

With all her gifts to reach the light discerned

Her spirit through.

Then in him time shall run

As in the hour that to young sunlight

crows:

And-"If thou hast good faith it can repose,"

She tells her son.

If this be Paganism, it is a kind of Paganism of which our Neo-Pagans have given us too little. The faith of Meredith is, of course, not that of the Christian Church, but, whatever the

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man ever was less inclined to put the moral clock back to the pre-Christian hour. The notion, with which we are familiar in the writings of several French, and at least one English poet, that the victory of Christianity was a defeat of the highest human civilization, an almost uncompensated loss to the world, finds no countenance from Meredith. The single sonnet, called The Garden of Epicurus, is enough to show the wide gulf that separates him from the earlier work, at any rate, of the great poet who was so nearly united with him in death.

That Garden of sedate Philosophy Once flourished, fenced from passion

and mishap,

A shining spot upon a shaggy map; Where mind and body, in fair junction free,

Luted their joyful concord; like the tree

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Not she gives the tear for the tear:
Harsh wisdom gives Earth, no more;
In one the spur and the curb:
An answer to thoughts or deeds:
To the Legends an alien look;
To the Questions a figure of clay.
Yet we have but to see and hear,
Crave we her medical herb.

For the road to her soul is the Real. And the Real includes the whole of things: not self only but humanity. The message of Earth is that shows man how to escape from the "rank individual fens" to "common delights"; shows him

one

How flesh unto spirit must grow. Spirit raves not for a goal.

From root to flowering twigs a flowing Shapes in man's likeness hewn,

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Desires not: neither desires

The Sleep or the Glory: it trusts; Uses my gifts, yet aspires; Dreams of a higher than it.

It

The whole poem repays careful study for anyone who wishes to try to understand the thought of Meredith. has always been part of the function of poetry to be a voice of the highest ideas of its time. No one will deny that it was that in Meredith's hands. He lived in a generation disillusioned of science as its predecessor had been disillusioned of faith; left face to face with questions it cannot simply put aside without loss of intellectual and spiritual stature, questions which, it becomes increasingly plain, can never be answered by any theory merely

His

physical or merely intellectual. And he gives his brave attempt at an answer: an answer ultimately, of course, of faith; one, that is, which interprets the facts by transcending them. No one can miss the courage of it, its force and sanity, and its life. But, if poetry must deal with ideas, it remains true that it does so at its peril. For, as we know, its essence is to be "simple, sensuous, passionate"; and it is not easy to be any of the three when handling pure ideas. So in Meredith. finest passages are full of an energy of fire that sets the thought aglow and kindles the heart of the coldest reader. But his inveterate intellectualism sometimes asserts itself over-much. And then, when we are left with the thought alone, we remember the saying that philosophy without poetry is an illusion. At any rate for poetry the pure idea, untouched by emotion, uncolored by imagination, is nothing. If In a queer sort of meditative mirth; poetry cannot move us, it cannot do anything for us. And many readers, who yet bear a grateful heart for the gifts of Meredith's untiring will and unresting brain, will turn from the moral and intellectual gymnastics of the argumentative poems to such a little meditation as the Dirge in the Woods, which has no faith or philosophy in it but only pure poetry, such poetry as Goethe's Warte nur, balde Ruhest du auch

But Meredith, as befits the author of the novels, is far from being only a poet of the great problems of life and death. He is also, for instance, what scarcely any of the great nineteenthcentury poets have been, a poet of the comedy of manners. There is no poetic drama of contemporary life that can be compared with Modern Love. It is tragedy and comedy in one, the eternal tragedy seen from within of the eternal comedy seen from without. The poet has the Shakespearean power of getting up to those heights of being from which human things are seen in all their petty, almost squalid, insignificance, the point of view from which, as he says:

A wind sways the pines,
And below

Not a breath of wild air:
Still as the mosses that glow
On the flooring and over the lines
Of the roots here and there.
The pine-tree drops its dead;
They are quiet, as under the sea.
Overhead, overhead

Rushes life in a race,

As the clouds the clouds chase;

And we go,

And we drop like the fruits of the tree,

Even we,
Even so.

If any state be enviable on earth,
"Tis yon born idiot's, who, as days go

by,

Still rubs his hands before him, like a fly,

the same as that which gives the Fool the final word in some of Shakespeare's tragedies. But like Shakespeare again, Meredith is too profoundly human to rest long content in any Greek god's attitude of half-contemptuous contemplation of man. “We are the lords of life, and life is warm"; and the poet is soon back to the struggle, with all his heart in it, feeling that its noise and dust are only what must be looked for from a mint that is always at work coining its copper, and silver, and gold. Modern Love is not easy reading, of course; very little that Meredith wrote is. But its difficulty has been greatly exaggerated; and those who will take the trouble to give it two or three readings will find nearly all the clouds lift and the road shine out plain before them. This is not the place to analyze the often analyzed drama. But it may be the place to say a word of the Meredithian gift of which it provides perhaps

the supreme exhibition. In poetry as in prose, Meredith was a born maker of memorable phrases. No poet so little read was ever so much quoted. His striking lines are, no doubt, far from common property yet; but their few readers remember them, use them, and spread them. And the particular reason why they are remembered is, I think, plain. It is seldom their purely poetic quality, seldom any haunting melody of sounds, seldom any of these master-strokes of the poetic pencil which leave the eye for ever full of a vision which it can neither penetrate nor forget. We can all remember lines of Keats, or Wordsworth, or Shelley, that we sang over and over with delight long before we had even asked ourselves exactly what they meant. Nobody ever did that with the poetry of Meredith, except in the case of some half-dozen or dozen poems of the Love in the Valley order. Mr. Trevelyan, indeed, talks frequently of the "haunting quality" of his verse. But this, with those exceptions, appears to me a complete mistake. When we speak of that supreme quality we are thinking, it seems to me, or ought to be thinking, of such things as

And Tiresias and Phineus, prophets old;

or

The river glideth at his own sweet will;

or

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell—

not of such things as the passage he quotes from The Empty Purse, which has "By my faith there is feasting to come," for its first line, and "A cry of the metally gnome" for its last. Such passages may ring with meaning and stimulus and good cheer; but to talk of their "haunting quality" is to misuse words. No; it is not in that di

rection that we must look for the cause of Meredith's lines so often remaining in the memory. They are remembered and quoted, not for their manner, but for their matter. The two are, no doubt, inseparable-the form can only be the form of the matter, and the matter only the matter of the form; but still we can and do distinguish some poets who, like Browning, are strongest in matter, and others who, like Swinburne, are strongest in form. And Meredith belongs emphatically to the first class. He is full of the stuff of brain and character, and we wish to remember him because we know that we get from him an increase of our stock of truth and will and power. And the style-not a purely poetic, not a "haunting" style-fits its object; it is tense and terse, of twisted and concentrated strength, of a Tacitean disdain of superfluities. The result is phrases that are sometimes, though not always, hard to grasp at first, but when once grasped, are held firm; such phrases as

Their sense is with their senses all mixed in,

Destroyed by subtleties these women are!

More brain, O Lord, more brain!

or

This truth is little known to human shades,

How rare from their own instinct 'tis to feel!

or-

And life, some think, is worthy of the
Muse;

or, the final words of all, where we do at last get something of Mr. Trevelyan's "haunting quality"—

Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul

When hot for certainties in this our life!

In tragic hints here see what ever.

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