Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Second Supplement, volume 2.djvu/635

 Many thought him greater in conversation than in any other art.

Meredith's novels are more like Platonic dialogues than works of fiction. His characters have as a rule singularly little volition or speech of their own. The voice of their creator can be heard perpetually prompting them from behind a screen. The poems fill the interstices of thought in the novels. Oscar Wilde said with some point that Meredith had mastered everything but language: as a novelist he could do anything except tell a story, as an artist he was everything except articulate. To this it might be replied that he sought commonly to adumbrate conceptions not susceptible to lucid or exact statement, that he did not wish to narrate a story but to exemplify projections of his individual imagination. He was articulate enough when he desired to be so. He never pretended to make or take things easy; and the 'pap and treacle' style in fiction or poetry was his special abhorrence. But the novel was more or less accidental to him. It was his object in the capacity of virtuoso to express a code of connoisseurship in life and conduct. He delineates character by a strange shorthand process of his own; his men, and especially his women, transcend ordinary human nature, yet his heroines, and chief among them his 'English roses,' can hardly be matched outside Shakespeare. His descriptive power and insight into the secret chambers of the brain were indeed superb. But description, character, plot were in the novels wholly subservient to the ideals of his imagination. Thoroughly tonic in quality, his writings are (as Lamb said of Shakespeare) essentially manly.

Of posthumous works by Meredith the chief were the unfinished story of 'Celt and Saxon' ('Fortnightly Review,' Jan.-Aug. 1910), containing an interesting résumé of some of his frequent race speculations; 'The Sentimentalists,' a conversation comedy (of two distinct periods) begun at the period of his conception of the Pole family in his most laboured work, 'Emilia in England.' It was produced at the Duke of York's Theatre on 1 March 1910, and subsequently achieved a succès d'estime (see Eye-Witness, 2 Nov. 1911); and 'Last Poems by George Meredith,' including 'Milton,' 'Trafalgar Day,' 'The Call,' 'The Crisis,' 'The Warning,' and other poems emphasising England's need of a general defensive service. In the same year the definitive memorial edition was begun, and has been completed in twenty-seven volumcd (1909-11): it includes all his writings (letters only excluded), together with various reading and a bibliography. A collection of Meredith's Letters edited by his son appeared in 1912. The most notable portraits are the painting by G. F. Watts in 1893 in the National Portrait Gallery (not a good likeness, the drypoint etching of Mortimer Menpes (1900), drawings by Mr. J. S, Sargent of 1901, and William Strang's portrait commissioned by King Edward VII for the royal collection at Windsor. Two caricatures appeared in 'Punch,' by E. J. Wheeler, 19 Dec. 1891. and by E. T. Reed, 28 July 1894. A caricature by Max Beerbohm appeared in 'Vanity Fair,' 24 Sept. 1896. Of the later portraits the photograph by his friend Mrs. Seymour Trower (''Mem. Ed''. xxii.) is inferior to that at the age of eighty given in the second volume of the Letters. But Meredith was a refractory subject, and though he had a fine portrait of his wife by his friend Frederick Sandys in his sitting-room he would never consent to give Sandys an adequate sitting. An early photograph is given in memorial edition, vol. vii., and two others first appear in the Letters (Oct. 1912). A bronze medallion by Theodore Spicer-Simpson was placed in the miniature room. National Portrait Gallery, in 1910.

Of Meredith's manuscripts, which attest throughout the intense and laborious character of the author's workmanship, the original autographs of 'Celt and Saxon,' 'The Egoist,' and 'One of our Conquerors' were deposited on loan in the British Museum by the novelist's son and daughter in 1910. Other MS. works were given by Meredith as a means of provision to his faithful attendant, Frank Cole, and his trained nurse, Bessie Nicholls, his seven years attendant. Of these 'The Tragic Comedians' fetched 220l., 'A Conqueror of our Time' (an early version of 'One of our Conquerors,' with no fewer than four versions of chapter xiv.) 260l., 'Diana of the Crossways,' in the early serial form, 168l., 'A Reading of Earth.' 205l.; 'The Amazing Marriage' and 'The Tale of Chloe' were also offered for sale (sec The Times, 2, 4, 26 Nov., 1 and 2 Dec. 1910). [The article is based primarily upon the numerous accounts and reminiscences which appeared in the London press in May 1909 (see The Times 20 and 27 May); on two well-packed articles by Mr. Edward Clodd in the Fortnightly (July 1909) and by Mr. Stewart M. Ellis in the same review, April 1912 (invaluable for ancestral details); on personal information kindly given by