* * * * *

In “Richard Feverel,” what a loosening of the bonds!  What a renaissance!  Nobody since Fielding would have ventured to write the Star and Garter chapter in “Richard Feverel.”  It was the announcer of a sort of dawn.  But there are fearful faults in “Richard Feverel.”  The book is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of the excellent Charlotte M. Yonge.  The large constructional lines of it are bad.  The separation of Lucy and Richard is never explained, and cannot be explained.  The whole business of Sir Julius is grotesque.  And the conclusion is quite arbitrary.  It is a weak book, full of episodic power and overloaded with wit.  “Diana of the Crossways” is even worse.  I am still awaiting from some ardent Meredithian an explanation of Diana’s marriage that does not insult my intelligence.  Nor is “One of our Conquerors” very good.  I read it again recently, and was sad.  In my view, “The Egoist” and “Rhoda Fleming” are the best of the novels, and I don’t know that I prefer one to the other.  The latter ought to have been called “Dahlia Fleming,” and not “Rhoda.”  When one thinks of the rich colour, the variety, the breadth, the constant intellectual distinction, the sheer brilliant power of novels such as these, one perceives that a “great Victorian” could only have succeeded in an age when all the arts were at their lowest ebb in England, and the most middling of the middle-classes ruled with the Bible in one hand and the Riot Act in the other.

Meredith was an uncompromising Radical, and—­what is singular—­he remained so in his old age.  He called Mr. Joseph Chamberlain’s nose “adventurous” at a time when Mr. Joseph Chamberlain’s nose had the ineffable majesty of the Queen of Spain’s leg.  And the Pall Mall haughtily rebuked him.  A spectacle for history!  He said aloud in a ballroom that Guy de Maupassant was the greatest novelist that ever lived.  To think so was not strange; but to say it aloud!  No wonder this temperament had to wait for recognition.  Well, Meredith has never had proper recognition; and won’t have yet.  To be appreciated by a handful of writers, gushed over by a little crowd of thoughtful young women, and kept on a shelf uncut by ten thousand persons determined to be in the movement—­that is not appreciation.  He has not even been appreciated as much as Thomas Hardy, though he is a less fine novelist.  I do not assert that he is a less fine writer.  For his poems are as superior to the verses of Thomas Hardy as “The Mayor of Casterbridge” is superior to “The Egoist.” (Never in English prose literature was such a seer of beauty as Thomas Hardy.) The volume of Meredith’s verse is small, but there are things in it that one would like to have written.  And it is all so fine, so acute, so alert, courageous, and immoderate.

* * * * *