He knew himself comically, no doubt, rather than tragically.  In Modern Love and Richard Feverel he reveals himself as by no means a laughing philosopher; but he strove to make fiction a vehicle of philosophic laughter rather than of passionate sympathy.  Were it not that a great poetic imagination is always at work—­in his prose, perhaps, even more than in his verse—­his genius might seem a little cold and head-in-the-air.  But his poet’s joy in his characters saves his books from inhumanity.  As Diana Warwick steps out in the dawn she is not a mere female human being undergoing critical dissection; she is bird-song and the light of morning and the coming of the flowers.  Meredith had as great a capacity for rapture as for criticism and portraiture.  He has expressed in literature as no other novelist has done the rapturous vision of a boy in love.  He knew that a boy in love is not mainly a calf but a poet. Love in a Valley is the incomparable music of a boy’s ecstasy.  Much of Richard Feverel is its incomparable prose.  Rapture and criticism, however, make a more practical combination in literature than in life.  In literature, criticism may add flavour to rapture; in life it is more than likely to destroy the flavour.  One is not surprised, then, to learn the full story of Meredith’s first unhappy marriage.  A boy of twenty-one, he married a widow of thirty, high-strung, hot and satirical like himself; and after a depressing sequence of dead babies, followed by the birth of a son who survived, she found life with a man of genius intolerable, and ran away with a painter.  Meredith apparently refused her request to go and see her when she was dying.  His imaginative sympathy enabled him to see the woman’s point of view in poetry and fiction; it does not seem to have extended to his life.  Thus, his biography is to a great extent a “showing-up” of George Meredith.  He proved as incapable of keeping the affection of his son Arthur, as of keeping that of his wife.  Much as he loved the boy he had not been married again long before he allowed him to become an alien presence.  The boy felt he had a grievance.  He said—­probably without justice—­that his father kept him short of money.  Possibly he was jealous for his dead mother’s sake.  Further, though put into business, he had literary ambitions—­a prolific source of bitterness.  When Arthur died, Meredith did not even attend his funeral.

Mr. Ellis has shown Meredith up not only as a husband and a father, but as a hireling journalist and a lark-devouring gourmet.  On the whole, the poet who could eat larks in a pie seems to me to be a more shocking “great man” than the Radical who could write Tory articles in a newspaper for pay.  At the same time, it is only fair to say that Meredith remains a sufficiently splendid figure in.  Mr. Ellis’s book even when we know the worst about him.  Was his a generous genius?  It was at least a prodigal one.  As poet, novelist, correspondent, and conversationalist, he leaves an impression of beauty, wit, and power in a combination without a precedent.