Meredith and Goethe

MEREDITH AND GOETHE JAMES STONE W HY was George Meredith, like so many of the Victorian philosophes, reticent about the sources of his philosophy? Perhaps he believed that his idea of nature was his own creation; or perhaps he felt that he had indicated his teacher (or teachers) clearly enough for posterity. Whatever was the case, his silence has aroused much speculation. Tennyson has been named as the inspiration of the sentimental spiritualism in Meredith's early nature poems; Mary (Peacock Nicolls) Meredith has been given credit for his belief in the spirituality of love and for his courageous outlook on life; the Moravian brothers of Neuwied and Thomas Love Peacock have been suggested as possible sources of Meredith's altruism; R. H . Home and Wordsworth have been mentioned as contributors to the poet's embryonic nature philosophy; and even Shelley, James Thomson, and August Comte have received their due for influencing Meredith in the early years of his life. AIl these hypotheses, it is true, are supported by the idea of nature that one finds in Meredith's poems. However, it seems to me that if one takes all these suggestions into account one must assume that Meredith's philosophy of nature was a patched-up conception. There is no evidence in Meredith's poetry to justify that assumption. Nor is there any valid evidence to support Lionel Stevenson's assertion that Meredith did not formulate his philosophy until after Darwin had published his Origin of Species: "George Meredith had little perception of the idea [evolution] till the scientists announced it; but thereafter he devoted himself to it unstintingly. When he became acquainted with Darwinism, his philosophic system developed promptly and completely.''' Mr. Stevenson, I believe, puts the matter too bluntly. The very fact that Meredith does not mention Darwin in his letters indicates that the scientist's theory had the effect perhaps of unifying the poet's already existing philosophy but not of adding anything of import to it. That Meredith had laid the basis for his concept of nature before 1859 and that this concept was founded upon one source of wisdom, one coherent philosophy of life into which all the disturbing facts of nineteenth-century science could be fitted, is an hypothesis that explains the relative consistency of the poet's idea of nature better IDarwin among the Poets (Chicago, 1932), 183-4. 157 Vol. XXI, no. 2, Jan., 1952 158 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY than does anyone of those advanced thus far. When I consider the logic of these assumptions, I can make no choice of oracle for George Meredith other than Goethe, the man whom Meredith himself praised as the "most enduring'" influence of all influences affecting his philosophy . As Meredith tells us in his letters, Goethe's faith in the unity of the real and the ideal, Goethe's belief that the ideal must be based upon the real, was the foundation of his whole philosophy of Earth: "Between realism and idealism there is no natural conflict. This completes that.... I hold the man who gives a plain wall of fact higher in esteem than one who is constantly shuflling the clouds.... Does not all science (the mammoth balloon, to wit) tell us that when we forsake earth, we reach up to a frosty, inimical Inane? For my part I love and cling to earth, as the one piece of God's handiwork which we possess. I admit that we can refashion; but of earth must be the material."3 II On the basis of his faith in this unity of the subjective and objective aspects of the world Meredith fashioned a philosophy devoid of contradiction. Because he accepted Goethe's contention that "Man is born, not to solve the problems of the universe, but to find out where the problem applies, and then to restrain himself within the limits of the comprehensible,'" Meredith decided that his conception of the ideal in nature had to be consistent with this realistic approach to Earth. Like his teacher he insisted, therefore, that man should accept without qualification nature in her "beauty and wisdom, gentleness, joyance, and kindness,'" for he conceived complete acceptance of nature...