246 Meredith's Novels [1909 



Zealous is Love for love, 



Grudge not love's kindness. 

 Ill 'tis for joy to wait, 



Light lost is blindness. 

 Ends life as life began, 



Heart which would meet heart. 

 Run we and outstrip Time, 



Child, be my sweetheart. 



" 20th May. — Meredith is dead after a two days' illness, and there 

 is talk of his being buried in Westminster Abbey. The papers say 

 more about him than they did about Swinburne, though as a poet he 

 was really far inferior to him. With the exception of ' Modern Love ' 

 and ' Love in a Valley,' Meredith wrote no verse that was quite first 

 rate, or even much of it readable, and his novels were not, in my opinion, 

 really great. I never could read quite through any of them. They con- 

 tained, of course, a number of good things and the style was original 

 and natural to the man, but as stories they had little point, and though he 

 sketched out his characters well at starting he had not the art to give 

 them strong dramatic action, nor had he sufficient knowledge of human 

 nature to make their doings credible. He was without a grain of 

 tragic power, still he had a vast number of readers and I see no reason 

 why he should not be buried in the Abbey. Politically I was for the 

 most part in agreement with him, and we interchanged letters on such 

 subjects more than once. I see in the obituaries that the fact of his 

 having been a tailor's son at Portsmouth is evaded by the paraphrase 

 of his having been ' born in Hampshire.' Only the ' Daily Graphic ' 

 gives a photograph of his birthplace at Portsmouth. According to 

 Meynell the fact of his tailoring parentage was the secret trouble of 

 his life. 



" It has been glorious weather all the week, and I never saw the 

 view of the downs from the Hilly Seven Acre field so beautiful. But 

 the ash-trees, checked by the frost of 1st May, are not yet in leaf. 

 Most of them are still quite bare while the oaks are in full plumage. 

 Nightingales are rarer this year than usual, probably because it was 

 so bad a breeding season last Spring. 



" I have been reading Rousseau's ' Confessions ' again after forty 

 years and do not find my opinion of them much altered. The early 

 part, before he went to Paris and grew famous, is wonderful as a work 

 of art and justifies itself as a young man's confession, for in spite of 

 its crudities, it is beautiful. But the rest is ugliness unredeemed. I 

 fancy my own memoirs, if they are ever read, will give the same im- 

 pression, though my youth has been prolonged beyond all measure and 

 his ended very early. It was reading Rousseau's ' Confessions ' about 



