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Henry Mayers Hyndman

The Record of an Adventurous Life

Chapter V
George Meredith

THE name of this remarkable personality recalls a long and intimate personal friendship, beginning for me at the early age of eighteen and ending only with George Meredith’s death. I knew Meredith well, that is to say, for just fifty years. From the days when, with abilities unrecognised, literary fame still far away and domestic trouble of the bitterest kind gnawing at his heart, he was making a hard uphill struggle against the world, lightened by keen and joyous, though at times grim humour and deep poetical insight and appreciation; up to the days when, his merits fully admitted and his genius thoroughly appreciated, the desire to become acquainted with such a man as he drew men and women of distinction from all nations to the little cottage under Box Hill, and his death was mourned, as the departure of one who was an honour to his country, by millions who assuredly could not understand his works.

Meredith’s was a popularity of a kind conquered but certainly not sought after, and the study of so deep and strange a mind, covered up as a rule from the outside world, possessed, for me a great fascination which I resisted and pushed aside as scarcely a fitting attitude towards so close a friend. I have always felt that to analyse the habits and tendencies of a man with whom one is on terms of close intimacy is almost an irreverence. On the other hand, it is quite impossible to sympathise with the grotesque hero-worship that envelopes the acknowledged great writer in a cloud of literary adoration, through which the plain, uninitiated, but probably none the less judicious admirer, is not allowed to penetrate. However, it is not my business here to parade my opinions on Meredith’s achievements in the world of letters, save in so far as they come naturally in as part of my relations with my old friend himself.

I was about eighteen when I made the acquaintance, which rapidly ripened into friendship, of Maurice FitzGerald, son of John Purcell FitzGerald of Boulge Hall, and therefore nephew of Edward FitzGerald the translator of Omar Khayyam. FitzGerald, whom I first met in the cricket field and as a member of the Southdown Club, which comprised at the time some of the best amateur batsmen in the South of England, was one of those men who never do full justice to themselves in the world.

I have always regretted much that, owing to family troubles and other causes, Maurice Purcell FitzGerald never developed, or at any rate showed to the public, the very considerable abilities which he unquestionably possessed. Circumstances drifted him out of the field of leisurely literary work, in which I think he was qualified to shine with at least as much brilliancy as his uncle, and he was lost in the whirl of anonymous journalism. He and his brother Gerald unfortunately possessed a father quite incapable of looking upon his sons as other than lost souls, who could only be saved from sempiternal roasting hereafter by a full share of unpleasantness and mortification here. Their boyhood and youth, so far as home influence could effect it, were made a burden to them, a burden rendered not less onerous by the delicate consideration of a stepmother. Others have overcome much greater disadvantages and have made their mark on their time. It is quite possible Maurice FitzGerald himself might have done so, had he lived; for he died in 1877, just as life was beginning to look brighter for him, at the early age of forty-two, leaving only some admirable translations from the Greek to bear witness to his natural faculty.

My intimacy with FitzGerald for many years was very close, and I knew his wife and family well too. His only son Gerald who, after a remarkable bit of litigation, inherited the family property, I first saw as a mere baby, then knew him well as a little lad of six, and only met him again lately forty years later. Maurice FitzGerald himself used at one time to bet rather heavily on horses, and certainly had the worst luck at that pastime of any man I ever heard of, except, according to what I read, the present Mr. Buchanan. FitzGerald, who knew Lord St. Vincent well, had backed that nobleman’s famous horse Lord Clifden for the Derby to win a very large sum indeed at long odds. But the amount he had staked in order to have the prospect of gaining so much was larger than he could afford to lose. When, therefore, Lord Clifden became a hot favourite and could be laid against at a very short price, FitzGerald instructed his commissioner or betting agent to cover his original stake at the current rate of odds. The agent was so confident the horse would win and that FitzGerald was only throwing away money that he never carried out the instructions. In the actual race the judge decided that Lord Clifden was beaten a short head by Mr. Naylor’s Maccaroni; though it was generally believed at the time that this was a grossly incorrect decision.

