spirit onto ideal heights.  Diana is an imperfect, sinning, aspiring, splendid creature.  And in the narrative that surrounds her, we get Meredith’s theory of the place of intellect in woman, and in the development of society.  He has an intense conviction that the human mind should be so trained that woman can never fall back upon so-called instinct; he ruthlessly attacks her “intuition,” so often lauded and made to cover a multitude of sins.  When he remarks that she will be the last thing to be civilized by man, the satire is directed against man rather than against woman herself, since it is man who desires to keep her a creature of the so-called intuitions.  A mighty champion of the sex, he never tires telling it that intellectual training is the sure way to all the equalities.  This conviction makes him a stalwart enemy of sentimentalism, which is so fiercely satirized in “Sandra Belloni” in the persons of the Pole family.  His works abound in passages in which this view is displayed, flashed before the reader in diamond-like epigram and aphorism.  Not that he despises the emotions:  those who know him thoroughly will recognize the absurdity of such a charge.  Only he insists that they be regulated and used aright by the master, brain.  The mishaps of his women come usually from the haphazard abeyance of feeling or from an unthinking bowing down to the arbitrary dictations of society.  This insistence upon the application of reason (the reasoning process dictated by an age of science) to social situations, has led this writer to advise the setting aside of the marriage bond in certain circumstances.  In both “Lord Ormont and his Aminta” and “One of our Conquerors” he advocates a greater freedom in this relation, to anticipate what time may bring to pass.  It is enough here to say that this extreme view does not represent Meredith’s best fiction nor his most fruitful period of production.

Perhaps the most original thing about Meredith as a novelist is the daring way in which he has made an alliance between romance and the intellect which was supposed, in an older conception, to be its archenemy.  He gives to Romance, that creature of the emotions, the corrective and tonic of the intellect “To preserve Romance,” he declares, “we must be inside the heads of our people as well as the hearts ... in days of a growing activity of the head.”  Let us say once again that Romance means a certain use of material as the result of an attitude toward Life; this attitude may be temporary, a mood; or steady, a conviction.  It is the latter with George Meredith; and be it understood, his material is always realistic, it is his interpretation that is superbly idealistic.  The occasional crabbedness of his manner and his fiery admiration for Italy are not the only points in which he reminds one of Browning.  He is one with him in his belief in soul, his conception of life is an arena for its trying-out; one with him also in the robust acceptance of earth and earth’s worth, evil and all, for enjoyment and as salutary experience.  This is no fanciful parallel between Meredith and a man who has been called (with their peculiarities of style in mind) the Meredith of Poetry, as Meredith has been called the Browning of Prose.