DOI article:
Street, George Slythe: Mr. Meredith in Little
DOI Page / Citation link:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.21806#0180
Mr. Meredith in Little
176
his bones. In The Case of General Ople and Lady Camper you
have him alive and imperfect. In The Tale of Chloe you have him
consummate.
If Mr. Meredith were one of those sympathetic writers who
can write only when they are drunk—and is not art life as
expressed by a finely drunken intelligence ?—I should think he
wrote The House on the Beach after a surfeit of tea. The appre-
hension, the phrase and the mechanism of conveyance are there ;
the quickening fire, the “ thatf as Sir Joshua Reynolds said, is
absent. “ You shall live ” Mr. Meredith seems to have said to
his potential puppets, and so they live—under protest. As has
happened before, when lack of customary inspiration has been feit,
he seems to have tried, in over-vehement self-justification, to do
what the füllest inspiration had hardly made possible. He has
offered you a caprice of feminine emotion more incredible than is
to be found in any other of his books. A middle-aged man,
grotesquely vulgär and abnormally mean-minded, asks, as his
price for not exposing an old friend, this old friend’s daughter to
wife. The daughter, having set herseif to make the sacrifice, had
to find in this treacherous cad, Tinman, some human merit for
her comfort, and for a prop of her obstinacy towards a seemlier
wooer. She found it in the fact that Tinman, being knocked
down by her father, did not return the blow. “ She had conceived
an insane idea of nobility in Tinman that blinded her to his
face, figure, and character—his manners, likewise. He had
forgiven a blow ! . . . Tinman’s magnanimity was present in her
imagination to sustain her.” The play of emotional fancy which
follows on this motive is delightful to read, and you are fain to be
persuaded, for your enjoyment, of its truth ; but when you have
shut the book the perversity is plain. Perversity is, I think, the
word. The caprice is gratuitous. When Mr. Meredith tried
our
176
his bones. In The Case of General Ople and Lady Camper you
have him alive and imperfect. In The Tale of Chloe you have him
consummate.
If Mr. Meredith were one of those sympathetic writers who
can write only when they are drunk—and is not art life as
expressed by a finely drunken intelligence ?—I should think he
wrote The House on the Beach after a surfeit of tea. The appre-
hension, the phrase and the mechanism of conveyance are there ;
the quickening fire, the “ thatf as Sir Joshua Reynolds said, is
absent. “ You shall live ” Mr. Meredith seems to have said to
his potential puppets, and so they live—under protest. As has
happened before, when lack of customary inspiration has been feit,
he seems to have tried, in over-vehement self-justification, to do
what the füllest inspiration had hardly made possible. He has
offered you a caprice of feminine emotion more incredible than is
to be found in any other of his books. A middle-aged man,
grotesquely vulgär and abnormally mean-minded, asks, as his
price for not exposing an old friend, this old friend’s daughter to
wife. The daughter, having set herseif to make the sacrifice, had
to find in this treacherous cad, Tinman, some human merit for
her comfort, and for a prop of her obstinacy towards a seemlier
wooer. She found it in the fact that Tinman, being knocked
down by her father, did not return the blow. “ She had conceived
an insane idea of nobility in Tinman that blinded her to his
face, figure, and character—his manners, likewise. He had
forgiven a blow ! . . . Tinman’s magnanimity was present in her
imagination to sustain her.” The play of emotional fancy which
follows on this motive is delightful to read, and you are fain to be
persuaded, for your enjoyment, of its truth ; but when you have
shut the book the perversity is plain. Perversity is, I think, the
word. The caprice is gratuitous. When Mr. Meredith tried
our