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Chapter X
SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF GEORGE
MEREDITH'S POETRY
George Meredith is one of the very few great writers in English who have attained the distinction of obscuring themselves. He is essentially and supremely a poet, yet his poetry, great though it is in bulk and substance, has been held from wide recognition by the brilliance and mass of his contribution to fiction. He himself declared that he wrote novels so as to be able to afford to write poetry; in other words, he regarded story-writing as his profession, and poetry as his natural vocation. It happened, however, that he belonged to the Celtic race, indeed was hailed by another great writer in both poetry and prose, " Fiona Macleod, " as the Chief of that race; and so fully did he share in the racial trait of enthusiasm and absorption, that only an eye as acute as his own could tell the difference between those of his works which were his effort to answer the prayer, " Give us this day our daily bread," and those which came with the wind and flame of inspiration.
The fact is, there is no difference. Meredith being a Celt could not help being fully himself in all he wrote. What distinguishes his poetry from his prose is inherent in the art of poetry, that provides him with a vehicle capable of expressing his deeper personal vision and emotion more adequately than prose ; more adequately, that is, in the sense of concentrated suggestiveness that touches the deeper and the higher regions of the mind as well as the work-a-day level. What I mean may be seen—to take a single typical example in his use of such a word as " seraphically." We can imagine a western novelist writing of a woman singing " seraphically," and feel that the word has thus been dragged down from its first estate around the Throne of God to the degradation of serving the purposes of erotic fancy. Now see Meredith's use of in it a passage in " The Lark Ascending :"
Was never voice of ours could say Our inmost in the sweetest way, Like yonder voice aloft, and link All hearers in the song they drink. Our wisdom speaks from failing blood, Our passion is too fnll in flood, We want the key, of his wild note Of truthful in a tuneful throat ; The song seraphically free From taint of personality, So pure that it salutes the sans, The voice of one for millions, In whom the millions rejoice For giving their one spirit voice.
Here the word " seraphically " is lifted in the soaring imagination of the poet towards its original place as indicating the glorious Beings who embody the Powers of the Universe, and stand as great Impersonalities not because they are devoid of personality but because they include all personal phases and are not bound to some freak of brain such as is called personality in the world of Shadows. It is not the lark that sings seraphically, for his
. . . . . silver chain of sound, Of many links without a break, In chirrup, slur and shake,
is too thin and small to permit the artist to liken it to the vast note of the sphere-Devas ; but its magic, working on the Divine thing in the soul of the poet, stirs him to a prophecy of an era in European poetry that is as yet only putting forth faint rays of dawn in such spiritual song as that of A.E, and this future song comes from so interior a degree of human nature that it outsoars the differences of the personal degree, and becomes the one Voice of the unified Spirit in Humanity, seraphic in dignity and beauty.
The same passage indicates also the general attitude of Meredith to life and the universe. His imagination goes beyond the clouds, but he keeps himself firmly anchored to the earth : his feet are set in the clay, but they are not feet of clay. He holds to the essential Divinity of Humanity, but he recognises the worth of all the powers and functions of human nature.
Our passion is too full in flood, he sings, for he knows that the lure of sense is away from the Spirit ; but he is no apostle of emasculation: against excess of passionateness he sees the contrasted evil of excess of passionlessness :
Our wisdom speaks from failing blood, it is decrepit, frigid, a monstrous code of " don'ts," irreconcilable with the Joy of Life. We need the lark's unification of joy which is the flowering of perfect wisdom, and beauty which is its inevitable expression. From our home on the ground we shall rise on a song to our home in the sky, but while life remains, the song's last note will be at the door of the nest.
The same idea is differently expressed in Meredith's " Hymn to Colour," a majestic eulogium of the arts as a regenerative power :
Look now where Colour, the soul's bridegroom, makes The house of heaven splendid for the bride...... He gives her homeliness in desert air, And sovereignty in spaciousness ; he leads Thro widening chambers of surprise to where Throbs rapture near an end that aye recedes, Because his touch is infinite, and lends A yonder to all end.
He traces, with great love as of a painter, the miracle of colour in sky and grass, in dewdrop and wing, and to his seeing eye it becomes something more than a matter of pigment, it becomes a finger of God beckoning Humanity onwards, yet not sloughing its past but spiritualising it.
They do not look through love to look on thee, Grave heavenliness I nor know they joy of sight Who deem the wave of rapt desire must be Its wrecking and last issue of delight. Dead seasons quicken in one petal spot Of colour unforgot. ...This way have men come out of brutishness To spell the letters of the sky and read A reflex upon earth else meaningless. With thee, O fount of the Untimed ! to lead, Drink they of thee, thee eyeing, they unaged Shall on through brave wars waged, ...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
This idea of balance is, I believe, the essence of Meredith's life and work. He has a constant eye for unity in contrast, as in his delightful sketch of "Marian" ending :
She is steadfast as a star, And yet the maddest maiden : She can wagera And give the peace of Eden,... 164 or in the simple natural detail of light and shade ;
The blackest shadow, nurse of dew, Has orange skeins across...
He also sees through as well as across the panorama of sight. A little poem, " Outer and Inner," is almost an epitome of these characteristics, and at the same time shows the poet's splendid mastery of details in observation, and his great power in setting them to exquisite music, and lifting the whole to the level of spiritual vision.
From twig to twig the spider weaves At noon his webbing fine. So near to mute the. zephyr's flute That only leaflets dance. The sun draws out of hazel leaves A smell of woodland wine. I wake a swarm to sudden storm At any step's advance. ...But now so low the stillness hums, My springs of seeing swerve, For half a wink to thrill and think The woods with nymphs alive. ...I neighbour the invisible So close that my consent Is only asked for spirits masked To leap from trees and flowers. And this because with them I dwell In thought, while calmly bent To read the lines dear Earth designs Shall speak her life on ours. ...Accept, she says ; it is not hard In woods ; but she in towns Repeats, accept ; and have we wept, And have we quailed with fears, Or shrunk with horrors, sure reward We have whom knowledge crowns ; Who see in mould the rose unfold, The soul through blood and tears.
An examination of these lines will show an extraordinary verbal economy. There is not a shadow of redundance ; every word is inevitable and enough. Take the penultimate verse above : it is in the most direct grammatical form, with only two possible, but Unnecessary, changes to make it the simplest prose—the word only in the third line transferred to the second line between that and my, and the fifth line made to read, " I dwell with them and yet it is a very gem of melodious speech and thought, compounded of a magical interplay of fancy, philosophy, and a scrupulously chaste selection of words. It is in this respect that Meredith's work makes a most salutary medicine to young aspirants towards poetical honours who are afflicted with noises in their ears contracted from too much Swinburne, or have acquired a halt and a stride through infection from the Tennysonian posturing which only its originator could carry off successfully ; and he gives no encouragement to the notion that a raucous string of words is poetry because it talks of " meadows green " or " waters blue." The result of this verbal economy in Meredith's poetry which in the best sense is pure wealth is a fine clarity (despite the inability to understand certain quite clear phrases of Meredith's that Mr. Bailey, the " Times " literary critic, confesses in his volume, "Poets and Poetry"), a close texture, an athletic-fitness, an absence of sentimental softness, a presence of emotional tenseness, a vigour, and a bracing quality that sum up the essential features of the best modern English poetry. |
