In the essays evoked during the last thirty years by George Meredith's books, attention has been called either to his powers as a remarkable stylist, a writer of brilliant epigrams and descriptions, a master of strongly intellectual characterization, and a humorist; or else to his protracted studies, overcrowded with observations and ideas, and to what some are pleased to call his hard, unsympathetic analyses of life. But for some, at least, who have found time to think their way through his nine long novels, the name of Meredith must have assumed an agnomen of "the theorist " rather than "the novelist." Enjoying his books and admiring even with enthusiasm his ability in fiction, some of us in spite of our wishes may apprehend that a combination of qualities will keep him from entering the inner circle of distinction that parts of his work have given him ample claim to. Yet Vanity never puts on cap and bells more childishly than when she tries to settle literary destiny for her own contemporaries. Whether Meredith is to be ulti

mately famous or not, we can be sure that he is and will be useful; though we may hesitate to call any one of his stories as a whole an artistic masterpiece, we shall not hesitate to say that the substance of his intellectual influence is valuable and not likely soon to be effaced.

When we put together our scattered impressions of his opinions on various topics, we find (to judge from a personal experience) some three or four aspects of his teaching especially conspicuous. These are his theories of fiction, sentiment, ideal womanhood, and romantic love. Whether these are points with which he is chiefly concerned or not, they will perhaps serve to illustrate the theoretical side of his writings. Even where we disagree with him, here and elsewhere, he wins our respect, his purpose is so serious, his labor so faithful. What he said of his last heroine, whom he introduced as for a time supporting herself by writing stories, we may say of him: "She did not chameleon her pen from the color of her audience. She worked in translucent conscience."

Though he invariably writes with a moral purpose, he is never the propagandist of particular current obligations. No philanthropic treatise is to be extracted from any of his novels. Shakspeare himself is scarcely more reticent respecting theology or those sanctities of personal religion that it has become the fashion for novelists to expound. Beauchamp's Career shows that he sympathizes with some sentiments of the English Radicals, yet his attitude is thoughtful and conservative, not that of an advocate. Richard Feverel is his only work that can be called a plea against a code of conduct. For instead of dealing with systems of thought and with truths of public relation, Meredith deals with truth of internal character and of social life.

He is a theorist. His fine power of catching life-like shades of speech and manner, his creations of strong characters and skillfully devised scenes for them to move through, are gifts that he has in common with other good novelists. But primarily his is the reflective rather than the creative habit, the bent of his mind is philosophical. Indeed, in one of his books he introduces as his partner "The Philosopher, who will not see things on the surface, and is, as a necessary consequence,

blind to the fact that the public detest him." This philosopher "maintains that a story should not always flow," that characters should be so true to life that they must move themselves, instead of being pliant to an arbitrary plot.

Plainly he belongs to the realistic school; not however to the class of superficial realism represented by some popular American fiction of to-day, and as little to the French realists of depravity. The superficial he will not notice; what occupies the foreground of human nature to such writers as Zola, Meredith indeed sees, but he sees it at one side. Life, he says, is not chiefly rose-pink or dirty-drab; idealism and brutalism he equally abjures.

To him novel-writing is a responsibility. "The Fiction which is the summary of actual Life," he has told us, "is Philosophy's elect handmaiden." The fictionist is a public teacher, partly by holding up examples of common follies and covert flaws of character, our laughs and frowns at which may lead us to personal introspection. "Comedy," he declares, “proposes the correcting of pretentiousness, of inflation, of dullness, and of the vestiges of rawness and grossness to be found among us. She is the ultimate civilizer." Aside from opening us to ourselves, it teaches us about men in general. Sometimes by the study of life in a novel we can see truths of human nature more accurately than by looking at the people around us; as astronomers get better results in some of their investigations of the sun and stars by telescopic photographs than by looking through the telescope themselves. Many creations of fiction work closely into our mental processes as formulæ of various qualities; some become as truly our heroes as do the real names of history. If our sympathies are tricked, if our judgments are deceived by characters romantically impracticable or philosophically untrue, if the figures whom our sensibilities follow are lovely yet mischievous fairies, the magician of the story is responsible. Therefore we find Meredith sedulous of true characterization, scientifically accurate in his psychology, shunning those sweet, poetical, unrealizable ideals that prove fruits of the lotus. He tries to animate his characters with what he calls "the fires of positive brainstuff," to paint "thoughtful women, thinking men."

