the world's pageantries and ate greedily BED IN SUMMER In winter I get up at night I have to go to bed and see And does it not seem hard to you, SYSTEM Every night my prayers I say, 25 The child that is not clean and neat, HAPPY THOUGHT 10 5 The world is so full of a number of things, TO AUNTIE The date of the Large Testament is the last date in the poet's biography. After having achieved that admirable and despicable performance, he disappears into the night from whence he came. How or when he died, whether decently in bed or trussed up to a gallows, remains a riddle for foolhardy commenta- 30 I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings. tors. It appears his health had suffered in the pit at Méun; he was thirty years of age and quite bald; with the notch in his under lip where Sermaise had struck him with the sword, and what wrinkles the reader may imagine. In default of portraits, this is all I have been able to piece together, and perhaps even the baldness should be taken as a figure of his destitution. A sinister dog, in all 40 likelihood, but with a look in his eye, and the loose flexile mouth that goes with wit and an overweening sensual temperament. Certainly the sorriest figure on the rolls of fame. (1877) 35 45 50 55 Chief of our aunts-not only I, And what were childhood, wanting you? IN THE STATES With half a heart I wander here A brother - yet though young in years, You speak another tongue than mine, I towards the night of time decline. Youth shall grow great and strong and To-morrow for the States-fr me San Francisco. GEORGE MEREDITH (1828-1909) Meredith is perhaps most widely known by his novels, but during recent years his poetry has come in for an increasing share of attention. His radical ideas, especially with respect to the emancipation of women, which are suggested rather than openly advocated in the novels, are explicitly avowed in the poems; and the form of his poetry, while no less characteristic than the style of his prose, is equally distinguished, and at times exquisitely musical. Meredith had to wait a long time to come by his own; his first volume of poems was published as long ago as 1851, and his first work of fiction, The Shaving of Shagpat, appeared in 1856. The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859) established his position in the world of fiction, as Modern Love (1862) won him recognition as one of the leading poets of the day; an unappreciative review provoked Swinburne to a letter of vigorous protest, in the course of which he said: 'Mr. Meredith is one of the three or four poets now alive whose work, perfect or imperfect, is always as noble in design as it is often faultless in result.' But after winning the suffrages of contemporary men of letters, Meredith had still to conquer the public. The Egoist (1879) is usually regarded as turning the tide in his favor, but in reviewing the Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth in 1883 Mark Pattison could still write: Mr. Meredith is well known, by name, to the widest circle of readers the novel readers. By name, because his name is a label warning them not to touch.' Diana of the Crossways (1885) opened the way for a larger circle of readers not only of this, but of the earlier and later novels, especially in the United States; the poems have made their way much more slowly to any considerable popularity, if indeed they can be said, as a whole, to have won it yet. Except in a few love lyrics and wayside studies, Meredith makes large demands upon his readers' powers of comprehension. He has his own system of philosophy, which needs some familiarity with his modes of expressing it before it can be understood. 'Where other writers appeal to the christian divinities or to humanity,' says a recent critic, he speaks, somewhat insistently, of the Earth, a term to which he attaches his own mystic meaning. The Earth is Nature, considered not as the malign stepmother which she is in pessimistic theory, but as a stern yet genial mother and instructress. The Earth gives us our bodies, our fund of power, and our basis of instinct. Life is an adjustment and realization of the inward forces that the Earth generates, and love it is that both tasks and rewards most completely our power of controlling these forces.' These are high themes for young readers, and they may well leave them till they are older and wiser. If they can appreciate Meredith's simpler poems, the understanding of the more difficult ones will come later. Of the external events of Meredith's life there is little to be said. Of Welsh descent, he was born in Hampshire, and educated in Germany. During his early manhood he worked as a journalist, and in 1866 he was a war correspondent in Italy and Austria, his sympathy with the cause of Italian unity and independence being shown in his novel Vittoria, published the following year. The last thirty years of his life were spent in quiet retirement at Boxhill, near London, and the enjoyment of the admiration of an ever-widening circle of readers. In 1905 he received the Order of Merit, perhaps the most distinguished of British decorations, and in 1908, on his eightieth birthday, an address of congratulation was presented to him from the leading writers of the English-speaking world. |