Chapter 12 On the Novels of George Meredith

Twenty years ago, George Meredith's reputation was at the height of its power.His novels, against all odds, have finally achieved fame, all the more brilliant and all the more remarkable because of the repression they have suffered.Moreover, it is generally found that the author of these distinguished works was himself a distinguished old man.People who visited Box Heights reported being thrilled by the chatter and laughter that boomed inside the country cottage as they walked up the driveway.The novelist sat among the usual bric-a-brac in the drawing room, looking like a bust of Euripides.Age had worn and thinned his fine features, but his nose was still pointed, and his blue eyes were still sharp and ironic.Although he sat immobile in the armchair, his countenance was alive and alert.It was true that he was almost totally deaf, but it was but the slightest torture to a man who could scarcely keep pace with the rapid pace of his own thoughts.Since he cannot hear what is said to him, he can give himself up to the pleasure of talking to himself.It probably didn't matter much to him whether his audience was educated or simple-minded.With equal pomp and ceremony he gave to a child the speeches which would compliment a duchess.Likewise, he cannot speak to both in the simple language of everyday life.And yet, whenever this well-crafted, stilted conversation, full of specific phrases and endless metaphors, culminates in a burst of laughter.His laughter swirls around his sentences, as if he himself appreciates the humorous exaggerations in them.The language master splashes and dives deep in the ocean of his words.Thus the legends of him grew, and so did the reputation of George Meredith, with the head of a Greek poet on his shoulders, who lived in a villa below Box Hill, and used an almost The loud voice that can be heard on the road, pouring out words full of poetry, irony and wisdom, make his fascinating and brilliant works more charming and more brilliant.

But this was the situation twenty years ago.His reputation as a talker was bound to decline, and his reputation as a writer seems to have suffered as well.In none of his successors is his influence now evident.His occasional observations on the subject were not meant to be flattering, when the own writings of one of his successors entitle him to have his opinions heard. [E. M. Foster writes in his Aspects of the Novel] Meredith is not as prestigious as he was twenty years ago.... His philosophical views have not lasted.His onslaught on sentimentalism has weary contemporaries... When he is serious and high-minded, his speech has a cacophony, a tone of domineering, which later becomes depressing... A Partly by fiction, partly by preaching (which was never popular, and is now considered empty), partly because he writes of his narrow local subject as if it were a whole universe, Meredith's Fame is at a low ebb right now, and it's no surprise.

Of course, the foregoing evaluation is not intended to be definitive; yet, in its eloquent sincerity, it summarizes with sufficient precision what has been circulated about Meredith.No, the general conclusion seemed to be that Meredith's reputation did not last long.The value of centenaries, however, is this: occasions like these allow us to fix this circulating impression.People's talk, mixed with half-obliterated memories, formed a fog that gradually made us hardly recognize its true colors.Re-opening his works, trying to read them with fresh eyes for the first time, freeing them from the boring comments of the author's reputation and accident-this may be what we do when a writer is born a hundred years ago. The most satisfying gift you can give on an anniversary.

