George Meredith



George Meredith, OM (12 February 1828 - 18 May 1909) was an English poet and novelist of the Victorian era.

Life
Meredith was born in Portsmouth, England, a son and grandson of naval outfitters.

His mother died when he was five. At the age of 14 he was sent to a Moravian Church School in Neuwied, Germany, where he remained for two years.

He read law and was articled as a solicitor, but abandoned that profession for journalism and poetry shortly after marrying Mary Ellen Nicolls, a widowed daughter of Thomas Love Peacock, in 1849: he was 21 years old and she was 28.

He collected his early writings, first published in periodicals, into Poems, published to some acclaim in 1851.

His wife ran off with the English Pre-Raphaelite painter Henry Wallis in 1858; she died three years later. The sonnet sequence entitled Modern Love (1862) came of this experience as did The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, his first major novel.

He married Marie Vulliamy in 1864 and settled in Surrey. He continued writing novels and poetry, often inspired by nature. His writing was characterised by a fascination with imagery and indirect references. He had a keen understanding of comedy and his Essay on Comedy (1877) is still quoted in most discussions of the history of comic theory.

In The Egoist, published in 1879, he applies some of his theories of comedy in one of his most enduring novels. Some of his writings, including The Egoist, also highlight the subjection of women during the Victorian period. During most of his career, he had difficulty achieving popular success. His first truly successful novel was Diana of the Crossways published in 1885.

Meredith supplemented his often uncertain writer's income with a job as a publisher's reader. His advice to Chapman & Hall made him influential in the world of letters. His friends in the literary world included, at different times, William and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Leslie Stephen, Robert Louis Stevenson, George Gissing and J.M. Barrie.

In 1868 he was introduced to Thomas Hardy by Frederick Chapman of Chapman & Hall the publishers. Hardy had submitted his first novel, The Poor Man and the Lady. Meredith advised Hardy not to publish his book as it would be attacked by reviewers and destroy his hopes of becoming a novelist. Meredith felt the book was too bitter a satire on the rich and counselled Hardy to put it aside and write another 'with a purely artistic purpose' and more of a plot. Meredith spoke from experience; his first big novel, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, was judged so shocking that Mudie's circulating library had cancelled an order of 300 copies. Hardy continued to try and publish the novel: however it remained unpublished, though he clearly took Meredith's advice seriously.

Meredith died in 1909 at his home in Box Hill, Surrey. He is buried in Dorking Cemetery, Dorking, Surrey.

Critical introduction
by John Bailey

It is not likely that very much of George Meredith’s poetry will ever be widely read. He is probably the most difficult of all our poets, as difficult habitually as Shakespeare and Shelley are occasionally. He seems to have been totally indifferent to the truth of that generally sound maxim with which Johnson rebuked the critics of Pope’s Homer: “the purpose of a writer is to be read.” It does not appear that he acted on any very clear distinction between poetry and prose, or even between prose and verse. The result is that his poetry often fails to satisfy perfectly legitimate and reasonable expectations.

People go to poetry for three things: for the delight with which it enraptures the ear, for its quickening and uplifting of the imagination, for the harvest of wisdom and truth to be reaped from its exhibition of the true life of nature and of man. From the greatest poetry they get all three at once. From Meredith, it must be sadly confessed, they get the first, the music of sound, very seldom: the second oftener, but far from always: the third almost always, though frequently presented in a manner and mood which belong rather to prose than to poetry. As to the first, it can only be said that Meredith, master of language as he was, was utterly defiant of the limitations, without which poetry as an art could not be. He could write, when he chose, things as exquisite as Love in the Valley or those stanzas in The Young Princess which, whatever they owe to Tennyson, could only have been borrowed by a master of music: “The soft night-wind went laden to death With smell of the orange in flower; The light leaves prattled to neighbour 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.” But he more often chose to write in a kind of shorthand, neither poetry nor prose, which is often ugly and always obscure. What is to be said of such abominations of hideousness as:
 * “Love meet they who do not shove
 * Cravings in the van of Love,

or
 * “Melpomene among her livid people,
 * Ere stroke of lyre, upon Thaleia looks,”

or of such contortions of obscurity as:
 * “A woman who is wife despotic lords
 * Count faggot at the question, Shall she live:—

except, what Meredith himself said of Whitman, that the Muse would “fain have taught” poets who treat their art in this reckless and insolent fashion:
 * “what fruitful things and dear
 * Must sink beneath the tidewaves, of their weight,
 * If in no vessel built for sea they swim.”

