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THE POETRY OF GEORGE MEREDITH.

The other day a subscriber to the London Library was told, on asking for Meredith's works, that the novels were all out, and that of the ten or dozen volumes of poems only two or three were in. Probably that represents the high-water mark of a demand for Meredith. For the moment, death is supreme, and the whole of that not very large world that cares for books is thinking and talking about George Meredith. The thinking and talking turn principally round the novels. The dominance of the novel in modern literature is so complete that many people are scarcely aware that the writer of The Egoist and Richard Feverel was also a poet. And of those who are, there is no question that few place the poet on at all the same level as the novelist. There they are very probably right. At any rate, there is no point of view from which any sane critic would pretend that Meredith was the greatest of our poets, while there is one from which he may be regarded as the greatest English novelist, perhaps the greatest novelist of any time or country. Whatever the defects of the novels, there are none to the making of which so much fundamental brainwork has been given. The novel has always suffered from lack of brains: but nobody can say that of a poetry which stretches from Shakespeare and Milton to Wordsworth and Shelley; to say nothing of the great Victorians. It was in the nature of Meredith to intellectualize whatever he touched, and that is as plain in the poems as in the novels. But the process which was so imperative in the one case may have been not far from superfluous in the other.

It is certain, then, that the poet occupies no such place in the history of our poetry as the creator of The Egoist

must always occupy in the history of the novel. And so, perhaps, the mem. bers of the London Library were wise in preferring the novels to the poetry when they made their combined rush at Meredith's works. Yet, after all, poetry has a way of out-living prose, and it is quite possible, that, two or three centuries hence, The Lark Ascending, Love in the Valley, and the great French odes will be remembered and the novels forgotten. No prose fails so completely as bad poetry; but then, on the other hand, when poetry succeeds, it has about it an imperishable quality never attained even by the best prose. And that for two plain reasons. It is form that preserves matter, and it is in poetry that the matter of human speech is most completely and perfectly under the mastery of form. That is one thing, and the other is that poetry is an utterance of the highest moods of the human mind, and it is these moods that most easily rise superior to the changes of times and manners. Nothing transcends time like the imagination. Job and Homer, Dante and Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton, speak a language which is of all time, which can never seem old-fashioned or odd. On the other hand, it is impossible to read the prose, even of the latest of them, the majestic chaos of Milton's pamphlets, without feeling at once that it is separated from us by two hundred years. The only poetry that ages as fast or faster than its contemporary prose is that which resigns its highest privileges in order to compete with prose. So long as it remains a thing made up of spirit and imagination even more than of intellect it is necessarily less tainted than prose by the subtle corruption of temporary and transient manners. So it may be with the work

of George Meredith. The fashion of this generation, as of all others, passes away, and may well become eccentric or wearisome in the ears of the next. How much that was once brilliant in Thackeray is now insipid or absurd, because its life lay in its reflection of some folly of the season, a folly which has now ceased to be amusing or even credible! Time only can show how much Victorian alloy is mingled with the imperishable gold of Meredith's prose. But there is no alloy in the song of "The Lark Ascending."

Unluckily, however, the poems are very far from all being of that fine quality. There is no use in denying that their gold has only too much alloy in it. It is not the alloy of matter, of the fashions and fancies of a past generation; it is something more fatal, an alloy of style and of essence. No honest reader can deny that the large majority of Meredith's poems are, to a greater or less degree, harsh, difficult, and obscure. Some of them have scarcely a line that yields its meaning at once, and at least a few lines that never yield their meaning at all. How many people can make anything whatever of such passages as

A woman who is wife despotic lords Count faggot at the question, Shall she live?

Who is quite sure of what the story of Archduchess Anne and Count Louis is meant to be? Who could paraphrase "The Last Contention" with any confidence of accuracy? Who does not find reading "The Empty Purse" something like trying to find one's way, without a path, through a thick wood on a dark night, in the midst of a terrific storm of thunder and lightning? The result is a rather complex expe rience, at once alarming, exhausting, stimulating, and, occasionally, when the flashes come, illuminating; but, when you reach daylight and the open

country, you cannot give a very clear account of the wood. The fact is, that Meredith treated both thought and language as a tyrant rather than as a lawful sovereign. And not even the greatest can do that with impunity. It is as true of language as it is, in Bacon's famous phrase, of Nature, that you can only conquer it by obeying. It is vain to run a-tilt against the necessary limitations of the human mind. The rules of grammar, which require the use of relatives and conjunctions, are not arbitrary things: they exist in response to the mind's demands. We cannot think in shorthand, as we are required to do in such verse as:

Rejoice ye to know not shame,
Not a dread, not a doubt; to have
done

With the tortures of thought in the
throes,

Our animal tangle, and grass
Very sap of the vital in this:
That from flesh unto spirit man grows
Even here on the sod under sun;
That she of the wanton's kiss
Broken through with the bite of an

asp,

Is Mother of simple truth.
Relentless quencher of lies.

