Within the last ten years of his life we had the great pleasure of seeing tardy justice done at length to the genius of Mr. George Meredith.  I like to think that, after a long and noble struggle against the inattention of the public, after the pouring of high music for two generations into ears whose owners seemed to have wilfully sealed them with wax, so that only the most staccato and least happy notes ever reached their dulness, George Meredith did, before the age of seventy, reap a little of his reward.  I am told that the movement in favour of him began in America; if so, more praise to American readers, who had to teach us to appreciate De Quincey and Praed before we knew the value of those men.  Yet is there much to do.  Had George Meredith been a Frenchman, what monographs had ere this been called forth by his work; in Germany, or Italy, or Denmark even, such gifts as his would long ago have found their classic place above further discussion.  But England is a Gallio, and in defiance of Mr. Le Gallienne, cares little for the things of literature.

If a final criticism of George Meredith existed, where in it would The Shaving of Shagpat find its place?  There is fear that in competition with the series of analytical studies of modern life that stretches from The Ordeal of Richard Feverel to One of our Conquerors, it might chance to be pushed away with a few lines of praise.  Now, I would not seem so paradoxical as to say that when an extravaganza is held up to me in one hand, and a masterpiece of morality like The Egoist in the other, I can doubt which is the greater book; but there are moods in which I am jealous of the novels, and wish to be left alone with my Arabian Entertainment.  Delicious in this harsh world of reality to fold a mist around us, and out of it to evolve the yellow domes and black cypresses, the silver fountains and marble pillars, of the fabulous city of Shagpat.  I do not know any later book than The Shaving in which an Englishman has allowed his fancy, untrammelled by any sort of moral or intellectual subterfuge, to go a-roaming by the light of the moon.  We do this sort of thing no longer.  We are wholly given up to realism, we are harshly pressed upon on all sides by the importunities of excess of knowledge.  If we talk of gryphons, the zoologists are upon us; of Oolb or Aklis, the geographers flourish their maps at us in defiance.  But the author of The Shaving of Shagpat, in the bloom of his happy youthful genius, defied all this pedantry.  In a little address which has been suppressed in later editions he said (December 8, 1855)

“It has seemed to me that the only way to tell an Arabian Story was by imitating the style and manner of the Oriental Story-tellers.  But such an attempt, whether successful or not, may read like a translation.  I therefore think it better to prelude this Entertainment by an avowal that it springs from no Eastern source, and is in every respect an original Work.”