GEORGE MEREDITH
prevalent in the palace as in the hut; but as romancers, especially French writers, frequently lay the scene of a tragedy in an isolated and forsaken-looking dwelling of forbidding aspect, so the close student of the psychology of the passionate or criminal mind may find his reveries disturbed by the contemplation of flowering honeysuckle, or rose, or sweet-scented lavender, or any innocent and beautiful fact of Nature that steals upon the inner contemplation of a direful plot based upon human misery.
Sin may be simple and sweet and forgivable, or it may be bitter and remorseful; and when the theme is of the latter kind, the romancer is no Oliver Goldsmith, singing of lowing kine and daisy-besprinkled meadows, but a Hardy or a Meredith devoted to introspection and the causes of human imperfections. Do such men love beauty, or even know it when they see it? Beauty is superficial: a sentiment lies beneath the surface, has to be searched for, is pricked into being. An analysis of the sentiment aroused by the emotion of beauty is a very different thing from the simple contemplation of beauty.
That George Meredith was filled with the emotion of beauty is manifest in his prose and his verse. Love of colour, form, harmony and contrast; a knowledge of Nature and Nature's art speak everywhere in his books. Sunrise and sunset thrilled him through and through, and he gave joyous utterance to a flood of words descriptive of the moving images that the ever-changing cloud-forms suggested to his imagination.
Yet we expect some expression of the artist's inner life in his home or his workshop; and that Swinburne, the sensuous singer of amatory graces, should have lived in a mean, bourgeois, terraced house in Putney, with his
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