work, which might have reassured him. At least one critic of "The Whirlpool" (Mr. H. G. Wells) has felt the change in Rolfe's way of thinking to be emblematic of a like wholesome change for society.

"It is the discovery of the insufficiency of the cultivated life and its necessary insincerities; it is a return to the essential, to honourable struggle as the epic factor in life, to children as the matter of morality, and the sanction of the securities of civilization."1

1 "The Novels of Mr. George Gissing," Contemporary Review, August, 1897.

CHAPTER XVI

THE NEWER FICTION. II

ONE class remains. It includes those novels or other works of the imagination which deal ostensibly perhaps with adventure or manners, but really with Life, and after a fashion so touched by faith or doubt as to leave a definite religious and ethical impression. The great names here are those of George Meredith' and Mr. Thomas Hardy; and their bare mention seems like the proffer of good wine at the feast's end. With Meredith I should group Robert Louis Stevenson and Mr. Rudyard Kipling; while Mr. Eden Phillpotts seconds Mr. Hardy.

Much that has been said of George Meredith's poetry might be repeated concerning his prose. It is characterized by the same courage, insight, sanity, and vigour; it is marred by similar mannerisms, self-assertions, and wilful obscurities; the reader of prose as well as poetry being sure of more or less contemptuous treatment at his author's hand. It is

1 Measured by the calendar Mr. Meredith belongs, of course, with the mid-Victorians; but his popular recognition came so late, and the sources of his youth seem so perennial, that there is no anachronism in placing him here.

hurt too by an excess of subtlety which seems like the exercise of ingenuity for its own sake,' and by an almost intolerable tendency to indulge in aphorism. There has been in English just one writer who could afford to make a business of coining aphorisms -and that man was Tupper. Tupper was an honest son of toil who made proverbs as other men dig potatoes or mend roads. If at times he mounted the tripod and invited a sort of mantic fury, or assumed the bearing of a seventh son of a seventh son, nobody thought the less of him; to open his mouth in parables and to utter dark sayings of old was a part of the day's work; and even when the dark saying proved-as it generally did-to be a platitude, this too was borne with as belonging to the lot of proverbmakers. Jewels are one of nature's by-products; the best of them are found, not made; the process of fabrication is a suspicious one; and even professional search for them is a precarious occupation. It requires the whole of Emerson's moral and spiritual power to make even his artificial multiplication of aphorisms tolerable. With George Meredith it frankly ceased to be tolerable at all, his frequent recourse to the " Pilgrim's Scrip" in "Richard Feverel" heavily penalizing the reader of that admirable book. This is not to say that his aphorisms are

1 Cf. the criticism of Prof. J. M. Manly in his English Poetry, 1170-1892: "But the gods gave him also the fatal gift of excessive intellectual ingenuity and a delight in the exercise of it; while the sole gift they denied him was self-restraint."

of the Tupper sort. Many of them are extremely clever, and many others sound as though they might be if their meaning could be discovered; but the fact remains that their pursuit or fabrication for their own sake is always a blemish on the work of genius. It is the antithesis of Shakespeare's method; gorgeously adorned though his style often is, the jewels seem all to be turned up naturally in the field which he is cultivating. They are of the essence of his matter. So much of George Meredith's wealth comes in the same legitimate way, that it is the greater pity to find him so often indulging in adornments of manner which, however splendid they may be, must still remain artificial.

Something of this same tendency to overdo what he might do almost perfectly appears occasionally in his love-scenes and his accompanying descriptions of Nature. The love-making of Richard Feverel and Lucy is deservedly famous; yet the summer and the maid both suffer from a luxuriance of sweetness that comes perilously near to a surfeit.

When all this has been said, however, we have to acknowledge in George Meredith a great creator of character, a true master of life's secrets, and a trustworthy guide along the way to such triumphs as are possible to man. He is no professional preacher; yet the religious and ethical note is sounded on nearly every page of his most characteristic work. This work may perhaps be best represented by "The Ordeal of Richard Feverel" and "The Egoist." The

former is, no doubt, the better story. It moves with force and vigour; its tragedy and comedy alike belong to life; its chief characters remain as companions after the book has been laid aside. Every father instinctively takes warning by Sir Austin and his system; every would-be man of the world by Adrian, whose clever selfishness, without abating jot or tittle of its spirit, is unmasked with complete effectiveness; every boy who would master circumstance finds in Richard a comrade whose great chance for victory is frustrated because he has not learned that self-conquest must come first; and this is still true, whether the fault be assigned to Richard himself or to Sir Austin and the System. To the "Pilgrim's Scrip" I have already paid my disrespects; but this too is a mine of wisdom for those who can stomach the soil in which they have to dig.

The average reader and the critic alike are disposed to balk at a too frank display of the moral in a fable. Yet he must be hypercritical indeed who does not admire the perfect frankness and the consummate ability of the chapter in which Sir Austin Feverel, visiting London in search of a bride for Richard, confers incidentally with two old friends. Both were Members of Parliament, "useful men, though gouty, who had sown in their time a fine crop of wild oats, and advocated the advantage of doing so, seeing that they did not fancy themselves the worse for it." He found one with an imbecile son and the other with consumptive daughters. "So