(2) THE OLYMPIAN UNBENDS

Lady Butcher’s charming Memoirs of George Meredith is admittedly written in reply to Mr. Ellis’s startling volume.  It seems to me, however, that it is a supplement rather than a reply.  Mr. Ellis was not quite fair to Meredith as a man, but he enabled us to understand the limitations which were the conditions of Meredith’s peculiar genius.  Many readers were shocked by the suggestion that characters, like countries, must have boundaries.  Where Mr. Ellis failed, in my opinion, was not in drawing these as carefully as possible, but in the rather unfriendly glee with which, one could not help feeling, he did so.  It is also true that he missed some of the grander mountain-peaks in Meredith’s character.  Lady Butcher, on the other hand, is far less successful than Mr. Ellis in drawing a portrait which makes us feel that now we understand something of the events that gave birth to The Egoist and Richard Feverel and Modern Love.  Her book tells us nothing of the seed-time of genius, but is a delightful account of its autumn.

At the same time it helps to dissipate one ridiculous popular fallacy about Meredith.  Meredith, like most all the wits, has been accused of straining after image and epigram.  Wit acts as an irritant on many people.  They forget the admirable saying of Coleridge:  “Exclusive of the abstract sciences, the largest and worthiest portion of our knowledge consists of aphorisms; and the greatest of men is but an aphorism.”  They might as well denounce a hedge for producing wild roses or a peacock for growing tail feathers with pretty eyes as a witty writer for flowering into aphorism, epigram and image.  Even so artificial a writer as Wilde had not to labour to be witty.  It has often been laid to his charge that his work smells of the lamp, whereas what is really the matter with it is that it smells of the drawing-room gas.  It was the result of too much “easy-goingness,” not of too much strain.  As for Meredith, his wit was the wit of an abounding imagination.  Lady Butcher gives some delightful examples of it.  He could not see a baby in long robes without a witty image leaping into his mind.  He said he adored babies “in the comet stage.”

Of a lady of his acquaintance he said:  “She is a woman who has never had the first tadpole wriggle of an idea,” adding, “She has a mind as clean and white and flat as a plate:  there are no eminences in it.”  Lady Butcher tells of a picnic-party on Box Hill at which Meredith was one of the company.  “After our picnic ... it came on to rain, and as we drearily trudged down the hill with cloaks and umbrellas, and burdened with our tea baskets, Mr. Meredith, with a grimace, called out to a passing friend:  ‘Behold! the funeral of picnic!’”