The truth is that Meredith never chose to accept the conditions of thought and language under which poetry works. Not only did he write many long poems such as The Empty Purse which consist almost entirely of abstract argument utterly alien to the simple and sensuous nature of poetry; but even into his true poems he introduces, without any apparent consciousness of a false note, such phrases of pure prose as “the taint of personality” or “the brain’s reflex.” Everywhere his poetry suffers from an over-activity of the mere intellect, working almost by itself, and not as poetry demands, in alliance with the senses and the imagination. Yet it is quite possible that the best of his poetry will outlast his novels. For, brilliant as the novels are, they would scarcely seem to have that assured serenity of beauty and truth which, far more than any such restless cleverness as theirs, is the mark of the novel made for immortality as we see it in Don Quixote and Goldsmith’s Vicar and the immortal company of the Waverleys. No novels ever had so much brains come to their making as Meredith’s; but the supreme work of art demands a harmony of qualities of which brains can only supply one. And however high we place the novels, poetry is still more than prose and—what is our present point—has commonly proved much the better stayer. That is not merely because its art is of a finer order. It is because, more even than the highest prose, it belongs to a world in which the contemporary is seen, as it were, from a height and in its true proportions. For this reason great poetry is of all time and is always modern. Even the Waverley Novels have in them far more matter which is now felt to be old-fashioned and to need explanation, than the contemporary poems of Wordsworth or Shelley. And so with Meredith; if a man really is a poet, his poetry, in spite of the exception of Scott, is generally the safest bottom in which he may embark for immortality. Clever as Meredith’s poetry is, it is never so brilliant as Diana or The Egoist. But Diana and The Egoist belong much more decidedly to the Victorian age and much more doubtfully to posterity than Love in the Valley or A Day of the Daughter of Hades. There is not a line in these poems which our grandchildren will find worse than harsh or difficult. There are many pages in the novels which they will find out of date, odd, and perhaps a little ridiculous. And whatever his poetic faults, Meredith was a true poet. A poet is one in whose words man and nature seem to be alive with a life of which no prose has the secret, a life at once natural and transcendental, at once known and unknowable. So Meredith himself says: “strange When it strikes to within is the known: Richer than newness revealed.” We live in a world of wonder. Some of us have little power to see it; some have no will. But the poet has both, and both in the highest degree. No one will for a moment deny either the will or the power to Meredith. To him the face, both of earth and of man, has sacramental value; it truly is what it seems to be and yet is so much more: and the life of the spirit lies in learning what that “so much more” may mean to those who have eyes to see it. To feel it is to attain to the consciousness of what lifts man above the indifferent beasts of the field. “There,” says Meredith, as he gazes on the Winter Heavens, “there, past mortal breath, Life glistens on the river of the death. It folds us, flesh and dust: and have we knelt, Or never knelt, or eyed as kine the springs Of radiance, yet the radiance enrings; And this is the soul’s haven to have felt.” Into that haven Meredith’s poetry, at its best, victoriously takes us. The glistening radiance of which he speaks is in all his finest poetry; and he makes us feel, as few poets do, both the manifold energies of earth, her fiery struggles, her everlasting movement, the beauty of her eternal interchange of death and birth, and the companion life of the body and spirit of man, responding to this kind but exacting and remorseless mother, living, working, loving, struggling ever upward into a life which more and more rejoices in realizing itself as a single link in a chain or ascending scale of timeless existence. If the multifold matter on which he lays his hand often fails to answer in music to the touch, yet little of it fails to answer in a new significance of life. History, myth, and the world of to-day all gain by his vivifying imagination. Few poets have created a more arresting vision of one of these mysterious incidents which are the turning-points of history than he in The Nuptials of Attila. There is not much political poetry which equals either in historical insight, or in imaginative power, the strangely neglected Odes in Contribution to the Song of French History