The Facts of Fiction (23 page)

Farther on the fruit trees caught the splendour of the night; and looked like a troop of sultanas taking their garden air, where the eye of man could not profane them. There were apples that rivalled rubies; pears of
topaz tint; a whole paraphernalia of plums, some purple as the amethyst, others blue and brilliant as the sapphire; an emerald here, and now a yellow drop that gleamed like the yellow diamond of Gengis Khan.

A man who pretends that he cannot tell the difference between an orchard and a harem is either a fool or a fraud. It is not to be wondered at that the rural electors of Bucks rejected Disraeli at his first attempt if he spoke about their farms and holdings in such terms. To an English mind there is something pathetically silly in the notion of an expatriated Jew trying to make the sight of an English orchard by moonlight presentable to his own imagination by putting a jeweller's price on every pear and apple; by dangling a carat before his long, donkey's nose.

But when all the stuffing has been knocked out of this over-stuffed book,
Sybil
remains a powerful and intelligent novel. In intention, it is considerably larger than most of the novels of that day or of ours. Its object was to unite the lives of men with the events of the time; it was the Chartists' Charter.

Where it came nearest to failure was on the human side, not on the historic. Sybil herself is simply a china statuette with streaming eyes. The march of the Chartists is described with the full impetuous sweep of urgent and excited narrative. In the alarm of the moment the author finds his head and his feet, forgets that he is Dizzy, and makes straight at his goal.

The march of Bishop Hatton at the head of the Hellcats into the mining districts was perhaps the most strikingly popular movement since the Pilgrimage of Grace. Mounted on a white mule, wall-eyed and of
hideous form, the Bishop brandished a huge hammer with which he had announced that he would destroy the enemies of the people: all butties, doggies, dealers in truck and tommy, middle masters and main masters. Some thousand Hell-cats followed him, brandishing bludgeons, or armed with bars of iron, pick-handles, and hammers. On each side of the Bishop, on a donkey, was one of his little sons, as demure and earnest as if he were handling his file. A flowing standard of silk, inscribed with the Charter, and which had been presented to him by the delegate, was borne before him like the oriflamme. Never was such a gaunt, grim crew. As they advanced, their numbers continually increased, for they arrested all labour in their progress. Every engine was stopped, the plug was driven out of every boiler, every fire was extinguished, every man was turned out. The decree went forth that labour was to cease until the Charter was the law of the land: the mine and the mill, the foundry and the loomshop were, until the consummation, to be idle: nor was the mighty pause to be confined to these great enterprises. Every trade of every kind and description was to be stopped: tailor and cobbler, brushmaker and sweep, tinker and carter, mason and builder, all, all; for all an enormous Sabbath, that was to compensate for any incidental suffering which it induced by the increased means and the elevated condition that it ultimately would insure; that paradise of artisans, that Utopia of Toil, embalmed in those ringing words, sounds cheerful to the Saxon race: “A fair day's wage for a fair day's work.”

If Disraeli could always have written like that, he would have taken his place alongside the virile novelists of the language. But the trouble is that an interest in
events, without an equal interest in the individual actors, makes poor fiction. And Disraeli never invented a character sufficiently satisfying to convince even himself.

In his most nearly successful novel,
Coningsby,
he simply pinned new names on well-known backs, and stood to one side to watch the fun. The weakness of the method is obvious: once the well-known men are dead and forgotten the reader has to go through the book with a key to the characters at his elbow to ensure that he is getting all of portraiture, all of scandal and all of impudence that the book has to offer.

Politics was the Disraelian substitute for philosophy. He saw the whole of life in terms of governments and downfalls of governments. Those of his books that do not point towards Westminster are completely forgotten. In the collected edition of his works, he describes how as a child “born in a library and trained from early childhood by learned men,” he grew to survey the political scene from a scholar's perch. And he remarks that “what most attracted my musing, even as a boy, was the elements of our political parties, and the strange mystification by which that which was natural in its constitution had become odious, and that which was exclusive was presented as popular.”

We can disregard the two obvious facts that compared with Gladstone, who really was a scholar, Disraeli, so far as learning went, was simply an undergraduate with a flower in his buttonhole, and that to say that Whigs were odious and Tories popular was either a purely temporary or else a prejudiced opinion. But prejudiced or ephemeral it was Disraeli's political faith.

