LILIUM REGIS.

THE BANSHEE.

A voice came crying to me window In the wind and the rain,

Like the voice of an old, old woman Who was crying in pain:

And I knew that Michael (God rest him!)

Would never spake again.

I knew, but I didn't let on I knew,
For fear the childhern had heard:

I had it ready on me tongue to say,
It was only a bird-

But the voice cried mighty loud and close,

And not one of the childhern stirred. Not one of the childhern moved in their sleep

-But the red fire shone;

And out dhere in the wet blue of the night

The voice went on

It was sad with the sorrows that are to come

And the griefs that are gone.

For the heart of the creature was full

erable divagations of the last hundred

and fifty years, must truly by now have provided material enough for a generalized criticism of its nature, its scope, its limiting conditions; but criticism can hardly be said to have yet made any calculated attempt to survey the whole parti-colored field and to define the principles which seem to be implied. In the early and bravely irresponsible days of the novel there could be no possibility of such a definition. So long as the art was still purely experimental, so long as it could spread in all directions over virgin soil, criticism could merely watch discreetly and take provisional note of failures and successes. But fiction must follow, and is already following, the line of development which carries it from its first expansive thoughtlessness to selfconscious deliberation. It must run its course, like other forms of art; it must lose certain qualities and assume others; it must submit to maturity and make the best of it without trying to reproduce the essentially youthful graces of its past. It continues so unmistakably to hold its own as the most characteristic form of our time that a distinguished future, it is impossible to doubt, still lies before it. But it must pay the penalty of its prolonged predominance by learning to "know itself" and to realize its principles. Such a process implies loss in a hundred ways, loss perbaps of the very qualities for which we most incline to value the art; but if the sacrifice is inevitable it is only the sharper challenge to the novelist to develop new values in their place. An artist is of his time, and if he inherits a form which has already yielded its first freshness he has

"The Collected Works of George Meredith." Thirty-one vols. London: Constable, 1896-8.

ities that remain. Criticism steps in

at this stage and tries to express the results that have been established, patiently hoping, be it confessed, to avoid its usual mistake of making the art square with its formula instead of molding its formula on the art.

No attempt can of course be made here to co-ordinate the scattered achievements of fiction in the manner suggested; but the single illustrious case to be considered will be approached as far as possible from this point of view. The work of George Meredith, so sumptuous and so varied, has for its admirers intellectual, moral, philosophical appeals which have perhaps to some extent obscured the ques tion of its strictly artistic characterization. Much has been written upon the strong consistent view of the world, of nature and society, which lies alike behind his novels and his poetry; but the art which went to its expression has usually been treated as a detachable matter, something to be estimated side by side, even if in the same prominence, with the personal doctrines of the great writer. Meredith cut so deep into his material and laid open such new sources that the fruition of his thought has occupied his critics before the form in which it was embodied. If it is attempted to reverse the process there can be little danger of overlooking the matter for the sake of the man. ner, for from this side the two things cannot be separated. The personality of an artist can be disentangled from his art, but never his art from his personality.

True, surely, of all writers, this is trebly true of Meredith, so sharply stamped with the mark of his brain and spirit was everything he touched. The most obviously Shakespearean in a

certain sense of modern authors, he was nevertheless the least so if the word is used of that aspect of Shakespeare's work which gives us the most striking example in all literature of an apparent exception to our rule, the aspect in which the writer is merged, almost beyond possibility of recovery, in his creations. Meredith is never for an instant in this sense dramatic. His own presence dominates every page of his books; and often enough, both in his prose and his poetry, we seem less to be handling a fashioned and selfcomplete work of art than to be actually present in his studio, watching while he flies impetuously at the marble which hides the statue, and perhaps at times more conscious of the process, of the crackle of blows and the hail of white chips, than of the lurking goddess. Yet even so, though the din and the effort may interfere with one kind of enjoyment, the display of power, the determination and the onslaught, joined with the sense that the possible prize is worth the struggle and that the unconquered block does in fact conceal the divineall this makes of such an experience an exhilarating memory for craftsman or critic. It fires the athletic quality which is part of the mind of every artist, and shows in the perfected work, when at other times it is given us rounded and flawless, the temper which the highest beauty receives from brain alone.

