Interpreters of Life and the Modern Spirit

INTERPRETERS ^ H*t#» A 1 nterpreters of Life I and the Modern Spirit by Archibald Henderson LONDON DUCKWORTH AND CO. 3 Henrietta Street, W. C. 191 Printed by The Manhattan Press New York, U.S.A. ~i Li To my Father and Mother, the Two who guided my first steps in the paths of literature, this venture into its wider fields is with all devotion dedicated. *w U INTERPRETERS OF LIFE George Meredith l Oscar Wilde 35 Maurice Maeterlinck 105 Henrik Ibsen 157 I. The evolution of his mind and art 159 II. The genesis of his dramas 243 George Bernard Shaw 285 The frontispiece is a photogravure from an unpu ?d picture of George Meredith by Alvin Langdt GEORGE MEREDITH "Then, ah! then . will the novelists' Art, now neither blushless infant nor executive man, have attained its majority. We can then be veraciously historical, honestly transcriptive. Rose-pink and dirty drab will alike have passed away. Philosophy is the foe of both, and their silly cancelling contest, perpetually renewed in a shuffle of extremes, as it always is where a phantasm falseness reigns, will no longer baffle the contemplation of natural flesh, smother no longer the soul issuing out of our incessant strife. Philosophy bids us to see that we are not so pretty as rose-pink, not so repulsive as dirty drab; and that, instead of everlastingly shifting those barren aspects, the sight of ourselves is wholesome, bearable, fructifying, finally a de- light. Do but perceive that we are coming to philosophy, the stride toward it will be a giant's —a century a day. And imagine the celestial refreshment of having a pure decency in the place of sham; real flesh; a soul born active, wind-beaten, but ascending/' George Meredith: Diana of the Crossways. — GEORGE MEREDITH The celebration of the eightieth birthday of George Meredith, with its vast garland of appreciation from the leading men and women of letters of the English-speaking race, served but as a pre- lude to the veritable outburst of laudation, tribute, elucidation, and panegyric that followed his death. The belated efflorescence of the repute of George Meredith, this sudden twilight emergence from the shrine of submerged renown to the pedestal of clear fame, at first sight warrants the suspicion, and in- deed quite patently provokes the question, as to whether the standard of literary taste in our time is not at last discovering in him a worthy guide and idealist. It is a neglected, rather than a forgotten, fact that the ideas prevailing at any particular pe- riod are of two distinct classes. On the one hand, there are the ideas which are in everybody's mind the clamant topics of popular discussion, wide dis- semination, and general acceptance. On the other hand, the really fertile and germinating ideas which 3 4;.-:. .INTERPRETERS OF LIFE overleap the boundaries of the present and, being endowed with prophetic potency, herald and an- nounce the future, are only known to a few, and are recognized by them as the ideas which the world must shortly be induced to ponder. Not ideas only, but standards of art and the laws of taste, furnish exemplification of this bipartite evolutional phe- nomenon. The significant fact which arises most conspicuously in the examination of Meredith's career is the amazing disparity between his appreciation by the great minds of his age and his acceptance by the general public. The immense mass of critical literature touching his career, as poet, as novelist, as psychologist, as philosopher, as critic of society, spans the wide arc of more than half a century. And in this consideration, something very like wonder is excited, not that Meredith is not more generally popular, but that he is not the most widely read of all English novelists of the present day. George Meredith has never lacked for the most edifying appreciation at the hands of the masters of his own craft. To call the roll of critics, novelists, poets, dramatists, men of exalted station in public life, who have acknowledged his mastery, heralded his greatness, paid him the supreme tribute of imita- tion, is to call the names of an overwhelming majority of the great English-speaking writers of his age. And yet withal, this paean of acclaim has never intoxicated the public with the glamor of Mere- GEORGE MEREDITH 5 dith's name, nor swung the "general reader" off his feet. If Meredith, in a life of eighty years un- swervingly dedicated to the highest ideals of his art and with the enlightened support of the most bril- liant and most solid minds of his time and race, could never succeed in reaching the heart and brain of that hypothetical, yet none the less real, "average man," there must lurk hidden away in the flower of