Mr. Meredith and his Aminta
By
Lewis E. Gates
MR. MEREDITH AND HIS AMINTA
IN his latest book the choppiness of Mr. Meredith’s style and the restless tacking of his method are as great as ever, and those worthy people who delight in the smooth seas and the steady zephyrs of ordinary English fiction will find their experience of “Lord Ormont and his Aminta” very much of a stormy channel-passage. But to people with sound nerves and adventurous spirits the experience is sure to be bracing and exhilarating. Perhaps the most surprising single effect that you get from “Lord Ormont” is that of the tingling vitality of the author. You can hardly realize while reading the book that you have to do with a writer who has been for forty years a tireless worker in literature, and who published his first venture in fiction two years before George Eliot’s first story. The style in “Lord Ormont” has all the audacity of a first rebellion against tradition and convention; the sentences rush forward in all possible rhythms except the languorous ones of the dilettante or the “faultily faultless” ones of the precisian or pedant; the imagination is restlessly self-assertive in its embodiment of every abstract idea in an image for eye or for ear; the tone is almost boisterous in its hilarity or brusqueness; and finally the book sounds everywhere the note of the future, and prophesies change and new social conditions without a touch of misgiving or regret. Perhaps in no earlier work has Mr. Meredith been so aggressive and, at the same time, so confident and buoyant.
As for Mr. Meredith’s technique, it remains in the new book substantially what it has always been, and many of the general effects he produces are familiar to his admirers and delightful in their recurrence. Where save in Mr. Meredith’s fiction can there be found such brilliance of surface? such vividness of dramatic portrayal? Or at any rate where is vividness so reconciled with suggestiveness of interpretation? concrete beauty with abstract truth? In all his novels he sends our imaginations flashing over the surface of some portion of life; he calls up before us this portion of life in all its fine contrasts of color and form, of storm and sunshine, of mid-day and moonlight; and yet at the same time he constrains us to pierce below the surface and to understand intuitively why the drama moves this way or that, what forces are in conflict, what passions are flushing or blanching the cheek, what fancies or ideals are making the eyes dream on a distant goal.
More nearly than any other living novelist, Mr. Meredith succeeds in overcoming the difficulties forced on the writer of fiction by the double appeal of life. Life is a pageant and life is a problem; it smites on the senses and allures the imagination, but it also challenges the intellect; it has power and beauty, but it has also significance. Now most writers of fiction who reveal to us the inner meaning of life allow its beauty and power to fade into shadowy vagueness; and those who give us the dramatic value of life too often lack penetration and philosophic insight. One of Mr. Meredith’s greatest claims to distinction lies in the fact that he, better than any other English novelist, has reconciled this conflict between vividness of portrayal and depth of interpretation. He has grasped English life in all its enormous range and mass and complexity; he has flashed it before us in all its splendid vividness for eye and ear and imagination; and at the same time he has made it suggestive to thought, has comprehended it through and through in its subtlest relations, and in portraying it has breathed into it the breath of a philosophical spirit.
If we analyze Mr. Meredith’s pages carefully, we find very few of those long disquisitions on character with which the pages of a psychological novelist are covered. He deals almost as constantly with acts, with dialogue, with what meets the senses, the eye and the ear, as the elder Dumas. It is a mimic world of images he gives, not a globe of the earth with scientific terms and black marks on yellow pasteboard. He is always primarily an artist, not a psychologist or a descriptive sociologist. Too often when we finish one of George Eliot’s stories we feel that she has explained her characters so exhaustively that we should not know them if we met them on the street. We have had so much to do with their ganglia and their nervous systems, and with the ashes of their ancestors, that we have little notion of the characters as actual living people. If a psychological novelist were to write out a professional analysis of one’s best friend, it may fairly be doubted whether one would recognize the description. In fact, in real life it is only criminals whom we are expected to recognize by anthropometric memoranda, – by the length of the index finger, the breadth of the ear, the distance between the eyes, and by the lines on the finger-tips.
Now Mr. Meredith avoids all anthropometric statistics and chemical analysis, and gives us the very counterfeit presentment of men and women as in actual life they go visibly and audibly past us; and yet he so seizes his moments for portraiture that the soul, the inner life, the character, photographs itself on the retina of a sensitive on-looker like a composite picture. He makes all his characters and scenes, and all the life he portrays, instinct with truth; and yet this truth is implicit; the author very rarely indulges in pretentious talk on these topics. For the most part, he is apparently busy putting before us the picturesque aspects of life and its dramatic moments.