FitzGerald did not win his money and was greatly disappointed; but he was absolutely horrified to discover later that he had to pay his whole bet owing to the action of his commissioner, and that he had no redress. It was a very serious matter for him. On another occasion he had bet long odds on a horse named Fitzroy in a match at Newmarket. Fitzroy was some forty lengths ahead of his opponent when he actually fell and broke his leg On yet a third occasion he had backed a horse named the Peer ridden by a celebrated jockey of the day named Wells. The animal was winning easily when, by some extraordinary accident, his jockey mistook the winning post, and having begun to pull up could not get his mount going again soon enough to avert defeat. These are only three examples of the sort of luck Maurice FitzGerald had, and I have every reason to believe that his account of what befell him was quite correct. Is there such a thing as luck? The philosopher will say certainly not. But I am quite confident that, however little evidence may be brought forward to justify the belief in good and bad luck, there is a vast deal of luck in life, and that in some cases it is impossible to fight successfully against it, in departments of human affairs very far remote from the surroundings of the race-course.

The following lines of translation from Sappho give an idea of FitzGerald’s verse:

These next verses are a little too long for the motive, but they are amusing.

Through FitzGerald it was that I was brought into contact with Meredith, Burnand and others, and enjoyed delightful times together at Seaford, then quite an unknown little place, a sort of village of the dead, one of the old Cinque Ports, rejoicing in all the ancient institutions and ceremonials of the Middle Ages; when the embouchure of the Ouse was at Seaford itself instead of at Newhaven, and its harbour and trade with Lewes and other inland towns made it quite an important commercial centre in its way. Our party there consisted of FitzGerald, his elder brother Gerald, an Italian named Vignati, some connection of FitzGerald’s, Lawrence the portrait-painter, and the two men named above. I was at the time playing in the Sussex County Cricket eleven but I generally contrived to get back in the evening, and jolly evenings and days those were. It was all so spontaneous and unaffected. The villagers around us knew nothing, and cared less, about the laughing, chaffing crew, who, with the sons of the chief local landowner, were making merry in one of the few decent houses on the front, or at the New Inn, already some centuries old.

Though Seaford was the spot at which Meredith’s first wife had carried on the intrigue with Wallis the painter which led to their separation, Meredith shook off the trouble this had occasioned him and was almost as jolly as Burnand, whose unfailing good spirits and happy humour have always been the wonder of his friends from his early days upwards. The FitzGeralds at this time were neither of them oppressed by the worries that afterwards attacked them both, and generally the idea of the whole party was, as is common in such cases, to get as much rest and amusement out of this chance gathering of intimates as was possible, and, as is not so common, we succeeded. It is a great pity no record could have been taken of the conversations, seeing that for brilliant spontaneity I remember nothing at all equal to them, and they covered a very wide field. Some day I may endeavour to give an impression of them. Meredith had just produced Evan Harrington and The Ordeal of Julian Feverel while he and Burnand and FitzGerald were living together at Esher. Burnand, having been turned loose by his father for joining the Catholic Church, was making his way as burlesque-writer and journalist, Black – Eyed Susan having been produced at the St. James’s Theatre and “Ixion” being in preparation and

was given to the sad sea waves with immense fervour, to a tune from one of Verdi’s operas.

But Meredith in particular was at his best in those days, and being quite at home with the men around him, and with no audience, he felt it incumbent upon him to dazzle, and, waiting to appreciate his good things, he delivered himself without effort or artifice of all the really profound and poetic and humorous thoughts on men and things that welled up continually within him, in a manner that I recall with delight these long years afterwards. It was on one of these occasions, when we were all sitting together on the beach tossing stones lazily into the sea and Meredith was discoursing with even more than ordinary vivacity and charm, that Burnand suddenly came out with, “Damn you, George, why won’t you write as you talk?” I had just been reading Meredith’s novels and other works and I understood well what Burnand meant.

Why Meredith, with such a wonderful gift of clear, forcible language as he possessed and was master of, should have deliberately cultivated artificiality I never have been able to comprehend. He had a perfectly marvellous flow of what I may call literary high spirits throughout his life, and his unaffected natural talk, such as this at Seaford, was altogether delightful. But his writing showed even then to my eye, young and inexperienced as I was, little trace of this unforced outpouring of wisdom and wit; while Meredith’s conversation was almost equally artificial, not to say stilted, except with men and women he had known well for years. Sometimes in the bosom of his own family with only his wife and children – whom he addressed in the same tone – and two such friends present he went on in this way. This show talk and show writing of Meredith’s was quite as brilliant as the unconsidered outpourings of the natural man, and he said perhaps even cleverer things; but his wit was much more sardonic and somehow you could hear the clank of the machinery all the time. That is why I love to think of the days at Seaford, and some of those others afterwards down at Box Hill.