As first novels are often so carelessly written, in which the author displays his talents without knowing how to best arrange them, we may as well turn first to Richard Ffulel. Look.It doesn't take a lot of shrewdness to see that the author is a novice.The style of this book is extremely uneven.He suddenly twisted into a hard knot, and suddenly stretched flat like a pancake.He seemed half-hearted and at a loss for what to do.Ridiculous quips alternate with lengthy narratives.He hesitated from one attitude to the other.Indeed, the whole structure thus arranged seems a little wobbly.The baronet wrapped in a cloak; the country family; the ancestral mansion; the uncles chanting aphorisms in the dining room; The merry peasants; on them are sprinkled here and there, here and there, with the dry aphorisms of the pepper-shaker of The Pilgrimage--what a strange concoction of all this!But the sense of strangeness was not superficial; it was not merely that those sideburns and hats were out of date; it was deeper, and it lay in Meredith's intentions, in the revolution he wanted to bring about.It is obvious that he took great pains to destroy the traditional form of the novel.Instead of trying to preserve the austere realistic picture of Trollope and Jane Austen, he has torn down all the usual ladders by which we learn to climb.Such a deliberate move has a purpose.This contempt for commonplace things, these airs and manners, this dialogue of "your lord" and "madame," all serve to create an atmosphere different from everyday life, to serve a A new, unique sense of the life scene prepares the way.Peacock, the writer from whom Meredith learned much, is equally willful, but the fact that we readily accept Mr. The advantage of the kind of assumption we make.On the other hand, Meredith's characters in "Richard Feverel" are not in harmony with their environment.We immediately exclaimed how unreal, how artificial, how incredible they were.The baron and the butler, the hero and heroine, the good woman and the bad woman, they are just types of the baron and the butler, the good woman and the bad woman.For what reason, then, did he sacrifice the advantages of the practical existence of the common sense of realism—the stairs to be climbed and the plaster to be painted?For, as we read his works, we gradually realize that it is not the complexity of the characters, but the splendor of a scene that he has a keen sense of.In his first novel, he creates scene after scene that we can give abstract names to—youth, the germ of love, the forces of nature.We straddled the horses of rhapsodic prose, surmounted all obstacles, and galloped towards these scenes with hooves.

Abandon all systems!Abandon the rotten world!Let's breathe the air of Enchanted Island!Gold spreads on the grass; gold runs in the stream; red gold glistens on the stalks of the pine trees. We forget Richard as Richard and Lucy as Lucy; they were youth incarnate; molten gold ran in that world.The author, then, is a visionary and a poet; however, we have not yet exhausted all the elements of this first novel.We must also take the author himself into account.His mind was full of ideals, hungry for argument.His boys and girls may spend their time picking daisies in the meadows, yet they breathe, however unconsciously, an air of intelligent questioning and criticism.On many occasions these conflicting elements are strained and threatened with rupture.The book is riddled with cracks throughout, and when they appear the author seems to have had twenty conflicting thoughts in mind at once.But the book manages to miraculously stay together and not fall apart, certainly not because of the depth and originality of its characters, but because of its intellectual power and intense lyrical vitality.

Thus, we are in a state of aroused curiosity.Give him another book or two and he'll start to get on track and get his blunt tone under control; and we're going to turn to Henry Richmond and see what's going on now.Of all possible scenarios, this one must have been the most bizarre.All traces of immaturity were gone, and with it the restless, dangerous indecision.The storyline advances quickly and smoothly along the road of autobiographical narrative that Dickens traveled.It is a boy talking, a boy thinking, and a boy taking risks.There is no doubt, therefore, that the author refrained from his babbling and cut out his verbiage.That style is as crisp as possible.It is very smooth, without any jerks.One feels that Stevenson must have benefited greatly from such a handy narrative, with its precision and dexterity in its choice of words, its swift and correct capture of the image of the visible.

At night, walk into the shade of dark green leaves and smell the aroma of the trees; wake up at dawn, the world is bathed in sunlight, you climb up and look far away, and write down the mountains you will see tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow. heart; one morning, the dearest person in the world will surprise you by coming to you before you wake up; it is a wonderful pleasure, I think. The diction is gorgeous, but a little coy.He is listening to what he himself has to say.Our sense of doubt arises spontaneously, it wanders, and finally rests (as in Richard Fleur) on the characters.These teenagers are no more real than the sample apples sitting on top of the basket.They were too simple, too gallant, too adventurous, to be of the same incomparable type as David Copperfield.They are specimens of youth, specimens of novelists; and we encounter again the extreme conventionality of Meredith's thought, which we had found with astonishment in his thought before.In spite of his audacity (there may be no risks he dared not take), there are many occasions when a character who fits a ready-made pattern will suffice him.But just when we thought those young gentlemen were too fitting and their adventures too trite, shallow fantasies flooded our heads, and we sank into the world with Richmond Roy and Princess Ottilia In the world of fantasy and romance, where everything is bound together, we can leave our imaginations unreservedly at the author's disposal.It is above all pleasant to be at one's disposal; it springs the heels of our boots; statement, because it certainly cannot be analyzed.Meredith's ability to elicit such momentary sensations was a testament to his extraordinary powers.However, this is a capricious force that emerges with a high degree of intermittentness.In some pages, the author has been thinking hard and pondering hard, scrutinizing one phrase after another, but there is no spark of thought.Then, just as we were about to drop the book, the rocket rose into the sky, and the whole scene shone with light; and years later, the sudden brilliance would remind people of the book.

