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had the misfortune to first read "Diana of the
Crossways" in that mangled edition in the Seaside
LIbrary, and as a stroke of retributive justice it seems
as if the book would never assume its proper form in
my head; so I warn all prospective readers of this novel
of George Meredith away from the slough into which I
fell when I attempted to steal my enjoyment. For he
who reads from a pirated edition is very like the small
boy who crawls head first under the circus tent and
purchases with his only five cent piece his glass of
pink lemonade. His constant trepidation gives his beverage
a too acrid tang, and the jokes of the clown come to
him partially blunted. There is nothing like the safety
of the main entrance and the first row of spectators,
where the authorities will smile one on one, even if
it requires a year of self-denial to save the requisite
half dollar. And in my own experience I was even more
like the small boy in coming in for only half the entertainment,
for he who reads "Diana of the Crossways"
in the aforesaid edition will find half his pleasure
stolen. The end is altogether lopped off, and a halt
is made just at the very point where an advance is imperative,
and where Mr. Meredith does stride on to a truly characteristic
ending with a justification of his "Diana"
and her flights. Any ending other than the union with
Redworth is an impossibility, and it is worth a whole
warehouse of "modern" novels, that closing
picture of the two women hand in hand after such a reign
of uncertainties. Die anyone else ever begin a novel
in such a genuinely perverse mood? A sixteen-page dissertation
in grotesque style on "diaries and diarists,"
with criticisms aside upon the art of the novelist ending
with the sentence:—"Wherewith let us to our
story, the froth being out of the bottle." Those
who are not of the limited audience which Mr. Meredith
asserts himself satisfied with will at once to the contents
of the bottle and let the froth go. But it would be
better for them if they handled the corkscrew and took
their potation with the usual preliminaries. That the
brew is of Meredith's finest there can be no doubt,
and although for my own part there are at least two
other books which I find swimming above "Diana
of the Crossways" in my constructed firmament of
his works, yet it has a peculiar lustre which makes
the lack of magnitude almost imperceptible. I have a
curious feeling that the characters in "Diana"
are dissociated from any landscape, that they move without
a background, as it were; but then they are strangely
human; they walk the earth if ever characters did, and
my feeling may be only a fancy after all. It is the
power of delineating character not only in its external
manifestations but in its secret recesses that makes
Mr. Meredith supreme among English novelists. He knows
his individuals through and through, and he makes them
felt by the reader in a way that we can never hope to
know our fellows in the flesh. This quality, in which
he is supreme, makes his work peculiarly valuable, and
we can forgive him seventy times seven the vagaries
of his genius when he has enriched our knowledge and
resources. I could not call Diana Warwick his finest
woman, because I would have to forget Sandra Belloni,
Cecilia Halkett and many another, not to think of Emma
Dunstane. These two women revolve around one another
and form the real centre of interest in the book. In
no work of Meredith's is the interest so undivided,
so constant in its attendance upon the central figure
and her fate. But the minor characters are all as sharply
drawn as ever—Sir Lukin, Arthur Rhodes, Mrs. Watkin,
Mr. Sullivan Smith and the rest. Percy Dacier and Tom
Redworth are conspicuous examples of Mr. Meredith's
power over his own sex; but Diana fills the canvas.
As he says of her himself:—"Not always the
same; not impeccable; not an ignorant innocent nor a
guileless; good under good leading; devoted to the death
in a grave crisis; often wrestling with her terrestrial
nature nobly; and a growing soul." The book abounds
in those strokes of sheer insight which force the blood
through the veins of these creatures of the imagination
and make them palpitatingly alive. Let me quote one
which flashes upon the characters of Diana and Redworth.
It was the evening before their marriage, and Diana
had discovered by her clearer vision the lofty manliness
in Redworth, which, I may remark, the reader has all
along been conscious of. Penitence and admiration sprang
the impulse. It had to be this or a burst of weeping.
She put a kiss upon his arm. She had omitted to think
that she was dealing with a lover, a man of smothered
fire, who would be electrically alive to the ast through
a coat-sleeve. Redworth had his impulse. He kept it
under; she felt the big breath he drew in. The impulse
of each had wedded—in expression and repression—her
sensibility told her of the stronger.
S.
