aloud to him one of the hymns from Keble’s Christian Year,” he did not, as the saying is, turn a hair.  His attachment to his daughter Mariette—­his “dearie girl,” as he spoke of her with unaffected softness of phrase—­also helps one to realize that he was not all Olympian.  Meredith, the condemner of the “guarded life,” was humanly nervous in guarding his own little daughter.  “He would never allow Mariette to travel alone, even the very short distance by train from Box Hill to Ewell; a maid had always to be sent with her or to fetch her.  He never allowed her to walk by herself.”  One likes Meredith the better for Lady Butcher’s picture of him as a “harassed father.”

One likes him, too, as he converses with his dogs, and for his thoughtfulness in giving some of his MSS., including that of Richard Feverel, to Frank Cole, his gardener, in the hope that “some day the gardener would be able to sell them” and so get some reward for his devotion.  As to the underground passages in Meredith’s life and character, Lady Butcher is not concerned with them.  She writes of him merely as she knew him.  Her book is a friend’s tribute, though not a blind tribute.  It may not be effective as an argument against those who are bent on disparaging the greatest lyrical wit in modern English literature.  But it will be welcomed by those for whom Meredith’s genius is still a bubbling spring of good sense and delight.

(3) THE ANGLO-IRISH ASPECT

Meredith never wrote a novel which was less a novel than Celt and Saxon.  It is only a fragment of a book.  It is so much a series of essays and sharp character-sketches, however, that the untimely fall of the curtain does not greatly trouble us.  There is no excitement of plot, no gripping anxiety as to whether this or that pair of lovers will ever reach the altar.  Philip O’Donnell and Patrick, his devoted brother, and their caricature relative, the middle-aged Captain Con, all interest us as they abet each other in the affairs of love or politics, or as they discuss their native country or the temperament of the country which oppresses it; but they are chiefly desirable as performers in an Anglo-Irish fantasia, a Meredithian piece of comic music, with various national anthems, English, Welsh, and Irish, running through and across it in all manner of guises, and producing all manner of agreeable disharmonies.

In the beginning we have Patrick O’Donnell, an enthusiast, a Celt, a Catholic, setting out for the English mansion of the father of Adiante Adister to find if the girl cannot be pleaded over to reconsider her refusal of his brother Philip.  He arrives in the midst of turmoil in the house, the cause of it being a hasty marriage which Adiante had ambitiously contracted with a hook-nosed foreign prince.  Patrick, a broken-hearted proxy, successfully begs her family for a miniature of the girl to take back to his brother, but he falls so deeply in love with her on seeing the portrait that his loyalty to Philip almost wavers, when the latter carelessly asks him to leave the miniature on a more or less public table instead of taking it off to the solitude of his own room for a long vigil of adoration.