The general idea of this is plain enough, at any rate to a Meredithian, from the first; but the details in which it expresses itself? Some of them do not get into clear daylight till the third or fourth reading, and one or two perhaps never. The fact is that in such writing as this we are still in the stage which may be described in its own words, "the tortures of thought in the throes," the stage we sometimes see in Shakespeare, sometimes in Shelley, rarely in any other really great poet. Poetry can never do its proper work when it is thrown at us in the shapeless shape of a succession of linguistic, or logical, or pictorial conundrums. Such a state of things is altogether fatal to the harmonious union

of ear, and heart, and mind, which is the condition of poetry doing its full and proper work. It is not merely a question of the extreme obscurity of many of Meredith's poems. They are often not only hard to understand, but unpleasant to listen to. They too often lack almost entirely the smoothness, the softness, the divine ease and suavity as of something that moves on its way secure and assured, which the true kings of poetry are never willing to go long without. To put it in one word, there is too little music in them. If, as Dryden said, music is inarticulate poetry, it is equally true that poetry is articulate music, and the defect of Meredith is that he too often gives us the articulation without the music. The power of the mind in Meredith is in his poetry, as everywhere else, prodigious; but "the special faculty of the poet," as Johnson said, "is that of joining music with reason," and for that mere power of brain is not enough. "Delight is the chief if not the only end of poesy," wrote Dryden again, following Aristotle; the kind of delight, no doubt, which is "to reason joined," but primarily and essentially delight: and the fountain of delight is beauty. And there is no delight because there is no beauty in such a tangle of ugly words and mixed metaphors as, to give one instance out of fifty, the sonnet entitled The State of Age. Who can take pleasure in such lines as:

Thou art for this our life an ancient egg,

Or a tough bird; thou hast a rudderless tongue

Turning dead trifles, like the cock of dung;

Which runs, Time's contrast to thy

halting leg.

But enough, perhaps more than enough, of this ungracious but necessary business of clearing the ground on which Meredith's poetic claims

really rest. His is a case in which perfect frankness is best, because most in accordance with his own character, and also most conducive to the increase of his popularity. We should not serve his fame by pretending that he is generally easy or always melodious. But when frank admission has been made of the worst it ought to win credence for the most wholehearted vindication of the best. The mill may not always grind as perfectly as we could wish, but no one brings finer grist to it than Meredith. The people who read poetry now are no longer what they once were, older or younger children demanding to be pleased; for good and for evil, for evil certainly as well as for good, they are become almost exclusively serious men and women, young or old, who look to poetry for inspiration and strength. To those who can receive his rather stern message no one brings more of these than this last survivor of the Victorian age, who seems to belong as much to a day he will have helped to create as to his own. He abounds in matter, in the stuff of brain and will and character, in real and vital knowledge of human life, in power of insight into the great forces that lie about us to hem us in or lift us up into a higher freedom, according as we understand them and face them with courage, with full and cheerful acceptance, with love. He, too, is a "physician of the iron age," and his prescription for it is no soothing syrup of any sort but a bracing tonic. Accept the iron of the age, he seems to say, and learn to be men of iron, men armed for any fortune, conscious that all victories worth winning are won by fighting, by returning again and again to the apparently unequal struggle, by faith that there is an ultimate victory to be found, not only beyond, but actually in, pain, in defeat, and even in death itself.

That is the root and base of Mere

dith's gospel. How does he set his poetry to preach it? First of all, in the old way of making it show us, now and then, even in a vision of musical magic, how good and sound a thing life is, the growth and vigor of man, the wonder and beauty of the place in which it has been given him to live. Here, as elsewhere, the condition of good fighting is to know we are not fighting for a shadow. The supreme triumph of all the arts is the same. is to make us feel, in the presence of the great picture or the great poem, an assured and serene conviction of the harmony that underlies the visible system of things, it is to be a kind of anticipation of the ultimate resolving of all doubts and discords. Meredith is not always simple enough to do this. But, in his happy moments, he can do it triumphantly.

It

Happy, happy time, when the white star hovers

Low over dim fields fresh with

bloomy dew,

Near the face of dawn, that draws athwart the darkness,

Threading it with color, like yew-
berries the yew.

Thicker crowd the shades as the grave
East deepens

Glowing, and with crimson a long
cloud swells.

Maiden still the morn is; and strange she is, and secret;

Strange her eyes: her cheeks are cold

as cold sea-shells.

not stand alone. The same breath of Romance is in the simpler melody of The Young Princess, especially in the final stanzas which half recall those which are the finest thing but one in Tennyson's Maud:

The soft night-wind went laden to death

With smell of the orange in flower; The light leaves prattled to neighbor ears;

The bird of the passion sang over his tears;

The night named hour by hour.

Sang loud, sang low, the rapturous
bird

Till the yellow hour was nigh,
Behind the folds of a darker cloud:
He chuckled, he sobbed, alow, aloud;
The voice between earth and sky.

These poems are obviously in the tradition which Tennyson inherited from Keats, a tradition of content, or rather of delight in the sheer beauty of the visible and audible world. But more often Meredith shows a nearer kinship to Shelley. Like Shelley, he can rarely rest in the gift that comes to eye or ear; he must hurry on to a rapture of intellectual and spiritual interpretation. His Lark, for instance is not like Keats' Nightingale, a bird, only different from others in a dream of immortality, but like Wordsworth's Cuckoo, "no bird but an Invisible Thing," like Shelley's "blithe spirit, Bird thou never wert." At least the actual bird of the first portion of the poem is soon absorbed in the voice and the message he is made to bring.

But Love in the Valley, though the
supreme instance of this particu-
lar power in Meredith, is too well
known to need quotation. The day of
the Romantics is over, but the day of
Romance is eternal. Not Keats him-
self has surpassed these stanzas in
their gift of bathing the world in a
shower of magic light whose beauty
is the all-sufficient assurance of its
truth. But Love in the Valley does He is, the hills, the human line,

For singing till his heaven fills,
'Tis love of earth that he instils,
And ever winging up and up,
Our valley is his golden cup,
And he the wine which overflows
To lift us with him as he goes:
The woods and brooks, the sheep and
kine,

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