When I was at Trinity Meredith came up to stay with me in my rooms in Rose Street for a fortnight, and I believe he had a thoroughly good time. At any rate he always said so and I think felt so. By this time, though he was thirteen or fourteen years my senior, I had got to know Meredith very well indeed and fancied, possibly with the presumption of youth, that I understood him better than he thought I did. I had become accustomed to his incisive methods of expression, and the strange way in which he would of a sudden turn into ridicule about half of what he had said seriously just before. But my undergraduate friends did not know what to make of him, and I dare say the same would have been the case with me had I not had the previous experience.

That Meredith was witty, powerful, active, good-humoured and a very keen observer of all that was going on around him they recognised clearly enough. Yet he never seemed to be conversing on the same plane as themselves, clever fellows as some of them were, and have since proved themselves to be. I felt this myself in my own rooms, and I am confident that the lack of sympathy arose from the artificiality I have noted. For Meredith fully enjoyed and entered into the untamed fervour of youth just entering upon its physical and intellectual emancipation. Though no judge of oarsmanship or games, he took pleasure in looking on at rowing, cricket, racquets and sports of all kinds, being himself always in training and very much stronger muscularly than he looked. In fact he was all wire and whipcord without a spare ounce of flesh upon him, and his endurance, as I found out in more than one long exhausting walk and vigorous playful tussles, was unwearying. And so Meredith, who had never been at either University before, saw Cambridge and the undergraduate life of the day as well as I could show it: looking in when possible at the lecture-rooms, lounging round the backs of the Colleges, watching the boats on the Cam, seeing much of interest in the colleges and libraries, going down to Ely and running over to Newmarket.

Nobody outside of my own immediate circle of friends knew that Meredith was that fortnight in the University, or had they known would have considered the fact of any importance whatever; which is perhaps rather strange when we remember that he had already written more than one of the works, including the Shaving of Shagpat, by which he will be remembered. But he had yet to conquer his public, and he was at great pains to render this task most difficult. Whether Meredith ever made use afterwards of the pleasant days, as to me at least they were, which he spent at Cambridge, I have never been able to discover, so I suppose he did not; but in his private letters to me he not unfrequently referred to this visit, and specially noted the fact that I was playing in the University Musical Orchestra, which was supposed to be fairly good even in those days and Meredith was always passionately fond of music. I wonder whether any of the steadily lessening band of those who met him with me then remember his visit.

Afterwards, at Seaford, at Goodwood, where we both went as Maurice FitzGerald’s guests for the races, at the Oriental Club with the same charming host, and elsewhere I saw Meredith from time to time. Not, however, until I had taken my degree and had passed through the Italian campaign of 1866 did I again meet him under circumstances which threw us continuously together. This was less than two years after I had taken my degree, and when I ought to have been at work at the Bar. However, it was in the summer of 1866 I met Meredith again, at the Hotel Cavour in Milan close by the public gardens; I did not know he was coming out to Italy, and he had no idea at the time that I was there already writing about the campaign, so our meeting was a surprise to us both. We were not long in one another’s company at Milan, however, as I went off on a long jaunt with Sala to Genoa and other towns, getting round eventually to Venice, where Meredith joined in with the party at the Hotel Vittoria.

Meredith was at this time acting as Special Correspondent for the Morning Post. It was, I imagine, the first time he had undertaken anything of the kind, and the work did not suit him. Certainly, he wrote nothing worth reading in his new capacity, and this was the more astonishing as walking through the callés of Venice and gondolaing through its Canals, on our visits to places of interest, Meredith’s observations on the works of art, the architecture, the history and the people were extremely interesting; while his reflections and general talk on political matters, as we used to sit out before the Café Florian until the early hours of the morning, were certainly worth reproducing. But Meredith positively hated writing as a daily task, and could not bear to think of the whole thing as a mere matter of business. This disturbed his vision and cramped his pen. The Morning Post letters are commonplace, not even high-class photography of the events passing before his eyes, and far inferior to what Sala was writing at the same time. But that the atmosphere of Italy breathed itself into him and that he entered fully into the spirit of that emancipation period, was shown later in his novels Vittoria and Sandra Belloni.

