What can I give Him, If I were a shepherd I would do my part,— PASSING AWAY Passing away, saith the World, passing away: Is the eye waxen dim, is the dark hair changing to grey I shall clothe myself in Spring and bud in May: Then I answered: Yea. Passing away, saith my Soul, passing away: With its burden of fear and hope, of labour and play, Rust in thy gold, a moth is in thine array, A canker is in thy bud, thy leaf must decay. At midnight, at cockcrow, at morning, one certain day Lo the Bridegroom shall come and shall not delay; Watch thou and pray. Then I answered: Yea. Passing away, saith my God, passing away: Winter passeth after the long delay: New grapes on the vine, new figs on the tender spray, Turtle calleth turtle in Heaven's May. Though I tarry, wait for Me, trust Me, watch and pray: Arise, come away, night is past and lo it is day, My love, My sister, My spouse, thou shalt hear Me say. Then I answered: Yea. GEORGE MEREDITH [BORN 1828, at Portsmouth; his grandfather and father were tailors (once prosperous) and his four aunts were among the beauties of the town. He completed his education at the Moravian school at Neuwied, where he learnt German thoroughly. For a time he was articled to a London solicitor, but soon turned to literature. Married in 1849 a daughter of Thomas Love Peacock, who left him nine years later and died in 1861: he married again in 1864. In 1855 he published The Shaving of Shagput, in 1859 The Ordeal of Richard Feverel; but before this he had published a volume of Poems (1851)—a complete failure commercially, but now one of the rarest and costliest of modern books. Meredith's main work henceforth was novel-writing, but he did not really command a large public till 1885, with Diana of the Crossways. His chief volumes of Poetry were Modern Love (1862), Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth (1883), Ballads and Poems of Tragic Life (1887), and A Reading of Earth (1888). He received the Order of Merit in 1905, and died four years later, a memorial service being held in Westminster Abbey.] It is not likely that very much of George Meredith's poetry will ever be widely read. He is probably the most difficult of all our poets, as difficult habitually as Shakespeare and Shelley are occasionally. He seems to have been totally indifferent to the truth of that generally sound maxim with which Johnson rebuked the critics of Pope's Homer: "the purpose of a writer is to be read." It does not appear that he acted on any very clear distinction between poetry and prose, or even between prose and verse. The result is that his poetry often fails to satisfy perfectly legitimate and reasonable expectations. People go to poetry for three things: for the delight with which it enraptures the ear, for its quickening and uplifting of the imagination, for the harvest of wisdom and truth to be reaped from its exhibition of the true life of nature and of man. From the greatest poetry they get all three at once. From Meredith, it must be sadly confessed, they get the first, the music of sound, very seldom: the second oftener, but far from always: the third almost always, though frequently presented in a manner and mood which belong rather to prose than to poetry. As to the first, it can only be said that Meredith, master of language as he was, was utterly defiant of the limitations, without which poetry as an art could not be. He could write, when he chose, things as exquisite as Love in the Valley or those stanzas in The Young Princess which, whatever they owe to Tennyson, could only have been borrowed by a master of music: "The soft night-wind went laden to death With smell of the orange in flower; The light leaves prattled to neighbour ears; Sang loud, sang low the rapturous bird He chuckled, he sobbed, alow, aloud: The voice between earth and sky." But he more often chose to write in a kind of shorthand, neither poetry nor prose, which is often ugly and always obscure. What is to be said of such abominations of hideousness as: or "Love meet they who do not shove "Melpomene among her livid people, or of such contortions of obscurity as: "A woman who is wife despotic lords Count faggot at the question, Shall she live: except, what Meredith himself said of Whitman, that the Muse would "fain have taught" poets who treat their art in this reckless and insolent fashion: "what fruitful things and dear Must sink beneath the tidewaves, of their weight, If in no vessel built for sea they swim." The truth is that Meredith never chose to accept the conditions of thought and language under which poetry works. Not only did he write many long poems such as The Empty Purse which consist almost entirely of abstract argument utterly alien to the simple and sensuous nature of poetry; but even into his true poems he introduces, without any apparent consciousness of a false note, such phrases of pure prose as "the taint of personality" or "the brain's reflex." Everywhere his poetry suffers from an over-activity of the mere intellect, working almost by itself, and not as poetry demands, in alliance with the senses and the imagination. Yet it is quite possible that the best of his poetry will outlast his novels. For, brilliant as the novels are, they would scarcely seem to have that assured serenity of beauty and truth which, far more than any such restless cleverness as theirs, is the mark of the novel made for immortality as we see it in Don Quixote and Goldsmith's Vicar and the immortal company of the Waverleys. No novels ever had so much brains come to their making as Meredith's; but the supreme work of art demands a harmony of qualities of which brains can only supply one. And however high we place the novels, poetry is still more than prose and—what is our present point has commonly proved much the better stayer. That is not merely because its art is of a finer order. It is because, more even than the highest prose, it belongs to a world in which the contemporary is seen, as it were, from a height and in its true proportions. For this reason great poetry is of all time and is always modern. Even the Waverley Novels have in them far more matter which is now felt to be old-fashioned and to need explanation, than the contemporary poems of Wordsworth or Shelley. And so with Meredith; if a man really is a poet, his poetry, in spite of the exception of Scott, is generally the safest bottom in which he may embark for immortality. Clever as Meredith's poetry is, it is never so brilliant as Diana or The Egoist. But Diana and The Egoist belong much more decidedly to the Victorian age and much more doubtfully to posterity than Love in the Valley or A Day of the Daughter of Hades. There is not a line in these poems which our grandchildren will find worse than harsh or difficult. There are many pages in the novels which they will find out of date, odd, and perhaps a little ridiculous. And whatever his poetic faults, Meredith was a true poet. A poet is one in whose words man and nature seem to be alive with a life of which no prose has the secret, a life at once natural and transcendental, at once known and unknowable. So Meredith himself says: "strange When it strikes to within is the known: |