which the poet himself valued as highly as any verse he had written. The second ode, that on Napoleon, contains perhaps the most penetrating analysis of his character ever written. The third, France, December, 1870, which we give here, has in it more of the prophetic spirit than any poetry written in England since Wordsworth or perhaps since Milton. And he shows the same power in his handling of myth. The idea, and much of the execution, of The Day of the Daughter of Hades makes it one of the most beautiful adaptations of ancient legend to the uses of an ever-changing humanity which any language can boast. It assumes too much knowledge in the reader, no doubt, as Phœbus with Admetus also does; but in spite of crudities and obscurities both are true imaginative creations, and have played a real part in helping modern Englishmen to perceive the undying significance and beauty of Greek story. And of course the author of the novels could not but be even more at home in the world of his own day. What modern poet has given us a finer, more tragic, or truer contemporary drama than Modern Love, of which, by the way, the difficulty is generally much exaggerated? When once the key explaining “Madam” as the wife and the “Lady” as the other woman has been firmly grasped, a very few readings will make nearly all the sonnets fairly clear. And Tennyson was as incapable of the subtlety, humour, and understanding of the feminine point of view shown in the Ballad of Fair Ladies in Revolt as Meredith was incapable of producing the lyrics which are the imperishable glory of Tennyson’s Princess. Yet, fine as these and other strictly human poems are, in Meredith’s poetry, unlike his novels, Nature is more than Man. Even in the novels Nature is no bad second. There are readers to whom their wit scarcely gives so much pleasure as their living and intimate knowledge of all the things that may be seen and heard by a man who likes being out of doors, has keen eyes, ears and brains, and makes the most of all of them. But this eager sympathy with birds and beasts and trees and clouds is even more omnipresent in the poems. Perhaps no English poet except Wordsworth and Tennyson brings back to a man who is fond of walking over the face of England so many of his keenest experiences, or prepares him for more and keener next time. No doubt Meredith is, in the Johnsonian phrase, “a tremendous companion.” You cannot dream or doze with him, as you may with Keats, for instance. The “gentle doings” of Nature which Keats found softer than ring-dove’s cooings are not much in Meredith’s way. He seldom broods over his own thoughts, or sets us brooding over ours. What he does is to translate them into an energy of will and action—in a word, of life. What he finds in Nature and Man he makes into a kind of creed or philosophy of life. The two are for him, more than for most poets, one subject seen from two points of view: Earth, the mother of man; Man, the son who is instantly lost if he attempts to forget or defy his mother. This is his central article of faith, and on it he builds a sort of doctrine or practical faith on which an excellent book has been written by Mr. George Trevelyan. It is a doctrine of courage, endurance, and strength, a facing of all facts, a refusing of all anodynes, a faith not in Heaven but in Earth, not in God but in Man. There is no rejection of a world of spirit: but in Meredith’s view that world must be reached not by the denial of the body but by its healthy and disciplined affirmation, not by attempting to despise or escape Earth but by loving her, and walking in her ways with firm and faithful feet. “Into the breast that gives the rose, Shall I with shuddering fall? Earth, the mother of all, Moves on her stedfast way, Gathering, flinging, sowing. Mortals, we live in her day, She in her children is growing. She can lead us, only she, Unto God’s footstool, whither she reaches: Loved, enjoyed, her gifts must be, Reverenced the truths she teaches, Ere a man may hope that he   Ever can attain the glee Of things without a destiny!” So he wrote in his early Spirit of Earth in Autumn, and the same doctrine is again and again repeated with slightly varied stress in poem after poem all through his life. No one will dispute its manliness, its note of health and sanity. But perhaps neither the poet himself nor Mr. Trevelyan fully realizes how lacking in tenderness, how short of healing power, it must at times appear to ordinary suffering, struggling, sinning men and women. Perhaps no man can explain his own faith. Perhaps the strength which he believes himself to receive from a doctrine, whether of heaven or of earth, which can be stated in words, commonly comes from some breath of spirit which refuses definition, and has no ancestry that can be set out