That was the feature of Meredith’s conceptions. What was going on around him he absorbed rather than reflected. And his imagination enabled him to depicture even scenes which he had never beheld with greater force and poetic insight than those who had been most deeply affected by their actual beauty. Meredith had never been in the tropics, yet the lady in the Shaving of Shagpat with hair dishevelled and head erect “stood up tall and straight before him like a palm tree before the moon.” He had never talked with Mazzini nor even seen him, yet he could write of the depth of Mazzini’s eyes, “their darkness was as the fringe of the forest and not as the night.” This is Meredith, the picturesque, at his best. I asked him what made him think of the former simile? “The hair falling over her shoulders and her slender shape,” he said. Wandering through the tropics and seeing a palm tree standing up in a high place under the moonlight, this simile always recurred to my mind.

It was in the Hotel Vittoria at Venice that there occurred between Meredith and Sala one of those ugly scenes which are always possible when men of entirely opposite character and temper meet. There was little or nothing in common between them. Meredith’s keen and at that period rather sardonic and satirical intelligence grated on Sala’s ebullience, and there was a continual friction below the surface from the first time they met; though none would have thought so who saw all of us cheerfully chatting on the Piazza San Marco. The quarrel arose, as such quarrels do, out of a very petty matter, which, when all was said, only amounted to the fact that Meredith, though just in all his dealings and hospitable in his way, was by no means liberal, while Sala, though extremely liberal, and hospitable as well, was by no means always just. Anyway, there arose a tremendous storm on Sala’s part, the accumulated outcome of weeks of irritation, and he insulted Meredith most grossly at the hotel table. Meredith could easily have killed Sala in any sort of personal encounter, but he kept a strong restraint upon himself and simply went away. As I was on very good terms with them both it fell to me, though by far the youngest of the party, to endeavour to make peace, and I did contrive to bring about a temporary understanding which happily lasted long enough to settle the matter, as shortly after we all left Venice and there was an end of it. But the affair was none the less unpleasant at the time.

For years after this, when I was in England, I used to see Meredith frequently; and gradually his fame grew, but still more with the judicious and critical than with the public at large. And now I think of it, just before leaving Venice, I ventured on a laughing prediction which has really been fulfilled much more nearly than I could have possibly anticipated when I made it. We were discussing literary matters, Henty and Sala and Spicer and Meredith and Brackenbury and I at our accustomed table outside Florian’s when the conversation turned on Meredith’s own writings, and we all agreed that he had the right to far higher and wider popularity than he had yet secured. Meredith declared that he always wrote with a standard of his own before him and that he did not care for popularity. This the rest of us would scarcely accept, and I blurted out, “I believe you will be popular enough one day, Meredith, and the funny thing is you will be appreciated even more for your defects than for your merits.” Meredith himself laughed, and really I think I spoke wiser than I knew.

And so our intimacy continued, and after I became a member of the Garrick Club became yet closer. But still Meredith was not regarded as the great writer he undoubtedly was. I may be wrong, but I have always thought that the commencement of a fuller recognition of his power and his place in the world of letters was due to a review of Beauchamp’s Career which appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette. Greenwood asked me to review the book and I declined on the ground that I knew Meredith too well, had grown up almost from boyhood as his friend, and that if I did by chance put my finger on any weak spots he would be sure to hear who wrote the article and, though he might not be offended, might even admit the truth of what was said, our relations would no longer be quite the same. So Traill wrote the review which filled two fat columns of the Pall Mall. Sure enough Meredith asked me who wrote the review and as Greenwood, who was himself an intimate friend of Meredith’s, had no objection I told him.

He was pleased with the criticism, which he had every reason to be as it was exceedingly well done in Traill’s best manner, being laudatory and appreciative without lacking discrimination. I asked Meredith if he would like to meet Traill. He said he should. So I invited them both to dinner at the New University Club. We had a very pleasant time and Meredith asked Traill down to Box Hill to dine and sleep at his cottage. Meredith was then writing The Egoist and during Traill’s visit read him the Introduction. Something in Traill’s face told him that full comprehension was lacking. “You don’t understand all that?” “No, I’ll be damned if I do,” stammered Traill. Meredith burst out laughing. “Well, I suppose it is rather hard,” he said. Traill told me it was made easier afterwards, but I don’t consider it a very intelligible piece of writing even now. But I do believe that was Meredith’s provoking love of obscurity. He loved to puzzle his readers. “Damn you, George, why won’t you write as you talk?” I told Traill that story and he agreed with me in thinking Burnand hit the nail on the head; for Traill, who wrote with admirable lucidity himself, could not understand why a man of Meredith’s genius should refuse to be altogether natural. The deepest water may be quite clear.

