guishing note of Mr. Meredith's work, in prose and verse alike. There are magnificent exceptions, of course, but they prove the rule and, broken though it be, there is no gainsaying its existence. To be concentrated in form, to be suggestive in material, to say nothing that is not of permanent value, and only to say it in such terms as are charged to the fullest with significance—this would seem to be the aim and end of Mr. Meredith's ambition. Of simplicity in his own person he appears incapable. The texture of his expression must be stiff with allusion, or he deems it ill spun; there must be something of antic in his speech, or he cannot believe he is addressing himself to the Immortals; he has praised with perfect understanding the lucidity, the elegance, the ease, of Molière, and yet his aim in art (it would appear) is to be Molière's antipodes, and to vanquish by congestion, clottedness, an anxious and determined dandyism of form and style. There is something bourgeois in his intolerance of the commonplace, something fanatical in the intemperance of his regard for artifice. 'Le dandy,' says Baudelaire, doit aspirer à être sublime sans interr uption. Il doit vivre et dormir devant

un miroir.' That, you are tempted to believe, is Mr. Meredith's theory of expression. 'Ce qu'il y a dans le mauvais goût,' is elsewhere the opinion of the same unamiable artist in paradox, 'c'est le plaisir aristocratique de déplaire.' Is that, you ask yourself, the reason why Mr. Meredith is so contemptuous of the general public?-why he will stoop to no sort of concession nor permit himself a mite of patience with the herd whose intellect is content with such poor fodder as Scott and Dickens and Dumas? Be it as it may, the effect is the same. Our author is bent upon being uninterruptedly sublime'; and we must take him as he wills and as we' find him. He loses of course; and we suffer. But none the less do we cherish his society, and none the less are we interested in his processes, and enchanted (when we are clever enough) by his results. He lacks felicity, I have said; but he has charm as well as power, and, once his rule is accepted, there is no way to shake him off. The position is that of the antique tyrant in a commonwealth once republican and free. You resent the domination, but you enjoy it too, and with or against your will you admire the author of your slavery.

R

HODA FLEMING is one of the least Rhoda known of the novels, and in a sense Fleming. it is one of the most disagreeable. To the general it has always been caviare, and caviare it is likely to remain; for the general is before all things respectable, and no such savage and scathing attack upon the superstitions of respectability as Rhoda Fleming has been written. And besides, the emotions developed are too tragic, the personages too elementary in kind and too powerful in degree, the effects too poignant and too sorrowful. In these days people read to be amused. They care for no passion that is not decent in itself and whose expression is not restrained. It irks them to grapple with problems 'capable of none save a tragic solution. And when Mr. Meredith goes digging in a very bad temper with things in general into the deeper strata, the primitive deposits, of human nature, the public is the reverse of profoundly interested in the outcome of his exploration and the results of his labour. But for them whose eye is for real literature and such literary essentials as character largely seen and largely presented and as passion deeply felt and poignantly

expressed there is such a feast in Rhoda Fleming as no other English novelist alive has spread. The book, it is true, is full of failures. There is, for instance, the old bank porter Anthony, who is such a failure as only a great novelist may perpetrate and survive; who suggests (with some other of Mr. Meredith's creations) a close, deliberate, and completely unsuccessful imitation of Dickens: a writer with whom Mr. Meredith is not averse from entering into competition, and who, so manifest on these occasions is his superiority, may almost be described as the other's evil genius. Again, there is Algernon the fool, of whom his author is so bitterly contemptuous that he is never once permitted to live and move and have any sort of being whatever, and who, though he bears a principal part in the intrigue, like the Blifil of Tom Jones is so constantly illuminated by the lightnings of the ironical mode of presentation, as always to seem unreal in himself and seriously to imperil the reality of the story. And, lastly, there are the chivalrous Percy Waring and the inscrutable Mrs. Lovell, two gentle ghosts whose proper place is the shadow-land of the American novel. But when all these

are removed (and for the judicious reader their removal is far from difficult) a treasure of reality remains. What an intensity of life it is that hurries and throbs and burns through the veins of the two sisters-Dahlia the victim, Rhoda the executioner! Where else in English fiction is such a 'human oak log' as their father, the Kentish yeoman William Fleming? And where in English fiction is such a problem presented as that in the evolution of which these three—with a following so well selected and achieved as Robert Armstrong and Jonathan Eccles and the evil ruffian Sedgett, a type of the bumpkin gone wrong, and Master Gammon, that type of the bumpkin old and obstinate, a sort of human saurian-are dashed together, and ground against each other till the weakest and best of the three is broken to pieces? Mr. Meredith may and does fail conspicuously to interest you in Anthony Hackbut and Algernon Blancove and Percy Waring; but he knows every fibre of the rest, and he makes your knowledge as intimate and comprehensive as his own. With these he is never at fault and never out of touch. They have the unity of effect, the vigorous simplicity, of life that belong to