MEREDITH & ENDS

BY JAMI BARTLETT

A description is composed of sentences whose order one can generally

reverse: I can describe this room by a series of clauses whose order is
not important. A gaze roams as it wishes. Nothing more natural, nothing
more true, than this vagrancy; for . . . truth is chance.

But, if this latitude, and the habit of facility which goes with it, become
the dominating factor, it gradually dissuades writers from employing
their ability for abstraction, just as it reduces to nothing the slightest
necessity for concentration on the reader’s part, in order to win him
over with immediate effects, rhetorical shock tactics. . . .

This mode of creating, legitimate in principle, and to which we owe

so many beautiful things, leads, like the abuse of landscape, to the
diminution of the intellectual part of art.

—Paul Valéry, “Degas, Danse, Dessin”1

I. BITTERNESS AND EXAGGERATION

George Meredith is a canonical writer generally agreed to be bad

at writing, and this article is less about why this is the case, or how
one could go about recovering him, than it is about what we find
in Meredith when we are no longer looking. I will complicate the
assumption, adapted from Paul Valéry above, that novelists share a
fraught relationship to the work that description does, that the task of
the novelist is to motivate character, plot, and “the intellectual part of
art” in spite of it, and that the result separates good novels from bad.
There is a grandeur in the simplicity of my approach that smacks of
Meredith—he opens his 1879 novel The Egoist by pitting The Comic
Spirit against The Book of Earth—but I intend to make use of a kind
of modest close reading that is in many ways counterintuitive to the
way we read novels in general and Meredith in particular. Rather than
seizing on his attempts at motivated description in order to accumulate
multiple conflicting or corroborating interpretations of why he’s say-

ELH 76 (2009) 547–576 © 2009 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 547
ing what he says the way he says it, I want to isolate and reduce the
semantic content of those descriptions to the point where they mean
very little. This will allow me to resituate the trade-off that Valéry
describes between the detail and the abstraction, so that rather than
engage arguments about the reflexive complexity of the novel genre
and its contemporary social or intellectual commitments, I can create
resonance between Meredith’s granular descriptions and the philosophy
of language. This discourse, concerned with how words mean but not
what or why, will offer us a different approach to the mechanics of
description, and a new vocabulary for its role in novel theory.

******

The first page of the Critical Heritage anthology devoted to Mer-

edith’s reception levels its attack at his “difficult” style, “liable to
charges of affectation, obscurity, structural weakness, and a lack of
proportion.” Even worse, his bad descriptions are contagious: it is,
it seems, impossible for critics to distinguish between, for they often
use the same examples to evidence, “his successful experiments and
his lapses from good taste.” There has never been agreement “about
his permanent place in letters,” and arguments to this effect abound
in “bitterness and exaggeration.” Even in his own lifetime, Meredith
“failed to make an impact on the public at large or to obtain from the
critical Press the degree of respect and understanding to which he was
entitled.”2 This is grim stuff, but it is charged with the inducement of a
dare; Meredith’s awfulness is just an obstacle to be overcome, and our
resistance to his intricacy is born of both an unimaginative relationship
to the pleasures of description, and an unrigorous examination of the
reasons why we read what we do.
Meredith’s “lapses in good taste,” figured as “affectation” and “ob-
scurity” in the Critical Heritage, galvanize the distinction Valéry makes
between the chanciness of particularity and the stability of abstraction,
and recasts his separation of description from the “intellectual part
of art” as a process, a syllogism that folds Meredith’s abstractions into
his accretion of details.3 Critics have tried to account for this rhetori-
cal process by turning to the compression of his aphorisms. In “The
Decay of Lying” Oscar Wilde writes that Meredith “is always breaking
his shins over his own wit,” and that “[b]y its means he has planted
round his garden a hedge full of thorns, and red with wonderful roses.”4
Something in those roses stands in for both Meredith’s aestheticism
and its origins; his martyrdom makes itself reiteratively available as an

548 Meredith & Ends