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of it, so to suit his Liliputian dimensions a narrow little doorway had been contrived in the lower panel, so deftly that it was all but invisible to the casual observer.

"I regret very much, Mr. Magnus," said the little man, that I cannot invite you in; I question whether my separate entrance would suit you, and it would be hardly the thing to wake my landlord at this hour. But if you will come this way to-morrow night I will arrange it so that you can get in through the large door; though, now that I think of it, my room is in the mansard, and whether you can get up there without stooping-My landlord is by no means a tall man, and he can easily touch the roof with his hand. You'll not find it uncomfortable when you are seated, though, and it would be very good of you if you would pay me a visit. It seems to me that we have much to say to each other, and I know I have something to say to you in answer to that last bitter speech of yours, but this snow and wind are too much for me. So may I hope

"I will come," interrupted the big man in a harsh voice, "if you wish it. You will then have to honor my dwelling-it is a short hour from town and not very comfortable at this time of year for spoilt city folk, but I will see that you reach the place without accident. Good night, Mr. Hinze."

"Good night. Auf wiedersehen."

The dwarf opened the little door, nodded a friendly farewell, and disappeared within. The other turned slowly away, the fast-falling snow and his own mournful thoughts for company.

[TO BE CONTINUED.]

From The Church Quarterly. THE POETRY OF GEORGE MEREDITH.'

What distinguishes Mr. Meredith-of whose works a new and complete edition is now appearing-what distinguishes Mr. Meredith among living writers is not so much his possession of this or that quality, the intensity and variety of his sympathies, the power or peculiarity of his style; it is that in an era of talent, in an era in which we may be

said to suffer from a plethora of talent, his work is so unmistakably beyond the reach of talent, so far, too, beyond the reach of labor added to ambition and desire it is so unmistakably the work of genius. Readers of Mr. Meredith's novels long ago discovered in him the man with the key to a new garden of romance which matched the best loved of old, to a new gallery in art whose portraits might hang unabashed beside those of the old masters. From a little clan the readers of his prose have grown into an army; but for the readers of his verse, these may even now easily be numbered. Yet it is not beyond possibility-though the Meredith of to-day is indisputably the novelist-that the Meredith of the twentieth century may be the poet. "All novels in every language," said De Quincey, "are hurrying to decay"-a judgment not without a germ of truth. Posterity, at all events, if one may venture to predict the future from the present-posterity will possess a considerable body of literature of its own, and will be necessarily impatient, as the present generation is impatient, of surplusage and bulk in the literature of the past; will do honor to the works of justest proportions, and harbor prejudices in favor of beauties apparent at first sight, and of excellence displayed in narrow ground. And in some sense poetry is excellence displayed in narrow ground, and may be regarded as prose cleared of the superfluous, transfigured prose, the sublimated essence, its precious sentiment close packed and embalmed for a long journey down the stream of time.

It cannot be said of Mr. Meredith that no writer of his century has challenged the like serious attention in the field of poetry as well as of fiction. To leave a great name-that of Scott-out of account, there are other and not inconsid

11 Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth. By George Meredith. (London, 1883.)

2 Ballads and Poems of Tragic Life. By George Meredith. (London, 1887).

3 A Reading of Earth. By George Meredith. (London, 1888).

4 Poems. The Empty Purse, with Odes to the Comic Spirit, To Youth in Memory and Verses By George Meredith. (London, 1892).

5 Modern Love a Reprint. By George Meredith. (London, 1892).

erable rivals. But Mr. Meredith has achieved a strikingly uniform success, such a success as makes it difficult to place his prose above his poetry, or his poetry above his prose, without misgivings that the verdict may be reversed by the critical court of the later generations. One thing is indisputable and noteworthy: Mr. Meredith's verse bears a very close relationship to his proseit supplements, reinforces, and interprets his prose. Essentially a dramatic artist, he has none the less experienced the lyrical passion for the deliverance of his own soul, and in his verse has set free his thought in his own person. It is precisely the dramatic artist entering through his imaginative sympathy into the characters and situations of his dramatis persone who presents "the imaginary utterances of so many imaginary persons, not his," and suppresses himself the while; it is precisely the dramatic artist, we may naturally suppose, in whom the impulse toward selfrevelation exists most strongly. He is the wide and clear-eyed spectator of life who sees and pictures it best, but is for the most part content to remain unknown behind his creations. And in Mr. Meredith's fiction, as in Shakespeare's, a persistent and impenetrable irony veils the artist himself; the author lurks undiscovered behind the humorist. So was it not with Thackeray, who steps forward ever and anon to speak in propria persona. So was it not with Scott, whose sympathies there is no mistaking. Shakespeare in his sonnets, the popular theory has it, laid aside the mask of humor, and "with the sonnetkey unlocked his heart." Let this be so or not, it is certain that Mr. Meredith lays aside in his verse the mask of humor worn in his novels. His poetry is more essentially serious than his prose; it is grave almost throughout; a personal utterance, the expression of the individual philosophy of the man. The reader of the novels is in contact with the dramatic artist, the spectator and student of life; the poems are the outspoken utterance of the man who is himself one of the dramatis persona in personal relation with the facts of the world. Taken together, this prose and this verse constitute an autobiography