If this intermittent brilliance is Meredith's peculiar virtue, it deserves a closer examination.Perhaps we first find that the sights that catch our eye and remain in our memory are static; that they are lights of illumination rather than profound discoveries;This is important: Richard and Lucy, Harry and Ottilia, Clara and Vernon, Beecham and Rainey are carefully placed in the right circumstances - on a yacht, Under blossoming cherry trees, on the banks of rivers—so that the natural scene is always an integral part of the mood of the characters.The author writes out the sea, sky and trees to symbolize the feelings and sights of the characters.

The sky was bronze, like the vault of a great furnace.Those creases of light and shadow are like the beautiful soft luster of precious satin.That afternoon, the buzzing of bees was like thunder, which set off one's hearing. This is a description of a state of mind. These winter mornings are divine.They disappear without a sound.The earth still seems to be waiting.A wren sang melodiously, passing the slender, soft and dew-drenched tree branches; the open hillside was green; everywhere was smoky, and there was hope and anticipation everywhere. This is a description of a woman's face.But only certain states of mind and certain expressions of the face can be described in the imagination—only that which is so highly tempered as to be simple, and which alone cannot be analysed.This is a limitation; for, though we may be able to see these figures vividly illuminated by a moment's light, they do not change and develop; and when the light fades, we remain in darkness.We have an intuitive understanding of the characters of Stendhal, Chekhov, and Jane Austen; of Meredith we lack it.We know the characters of those writers so well that we can almost completely dispense with those fleeting "great scenes."In those novels some of the most emotional scenes were the most peaceful.We have been affected by nine hundred and ninety-nine slight strokes, and when the thousandth stroke appears, it is as slight as the others, yet the effect is enormous.But in Meredith's book there are no light strokes, only hammerlike strokes, so that our knowledge of his characters is partial, in bursts, in fits and starts.

Meredith was not one of those great psychologists who feel their way in and out of every nerve fiber of the mind with imperturbable patient delicacy, making one character quite different from another in the slightest detail. .He belongs to the ranks of poets who identify characters with passion or ideal; they symbolize, abstract.Perhaps, however, this is his difficulty—he is not quite a poet-novelist like Emily Bronte.He doesn't soak the world in one emotion, his mind is too self-conscious and worldly to remain lyrical for long.He doesn't just chant; he dissects.Even in his most lyrical scenes, there is a mocking sarcasm surrounding the phrases and laughing at their excess.Read on, and we shall see that the comic spirit, if allowed to dominate the scene, turns the world beyond recognition. The Egoist immediately corrects our theory that Meredith is a master of great scenes.Here there is none of the sudden, hasty rush that used to drive us across obstacles to one emotional peak after another.This is an instance that calls for argument; and argument requires logic; Sir Willoughby, this "magnified form of our primitive male," is slowly tossed and tossed before the fire of examination and criticism, not Allow the victim to twitch to escape the steadfast flame.This may be true: what is being baked is a wax model, not a living flesh and blood body.At the same time, Meredith speaks highly of us, which we, as readers of fiction, are not used to.We are civilized beings, he seems to say, watching the comedy of human relations together.We are deeply interested in human relationships.Men and women are not cats and monkeys, but a larger and wider being.He imagined us being able to have an unbiased curiosity about the behavior of our fellow man.It is so rare for a novelist to pay such praise to his readers that we are at first bewildered and then smile.Indeed, his comic spirit was a more perceptive goddess than his lyrical style.It was she who forged a definite path through the tangled thorns of Meredith's way of writing; it was she who repeatedly surprised us with the depth of her observations; it was she who created the solemnity, seriousness and vigor.One cannot help thinking that, had Meredith lived in an era or country where comedy was the norm, he might never have acquired that air of intellectual superiority, that darkly serious manner which he As pointed out, it is necessary to correct it with a comic spirit.

