some fruit. The doctor insisted on bleeding him, but, on the boy's threat to pull his nose, water-gruel and bed were nominally substituted. In the manse garden was a remarkably large pear-tree, the forbidden fruit of which, it is said, young Byron tasted, and the tree went by his name. Byron's grandmother, Mrs. Gordon of Gight, occupied a house where the County building now stands. On 23rd May, 1784, the Lady writes, wishing drekely for a slater to loake at Lady Gights hous and ofesas, as the leat windes has broken of a good maney sleves (slates) of the Hous.' The traditions of Byron at Banff are not exemplary. On a lady remonstrating with his mother on his violent and improper conduct, the child butted her like a ram, and threatened to throw her over the balcony. He shocked public opinion in Banff, and was called a 'nickom,' or 'that little deevil Geordie Byron.'

In a recent description by Leitch Ritchie, Banff is said to be 'one of the most beautifully situated towns on the northern coasts of Scotland; its walks, rides, and drives are unrivalled in the kingdom; but though cheerful and lightsome in its aspect, it seems to stand apart from the rest of the world.' This is unfortunate for the rest of the world, and also for Banff. But there is no reason why the town, with its quaintly interesting history and the beauty of its surroundings, should not become again, what it was a century ago declared to be, the gayest little county town in Scotland.

ART.

ART. VII.--The Novels of George Meredith.

CRI

Vols. 1-16. London, 1897.

In Progress.

YRITICISM, it is complained, moves but haltingly after the pioneer of genius, and the boundaries of art are enlarged in its despite. We have, therefore, in criticism a somewhat discredited science. The judgment indisputably takes a colour, consciously or unconsciously, from the kind of excellence with which it is familiar; in excellence of an unfamiliar type there is a bewildering and baffling element. We are on the whole right in thinking that the laws of art are written in the practices of the great artists; we are right too in conceiving the grammar of criticism as in great measure a system derived from these practices; we fail when we assume that the book of practices is closed and that the grammar as it exists is final. It is possible thus to account for the great historical mistakes of criticism, to account for its inefficiency in dealing with an original writer who indulges in novel and unfamiliar practices, and justifies them only by his results. But despair of finding a final canon need not drive us into the wilderness of private tastes and individual opinions. It is surely not beyond hope, that we may yet attain to an apparatus criticus which, while it formulates a general demand, will leave art practically unfettered in its choice of methods;—that we may in the future lay down a system of criticism, which shall be possessed of a touchstone universally applicable, yet free to enlarge its grammar of practices.

It is perhaps best, since no other body of principles at present in existence formulates a consistent demand, to make an appeal, even when dealing with an author who disregards conventions, to the broad traditions of ancient art, or to take these at least as the most fitting point of departure in any attempted critical estimate. They at any rate knew what they wanted in art, and we do not.' For this reason Matthew Arnold, in his search for what was sound and true in poetical art, found the only sure guidance among the ancients. They at any rate knew what they wanted in art, and we do not.' We do not know what we want in art, nor, we seem now to be told, is it a matter of any importance, since we do not greatly need to know. The writer will write as he pleases, and the business of the critic will be merely to note characteristics, as a chemist notes some natural element.' The author and his work stand to the critic as Nature and her phenomena stand to the man of science. There is no room left for the expression of dissatisfaction, there can be no inequalities in art. Like nature, art too is perfect. Perfection is equal,' writes one of Mr. Mere

dith's disciples, and all art stands on the equality of perfection.' How luminous a saying! What insight, what sagacity! Here is the only and the true simplification of criticism, henceforth to consist in the selection of superlatives, since the praise of perfection cannot be adequately conducted save in superlatives. But a writer of Mr. Meredith's calibre is not served by criticism such as is suited to the ceremonial which accompanies the canonization of the minor poet or the decadent. He is not served by this inability to perceive distinctions, to discriminate, to appraise with justice; he is not served by a gracious readiness to accept all art as on the equality of perfection. A writer of Mr. Meredith's genius is better served by principles of criticism which narrow the circle than by these sweeping circuits of magnificent inclusiveness. Though his worth and influence are yet uncalculated, the curve of his orbit yet undetermined, there is that about Mr. Meredith which distinguishes him from the lesser writers. He is very evidently not of their company, though he has not yet attained a secure niche in the national imagination. Mr. Meredith is not the people's favourite, and no extravagances of critical appreciation will ever make him their favourite, but he is a figure of sufficient importance to suggest the application to his work of the severest tests, such tests as need only be applied to writers who challenge comparison with the best literary artists, not of their own day alone but of England. And, however it may be with writers of whom we think and speak as accomplished rather than creative, questions of technique are not the first questions that arise in connection with such an author. An author who challenges comparison with the classics of our own or any other literature does so on broader ground than the finish or perfume of his sentences.

Is there not in field, wood, or shore something more precious and tonic than any special beauties we may chance to find there,-flowers, perfumes, sunsets, something that we cannot do without, though we can do without these? Is it health, life, power, or what is it?"