in a genealogical tree. When Meredith puts his creed to the supreme test, as his wife lay dying, and gives us the result in that uplifting poem A Faith on Trial, it is better not to ask too curiously whether, in actual fact, the consolation and strength which he seems to himself to derive from Earth and her wild cherry blossom have or can have any other ultimate origin than the spirit, divine or human, which has spoken through the noblest voices of Israel, Greece, Italy, and England. When in another fine poem, In the Woods, he declares that the “green earth” “gave me warnings of sin” and lessons “of good and evil at strife, And the struggle upward of all And my choice of the glory of Life,” we need not ask how such teaching can possibly come of “Earth.” It is enough that it comes; that the poet’s spirit, and ours with his, is in Earth’s presence quickened into a new and higher energy of life, strengthened to struggle and endure, delivered of self, set free to enjoy, made ready for acceptance and peace. “Take up thy song from woods and fields Whilst thou hast heart, and living yields Delight: let that expire— Let thy delight in living die, Take thou thy song from star and sky, And join the silent quire.” There we get his creed, purged of its harshness, passing out of intellectualism into music, into that musical reason which is poetry; which, because it is music, cannot be so definite and articulate as if it were mere words. But even in the harsher statements of his doctrine, such as Earth and Man, or The Test of Manhood, or The Thrush in February, poetry, if poetry be that which by the help of the imagination sets the spirit free, is always triumphing over the obstacles put in its way by an over-restless brain and an ear that heard discords without noticing them. Take the great conclusion of The Thrush, with its lovely closing simile: he is speaking of his beloved earth:— “She, judged of shrinking nerves, appears A Mother whom no cry can melt; But read her past desires and fears, The letters on her breast are spelt. A slayer, yea, as when she pressed Her savage to the slaughter-heaps, To sacrifice she prompts her best: She reaps them as the sower reaps. But read her thought to speed the race, And stars rush forth of blackest night: You chill not at a cold embrace To come, nor dread a dubious might. The sighting brain her good decree Accepts; obeys those guides, in faith, By reason hourly fed, that she, To some the clod, to some the wraith, Is more, no mask; a flame, a stream. Flame, stream, are we, in mid career From torrent source, delirious dream, To heaven-reflecting currents clear. And why the sons of Strength have been Her cherished offspring ever; how The Spirit served by her is seen Through Law; perusing love will show. Love born of knowledge, love that gains Vitality as Earth it mates, The meaning of the Pleasures, Pains, The Life, the Death, illuminates. For love we Earth, then serve we all; Her mystic secret then is ours: We fall, or view our treasures fall, Unclouded, as beholds her flowers Earth, from a night of frosty wreck, Enrobed in morning’s mounted fire, When lowly, with a broken neck, The crocus lays her cheek to mire.” The crown of all is given in the strange, difficult, glorious Hymn to Colour, which is for Meredith a single name for the material splendours of Earth and Heaven and the spiritual glories of human Love. With that key men will “come out of brutishness,” becoming gods without ceasing, or wishing to cease, to be animals. “More gardens will they win than any lost; The vile plucked out of them, the unlovely slain. Not forfeiting the beast with which they are crossed, To stature of the Gods will they attain. They shall uplift their Earth to meet her Lord, Themselves the attuning chord!” Poetry has, perhaps, to-day a greater work to do than ever before; and never a better chance of doing it. Each poet can only do it in his own way. He gets the gain and pays the penalty of that way being what it is, which is another way of saying of being himself. Here is Meredith’s way: what he wrote is what he was. His way is not easy walking. The right and happy thing when we read poetry is to be so caught up into the poet’s being, so absorbed in him, that for the time we spontaneously see with his eyes, think his thoughts, speak his words. With no poet is that more difficult than with Meredith. Yet, if and so far as we attain to it, we get a new vision of Earth and of Man from one who had looked on both with an eye of rarest keenness, penetration, and love. Truth and Beauty gain for us a fuller meaning. We perceive more, love more, live more. For the life Meredith gives is the life in which, more than all but a very few men, he believed: a life which meant knowing as well as loving, loving as well as knowing.