This fondness of his for brilliance of surface, for vividness of portrayal, accounts for many peculiarities of Mr. Meredith’s method, – among them for the use of what may be termed Meredith mosaic. His opening chapters are nearly always curious composites, made up of dozens of little speeches, little acts, little scenes, collected from a series of years, and fitted together into a more or less homogeneous whole. He dislikes formal exposition; he instinctively shrinks from discoursing through wearisome pages on the early lives of the actors in his story, on the formative influences, for example, which had moulded the characters of Aminta and Weyburn up to the moment when the continuous action of “Lord Ormont” begins. Yet the “fuller portraiture” requires that this knowledge be in some way ensured to his readers. Hence he puts before us such skilfully chosen bits of Aminta’s and Weyburn’s early lives, that while our imaginations are always kept busy with words and tones and acts and looks, we are at the same time inveigled into a knowledge of minds and hearts and motives. Chapters constructed on this plan are curiously without continuity of action, and often seem puzzling in their fragmentariness. But they combine, in an unusual degree, vividness of portrayal with suggestiveness of interpretation.
Another means by which Mr. Meredith secures his brilliance of surface, his glowing color, is through his lavish use of figures. Mr. Meredith is a poet subdued by the spirit of his age to work in its most popular form, the novel; but even in prose his imagination will not be gainsaid, and everywhere we find in his style the sensuous concreteness and symbolism of poetry. “Absent or present, she was round him like the hills of a valley. She was round his thoughts – caged them; however high, however far they flew, they were conscious of her.” … “Aminta drove her questioning heart as a vessel across blank circles of sea where there was nothing save the solitary heart for answer.” In no other contemporary English fiction do we come upon passages like these, and realize with a sudden pang of delight that we are in the region of poetry where imaginative beauty is an end in itself.
Very often, of old, it was Nature that enticed Mr. Meredith into these ravishing escapades; in “Lord Ormont” he seems pretty nearly to have broken with Nature. Yet, now and then, he puts before us a bit of the outside world with a compression of phrase, a brilliance of technique, and an imaginative atmosphere, not easily to be matched.
“A wind was rising. The trees gave their swish of leaves, the river darkened the patch of wrinkles, the bordering flags amid the reed-blades dipped and streamed…
“The trees were bending, the water hissing, the grasses all this way and that, like the hands of a delirious people in surges of wreck…
“Thames played round them on his pastoral pipes. Bee-note and woodside blackbird, and meadow cow, and the leap of the fish of the silver rolling rings, composed the music.”
But often as Mr. Meredith’s imagination seeks and realizes the beautiful, it still more often works in the grotesque, and decks out his subject with arabesque detail. His satirical comment on the life he portrays finds its way to the reader through the constant innuendoes of figurative language.
“She probably regarded the wedding by law as the end a woman has to aim at, and is annihilated by hitting; one flash of success and then extinction, like a boy’s cracker on the pavement…
“Thither he walked, a few minutes after noon, prepared for cattishness… He would have to crush her if she humped and spat, and he hoped to be allowed to do it gently… Lady Charlotte put on her hump of the feline defensive; then his batteries opened fire and hers barked back on him.”
That Mr. Meredith often overworks these grotesque figures even his warmest admirers must admit. There is a passage in the opening chapter of “Beauchamp’s Career,” where for two pages he describes the creation of an artificial war-panic under the figure of “a deliberate saddling of our ancient nightmare of Invasion.” Before Mr. Meredith consents to have done with this figure, even his most obsequious admirers must be desolated at his persistence. One is tempted to borrow the figure, and to call this kind of writing Mr. Meredith’s nightmare style, when a figure like a nightmare gets the bit in its teeth and goes racing across country with the author madly grimacing on its back.
In point of fact, the imaginative or figurative quality of his style is probably what costs Mr. Meredith most readers. His perpetually shifting brilliances prove very wearisome to certain eyes. He is too much of a flash-light, or has too much of the flourish of a Roman candle, for those who pride themselves on their devotion to the steady effulgence of the petroleum evening-lamp. Hazlitt used to tell people who objected to Spenser’s “Faery Queen” on the ground of the allegory, that, after all, the poetry was good poetry and the allegory would not bite them. But if you similarly urge upon the objectors to Mr. Meredith’s style, that a story of his is too great to be neglected because of mere questions of phrasing, they are very likely to tell you that they cannot see the story for the glare of the style; just there lies their point.