Many were my visits to Box Hill after my return from Australia, and we got to know Meredith’s second wife very well too: they staying with us in Devonshire Street and we with them down there. I have heard some of Meredith’s friends speak rather slightingly of this lady, as if she were intellectually quite unworthy of her husband. Genius has no mate. But Mrs. Meredith was a charming, clever, tactful, and handsome Frenchwoman: a good musician, a pleasant conversationalist, a most considerate, attentive and patient wife and an excellent mother. Nobody who knew her could fail to admire, esteem and like her.

Her care of her husband was always thoughtful but never obtrusive, and Meredith with all his high qualities was not by any means an easy man to live with. Writing men mostly are not. At one time he would persist in turning vegetarian. It was well-nigh the death of him. But he had persuaded himself that that was the right sort of food to give the highest development to body and mind, and persist in it he would. What was to be done? Meredith was a man who took a tremendous lot out of himself, not only intellectually but physically. He was always throwing about clubs, or going through gymnastic exercises, or taking long walks at a great pace, not allowing an ounce of fat to accumulate on his body or his face. It was the same with his writing. He never pretended to take matters easy. So poor Mrs. Meredith had a hard time during this bread and roots period. She saw her husband gradually going down hill and becoming every day more gaunt and hungry-eyed and skeletonic; yet if she or any one else ventured to suggest that this meagre diet was unsuited to a man of his habit of life and work, and that – this very gently – his increasing acerbity was caused by sheer lack of sustenance and his energy consequently sawing into his exposed nerves – well, it was a case of “stand from under” very quickly. Mrs. Meredith tried every conceivable device to arrest the nerve weakness she saw coming upon Meredith. She boiled his vegetables in strong broth, introduced shredded meat as far she dared into his bread by connivance with the baker, and tried various other estimable frauds upon him. All to no purpose.

She begged me as one of his oldest friends to try what I could do. I did try and, metaphorically speaking, fled for my life. Really I thought my old friend would die, so determined did he seem to commit suicide in this unpleasant way. At last things got so bad and he was so weak that he recognised the truth himself, and was forced to admit that a man who does double duty as an athlete of mind as well as an athlete of body wants another animal to do his preliminary digestion for him, if he is to keep himself up to the mark at all. So Meredith took to meat-eating again and all went well; but I have always thought this mistaken rush to a vegetable diet was responsible for the lesion which came later. For Meredith was so sound in every way up to that time that I fully believed he would live in good health and vigour to the age of a hundred, though a man who preserved his faculties as well as Meredith did up to over eighty had, I must admit, an excellent innings.

To return to Mrs. Meredith. This lovable lady was as humble as she was devoted. They were going out together to some grand party and she said to my wife, “It is not me they want to see; it is my clever husband.” I remember too, that once when dining with us a well-known man of that day made a vigorous attack on France and French life and French women. We were horrified and at a loss what to do or say. Mrs. Meredith, in the most pleasing way took up the subject, showed, of course, in a few words that she knew a great deal more about it than the unfortunate critic, and without the least betraying that she was French herself put things right. How very odd it is, by the way, that even highly-educated .Englishmen will at most awkward moments thus display their ignorance of French life and home manners. Meredith himself, I am sure, fully appreciated his wife’s fine qualities, and his home was certainly a happy one while she lived.

Many a pleasant day my wife and I passed with them at Box Hill, I taking long walks with Meredith during the day and playing duets with Mrs. Meredith at night. The first of these walks I remember well was to Epsom and back, to see the Derby run in the race won by Kisber. It was a splendid day, the air was bright and clear, the trees were just bursting out into foliage, and Meredith was in the highest spirits, full of the joy of life and the inspiration of the happy spring time. Our road lay up hill and down dale, and as we mounted a slight ascent, whence we could see the race-course in the distance, the roar of the betting ring and the clamour of the multitude broke in suddenly upon our conversation. So we went on, Meredith discoursing gloriously in the valley, the turmoil of the mob coming in as chorus upon the hill. We witnessed the Derby itself, and looked down upon the crowds from the elevation above Tattenham Corner. We had not the remotest idea which horse had won till the next day. But we had many similar walks without these interruptions, and very pleasant walks they were.