Nor does it seem to him outside the novelist's province to be didactic by more than implication or suggestion. Occasionally, quite neglecting his actors, he steps to the front of his stage and delivers an earnest parabasis to his audience. Even in the full sweep of his comedy, whole-souled as his pleasure is in the laugh at some ridiculous character or grotesque situation, after laughing he falls to thinking how and why people deflect from sense into folly. In these panoramas of absurdities he not only hopes that we shall catch suggestions of our silly selves; sometimes, even here, he takes up his fescue and throws a lecturer's gown over the bright attire of the comedian. Yet he is never pedagogic or sombre in his advice. Where it is plain, he knows that the unaided lesson is better than tutoring; he has faith in the sanitation of mirth. "The philosopher finds himself clinging to laughter as the best of human fruit," he has written; and so long passages are doctrinal only to those who read thoughtfully.

So earnestly intellectual himself, he demands that his readers shall adopt his mental seriousness. In his own words, his characters "knock at the door of the mind, and the mind must open to be interested in them." "Only those who read her woman's blood and character with the head will care for her,"

he says of one of his heroines. win none," he writes elsewhere:

mon.

"My people conquer nothing, "they are actual, yet uncom

It is the clock-work of the brain that they are directed to set in motion."

This, then, is Mr. Meredith's standard of fiction: to write with a sense of responsibility, to aim at presentation of character rather than at story-telling, to regard an accurate psychology as morally obligatory, to satirize folly and to present exemplars of intelligent culture, to appeal for approval to the intellect.

If we were to dub Meredith with any single name after our general term of Theorist, perhaps the most appropriate would be Anti-sentimentalist. The various manifestations of sentimentalism he is continually deriding or denouncing, and upholding their opposites by precepts and examples. At first it is scarcely clear what his use of the word implies; his most aphoristic remark on the subject while certainly striking is still

possibly a trifle obscure: "Sentimental people fiddle harmonies on the strings of sensualism, to the delight of a world gaping for marvels of musical execution rather than for music." We are all the more confused by hearing fastidious readers occasionally complaining that Meredith fiddles discords on these same strings. Though he is moral enough, they say, his habit of plain speech upon certain topics is needlessly offensive. He has a way of alluding to our different senses, where delicate taste tells us to forget that we have senses. Instead of ignoring the body he would recognize it as a large factor in human life. The shame in the acknowledgment, he holds, springs from a consciousness of morbid subservience to its worst power. An ideally pure character would talk with the straight gaze of innocence about every thought and every action. "True poets and true women," he has said, "have the native sense of the divineness of what the world deems gross material substance." It is "delicacy of nerve, not weight of brain," that leads to prudish over-refinement. He believes in weight of brain.

The sentimentalists, he admits, have a part to play in civilization; through their efforts it is continually advanced, “sometimes ridiculously." On many topics, no doubt, assumed unconsciousness or euphemistic allusion is decent. Yet when we come to suppose that surface concealment of the lower life is annihilation of it, we are in the devil's steel-trap. Mr. Meredith believes in evolution from beast to soul; he regards that evolution as at present only half accomplished. Man is in transition, governed partly by spiritual, partly by physical forces. Recognizing our finer selves, we must recognize our lower selves also. This the sentimentalist declines to do.

Everyone, to venture an awkward image, may be represented as a pair of Siamese twins. Each of us walks about in dual individuality; the problem of life is, Which is going to lead and control, the sensual or the spiritual? In our present state neither can be destroyed.

Now the sentimentalist's more advanced self is ashamed of his brother. Palid, weak-limbed, he is afraid of him, too; as well he may be, for he bears the marks of many a private drubbing. Yet he walks through society as if he were quite untwinned. He twists his neck awry so that he may not see