the outlook and the inlook of life. To Mr. Meredith's poetry belongs therefore a special, because a near and personal. interest; it supplements his prose, as has been said, and stands to it somewhat in the relation of interpretative criticism. Not the ignoble curiosity which pries into the private life of an author, but a legitimate intellectual curiosity is here satisfied. One is grateful to possess the individual view of so ardent and so brilliant a student of life, especially if, as in Mr. Meredith's case, no discord is introduced into the harmony of the entire impression received from his work. The predominant note in Mr. Meredith's work as a whole, both prose and verse, is its invincible fortitude, its cheerful acceptance of things as they are. He belongs to that company of artists who have looked the world in the face, and expressed neither disappointment nor dissatisfaction therewith. In an epoch in which poets are neither few nor insignificant, Mr. Meredith shares with Browning the distinction that he has never for the briefest season dwelt in the melancholy shade. Here is poetry in which prevails no sense of sadness, no overpowering sentiment of pity for the vexed human race, no Virgilian cry with its sense of tears in mortal things, no wistful regrets, no torturing doubts. Even so interesting and so great a writer as Count Tolstoi suffers at times a sense of hopelessness to overcome him, and involves us in his own despair. But Mr. Meredith's citadel of mind and heart is impregnable, and, while he will have us see the naked truth, fortifies us for its reception. In this poetry there is ever scant sympathy dispensed for weak nerves and apprehensive hearts. Reaa "Earth and Man," or this "Whisper of Sympathy":

Hawk or shrike has done this deed
Of downy feathers: rueful sight!
Sweet sentimentalist, invite
Your bosom's power to intercede,

So hard it seems that one must bleed Because another needs will bite! All round we see cold nature slight The feelings of the totter-knee'd.

O it were pleasant, with you
To fly from this tussle of foes,

The shambles, the charnel, the wrinkle!
To dwell in yon dribble of dew

On the cheek of your sovereign rose,
And live the young life of a twinkle.1

"Part of the test of a great literatus," said Whitman, "shall be the absence in him of the idea of the covert, the lurid, the maleficent, the devil, the grim estimates inherited from the Puritans, hell, natural depravity, and the like. The great literatus will be known among us by his cheerful simplicity, his adherence to natural standards, his limitless faith in God, his reverence, and by the absence in him of doubt, ennui, burlesque, persiflage, or any strained or temporary fashion."

How luminous a saying-but how shattering to the pretensions of the majority of our literati! The absence of doubt, ennui, burlesque, persiflage, or any strained or temporary fashion! Yet it is thus Mr. Meredith may be known among his contemporaries as the great literatus; by his cheerful simplicity, his adherence to natural standards, his limitless faith in God, and by the absence in him of doubt and ennui. And this though we have passed and are passing through times unfavorable to literature possessed of these qualities, times whose spiritual winds are chill, and whose skies grey with the greyness of the sea in winter. Too surely the modern world is not all that it was expected to be; it has disappointed expectation, and we moderns have reaped from it a plentiful crop of discouragement. Since the Renaissance, that birthday of the modern world, brought with it a sense of buoyancy, of widening horizons, and incalculable advances, and endless triumphs for humanity, since then only a poet here and there has been a minister of hope and promised great things in a day that was not very far off. These eager spirits on the watch-towers of thought saw at times, or thought they saw, the breaking light of some great morning of the world-a light that was about to fill the heavens and orb into humanity's perfect day. Wordsworth and Coleridge had these purple visions in youth, but the disillusioning years dealt hardly with them. Shelley could not bring himself to believe that the light that filled his own soul did not

1 Ballads and Poems, p. 63.

shine in the open sky. But we of the modern world do not suffer from these illusions, and the happy enthusiasts among us who put their trust in the progress of science seem also to suffer from disillusion. They are reluctantly brought to confess that while science has given liberally to humanity with one hand, she has taken away with the other. While, however, the majority of the latter-day poets have felt the absence of inspiring motives in the atmosphere of the time, Mr. Meredith breathes the keen disillusioning air without pain and without discouragement, and declares it to be spiritually bracing. The season is autumn, and the grey mist

Narrows the world to my neighbor's gate,
Paints me life as a wheezy crone.
I, even I, for a zenith of sun
Cry, to fulfil me, nourish my blood;
O for a day of the long light, one!
But here is the last word:

Verily now is our season of seed,
Now, in our Autumn; and Earth discerns

Them that have served her in them that can read,

Glassing, where under the surface, she

burns,

Quick at her wheel, while the fuel, decay, Brightens the fire of renewal; and we? Death is the word of a bovine to-day, Know you the breast of the springing To-be ??

