Dr. Conan Doyle's Estimate of Mr. George Meredith
Dr. Conan Doyle's Estimate of Mr. George Meredith is an article published in the Manchester Evening News on 21 november 1893.
Report of a lecture "George Meredith, Novelist and Poet" given by Arthur Conan Doyle on 20 november 1893 at the New Windsor Chapel (Salford, Manchester, UK)
Report
Addressing a large audience at New Windsor Chapel, Salford, last night, on the subject of "George Meredith, novelist and poet," Dr. Conan Doyle spoke, to use his own phrase, in "superlative language" of that author's work. He did so, he said, because the novels themselves were superlative, and because the day was not far distant when they would be acknowledged to be so. Meredith's influence was the strongest existing force upon the younger generation of authors. Hitherto "Meredith meat" had been found too strong for the popular taste, but "Meredith and water" had not. Stevenson was a dilution of Meredith, and Stevenson himself was reproduced by other successful men. In this century, remarked Mr. Doyle, we had had three great authors whose very qualities had for a time hindered their progress — Browning in poetry, Carlyle in history, and Meredith in fiction. He thought it was a safe prophecy that Meredith, like Browning and Carlyle, would ultimately take his true place, and would be regarded as the most original and most masterful writer of fiction of the Victorian era. Of Meredith's poetry Mr. Doyle said he would say nothing, although it was in poetry that he first broke ground. Dealing with the novels, he characterised "Richard Feverel" as the most popular and the most symmetrical of them all. It was a book which took its place with "Vanity Fair" "Esmond," and "The Cloister and the Hearth," as one of the four strongest novels in modern fiction. Meredith had taken the novel as his medium because it happened to be in vogue in the age in which he lived. In Shakspere’s day he would have taken the drama, in Addison's the essay, and in either he might have been equally powerful. Mr. Doyle read some of the lighter passages from "Richard Feverel," "The Egoist," and others of the series, and briefly passed in review the principal works of the novelist.
