Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Second Supplement, volume 2.djvu/633

 Sunday Tramp friends, Sir Frederick Pollock) appeared in 1885, and three editions were exhausted during the year. At length the general public was captured. Diana was clearly modelled upon the brilliant Caroline Sheridan, the Hon. Mrs. Norton [q. v.], whom he had met at the Duff Gordons before 1860, and who was long a favourite theme of society gossip. The legend of her having betrayed to 'The Times' the secret confided to her by Sidney Herbert that Peel had resolved on the repeal of the Corn Laws was of later growth, and Meredith was subsequently persuaded by the Dufferins to repudiate the popular identification of Mrs. Norton's career with that of his heroine. The book was blessed by Henley in the 'Athenæum' and the heroine celebrated as of the breed of Shakespeare and of Molière. A parody appeared among 'Mr. Punch's Prize Novels,' and society grew alive to the peculiar flash of the Meredithian epigram. Invitations from society and societies inundated him, and Box Hill became a place of pilgrimage. Collective editions of his works were arranged and proposals were made to dramatise 'Evan Harrington' and 'The Egoist.' The belated success coincided tragically with the insidious development of a spinal complaint and with the serious and soon hopeless malady of his wife. Two operations proved ineffectual, and she died on 17 Sept. 1885. Despite ebullitions of temper, which appeared at times almost uncontrollable, Meredith was devotedly attached to one who protected him not only from himself but also from adroit strangers, concerning whose claims upon his attention he was often far too sanguine. It was to the poetic mood that his mind reverted during this period of privation and suffering. The years 1887-8 yielded two of his most characteristic volumes of verse, 'Ballads and Poems of Tragic Life' and 'A Reading of Earth' — the last containing 'The South-Wester,' 'The Thrush in February,' 'Nature and Life,' 'Dirge in Woods,' and above all the 'Hymn to Colour,' with the touching epitaph 'M. M.' The 'Nature Poems' were collected with beautiful drawings by W. Hyde, 1898 (sm. fol.).

His temper mellowed greatly during his last twenty years, and he became in a sense far more approachable. In 1887 he spent a month at St. Ives in Cornwall to be near his friends the Leslie Stephens. In July 1888 he dined at the Blue Posts tavern in Bond Street with (Lord) Haldane and Mr. Asquith, sitting between Mr. A. J. Balfour and Mr. John Morley. In August 1888 he paid a visit to his younger son William, who was interested in an eleotrical engineering firm with business in South Wales, and was at Tenby, Llandilo, Towyn, and Brecon (see Cardiff Western Mall, 12 Feb. 1908). In 1889 he was at Browning's funeral 'The Ring and the Book' and Tennyson's 'Lucretius' were among his favourite poems. Similarity of temperament with his elder son Arthur precluded equable relations but he was distressed and made despendent by the news of Arthur's death at Woking in March 1890, when he himself was shaken and ill. In 1892 he underwent the first of three operations for stone in the bladder.

Meanwhile in 1889 Meredith returned to fiction. The most individual of the later novels, a new study of modern femininity, 'One of our Conquerors,' ran simultaneously through the 'Fortnightly,' 'Australasian,' and 'New York Sun' (Oct.-May 1890-1). 'When I was sixty,' Meredith wrote, 'and a small legacy had assured my pecuniary independence, I took it into my head to serve these gentlemen (the critics) a strong dose of my most indigestible production. Nothing drove them so crazy as "One of our Conquerors."' In the prologue Meredith's mania for analogy, epigram, and metaphors runs riot. 'Lord Ormont and his Aminta,' in which a similar motive — that of people rendered strangers to themselves by a false position — is reinvoked, first appeared in the 'Pall Mall Magazine' (Dec. 1893-Aug. 1894). Issued separately in three volumes by Chapman & Hall in 1894 (and by Scribners in America), it was gratefully inscribed to the surgeon who had operated on him, George Buckston Browne. The basis of the story is to be found in the secret marriage of the famous Charles Mordaunt, earl of Peterborough [q. v.], in 1735 with Anastasia Robinson. The novel, which reverts to an easier style of writing than 'One of our Conquerors,' contains many of the writer's adroitest sayings. Meredith still had several novels in solution in his mind, the names of which have partially survived, such as 'Sir Harry Firebrand of the Beacon,' 'A Woman a Battle,' and a novel dealing with the career of Lady Sarah Lennox, in addition to the half-finished 'Celt and Saxon' (sketch on a great scale in 1890), the torso of which applied in the 'Fortnightly' in 1910 and subsequently in the memorial edition (vol. XX.); but the last completed novel at which he travailed hard in 1894 was 'The Amazing Marriage,' in which the character of Woodseer, the virtuoso of nature and style, was a long-promised sketch of one of his