Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/269

243 GEOKGE MEREDITH'S LETTERS 243 prohibitions, and nobility playing happily with children, and pride receiving wounds without a word. But there is one broad feature that must be noted, at first sight the most startling of all. For these letters make it clear that this resolute life, so nobly planned, so greatly lived, was yet essentially frustrate. If success be the perfect development and unswerving exercise of our finest powers, then Meredith has to be accounted failure. The apprehension has been spreading for some time that the best of his work is in his poems, and with it there has moved, as natural corollary, a presumption that his devotion to fiction was but another example of that perverse misappli- cation of their powers which artists of all kinds will keep displaying. Exactly the reverse, it seems, was true. He, too, knew that poetry was his proper task, and he fought passionately for leave to pursue it. The leave was never granted. ** Truly the passion to produce verse in our region is accursed," he writes when he was in his fifties. " I ask myself why I should labour, and, for the third time, pay to publish the result, with a certainty of being yelled at and haply spat upon for my pains. And still I do it. I scorn myself for my folly." To pay for his poems he wrote novels, novels being apparently the public's taste. Too much of a poet and philosopher remain- ing in them, he had to condescend and compromise a second time, taking still more alien and still less useful task-work. " My novels have been kept back by having had to write for the newspapers — the only things that paid." The treble strain would have broken a smaller man ; him it merely maimed. " My health is now far from good. I finished the last volume of a novel two years ago by writing at night for three months. An attack of whooping-cough fol- lowed on lowered nerves. I have never been well since then. My digestion is entirely deranged, and