Form is a vital matter in literature-it will not do to disregard it, it is a vital matter; but the Aristotelian canon lays its first emphasis upon form in the sense of architectonics rather than in the sense of finish of detail. And if we are to judge of Mr. Meredith's achievement by classic canons it is well for him that it is so.

As a novelist, and it is as a novelist that Mr. Meredith claims. the most serious attention—as a novelist he is a worker in a field not directly recognized in the ancient world as a legitimate

sphere

sphere for the literary artist. But within the present century Fiction has made a kind of triumphal progress from villagemaiden to reigning beauty at the Court. Her charms compel universal homage. She has taken without protest a place beside poetry, the drama and history, as a branch of art, hardly if at all of inferior dignity. She has usurped the place of these older literary arts in public favour. This position she has achieved while still in her artistic youth. She has enlarged the sphere of her influence, and is likely still further to enlarge it, for she draws to herself every variety of talent and offers it an open field. In the novel we have the formal mould into which much of the best creative energy of the century has been directed; and in his choice of the novel as the best medium for his own imaginative work Mr. Meredith followed a true guiding instinct. Here the peculiarities of his methods detract less from the effectiveness of his work than in his poetry. Traditions and conventions are of less weight in fiction than in any other department of literary art, and of this fact Mr. Meredith has taken advantage. Nevertheless, and in spite of his indifference to literary traditions, many of the qualities of Mr. Meredith's work are classic qualities. The novel may be regarded as a drama written out in full for the fireside reader, with occasional comments by the Chorus in the person of the author. Mr. Meredith's novels are in every sense dramas, usually comedies or tragi-comedies, but essentially dramatic in presentation. If we make a demand upon the modern novelist in the person of Mr. Meredith such as was made upon the ancient Greek dramatist, a demand for design, and again design, and yet again design, we shall not find an absence of design, we shall not find even a weakness, but a positive largeness, a breadth of design, which at once distinguishes him as a writer of no ordinary note. The breadth of design in his works forbids, in our judgment, any question as to his intellectual eminence. It is when he attempts to execute his design that he is less successful. To anticipate in a measure what must be the concluding judgment on Mr. Meredith, we may say that his design is usually noble and spacious, but it is never wholly extricated. It is extricated in parts, but in the main, like some colossal sphinx, it lies halfburied in the desert sand.

That Mr. Meredith has not been altogether successful is not indeed surprising; the task he has set himself in each one of his greater novels is a task of vastly greater magnitude than that undertaken, let us say, by Euripides in his 'Hecuba' or 'Ion." The canvas is a larger one, the types of character more subtle and complex, the issues more involved, the action no less. Vol. 186.-No. 371. important.

M

important. If we have to complain that Mr. Meredith's designs are less completely extricated than those of his predecessors who have created the traditions of art, if in parts they are not in any respect set free, it is only just to bear in mind the magnitude of his intellectual undertakings. The character of Mr. Meredith's drama must also be borne in mind. It is the drama of conduct and of motives, the inner springs of conduct, of character evolved by varying sets of circumstances and amid the mutual relations, actions, and reactions of human life. He is, besides, the chronicler of the subtle and elusive fluctuations of emotion, the ebb and flow of feeling, the alternations of moods that make a theatre of the human heart. Present as spectator of this subjective play of swiftly passing moods, he delights to publish the secrets whispered on that inner stage, to draw aside at certain critical moments, in certain critical situations, the curtain that makes it invisible to the physical eye. It is not merely what his personages do, but how and what they feel that interests Mr. Meredith; he is the novelist who most faithfully records the phases of that inner, partly even subconscious life which, viewed from without, we denominate character or temperament. This psychological forest Mr. Meredith has not indeed been the first to enter, but no previous author has penetrated it so deeply. One and not the least of his distinctions, therefore, is to have added to art a new province legitimately reclaimed for future cultivation by his successors.

In his methods Mr. Meredith, if not without precursors, has pushed beyond the limits of tradition. He is content to indicate rather than to describe, to suggest rather than to paint a picture, 'to rouse the inward vision' rather than elaborate a finished masterpiece. These are the characteristics which delight Mr. Meredith's disciples and remind them of Browning. Like Browning he is content to depend upon his reader to a larger degree than perhaps the majority of present-day readers are prepared to bear. Thus Mr. Meredith and Mr. Browning, declining to pipe to popular airs, haughtily impose a test upon their audiences. They trust to the sympathy and to the intelligence of the faithful few, they make words their servants, nor suffer themselves by any over-scrupulous regard for form to become the slaves of their own vocabularies. Mr. Meredith's interests and methods may be thus briefly indicated; but the spirit of his work, the leaven that leavens it, resides in his apprehension of life as a tragi-comedy, as a subject for thoughtful laughter.' Mr. Meredith conceives that there exists no need to distort or dislocate human life, to view it in concave or convex mirrors, in order to present a picture