That “The Egoist” is typical—­in a sense, most typical of the fictions,—­is very true.  That, on the other hand, it is Meredith’s best novel may be boldly denied, since it is hardly a novel at all.  It is a wonderful analytic study of the core of self that is in humanity, Willoughby, incarnation of a self-centeredness glossed over to others and to himself by fine gentleman manners and instincts, is revealed stroke after stroke until, in the supreme test of his alliance with Clara Middleton, he is flayed alive for the reader’s benefit.  In this power of exposure, by the subtlest, most unrelenting analysis, of the very penetralia of the human soul it has no counterpart; beside it, most of the psychology of fiction seems child’s play.  And the truth of it is overwhelming.  No wonder Stevenson speaks of its “serviceable exposure of myself.”  Every honest man who reads it, winces at its infallible touching of a moral sore-spot.  The inescapable ego in us all was never before portrayed by such a master.

But because it is a study that lacks the breadth, variety, movement and objectivity of the Novel proper, “The Egoist” is for the confirmed Meredith lover, not for the beginner:  to take it first is perchance to go no further.  Readers have been lost to him by this course.  The immense gain in depth and delicacy acquired by English fiction since Richardson is well illustrated by a comparison of the latter’s “Sir Charles Grandison” with Meredith’s “The Egoist.”  One is a portrait for the time, the other for all time.  Both, superficially viewed, are the same type:  a male paragon before whom a bevy of women burn incense.  But O the difference!  Grandison is serious to his author, while Meredith, in skinning Willoughby alive like another Marsyas, is once and for all making the worship of the ego hateful.

It is interesting that “Diana of the Crossways” was the book first to attract American readers.  It has some of the author’s eccentricities at their worst.  But it was in one respect an excellent choice:  the heroine is thoroughly representative of the author and of the age; possibly this country is sympathetic to her for the reason that she seems indigenous.  Diana furnishes a text for a dissertation on Meredith’s limning of the sex, and of his conception of the mental relation of the sexes.  She is a modern woman, not so much that she is superior in goodness to the ideal of woman established in the mid-Victorian period by Thackeray and Dickens, as that she is bigger and broader.  She is the result of the process of social readjustment.  Her story is that of a woman soul experiencing a succession of unions and through them learning the higher love.  First, the marriage de convenance of an unawakened girl; then, a marriage wherein admiration, ambition and flattered pride play their parts; finally, the marriage with Redbourne, a union based on tried friendship, comradeship, respect, warming into passion that, like the sudden up-leap of flame on the altar, lifts the