Meredith's art, indeed, as we follow it from book to book, reflects one long conflict with stubborn and recalcitrant material. It is as though he could never be content until he should make language do a little more than it ever will. Most writers by middle life have acquiesced in the limitations of their medium, and their submission is dignified, rightly enough, by the style of mastery of their craft. There is, then, in the typical case, a moment at which

hand and brain work in harmony and produce their best work, before the time arrives when the hand, now completely controlled, is found to be closing upon a gradually weakening substance. That is, on the whole, the evolution more or less clearly to be traced in most cases. But Meredith's record is utterly different. The compromise between intention and result, between thought and word, is struck with extraordinary precocity in his earliest work and with ever increasing difficulty in his later. Not of course necessarily on this account is "The Ordeal of Richard Feverel" a better book than "One of our Conquerors," when the scope, the significance, the final product of the balance is considered, as well as its nicety. But while it is solely a question of the command of the medium in which he worked, it is easy to see that the Meredith of 1859 was far surer of poised and sustained effect than the Meredith of thirty years later. The rocky utterance with which his stories tended more and more to be wrenched into being was the exaggeration no doubt of an inherent mannerism; but to name it thus does not carry us far. With the living force which Meredith throughout poured into his work, the history of its style becomes the history of its substance; and the growing sense of effort merely implies that he charged his art with ever more complicated burdens. No other imaginative writer of our time has had to reckon with a brain so perennially insurgent and insistent. Meredith's intellect touched life at an immense number of points and could rest at none of them. He was only incidentally a painter of nature and society; essentially he was an interpreter of one and a critic of the other. The distinction places him nearer Carlyle than Browning; for Browning, though in his case also intellectual curiosity never relaxed its strain upon his art, was far

It

less a critic than a portrait-painter, and was more interested in character, for its own sake, than Meredith ever was. We thus arrive at what must be called a fundamental weakness in Meredith's attitude as a novelist pure and simple. Character is the corner-stone of fiction, and the variation of an inch in its position must more or less insidiously affect the whole fabric. is perfectly true of course that a novel is in one sense necessarily a criticism of life, for the simple reason that nothing a human being may say or do can iraginably be anything else. Nor must it be suggested that good fiction cannot be produced except upon the most strictly impersonal lines. All this may be admitted without touching the assertion that fiction is the masterart of representation, and is more than this only at its own risk and on its own responsibility. So far from resenting the limitation, fiction should glory in it and be ever ready to look jealously ou the tendency to infringe it. It is, or it should be, the especial pride of this beautiful art that it can represent more fully and freely, with greater subtlety and greater precision, than any other; and it ought not to forget that, however often it may do it with impunity, to allow other considerations to cloud the issue is really by just so much to compromise its unique power. To be interested first and foremost in character as such is the novelist's safeguard and justification. Meredith's interest in character was ultimately relative; it was closely modelled, that is to say, upon his philosophy, and it was in their bearing upon his philosophy that men and women appealed to him. The desire to show their value or their uselessness was the larger part of his desire to portray them; and, often as he might portray them magnificently, this constant preoccupation must be taken into account if we try to speculate as to the verdict which

will eventually be passed upon his work. It must also be distinguished from the obvious truth that for the strictest novelist human beings have a varying range of values, the difference being that judgment depends for him upon the æsthetic and not upon the ethical elements of the case.

We are here promptly confronted with the question whether the novel was really the form best fitted for this masterful imagination, or whether it might not have expressed itself with less hindrance in some more confessedly personal shape. But it will not do, we must be firmly reminded, to be tempted at this point by a question so completely in the air; the plain fact being that when Meredith began to write, as indeed when he ceased, no other form was possible for creative work on a scale so extended. Art, it would seem, insists on claiming that at least its greatest followers should, at any given epoch, keep to the main lines of its evolution. They must accept the forms which lie to their hand, wilfulness in such a matter being allowed only to those whose force is intense rather than broad. Meredith's power was too varied for any but the central stream, whatever its disadvantages; he was a novelist by predestination. Nor should it be forgotten that this very clash between the claim of art on one hand and individual impulse on the other may actually discover compensating sources of strength; is indeed conflict in some shape or other, with consequent sacrifice, seems ever necessary for the engendering of the best. It is surely, for example, not fanciful to trace to what we have called Meredith's initial weakness as a novelist one of the most characteristic and important qualities of his work. With an outlook on life so little detached, with an interest so speculative and constructive, with a range of opinion so positive in its operations, Mere