Sunday Poetry - George Meredith

Last weekend I listened to a Melbourne Symphony Orchestra concert on Classic FM that included one of my favourite pieces, The Lark Ascending by Ralph Vaughan Williams. This beautiful music was written in 1914 (the version we know for solo violin & orchestra was written in 1920) & based on this 1881 poem by George Meredith (photo from here). Maybe it's become a little hackneyed with overuse but I never tire of listening to it. Here's a lovely performance at the BBC Proms in 2003 by Janine Jansen.

He rises and begins to round,
He drops the silver chain of sound
Of many links without a break,
In chirrup, whistle, slur and shake,
All intervolv’d and spreading wide,
Like water-dimples down a tide
Where ripple ripple overcurls
And eddy into eddy whirls;
A press of hurried notes that run
So fleet they scarce are more than one,
Yet changingly the trills repeat
And linger ringing while they fleet,
Sweet to the quick o’ the ear, and dear
To her beyond the handmaid ear,
Who sits beside our inner springs,
Too often dry for this he brings,
Which seems the very jet of earth
At sight of sun, her music’s mirth,
As up he wings the spiral stair,
A song of light, and pierces air
With fountain ardor, fountain play,
To reach the shining tops of day,
And drink in everything discern’d
An ecstasy to music turn’d,
Impell’d by what his happy bill
Disperses; drinking, showering still,
Unthinking save that he may give
His voice the outlet, there to live
Renew’d in endless notes of glee,
So thirsty of his voice is he,
For all to hear and all to know
That he is joy, awake, aglow,
The tumult of the heart to hear
Through pureness filter’d crystal-clear,
And know the pleasure sprinkled bright
By simple singing of delight,
Shrill, irreflective, unrestrain’d,
Rapt, ringing, on the jet sustain’d
Without a break, without a fall,
Sweet-silvery, sheer lyrical,
Perennial, quavering up the chord
Like myriad dews of sunny sward
That trembling into fulness shine,
And sparkle dropping argentine;
Such wooing as the ear receives
From zephyr caught in choric leaves
Of aspens when their chattering net
Is flush’d to white with shivers wet;
And such the water-spirit’s chime
On mountain heights in morning’s prime,
Too freshly sweet to seem excess,
Too animate to need a stress;
But wider over many heads
The starry voice ascending spreads,
Awakening, as it waxes thin,
The best in us to him akin;
And every face to watch him rais’d,
Puts on the light of children prais’d,
So rich our human pleasure ripes
When sweetness on sincereness pipes,
Though nought be promis’d from the seas,
But only a soft-ruffling breeze
Sweep glittering on a still content,
Serenity in ravishment.

For singing till his heaven fills,
’T is love of earth that he instils,
And ever winging up and up,
Our valley is his golden cup,
And he the wine which overflows
To lift us with him as he goes:
The woods and brooks, the sheep and kine
He is, the hills, the human line,
The meadows green, the fallows brown,
The dreams of labor in the town;
He sings the sap, the quicken’d veins;
The wedding song of sun and rains
He is, the dance of children, thanks
Of sowers, shout of primrose-banks,
And eye of violets while they breathe;
All these the circling song will wreathe,
And you shall hear the herb and tree,
The better heart of men shall see,
Shall feel celestially, as long
As you crave nothing save the song.
Was never voice of ours could say
Our inmost in the sweetest way,
Like yonder voice aloft, and link
All hearers in the song they drink:
Our wisdom speaks from failing blood,
Our passion is too full in flood,
We want the key of his wild note
Of truthful in a tuneful throat,
The song seraphically free
Of taint of personality,
So pure that it salutes the suns
The voice of one for millions,
In whom the millions rejoice
For giving their one spirit voice.

Yet men have we, whom we revere,
Now names, and men still housing here,
Whose lives, by many a battle-dint
Defaced, and grinding wheels on flint,
Yield substance, though they sing not, sweet
For song our highest heaven to greet:
Whom heavenly singing gives us new,
Enspheres them brilliant in our blue,
From firmest base to farthest leap,
Because their love of Earth is deep,
And they are warriors in accord
With life to serve and pass reward,
So touching purest and so heard
In the brain’s reflex of yon bird;
Wherefore their soul in me, or mine,
Through self-forgetfulness divine,
In them, that song aloft maintains,
To fill the sky and thrill the plains
With showerings drawn from human stores,
As he to silence nearer soars,
Extends the world at wings and dome,
More spacious making more our home,
Till lost on his aërial rings
In light, and then the fancy sings.