Recognition
Before his death, Meredith was honoured from many quarters. He succeeded Alfred, Lord Tennyson as president of the Society of Authors, In 1905 he was appointed to the Order of Merit by King Edward VII.

Five of his poems ("Love in the Valley," "Phoebus with Admetus," "Tardy Spring," "Love's Grave," and "Lucifer in Starlight") were included in the Oxford Book of English Verse 1250-1900.

In popular culture
His contemporary Sir Arthur Conan Doyle paid him homage in the short-story "The Boscombe Valley Mystery", when Sherlock Holmes says to Dr. Watson during the discussion of the case: "And now let us talk about George Meredith, if you please, and we shall leave all minor matters until to-morrow."

Oscar Wilde, in his dialogue The Decay of Lying, implies that Meredith, along with Honoré de Balzac, is his favourite novelist, saying "Ah, Meredith! Who can define him? His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning".

Poetry

 * Poems. Parker, 1851; New York: Scribner, 1898.
 * Modern Love and Poems of the English Roadside, with Poems and Ballads. London: Chapman & Hall, 1862
 * (edited by E. Cavazza). Portland, ME: Mosher, 1891.
 * Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth. London: Macmillan, 1883; Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1883.
 * Ballads and Poems of Tragic Life. London: Macmillan, 1887; Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1887.
 * A Reading of Earth. London: Macmillan, 1888; Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1888.
 * Poems: The Empty Purse, with Odes to the comic spirit, to Youth in memory, and Verses. London: Macmillan, 1892; Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1892.
 * Selected Poems. London: Constable, 1897; New York: Scribner, 1897.
 * The Nature Poems. London: Constable, 1898.
 * Odes in Contribution to the Song of French History. London: Constable, 1898, New York: Scribner, 1898.
 * A Reading of Life, with other poems. London: Constable, 1901; New York: Scribner, 1901.
 * Last Poems. London: Constable, 1909; New York: Scribner, 1909.
 * Love in the Valley, and Two Songs: Spring and Autumn, Seymour, 1909.
 * Poems Written in Early Youth, Poems from "Modern Love," and Scattered Poems. London: Constable, 1909; New York: Scribner, 1909.
 * The Poetical Works of George Meredith (edited by G.M. Trevelyan). London: Constable, 1912; New York: Scribner, 1912.
 * Poems. (2 volumes), London: Constable, 1913. Volume I, Volume II.
 * Selected Poems. London: Constable, 1919.
 * The Poems of George Meredith (edited by Phyllis B. Bartlett; 2 volumes). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978.
 * Selected Poems (edited by Keith Hanley). Manchester, UK: Carcanet Press, 1983.
 * Modern Love (edited and with an afterword by D. von R. Drenner, wood engravings by John DePol). Zauberberg Press, 1991.

