NOTES

New Zealand Tablet, 7 April 1921, Page 26

NOTES

Meredith ■ On the shelves of our leading booksellers’ shops you may see in some remote corner to-day all the works of George Meredith with the dust on top of them and their paper covers fading with age. Robert Chambers and William Le Queux and id ovine genus are in the windows in whatever sort of editions people will buy. Meredith taxes the intelligence and presupposes education while the latter only postulate a capacity for wasting time unprofitably, and therefore they sell. " However, New Zealand is not alone in neglecting Meredith. England has had few greater, luminaries in her literary firmament, but. England, too, neglects him. It is a fact pregnant with significance that while Richard Fever el fell flat in London it was at once proclaimed as a masterpiece by French critics. But, . just as French prose is incomparably above English prose, , French criticism is as far above what in England passes for criticism as one thing on this earth above another. Meredith had many of the gifts .of the great French novelists; he was head and shoulders above the British reading public; and it was a tardy recognition that came to him even among the elect. Indeed, his public is the elect, and more than any modern writer he remains caviare to the general. George Meredith was a keen psychologist: no pen has depicted in English finer characters than Diana and Sandra. And as it is where works of Art in general are concerned, so • • • i • , O ” it is with his work: appreciation is not possible for those who are ipcapable of admiring the art, of a .master. A Prophet of Sanity Meredith has been called a prophet of sanity. From a well-known essay of his we learn a little of his philosophy. He tells us not to take things too seriously, awhile not taking them too "lightly; to be neither a pessimist nor an "optimist; to laugh if we must laugh but withal not without a certain tenderness; to recognise the mockery and littleness of humanity and to appreciate what there is of good and noble in it ; not to forget when we consider failures how much they that failed have done to make the road easier for their successors. Plere is a passage which gives us the clue to his spirit: 'ibl esw : i r-. ,v “If you 1 detect the ridicule, and your kindliness I-is chilled by *' it,- 1 you ' are slipping into ' the grasp of > satire. i ? : ifißg b If instead -of- falling foul of the ridiculous person with a satiric rod, to make him writhe and shriek aloud.

you prefer to sting him under a semi-caress, by which he shall in his anguish be rendered dubious whether indeed anything has hurt him, you are an engine of Irony. 'lf you laugh all round him, tumble-him; roll him about, deal him a smack and drop a tear on him, own his likeness to you and yours, to your neighbor, spare him as little as you shun, pity him as much as you expose, it is the.spirit of humor that is moving you. x The Comic, which is -the perceptive, is the governing spirit, awakening and giving aim to those powers of laughter, but it is not to be confounded with them, differing from satire in not sharply driving into the quivering sensibilities, and from humor, in not comforting them and tucking them up, or indicating a broader than the range of this bustling world to them.” - . Under all his humor and brilliance lies a fund* of what the French call It gros bon sens cummun Anglais —the gross common sense of John Bull. But his genius breaks forth in such , a dazzling coruscation that only the student gets to the heart of him. The average reader, in a hurry to get on with' the story, is blinded by his very light and cannot see at all. Obscure The owl and the bat blundering in the daylight are like the readers who call Meredith obscure. People whose, minds are fed on what is known as light literature which is not literature from any point of view —do not love books that expect them to use their brains. And as the number of readers whose only literature is light literature is legion, it is not astonish-* ing to find obscurity attributed to Meredith, with less reason on that it has been to Brovvninp. Meredith was primarily a psychologist: character meant most to him. It is therefore a mistake to take him up and read him for the ’sake of incident and adventure as has become too much the habit with readers nowadays. There is the first point at which ho baffles ordinary readers. Again, Meredith was a poet, and as a poet he found it hard to tell a tale in a common way. He was rich in metaphors and images, full of brilliant by-play, abounding in sparkling comment and aside. He dressed the bare -bones in such attractive garments that one forgot for a moment that there were any bones at all. We ought to regard him as a classic writer and to approach him with the intense application with which we would take up for study a novel by Flaubert or a play by Moliere: in other words unless we are ready to raise ourselves to meet him we shall not meet him at all. Meredith the Poet 7j r L smad sum 0116 can kuv George Meredith’s J oems. There are not many of them ; they are not lengthy; but what there is is good. The English critics received his verse as coldly as his prose ; but Swinburne who knew what poetry is fell upon the Philistines arid boldly asserted that the century that has gone did not produce four greater poets than George Meredith. Here is a sample of his power-two stanzas that Swinburne loved for their melody and beauty: 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 dark, , ness, v ‘ Threading it with color, like the yewberries the yew. ■ Thicker crowd the; shades as the grey East deepens ’ Glowmg and with crimson a long cloud swells. ■ i “i^ the morn 1 ! S; and strange she is, and secret V 8 shells 101 ' ey6S ’ her cheeks are Oold as cold seaNnfp?^° ten ' K aPPned ' that . when the ? writer of these \ Notes was a boy he was living for some .months to-1 undi £ roorßooks rtd TnTauth oldTh’ Wb one sometimes sadly thinks oT l old .; books that we .shall not have leisure to read again.l

Old memories are bound up with our acquaintance "with Evan Harrington-, Bhoda JFleming, and Richard Fever el, and certain f other : works by writers not much read nowadays : whom our then host loved. What 5 a'boon ( it would be for the present rising generation if the Good People—as the Irish call the- fairieswould come hither and remove from all book shops? the trash that stands between us . and the best in literature. .... Mr. Dooley , once„ said that he propped,,himself up : behind the Bible and Shakespere and left Hall Caine and Marie Corelli raging tfutside. Most of : us would do very well to imitate him in that, taking the Bible and Shakespere as meaning good; literature in general, sacred and profane. : '' ! -: ;! - - ; ' ; '. ■■ ii -