Evan Harrington - George Meredith

The great Mel - Melchisedec Harrington - is a tailor with delusions of grandeur. He was once mistaken for a Marquis &, ever since, enjoys pretending to be an upper-class member of the Harrington family when, in reality, he was a tailor in the town of Lymport-on-the-Sea. He ran up debts that he had no hope of paying & created embarrassments which his sensible, respectable wife, Henrietta Maria, had to deal with. Mel's daughters had all married well but none of them had told their suitors that their father was a tailor. Harriet married rich brewer Andrew Cogglesby; Caroline married Major Strike & Louisa married a Portuguese Count & became Countess de Saldar. Only Andrew Cogglesby discovered the truth of his wife's family & he was a good-natured man who couldn't have cared less. The only son of the family, Evan, has not been brought up to be a tailor. He's in that halfway state of being educated above his station but with no money to keep up any position at all. His father wanted him to go into the Navy, then the Army & in the end he went out to his sister, Louisa, in Portugal, where he has met the wealthy Jocelyn family of Beckley Court & fallen in love with Rose Jocelyn.

When the story begins, the Great Mel has died. His widow expects that Evan will come home, take up tailoring & pay his father's debts. Evan arrives for the funeral alone (none of his sisters are willing to be seen in Lymport) & tries to comfort his mother. When Evan hears the situation, he agrees at once that he must pay his father's debts but he's in a dilemma. He's in love with Rose, a young lady who has been heard to be scornful of tradesmen. Louisa, Countess of Saldar, is a schemer who is determined to see Evan marry either Rose or her cousin, Juliana Bonner, an invalid who is the heiress to Beckley Court, the home of the Jocelyns but the property of Rose's grandmother, Mrs Bonner. She wangles an invitation to Beckley Court for herself, Evan & Caroline (who is unhappy with her abusive husband & is being pursued by the Duke of Belfield) & is disconcerted to find Andrew Cogglesby is also a guest. This is where the intrigue & machinations really begin.

Louisa is a beautiful woman who always has admirers hanging around her, including Rose's brother, Harry, & several other members of the house party. Louisa is terrified that someone will discover the tailoring connection. Evan has promised to be apprenticed to a friend of his father's but is reluctant to begin. He loves Rose but is conscious of his poverty & his connections. Rose realises that she loves Evan despite his background & announces her engagement to him. Ferdinand Laxley is another of Rose's suitors & hearing rumours of Evan's family, is determined to make mischief. The chief schemer though is Louisa. She imposes herself on the party, bewitching the men & irritating the women. When she writes a letter imitating Laxley's handwriting to an absent husband alerting him to the affair of his wife with another guest, Lady Jocelyn dismisses Laxley from the house. When Evan discovers what Louisa has done, he confesses to writing the letter & his engagement with Rose is broken. The scene is set for tragedy mixed with quite a bit of farce.

Evan Harrington (cover from here) is a very strange book. If I hadn't been reading it with my 19th century bookgroup, I don't think I'd have read past the first few chapters. The tone is a mixture of social comedy, romance & farce & the prose is over the top & very convoluted. A whole lots of characters are introduced in the early chapters, tradesmen & creditors discussing the Great Mel, but then most of them disappear from the story & we're left confused. But suddenly, about halfway through, I suddenly found I couldn't put the book down & read the last half in just a few days. I was so irritated by the pretentious Countess at first but soon I just wanted to find out what outrageous scheme she would come up with next. Evan is a pretty colourless hero, honourable but silly. He is given money by a benefactor &, instead of paying off the debts or using it in some other useful way, he loans money to Harry Jocelyn (who has gotten a young working class woman pregnant) who is such a fool thatr he decides, on this evidence alone, that Evan must really be a gentleman after all. Anyway, now that he's in the fellow's debt, he can't expose him as a tradesman as it would be bad form.

The women are more interesting than the men in this book. Mrs Mel, Evan's mother, is a humourless but very proper woman who does the right thing no matter the consequences. I loved the scene when she's at an inn & Old Tom Cogglesby (Andrew's brother) arrives demanding his trunk taken up to his room, his chops perfectly cooked & his bed remade because it's lumpy. The landlady's in a complete flap but Mrs Mel manages Old Tom as though he were a recalcitrant child. It turns out they're both on their way to Beckley Court & he offers her a lift in his donkey-cart. Rose begins as a rather affected, spoilt girl who is attracted to Evan but snobbish about class. She realises that love is more important when he confesses his background & she is very strong-minded when it comes to family opposition to her plan to marry Evan. Juliana is not a stereotypical Victorian invalid, she's bad-tempered & resentful, prone to fits of weeping & sulking. She knows she's plain & has nothing to recommend her but her position as heiress. She knows that Evan loves Rose but she finds it very difficult to be gracious about it.

Evan Harrington was one of Meredith's first novels & he used his family background as the basis for the Harrington's tailoring business. Apparently his father (who was a naval outfitter) was horrified by the novel & embarrassed that his son had used his life in his fiction. I think the varying tone of the novel - from serious romance to farce - comes from inexperience. Some of the characters are just eccentric for the sake of it, Evan's friend John Raikes for instance, &, like many three volume novels, it's too long. However, there are scenes like the picnic & the races, which are so beautifully done. It's a real mixture of styles & tone but when it works, it's immensely readable.

