Meredith on the Nature of Metaphor

MEREDITH ON THE NATURE OF METAPHOR IDeborah S. Austin Meredith has been praised and blamed for making so much use of imagery in his novels, but so far his own pronouncements-and there were many-on the nature and use of metaphor have not been isolated from the rest of his work and made available in one place. They make interesting reading, for they show us that the most conscious stylist among the great English novelists of the nineteenth century was almost pathologically aware of the powers of metaphor to illumine or to obscure meaning. Since the publication of The Shaving of Shagpat, in 1856, Meredith's style has been a barrier to readers, but his early critics persisted in regarding the stylistic eccentricity as something which, if pointed out to him, he would soon outgrow. Actually, it was the first manifestation of a type of experiment with language which Meredith was to continue for the rest of his life. He was concerned, probably more than-'any of his contemporaries, with what Mark Scharer has called "the word, with figurative structures, with rhetoric as skeleton and style a body of meaning."l "The point to be considered," Meredith said, as early as Sandra Belloni (1864), "is, whether fiction demands a perfectly smooth surface. Undoubtedly a scientific work does, and a philosophical treatise should. When we ask for facts simply, we feel the intrusion of style. Of fiction it is a part.'" What follows in the same passage is the opening skirmish in Meredith's long war with the British public. For though in his early novels' he made certain efforts to adapt his manner of expression to the general reader, there were certain compromises in the use of language that Meredith quite consistently refused to make. . His refusal, like most cases of stubbornness on the part of creative intelligence, was based on a mixture of conviction and prejudice. A poet writing novels, Meredith was sure that the image-making capacities of the poet had a valid use in the novel. A professional Celt, proud of his swiftness of apprehension, he felt strongly that Anglo-Sa.xon readers 96 MEREDITH ON THE NATURE OF METAPHOR 97 needed to be schooled in subtlety. And, as is true of most people with a strong didactic turn of mind, failure often made him angry or hurt, but it never made him give up. The English race was not imaginative. Very well, then, its imagination required stimulation, for it was just this bluntness of perception which caused the failure of so many human relationships. The novelist, who dealt as a matter of course with the effect of human beings on each other, should provide this education in subtlety, but he seldom did so because, as Meredith pointed out, our language is not rich in subtleties for prose. A writer who is not servile and has insight, must coin from his own mint. In poetry we are rich enough; but in prose also we owe everything to the licence our poets have taken in the teeth of critics. ... Our simplest prose style is nearer to poetry with us, for this reason, that the poets have made it. . . . Mr. Runningbrook coins words and risks expressions because an imaginative Englishman, pen in hand, is the cadet and vagabond of the family-an exploring adventurer ... the necessity to write as he does is so great that a strong barrier-a cheveauxde -/rtse of pen-paints-must be raised against every newly-minted word and hazardous coiner, or we shall be inundated. If he can leap the barrier, he and his goods must be admitted.... poetic rashness of the right kind enriches the language. I would make it prove its quality. (Sandra Bel/oni, 64....5.) It was against this "cheveaux-de-frise" that Meredith was to hurl himself for the next forty years, often quixotically, but always with sincere faith in the cause for which he fought. As time passed, irritation with critics and public .~like contorted his prose beyond the baroque to the grotesque, but we find iIi the last novel (The Amazing Marriage, 1895) very nearly the same defiance and determination that had been expressed ·in the...