“Diana of the Crossways” I liked better, and had I had absolutely nothing to do I might have read it to the end.  I remember a scene with a rustic—­a rustic who could eat hog a solid hour—­that amused me.  I remember the sloppy road in the Weald, and the vague outlines of the South Downs seen in starlight and mist.  But to come to the great question, the test by which Time will judge us all—­the creation of a human being, of a live thing that we have met with in life before, and meet for the first time in print, and who abides with us ever after.  Into what shadow has not Diana floated?  Where are the magical glimpses of the soul?  Do you remember in “Peres et Enfants,” when Tourgueneff is unveiling the woman’s, shall I say, affection, for Bazaroff, or the interest she feels in him? and exposing at the same time the reasons why she will never marry him....  I wish I had the book by me, I have not seen it for ten years.

After striving through many pages to put Lucien, whom you would have loved, whom I would have loved, that divine representation of all that is young and desirable in man, before the reader, Balzac puts these words in his mouth in reply to an impatient question by Vautrin, who asks him what he wants, what he is sighing for, “D’etre celebre et d’etre aime,”—­these are soul-waking words, these are Shakespeare words.

Where in “Diana of the Crossways” do we find soul-evoking words like these?  With tiresome repetition we are told that she is beautiful, divine; but I see her not at all, I don’t know if she is dark, tall, or fair; with tiresome reiteration we are told that she is brilliant, that her conversation is like a display of fireworks, that the company is dazzled and overcome; but when she speaks the utterances are grotesque, and I say that if any one spoke to me in real life as she does in the novel, I should not doubt for an instant that I was in the company of a lunatic.  The epigrams are never good, they never come within measurable distance of La Rochefoucauld, Balzac, or even Goncourt.  The admirers of Mr. Meredith constantly deplore their existence, admitting that they destroy all illusion of life.  “When we have translated half of Mr. Meredith’s utterances into possible human speech, then we can enjoy him,” says the Pall Mall Gazette.  We take our pleasures differently; mine are spontaneous, and I know nothing about translating the rank smell of a nettle into the fragrance of a rose, and then enjoying it.

Mr. Meredith’s conception of life is crooked, ill-balanced, and out of tune.  What remains?—­a certain lustiness.  You have seen a big man with square shoulders and a small head, pushing about in a crowd, he shouts and works his arms, he seems to be doing a great deal, in reality he is doing nothing; so Mr. Meredith appears to me, and yet I can only think of him as an artist; his habit is not slatternly, like those of such literary hodmen as Mr. David Christie Murray, Mr. Besant, Mr. Buchanan.  There is no trace of the crowd about him.  I do not question his right of place, I am out of sympathy with him, that is all; and I regret that it should be so, for he is one whose love of art is pure and untainted with commercialism, and if I may praise it for nought else, I can praise it for this.