George Meredith was such a well-known figure in his time but is hardly read at all now. Only The Egoist seems to be in print although his work is available as eBooks. His best-known novel is Diana of the Crossways, which was reprinted by Virago & has been sitting on my tbr shelves for a very long time. Diana was based on Caroline Norton & I was so impressed by his female characters in Evan Harrington that I really must read Diana soon. Meredith was well-connected in literary circles (he was a reader for publishers Chapman & Hall) & knew Hardy, Tennyson, & Rossetti. He advised Hardy not to publish his first novel because the satire was too savage & Meredith's career had suffered from adverse criticism of his early novels & their "low moral tone". As I've been reading Max Beerbohm's essays recently, I loved this caricature by Beerbohm of Meredith trying to get Rossetti to go for a country walk. Janey Burden languishes in the background. Meredith was known for his love of nature & he was a respected & revered figure in London literary society. Although his health declined in his old age, he continued to be visited by friends at his home at Box Hill until the end of his life.

Reading in instalments

Do you enjoy the suspense of reading in instalments? I usually have at least one or two instalment reads on the go & I enjoy the feeling of reading a book as lots of people read novels in the 19th century. Of course, sometimes when the suspense is too much, I have the luxury of having the entire book in my hand so I can race ahead if I want to. But, if I'm taking part in a discussion of the book, it's easier to avoid spoilers if I try my best to stick to this week's instalment - at least until the very end when I usually read the last couple of sections in a great rush.

I belong to an online reading group that specialises in 19th century literature. At the moment we're reading The Ordeal of Richard Feverel by George Meredith. Meredith was one of the towering figures of 19th century literature but he's virtually forgotten nowadays. I've read his poem, really a novel in verse, Modern Love, & I've had a Virago edition of his Diana of the Crossways on the tbr shelves for years so I'm enjoying the nudge that this group has given me to pick up one of his novels. The group has been around for years so they've read all the usual suspects - Austen, Brontes, Dickens, Trollope - & I love the breadth they've brought to my reading with many authors I've never heard of or not read if I knew of them. Recently we've read a couple of novellas by the German Romantic writer, Theodor Storm, Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther, E T A Hoffmann's Devil's Elixir & Scott's Bride of Lammermoor. Coming up this year are Joseph Conrad's Almayer's Folly, Tolstoy's Death of Ivan Ilych & Jennie Gerhardt by Theodore Dreiser. Now that I have an e-reader, I've also been able to download most of these books for free although there's nearly always an edition in print for those without an e-reader.

Then, my group of online friends, the doves, are often reading a book in instalments. Usually there's a Persephone & often a 19th century novel as well. At the moment, it's Vere Hodgson's Few Eggs & No Oranges & Thomas Hardy's A Pair of Blue Eyes. I'm not reading Vere because I've read it twice already but I am reading the Hardy. I read it about 20 years ago & have forgotten everything about it so it's like reading a new book. Our discussions are usually fairly laid back & sporadic. Nothing formal but it's nice to know that others are reading along & occasionally someone posts a comment.

I've also jumped on board the troika for Dovegreyreader's Team Tolstoy read of War & Peace. I read War & Peace over 30 years ago. It took me months as I kept putting it down for something lighter (in weight) & shorter. This time, we're reading it in monthly instalments of about 120pp to celebrate the centenary of Tolstoy's death. I'm loving it. We meet up on the 9th of every month to talk about the latest instalment & we're half way through now. I find it best to read the month's chapters on the weekend before the 9th so I sat down on Saturday afternoon & read the whole lot in almost one sitting, I couldn't put it down. The current section ends with Pierre gazing up at the comet in the sky above Moscow, the comet of 1812 that presages so much for all the characters & for Russia. It was very difficult to stop just there... I regret not joining Lynne for her monumental read of Ulysses a couple of years ago. I think I could have climbed that mountain if I'd had the courage to begin.

Do you ever get distracted by your bookshelves when you're dusting? I was dusting the other day & came across a battered little Penguin paperback, A Book of English Poetry, collected by G B Harrison. First published in 1937, revised in 1950 (although he still stops at Rossetti, Gabriel not Christina) & my copy, bought for $2 at the Lake Daylesford Book Barn in the 1980s, is the 1974 reprint. I used to read a lot of poetry & there are a lot of lines & phrases rattling around in my head, but I realised as I looked through this book that I don't read much poetry any more. So, I've decided to set myself a challenge. To read through this anthology, from Chaucer to Rossetti, a couple of poets a week. Maybe I'll post some favourites along the way. Last night, I read Chaucer & Sir Thomas Wyatt before I went to sleep. Wyatt has always been a favourite for his beautiful lyrics & his connection with Anne Boleyn & the Court of Henry VIII.

And I'm going to use my Lake Daylesford Book Barn bookmark to keep my place. I spent a lot of time in Daylesford in the 1980s. My friend, P, had a house right on the Lake, just two doors up from the Book Barn. I spent many cold Sunday afternoons browsing there by the warmth of the potbelly stove. So, a bit of a nostalgia trip as well as reacquainting myself with G B Harrison's choice of English poetry.