Dumbly a Poet: Lost Harmonies in Meredith's Later Fiction

Abstract

George Meredith's reputation as the obscure but decorative genius whose work went unread was shattered in 1885 by the publication of Diana of the Crossways. Three editions appeared that first year and the was hailed as a great novel, Shakespeare in, modern English.1 However, neither Meredith nor Diana of the Crossways has been well thought of in this century. In 1918 Ezra Pound, whose literary judgments were to prove so influential, dismissed Me-redith as chiefly a stink.J2 In 1972 Donald David Stone described Diana as a book whose very weakness in writing and whose facile thematic conclusion could scarcely have convinced perceptive young writers that there was a future in combining old formulas with new subterfuges.3 Stone, and Pound in his fashion, have focused on a crucial issue: what did Meredith offer future writers? Stone argues for what is now an accepted evaluation, that of the two novelists writing more or less at the same time it was Henry James and not Meredith whose fictional strategies created a major direction of modem fiction. Yet at least one attitude of modern literature, the rejection of correspondences between people's inner lives and their external expressions in plot and dialogue, is inherited from Meredith. This discontinuity, a sense that gestures distort feelings, occurs throughout Meredith's work. But it is particularly present in the final four novels, in which Meredith's bizarre, even arbitrary plots express his increasing distrust of any intended form of communication, be it of language or of event, in life or in art. This distrust reflects Meredith's central conviction of the ever-present and everdistorting power of ego in our words and acts. The developing result for Meredith's art was a fragmented and an imagistic style which, despite the