What price George Meredith?

Another biography of Thomas Hardy, and, it seems a good one, by Claire Tomalin. But what is it about Hardy that so attracts biographers? There have been a good few of them, even in the last quarter century. Indeed Hardy (‘little Tommy Hardy’, as Henry James unkindly and not very sensibly called him) has survived rather well. His novels are regularly set for A-level and several have been filmed. His poetry too has lasted. What G. M. Young called its ‘ancient music . . . this gnarled and wintry phrasing’ endures, influencing, for instance, Philip Larkin.

And what of his contemporary rival poet-novelist, with whom his name was coupled, and to whom he was compared? What of Meredith? Down in the cellar with no takers. Meredith, Paul Johnson informed us recently, was ‘no good’. Others seem to agree. Moreover, though his life was at least as interesting as Hardy’s, he attracts no biographers. I remember reviewing one near the end of the Seventies. Has there been another since? Strange: this, after all, was a novelist whom Stevenson regarded as a master, and one whom James declared ‘very superior to any other here, in his scorn for the beefy British public and all its vulgarities and brutalities’.

As for his biography, not many English novelists have been exhibited at the Royal Academy impersonating a dying poet, but Meredith was the model for Henry Wallis’s famous painting ‘The Death of Chatterton’. Sadly for Meredith, his first wife, who was the daughter of Thomas Love Peacock, then ran off with the painter. This provoked his poetic sequence, Modern Love, which is witty, intelligent and painful. ‘How many a thing which we cast to the ground/ When others pick it up becomes a gem.