In the rest of the story we have an account of the brothers in the London house of Captain Con, the happy husband married to a stark English wife of mechanical propriety—­a rebellious husband, too, when in the sociable atmosphere of his own upper room, amid the blackened clay pipes and the friendly fumes of whiskey, he sings her praises, while at the same time full of grotesque and whimsical criticisms of all those things, Saxon and more widely human, for which she stands.  There is a touch of farce in the relations of these two, aptly symbolized by the bell which rings for Captain Con, and hastens him away from his midnight eloquence with Patrick and Philip.  “He groaned, ’I must go.  I haven’t heard the tinkler for months.  It signifies she’s cold in her bed.  The thing called circulation is unknown to her save by the aid of outward application, and I’m the warming-pan, as legitimately as I should be, I’m her husband and her Harvey in one.’”

It is in the house of Captain Con, it should be added, that Philip and Patrick meet Jane Mattock, the Saxon woman; and the story as we have it ends with Philip invalided home from service in India, and Jane, a victim of love, catching “glimpses of the gulfs of bondage, delicious, rose-enfolded, foreign.”  There are nearly three hundred pages of it altogether, some of them as fantastic and lyrical as any that Meredith ever wrote.

As one reads Celt and Saxon, however, one seems to get an inkling of the reason why Meredith has so often been set down as an obscure author.  It is not entirely that he is given to using imagery as the language of explanation—­a subtle and personal sort of hieroglyphics.  It is chiefly, I think, because there is so little direct painting of men and women in his books.  Despite his lyricism, he had something of an X-ray’s imagination.  The details of the modelling of a face, the interpreting lines and looks, did not fix themselves with preciseness on his vision enabling him to pass them on to us with the surface reality we generally demand in prose fiction.

It is as though he painted some of his men and women upon air:  they are elusive for all we know of their mental and spiritual processes.  Even though he is at pains to tell us that Diana’s hair is dark, we do not at once accept the fact but are at liberty to go on believing she is a fair woman, for he himself was general rather than insistently particular in his vision of such matters.  In the present book, again, we have a glimpse of Adiante in her miniature—­“this lighted face, with the dark raised eyes and abounding auburn tresses, where the contrast of colours was in itself thrilling,” “the light above beauty distinguishing its noble classic lines and the energy of radiance, like a morning of chivalrous promise, in the eyes”—­and, despite the details mentioned, the result is to give us only the lyric aura of the woman where we wanted a design.

Ultimately, these women of Meredith’s become intensely real to us—­the most real women, I think, in English fiction—­but, before we come to handshaking terms with them, we have sometimes to go to them over bogs and rocky places with the sun in our eyes.  Before this, physically, they are apt to be exquisite parts of a landscape, sharers of a lyric beauty with the cherry-trees and the purple crocuses.