printed, the original "Modern Love," which was selected by the author for republication as a separate volume in 1892, accompanied by some new poems. The best order in which first to read Mr. Meredith's poetry is not, I think, the chronological order. If one begins with "A Reading of Earth," and passes to the remaining volumes by way of the "Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth," one moves more easily, receives a more continuous, a more unbroken impression, and enters at once into sympathy with the attitude of the author. And Mr. Meredith's attitude, his choice of subject, and his method require to be acquiesced in-"not to sympathize is not to understand." A poet commonly places himself en rapport with his audience by his choice of subject or by the adoption of a familiar method, and he is accustomed as artist to retire to a distance from his work and to contemplate its effect from a point of view not entirely his own. He has during the creative process his audience in his eye. If he is unable or unwilling to gain this remoteness from his own creation, if he declines to place himself either by choice of subject or by the adoption of a familiar method at the universal point of view, he demands an unusual intel lectual activity from his readers, and wins his way with them certainly more gradually, perhaps not at all. Approval of his choice of subject, approval of his method, are not assured him until it be granted that the effect has justified the means. For a law of parsimony holds in art: the old methods are sealed by acceptance, and a new, if not successful, is an impertinence. balance effected by the new method, the new choice of subject. Or rather let us say that with each original poet a novel aspect of things is brought into the foreground, a new predominant purpose is displayed. With Tennyson the main purpose was to bend his language to his thought so that no verse should escape him unenriched by a musical cadence, that no arrow unfeathered with melody should leave his bow. With Mr. Mercdith the main purpose is achieved if no line, no phrase escape him uninformed by force, if he discharge no shaft unwinged or unweighted with thought. Hence obscurity is the charge brought against him; he has been called an inarticulate poet, and indisputably he is at times obscure. But like Browning's, Mr. Meredith's obscurity arises out of the number and fervency of his ideas; he is obscure because he has so much to say and is in such haste to say it, and moreover insists upon his own point of view and demands from his reader that flexibility of intelligence, that intellectual activity necessary to the appreciation of an unfamiliar poetic method. And obscurity is after all the vaguest of charges. Gray was accounted obscure; Shelley intolerably obscure; Tennyson, even our popular Tennyson, in the days of his early triumphs was censured for his obscurity. And if the readers of Browning are content to travel far, and at times even with lagging step, to catch sight of splendors such as this I shall keep your honor-safe; With mine I trust you, as the sculptor trust Yon marble woman with the marble rose, Loose on her hand, she never will let fall, In graceful, slight, silent security. then the readers of Mr. Meredith may well be content to undergo occasional mental fatigue for the sake of, let us say, such a magnificent "Meditation under Stars" as this The onus probandi rests with such a poet to show good reason for his departure from accredited poetic example. The progress of Wordsworth through ridicule to fame was the progress of a poet of determined independence in choice of subject as well as in poetic methods. Yet opposition once overcome, it is the poet with the note of We who reflect those rays, though low our strangeness in his voice to whom we return-the note of strangeness is the note of individuality. In poetry, too, as in all art, there is a compromise effected, and the note of strangeness is the mark of the fresh compromise, the alteration of place To them are lastingly allied. So may we read, and little find them cold; Not frosty lamps illumining dead space, Not distant aliens, not senseless powers, The fire is in them whereof we are born; The music of their motion may be ours. Spirit shall deem them beckoning Earth usually, though with brilliant instances and voiced Sisterly to her, in her beams rejoiced. Half strange seems Earth, and sweeter than her flowers.1 It may freely be granted that in general we have too continuous a strain, too unrelieved an emphasis in Mr. Meredith's poetry. It lacks breathing spaces, points of repose for the imagination. Once we have ascended his poetic car we are borne along at full speed, a speed that is rarely slackened until the goal be reached. Thus it comes that one cannot read for long in these volumes, as in Tennyson's; one cannot fleet the time carelessly with this poet as with Mr. William Morris. Mr. Meredith is not of the singers who simply say the most heart-easing things, who lead us to their favorite haunts by wood or stream and discourse music to us that we may drink oblivion of care and pass into a many-colored dream of flitting shadows. And if he fall short as a poet, it is that his poetry is too strenuous to be altogether peaceful, and that the impressions received from it are too crowded to permit of that leisurely sipping of the cup, that tranquil enjoyment which is essential to the due appreciation of poetry. Poetry and haste are eternal incompatibles. One cannot bolt a stanza in the five minutes' interval between engagements, nor can one find perfect happiness in the company of a poet whose pace is always a gallop. Mr. Meredith's