and tedious railway journeys, from the point of view of literature he is merely the perpetual curate of Pudlington Parva.  As for George Meredith, who could hope to reproduce him?  His style is chaos illumined by brilliant flashes of lightning.  As a writer he has mastered everything, except language; as a novelist he can do everything, except tell a story; as an artist he is everything, except articulate.  Too strange to be popular, too individual to have imitators, the author of Richard Feverel stands absolutely alone.  It is easy to disarm criticism, but he has disarmed the disciple.  He gives us his philosophy through the medium of wit, and is never so pathetic as when he is humorous.  To turn truth into a paradox is not difficult, but George Meredith makes all his paradoxes truths, and no Theseus can thread his labyrinth, no OEdipus solve his secret.

However, it is only fair to acknowledge that there are some signs of a school springing up amongst us.  This school is not native, nor does it seek to reproduce any English master.  It may be described as the result of the realism of Paris filtered through the refining influence of Boston.  Analysis, not action, is its aim; it has more psychology than passion, and it plays very cleverly upon one string, and this is the commonplace.

* * * * *

As a reaction against this school, it is pleasant to come across a novel like Lady Augusta Noel’s Hithersea Mere.  If this story has any definite defect, it comes from its delicacy and lightness of treatment.  An industrious Bostonian would have made half a dozen novels out of it, and have had enough left for a serial.  Lady Augusta Noel is content to vivify her characters, and does not care about vivisection; she suggests rather than explains; and she does not seek to make life too obviously rational.  Romance, picturesqueness, charm—­these are the qualities of her book.  As for its plot, it has so many plots that it is difficult to describe them.  We have the story of Rhona Somerville, the daughter of a great popular preacher, who tries to write her father’s life, and, on looking over his papers and early diaries, finds struggle where she expected calm, and doubt where she looked for faith, and is afraid to keep back the truth, and yet dares not publish it.  Rhona is quite charming; she is like a little flower that takes itself very seriously, and she shows us how thoroughly nice and natural a narrow-minded girl may be.  Then we have the two brothers, John and Adrian Mowbray.  John is the hard-working, vigorous clergyman, who is impatient of all theories, brings his faith to the test of action, not of intellect, lives what he believes, and has no sympathy for those who waver or question—­a thoroughly admirable, practical, and extremely irritating man.  Adrian is the fascinating dilettante, the philosophic doubter, a sort of romantic rationalist with a taste for art.  Of course, Rhona marries the brother who needs conversion,