Undoubtedly, at times, Mr. Meredith seems glaringly wilful in his rejection of ordinary rhetorical canons; there is something, too, of a flourish in his eccentricity; and often, apparently out of sheer bravado, he inserts in his stories rollickingly grotesque passages, or throws at the critics long sentences full of the clash of metaphors. One may fancy his exclaiming with Browning, —
“Well, British public, ye that like me not,
(God love you!) and will have your proper laugh
At the dark question, laugh it! I laugh first.”
But after all, isn’t he right in maintaining his individuality against all-comers? Can any one who understands the true nature of an individual style and its self-revealing power, wish Mr. Meredith’s style less racy, less figurative, less original? Surely, words and phrases that bear the impress of a nature like Mr. Meredith’s are better worth while than those that have become smooth and shiny with conventional use, – always providing that the metal be twenty-carats fine. The intimacy of the relation that Mr. Meredith’s style makes possible between ordinary folk and a great and original personality is something that cannot be too highly prized in these days of conventionality and democratic averages. The words of most writers now-a-days give us no clew to their individualities. “Tête-à-tête with Lady Duberly?” exclaims the man in the play. “Nay, sir, tête-à-tête with ten-thousand people.” Private ownership in words and phrases seems in danger of becoming, even more speedily than private ownership in land, a thing of the past. The distinction of Mr. Meredith’s style is something to be devoutly grateful for. One would infinitely rather have a notion of the world as it gives an account of itself in Mr. Meredith’s mind, than a conventional scheme of things drawn out in the stereotyped phrases of the rhetorician.
Possibly, however, there is one sound reason for wishing that Mr. Meredith would be just a little less insistent on differences, and would now and then “mitigate the rancor of his tongue;” that reason is based on the fear that in this stupid world of ours compromise and conventionality are needed to secure any adequate hearing. It seems a great pity that so many people should be frightened away from Mr. Meredith’s work by its mannerism, and should be oblivious to some of the most suggestive current criticism of modern life. To Americans it seems specially to be regretted that English people should be so little receptive of the ideas of the most comprehensive and the least insular of their novelists. Mr. Meredith has grasped English life in its whole range and in all its vast complexity. He has dealt with the high and the low, with rustic and cockney, with plebeian and aristocrat, with the world of letters and the world of art and the world of fashion, with the modern “conquerors” of social power and position, and with the hereditarily great. All this vast range of life he has portrayed with equal vividness and with the same unfailing sympathy and insight; and yet his point of view is always curiously beyond the radius of the British Isles, and many of his implications are by no means favorable to the present organization of English social and political life. Of course, it may be this very lack of insularity that prevents a better understanding between him and his public. Detachment on his part may make attachment on their part impossible. And yet this ought not to be so; for despite his occasional severities and the all-pervading independence and individuality of his tone, no one has loved English life more heartily, studied it more painstakingly, or represented it more patriotically. Indeed, certain of its important aspects can be found adequately portrayed only in Mr. Meredith’s pages; for example, the genuine irresponsibleness of the most brilliant English life. No other novels offer us such pictures of the world of the luxuriously idle and systematically frivolous, of the habits and homes of the people who have never been wont to give an account of themselves to others, who have made idling into a fine art, and feel that the land exists for them to shoot over, and the sea for them to sail on in yachts. The so-called society-novelist succeeds admirably with the gowns and the etiquette of this region, but gives us for its inhabitants a lamentable lot of insipidities. But Mr. Meredith’s aristocrats have brains as well as deportment and decorations; they have the mental and moral idiom, the wit and the culture and the weight of men of birth and position, their prejudices, too, and perversities. That some wildness and even rankness of style should keep the British public from enjoying Mr. Meredith’s vigorous and sympathetic studies of its idolized “upper classes” seems strange; and even more regrettable than strange it seems to those who find running all through Mr. Meredith’s patriotic portrayal subtle insinuations of a criticism of English life most uninsular in its tenor and most salutary in its drift.