his art some deadly canker of secret and devitalizing force. Or else, his bodily death but heralds the new life of his lasting fame. It is difficult to parry the conclusion that George Meredith's fame strengthens its claim upon posterity by reason of long delayed general acknowledg- ment. The educative influence of his Active achieve- ment, so arabesque, so fantastically kaleidoscopic, so ravishingly tortuous, yet withal so clear-visioned, so intense and so hardly sane, has been imperceptibly if glacially slow and sure. It is not too much to say that, in the large sense, the discrepancy between his general recognition and his deserts in the past, is to be explained by the fact that, certainly in ideal and purpose, he was ahead of, rather than behind, his age. He dreamed, scarcely hopefully, of a change in public taste wrought in part by the influence of ! ! 6 INTERPRETERS OF LIFE his example; and never wholly despaired of elevat- ing the literary standards of that public he thanked God he had never written a word merely to please. His tutelage in self-discipline, his devotion to the law of the "stern-exact," and his fidelity to the instinctive integrity of his taste rather than to the clamor of popular authority, assured him a serene passage through the ordeal of public negligence and repro- bation. In his own words: "Ye that nourish hopes of fame Ye who would be known in song Ponder old History, and duly frame Your souls to meek acceptance of the thong. "Lo ! of hundreds who aspire Eighties perish—nineties tire! They who bear up, in spite of wrecks and wracks, Were seasoned by celestial hail of thwacks. "Fortune in this mortal race Builds on thwackings for its base; Thus the All-Wise doth make a flail a staff, And separates his heavenly corn from chaff." Meredith persevered heroically in the resolution to image life reflectively, to "paint man man, what- ever the issue." And while we rejoice to-day in the consummation of the separation of the "heavenly corn" from the "chaff," the confession remains to be made that the "thwackings" were—oh! distinct- ly—"terrestrial." "If the gods showed their love GEORGE MEREDITH 7 for Shelley by causing him to die young," remarks Mr. Trevelyan, "they have shown their love for Mr. Meredith in a more satisfactory manner, by leaving him to receive from us in old age the homage that was due to him from our grandfathers." There is a passage in the chapter "At the The- atre" in Rhoda Fleming, which brings into sharpest light Meredith's opinion of the public. "It is a good public, that of Britain, and will bear anything, so long as villainy is punished ... It was a play that had been favoured with a great run. Critics had once objected to it, that it was made to subsist on scenery, a song, and a stupid piece of cockneyism pretending to be a jest, that it was really no more than a form of slapping the public on the back. But the public likes to have its back slapped, and critics, frozen by the Medusa-head of Success, were soon taught manners. The office of critic is now, in fact, virtually extinct; the taste for tickling and slapping is universal and imperative; classic appeals to the intellect, and passions not purely domestic, have grown obsolete. There are captains of the legions, but no critics. The mass is lord." Mere- dith persistently scorned an air of easy familiarity with the public, and continued to make his "classic appeals to the intellect" and his evocations of "passions not purely domestic." Undismayed by the conviction that his immediate audience was apa- thetic if not actually antipathetic to his work, he pro- 8 INTERPRETERS OF LIFE duced book after book, marked by sanity of utter- ance, philosophic poise, and an artistic individuality which must needs ultimately compel recognition. His attitude toward the public, despite an early ut- terance or two, is one neither of condescending su- periority nor of embittered disappointment, but rather of forthright recognition of the fact that the spirit of his thoughtful laughter has not found per- manent lodgment in the British intelligence. "The English people know nothing about me," he said in 1905; "there always has been something antipathetic between them and me. With book after book it was always the same outcry of censure and dis- approval. The first time or two I minded it. Since, I have written to please myself." In the America which gave the world a Howells and a James, and which produced a Mrs. Wharton and a Mrs. Ather- ton for Meredith's delectation, he found a more generally congenial and appreciative audience; and u only a few months before his death he said, They have always liked me better in America.

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