George Meredith

George Meredith by Alice Meynell

Alice Meynell’s “George Meredith” is a critical essay arguing that Meredith raised the novel to one of the highest imaginative arts of modern literature. Meynell presents him not merely as a storyteller but as a philosophical novelist whose fiction joins intellect, passion, moral vision, and psychological insight. The essay’s central claim is that Meredith made fiction a “criticism of life” in the fullest sense. Unlike novelists who excelled chiefly in irony, invention, morals, or emotion, Meredith is shown as a writer who studies human beings historically and causally: he traces character from early error through maturity to consequence. His novels do not simply recount events; they reveal the moral and psychological laws by which people create their own destinies. Meynell praises Meredith’s greatness in thought, sympathy, and artistic purpose. He is described as a humane but unsentimental observer of mankind, like a physician studying the pulse of a suffering brother. His art aims to help humanity without offering easy consolation. His doctrine is severe: Nature, Reason, and consequence avenge egoism, self-deception, and moral failure. Meredith’s moral imagination teaches endurance, self-conquest, and the surrender of personal self-importance to a larger vision of life. At the same time, Meynell frankly criticizes Meredith’s style. She finds his prose powerful, beautiful, and intellectually magnificent, yet often strained by mannerism. He fears the commonplace and therefore avoids plain narrative phrasing, sometimes twisting sentences and dialogue tags into artificial forms. This habit prevents him from attaining classical simplicity, though Meynell insists that the foundation of his style remains strong enough to survive its surface faults. His poetry, too, is judged difficult, sometimes marred by strange words and over-subtle fancy, though animated by a great imagination. The essay also emphasizes Meredith’s Comic Spirit. Comedy, for him, is not trivial amusement but a moral force that exposes vanity, egoism, and the delusion of personal centrality. His comedy serves the same austere doctrine as his tragedy: human beings must learn discipline, humility, and acceptance of the laws that govern life. Overall, Meynell’s work is a dense, admiring, but discriminating portrait of Meredith as a major intellectual and moral force in fiction. She sees him as a novelist of consequence, character, and civilization, whose greatness lies in making the novel a vehicle for wisdom, spiritual scrutiny, and serious imaginative art.

By Alice Meynell · First published 1922 · Genre: Literary Criticism, Biographical Essay, Author Study · 1,448 words

First lines

If the novel has been raised to the highest place in literature in our time, this was mainly by the power of one hand. Victor Hugo had not the intellect, nor Flaubert the purpose, nor George Eliot the drama, nor Thackeray the tolerance, that in union could achieve such an exaltation of an art that was once pastime. Fiction was made by Meredith for his generation the companion of poetry, and thus the second great imaginative art of letters. The picaresque novel, the novel of irony, the novel of invention, the novel of morals, the novel of emotion-the work of Le Sage, Cervantes, Balzac, Charlotte Brontë-works of genius as they are, take an intermediate, arbitrary, and partial place; they are on the way to the work of intellect and philosophy in fiction, the novel that watches life, perceives, detects, indeed, but has also the spiritual insight, wisdom as well as knowledge, and not only temperament but passion; that not only states the problem, but accounts for it.

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literary biography · Victorian literature · English novelists · poetry · literary criticism · author study · nineteenth-century literature · British literature · critical essay · intellectual portrait · prose style · character analysis

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