The majority of the poets seek refuge when the psychological climate of the times is unfavorable to poetry, the majority seek refuge in the limitless romance of the past. Not so Mr. Meredith. He is a poet of a sæculum realisticum, and the only romance for him is the real romance of the present, the inexhaustible romance of the future. The poetry with the passion for the past, the poetry that would hang its richly wrought arabesque in gold and purple between us and the facts of life, has here given place to the poetry with an undivided allegiance to the present, and to truth palatable or unpalatable. Goldsmith, that tender, human-hearted poet, wrote of his favorite books as being those which, amusing the imagination, contributed to ease the heart, and

2 A Reading of Earth, pp. 2-4.

in another of his exquisite sentences defined the office of the poet-sage "Innocently to amuse the imagination in this dream of life is wisdom." The wisdom of Mr. Meredith's poetry is made of sterner stuff. If we are to be cradled in comfortable philosophies, transcendental or mystical, lapped in soft Lydian airs, or borne in a car of song by the instinct of sweet music driven, we must read poetry other than this. And Mr. Meredith declines, too, the sad task in which Matthew Arnold engaged, the task of "sweeping up the dead leaves fallen from the dying tree of faith."

These are our sensual dreams; Of the yearning to touch, to feel The dark Impalpable sure And have the Unveiled appear:1 Poetry such as this, devoid of the sentiment of regret, devoid of that tender melancholy so characteristic of Matthew Arnold; almost devoid, too, of the sentiment of pathos; poetry which seems to shun the elegiac sentiment in which so much of the world's poetry is steeped, and by which it makes its appeal; poetry like this strikes a strange and original note. The chords to which Mr. Meredith trusts for his effects are chords seldom heard upon the lyre; his is a poetry of almost exclusively intel

lectual interest-the music from an iron string. It is not to be expected that this poetry should give us the full sense of vitality as Chaucer gives it, of the mere joy of living, or charm us to dreamful ease as Spenser charms.

cence,

He who has looked upon Earth
Deeper than flower and fruit
Loses some hue of his mirth.2

But poesy has an infancy, an adolesan immortality Protean. Mr. Meredith's is not the buoyant spirit of Chaucer, but the virtue of his poetry resides none the less in its astonishing vitality and in the power to communicate that vitality. To the freshness and buoyancy it possesses is added a flavor of intellectual bitter that springs from its devotion to reality, and it is by reason of its rarely mingled elements, its freshness and buoyancy, and its strenu

1 A Reading of Earth, p. 89.

2 Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth, p. 30.

ous devotion to reality that Mr. Meredith's poetry achieves a new poetic triumph.

"I am certain," said Keats of his own "Lamia," "I am certain that there is that sort of fire in it which must take hold of people in some way-give them either pleasant or unpleasant sensation." The poetry of Mr. Meredith, too, is not negligible; it has that sort of fire in it which takes hold of one, and gives him either a pleasant or unpleasant sensation. This is the verse that will not suffer a reader to pass by in peace, and, if it makes not music for him, he will, with Hotspur, prefer to hear the dry wheel grate on the axle-tree.

Square along the couch, and stark
Like the sea-rejected thing
Sea-sucked white, behold their king
Attila, my Attila! .

Him, their lord of day and night,
Dumb for vengeance. Name us that,
White, and lifting up his blood

Huddled in the corner dark,
Humped and grinning like a cat,
Teeth for lips! 'Tis she! She stares
Glittering through her bristled hairs.
Rend her! Pierce her to the hilt!3

Discriminating readers of Mr. Meredith's novels have no doubt felt the

presence of the poet even in his garment of prose, but probably few suspect that the poet preceded the novelist. His first public appearance was with a volume, published in 1851, simply entitled "Poems," and dedicated to his father-in-law, Thomas Love Peacock. It was not until some years later that he took the field with a novel, "The Shaving of Shagpat." The second volume of poems appeared in 1862 (three years after "Richard Feverel"), "Modern Love and Poems of the English Roadside, with Poems and Ballads"; the third, "Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth," in 1883; the fourth, "Ballads and Poems of Tragic Life," in 1887; the fifth, "A Reading of Earth," in 1888; the sixth, "The Empty Purse and Other Poems," in 1892. Of these the first volume is now a rare treasure, more especially as the author has not cared to reprint his "Juvenilia," and the second contains, besides many verses never re

3 Ballads and Poems of Tragic Life. p. 93.

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

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. Meredith 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

acceptance, and a new, if not successful, Yon marble woman with the marble rose, is an impertinence.

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

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.

To them are lastingly allied.

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