verse has caught contagion from the hurry and the bustle of modern life. And his utterance, too, is a staccato utterance. It would be untrue to say of him that there was no light and shade in his conceptions, but there is often an absence of light and shade in his expression. And though Mr. Meredith conceives aright the sensuous as well as the intellectual life, his poetry 1 A Reading of Earth, p. 12. to the contrary, lacks the sensuous element, usually fails to express that element as vividly as it expresses the intellectual. Language, especially the language of poetry, has an office other than that of mirroring with precision a train of ideas; it must make appeal to the senses, to the eye and to the ear, to the memory and its associations, to the imagination and its dreams. Yet this is not the day nor the hour to complain of poetry in which the intellectual element outbalances the sensuous; rather we owe to poetry of which this is true a debt of gratitude. A little thought goes far in modern verse, and the critics assure us that even that little is unnecessary. "Poetry," Mr. Henley tells us, "is style." And in Mr. Meredith's poetry the very force and intensity of his thought communicate a beauty to his phrase the beauty that strength. Take this of Byron's “Manfred" Considerably was the world shines in Of spinsterdom and clergy racked But we should wrong Mr. Meredith by saying that his is always the music from an iron string. That he is master of a manner besides this of rugged force is easily demonstrable. The critic will need to search diligently through English poetry to discover a poem of more blithe and gracious sweetness, more radiant with the dew and sunshine of morning, with the captivating joyance of youth than "Love in a Valley." The measure-and it may be noted that in metres Mr. Meredith greatly and successfully dares-the measure itself dances to the tripping pulses of the young blood. Cool was the woodside; cool as her white dairy Keeping sweet the cream-pan; and there the boys from school, 2 Ballads and Poems of Tragic Life, p, 68. Cricketing below, rushed red and brown with sunshine; O the dark translucence of the deepeyed cool! Could I find a place to be alone with heaven, I would speak my heart out: heaven is my need. Every woodland tree is flushing like the dog-wood, Flashing like the white beam, swaying like the reed. Fushing like the dog-wood crimson in October; Streaming like the flag-reed south-west blown; Flashing as in gusts the sudden-lighted white beam; All seem to know what is for heaven alone.1 Here, and in a pastoral not reprinted from his earliest volume, Mr. Meredith's verse bubbles, and creams and ripples from the very founts of spring and summer. But to enter into the true spirit of Mr. Meredith's poetry of nature, we must come to it by way of "A Reading of Earth." We are constantly assured by modern criticism and by the practice of modern poets that it is no part of the poet's duty to be a teacher, that the exposition of belief lies altogether outside the province of art. Mr. Meredith abides by the tradition of the greater English poets, Spenser and Milton and Wordsworth, and his poetry frankly outlines a faith, delineates a philosophy of life. It is a creed of full and lasting "joy in the old heart of things;" but how hold and live by that creed in the face of the certain sorrows, the uncertain issues, the unavoidable partings of life, the knowledge that The word of the world is adieu To preserve for the human race during its dark hours the heart of hope, the Come, and like bees will we gather the faith that there is some soul of goodness rich golden honey of noontide Deep in the sweet summer meadows, bordered by hill-side and river. O joy thus to revel all day in the grass of our own belov'd country, Revel all day till the lark mounts at eve with his sweet "tirra-lirra;" Thrilling delightfully. The lyric beauty of poems such as these will recall to readers of the novels the passion-brimming lyrical enchantments woven in the "Ferdinand and Miranda" chapters of "Richard Feverel," beside which I do not know that there is anything in literature to be placed since "Romeo and Juliet" itself. In others of the "Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth" is heard the same clear lark-like trill of gladness, a music as of the early world untouched by human pain or sorrow, a song of the elements Water, first of singers, o'er rocky mount and mead, First of earthly singers, the sun-loved rill Sang of him, and flooded the ripples on the reed Seeking whom to waken and what ear fill.2 1 Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth, p. 95. 2 Ibid. p. 73. in things evil, that evil itself is not immortal, and that the destiny of man is something more than to die, to preserve this heart of hope and this faith is not the meanest achievement of the poet. Yet, when this faith and this hope are threatened, so exclusively does the poetic spirit seem to feed upon the beauty and the pathos of life that the poets often offer us no more than a sad philosophy of indifference," or a fuller life of the senses, the worship of the flesh in despair of soul. But Mr. Meredith in this also abides by the poetic tradition of the greater poets and refuses to despair of soul. The resurgent brood of questions to which earth, our mother, replies not are but the brood of unfaith, and earth's silence argues no indifference to her children. Of those who ask them Earth whispers they scarce have the thirst, Except to unriddle a rune; it trusts 8 A Reading of Earth, p. 71. Uses my gifts yet aspires In "A Faith on Trial" and in "Earth and Man" Mr. Meredith sets forth a spiritual philosophy