When I went in for my studies and writing on India, and afterwards on economic subjects and Socialism, I got much friendly encouragement from Meredith, who was always exceedingly good-natured to younger men. Funnily enough, however, when I offered to translate La Russia Sotteranea by Stepniak, the first copy of which Kropotkin had given me when it reached England, for the benefit of the Russian Red Cross movement, Meredith declined the book as “reader” for Messrs. Chapman & Hall. In this case I think his judgment was wrong, as directly the six months of copyright had expired, Messrs. Smith & Elder brought out a translation which had a very large sale. There were scenes in the work which impressed themselves very strongly on my mind, notably that of the anonymous printer in the secret underground press who went on working, working, working, regardless of health, danger or enjoyment, quite satisfied that he, the unknown toiler, was helping to spread the light in the world above.

At a later date, Socialism and bad luck having seriously crippled my means, I thought of turning to journalism as a business, having previously written as a matter of intellectual pleasure, though I was fortunately well paid for what I wrote. I was lucky enough to obtain an exceedingly good offer as leader-writer for a well-known journal. I went to Meredith and asked him whether in his opinion I ought to accept this proposal and tie myself up partially in this way, or should trust to some knowledge of finance I possessed to pull me through. Meredith strongly advised the latter course. “If you once begin to write regularly for money mostly,” said he, “you will be insensibly drawn into the whirlpool of daily journalism and may never be able to struggle out again. You cannot possibly do what you are doing and be a thorough-going journalist too. Keep yourself independent, no matter at what cost.” As my wife was ready to run this risk, which has proved to be a risk indeed, after I had declined to go in as a regular party man, I took Meredith’s advice. I have no right to regret this decision, having regard to the great progress which the cause to which I devoted myself has made.

As I was churned up more and more in the Socialist propaganda, and the necessity for attending to my own affairs pressed upon me at the same time, I saw Meredith less and less, especially after I very foolishly gave up my membership of the Garrick Club. But from the time that Meredith’s health began to fail, we always went down to see him at Box Hill as often as we could. The manner in which he fought against a physical disability, specially annoying to such an active man as he, always astonished us. The struggle to maintain some semblance of his old vigour so long as he could get about was fine, though sad to witness, and his light-hearted greeting was as charming as ever.

Not, however, that he gave up his artificiality. This had become part of himself. On one occasion we saw this very markedly. We were sitting, all three of us, Meredith and my wife and I, on the old oak seat which lay a little above his ivy-covered cottage, on the path that led up to his own hermit bungalow, under the trees, on the slope of the hill. Never, even in the very best of his health and vigour, was he more cheerful or more spontaneous than when, in the soft summer air, with the flowers around us, and the sweep of green down stretching far away beyond up to the black yew trees in the distance, he discoursed of many things and many men, the old time and the new. We listened to him with delight, and would gladly have listened on. As it grew a little late, he told us that Mr. John Morley and Mr. Haldane were coming down to dine with him and pressed us to stay and meet them, an invitation we would gladly have accepted but could not. A few minutes later Mr. Haldane came alone up the path, Mr. Morley not having been able to accompany him, and seated himself on the same bench. Straightway, the old change from the fresh and familiar to the artificial and brilliant was made manifest, and there was Meredith, who a few minutes before had been as full of easy jollity as in the Seaford days, again forcing his intellect to strain for effect quite unnecessarily, and to us who admired him, most provokingly.

On this occasion he gave me his last book of poems, and from one of them I think the following is not out of place:–

My correspondence with George Meredith was frequent, and extended over many years. Unfortunately, when we left our house in Devonshire Street in 1887 I destroyed most of my letters from men of note, which I have since greatly regretted. The three letters below, however, give an idea of his style and of the warmth of his heart:

Meredith’s end came to him easily: he felt he had done his work, though he worked to the last; and he knew that he had gained in his concluding years that full acceptance of his genius for which he had waited, but had not striven, so long.

 
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