But, in many respects, the age—if we can judge of something so indeterminate—is at odds with Meredith, or rather his age and his age in ours (1928 years) were mutually antagonistic.His teachings now sound too harsh, too optimistic, too shallow.It imposes a point of view; and if the philosophical point of view is not exhausted in a novel, we can draw out this epigram with a pencil, cut out that exhortation with scissors, and paste them all together. together to form a system, then we can safely say that either the philosophy, or the novel, or both are faulty.The first is that he is too determined to teach others a lesson.He could not suppress his own opinion even while listening to the most profound secrets.Nothing causes more resentment and discontent in the characters of a novel than this.They seem to argue that if we were created merely to express Mr. Meredith's view of the universe, we would rather not exist at all.So they die; and if a novel is full of dead characters, even if it is full of deep wisdom and high teaching, it falls short of what it should be as a novel.At this point, however, we have touched on another argument that the present age may tend to be more sympathetic to Meredith.When he wrote in the 1870s and 1880s, the novel had advanced to the point where it could only survive by moving forward.Here is one possible argument: since the perfect novels of Erlington's Cabin and Ellington Cabin, English fiction has had to escape the dominance of this perfect model, just as English poetry has had to escape Tennyson's. Perfect example.George Eliot, Meredith, and Hardy were not perfect novelists, largely because they insisted on introducing speculative or poetic qualities into their novels, which may not be comparable to the most perfect novels.On the other hand, if the novel had remained in the state of Jane Austen and Trollope, it would have lost its life by now.Meredith thus stands out as a great inventor who deserves our gratitude and excites our interest.We have many doubts about him, and we cannot form a definite opinion about his work, all because his work is experimental and therefore contains elements that do not fit together harmoniously—the various qualities in the book are Contradictory; the quality that can hold them together and unite them is ignored.In reading Meredith, therefore, it is in our best interest to allow some leeway, and to relax certain standards.We cannot expect the perfect balance of traditional styles, nor the triumph of patient, stale philosophies.On the other hand, he states: "My method of writing prepares my readers for a pivotal exhibition of characters and then fully displays their blood and mind under the pressure of a harsh situation. "His statements have often been proven correct.Scene after scene flooded my mind with a strong flash.Instead of laughing he would "give his lungs full play" or "enjoy the quick and intricate motion of the needle" for sewing, if the dance-teacher's flamboyant prose that made him write such sentences annoys us , we should remember that such phrases prepare the way for "harsh situations."Meredith is creating an atmosphere from which we can transition naturally into a heightened emotional state.Where a realistic novelist like Trollope falls flat, a lyricist like Meredith becomes pompous and false; It is a greater crime against the quiet and indifferent nature of prose novels.If Meredith had given up the novel altogether and devoted himself entirely to poetry, perhaps he had been well advised.However, we must remind ourselves that the fault may be on our part.We have enjoyed too long the Russian novel which has been castrated and neutralized by translation, and our enthusiasm for the psychological detours of the French may lead us to forget that the English language is naturally rich; Full of humor and eccentricity.Behind the splendor of Meredith's prose there was a great ancestor; we cannot escape all Shakespeare memories. These many questions and limitations come to our minds as we read.It may be taken that this fact proves that we are not near enough to be fascinated by him, nor far enough away to observe him in proportion.Trying to make a final estimate now, therefore, is more delusional than it usually is.But, even now, we can affirm that to read Meredith is to be aware of a rich, powerful mind, to hear a voice booming, though we are too far apart to hear We can't mistake his distinctive accent without knowing what he's talking about.Moreover, when we read, we feel that we are facing a Greek god, though he is surrounded by countless furnishings in the living room of a country house; He couldn't hear; even though his limbs were stiff and numb, he was surprisingly alive and alert.This very distinguished and disturbed figure, his place is with the great eccentrics, not with the great masters.You can guess that his work will be read in fits and starts; he will be forgotten, found, rediscovered and forgotten again, like Donne, Peacock and Gerard Like Hopkins.But as long as English novels are read, Meredith's novels must come to the fore from time to time;