Coningsby, Sybil
and
Tancred
form an imposing philosophic trilogy, which Disraeli really believed presented a
picture of the whole of English society. They presented the picture as seen through the eyes of an alert foreigner. Actually they presented a far better picture of Disraeli, cunning, inspired and anxiously trying to dig a hole in which to take root in English soil.

We now come upon a pair of novelists, men of the first rank, Meredith and Hardy, who had much in common, yet whose resemblances serve merely to throw their dissimilarity into sharper relief.

They were like two men travelling along the same road at the same time, one on the way to an everlasting wedding feast, the other on the way to bury the baby. They were both writers who saw life in the large terms of poetry. But one was lyrical, the other epical. One was radiantly cheerful. The other unremittingly tragic; we might almost say inevitably tragic, for extend a lyric and you generally find a tragedy.

One was on good terms with the universe; the other as soured in his writing as though God had trodden on him and not apologised. Meredith would have said that creation was on his side; or at least, that he was on the side of creation. Hardy suffered grave doubts as to whether creation were not actually cruel in creating anyone.

Both writers were unchristian, or anti-christian; though remembering the age in which they lived, it is something—like measles in an epidemic—that one would hesitate to adduce as evidence of any fundamental originality. A violently anti-christian, or atheistic novelist, nowadays, would be worth any amount of individual notice; like an industriously enthusiastic Israelite uselessly making an eighth round of the walls of Jericho.

That Meredith was a novelist at all is astonishing. There is so much that is commonplace in the greatest of novels—indeed a novel scarcely can be great without a lot of the ordinary business of life in its pages—that to see Meredith turn novelist is rather like seeing a tightrope walker earning his living by carrying hods of bricks across a builder's plank.

Meredith was a poet of remarkable lambency of emotion. And a philosopher of quite inchoate philosophy. He had in him the makings of a far more uniformly successful poet than novelist. But there were fewer interested in that kind of success, and Meredith shrank from neglect with a most unphilosophic instinctiveness.

Meredith, indeed, is one of the most unnatural novelists in the language. He had—at least in his early years—an impetuous load of things to say, but the manner he adopted of saying them was anything but the novelist's. Wilde remarked that “as a novelist he can do everything, except tell a story.” And Meredith certainly seems in places to keep up a running fight between his philosophy and his fiction, between himself and his characters.

He became a novelist for quite the wrong reason. It was not because he even
wanted
to tell a story, or to paint a picture of human affairs, that he wrote. It was simply that he had evolved a theory of Life. And since it was one of those theories that fit life only about as well as the Procrustean bed fitted its occupant, he had to invent a world in which he could perform his choppings and loppings to his, and his theory's, satisfaction.

Mercifully, he was an optimist; and he was that far rarer thing, an intellectual optimist. He believed in Nature as ardently as men an age or two before him had
believed in God, and he evoked Man where they had called upon the Son of Man. In other words, he was a passionately, even fanatically, religious man, though in a fierce, free, irreligious fashion. His theory, however, was always getting under his feet. It was a theory of comedy, and therefore of laughter. The one illogical thing that remains in a natural world is laughter. And to theorise about it is perhaps the most dangerous thing that a humorist can do.

Mankind is one, said Meredith, and anyone acting selfishly, is a subject for huge and brooding merriment. Looked at through such a pair of philosopher's spectacles, life is a perpetual contortion in which the nose is being cut off to spite the face. It is a theoretical, spiritless laughter that Meredith's high comedy provokes; but once a mind has enjoyed the amusement that his books offer, the rest of fiction, for a time, at least, seems a little sodden to the taste.

The unique thing about Meredith is the way in which he contained within himself the vital parts of both a propagandist and a poet. At that very moment when his theory seems to drag his comedy down from the level of Olympian laughter, there is the beat of wings in the air; and Meredith, the poet and the lover, is there doing his djinn's work, and carrying his creation back into the clouds where it belongs.

It may seem a perfectly fruitless occupation discovering what it is that destroys Meredith's novels, when they are there before us glittering with competence. But with Meredith we have always a feeling that his brilliance is consuming him; that his speaking voice might be more pleasant if he had not sung so much.