When
Keats said, "Beauty is truth; truth beauty; that
is all ye know and all ye need to know," he might
have added, if he had been writing prose, that goodness
is another synonym for both truth and beauty. The love
of beauty is the love of truth and goodness. By the
love of beauty I do not mean the artistic instinct,
of which it is only a branch. Art is not necessarily
true or good. Perfectly genuine art may be neither beautiful
nor true nor good. Art is a non-moral thing, and may
be good or bad, according to the nature of him who uses
it. The man of fine and noble instincts is all the finer
and nobler for being an artist, but the man whose instincts
are originally weak and base becomes all the weaker
and baser in the atmosphere of art. It is not thus at
all with the sense of beauty. This can only be of truth
and goodness. Art may disturb, but beauty can only bring
rest. Beauty expands the soul and raises it to quiet
heights. Everything that is mean or cruel or impure
shrinks from the sense of beauty as a disease shrinks
from the mountain air. Beauty is the essence of harmony.
The moment the soul is shaken by any unworthy passion,
any distress or bitter remorse, the sense of beauty
is undone. Only with those who live nobly can the spirit
of beauty dwell secure. So absolutely true is it that
"beauty is truth" that this is the perfect
justification of many things in art that are condemned
by the rigid realist. That art, which is the accurate
transcription of nature, since it is true, is beautiful,
but there is also the art of creation which is not contrary
to nature, but parallel with it. The painter may paint
us a flower different from any flower that exists upon
earth, and yet he may paint it under so clear an impulse
of creation that it may be actually as beautiful and
true a thing, and as fully entitled to existence, as
anything we have seen with our eyes. He has made no
unreal thing. He has simply been active under the influence
of the same eternal spirit that moulded and constructed
the universe. A great poem may be built up of images
utterly unreal, and yet its beauty and imaginative fitness
may be so convincing that we feel that nature herself
might have fashioned it in some such manner had she
not followed another vein. The poem, therefore, is artistically
true. The novelist may paint us a character such as
we never actually met with, nor believe to be anywhere
existent in life, and yet it may be so life-like, so
in touch with the warm human impulses within us, that
it becomes real to our imaginations, as genuine a human
being as any whom we cannot hear or see in the flesh.
Such a character, no matter what the extreme realists
may say, is true. There is scientific truth, and the
latter is of almost as much value in the economy of
intellect as the former.
L.
I
have just had the pleasure of perusing a copy of The
Lake Magazine, the new Canadian periodical published
in Toronto. If the name and personality of the editor
has to do with the success of a magazine, then The Lake
Magazine ought to be a success. Mr. Mowat, so well known
as "Moses Oates," is the editor-in-chief,
and his long and successful career as a journalist augurs
well for the good quality of the magazine. The articles
by Mr. Hopkins and others on Imperial Federation, Mr.
Blake, and The Political Situation in the States, give
the magazine some of the heavier qualities of a review,
perhaps too much so for the success of a popular periodical.
Mr. Haultain and Mr. Charlesworth have each something
to say about literature and art, and both say it well.
There are two good poems by Miss Pauline Johnson and
Mr. Tassie. "My Friend Mark" is rather a good
sketch, but on the whole the fiction, which should be
the strength, is the weakest part of the number. Here
lies the great obstacle which Mr. Mowat has to overcome
to make his magazine a success. It is the old weakness
pertaining to all our Canadian periodicals—the
utter failure to produce interesting and original fiction.
There are two mistakes made by Canadian editors in this
respect—they either avoid the creative literature
altogether, contenting themselves with essay and critique,
with a weak or common-place bit of verse sandwiched
in, or else they make the equally bad mistake of trying
to ape the American standard in both fiction and verse.
It is ridiculous for our magazines to try and equal
or copy the outside magazines, and the effort is the
great cause of failure. What we want is something that
is purely Canadian, and to do this the Canadian editor
wants to be a Canadian in his aims and ideals. He does
not want to take the American or English standard or
style of periodical, with its highly-trained and suppressed
literature, and force hate work of our writers through
such a literary sieve to do this as to produce a Canadian
journal or periodical which is a puerile imitation of
the foreign type. An instance of this weakness is the
strange method all our periodicals have of advertising
for short stories, and boiling the idea asked for down
not only as to subject but even as to space and style.
The result is that the work is truck work done for the
money. Our editors ought to remember that if they want
to find any work produced by Canadian genius they ought
to try and procure work that has already been written
as a work of love, and that in the budding stage of
a country's literature the best writers are not liable
to curtail their work. Then, again, the best work is
not that of history and adventure; what we need is more
of the really imaginative, of a virile nature, in our
fiction. Some of the best work we will produce just
now in the near future will be considered too unfinished
for the Eastern American market; but even Hamlin Garland
is conquering the east by his vigorous imagination and
human realism. Our editors will do well to study this
matter, for it applies to our verse as well as to our
prose. Meanwhile, we wish The Lake Magazine many years
of at least paying continuance and an ever-growing constituency.
C.
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