George Meredith: His Life and Friends in Relation to His Work

Front Cover
Dodd, Mead, 1920 - 326 pages
George Meredith, 1828-1909, was an English novelist and poet of the Victorian era. This book is of particular interest to scholars interested in his early life, his relationships with his friends, his marriages, and of his work as a journalist. Discussions of his literary output are viewed partially through those relationships, which can be seen as "chatter about Harriet," the book is, nevertheless, replete with quotations from people who knew him during all the phases of his life.
 

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

Popular passages

Page 92 - COME not, when I am dead, To drop thy foolish tears upon my grave, To trample round my fallen head, And vex the unhappy dust thou wouldst not save. There let the wind sweep and the plover cry ; But thou, go by. Child, if it were thine error or thy crime I care no longer, being all unblest : Wed whom thou wilt, but I am sick of Time, And I desire to rest. Pass on, weak heart, and leave me where I lie : Go by, go by.
Page 252 - Ah ! Meredith ! Who can define him ? His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language : as a novelist he can do everything, except tell a story : as an artist he is everything, except articulate.
Page 92 - And it shall come to pass in the day that the Lord shall give thee rest From thy sorrow, and from thy fear, And from the hard bondage Wherein thou wast made to serve...
Page 71 - And bore him to a chapel nigh the field, A broken chancel with a broken cross, That stood on a dark strait of barren land. On one side lay the Ocean, and on one Lay a great water, and the moon was full.
Page 147 - Mr Meredith is one of the three or four poets now alive whose work, perfect or imperfect, is always as noble in design as it is often faultless in result.
Page 107 - ... loose sailor's knot; no waistcoat, knickerbockers, grey stockings, and the most serviceable laced boots, which evidently meant business in pedestrianism; crisp, curly, brownish hair, ignorant of parting; a fine brow, quick observant eyes, greyish — if I remember rightly — beard and moustache, a trifle lighter than the hair. A splendid head; a memorable personality. Then his sense of humour, his cynicism, and his absolutely boyish enjoyment of mere fun, of any pure and simple absurdity. His...
Page 152 - He understood character, and (though often too indulgent to its shadier side) he knew how to deal with it, and had indeed rather a marked distaste for that inexpert class of persons who waver on the edge of life without ever throwing themselves boldly into it, and gripping at the facts. But Mr Meredith...
Page 253 - One incomparable novelist we have now in England, Mr. George Meredith. There are better artists in France, but France has no one whose view of life is so large, so varied, so imaginatively true. There are tellers of stories in Russia who have a more vivid sense of what pain in fiction may be.
Page 118 - MEREDITH (GEORGE)— MODERN LOVE AND POEMS OF THE ENGLISH ROADSIDE, WITH POEMS AND BALLADS.
Page 194 - All their long life lies behind Like a dimly blending dream : There is nothing left to bind To the realms that only seem. They are waiting for the boat ; There is nothing left to do : What was near them grows .remote, Happy silence falls like dew ; Now the shadowy bark is come, And the weary may...

Bibliographic information