Novels

 * The Shaving of Shagpat: An Arabian entertainment. London: Chapman & Hall, 1856, Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1887.
 * Farina: A Legend of Cologne. London: Smith, Elder, 1857.
 * The Ordeal of Richard Feverel: A History of Father and Son]]. (3 volumes), London: Chapman & Hall, 1859; (1 volume), Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1887
 * (edited and introduced by John Halperin). New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.
 * Evan Harrington; or, He would be a gentleman. Harper, 1860; (3 volumes), Bradbury & Evans, 1861.
 * Emilia in England (3 volumes). London: Chapman & Hall, 1864
 * published as Sandra Belloni. London: Chapman & Hall, 1886; Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1887.
 * Rhoda Fleming: A story. (3 volumes), Tinsley, 1865, )1 volume), Bsoton: Roberts Brothers, 1886.
 * Vittoria (3 volumes). Chapman & Hall, 1866, Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1888.
 * The Adventures of Harry Richmond. (3 volumes), London: Smith, Elder, 1871; (1 volume), Roberts Brothers, 1887.
 * Beauchamp's Career. (3 volumes), Chapman & Hall, 1876; (1 volume), Roberts Brothers, 1887
 * reprint (edited and introduced by Margaret Harris). Oxford University Press, 1988.
 * The House on the Beach: A realistic tale. Harper, 1877.
 * The Egoist: A comedy in narrative. (3 volumes), London: Kegan Paul, 1879; New York: Harper, 1879
 * reprint (edited and introduced by Margaret Harris). Oxford University Press, 1992.
 * The Tragic Comedians: A study in a well-known story. (2 volumes), London: Chapman & Hall, 1880; (1 volume), Munro, 1881.
 * Diana of the Crossways. (3 volumes), London: Chapman & Hall, 1885; (1 volume), Munro, 1885.
 * Jump-to-Glory Jane, privately printed, 1889, Sonnenschein, 1892.
 * The Case of General Ople and Lady Camper. Lovell, 1890.
 * The Tale of Chloe: An episode in the history of Beau Beamish. Lovell, 1890.
 * One of our Conquerors. (3 volumes), Chapman & Hall, 1891; (1 volume), Roberts Brothers, 1891.
 * The Tale of Chloe; The house on the beach; The case of General Ople and Lady Camper. Ward, Lock & Bowdon, 1894.
 * Lord Ormont and his Aminta: A novel. (3 volumes), Chapman & Hall, 1894; (1 volume), New York: Scribner, 1894.
 * The Amazing Marriage (2 volumes). London: Constable, 1897; New York: Scribner, 1897.
 * The Story of Bhanavar the Beautiful. London: Constable, 1900.
 * Chillianwallah. Marion Press, 1909.
 * Celt and Saxon. London: Constable, 1910; New York: Scribner, 1910.
 * The Adventures of Harry Richmond: The unpublished parts (edited with an introduction by Sven-Johan Spanberg). Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell International, 1990.

Non-fiction

 * An Essay on Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit (first published in New Quarterly, 1877). London: Constable, 1897; New York: Scribner, 1897.
 * Up to Midnight: A series of dialogues contributed to the "Graphic". Luce, 1913
 * George Meredith's Essay On Comedy and Other New Quarterly Magazine Publications: A Critical Edition (edited by Maura C. Ives). Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1998.

Collected editions

 * The Works of George Meredith 1909-1911
 * De Luxe Edition (39 volumes), London: Constable
 * Library Edition (18 volumes), London: Constable
 * Boxhill Edition (17 volumes), New York: Scribner
 * Memorial Edition (27 volumes). London: Constable; New York: Scribner.

Letters

 * Letters of George Meredith: Collected and edited by his son. (2 volumes), London: Constable, 1912; New York: Scribner, 1912. Volume I: 1844-1881, Volume II: 1882-1909.
 * The Letters of George Meredith (edited by C.L. Cline). (3 volumes), Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1970.
 * Selected Letters of George Meredith (edited by Mohammad Shaheen). New York: St. Martin's, 1996.

Edited

 * (Editor and author of introduction and concluding chapters) The Cruise of the Alabama and the Sumter: From the private journals and other papers of Commander R. Semmes. Saunders & Otley, 1864; Carleton, 1864.
 * Letters from Egypt, by Lady Lucie Duff-Gordon

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy the Poetry Foundation.