of courageous faith, a philosophy akin in some respects to that of Wordsworth, but informed by the later spirit of scientific realism. The poet is now, as the man of the future will be, as we are all fast becoming, neither idealist nor realist, neither one nor the other, because both. If Mr. Meredith in his poetry rejects with the unalterable mien of physical science any mystical explanation of things which leaves the facts and laws of the great external world of our physical nature out of account, he rejects with equal firmness the philosophy of immediate conclusions based upon the slight and meagre knowledge we possess. Like the Christian's, Mr. Meredith's word is "Faith till proof be ready." Only when the lesson of Nothing harms beneath the leaves Only at a dread of dark Have you by the hair. Few among Mr. Meredith's poems are more quaintly, and at the same time more powerfully, conceived than this, "The Woods of Westermain." The very spirit of the forest is abroad in it, a mystery of life lurks in the thicket and among the leaves. With it should be read "Melampus”— Where others hear but a hum and see but The tongue and eye of the fountain of life a beam, he knew." Here, as in all his nature-poems, Mr. Meredith moves with the firm step of one to whom the path is a familiar one; a subtle accuracy of observation shines in every epithet. There is no poet since has been duly learned, only when the the death of Wordsworth for whom na A fortitude quiet as Earth's At the shedding of leaves2 attitude of ture has meant so much as for Mr. unfaith clamoring to be coined Meredith. From many of his poems one To faith by proof might conceive him as entirely preoccupied with nature, a close and eager student, to whom the world of individual men and women was little more than a shadowland. How far this is wide of the truth readers of Mr. Meredith's novels are indeed aware; and perhaps we need go no further for convincing proof, if any were needed, of the mental grasp and breadth displayed in his work, a breadth and grasp unmatched in the work of any living man. The place occupied by nature in modern poetry since the advent of Wordsworth must in large measure be associated with the growth of a knowledge of nature, and the desire for that knowledge displayed in scientific investigation. With Mr. Meredith nature is not so much, as with Wordsworth, an object of impassioned contemplation, an enclasping presence, the source of spiritual ecstasy. She is rather nature as re Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth, p. 1 vealed to us by science, the eternal activity, the nature that overflows with individual life. And an enduring place among the English poets is assured to Mr. Meredith if for this alone, that he is the first to accept fearlessly the view of nature offered by modern science, and not to accept it only, but to find that view vitally poetic and inspiring. For this he will be remembered. He will be remembered and honored as that coura geous spirit who, when his companions were assailed by fears, embraced with ready welcome the entire unbroken ring, the whole result of science, and, claiming this too as a province of art, drew from the new truths fresh auguries and hopes and lessons for humanity. Mr. Meredith's study of nature is that of the naturalist, the naturalist who has become the passionate lover. He would have us believe that a closer intimacy with nature will serve to prove her Mother of simple truth, Relentless quencher of lies, and to dispel the unworthy apprehensions which, judging her with shrinking nerves, makes her "a cruel sphinx," A mother of aches and jests; She is before and above all the Earth our mother, instructress of her children; and to prate of other worlds ere we have mastered this and its lessons seems to Mr. Meredith the hugest of follies. Through the knowledge of earth, "never misread by brain," we approach a fuller consciousness of the issues and meanings of life, Till brain-rule splendidly towers.' Mr. Meredith is at times obscure, but he is never intangible; he is at times difficult, but he is never unreal. Sureness of grasp, concentration, force, significance these are the splendid qualities of his style, and at times one catches an accent, a phrase, a verse exquisitely tuneful, a melody wholly his 1 A Reading of Earth, p, 78. Her pomp of glorious hues, Her revelries of ripeness, her kind smile.❜ His "cosmic enthusiasm" is without reservations, his spiritual freedom untrammelled and entire. "The Ballads and Poems of Tragic Life" display Mr. Meredith in his characteristic, his unmistakable style, the style which is the despair of so many readers. Here are ballads, indeed, but not of that species which may be defined as the simplest and most direct form of narrative poetry. To disentangle these tales one must proceed warily, and piece reflections, apostrophes, and the future each together, like a mosaic, from hints, may not find ballads of this order acceptable. Save in "The Nuptials of Attila," the vigor of the manner hardly compensates for the harshness of the narration. But "The Nuptials of Attila" is a notable exception, a notable poem. It is not only a notable, it is an altogether marvellous and indescribable poem. To read it is to hear the tread of armies, to mingle in the tossing tumult of barbarian camps, to catch one's breath in the presence of the queen of tragedy herself. There is no poem with which it can to any purpose be compared. From first to last it displays the characteristics of Mr. Meredith at his best and strongest, and will take rank among the great achievements of mod8 Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth, p. 119. |