If Meredith's genius (to change the metaphor) could have been fitted with some anti-dazzle device before it set
out, he would have had twice as many admirers to-day, and there would not have been one hundredth of those casualties that he left strewed behind him in the ditch. He did not even have the sense, or the modesty, to start dimly. He had the headlights of his mind blazing before he had left the drive. Thus,
The Egoist
opens with a Prelude, good enough in its way as a piece of pranked-out philosophy that is about as inviting to the timid reader as the notice to tramps that there are man-traps set. It is not even as though the author were content with drawing a moral from his story. He is at the other game of writing a parable to fit a moral.

Meredith is an example of the dangers of longevity in literature. Charles Reade said that a writer of any magnitude would become great merely by growing old. But Meredith shrank with age. He accumulated a big, rambling reputation at the cost of himself. He became simply a wan crusader, wrapped in perpetual evening, dreaming war.

To understand the real Meredith, it is necessary to re-inflate the Sage of Box Hill, and restore him to the original size of the Surrey Strong Man, tossing iron bars about for pleasure like a navvy at a country fair, hirsute and heroic like a buccaneering Christ. He was a man with the storm-wind behind him; a man in a rage with the rest of the world. He was a far greater figure than the attenuated philosopher, the stiffened athlete, acidly complaining that the reviewers had been against him all his life.

The conviction that the small world of men was on its own side and not on his, led to that quite unnatural tautening of muscle and arching of neck that Meredith adopted to shoulder his way through the crowd. If a reason has to be found for every peculiarity of a writer,
we can lay our fingers on the exposed nerve of Meredith without undue hesitation.

Meredith was born the son of a naval outfitter in Southampton—Marryat mentions the firm—and he had an almost morbid sensitiveness about his parenthood. His family moved in that uncertain social twilight between the petty tradesman and the petty gentry. Probably he was never quite sure whether an advance of his would be met by a salute, or a snub. His aloofness earned him the name of “Gentleman Georgie.” And the whole early years of his life—the death of his mother, his father's dislike of him, the distaste for his fellows—are the period of painful transformation of the obscure tradesman into the famous writer.

Mr. Priestley has suggested that in later years Meredith was “ashamed not of the tailor's shop, but of his shame of the tailor's shop.” Certainly the figure of a tailor's son feverishly trying to escape the abhorréd shears is one on which the spirit of comedy could play to advantage. It would have been very difficult for the sage to confess the snob. And once he ascended the public pedestal he left the snob behind for the literary historian to discover. Thus in
Evan Harrington
he laughed at the colossal accident of his birth. And in
Henry Richmond
he obscured the fact that there had been any accident at all.

This manipulation of things in his mind, his habit of flicking a fact about like a ball in a fives court, is like that of no other writer so much as it is like that of Laurence Sterne. Both writers had their theory of comedy. And both writers took a mischievous delight in arriving at the comic situation by the roundabout route of letting their comic spirit bounce from the four sides of their mind on its way.

In ornament as well as in structure there is a great
deal of Laurence Sterne in George Meredith. That fantastic passage about a leg in
The Egoist
could have been written only by one of two writers:

Mrs. Mountstuart touched a thrilling cord. “In spite of men's hateful modern costume, you see he has a leg.”

That is, the leg of the born cavalier is before you: and obscure it as you will, dress degenerately, there it is for ladies who have eyes. You
see
it: or, you see
he
has it. Miss Isabel and Miss Eleanor disputed the incidence of the emphasis, but surely, though a slight difference of meaning may be heard, either will do: many, with a good show of reason, throw the accent upon
leg.
And the ladies knew for a fact that Willoughby's leg was exquisite; he had a cavalier court-suit in his wardrobe. Mrs. Mountstuart signified that the leg was to be seen because it was a burning leg. There it is, and it
will
shine through! He has the leg of Rochester, Buckingham, Dorset, Suckling; the leg that smiles, that winks, is obsequious to you, yet perforce of beauty self-satisfied; that twinkles to a tender midway between imperiousness and seductiveness, audacity and discretion; between “you shall worship me,” and “I am devoted to you”; is your lord, your slave, alternately, and in one. It is a leg of ebb and flow and high-tide ripples. Such a leg, when it has done with pretending to retire, will walk straight into the hearts of women. Nothing so fatal to them …