As to the precise value of the lesson latent in “Lord Ormont,” there is, of course, much dubious questioning possible. The points at issue, however, are of a kind on which perhaps only the Ulysses of the matrimonial ocean, “much-experienced men” in the storms and sunshine of married life, are in a condition to pronounce. Nevertheless ordinary people may at least admire the conscientious care with which Mr. Meredith has safeguarded his dangerous advice and his somewhat revolutionary plea for the freedom of woman. His preceding novel, “One of our Conquerors,” was from first to last a strenuously faithful study of the penalties that follow infringement of social conventions in the matter of marriage. The book might have been named “Mrs. Burman’s Revenge.” Mrs. Burman concentrated in her unprepossessing person all the mighty forces of prejudice which the society of the western world puts into play to protect one of its sacred institutions, marriage. Poor Nataly, who had ventured after happiness outside of conventional limits, lost happiness and finally life itself solely through her agonizingly persistent consciousness of her false adjustment to her social environment. She had built her house below the level of the dikes, to use Weyburn’s metaphor, and the ever-present danger wore upon her and sapped her life.
Having thus set forth with the elaborateness of a three-volume novel, and with the utmost power of his imagination, the almost resistless might of social conventions, their importance, and the danger of defying them, Mr. Meredith in his last book ventures to plead for the individual against society, and to assert the right of the individual occasionally to rebel against a blindly tyrannizing convention. “Laws are necessary instruments of the majority; but when they grind the sane human being to dust for their maintenance, their enthronement is the rule of the savage’s old deity, sniffing blood-sacrifice.”
The case of immolation that Mr. Meredith studies is meant, despite some very special features, to be typical. The veteran Lord Ormont stands as the representative, the most polished and prepossessing representative possible, of the class of men for whom woman is still merely the daintiest, the most exquisite toy that a benevolent Providence has created for the delectation of the sons of Adam. Weyburn is the ideal modern man of “spiritual valiancy,” every whit as vigorous and virile as Lord Ormont, but mentally and morally of immeasurably greater flexibility, and keenly alive to the needs of his time and the signs of social change. He, too, is doubtless meant to be a type, – so far as Mr. Meredith allows himself in character-drawing the somewhat dangerous luxury of types; he is to be taken as the most efficient possible member of a modern social organization, where the standards of individual excellence are fixed, not primarily by the organism’s need of defence against external foes, but by what is requisite for the inner expansion and peaceful evolution of society. Aminta, “the most beautiful woman of her time,” has been half-secretly married to Lord Ormont in the Spanish legation at Madrid, after a few weeks of travelling courtship; forthwith she has become in his eyes his Aminta, his lovely Xarifa, his beautiful slave, whom his soul delighteth to honor, – with ever a due sense of the make-believe character of her sovereignty and with a changelessly cynical conviction of the essential inferiority of the feminine nature. From his “knightly amatory” adulation, from the caressing glances of his “old-world eye upon women,” from his “massive selfishness and icy inaccessibility to emotion,” Aminta finally revolts, and takes refuge with Weyburn because with him she finds “comprehension,” “encouragement,” “life and air,” freedom to “use her qualities.” “His need and her need rushed together somewhere down the skies.”
Doubtless, all this seems dangerously near the old doctrine of elective affinities, on which organized society has never looked kindly. But once more we cannot but admire the care with which Mr. Meredith has limited his acceptance and recommendation of the principle. If it is to be operative only in a society in which a schoolmaster of spiritual valiancy is the popular hero, the ideal of manhood, and in which the most beautiful women of their time desert famous military leaders to become part-owners in boarding-schools, Mr. Meredith can hardly be accused of recommending very serious or far-reaching changes in the present state of the marriage contract.
Whatever one may think of the special moral of the book, the nobly optimistic tone of the whole is inspiriting. Mr. Meredith’s vigorous optimism and his suggestion of endless vistas of social progress contrast curiously with Mr. Hardy’s harping on the age of the earth, Druidical ruins, and the irony of a cruel Nature. Mr. Meredith, like his own Weyburn, is “one of the lovers of life, beautiful to behold, when we spy into them; generally their aspect is an enlivenment, whatever may be the carving of their features,” or, we may add, the eccentricity of their style. He is one of those who “have a cold morning on their foreheads,” and whose “gaze is to the front in hungry animation.” His optimism is doubly grateful because it is not the optimism of untempered youth, but, like Browning’s, the optimism of a man who has sounded and tried life in all its shallows and depths, has sailed far and wide over its surface, and yet possesses a genuine Ulysses-like hunger for achievement and belief in its worth. In this age when the decadents like the Philistines be upon us, and when the weariness of much learning and of much feeling weighs down so many eyelids, it seems strange that the virility and vigor and courage of Mr. Meredith do not find welcome everywhere among the sane-minded.